‘You’ll gather that Aiken was not one’s favourite colleague,’ Heskell said.
‘Wow,’ Stryker said in a disgruntled voice. ‘I can’t wait to see if you people hold a funeral or a jubilee. If I catch this killer I suppose you’ll all chip in to pay for his defence, is that it? Or crown him with myrtle?’
‘Only if Myrtle doesn’t mind,’ Wayland said laconically.
‘Please forgive my family, Lieutenant,’ Stark said, looking around repressively. ‘It must be the shock.’
‘Or it might just be the truth,’ Rocheleau said. ‘You were always too ready to forgive Aiken his trespasses on other people’s corns, Dan. The man was a son-of-a-bitch to work with and you know it. We might be academically weaker for his loss, but by God we’ll be happier.’ Ah, friends, lose not your cool, he thought. Let us be dignified, for God’s sake, and help this intruder to do his distasteful duty quickly and neatly, and then get the hell out of here. More to the point, let’s help him get rid of Aiken once and for all. He destroyed so much while he was here, let not his evil live after him.
‘Amen,’ Edward Pinchman murmured, as if he’d read Pete’s thoughts.
‘I think we should be flattered that the Lieutenant thinks any of us capable of murder,’ Wayland drawled. ‘I’ve never thought any of us had enough nerve to kick a cat, much less slaughter a fellow human being. If you could stretch that description to fit Aiken. We’re all such sensitive souls.’
‘Rubbish,’ Kate said, briskly. ‘Anyone is capable of murder, under the right circumstances.’
Richard regarded her with glee. ‘Even you?’
‘Even me.’
‘Especially you,’ Underhill pointed out, but without malice. ‘Look at the shelves in your office – three hundred and sixty-five ways to kill without being caught, all at your fingertips.’
Kate smiled sweetly. ‘And at everyone else’s. People are always borrowing my books.’
‘If you’re talking about crime novels, I might point out to you that they only deal with failures in the art of murder, not successes. At the end, whatever means used, the killer always gets caught. That’s where they differ from real life,’ Stryker said.
‘Is that supposed to give us hope, Lieutenant?’ Heskell asked, archly.
‘Does it give you hope, Mr Heskell?’ Stryker asked.
‘One always has hope,’ Heskell said, majestically.
‘My God, Aiken would have loved this,’ Lucy Grey-Jenner said, suddenly. ‘It’s almost a shame he isn’t here to join in.’
‘Considering his tongueless state, he wouldn’t have much to say,’ Wayland pointed out.
‘Why aren’t you questioning Aiken’s family? His friends?’ Fowler asked, petulantly. ‘Why us, first of all?’
‘Aiken’s friends will be taking to the hills,’ Heath said.
‘Without even stopping to put on their eyelashes,’ Wayland added, inspecting a thumb-nail and ignoring a jab from Kate. ‘Doesn’t post-mortem mutilation usually have a sexual connotation?’
‘Even more likely, a ritual connotation,’ Jane Coulter said, leaning forward. ‘You have only to consult Fraser or . . .’
‘Dear me,’ Pinchman murmured. ‘Back to that, again.’
‘We can’t ignore it,’ Dr Coulter said, firmly. ‘We know Aiken had – different – sexual preferences. That world is a murky one, full of psychotic and obsessive behaviour.’
‘Almost like the home life of our own dear Department,’ Underhill said.
She fixed him with a cold eye. ‘You are a silly young man,’ she said. ‘And I’d forgive you nothing, were it not for two of your poems.’
‘I think we should get back . . .’ Stryker began.
‘Which two?’ Underhill asked, leaning forward with the first sign of real interest he’d shown since entering the room. Jane Coulter just stared at him, then turned away. Underhill sank back, his lower lip stuck out like a sulky child’s.
Their feet run to evil and they make haste to shed innocent blood, he thought. They do but flatter with their lips, and dissemble in their double hearts. They don’t care who killed the old bastard, as long as nothing touches them. I hated him, last night. I must erase that hate from my soul now that he’s dead, but I cannot. At a stroke of his tongue he hath broken my bones. Perhaps there is such a thing as retribution, after all. But I wish he’d felt that knife in his mouth. I wish he’d known. God forgive me. His hands ached as he clenched them beneath the table, invisible punishment for his invisible evil. See, he thought, see how I am shamed.
