Holmes Sweet Holmes

by Dan Andriacco

  “I’ll be the judge of that. And whether you acknowledge it or not, you bear a certain responsibility for the story. It happened on your watch.”

  “I didn’t know about this” - I pointed at the paper - “before this morning. Maggie didn’t call me for a comment before publication. But, by the way, she did get comments and ‘no comment’ from several people - including you, Ralph. And none of you thought of telling me the story was in the works, which I’m sure you know violates our college communications policy.”

  I was getting up a head of steam now, and I made the mistake of chugging along instead of stopping right there to dwell a while on Ralph’s faux pas. “But even if you had referred the reporter to me, it’s not like I could have stopped the story.”

  “And why not? Your lady friend is the editor.”

  “News editor.” And whether she was my lady friend was dubious, but I wasn’t going to get into that with Ralph. “Leave her out of this.” I was halfway out of my chair before I realized it. I sat back down. “To answer your question, we have freedom of the press in this country and it’s a freedom that journalists take a great deal of pride in exercising - that’s why not.

  “Listen, Ralph, if this discussion is supposed to be about my competency as a public relations professional, I will remind you that nobody ever questioned that professionalism in the twelve and a half years I held this job before you arrived. And there’s not much you can do about Mac, either.” I smiled. “He has tenure.”

  Tenure is the academic equivalent of life eternal. A teacher who had it was almost impossible to fire - and Mac had it.

  “You don’t,” Ralph said.

  The simple declarative sentence chilled me more than a lot of blustering and posturing would have. I love my job, and finding another one in the same or a related field in this weak economy would be a very dicey proposition indeed.

  “And as for Professor McCabe,” Ralph went on, “his position is not as solid as you seem to imagine. Many alumni and corporate supporters of the college were appalled at the theft of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection and the homicide that followed it. None of that would have happened if McCabe hadn’t brought that dratted collection of so-called Sherlockiana to campus to begin with.”

  The murder of a prominent participant in my brother-in-law’s ill-fated “Introducing Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes” colloquium on campus had happened half a year ago.1 I wasn’t surprised to find that for Ralph the memory was fresh.

  “The crimes were hardly Mac’s fault,” I objected. “Besides, he solved them in short order, which kept the journalistic feeding frenzy at minimum. It didn’t even extend beyond spring break, which kept the students out of it. And furthermore, neither the victim nor the murderer was part of the St. Benignus community.”

  I thought that was a pretty comprehensive defense. But Ralph was having none of it, of course.

  “True, but irrelevant,” he snapped. “The media attention to events surrounding the so-called popular culture program only swelled the ranks of those concerned that we have such a program in the first place. Courses on rock and roll, comic books, and Star Wars - lectures on Sesame Street and Columbo - you won’t find academic cotton candy of this sort at other Transfigurationist colleges. They may not survive at this one much longer. And if they go, McCabe goes.”

  “Neat trick.”

  “No trick at all, Cody. I’m talking about the normal process of academic review, which was followed even in the extremely undisciplined atmosphere that presided on this campus before I arrived a year ago. You must know how that works.”

  I was seeing the whole picture now, and it was ugly.

  “Every program gets reviewed every three years,” I recited. “A faculty committee looks at the number of students it attracts, what happens to those students when they graduate, how many faculty members it takes to run the program, and how much it costs. The committee makes a recommendation to the vice president for academic affairs. The whole process can be bucked up to the president or even the board of trustees, but in practice the academic vice president almost always has his way - even if he goes against the committee recommendation.”

  “Precisely,” Ralph said, his mouth turning up again.

  He’s the vice president for academic affairs, as well as provost.

  “The popular culture program is in the review process right now,” he said. “As a consequence, Professor McCabe’s blog may be a short-term problem. Your performance, however, remains a matter of concern to me, Cody. I believe it should be a matter of concern to you as well.”

  Ralph seemed to have outgrown the notion, which he once expressed to me, that I was basically well meaning and possibly even salvageable if I could be pried away from the negative influence of my brother-in-law.

