Death by Dissertation

by Dean James

  On a hunch, I went upstairs to the history department office. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to see, but I began walking down the hall. I could at least get some idea of who was on the fifth floor, because the eavesdropper could easily have come up.

  As I turned the corner, I saw Azalea ahead of me, just coming out of the department office. Margaret was with her. Since they didn’t appear to have noticed me, I trailed them casually.

  They stopped at Wilda’s office. After knocking, Azalea opened the door, and she and Margaret walked in.

  I scurried quickly down the hall and was almost in front of the door before I realized that it was open wide enough for me to see inside, and the occupants of Wilda’s office were able to see me as I skidded to an ungainly stop outside the door. Trying to appear innocent, I smiled at the four women in the office, as their blonde heads turned almost as one in my direction.

  Her face blank, Margaret closed the door quietly in my face, as Wilda, Azalea, and Selena turned their backs.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I stood there in the hall for a moment and called myself twenty-seven kinds of stupid. One of the women in that room was probably a double murderer. I was convinced of it now. And, in my usual graceless way, I had advertised my presence at the most inopportune time. I was willing to bet also that one of them had been down on the fourth floor, listening in on my conversation with Bella and Bruce. The fourth floor was where much of the library’s history collections were shelved. The eavesdropper could have been any one of them, even Azalea, who often read history, particularly books by faculty members.

  But that conversation would probably alarm only one of them unduly. I just couldn’t believe that this was a conspiracy by the four of them. Three of them were innocent, I thought, innocent at least of the two murders, and maybe those three didn’t realize that the fourth was the culprit.

  I decided to move away from Wilda’s office door before one of them came out and found me still there. I lumbered down to the history office, lost in thought, and almost ran into Dan Erickson.

  We both mumbled “sorry” to each other. I stopped, but Dan brushed on by me and rounded the corner. Actually I was relieved, because after our conversation that morning, I didn’t feel up to talking to him again for a while. I hoped he had already contacted Herrera. If he hadn't by the next day, I’d have to tell the lieutenant myself what Dan had told me.

  It might be a moot point by then, anyway, if what I suspected about the two murders was true. I went on into the office and smiled casually at Thelma, who winked at me once again. Her small act of espionage had clearly cheered her up—or perhaps it was the fact that Azalea was not in the office.

  I picked up one of the phones and punched in my home number, anxious to talk things over with Maggie and Rob. My phone rang and rang, but no one answered. I disconnected, then asked Thelma for the department’s list of home numbers. I found Rob’s and dialed it. After four rings, the answering machine picked up. My stomach did a couple of flip-flops as I listened to Charlie’s voice prompt me to leave a message. Rob obviously hadn’t thought about the answering machine the past few days.

  “Rob, it’s me,” I mumbled, trying to keep my voice from Thelma’s eager ears. “I’m on campus, and I’ve found out a lot of things we need to talk about. I think I’ve got it figured out, so you and Maggie come on over as quickly as possible. I’ll be in my carrel.”

  Once again I disconnected, then I punched in Maggie’s home number. When the answering machine picked up, Maggie’s voice invited me to leave a message. I repeated the message I had left for Rob, then hung up.

  Thelma was staring at me unashamedly, but I didn’t want to stick around and face any questions. I bade her goodbye, then escaped out into the hall.

  From the periphery of my vision, I caught a flash of movement, as if someone had just ducked out of sight around the corner. I stood still, listening. Muted sounds of conversation came from an office nearby, and the fluorescent lights hummed faintly above me. I couldn’t hear any footsteps.

  I shrugged off my vague feeling of disquiet. Hearing Charlie’s voice on the answering machine had unsettled me to the point that I was imagining things.

  I turned and walked the other way down the hall, toward Ruth McClain’s office. I thought the time had come to take her into my confidence and ask what she knew about Margaret’s dissertation.

