Rhapsody in Red Read online

  I should have known that wasn’t going to happen.

  Acrid fumes from the chem lab irritated our noses, and the open window, wherever it was, kept banging every few minutes. Occasional gusts of cold wind purified the air momentarily, and then the chemical stench would return.

  “Shouldn’t we call someone else?” Professor Thorn threw a worried glance at the cell phone in my hand. “I mean . . . someone at the college . . . the president or dean?”

  “Not just yet,” I said. I made no move to return her phone.

  She looked doubtful but said nothing. The window banged a few more times, and we weathered a few more blasts of wind. Then, faintly, I heard police sirens.

  “Now,” I said, and dialed the home telephone of the college dean, who is known since The Great Renaming as the vice president for academic affairs.

  Among faculty it is said cynically, though not very originally, that his affairs would necessarily be academic. His actual name is Dean Billig. He was promoted to dean while we were still Overton Grace College, and thus he became Dean Dean Billig. The faculty immediately shortened the name, not entirely affectionately, to Dean-Dean.

  Years before my time, Dean-Dean came to Overton with a master’s degree in psychology and gradually worked his way up to department chair. His lack of a Ph.D. posed no accreditation problem because the psychology department was folded into the division of social sciences. The division head was my boss, the well-credentialed chair of the history department.

  However, Dean-Dean later earned his Ph.D. via correspondence without ever leaving our campus. That solved his personal accreditation problem but created another. He still grows self-conscious around faculty who earned degrees in residence at major universities, going eye-to-eye with tenured professionals in cutthroat oral examinations.

  But that is ancient history.

  Dean-Dean’s high-pitched voice answered the third ring.

  “This is Preston Barclay,” I said. “We have a problem. Professor Thorn and I are at the college—”

  “University,” he corrected.

  “. . . in the science center,” I continued. “We’ve found Laila Sloan dead in her office.”

  There was a silence, after which Dean-Dean several times invoked the Deity to himself sotto voce. A faint rustle came through the line as if the phone were trembling against his ear.

  “Are . . . are you sure she’s dead?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry. There’s no doubt.” I resisted the temptation to use the phrase dead as a frozen mackerel. Although accurate, it seemed a bit insensitive.

  “Do you . . . can you tell how she died?” Dean-Dean had his breath back now and took a tentative step toward controlling the situation. The sirens grew louder, and I wondered if he could hear them through the phone.

  How she died? I told him in words he couldn’t misunderstand. “It looks like somebody slugged her and then choked her.”

  Dean-Dean invoked the Deity again, reflexively rather than conscientiously. “Don’t call the police,” he said. “I’ll be right there. Whatever you do, don’t call the police.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Good boy.” He slammed down the receiver.

  I guess that answered my question about whether he could hear the sirens.

  I handed the phone back to Professor Thorn.

  “What did you tell him you wouldn’t do?” she asked.

  “Call the police,” I said.

  The loose window banged again.

  She frowned. “You’ve already called them. Why didn’t you tell him?”

  I grinned. “You’ll see.” I was feeling less and less like a history professor.

  She again looked doubtful but said nothing.

  Sirens came closer and the chemical odor grew stronger.

  Concern showed on Professor Thorn’s face. “Will we have to tell the police why we came here? It’s so embarrassing. . . .”

  I gave her a straight look. “We have to tell them exactly what happened. If we lie or hold anything back, they’ll dig it out and confront us with it. Our interviews won’t be pleasant, but we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  It had not yet occurred to me to question her story.

  Sirens whined outside, then stopped, leaving an eerie silence. Even my internal music rested, bringing a welcome interlude of relief. Running footsteps sounded on the stairs, and two uniformed policemen burst into the hallway.

  I pointed to the open office door. The lead policeman took two careful steps through the doorway. One look was enough. He came back outside and used his hand radio to call for backup. His partner sealed off the office with yellow tape.

