Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

She immediately stood up. “Well, Jake . . . we’ll continue this conversation as soon as I return. It shouldn’t be long.”

  I was sitting there wondering how I was going to keep my job when it struck me that Wheatley was the name that had been hand-written on the name tag pinned to the reunion booklet I found on the bridge. There was something else about the name, but I couldn’t place it.

  Wandering over to the window, I stared down at the campus. Two coeds were stretched out on the lawn below the police building. One was sunbathing and the other was tossing French fries to a couple of squirrels. Leaves from the majestic oaks were gently drifting down onto the freshly mown grass.

  A woman’s voice suddenly cried out in agony from beyond the open doorway. It had come from Captain Morgo’s office. The anguished cry subsided to a low sobbing wail. Edging closer to the open doorway, I could hear Lieutenant Ritterspaugh’s voice as she gently soothed the distraught woman.

  “I’m so deeply sorry, Mrs. Wheatley,” she said.

  Leaning around the corner, I had a narrow view of the office through the crack in the door. A woman was standing in the center of the room, her delicate angular face wearing the stunned look of someone who has just been told she has an incurable disease.

  Beyond her, Captain Morgo was sitting behind her desk staring down at the pager display of her cell phone. A man from the sheriff’s plainclothes investigative unit was standing along the far wall making notes in a spiral notebook. Lieutenant Ritterspaugh had her back to me.

  “Dennis would never take his own life,” said Mrs. Wheatley, stifling another sob. “He had too much to live for. And he hated high places. He had a morbid fear of them. He would never have walked out on that bridge . . . much less looked over the railing.”

  In her midforties, she was no more than five feet tall with long black hair and a slender build. She had obviously dressed for a day of informal alumni parties, with a navy cotton blouse, white blazer, and pleated skirt over walking shoes. Her straw hat had a red ribbon around the crown. A white plastic name tag hung around her neck with block letters that read, “Evelyn.”

  “We have a preliminary laboratory analysis from the sheriff’s office that indicates your husband had a very high blood-alcohol level, Mrs. Wheatley,” said Captain Morgo.

  “My husband didn’t drink alcohol. Never. He hated it,” she replied, her right hand slashing angrily at the tears on her cheeks and knocking the straw hat off her head.

  “I will not cry,” said the tiny woman fiercely as she picked up her hat.

  “His blood alcohol-level would have been nearly twice the legal limit if he had been driving,” Captain Morgo went on, “and there was a mug of whiskey near the spot where he died.”

  “And I’m telling you that Dennis didn’t drink alcohol,” said his widow emphatically.

  “When something like this happens, it is always a terrible shock, particularly to close family members,” said Lieutenant Ritterspaugh. “All too often, they are the last to know about a loved one’s . . .”

  “For God’s sake,” said Mrs. Wheatley, her quavering voice growing stronger. “This is my husband you’re talking about. I knew him better than anyone in the world. And I’m telling you, he would never do such a thing . . . please . . . I would like to see him now.”

  The sheriff’s investigator detached himself from the wall.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” he said.

  Not when you haven’t found the poor bastard’s head, I privately agreed. At that moment, Carlene came around the corner and stopped short, startled to see me blocking the doorway. The momentary alarm in her eyes was quickly replaced by a look of triumphant satisfaction.

  “The president would like to see you right away,” she said. “His secretary said it was very important.”

  I was still straining to hear what the sheriff’s investigator was saying to Mrs. Wheatley and whispered, “The president of what?”

  “President Jordan Langford . . . the president of this college,” she said with an exultant gleam.

  Looking down at her, I realized that she thought the summons could mean only one thing. For all my transgressions, I was about to be cut off at the knees by the big kahuna himself.

  “Thank you, Carlene. I’ll check my calendar,” I whispered.

  Her liquid eyes regained their familiar confusion as she retreated down the hallway.