  The door of Ruth’s office was closed, but the lights were on. I started to knock, but then I heard voices and realized she must be talking to someone. I checked my watch, then peered at the small typed card taped on the door. This was during her regular office hours. I’d have to wait until whoever was with her finished.

  I leaned against the wall beside her door and tried to let my restless mind slow down the turmoil of thoughts. I had to concentrate and think through all this information rationally.

  Philip Dunbar’s dissertation seemed to be the key to the whole problem. I found it hard to believe that all existing copies of it had been in his car when he was killed. I was convinced that he must have had another copy somewhere.

  Then, when he had died so tragically, an opportunist had seized the chance to take possession of what could be a valuable property. If Dunbar’s dissertation had been of the quality of his article, then the full-length work would have been valuable indeed. The article demonstrated his abilities both as a scholar and as a writer. Not only would an outstanding dissertation, published as a book, bring its possessor an excellent reputation in the competitive world of academia, but it could bring money from the popular market as well. Dunbar’s writing style was lively and interesting, and I could see easily where his work would appeal to an audience larger than that of the scholarly community. Writers like Barbara Tuchman, with fewer historical credentials than Dunbar would have possessed, had hit the best-seller list with works of history that were both scholarly and entertaining. Finally, with the academic job market so difficult to crack, some persons might be willing to commit murder to get ahead.

  Stealing the dead man’s scholarly efforts, therefore, could pay off handsomely for the person cool enough to gamble on it—and patient enough to wait an appropriate length of time. Was Margaret cool enough and patient enough to fit the scenario I had sketched out? She would have had to do something about her writing style, however. But maybe she had written her dissertation that way on purpose, to mask her theft.

  She certainly seemed cool enough, I thought, based on that conversation earlier in Ruth’s office. She hadn’t seemed the least bit grieved over Whitelock’s death, had actually sounded pleased that Ruth was so much easier to work with. But if Margaret had been having kinky sex with Whitelock, no wonder she was happy to have him out of the way.

  That would certainly explain why Whitelock was willing to let one of his students plagiarize the efforts of another of his students. Briefly I wondered whether Charlie’s main motive in blackmailing Whitelock had been to get his hands on Dunbar’s dissertation. I was convinced that Charlie had figured out that someone had the missing dissertation, and his attempts to put pressure on Whitelock might have been directed toward obtaining the dissertation for himself.

  Charlie had miscalculated badly, however, because whoever had the dissertation and planned to use it had murdered to keep it. Once Charlie was out the picture, though, Whitelock must have panicked, and the killer decided to take him out of the picture, as well, counting on the fact that the whole dissertation angle seemed so unlikely that no one would ever figure it out.

  I smiled grimly as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. The killer had reckoned without my nosiness and my loyalty to Rob. I don’t know whether the killer had had any idea that Rob could shape up in the police view as such a good suspect, but Rob had two hidden assets, as it had turned out—Maggie and me.

  Rather pleased with this picture of Andy Carpenter as Nemesis, I entertained myself with the mental picture of the newspaper headlines. “Brilliant amateur leads police to murderer”
sounded pretty good.

  Then I brought myself back to earth. This was not the time to indulge my adolescent fancy of being a famous amateur detective. There were still a number of loose ends to tie up before I could call the case solved, and I wasn’t going to settle anything by fantasizing.

  I glanced at my watch. Almost two o’clock. I hoped Maggie and Rob would get my message soon. I wanted to talk to them after I talked to Ruth. I stared at her door, willing whichever gabby student was with her to finish up so I could have my turn.

  My attempts at mental telepathy came to naught, so I settled back against the wall once more and contemplated some of those loose ends.

  What, for example, was Anthony Logan’s connection, if any, to the murders? Granted, I now knew that he was Margaret’s father, but I couldn’t figure out whether that was supposed to mean anything. I made myself slow down, and I concentrated on recalling that long conversation Logan and I had had the day Rob and I discovered Whitelock’s murder.

