College-Cut Kill

Chapter Four Sweating Bullets

At that moment a car drove in. I heard it stop. Till gave me a quick look. I got up out of the chair. Bill Armand, the faintly vulpine junior, and Brad Carroll came around the side of the house, carrying suits and towels. One of Armand’s dark eyebrows went high in surprise as he saw Tilly.

“Why, hello, Tilly!” Brad Carroll said in his careful voice. “Hi, Rod. I didn’t know you two were acquainted. Rod, we decided this was the day to take you up on your standing invite.”

“Hello, Brad,” Tilly said, “And Bill. I met Rod in our writing class. The guy is persuasive.”

“We’ve noticed that,” Bill said. “Tilly, you’re looking wonderful.”

“Thank you,” she said gravely.

There was a moment of awkwardness. I said, “The bar is the kitchen shelf, mates. Select your venom and some for us. Till’s is rum and coke and I’m on bourbon and water if you feel industrious. You can change in the bedroom.”

They went inside. Tilly reached over and touched my arm. “Joe, darling. This is going to give them a very choice bit of gossip.”

“Do you really care?”

“Uh uh.”

“That’s my girl.”

They came back out bearing drinks. Bill clowned it his towel over his arm like a waiter’s napkin. He bowed low as he handed Tilly her drink, murmuring, “Madame.” In trunks he was deeply tanned, whip-lean, with long smooth muscles. Brad was whiter, softer, thickening a bit in the waist, with a small roll of fat over the top of his yellow trunks.

Bill sat on the edge of the terrace turned toward us, with one eyebrow still high enough to give him a knowing look. Brad said, “We didn’t do this right. We should have come armed with charming blondes and a couple of jugs to salve our conscience. We thought you hadn’t had time yet to live dangerously, Rod.”

“I keep telling you that we’re underestimating the guy,” Bill said.

“Where’s Al Siminik, Brad?” I asked. It seemed odd to see Brad without his shadow.

“By the time we see him again, we’ll have forgotten what he looks like. He’s earning his keep, throwing his muscles around,” Bill answered.

I eyed Bill. “What’s your sport, Armand?”

He laughed. “Molly.”

Tilly bristled. “That isn’t a nice thing to say, Bill?”

“Protecting your sisters?” he jeered.

I was amazed at how cold Tilly’s gray eyes could get. “The only thing I have against Molly is that she’s stupid enough to find you attractive, Bill Armand.”

He held up his hands in mock defense and ducked his head. “Hey! Take it easy.”

Talk became more casual. After a while Bill drove to the main road and phoned Molly. He came back and said that Brad’s girl, Laura, was coming out and bringing Molly with her. Shortly after that, Bill and Tilly went in for a swim. Brad moved over into the chair where Tilly had been.

His smile was very engaging. “Rod, you strike me as being a pretty canny guy.”

“Oh, thank you, sir.”

“No gag, Rod. I mean it. You’re smart enough to see how things stand at the chapter. Arthur is one of the best friends I’ve got.” He was working the knife out of the sheath very slowly and I knew why he’d decided to come out. Carroll, the tireless politician.

“But...” I said.

He gave me a quick look. “Oh, you see it too?”

“Better tell me what you see, Brad.”

“I’ll be frank. I wouldn’t want this to go any further. I see a sweet guy who completely lacks the executive touch. He’s too heavy-handed. Now take Harv Lorr. There was a great president. We used to have a penny-ante poker game going on weekends in his room. Will Arthur go for that? Not for a minute. It says in the book no gambling in the house. The boys resent that rule-book attitude, Rod. But a lot of the fellows figure it this way. They say that Arthur was elected and he’ll graduate in June, so why not play along with him.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that this is a whole year out of our lives. Why let Arthur make it a poor fraternity year? Every member has a vote. Right now, because of some people’s sense of duty, Arthur swings the majority. But if the rest of us who don’t quite agree with some of his measures could consolidate our vote, we could do just about any thing we pleased.”

“In other words, let Arthur have the title and let you have the real push.”

“I didn’t say that!” he said in a hurt tone.

“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?” I asked disarmingly.

He pretended to think it over. “Well, it would be one way to put it, Rod.”

