College-Cut Kill

Chapter Two Axes to Grind

The creative writing deal met once a week for a two-hour session, Friday from ten to twelve. It was taught by a dry but pompous little man who, the year before, had hit one of the book clubs with a novel that had little to recommend it but the incredible size of the heroine from the waist up and the frenzy with which she met all emotional experiences.

Tilly Owen was in the class. I located her at the first session, a tallish dark-haired girl, almost plain. Her face showed nothing and I was disappointed in her. She took notes meekly, her dark head bent over the notebook. But when she walked out, I did a quick revision. The tall body had an independent life of its own. Her face showed a clear and unspectacular intelligence, an aloofness — but the body was devious and complicated and intensely feminine, continually betraying the level eyes. She went off with a few other girls before I could make an intercept.

During the week leading to the next session when I saw her again, I enlarged my circle of friends inside the fraternity. Brad Carroll thawed a great deal, particularly after I had a few of them out to the beach house for cocktails. I began to learn more about the insides of the brethren.

Step Krindall, with the baby blue eyes and the pink head, was as uncomplicated and amiable as a dancing bear. Arthur Marris had too deep a streak of seriousness in him, verging on self-importance. His touch was thus a shade too heavy. The better house president knows when to use a light touch. Every house has its types. Bill Armand, the dark, vital junior was the house skeptic, the cynic, the scoffer. Ben Charity, the shy blond Georgia boy was the gullible one, the butt of most practical jokes. The angel-faced redheaded sophomore named Jay Bruce was the house clown. There was the usual sullen, heavy-drinking kid on his way off the rails — one Ralph Schumann, a senior.

The rest of them seemed to merge into one composite type, a bunch of well-washed young men in a stage in their development when clothes, women, snap courses and hard-boiled books had a bit too much importance. They talked easily and well, made perhaps a shade too confident by their acceptance into one of the most socially acceptable groups on the campus. And, in many ways, they were exceedingly silly, as the young of any species is likely to be.

Their silliness pointed up the vast gulf that my two years out of college had opened up. I could see that in their group mind I was becoming rated as one hell of a fellow, a quick guy with a buck, a citizen who could handle his liquor, keep his mouth shut.

I found that I had not lost the study habit. Necessary research during the two intervening years had kept me from losing the knack. The courses were amazingly stimulating. I had expected boredom, but found intellectual excitement.

On Friday came the second writing class. As per instructions, the entire class had done a short-short apiece and dropped it off on the previous Wednesday at the instructor’s office.

He gave us a long beady stare and we became silent. “I should like to read one effort handed in,” he said. He began to read. I flushed as I recognized my own masterwork. I had banged one out with an attempt to give him the amateur stuff he expected.

He finished it and put it carefully aside. “I shall not tell you who wrote that. I read it because you should all find it interesting. I do not care to be laughed at. That story had complete professional competence. No doubt of that. And it is a devilishly clever parody of the other stories that were turned in. It is a tongue-in-cheek attempt to cover the entire scope of the errors that beginners make.

“Yet the perpetrator of this — this fraud, could not conceal his ability, his very deft turn of phrase and control of emotion. I am mystified as to why he or she should be taking my course. I suggest to this unnamed person that he or she give me credit, next time, for a bit more intelligence.”

I shot a wary look to either side. No one was watching me. I forced myself to relax. Another dumb stunt like that and I would destroy my purpose, if I hadn’t done so already...

At noon I elbowed my way through the mob and went down the steps behind Tilly Owen. I fell into step beside her and said, “My name is Rod Arlin, Miss Owen.” I gave her the very best smile. “I offer lunch, an afternoon on the beach, early dinner in Tampa, and a few wagers on the canines at Derby Lane.”

She quickened her pace. “Please, no.”

“I come well-recommended. Arthur Marris will vouch for me.”

“I have a date.”

I caught her arm above the elbow and turned her around. Anger flashed clear in her gray eyes.

“And a Mr. Flynn in New York considers me to be a bright kid, if that means anything.”

The anger faded abruptly and her eyes narrowed. “If this is some sort of a—”

“Come on. My car’s parked over in the lot behind Administration.” I gestured.

She sat demurely beside me in the car. I parked in front of her sorority house. She dropped off her books, changed to a pale green nylon dress beautifully fitted at the waist and across the lyre-shaped flare of her hips, and came back out to the car with swim suit and beach case in an astonishing twenty minutes. She even smiled at me as I held the door for her.

At lunch she said, “Now don’t you think you ought to tell me why...”

“Not yet. Let’s just get acquainted for now.”

She smiled again, and I wondered how I had managed to think of her as plain. I got her talking about herself. She was twenty-two, orphaned when she was eighteen. A trust fund administered by an uncle was paying for the education. During the summer she had gone north to work at a resort hotel. She adored steaks, detested sea food, kept a diary, lived on a budget, hated the movies, adored walking, wore size eight quad A shoes and thought the fraternity and sorority system to be feudal and foul.

She gave me a surprised look. “I don’t talk like this to strangers! Really, I’m usually very quiet. You have quite a knack, Rod. You’re a listener. I never would have thought so to look at you.”