  There was nothing threatening about his tone. There didn’t need to be. Now that he’d reminded himself that he had the upper hand, Ralph was back to normal: objective, academically dry, passionless. If he cut himself shaving, would he bleed?

  With a nod of dismissal and a “Good day, Cody,” he made for the door. When he was halfway through it I called out after him, “Have a great day, Ralph!” Oh, and was it good for you, too?

  1 See No Police Like Holmes (MX Publishing, 2011).

  “Where’s Mac?”

  I deal with Ralph Pendergast the way I would a junkyard dog: Never let him know I’m afraid of him.

  But I am.

  After he left I just sat there trying to will the lead weights in my stomach to go away. No dice.

  I looked around my little office at the army of green file cabinets, the Rolodex left over from the 1990s, the desktop computer, and the wall of shelves stacked with letterhead paper, envelopes, books, binders, and campus publications.

  The carpet, which used to be beige, still had a cigarette hole in it from my predecessor, who died of a heart attack in this very room while I was helping him put together the campus calendar. When I first took over from him I was to hire somebody to replace me. Now, several rounds of budget cuts later, there’s just Popcorn and me.

  She came into the office, set a cup of decaf in front of me, and sat down. Her green eyes, magnified by reading glasses, glowed fiercely, like a cat’s eye marble.

  “I got it all,” she announced, “on digital tape and in shorthand.” Of course. We’d been working hand in glove for so long that I knew Popcorn would pick up what I had in mind when I flipped on the intercom with my elbow. “I can have a transcript for you within the hour.”

  “No hurry. I don’t know that it’ll do much good, anyway. He didn’t say anything incriminating - nothing any other red-blooded college administrator might not say. There was nothing personal about it. There never is.”

  Popcorn set her handsome, almost masculine jaw, and crossed her arms. She was wearing a white jumpsuit neatly tailored to hug every curve, of which she has a lot. She isn’t plump, but she would be if she ever stopped jogging and doing daily exercises in her office adjoining mine. I pretend not to notice that she keeps a scale in my closet, and she pretends not to hear my cries of agony when I get another rejection e-mail. She reads my manuscripts before I send them out, almost always advising me to throw in more sex and violence. A grandmother of three, she is a widow and much addicted to those steamy romance novels by Rosamund DeLacey with titles like Love’s Sweet Sting.

  I swigged the last of the coffee. “I want to go talk to Mac about this. If anything happens, deal with it.”

  She nodded. “Sure, chief. I’ll cover your -”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  It was our standard office joke that wasn’t a joke. She can run the office a lot better without me than I could without her. So with a clear conscience I left Carey Hall, the dorm that houses our cramped offices, and cut across campus. It was a beautiful day, with a crystal cle
ar sky above and a mid-September chill in the air - a good day for sweaters and sweatshirts and corduroy jackets like the one I was wearing. In fact, it was a good day for anything. When I was in my teens and twenties, spring was my favorite season; now that I’ve reached my mid-thirties - well, late thirties - the sweet sadness of fall has even greater appeal.

  I couldn’t help slowing down a little as I cut through the quadrangle, a long grassy area in what used to be the center of campus before the big building boom of the mid-1970s. A couple of guys in sweatshirts were tossing around a football, with some other guys and two or three girls watching. I’d been doing something like that the first time I met Sebastian McCabe when we were both students here. I was playing with a football and he was flying a kite and we collided, years before Mac’s similar clash with the ambassador’s son. I’d never seen anybody fly a kite in November before. Later, we took some classes together, although Mac is almost three years older than me.

  Herbert Hall, the arts and sciences building where Mac holds his office, is at the far end of the quadrangle, down past Chemistry and Biology. It is architecturally indistinguishable from most of the other buildings on campus, and deliberately so. Except for the Bennish library and a few other early Georgian buildings, the style is all of a piece - federal, made out of brick with bell towers and arched windows. It isn’t exciting, but it’s solid, honorable, and historic.