‘This meeting,’ Stryker was continuing, doggedly. ‘Can anyone tell me what happened at this meeting?’
‘My secretary is transcribing her notes at the moment,’ Stark said. Sure enough, beyond the door, they could hear the steady rhythmic tap of a typewriter. ‘It was really rather a dull meeting.’
‘Except for the argument,’ Heskell said, eagerly. ‘That wasn’t dull.’
‘Hardly an argument, merely a difference of opinion about the use of the photocopier,’ Stark said, wearily.
‘Underhill threatened to punch Aiken,’ Heskell said, with some triumph. He’d obviously been waiting for an opportunity to announce this.
‘I didn’t threaten to punch him,’ Underhill said, rather loudly. ‘I only said I wished he’d pick on someone his own size so they could punch him.’
‘We’re giving the Lieutenant a very unbalanced view of the affair,’ said Frank Heath, in his soft but penetrating voice. As he hadn’t spoken much up to now, his entry into the conversation had something of a stopping quality. As it had before, Stryker remembered. He took another look at the big negro. A handsome man, broad in the chest and shoulders, and sitting with easy grace. An ex-athlete? ‘Most of us spend most of our time being quite ordinary people, Lieutenant, aside from our pretensions to scholarship.’
‘Some of us have scholarship,’ Fowler snapped.
‘And some have scholarship thrust upon them,’ Wayland murmured.
‘The point is,’ Heath went on, calmly, ‘that after the business portion of the meeting, we behaved like perfectly normal respectable citizens. We ate our sandwiches, we drank our sherry, and we talked about things like Christmas, children, dogs and cats, mortgages – and the price of hamburgers.’
‘Did any of you speak specifically to Professor Adamson?’ Stryker asked.
‘Of course. We all did,’ Stark said, impatiently. ‘It was very casual, very friendly. We moved around. It was supposed to be friendly.’
‘Can any of you remember what Adamson said? I’m looking for a lead, here. Did he mention what he planned to do after the meeting?’ He looked around, but they all shook their heads. ‘Did he mention any names?’ Again, the heads shook in negation. ‘How about what he’d done during his vacation?’
‘You make it sound like an assignment,’ Wayland commented. ‘What I Did on My Vacation by . . .’
‘He went to Greece,’ Kate said.
‘Oh?’
Kate sat up impatiently and looked around at the others. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘He’s going to keep us sitting here until he gets what he wants. Aren’t you?’ she asked Stryker.
‘Oh, I are. Indeed I are,’ he agreed, cheerfully.
‘Well, then – let’s get the thing over with. Frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my last Saturday before term begins than sitting around here showing off to the police.’
‘Ah, me,’ Stryker said. ‘Pearls before swine, of course.’
She flashed him an irritated glance. Behind that smiling face he was sitting and watching them, willing them to say the wrong thing. Didn’t they see that? He’d already seen far too much, in her opinion. They had to stick to facts, nothing else.
‘After Dan poured the drinks, I was talking to you, Edward, and Frank. Isn’t that right?’
‘I believe so,
my dear,’ Pinchman agreed, amiably. There was warmth in his voice and Stryker could see he was fond of the girl. They all seemed to be – as if she were the awkward duckling they knew would become a swan, one day. He could see the old man looked tired, and was probably in pain from his amputated legs and the cold weather and the shock and strain. Stryker remembered that same tight numbness in his grandmother’s face when her arthritis was very bad.
‘That’s right,’ Heath said in his gentle voice. ‘We were talking about vacations in general. Jane had been to France, I’d been to Italy, and Aiken came up and said he’d been prowling in Greece.’
‘Prowling?’ Stryker asked.
Kate’s eyes met Stryker’s, but she looked past him to the previous night. Aiken had looked, as always, like the ageing tenor in a touring Light Opera company – dressed impeccably, his hair combed carefully over the small bald spot, his hands gesticulating gracefully, always assuming the spotlight was on him. He’d circled like a lynx around a flight of broken birds, attacking first one, then another. She had only been the first.