  Dimly heard mutterings from outside the building indicated that a crowd had formed. Mostly students, I supposed. There must have been more police restraining them, for none entered the building.

  The lead policeman inside was a well-groomed man of about thirty. He turned to me now, his manner tentative. “I don’t know if you remember me, Dr. Barclay, but I was in your Western Civ course eight years ago.”

  “You’re Ron Spencer, and you wrote a research paper on ‘Anti-Semitism in Elizabethan England.’” I tried not to sound like a professor. “Those sergeant’s stripes look good on you.”

  He glanced at his sleeve with a self-conscious grin. “Yeah. But I’m still embarrassed about that paper.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “With one exception, it was a fine paper.” He showed too much deference, so I added, “You have to forget you were a student here. Forget we’re faculty. Treat us like you would anyone else at a crime scene.”

  “Right,” he said, suddenly all business. He pointed his partner toward Professor Thorn and led me a few steps up the hall. I told him, briefly, how we happened to find the body.

  It’s a good thing I was brief, for I’d no sooner finished than people started arriving. I’d thought the building was deserted because we saw no lighted windows as we approached. But it turned out several people were in rooms on the opposite side.

  First to arrive was Bob Harkins, a tall chemistry professor with curly blond hair and a pink-cheeked complexion that made him look as young as a student. When cornered, he would confess to thirty-eight years. But he usually avoided being cornered. Dressed in a black lab apron and shirt sleeves, he came out of a lab at the far end of the hall.

  “What’s going on, Press?” His voice revealed nothing beyond normal curiosity.

  Before I could answer, Sergeant Spencer intercepted him and took him aside. They were about the same size and looked about the same age, though Spencer could not be a day over thirty. Bob gestured freely during the questioning, his face the picture of injured innocence.

  Next to arrive was the college’s lone philosophy professor, Gifford Jessel, another tall, late-thirties-to-early-forties type. His head was adorned with a garland of short-cropped, raven-black hair around a doorknob-bald pate. He stepped out of the stairwell, apparently having descended from his office on the third floor. In point of fact, his office was the third floor. Assigning him an office carved out of what had once been the building’s attic presumably reflected the low priority our administration placed on his subject. But Giff accepted the assignment with a grin and quipped that it was the best place to teach Attic Philosophy.

  Now he looked from Professor Thorn to me and asked, “What’s the problem?”

  I gave it to him straight. “Laila Sloan is dead.”

  His mouth dropped open, but before he could say anything, the second cop interrupted and separated him from the rest of us.

  A high-pitched voice sounded angrily above the mutter outside, and presently a breathless Dean-Dean trotted out of the stairwell. His head jerked around in quick, birdlike motions as he took in our group. Then he moved directly to the office door and lifted the tape as if to step through.

  Both policemen converged on him, and Sergeant Spencer warned, “Sir, you mustn’t go in there.”

  “I have to see what’s going on. I’
m in charge of the university in President Cantwell’s absence.” Dean-Dean drew himself up to his full five feet eight inches, which was not too impressive since he stood among two policemen and two professors, all of whom stood about six feet three. Matter of fact, he wouldn’t have been too impressive beside my five foot ten.

  Whatever Dean-Dean was wearing when I phoned, he now wore the super-dark blue suit that’s supposed to make him look authoritative. He means well for the college, but he seems to think he can make the ship go faster by running along the deck. Most of us don’t mind that until he wants us to run beside him.

  With a policeman at each elbow gently ushering him away from the yellow tape, he looked at me accusingly. “I told you not to call the police.”

  “I followed your instruction to the letter, sir,” I said. I tried to look innocent.

  Dean-Dean’s gaze flip-flopped from one of my eyes to the other like a moth trying to choose between two lightbulbs. I don’t know what he expected to find there, but he spoke in an accusatory tone. “Well, someone must have called them.”