  Mac’s administrative assistant, Heidi Guildenstern, is also historic because she’s been with the college forty years. Technically, she’s the admin for the popular culture program, which is part of the English department. But since Mac is the only full-time teacher in the tiny program - the others being full-time experts and part-time teachers - that gives him a monopoly on her secretarial skills, if not her loyalty.

  “Where is he?” I asked as I passed through the open door of Mac’s outer office.

  Heidi looked up from her computer long enough to glare at me with washed-out gray eyes. “If you mean Professor McCabe, I am quite sure I haven’t a clue, Mr. Cody.”

  She doesn’t approve of Sebastian McCabe or the frivolities of popular culture. She’s been trying for years to get transferred to another job on campus. Mac, on the other hand, likes having her around. Arguing is one of his favorite pastimes.

  I swept past Heidi into Mac’s inner office. His desk was stacked with so many papers that you couldn’t tell whether anybody were sitting at it or not. The wastebasket was bulging. The shelves lining the biggest wall were sagging, mostly with paperbacks - some of which were Mac’s own output. Comic books and DVDs were crammed in on some of the lower shelves. A set of bagpipes flopped like a dead animal over a filing cabinet. An ashtray nearly full of cigar butts and ashes sat next to the sign on Mac’s desk that says “Thank You For Not Breathing While I Smoke.” The whole campus is non-smoking, of course. But Mac breaks that rule with abandon in his own office, where he pollutes only his own lungs, and occasionally in other places as well. My sister is more effective at enforcing her own no-smoking zone at home, for which, as a frequent visitor to that domicile, I am intensely grateful.

  Situation normal, I thought as I looked around. I felt a little foolish for barging in there.

  “Mr. Cody, this is highly irregular.” Heidi, framed in the doorway, gave me her most disapproving look.

  In my more paranoid moments (which are often), I have suspected Heidi of being a spy for Ralph Pendergast. At five-foot-nine and weighing maybe one-ten sopping wet, she looks like she could use a solid meal and a regimen of natural vitamins. A little weightlifting wouldn’t hurt, either. Her taste in dresses runs to floral patterns that went out of style in the 1940s, like this pink and gray number she was wearing now. Her hair, auburn fading ungracefully to gray, has that electric shock look. She wears it neck length and pinned away from her ears with a couple of barrettes. I don’t think her looks or personality would make me turn somersaults, even if I were of an age to be interested in women in their late fifties, but who knows what would appeal to a guy like Ralph? Maybe they had a thing going.

  The speculation was unfair, and I mentally slapped myself. Ralph is a married man.

  “Mr. Cody, would you please -”

  “Sorry, Heidi. I have no time for your constant flirting. I must find Mac. Good-bye.”

  I knew he didn’t have a class all morning, so I checked out all of his other campus haunts - the game room, the library, and the fast food restaurants. Not finding him in any of those places, I should have realized he was engaged in some childish pursuit elsewhere. My brother-in-law is just a big kid who has never grown up and never will, a Peter Pan mind in an Orson Welles body.

  All right, then, the hell with him. Let him play his games while Ralph Pendergast plotted to pin both our hides to the wall. There was somebody else I needed talk to just as badly. I headed away from campus, breathing deeply of the crisp fall air and enjoying the brisk walk.

  “We Can’t Go On Like This”

  Within a few blocks I was in downtown Erin at the offices of The Erin Observer & News Ledger, sandwiched on Main Street between Daniel’s Apothecary and the law offices of Farleigh & Farleigh (the senior of which has been dead for twenty years).

  The place isn’t like The Daily Planet or any other newspaper you might have seen in a movie, with row after row of reporters. Although it’s part of the Grier Ohio NewsGroup, which is owned by the global Grier Media Corp., The Observer’s total staff is eight or ten people. When I came through the door I immediately saw Frank Woodford, editor and general manager, sitting in his glass office in his shirt sleeves. He was reading The Wall Street Journal, but looked up long enough to give me a smile and wave. When this book becomes a movie, Morgan Freeman can play Frank, but he’ll have to grow a mustache and lose some hair.