‘He said he’d been prowling around Greece – he called it looking for Toys in the Attic. He said he’d visited Athens, Delphi, Thermopylae, and so on. Frank asked if he’d had much sun and he made one of his usual cryptic remarks. Something like “not much sun, but I saw the light near Delphi and solved the riddle of a Grecian sphinx” – whatever that meant.’
‘Didn’t you ask what it meant?’
‘Of course not – he wanted us to ask. It was a trap, as usual, and I was damned if I was going to be sophomoric enough to fall into it so he could deliver the punch line. I said something about nobody ever mistaking him for a Sphinx and he turned on me. Towards me, I mean.’ She paused. ‘No – on me. Aiken had this theatrical quality of stillness. It was rather like guns swinging around to bear on me.’
‘And did he fire?’
‘No.’
‘Blank cartridge?’
‘Diversionary action,’ Pete Rocheleau said. ‘I backed into her and spilled the sherry.’
‘The Task of Amontillado – protecting the innocent,’ Richard said. ‘Nicely done, Pete.’
‘Yes,’ Kate agreed. ‘By the time we’d finished mopping up, Aiken had moved on to his next – target.’
‘And who was that?’ Stryker looked around.
‘I think it was myself,’ Stark said.
‘No, it was I,’ Jane Coulter said. ‘I was telling Arthur about an obscure Biblical reference I’d tracked down . . .’
‘I was there, too,’ Wayland put in.
‘And what did Adamson say?’
Wayland sat up, suddenly. ‘He said “Which of you is going to kill me?” So we all drew lots, and guess who . . .’
‘He said nothing in particular,’ Jane Coulter said. ‘He simply listened for a moment, then said something about greener pastures, and moved on.’
‘And what would he have meant by that?’
‘I haven’t the vaguest idea,’ Jane said.
‘You have to know what he was like,’ Kate said, desperately.
‘Which is exactly what I’m trying to find out,’ Stryker agreed. ‘Tell me.’
She tried. ‘There we all were, trying to be pleasant, because we like one another, you know . . . and Aiken kept drifting around trying to turn it into the last act of Hamlet. He kept stabbing around, looking for – ’ She paused to consider. ‘It was as if he were looking for a fight. As if he had some secret he was bursting to tell, but nobody was asking him the right questions.’ She looked around. ‘I guess that sounds kind of melodramatic . . . but it’s the best I can do. Sorry.’
‘That’s fine,’ Stryker said. ‘Thank you. Anyone else?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Wayland said, slowly.
‘Well, for goodness sake,’ Heskell said. ‘How does it feel after all these years?’
‘Fine,’ Wayland said, absently. He looked down the table at Stryker, who was surprised to see the belligerence gone from his eyes. His statement was correct – he had been thinking. ‘It must have been some addict,’ Wayland said, earnestly. ‘After all, the campus is surrounded by some of the worst slums in the city, right? And while I’m all for supporting the economically underprivileged, there’s no doubt it’s a cesspit out there. Particularly as far as drugs are concerned. I’ve been working on the local drug-abuse programme and I know, believe me. It’s coming from the slums into the campus. There are a lot worse pressures than money – and if one of Aiken’s students had a drug problem, well – they’re at an emotional time of life, usually rebelling against authority. Perhaps one of them – maybe after taking some hallucinogenic – went for Aiken as a symbol. Maybe he wants to cut all our tongues out.’
‘My God, you can’t be serious!’ Fowler said, going white.
Wayland shrugged. ‘There are plenty of them around, believe me. I work with them, and they scare the hell out of me, sometimes. They’re not like we used to be. They shoot Presidents – why not professors?’
‘Aiken wasn’t shot,’ Fowler said, pedantically.
‘I take the point, Mr Wayland,’ Stryker said. ‘But just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer . . .’
‘One murder doesn’t make a psycho,’ Kate said, quietly. ‘But he does have a point, doesn’t he?’
‘He does,’ Stryker agreed.
‘And while you’re here wasting time talking about a stupid meeting, he could be out there . . .’ Heskell said, somewhat hysterically. ‘Planning another murder. One of us.’
Stryker turned to his Sergeant. ‘Tos, how many men will we have working on this killing?’
