Death by Dissertation

by Dean James

  Or maybe it was just the jealousy (yes, jealousy!) making me overly sensitive. “Was there ever anything more than friendship between you?”

  He turned pink. “Geez, Andy, you’re not making this easy.” He sighed. “But we should start as we mean to go on, I suppose. Yes, there once was something more between us. Charlie and I had a brief—a very brief—fling a few years ago in college. I figured out quickly that it wouldn’t work, partly because I had someone else on my mind”—he looked hard at me—“and partly because Charlie was too promiscuous for my taste. Somehow, we stayed friends.”

  “And at some point, or maybe all those years ago,” I said softly, “he fell in love with you. Poor guy. He just couldn’t get it right.”

  Rob shook his head. “I wish I could have him back for a little while, just to tell him that I did love him, in my way.”

  I put my arms around him, and he rested his head on my shoulder. “Geez,” he muttered, hugging me.

  “You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” I said before I kissed him again.

  “I guess you’re right.” He hesitated. “Do you want to see the sheet of paper I took?”

  With my stomach clenched, I shook my head. “No, I trust you.” And, please, God, don’t let him betray that trust this time!

  Rob smiled his thanks and his joy. A few minutes later, breathless but happy, I left him fixing his breakfast. I floated out the door and to my car, unable to concentrate on my errand. My thoughts kept straying to Rob, and I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror. I was lucky not to have an accident, because my attention certainly wasn’t on driving.

  By ten-thirty I was on the fourth floor of the library, heading straight for Dan’s carrel, where he usually spent most mornings. Now that I was getting closer to the actual confrontation, I was able to focus on something besides Rob, and my stomach churned. At this rate, I’d have an ulcer before I was thirty!

  Dan was practically a stranger, and here I was, about to ask him some intensely personal questions.

  His carrel was empty, but the light was on, so I figured he must be around. As I waited nervously, I scanned the shelves out of habit. Dan was supposed to defend his dissertation soon, though with Whitelock’s death, I wasn’t sure what would happen to the professor’s doctoral students. Dan had to defend; he wouldn’t be considered for the post-doc at Harvard unless he completed the degree. Both Selena Bradbury and Margaret Wilford had also lost their major professor, but, as far as I knew, neither of them had jobs or fellowships lined up for the spring semester. Someone else would have to take Whitelock’s place in order for them to get their degrees. Ruth McClain was the obvious choice.

  My eyes roved over Dan’s shelves, seeing that he had the standard works on Anglo-Saxon England checked out to his carrel. One title gave my head a funny feeling as I stared at the spine of the book. The lettering leaped out at me: Anglo- Saxon England. Sir Frank Stenton’s book, the classic, authoritative work on the period.

  Dazed, I sank down into Dan’s chair, as that puzzling, elusive fragment of memory suddenly took full shape in my mind.

  I had seen the Stenton book on a table just before I spotted Charlie Harper’s body that morning in the grad lounge. I remembered mentally reminding myself to get it from whoever had it checked out at the time. But the sight of Charlie’s body—or, more likely, the bump on my head from hitting the wall—made me temporarily forget about the book.

  And now, here it was, in Dan’s carrel. Did this mean that he had been the person in the grad lounge when I discovered Charlie’s body? What was he doing there? Had he simply found the body, just before me, and panicked over being seen with the corpse? Or was there a more sinister explanation? Was he the killer?

  That would certainly explain why he shoved me and removed the book from the room. Then I remembered Dan’s phone call after I had returned home from campus that morning. He had called to find out whether I had seen him or somehow figured out that he had been in the room.

  “Hey, Andy!” Dan’s voice roused me from my reverie. The Southern greeting still sounded discordant in Dan’s nasal Boston twang.

  There he stood, dressed in blue jeans and crisp Oxford-cloth, button-down shirt—long sleeves, no less—grinning down at me.

  “Morning, Dan,” I said quietly as I stood up.