“What do I look like?”

She cocked her head to the side and put one finger on the cleft in her chin. “Hmmm! Pretty self-satisfied. Someone who’d talk about himself rather than listen. And you’re older than I thought. I never noticed until just now those little wrinkles at the corners of your eyes. Quite cold eyes, really. Surprisingly cold.”

“Warm heart.”

“Silly, that goes with hands not eyes.”

We drove out to the beach. She was neither awed by nor indifferent to my layout. “You should be very comfortable here,” she said.

The sun bounced off the white sand with a hard glare. I spread the blanket, fiddled with the portable radio until I found an afternoon jazz concert. The gulf was glassy. It looked as if it had been quieted with a thick coat of blue oil. Porpoise played lazily against the horizon and two cruisers trolled down the shore line. Down by the public beach the water was dotted with heads.

She came across the little terrace and down across the sand wearing a yellow print two-piece suit. Her body was halfway between the color of honey and toast, fair, smooth and unblemished. I rolled onto my elbows and stared at her. It put a little confusion into her walk, a very pleasing shyness — with the mind saying don’t and the body saying look. That kind of a girl. That very precious kind of a girl.

“Well!” I said. She made a face at me.

She sat on the blanket, poured oil into the palm of her hand and coated herself. We lay back, the radio between us, our eyes shut, letting the frank Florida sun blast and stun and smother us with a glare that burned through closed lids with the redness of a steel mill at night.

“Now,” she said sleepily. “Now tell me.”

I reached over and closed the lid of the radio. “Have you made any guesses?”

“Just one. That was your story he read today, wasn’t it?”

It startled me. “A very good guess indeed. Mind telling me how you made it?”

“Too simple, really. Somebody in the class had to be there on... false pretenses. I’m a senior here, you know. So I happened to know everybody else in the class except you.”

I told her why I had come.

She didn’t answer. When I glanced over I saw that she was sitting up, her forehead against her raised knees. She was weeping.

I patted her shoulder. It was a very ineffectual gesture. The oil she had used was sticky.

She talked without looking at me. “I didn’t want to come back here. I wanted to go to some other school. Every day I see places where... we were together.”

“Do you feel the way Mr. Flynn does?”

“That Ted didn’t kill himself? Of course. We were going to be married. Almost everybody knew that. And now they look at me and I can see in their eyes that they are full of nasty pity. The girls won’t talk to me about dates or marriage. I thought I’d die this summer. I worked every day until I was too exhausted to think about anything, just go to sleep.”

“If he didn’t kill himself, somebody else did.”

“That’s the horrible part.” She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were red. “That’s the awful part, having to accept that. And that’s why I came back. I thought I would try to find out. The first thing is to find out why anyone should kill Ted, why anyone should want him dead.”

I took her in on my reasoning thus far. “If you assume that he was killed, you have two choices. The other deaths in the house were either accidents or they were caused too. If they were accidents, somebody was after Ted as an individual. If they were not accidents, then you have two further choices. Were they linked, or were they separate crimes? If they were linked, there is no use looking in Ted’s history for an enemy. If they were linked, he and the others were killed as symbols, not as individuals. Do you follow me?”

“Of course. I’ve been thinking the same way. But you’ve organized it better.”

“That may be the reason I’m here. The use of orderly thought processes acquired through feature work now applied to murder. Do you think you would slip in public if you called me Joe?”

“No. I’m Tilly, of course. But let’s get on with it. Five died. Sherman, Winniger, Welly, Forrith and Ted. Suppose they were killed as a symbol. It had to come from someone inside the house, or an outsider. Each guess leads to a different set of symbols, Joe.”

“You are doing very nicely. Keep going.”

“If they were all killed by a fraternity brother, it had to be because of jealousy, spite, house politics... all that doesn’t satisfy me, Joe. Those reasons seem too trivial somehow. And if it came from outside the house, you have to agree that it was a male who was willing to take the chance of being seen inside the house. There the risk is greater, but the motives become stronger. The fraternity system is based on a false set of values. Kids can be seriously and permanently hurt by the sort of cruelty that’s permitted. A mind can become twisted. Real hate can be built up.

“When I was a freshman, one sorority gave my roommate a big rush. She wanted to join and so she turned down the teas and dances at the other houses. When the big day came she was all bright-eyed and eager. The stinkers never put a pledge pin on her. She offended somebody in the house and in the final voting she was blackballed. But she had no way to fight back.”

“What happened to her, Tilly?”

“She left school before the year was over. She wrote once. The letter was very gay, very forced. But even though it hurt me to see what happened to her, I was too much of a moral coward to turn down my own bid that night she cried herself to sleep.”

“Then,” I said, “if this is a case of a twisted mind trying to ‘get even’ with Gamma U, we have to find out who took an emotional beating from the brethren in the pledge department, eh?”