  “Mrs. Wheatley,” Lieutenant Ritterspaugh was saying through the partially open door, “I’ve had experience in working with victims of tragedy, and we have three very gifted grief counselors on staff here at the college. I would like to suggest that one of them might—”

  “I don’t need your goddamn grief counselors,” shouted Evelyn Wheatley, her eyes flaring with anger. “My husband is dead, and I want to know why.”

  If I hadn’t been hung over and fed up with my job, I would never have gone in there. Without stopping to think about the consequences, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  Captain Morgo looked up at me and growled, “What do you want?”

  “Mrs. Wheatley, did your husband ever serve in the military?” I asked.

  “This is a private meeting, Officer Cantrell,” said Captain Morgo. “Leave my office at once.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Mrs. Wheatley. “Why do you ask?”

  “That will be all, Officer Cantrell,” ordered Captain Morgo, standing up and walking around her desk toward me.

  “I don’t believe your husband took his own life,” I said. “He definitely wasn’t alone out there on that bridge.”

  Captain Morgo planted her powerful body in front of mine.

  “You are suspended from duty, Officer Cantrell,” she said. “Now get out of my office.”

  I glanced over at Mrs. Wheatley. She was staring at me in my idiotic uniform as if I had just arrived from Mars.

  I didn’t salute Captain Morgo when I left. I heard the door close behind me as I went down the corridor. At the edge of the first open doorway, my eye caught a flash of color. A glance in that direction revealed the face of the auburn-haired reporter I had met on the bridge. She was staring back at me as if she had been caught shoplifting.

  She had to have heard everything that had gone on in Captain Morgo’s office.

  I kept on going.

  4

  Walking across the sun-dappled quadrangle to Jordan Langford’s office, I mused over the probability that I would soon find myself dropping to the next rung down the career ladder and tending the bar at the Fall Creek Tavern.

  Ahead of me on the brick walkway, a student was tossing a Frisbee to an Irish setter. The dog leaped into the air to catch it on the fly, clamped it firmly in his mouth, and ran off past the statue of Francis Channing Barlow, the Union Civil War general.

  Jordan’s office was on the top floor of Hastings Hall, a granite edifice with medieval parapets and stone gargoyles perched at each corner. His suite took up the entire floor and had an impressive view of both the campus and the lake beyond. I could almost see my cabin from the reception area.

  A young woman looked up from the receptionist’s desk after I came through the outer plate-glass door. She was obviously a student intern. A two-inch-wide purple streak ran down the middle of her blonde hair, which was cropped at the neck as if someone had cut it with hedge clippers. An open paperback copy of The Fountainhead sat on the desk in front of her.

  Removing my uniform hat, I said, “I’m here to see the Emperor of St. Andrews if he happens to be in residence at the moment.”

  She grinned, revealing two levels of metal braces. Over her shoulder, I saw Jordan come through the door of his office, his eyes absorbed in the folder he was carrying. Dropping it on his secretary’s desk, he looked up and saw me.

  “Do you know who you look like?” asked the intern, holding the eraser of her yellow pencil to her chin.

  I shook my head.

  “My favorite actor.”

  “Who is that?”

/>   “Harrison Ford. Before he got old.”

  “I’m his illegitimate son,” I said.

  “Are you funning me?” she asked, her eyes widening.

  “Jake,” called out Jordan Langford from across the suite.

  I followed him through the door and shut it behind me. Under the twelve-foot-high ceilings, his walnut partners’ desk gleamed in front of the leaded casement windows. An oil painting of Benjamin Franklin dominated the wall above the fireplace. It hadn’t been there the last time I visited.

  “Your truck was illegally parked in the provost’s personal space,” he said. “She had you towed away.”

  “That’s why you called me up here?” I asked.

  He stared at me for several seconds.