  “What’s up?” he asked as he perched on the edge of the carrel desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company this morning?” He picked up on my mental turmoil and watched me expectantly. As he waited, he rubbed the tip of his right index finger across his leg, as if his finger itched.

  “We need to talk about something.”

  “Sure.” Dan frowned. “Here?”

  “No. Why don’t we go to a study room down at end of the stacks?”

  Dan followed me, and we found one of the empty rooms and went in and closed the door.

  “So, Andy, what’s up?” he said again, eyeing me nervously.

  For the first time, I noticed dark shadows beneath his eyes and faint lines of strain around his mouth. I was going to take a chance. I didn’t have much to lose, so I decided to go for it.

  “What were you doing in the grad lounge the morning I found Charlie Harper’s body?”

  The question obviously hit home. I had hoped all along that I was wrong about him, but, by his reaction, I knew I was right. The look of shock on his face disappeared almost in the same instant it appeared, but I had seen it.

  He laughed uneasily. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  I didn’t reply. I stared at him, not smiling, willing him to forgo the attempt at denial. He stared back almost defiantly. Then his resolve apparently wavered. His shoulders slumped, and he put his head between his hands. The fingers clinched in the thick blond hair until the knuckles went white. When he raised his head to look at me again, he looked frightened.

  “How did you know?” Dan asked shakily. “And how long have you known?”

  I answered the second query first. “Since just a few minutes ago, for sure. Though, I figured part of it out last night. Rob and I discovered that you and Charlie had gone to prep school together.” He gave me a startled glance, and I continued. “Rob and I are wondering why neither you nor Charlie had ever told anybody.” For the time being, I decided to leave Maggie’s name out of it. “It just seemed odd, and the more I thought about it, the more it puzzled me. Then this morning I saw Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England on your shelf.”

  Dan’s eyes blinked in reaction, and I continued. “I saw the Stenton book on a table in the grad lounge, just before I found Charlie lying on the couch. While I was staring at his body, someone pushed me and I bumped my head on the wall. But I had forgotten about the book, probably because of the combination of the bump on my head and the shock of finding Charlie’s body.” I paused. “Then, when I saw the book in your carrel this morning, it all came back to me. Now I know why you called me at home that same morning. At the time, I thought it was a little strange, but I never stopped to think how you could have found out so quickly that I’d been the one to discover Charlie. You were trying to find out if I had seen you.”

  He started to protest, but I held up my hand to forestall him. “I realize that’s not much evidence to go on,” I said, “but the coincidence was a little too noticeable. So I gambled.”

  I almost expected him to get up and storm out of the room. After all, there was no way I could compel him to keep talking to me. I would have to tell Herrera, if I couldn’t talk Dan into talking to the police himself. The lieutenant could look up the library’s records of check-outs on the Stenton book.

  “And so you decided that it was I who pushed you.” Dan made this statement in a voice devoid of inflection.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  He groaned, a miserable sound, then turned to look at me pleadingly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was so terrified of being discovered with the body that I simply reacted before I thought. I didn’t realize who you were until I pushed
you.” Dan’s hands moved restlessly on the table between us.

  I felt pity, listening to his misery-laden voice, and said, “You didn’t hurt me.”

  “Thank God,” he replied. He gave me a look of calm resolution, as though he had made up his mind to talk to me. Perhaps he had been so worried about being found out, that this was more of a release than anything else.

  The timing was right to ask another question. “Why didn’t you and Charlie tell us that you had been in school together?”

  Dan sat up straight in his chair and gazed at some indeterminate point. When he spoke, he didn’t answer my question directly. “I knew Charlie for a year, in prep school,” he said. “I was a senior, and he was a freshman. I was having trouble in second-year Latin and was assigned a tutor. That tutor was Charlie. He was such a whiz at languages that, even as a freshman, he was tutoring seniors.” He paused to take a deep breath, then stated baldly, “He seduced me during our first session.”