“Doesn’t it look that way to you? And you can find that out, you know. There are six thousand kids in the university. Two thousand belong to clubs and fraternities and sororities. Four thousand are what we so cutely call barbarians. Barbs. Outcasts. Spooks, creeps, dim ones. There, but for the grace of the Lord—”

“It can be narrowed down a little, Tilly,” I said. “The first two were killed last year just before the rushing season started. That means that if the assumption we’re making is correct, the jolt came the year before and the party brooded about it for almost an entire year before taking action. That would fit. He would be a junior.

“Assume, with the even split between male and female, there are seven hundred and fifty juniors. Five hundred of them are barbs. Out of that five hundred, probably fifty were on the Gamma U rush list two years ago. Out of that fifty, I would guess that fifteen to twenty were pledged. The rush list should be in the files. If we both work on it, we ought to be able to narrow it down pretty quickly.”

She looked at me and her eyes filled again. “Joe, I... some day I want to tell you how much it means that you’ve come here to...”

“Last one in is a dirty name,” I said.

She moved like I thought I was going to. As I reached the edge, she went flat out into a racing dive, cutting the water cleanly. She came up, shook her wet hair back out of her eyes and laughed at me.

We swam out, side by side. A hundred yards out we floated on the imperceptible swell. “Ted and I used to swim a lot,” she said in a small voice. And then she was gone from me, her strong legs churning the water in a burst of speed. I swam slowly after her. When I caught up with her, she was all right again.

“It’s clear today,” she said, going under in a surface dive. I went down too, and with my eyes squinted against the water I could see the dance of the sunlight on the sandy bottom. I turned and saw her angling toward me, her hair streaming out in the water, half smiling, unutterably lovely. I caught her arm and, as we drifted up toward the surface, I kissed her.

We emerged into the air and stared at each other gravely. “I think we’d better forget that, Joe,” she said.

“That might be easier said that done, Tilly.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean, Joe. Ever.”

Only three to go. I parked in the shade and was glad of it when I found he hadn’t come back yet. It was a tourist court and trailer park. The layout had been pasted together with spit and optimism. Neither ingredient had worked very well. Dirty pastel walls, a litter of papers and orange peels, a glare of sun off the few aluminum trailers, some harsh red flowers struggling up a broken trellice. I watched his doorway. The sign on it said Manager. A half hour later a blonde unlocked the door and went in.

I walked over and knocked. She came to the door, barefoot. In another year the disintegration would have removed the last traces of what must have once been a very lush and astonishing beauty. That is a sad thing to happen to a woman under thirty.

“Maybe you can’t read where it says no vacancy,” she said.

“I want to see Bob Toberly,” I said.

“If it’s business, you can talk to me. I’m his wife.”

“It’s personal.”

She studied me for a few moments. “Okay, wait a sec. Then you can come in and wait. He’s late now.” Her voice had the thin fine edge that only a consistently evil disposition can create.

She disappeared. Soon she called, “Okay, come on in.”

Her dress was thrown on the unmade bed. She had changed to a blue linen two-piece play suit that was two sizes too small for her.

“I gotta climb into something comferrable the minute I get in the house,” she said defiantly. “This climate’ll kill you. It’s hell on a woman.” She motioned to a chair. I sat down. She glared at me. “Sure I can’t handle whatever it is you wanna see Bob about?”

“I’m positive.”

She padded over to the sink, took a half bottle of gin out of the cabinet and sloshed a good two inches into a water tumbler. “Wanna touch?”

“Not right now, thanks.”

She put an ice cube in it, swirled it a few times and then tilted it high. Her throat worked three times and it was gone. The room was full of a faint sour smell of sweat.

The room darkened as Bob Toberly cut off the sunlight. He came in, banging the screen door. He was half the size of a house, with hands like cinderblocks. He looked suspiciously at me and then at the bottle on the sink.

“Dammit, Clara, I told you to lay off that bottle.”

“Shaddup!” she snapped. “I drink what I please when I please with no instructions from you.”

He grabbed her arm and twisted it up behind her. He pushed her to the door, shoved her outside. “Wait out there until I tell you to come in.”

He turned to me, ignoring her as she screamed at him. “Now what do you want?”

“I’m making a survey of local students who were turned down by the local chapter of Gamma U. It’s for a magazine article condemning fraternities. I got my hands on the rush list for two years ago. Your name was on it.”

He rocked back and forth, his lips pursed, staring down at me. Suddenly he grinned. “What do you want to know?”

“What was your reaction when you weren’t pledged? How’d you take it?”

“I wanted to go bust those smart guys in the chops.”

“Did you know why they turned you down?”

“Sure. They were rushing me because they figured me for eventual All-American here. But the timing was bad. In early practise I got a bad shoulder separation. It happened during rush week. They got the spy system operating and found out I was out for the year, probably out for good. From then on I was just another guy with muscles.”

“Has it made any change in your life?”

He frowned. “I got stubborn. I decided I wanted to stay in school. But they dropped me off the athletic scholarship list. I married Clara, tier daddy had just died and left her this place. It brings in enough to swing the school bills.” He turned and stared at the door. Clara stood outside looking in through the screen. “I didn’t know at the time that she was no good.”

Clara screamed more curses at him. He went over casually and spit through the screen at her. A charming little family scene. I got out as quickly and quietly as I could. As I drove out onto the road I could still hear her.