  “That sounds like a safe bet,” I said, now trying to look stupid, which does not require great effort on my part. My internal orchestra suddenly detonated like a bomb into a lively scherzo with a bassoon cavorting in the lead. Something about Dean-Dean always evokes that bassoon.

  Professor Thorn, who’d been standing just out of Dean-Dean’s line of vision, caught my eye with a barely visible nod. I’d told her she’d see why I didn’t tell Dean-Dean I’d already called the cops, and now she let me know she understood. That was an improvement from the skittish-ness she’d shown in my office.

  While that exchange was going on, another person arrived. This was Luther Pappas, a thick-shouldered, barrel-chested, swarthy man with a handlebar mustache and bristly black hair. Pappas was the janitor, though the administration’s Great Renaming gave him the title of custodial associate. He said nothing, but looked from one face to another until Sergeant Spencer took him aside for questioning.

  Dean-Dean seemed to notice Professor Thorn for the first time. “My dear, I’m sorry you had to witness all this. It’s not the usual way we welcome new faculty.” His face put on its best imitation of an overly attentive undertaker.

  “This is terrible, terrible,” he said to no one in particular. “Things have gone so well for us since The Crisis. . . . This is terrible . . . a terrible thing for the university . . .”

  “It’s kind of hard on Laila, too,” I said.

  Dean-Dean glared at me and turned away toward Sergeant Spencer.

  Professor Thorn murmured, “I see why you’re the campus recluse.”

  “More like the campus leper,” I said. Someday, maybe, I’ll learn to control my tongue.

  Or my mind, which now noted that Professor Thorn’s eyes had widened when Dean-Dean mentioned The Crisis. I thought all faculty knew our school’s recent history. But maybe she hadn’t been briefed.

  Dean-Dean confronted Sergeant Spencer. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing.” The sergeant’s eyes twinkled. As a former student, he seemed to enjoy telling the dean what to do. “We’re all going to stay right where we are till Homicide gets here.”

  As we waited, a feeling crept into me that something unpleasant out of my past was about to rise up and smack me in the face.

  We stood around without saying anything while the tension grew and our already-glum mood subsided to grim. Someone must have thought to close the banging window, for the cold gusts had ceased and that chemical stench permeated the hallway without opposition. The various professors exchanged occasional glances or shrugs, Dean-Dean tapped an impatient foot, and both policemen watched us with expressions that would make Snow White feel guilty.

  My cerebral orchestra abandoned the scherzo in favor of a Chopinlike waltz played on strings rather than piano. Under its influence my tension receded like an ebbing tide. I pushed aside my forebodings and told myself the campus would quickly return to normal.

  The crowd’s murmuring outside had stilled, but now came the siren of another approaching police car. Its shrilling dwindled into silence. A car door slammed and curt orders sounded.

  “Homicide,” Sergeant Spencer explained.

  As if on cue, Overton City’s captain of homicide entered.

  He was the one man in the world I’d hoped never to see again.

  CHAPTER 3

  I had hoped never to see Clyde Staggart again, yet after twenty-three years he’d turned up as captain of homicide in Overton City. I’d heard he’d arrived in town recently to take the homicide job, but I’d found it easy to avoid running into him. Who could know I’d become a prime witness in a homicide investigation?

  Staggart was five years my senior, which would make him about fifty-five. But time had made few changes in him. About six feet tall, he had the thick neck and rounded shoulders of a football lineman who’d spent extra time in the weight room. He looked like a dumb ex-jock until you saw his eyes. Jet-black and deep-set, they reminded me of a starved rat about to charge out of a dark hole at a sleeping baby.

  As he passed through the hall, his gaze flicked to mine for a moment. His lips twisted into a sarcastic smile, but he said nothing and moved directly to Sergeant Spencer. Three more plainclothes detectives, one carrying a camera, came close behind him, along with a small, sloppily dressed man I took to be the medical examiner. The one with the camera had a face remarkably like that of a basset hound, though not quite as pretty.