“Let’s get it out in the open. You want me to vote with you.”

“Only if you sincerely believe that it’s the thing to do.”

“Let’s take the gloves off, Brad,” I said. “I’m a transfer. I’m a senior. I’m not living in the house. As I see it, there’s no reason for me to get messed up in local chapter politics. With either you or Arthur running things, the food is going to be good, the lounge is going to be comfortable, the dances are going to be fun. I don’t care about anything else.”

“That,” he said firmly, “is what I consider an irresponsible and selfish attitude.”

“Consider it anything you want to.”

“Then I may take it that you’ll vote with Arthur?”

I saw I had hurt his feelings. Or at least he had decided that should be his attitude. “You may take it this way. I’m not for you or again you. When I attend chapter meetings I’ll refrain from voting. Then you won’t have to worry about a counterbalancing vote.”

His smile was full of satisfaction. “I’m glad to hear you say that. Frankly, a lot of the younger boys would be willing to follow; your lead in preference to mine, even. You’ve made quite an impression, Arlin. Quite an impression.”

“Do you want some advice?”

“What do you mean?”

“Take it or leave it. You’re creating tempests in teapots, Carroll. You’re misdirecting a very strong itch for power. Find some new direction for it.”

He dropped all expression. “Am I to judge from that that you consider the fraternity to be unimportant?”

“Take it any way you please.”

“You damn veterans are all alike. Everything is a big joke. Arthur is the only one I ever saw who takes things seriously. Just because you fought a war, you’ve got this superior attitude. Frankly, Arlin, it makes me sick to my stomach.”

“Vote for Carroll!” I said. “Vote for a square deal!”

“Go to hell!”

“Now you’re being stupid. Offend me too much and I’ll get interested enough to bust a few spokes out of your big wheel.”

He chewed that around in his mind for a while. I was rewarded with his most charming smile, an outstretched hand. “Sorry, Rod. I get too worked up.”

“Forget it,” I said, yawning.

He stood up. “I’m glad to see Tilly dating, Rod. Poor girl. She needs a few good times.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

He flushed. “You’re damn difficult to talk to sometimes.”

At that point a car stopped behind the house. We heard a girl’s voice over the sound of the surf. They came around the side of the house. Bill and Tilly came out of the water to meet them. Molly had a trim little figure, chestnut hair, a set of large trusting eyes and a vulnerable mouth. Her eyes glowed as she watched Bill Armand walk toward her. Laura was as dark as Tilly, but taller, a shade leaner, with a face so patrician that it looked inbred. Her speech was a finishing-school drawl.

Molly was a giggler. Bill treated Molly with affectionate amusement. Brad treated Laura as a girl who had earned the right to share in his reflected glow as a large wheel around the university. Both girls tried without success to conceal an intense curiosity about Tilly and me and our current status.

Tilly turned feline on me, and in the process she was as cute as a bug. I saw her wondering how to handle the problem. Finally she gave me a meaningful stare and said, “Rod and I are so glad you could come out here. What are you drinking? Rod, fix them up, like a dear, will you?”

Laura gave Molly a meaningful look.

It was a complete essay, that look.

We swam, we loafed in the sun — three couples on a late Saturday afternoon. To any onlooker we were young and carefree and casual. Uncomplicated. I lay with Till sprinkling sand on the back of my arm and thought about us.

One vulnerable little girl heading for heartbreak, one icy maiden as ambitious as her grasping boy-friend, one young cynic complicated by a streak of ruthlessness, one lovely girl who had been persuaded the night before that this was not the time to die — and one pretender, a young man who had thought it possible to come to this place and solve a pretty problem without becoming emotionally involved, and who was slowly finding it impossible.

The police station of Sandson and the fire department shared the same building. It looked vaguely like a Moorish castle.

The man they steered me to was a Lieutenant Cord. He was an unlikely six foot six with a stoop that brought him to six three. He had a corded throat, heavy wrists, and a slack liver-spotted face.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Arlin?”

“I’m at the university, Lieutenant. I’ve been doing some work in psychology. One of the case histories assigned to me is the case of Tod Sherman, who was killed during March this year.”