  Logan had taken some pains to tell me stories to Whitelock’s discredit. That tale about the young woman, sent to Europe by her parents to get her away from Whitelock, was a good example.

  What if Logan had been talking about his own daughter? That would certainly explain the bitterness he had seemed to feel toward Whitelock. The story would also strengthen Margaret’s connection to Whitelock. Maybe she had had an affair with him years ago, when she was an undergraduate. Then she returned to the university as a graduate student and ended up working with her former lover. They resumed the relationship at some point, and Margaret had plenty of blackmail material to force Whitelock to go along with her plans to use Dunbar’s work as her own.

  Whitelock would have had to cooperate. He could have exposed Margaret, but that would have destroyed him, as well. So he had to support the whole thing.

  But what if Whitelock had panicked after Charlie’s murder? Margaret had killed Charlie because he was threatening exposure, and with him out of the way, she might have figured that Whitelock would be more easily controlled. But maybe Charlie’s murder had backfired, made Whitelock more nervous, more anxious to confess and take whatever the consequences might have been. That could have prompted Margaret to murder him.

  I thought then of my conversation with Dr. Farrar. She had heard Whitelock argue with four different people the afternoon of the day he had probably died. Two men, two women had argued with him. Bella and Rob accounted for two of the people. Who had been the other man and woman?

  What if the other woman had been Margaret? Surely the police could check easily enough whether she had been at work that afternoon. If she had been arguing with Whitelock, she could have stormed out of his office and gone right down the hall to her father’s office.

  The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. Anthony Logan could have been the other man who had argued with Whitelock that afternoon. What was it Dr. Farrar had said about Logan?

  He often had tea with her in the afternoon, but that particular afternoon, after she left her office in disgust at the noise coming from Whitelock’s office, she stopped by Logan’s office, and he wasn't there.

  I was sure those were her exact words. He wasn't there. She hadn’t said he’d already gone home for the day, just that he wasn’t there. Because, I thought, my elation mounting, he was in Whitelock’s office at that very moment, arguing with him.

  I developed the theory further in my mind. Logan and Whitelock were arguing in Whitelock’s office. Logan, having heard the whole sordid story from his daughter, tried to reason with Whitelock. Whitelock, of course, probably refused to listen. Then, angrily, Logan picked up the ashtray and bashed Whitelock over the head. Stunned at what he had done, Logan left quietly, Whitelock dead or dying on the floor. Probably no one noticed him leave Whitelock’s office.

  I mulled it over for a moment longer before I spotted one flaw in the sce-nario—I assumed that there were two murderers. Logan had killed Whitelock to protect his daughter, but he hadn’t killed Charlie.

  Or had he?

  Maybe Margaret had come to her father with her problems before Charlie had been killed. If that had been the case, then Logan could have killed Charlie and Whitelock. Charlie first, because he was the most direct threat. Logan could have assumed that Whitelock would be more pliant than Charlie, with more to lose. Then Whitelock was killed when he panicked and threatened to give everything away. Someone would have to prove that Logan had known about all this before Charlie’s death, however.

  My head was beginning to hurt, plus I was feeling a little ashamed of myself. I was still having trouble seeing Logan as the murderer. I had to admit that the need to protect his daughter was a powerful motive, especially for a man who seemed to have hated Whitelock. Margaret was just as capable of protecting herself, though, as she was of asking her father to do it for her. There was no need for her to have involved him at all.

  That was enough for the moment, I thought grimly. Before I tried to carry this much further, I had to talk to Ruth and confirm that Margaret was using what I suspected was really Philip Dunbar’s work. Ruth could at least tell me more about what Margaret’s dissertation actually contained than my hasty perusal had allowed. And, I brightened at the thought, Ruth might actually know a little something more about what Dunbar had written.

  Then, almost as it on cue, Ruth’s door opened, and an undergraduate popped out.