  Staggart lifted the tape and entered Laila’s office, returning a few moments later to beckon the medical examiner forward. I lost track of the action then, for the detectives broke up our group of bystanders. The dogfaced one beckoned me into a classroom. Without speaking, he pointed me into one of the ancient student chairs, the bare hardwood kind with an arm for a right-handed notetaker and a flat seat that made no concession to the varied shapes of students’ bottoms.

  Without a word, Dogface returned to the hall. Maybe he thought if he left me alone long enough I would ferment.

  I didn’t, but my mind slid back to dwell on Wednesdays past. At this hour, Faith and I used to attend prayer meeting at Saint Mark’s Grace Church. During the hymns and prayers, we would hold hands and feel close to each other and close to God in a way I haven’t felt these three years since the cancer took her away. I don’t go to prayer meeting anymore.

  Forcibly, I brought my mind back to the present. Some lazy instructor had left a complicated equation on the blackboard without adding a “do-not-erase” caveat. Most of the campus has upgraded to dry-erase whiteboards, but this was one of the antique original chalkboards we still use in the older campus buildings. I walked up and changed the arabic number 2 on one side of the equation to 5. I wondered if the instructor would notice that it no longer balanced.

  I was just returning to my chair when Staggart loomed in the doorway. “It’s been a long time, Press,” he said. He nodded toward the blackboard. “I see you’re still playing cutesy.”

  “I’m allergic to people who leave loose ends for other people to tie up.”

  Staggart motioned me into a student chair and hovered over me. “What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”

  I grinned at him. “Since when do you get in trouble by finding someone dead and reporting it?”

  “That depends on the circumstances.”

  He stood with hands on hips. Dogface slipped through the door with a notepad in his hand and eased into a seat behind me.

  “All right, Press,” Staggart said, “tell me about those circumstances.”

  “I’ll be happy to,” I said, “if you’ll back up a couple of steps.”

  It occurred to me that I was acting less and less like a professor. I seemed to have regressed a couple of decades into a self I hadn’t visited in years. But that self hadn’t had a head full of mad musicians. The madmen now played a German oom-pah-pah waltz with a tuba so loud that the ooms overshadowed the pah-pahs. Th
e internal music is a constant distraction, but at least I’m in famous company. Beethoven and Schumann both had musical hallucinations. Schumann even wrote them down, and it’s said he thought he was taking dictation from Schubert’s ghost.

  Staggart exhaled in impatience, startling me out of my thoughts. He didn’t like it, but he backed off onto the classroom’s raised dais and sat on the corner of the instructor’s desk. That put him looking down at me, which I suppose was the main thing he wanted.

  I summarized Professor Thorn’s coming to my office with a problem and our finding Laila Sloan dead.

  His skeptical gaze never left my face. “So you were alone in your office for a couple of hours before the Thorn woman arrived?” His lips twisted again into that sarcastic half-grin. “And why would she bring that problem to you? I’d think she’d go to another female or to the college administration.”

  “University administration,” I corrected. For heaven’s sake, I was beginning to sound like Dean-Dean. “You’ll have to ask her about her reasons. All I know is that she did come to me.”

  “And you believed her story about sexual harassment?” His voice grew derisive.

  “It wasn’t up to me to believe it or not. She seemed sincere, and I could see she was worried. If she’d been lying, that would have come out when we met with Professor Sloan.”

  I’d promoted the deceased again, but that didn’t seem to matter now.

  Staggart sneered. “What would you have done then?”

  I grinned at him again. “I’d have taken them to the dean. He gets paid for refereeing faculty catfights. I just teach history.”

  “Get out of here, Press.” Staggart jerked his thumb toward the door. “And keep your nose clean.”

  “I always keep it clean,” I said. “I thought you’d remember.”

  Professor Thorn stood waiting in the hall. Her lips were drawn tight, her body tense. I didn’t envy her—a new faculty member, apparently without friends, and now forever associated with this incident.