  Well, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather! It was so unexpected, I didn’t know how to react.

  Once he got started, Dan decided to tell everything. “We had a relationship for the rest of the school year, until I graduated.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried to forget that year, but it never worked. I was infatuated with him. He made me feel like I was the only person in the world who mattered. Even though, God knows the kind of trouble we could have gotten into if anyone had found out. I had already turned eighteen, but he was only fifteen. I had to be crazy.” He looked at me again, and the pain in his eyes made me want to shrink away from him.

  “I was a textbook case, the classic situation,” he continued. “My father ran off when I was two, and my mother worked so hard to keep us fed and clothed that she was too tired to give me much attention.” Dan laughed derisively. “I was the scholarship kid who’d do anything to fit in—an easy mark for someone as smooth as Charlie. Even at fifteen, he was years older than I was. I didn’t find out until the next year, when I was in college in New Jersey and Charlie wasn’t answering my letters, that he had been sleeping with another student he was tutoring. I was sure naive!”

  Feeling sick at my stomach, I was uncertain what to say. Having to witness the exposure of such painful secrets unnerved me.

  “The last time I saw Charlie—before we both wound up in graduate school here—was my graduation day.” Dan’s tone was noncommittal. “I went through hell, getting over the way he treated me. After a long time, I began dating— girls this time.” He laughed again. “One of them was just as much a barracuda as Charlie ever was. I broke up with her when I moved to Houston. I was getting along well until one day, at the beginning of school two years ago, I walked into the grad lounge, and there he was, in a roomful of new students. At first, the beard threw me off, but then I recognized him.”

  “That must have been quite a shock,” I offered inadequately.

  “Yes, it was. I approached him after everyone left. It took him a minute to place me. I knew then, all over again, just how little I had meant to him.” He said it with only a faint trace of bitterness. “Charlie didn’t seem at all fazed when he realized who I was. He acted like we were old classmates who had gradually lost touch rather than former lovers.”

  He turned to look at me, and I met his gaze, trying not to turn red. His intensity embarrassed me.

  “I wanted to confront him, right then and there, and say all the things I never got to say all those years ago. I wanted to make him feel, or at least acknowledge, what I felt then.” He shook his head. “But when the time came, I couldn’t say anything. He practically dared me to say something, knowing that I wouldn’t. He was in control, as always, and I felt just as naive I’d been twelve years ago.”

  “What happened after that?”

  Dan closed his eyes tightly and took a deep breath. “Charlie ‘seduced’ me again, except this time, I knew exactly what I was doing. I just didn’t care. The rational part of my brain simply shut down. The next morning, though, I called myself all kinds of idiot, even while I sat by the phone, wanting to call him and wanting him to call me. Of course, he never called. At least, not that day. And I couldn’t get up the nerve to call him. When I saw him on campus, he was always friendly but distant.

  “Everything was fine until the end of last semester,” he continued. “Foreign languages have always been my weak spot. I was desperate to pass the Latin exam. I had already failed it twice, and I was told that I could take it only once more, even though the rest of my work was outstanding.” He sighed. “I can handle Latin when I’m not under pressure, but that exam just threw me, every time. They had given me extensions, because I should have passed the damn thing before I got to the dissertation stage. They made allowances because of the rest of my work. But who ever heard of a medievalist who couldn’t handle Latin?

  “I was desperate,” he repeated. “I went to the one person I thought could help me most, and it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I asked Charlie for help, and he volunteered readily enough.” Dan now looked extremely uncomfortable. “This is going to put you in an awkward position.”

  I had discerned what probably happened, knowing Charlie as I did. “I won’t betray your confidence over this,” I promised, hoping he would understand that I meant only his confession about the Latin exam.

  Dan expelled a sigh of relief. “The language exams are given on the honor system, as you know,” he said. “Charlie sat with me at my carrel and dictated the translation to me.” He shook his head in reluctant admiration. “I think he looked up one word, the whole forty-five minutes it took him to dictate the thing. It would have taken me that long to wade through the first two or three paragraphs.”