I made it pretty breezy. He leaned back in his chair and for the first time I noticed a very alert intelligence hiding behind his sleepy gray-green eyes.

“Let me get you straight. I remember Sherman. How does it hook up with psychology when a lad had a bad accident like that?”

I took a deep breath. I had to make it better than I thought. “You know, of course, about accident-prone people and how they contribute the lion’s share of motor vehicle accidents and accidents in the home. The study of such people is a legitimate part of modern psychology. I have reason to believe that Sherman was an accident-prone. Actually it is the death wish operating on a subconscious level, or else the result of a childish desire for attention.”

“What do you want from me?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a summary of what happened. I’ve talked to the other members of the fraternity who were there at the time. Their reports are confusing.”

He looked at the wall clock. “I guess it won’t take too much time. We got the call on a Sunday afternoon. They don’t operate the dining room at that house on Sunday’s and nearly everybody was out. A boy named Flynn, the one who hung himself three months later, was the one who heard the shot and traced it to Sherman’s room. Flynn was in the lounge at the time, and it took him, he said, maybe ten minutes to find out who and what it was.

“One other lad, a sophomore named Armand, was in the house at the time. He was asleep and the shot didn’t awaken him. Flynn was smart. He phoned the campus infirmary and then us. He didn’t touch the body. He checked the time. We got there as the ambulance did. The doctor pronounced him dead. We were both there a little less than twenty minutes after the shot according to Flynn’s watch. Sherman had been sitting at his desk by the window. There was an oily rag and a bottle of gun oil on top of the desk. The gun was a .45 Army Colt.

“The slug had caught him under the chin and gone up through the roof of his mouth, exploding out of the top of his head to lodge in the ceiling. He had fallen to his left between the chair and the window. The gun was under his desk. The ejected cartridge case was on the window sill. A full clip was on the desk blotter beside the oil bottle. It was the standard mistake. Ejecting the case and forgetting the one in the chamber.

“As I see it, he was holding it pointing up toward him, and he pulled the slide down so he could look through the barrel. His hand was oily and the slide got away from him. When it snapped up, it fired the shell in the chamber.”

“Were you complety satisfied with the verdict of accidental death, Lieutenant?”

He smiled humorlessly. “Now what kind of a fool question is that, Arlin? If it wasn’t accident it would screw up this psychology report, wouldn’t it?”

I tried again. “Did you investigate to see if anyone said he was depressed?”

“Sure. Lots of guys are cagey enough to do a hell of a good job of faking an accident when they want to knock themselves off. But in that case there is an insurance angle, usually, and the guy himself is older. No, this Sherman was apparently a pretty popular guy in the house. He wasn’t depressed. He’d busted up with his girl, but he had a new one pretty well lined up. He had enough dough, a good job after graduation, and his health.”

“You’ve been very kind, Lieutenant.” I stood up.

“Any time,” he said.

I went to the door. As I turned the knob he said, “Just a minute.” I looked back at him. He smiled. “Do me a favor, Arlin. Come around some time and tell me what the hell it was you really wanted.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“See you around, Arlin.”

I went out and sat in the car. There was a coldness at the nape of my neck. Up until the talk with Cord, I had been willing to go along with the theory of a chain of accidents. I had tried to be thorough for the sake of the pay I was getting. Mr. Flynn had just been a man pathetically anxious to prove his son was not a suicide. Tilly had been a girl who had not been able to understand how Ted Flynn’s mind may have been unstable, along with his undeniable brilliance.

But now everything had a new flavor. It was something that Cord had said, and yet, going over his words again and again, I could not pick it out.

I knew, sitting there in the sun, as well as I knew my own name that the odds were in favor of someone else’s finger pulling that trigger. I was sweating and yet I felt cold.

For the first time I realized that my operations were a bit transparent. If someone had killed Sherman — and I didn’t know why I was so sure they had — then that someone might still be in the house. If so, he was watching me. It would be natural for him to watch me. I was a stranger. I was an unknown factor.

I sensed a quiet and devious intelligence at work. A mind that could plan carefully and then move boldly.

I drove away. My hands were too tight on the wheel and my foot was shaky on the gas pedal.