Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 2, January 1973

Campus Murder With Tomahawk by Waldo Carlton Wright

Furtive and illicit was his love, sudden and primeval his dying. Who killed the campus lover boy — and why?

It was natural for the faculty to suspect Martha Gordon of murdering her husband. Then Dr. Cloute, president of Horseham College, reminded the troopers that Natty, a half breed Indian maintenance man, was the only one who could have used the tomahawk so effectively.

I was just back from the boondocks that spring semester, teaching journalism, when the bludgeoned body of Cyril Gordon was found naked in the hemlock woods back of campus.

Horseham College, with ivy draped red brick Old Main, huddled on a knoll, is one of those half forgotten New England colleges where even today the house mothers are more likely to call the president the headmaster and the catalogs still offer Elocution as a liberal arts subject.

Cyril Gordon, tall, lean, with wavy flaxen hair, was teaching Dramatics. He lived with his red headed wife Martha in Wentworth Hall. Everyone could hear them quarreling. That is, her tearing him apart, even at rehearsals. It was pretty plain she was jealous of Eve Hackett, and not without cause.

Eve Hackett had come to Horseham a tight lipped virgin several years ago, directly from Durham, as dean of women. In addition to counseling the farm girls on the naughty ways of the birds and the bees, she taught Speech 101 with appropriate gestures. Dr. Cloute approved of Miss Hackett’s distinctly Harvard accent, being a New Hampshire man himself.

Natty Bowles, the half breed, told me he had caught Hackett and Gordon on the black leather couch in his office one night. He had gone in to Old Main to check the thermostats. But Natty had such a vivid imagination. As it turned out that was only a preliminary interlude to what happened between the young drama instructor and the prim hipped dean of women.

Natty, a cross between a French Canadian mother and an Algonquin chief, became one of my best friends. He had carried my trunk to the third floor of the wooden faculty dorm when I arrived at midterm. From his Indian heritage he had acquired the body of a blacksmith, from his French mother, his peeping Tom character. He could outwork any two farm hands, replace a leaky roof in the morning, dig a trench for a broken pipe that afternoon. And all night every two hours he walked the rounds of campus buildings, against the threat of prowlers, fires, or panty raids of the girls’ dorms. He would fall asleep in my office, listening to the radio, but in ten minutes he would be on his rounds.

He was the first one to tip me off as to what went on between the young drama instructor and the dean of women. He had heard them talking together on the stage of the gym. It was after midnight and he had come down to check the furnace. He had slipped back in the vestibule, listened.

“Make love,” he said, grinning, exposing a missing front tooth. The tip of his red nose almost slipped into the hole.

“You mustn’t go around telling lies like that about people you don’t like,” I said, recalling that Natty had complained to me a month earlier about Cyril Gordon tearing him out for turning down the heat the evening he had scheduled a rehearsal for the spring play.

Not that it. seems too unlikely Miss Hackett was having her first affair. It had to happen sometime, he being a poet. Besides it was all too evident Cyril Gordon had had it up to his bobbing Adam’s apple with his marriage to a fading red-headed actress.

Mrs. Gordon had brought with her the wrinkled neck glamor of Broadway. She had understudied Helen Hayes, appeared with the Lunts. Any day you could find her in the snack bar on a stool making up to whatever sweat shirted athlete might slide into the next stool for Ma Pringle’s mid-morning hamburgers and coke.

Late afternoons from the office on the raised ramp of the gym, I could hear them. During rehearsal Mrs. Gordon lent her Helen Hayes voice in coaching the play. They were staging Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. Cyril had agreed to be the narrator, off stage, having been unable to entice any of the farm boys to read the part.

“Stop mouthing those lines like a trained seal,” she would call out of the darkness to her husband. “Damn it all, Cyril, put some guts into it.”

“Yes, darling,” Cyril said. “It’s been quite a while since I played this part.”

“Well, get with it,” she called, motioning to the student players. “Let’s go through the graveyard scene again. From the stepladder where the dead girl says ‘Mother look at me, just once.’ ”

As the time came nearer for the pre-Easter performance, Mrs. Gordon continued to chew him out. He seemed to grow meeker, with his quiet, “Yes, darling. Of course, Martha, you know best.”

Even the cast took to feeling sorry for him. No one resented his having this affair on the sly with the prim Victorian dean of women.

The night of the performance, with the auditorium crowded, when Cyril was halfway through the narration, speaking the lines with the nasal twang of a Yankee telling the story to. his cronies around a pot bellied stove, a voice roared from the wings, “Damn it all, Gordon, put some feeling into it.”