  I checked my watch; she’d been in there at least half an hour. She smiled uncertainly at me, and I’m afraid I probably glowered at her before she skittered nervously away.

  I could almost tell the length of the young woman’s visit by the look on Ruth’s face as I closed the door behind me.

  “Isn’t advising undergrads fun?” I asked cheerily as I sat down across from her.

  She shot me a dark look. “Full of laughs,” she muttered, running a hand tiredly through her hair. “What can I do for you today, Andy? I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of spare time the next few days.” She indicated the manuscripts on her desk.

  I took a deep breath. “Actually,” I began, “that’s what I need to talk to you about.”

  “These dissertations?” she asked, the puzzlement obvious in her voice.

  I nodded, trying to figure out the best way to proceed. “You already know that I’ve been nosing around, trying to figure out what’s going on,” I stated, and Ruth smiled in affirmation. “And you warned me to be careful, and I’ve tried to be. But I think I’ve finally got things figured out, and I think you can help me prove it.”

  She regarded me with something approaching polite disbelief. “What do I know that could help you? How do these dissertations relate to anything?”

  Well, I could either launch into a long story and try to convince her, or I could cut to the chase and simply ask what I needed to know. The explanations could come later.

  “Selena Bradbury and Margaret Willord were supposed to defend their dissertations this semester, and I’m assuming, from what I observed earlier today, that you’re going to be taking over for Dr. Whitelock.” I waited for Ruth’s confirmation, and after she nodded, I continued. “I need to know the subjects of their dissertations.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. “I cannot, for the life of me,” she said, her voice dry as dust, “understand what their dissertations have to do with this whole mess. But I assume you think you have a good reason for asking.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Ruth grinned. “The great detective obviously isn’t going to explain things to me, so I suppose I’ll go along. There’s no great secret, as far as I can tell, about their dissertations. Selena has done a new study of the Frankish laws and actually translated them into English. It’s an excellent work of legal history. I’ve been pleased with the whole project.”

  My heart started beating a little faster. I hadn’t given much thought to Selena as a viable suspect, and it now seemed that she was truly out of the running. A dissertation on the Frankish laws was
quite different from Dunbar’s work. I could see the noose beginning to tighten around Margaret’s neck.

  “And Margaret Wilford?” I prompted eagerly.

  “Margaret surprised me a little with her choice of topic. She’s working on the Norse invasions of the Frankish kingdoms, focusing on the military aspects. You know,” she mused, “I hadn’t realized Margaret was so interested in military history.”

  Dumbfounded, I stared at Ruth. “Are you sure?” I croaked.

  “Of course I’m sure, Andy,” she said and thumped one of the piles on her desk. “Here’s her dissertation.” She pointed over to the corner, and I saw another pile of papers on a table. “That one is Selena’s.” Then she put her hands on a pile near the center of her desk—the one I had been reading through earlier. “This one is Dan Erickson’s.”

  “Dan’s?” I managed to ask. “What’s his topic?” I had never heard him talk much about the subject of his dissertation, just that damned post-doc at Harvard! The more I thought about it, the more I realized how odd that had been.

  Watching me carefully, Ruth responded to my query. “Dan’s work is very interesting. Anglo-Saxon England isn’t my period, of course, but I know enough to realize that he’s offering a major reinterpretation of the life of one of the seminal figures of the period, Alfred the Great. He’s going to cause quite a stir with this. I was astonished at the quality of it.”

  I stared wordlessly at Ruth. It had been Dan Erickson all along.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I felt like an utter fool. I had focused so intently on Margaret that I hadn’t thought seriously about Dan, even after his so-called confession putting him at the scene of the crime. He had known Philip Dunbar; he had been around at the time of his death. He had as much to gain as Margaret or Selena by stealing Dunbar’s work. That junior fellowship at Harvard would be worth killing for—at least for some people. Dan had certainly put me off the scent, at least for a while, with his confession. Did he think he had convinced me of his innocence?