Toscarelli considered. ‘Yourself and I . . .’ (Some of the professors flinched visibly.) ‘Plus Pinsky and Neilson, full-time. Maybe a few more part-time if you need them. Then the uniformed division, of course, as many as we can get, and the forensic people, and the people in Records . . .’
‘As many as a hundred, would you say?’
‘Oh, easy. Sure.’
‘And what will they be doing?’
Toscarelli tilted his head on one side and pursed up his mouth. ‘Forensic, they’ll be doing the post-mortem and all that stuff, fingerprints if any, examining the fluff and stuff found at the scene. The other detectives will be checking out Adamson’s friends and family, all his students last year, and things like that. Then they’ll fill in his movements over the past week, month, year . . .’ He paused. ‘You want me to go on?’
‘No, that’s enough,’ Stryker looked down the table. ‘We have a lot of killings in the city. Like in most cities. I’m sorry to say that some of them receive less attention than others. But when a respectable citizen is killed in inexplicable circumstances, I can assure you the investigation is massive. Once the papers get hold of this . . .’
‘Oh, my God,’ Fowler gasped. ‘The newspapers, television . . . I’d forgotten all about that. Dan . . . the publicity.’
‘I know,’ Stark said. His face was grim. ‘I’ve already talked to the Dean about it.’
‘Pictures in the paper, names . . .’ Fowler went on.
‘Indeed,’ Stark said, drily. ‘Did you really think it was going to be a private funeral, Arthur?’
‘I . . . didn’t . . .’ Fowler sank back, gaping.
‘Quite,’ Jane Coulter said. ‘Quite.’
‘That’s why I thought you all would prefer to talk to me, first,’ Stryker continued, ‘I didn’t want you to have to face . . .’
‘Aiken’s dead,’ Kate suddenly announced in a stricken voice. ‘Aiken was murdered.’
‘Indeed, he was,’ Stryker agreed, gently. While talking to the others he’d been keeping an eye on her. Watching the change take place, watching the truth sink in. As it was slowly sinking in for the rest of them. First the annoyance at being dragged down here, the resentment at being suspected, the defensiveness
most people feel at being questioned – it had all been going on under the conversation. It was what he had wanted to see, the reason he’d wanted them all together like this – he wanted to know who they were, and how they were with one another. He’d learned a lot. He had a lot still to learn.
Kate looked at the others, at her own hands, looked again at Stryker. ‘It’s terrible. He was stabbed, mutilated.’
‘Yes.’ His voice was even.
‘We’re terrible,’ she went on. ‘Sitting here, bickering and bitching at one another, being obstructive and smart-ass and . . . in this room, here . . . all of us . . . is it always like this? Are people always like this?’ she demanded, appalled.
Stryker smiled. It was a gentle, forgiving, kindly smile.
‘Only those with something to hide,’ he said.
EIGHT
Toscarelli looked down his list.
‘So start,’ directed Stryker, leaning back in the chair and rubbing his eyes, then his ear, then his elbow, and finally, his knees.
Toscarelli settled back. ‘So, Underhill went home to his wife and kids, said his prayers, went to bed, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Rocheleau went home, to an anniversary party, where everybody could see him all night, especially his mother-in-law, who will hate having to admit to it, wanting nothing more of her life than to land some crap on him.’ Toscarelli looked up, but Stryker’s eyes were closed, so he went on. ‘Dr Coulter went next, along with Trevorne and Wayland. She went on to another meeting, she must be a glutton for punishment, at the Dupont Hotel. It’s only a couple of blocks away, so she walked, stayed until eleven-thirty, had them call her a taxi . . .’
‘Jane Coulter, you are a taxi,’ murmured Stryker.
‘. . . which took her to the faculty car park. He waited until she was safe in her car, which she asked him to do, and then followed her out on Gratiot for about a mile, which she didn’t ask him to do but it was on his way home. Trevorne and Wayland went on to dinner, then back to her place afterward.’ Again, he looked at Stryker, but apart from a scowl that drew his regular features into an ill-tempered knot, he hadn’t moved. ‘Heskell went next, met his fiancée downtown, had dinner, went to a late movie, then back to his place. I bet she’s ugly and rich.’
Monkey Puzzle Page 5