  Frank belongs to every civic group in town, from the Kiwanis to the Better Business Bureau. Everybody knows him and likes him, including the advertisers that keep the cash rolling into the Grier Media Corp. coffers from our little corner of southern Ohio. But Lynda Teal, as news editor, does the heavy lifting of producing a newspaper that tells people what’s going on in their local community, keeps the facts straight (or reasonably so), and provides a little entertainment along the way. At times she doubles as a reporter, and her first-person account of the murderer’s undoing last spring had won awards from the Associated Press and from The Observer’s parent company. Today she was bent over a computer screen arguing some nuance of the English language with Henry Knox Wilcox, a retired drama professor who reviews local plays for twenty-five dollars a shot and ego gratification. With his bald head, curved nose, and hunched back, I’ve always thought he looks like a turtle.

  “How about lunch?” I asked. I wasn’t taking to Wilcox, whose presence I rudely ignored.

  “Great!” Lynda said. “I’m hungry. Where am I taking you?”

  “Since it’s your turn to pay, you pick.”

  For about four years we had been what Popcorn likes to call “an item.” Now I didn’t know what we were. Last February, the winter of Lynda’s discontent, she had given me the famous “Let’s Just Be Friends” Speech. That hadn’t worked out so well. We’d basically avoided each other for four weeks and two days, not that I was counting. Then we got caught up together in that Sherlock Holmes colloquium murder business and things changed a bit. In a mad moment during that adventure she even said she still loved me. Things had looked promising.

  But that was six months ago and her Facebook relationship status still said “It’s complicated.” We went out together, but it wasn’t quite like it used to be. There was a certain holding back on her part, as if she were afraid to fall back into the easy familiarity we had before. I felt like we were in limbo, and not being Catholic, despite attending Mass weekly (I’m a lapsed Presbyterian), I don’t know very much about limbo. But I knew this lunch wasn’t going to help matters.

  As usual,
we wound up right next door at Daniel’s Apothecary. When my father used to say he was going to “the apothecary,” he meant the liquor store. Daniel’s actually is a small, independent drug store owned and operated by the Daniel family since 1904. But it’s also a circa 1959 soda shop with a jukebox, fountain drinks, black and chrome tables, and red and white stools at the long counter. Poster-size photos of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean decorate the wall, along with old Pepsi and Coke signs (some in neon) and a Route 66 clock. The milkshakes made with Hershey’s ice cream are to die for, but certainly not to diet for.

  After exchanging predictable “beautiful weather” small talk with acquaintances around the room, we sat at a table. We ordered our meals and drinks all at once.

  “I’ll have the Frankie Avalon and a Diet Mountain Dew,” Lynda told our waitress. Vern is a cheery, round woman whom I strongly suspect of being milkshake-fond. The Frankie Avalon sandwich is a concoction of pepperoni, Genoa salami, ham, and provolone cheese. “Oh, and an order of crinkle cut fries.” I must have turned pale. “Something wrong?” Lynda asked, with a bit of attitude in her husky voice.

  The sandwich has like a million calories and the French fries carry a toxic level of trans-fats; that’s what’s wrong. Why don’t you just schedule your open-heart surgery now and save time? “No, nothing’s wrong, nothing at all,” I assured Lynda. I turned to Vern. “I’ll have the Elvis and caffeine-free Diet Coke, please.” I know I should have ordered the fresh-squeezed lemonade. My urologist, Dr. LaBelle, says lemonade helps cut kidney-stone production. But Diet Coke goes better with The Elvis, a peanut butter and sliced banana sandwich on Texas toast. And at least I ordered the caffeine-free variety.

  I try to take care of my health, okay? Unfortunately, Lynda finds my helpful suggestions in that regard annoying, which is a source of some tension between us. I believe her exact words on one occasion were, “You ought to hire yourself out as somebody’s conscience, and I don’t mean mine.” More broadly, she had complained at the time of our break-up, and in the months leading up to the old heave-ho, that I was bossy, domineering, and jealous. So I had been attempting to be more non-directional. It was hard work.