The Irish drama coach dropped the sheet to the stage. He switched off the mini light that had been focused on the page. He turned and vanished into the wings, back stage. Like a fadeout. That was the last any of us saw Cyril Gordon alive.

It almost broke up the play, her swearing at him, his walking off like that. But she hurried up the left aisle, switched on the light and continued to read the narration as if nothing had happened.

The young players were quite upset. Some forgot entire lines. But with awkward pauses they ran through the third act and the curtain dropped with a plop on the stage.

Dr. Cloute came back stage to talk to Mrs. Gordon. She was sitting on the divan, crying. Dr. Cloute sat down beside her, patted her hand.

“You were quite right in correcting his reading,” he said. “His enunciation was abominable.”

“I just don’t know what got into me,” Mrs. Gordon said quietly. “By the way, where did the bastard go?”

The Irish poet wasn’t anywhere in the gym, nor in the Gordon apartment in the faculty dorm. Only Natty Bowles had seen where he had gone, to the apartment of the dean of women. But no one else knew that at the time. None of the students and surely none of the faculty. Dr. Cloute appeared to be the most mystified about the disappearance of the drama director.

As an able administrator, Dr. Cloute that same week appointed Mrs. Gordon to carry on her husband’s classes. She even agreed to coach one of Miss Hackett’s speech classes that was preparing for the spring debate with the team from Dennison.

The former actress proved an able replacement of her husband. She held tryouts for Macbeth, arranged for a girl’s chorus in the Greek style, wrote the verses to come in at the end of each act, to comment on the cruel murder of the King.

Her target for abuse became the dean of women. Not that she ever went into the dean’s office, accused her of adultery, or anything like that. Instead she cut Miss Hackett down, word by word, criticizing her students of speech.

“Who ever taught you to talk like an Edison record?” she would ask the girls. “Gestures like that went out with elocution, years ago. Say the lines naturally, Phyllis. This lady Macbeth is a murderess, not a dean of women in some smart assed college, like Horseham.”

It was Natty who told me that Cyril Gordon was still on campus, hiding out, waiting for an opportunity to settle for her bawling him out, ruining his career. Natty had seen him twice slipping into Miss Hackett’s apartment well after hours. He was carrying a tennis racket, as if this were the weapon with which he planned, when opportunity offered, to do away with his wife.

Dr. Cloute alerted the troopers. Obviously there was a potential killer on the loose around campus, a disgruntled member of the faculty bent on possible murder of his wife. Anything might happen.

“Not a word of this in the papers, Henderson.” He had called me into his office where he sat in state, like a ruler in more ways than one.

“But word’s bound to leak out, with the troopers nosing around.” I knew something would soon slip into the Bedford Eagle through one of the campus correspondents.

“That’s what I hired you for, public relations, Henderson.” He pressed the tips of his fingers together to show how all things can be contained. “Horseham’s image must be maintained, especially with the riots and violence on most campuses.”

The troopers searched every nook for the missing Cyril Gordon. Even the dark room in the science building where Natty claimed to have seen the lovers go one evening last fall. The drama instructor had vanished.

Then one afternoon in May, bloodhounds were brought in to track the missing Irishman. They smelled a pair of Gordon’s trousers, then set off along a tan bark path that led into the hemlock woods. There on an open knoll, under alder bushes, they came on the decomposed body of the former drama director. The poet’s head had been bashed in. by a flint tomahawk that lay by his naked, fly-blown body. A red swastika had been smeared on his chest.

Naturally at first everyone suspected Mrs. Gordon had followed her husband and the dean of women up the tan bark path, interrupted their party and cracked in his skull. Probably he had been murdered shortly after she had interrupted his reading the part of the narrator in “Our Town.”

Of the members of the faculty the troopers questioned, the most upset emotionally was Miss Hackett.

“There was never anything between us but friendship,” she kept repeating in her Victorian way. “He would often come to me for consolation. I felt genuinely sorry for him, the way she browbeat him. But for anyone to infer anything more is too preposterous for words.”

Mrs. Gordon went to pieces in the morgue when the troopers took her there to complete the identification of her husband.

“Poor dumb bastard,” she said. “I loved him.”

It was the Indian tomahawk shifted suspicion to Natty Bowles. Yes, he had seen the drama director several times after the night of the performance, dodging around campus after midnight. Yes, that was his axe. He had given it to Dr. Cloute to add to his Indian collection. Yes, he had watched the lovers on the knoll many evenings, starting last fall. And then back stage that winter, when he came in to check the furnace.