  Dan looked away from me. “Needless to say, I passed. Charlie made enough deliberate mistakes for it to seem realistic.”

  “And once he had you safely through the Latin exam,” I supplied, no trace of emotion in my voice, “he blackmailed you, didn’t he?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The word blackmail reverberated in the small, stuffy room, though I hadn’t really made an accusation, more of an observation. Dan nodded in response.

  “I should have expected something like that from Charlie,” Dan replied. “Knowing the other sterling qualities he possessed, I shouldn’t have been surprised by his taste for blackmail.”

  Charlie’s motive for blackmail puzzled me. What could Dan have that Charlie wanted? Startled, I realized I had voiced the question aloud.

  Dan snorted. “He got his kicks making people do things they didn’t want to do.” He scratched his head. “After he helped me with that exam, I didn’t hear from him for over a month. Then one day he called and said his place was a mess and he wanted me over there that evening to clean it up for him.” He laughed. “I thought at first he was drunk, and I told him so, but he just smirked and reminded me of what the department would do if they found out how I ‘passed’ my Latin exam.”

  He sat up straighten “When I got there, the place was a wreck—purposely so. He had taken the time to make it as messy as possible. His roommate was out of town. It took me four hours to do the laundry, wash the dishes, make the bed, everything. He sat there reading the whole time, acting like I was just some person he had hired to clean his apartment.” Dan’s tone held a note of wonderment mixed with pain. “He was the coldest bastard I’ve ever known.”

  His face paled, and again he gazed off into the distance behind me. “There were other things he had me do, things that I don’t want to go into.” He laughed again, and the bitterness in his laughter chilled me. “They didn’t do much for my self-respect. Cleaning his apartment and running menial errands for him were bearable, at least.” He clenched his fists, and his whole face tightened up. “There were more than a few times when I wanted to bash him over the head. You can’t imagine how humiliated I felt. But I thought, once I had my degree, there wasn’t anything he could do to me anymore, and I wanted my degree badly enough to p
ut up with his power trip. He had me right where he wanted me, for the time being anyway, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it except bide my time.’’

  “Until you could bash him over the head and get away with it?” I asked this gently, feeling compelled to do it, even though I knew how Dan would respond. If he had believed having his degree would take him beyond Charlie’s reach, he was deceiving himself. Or perhaps he was trying to deceive me, downplaying it, so that I would believe he hadn’t killed Charlie for that reason.

  “No,” Dan replied tiredly, “I didn’t. But I wouldn’t mind shaking the hand of the person who did.” He turned to look me full in the face.

  “Wouldn’t Charlie have gotten in trouble, too,” I asked, “if he admitted to the department that he helped you cheat on your exam? Why didn’t you try to bluff him? His position wasn’t any better than yours.”

  “I didn’t have the nerve, and Charlie knew it. We might both have been expelled, of course, if he had told, but I couldn’t take the chance and force his hand.”

  If Dan had stood up to him, I thought, chances were that Charlie, for once, would have been defeated. But maybe Dan was right. Maybe Charlie would have confessed, just to see what would happen. After all, he had money to fall back on if the situation blew up in his face. Dan didn’t.

  Before Dan could say anything else, I posed another question. “What were you doing that morning in the grad lounge?” Since I had no idea of the time of Charlie’s death, I wondered what he could tell me.

  “I was looking for the Stenton book.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve told you everything else, so you might as well hear the worst. The night before, I got a call at home about a quarter of eleven. It was Charlie, and he insisted I come over immediately to campus. He told me he was in the history grad student lounge and needed to talk to me right away. I was furious, because I was right in the middle of the final chapter of my dissertation, finishing some revisions Whitelock had suggested, and everything was going smoothly. I didn’t want any interruptions when the writing was going so well. When I told him that, he threatened me again and told me I didn’t have any choice.”