  “You look so ridiculous in that uniform,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  He was dressed in a charcoal-gray, double-breasted suit with a white shirt and red-speckled power tie. Behind him, a power wall of photographs included pictures of Jordan with Bush the younger, Clinton, Obama, Mandela, and Beyoncé. I had met two of those same presidents. One of them had even pinned a medal on me. In looks and presence, Jordan was more charismatic than both of them.

  “I understand you were the first one on the scene at the bridge this morning,” he said.

  “Yeah, aside from whoever it was that helped him over the railing. What were you doing there?”

  I could see the question made him uncomfortable. I had known him since we were college roommates and knew how he reacted to just about any situation. He stared hard at me as if weighing whether to tell me the truth.

  “Let’s just say I happened to be driving by,” he said.

  “At six in the morning in your tennis whites?”

  “Leave it alone, Jake.”

  I decided to leave it alone.

  “Janet Morgo says you don’t think Dennis Wheatley’s death was a suicide.”

  “That’s right.”

  It finally struck me who Dennis Wheatley was, or at least had been. Although I hadn’t recognized his grossly contorted features when he was hanging under the bridge, he was the man who had become famous after creating a franchised chain of fast food restaurants designed to reverse America’s trend toward obesity. He was the poster boy alumnus for St. Andrews College.

  “We’re trying to keep a tight lid on things for the moment,” Jordan said. “You can probably understand why.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded.

  I remembered Dennis Wheatley from the series of funny, self-deprecating television commercials in which he offered Americans free bonus meals if they lost weight.

  He had installed computerized cheat-proof scales that worked like ATMs in each of his restaurants so that customers could record their ongoing weight loss wherever they were. He was a multibillionaire and on the Forbes list of twenty richest Americans.

  “There’s something else,” said Jordan. “Dennis Wheatley was a dying man, and he was increasingly despondent in recent weeks. I talked to him almost every day. He had pancreatic cancer, and it had metastasized. He told me the doctors only gave him a few weeks to live, and he hadn’t told his wife.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Until a few weeks ago, he thought he had licked it,” said Jordan. “It was in remission and then came roaring back. Evelyn Wheatley is . . . intense. He didn’t want her to worry.”

  “She’s on the warpath now.”

  “Evelyn also doesn’t know that Dennis gave the college a gift of fifty million dollars two weeks ago. I was going to make the announcement at the trustees meeting on Monday.”

  “Who else knows about the gift?”

  “Aside from Wheatley’s portfolio manager, no one to my knowledge. Unlike most of the major pledges we receive, Dennis’s gift was unrestricted. No strings attached. He just said, ‘Jordan, do some good with it.’”

  “You’ve already received it?”

  “The money’s sitting in my private discretionary fund account right now.”

  “What do you plan to do with it?”

  “A global warming research center in his name,” he said.

  There was a knock at the door, and his secretary’s face appeared around the edge.

  “Congressman Cornwell is on the phone again for you from Washington.”

  “Tell Sam I’ll have to call him back,” he said with an easy smile as he sat down on one of the leather sofas. “I need ten minutes undisturbed, Jenny.”

  “Certainly,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  His smile disappeared.

  I dropped my uniform hat on the other couch and sat down opposite him. Even though we were the same age, he definitely looked younger. His mocha-toned skin was as smooth and unlined as the day I had met him in college. At six feet, he was still lean and hard. There was a touch of gray at the temples of his close-trimmed black hair.

  “I haven’t seen you for a while. How’s it going over there?” he asked, his expressive brown eyes locking onto mine.

  “I have nothing to do,” I said. “I do that well.”

  “You once did a lot of things well.”

  “Yeah . . . but I handed in my cape a long time ago.”

  “To say you’re overqualified for the campus police would be a joke.”

  He was right.

  “Look, I’m grateful for the job, Jordan. My prospects were limited. It was this or repossessing used cars.”

  “Janet Morgo wants you out of her department,” he declared. “She told me last week that you’re a bad influence on the rest of her team. She asked that I find you another soft landing . . . maybe the catering office.”