Dr. Cloute admitted that Natty had given him the tomahawk to add to his collection of artifacts. He was proud of his collection. He would show it to his students during his lectures on the French and Indian wars. He had written several papers on this bit of Colonial history, saying, “Somehow, I feel far enough back one of my ancestors was a chief of the Six Nations.”

Oddly enough, Dr. Cloute hadn’t missed the tomahawk until it was found by the body of Cyril Gordon. It had evidently been taken from the white pine chest in his study where he kept arrow heads, stone pestles, hide scrapers, bone fish hooks and round net sinkers, peace beads of wampum, charred cobs of Indian corn.

In his lectures to the senior class he always stressed the cultural status of the American Indians. They were nearer civilization than the early Colonials realized. They knew how to preserve meat. They had cross pollinated corn, beans, squash. And they were a highly moral people. There was no trading of maidens under the hide tepees or in the long bark houses. At that, he would smile knowingly and his senior students would smile back. They knew this was his way of condemning what went on back campus, even among some of the Horseham faculty.

Suspicion centered like the nose of the bloodhounds on Natty Bowles. He told too many conflicting stories about what he had seen, how he had watched the lovers make love back stage and on the grassy knoll. But when the prosecuting attorney held up the tomahawk for the jury to see the dried blood on the blade, he shook his head, denied he had used it to knock but the brains of Cyril Gordon, director of dramatics. As much as he admitted hating him.

Yes, he had seen the red paint on the bloated body when the troopers moved it into the morgue, holding their noses. Yes, the body bore the Indian curse sign, the sign a brave painted on the chest of his dead enemy.

Had Natty ever quarreled with the drama director? Yes, the white man had sworn at him on three different occasions for forgetting to leave the thermostat turned up in the gym winter evenings Gordon was holding rehearsals. Gordon had called him a bad name, a lazy clout. At first Natty had thought the drama director had meant the president, Dr. Cloute. At the time Natty had asked me what it meant and I had told him clout meant a blow.

“So instead you deliberately set out to kill him, didn’t you?” The attorney repeated the charge to remind the jury. “You sneaked up on him while he was asleep on the knoll, struck him with your tomahawk. Then with red clay you painted on the dead man’s chest the swastika of death.”

The jury brought in a verdict of murder in the first degree. Natty was shipped to the death house. But after the prison psychiatrist’s examination, Judge Trent had Natty committed to the hospital for the criminal insane.

Campus settled down after that. Came the time for finals, new contracts for the faculty, Dr. Cloute’s wife Hilda forced him not to renew Miss Hackett’s contract. Hilda had taken Martha Gordon into her confidence. Mrs. Gordon could handle the speech classes much better than the dean of women.

The last day of school, Miss Hackett opened the little blue envelope. Instead of her contract for the next year, she found a neatly typed letter informing her that Bruce Harrison would become dean of both male and female students.

She had heard the day before through the campus grapevine, that because of my friendship with Natty, Dr. Cloute had not renewed my contract, under the contrived excuse that journalism would not be offered next year at Horseham College. She came to my office to see me.

“Before I leave, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your keeping my affair with Mr. Gordon out of the papers,” she said, sitting down by my desk and lighting a cigarette.

“That was nothing, just good public relations, as Dr. Cloute would put it.”

“He gave you the sack too, didn’t he?” she asked. Except for her wide blue eyes and one strand of crow black hair that had a way of dropping down over one eye and that she kept tossing aside like an untamed mare, she looked much like my youngest aunt Matilda, the one who lives in Boston.

“I don’t know what to do about it,” she said. “Maybe you could advise me.”

“About what?”

“Dr. Cloute.” She tossed her head. “He’s quite a bastard, you know.”

I shook my head. She seemed like Natty, accusing the president of Horseham College.

“The first year I came to Horseham as dean of women, he asked me to teach a two-hour course in speech. ‘As a favor, Miss Hackett,’ he said, and five hundred dollars more a year.”

“Horseham doesn’t pay very well,” I admitted to encourage her to continue the story of her relations with Dr. Cloute.

“I soon enough found out what the extra salary meant,” she spoke quietly, as if confessing to a priest. “He would call me into his office after the last bell. At first he would talk about his family in New Hampshire and ask me if I had ever met any other Cloutes while I was at Durham. That led to his confessing that he was part Indian. And then he asked me if I didn’t want him to show me how the Indians made love.”

“And did he show you?”

“Yes, after he threatened to tell the faculty how he had seen me going into the darkroom with one Of my senior boys, to help him develop some pictures of my speech class.”

“So Dr. Cloute was your first lover.” I knew she wanted me to level with her.

“Yes, we got along all right. The second year he put through another thousand dollar raise. And then Cyril Gordon came on campus. From that first faculty meeting, loved this blue-eyed Irishman, the free way he walked, swinging his legs, whistling, his touseled hair bobbing with his laughter. I had dreamed of a lover like him, gentle as summer rain, coming on me sitting in the heather, waiting for his voice.”

“And he found too what he was looking for?”

I must encourage her to be quite frank.

“You and everyone else on campus knows he did. His wife had interrupted his career, torturing him, before his class, at rehearsals. He told me she was driving him daft.”

“Yes, it was quite evident.” I had heard the red-headed actress many times tearing away his dignity as a man.

“If you were I, would you tell the police?” Her quick question caught me wondering how it had been, this Irishman lying with her in his arms, on the divan back stage, on the pineneedled knoll in the back woods.

“Tell the police what?” I asked, wondering what she meant. She put out her cigarette in the ash tray, watching the sparks flare and die.

“About Dr. Cloute and how he took to following us, spying on us. Once on the divan a small flashlight flicked on in the wings and I saw his face twisted with his own frustration. My next salary check was fifty dollars short. When I asked why he said the board of trustees had ordered him to cut all salaries fifteen percent and his hands were tied. I learned later the only two salaries that had been cut were Gordon’s and mine.”

“You expected that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, it proved he was planning to do away with us. I told Gordon we must be more circumspect, stop seeing each other. But he just laughed, said Cloute was a yellow-bellied bully, frantic with jealousy, but harmless as crazy old Natty. Cyril should have known better. And then that horrid last day.”

She stopped and taking a kerchief from her bag, wedged it against her lips. Her shoulders shook but she didn’t cry, returned the wadded kerchief to her beaded bag.

“So you were on the knoll with Gordon when he was murdered?”

“Yes, I was sitting with my back against the trunk of a giant hemlock, smoking. Gordon was reading Browning. He had just come to the lines about Fra Pandolf pointing to the oil painting of the Last Dutchess in the Florentine gallery. Through a clump of alder I saw the red-rimmed eyes of an Indian. His face was painted with blotches of white and yellow and one hand grasped the hilt of a tomahawk. I screamed much as the Dutchess must have cried out when she saw her husband, the Duke, standing at the foot of the bed.”

“Did your screams scare him away?”

“No, he hooted, sprang from the aiders and swung the tomahawk at Cyril. Before my poet could throw up his arms to protect himself, the Indian sunk the stone blade into his skull.”

“Did you blank out at that?” I asked.

“No, I was so frozen with fear I stopped screaming. As if I weren’t there he stooped over his victim and with a stick daubed a swastika sign on the dead man’s chest.”

“He didn’t strike you?” I asked her.

“No, he turned so I could see the grimace on his face, a mask of hate, lips drawn back, narrowed eyes, distended nostrils. With a grunt he tossed the stone axe at the dead body, swung and vanished in the underbrush.”

“You mean, the Indian was Natty?”

She shook her head. “It was Dr. Cloute, made up like ah Indian.”

“How did you recognize him?”

“When he sneered, drew back his lips in that look of hate. Natty was missing a front tooth. Dr. Cloute’s dentures were always perfect.”

She opened her bag, took out a calling card, scribbled an address on the back, handed it to me.

“I’m going home to New Hampshire for a while.” She rose, threw the strap of her bag over one shoulder. In her blue tailored suit, she looked like a smart Wave.

“You mean you’re not going to the police?”

She turned to look out the window of the gyn, across campus, toward Old Main perched high among the hemlocks. She then looked at me.

“No, I’m leaving him to live with his crime. Remember the lines, ‘There is a Fate that shapes our lives. Rough hew them how we may.’ ”

She turned to the door and for the first time I saw how clear and blue her eyes were.

Sitting alone in my stuffy office, I wondered where I would get another job. Then I remembered Natty in Farview, better housed, fed and watched over than he had ever been on campus, I went along with Miss Hackett’s decision. Leave the murderer to sweat it out. It was a warped, illegal decision. But as many crazy twists of poetic justice, probably it was the most just.