  “I was thinking about quitting anyway,” I said, deciding not to bring up my suspension.

  “To do what?” he asked skeptically.

  “I’m thinking of running against Congressman Cornwell,” I said. “There’s a real groundswell of support out there. I’m already feeling it over at the Fall Creek Tavern.”

  Chuckling, he said, “I can handle Janet for now. She can be difficult sometimes, but she’s a lot better than the last chief we had, believe me. You never met him, but he was as big a Neanderthal as Jim Dickey.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “So what else is new?” he asked, as if he had all the time in the world. It was obvious he wanted or needed something. I had no idea what it could be.

  “A couple of guys think I should be starting at fullback in today’s game,” I said.

  “If the Tank is ready to go, then so am I,” he said with a grin.

  Jordan and I had been the tandem backs on the only St. Andrews football team to ever win a Division III national championship. He had the footwork of Emmitt Smith and ran like a deer. I ran straight ahead like Riggins and carried the pile. He went all-American and was voted most valuable player. I had my left knee replaced.

  “So let’s cut to the chase. What do you need, Jordan?”

  He stood and went to the open window that looked out over the quadrangle. I waited for him to tell me what was on his mind. I assumed it had something to do with Dennis Wheatley’s death. Maybe all that money.

  “I’m sure you remember that there was actually a time when I was deeply committed to the advancement of the human condition, Jake,” he said as if dictating a term paper. There was another pause. He seemed to be waiting for my confirmation. I didn’t say anything.

  “Thanks to the inspiration of Dr. King, Medgar Evers, and a whole lot of others who blazed the trail, I’ve had the chance to explore those boundaries . . . through a legacy forged in blood. I’ve always treasured that. When I got back from the Peace Corps, I decided to work in the inner city in order to advance that legacy. I was a good community advocate. I really was,” he said. “I earned my stripes during those years in Detroit just like you did in the army.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, still wondering where it was all heading.

  “And as I look back on it, I was happy then,” he went on. “
And Blair was happy.” He paused again and said, “I think she was happy.”

  Blair was his wife. He was the one she left me for. After I had received her Dear John letter, I received a long one from him. Without apologizing, he tried to explain how it all happened. He hoped I would understand and forgive them.

  “Anyway, she says she was happy. Happiness, peace, contentment . . . that’s what life is supposed to be about, right Jake?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “You’re talking to Mr. Happy.”

  I had never heard him sound so confused and bewildered. The Jordan Langford I knew had always been certain of everything, particularly his own blazing star in the universe. A lot of people had predicted he would be a senator or governor, if not president someday. I had always assumed that was one of the reasons Blair married him.

  “We have a lot more of everything right now, but we’re not content, Jake,” he said, still staring out at the campus. “Blair and I argue all the time. She wanted me to stay in community work. I saw the chance to do a lot more on the executive side. I learned I had a talent for it . . . the gift of working with people and discovering that they usually came to believe in me . . . and to follow me. There are a lot of community advocates in this country, but there are very few good executives to marshal all that talent and make it work. I saw that when I moved over to the administrative side . . . that I could be exponentially more influential than as one good community organizer. It’s all about the validity of how a man chooses to spend his life.”

  It was starting to sound like the beginning of a resignation speech. I wondered if he was thinking about quitting his job. Maybe he wanted to run for something. But he wouldn’t have called me in to talk about that.

  “You can take the position that everything has its validity on some level,” he said. “I wasn’t fearful of idealism back in Detroit. But many of the groundbreaking things I took pride in then somehow ring false today.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “All right . . . take our minority faculty members. When you and I were here as students, this college didn’t have any. Now thanks to me, there are more than two dozen . . . and they all claim to celebrate racial and ethnic diversity. But when I issued a directive last year that all incoming freshmen would have their roommates randomly selected so each kid could experience true diversity, they organized campus protests. I was branded an Uncle Tom and a lot worse.”