College-Cut Kill

Chapter Six Shooting at Windmills

She went in ahead of me and put the lights on, as I put the top of the car up against the dew. The gulf was rough, the waves thundering hard against the beach. We dragged chairs out onto the terrace. I held her tightly against me for a moment. “Hey,” she said, “I want to keep on thinking clearly for a while. Leggo!”

“Chilly woman.”

“Hush!” She sat down and after three tries we got our cigarettes going. “This,” she said, “is probably silly. You’ll have to let me know. Remember when we talked about what the dead boys had in common except the fraternity?”

“I remember.”

“Brad’s death makes the pattern more clear, Joe. Can you guess what they had in common?”

I thought for a time. “No. Give.”

“Rex Winniger, Tod Sherman, Ted and Brad were all very positive people. Strong personalities. They had influence in the fraternity. Every house has a certain quota of nonenities. But there was nothing wishy-washy about any one of that four. They had power in the house and on the campus. Is that going to help?”

I felt the excitement. “That is going to help. You are a lovely and intelligent gal. I was so close to it I didn’t even see it. Wait a minute now. Let me think. It doesn’t make motive any stronger from a sane person’s point of view, but it does make it clearer. Jealousy. Lust for power. If the pattern is anything other than accidental, it means we have to look among the membership for our boy. And we said a long time ago that insiders would have the edge by far on opportunity.”

I guess we got it both at the same time. She reached over and held my hand. Her hand was like ice. “It couldn’t be, Joe. It just couldn’t be.”

“Come on inside. I want to read you something.”

We went in and shut the terrace doors against the wind. I found my lecture notes from the abnormal psychology class. They were fragmentary, but I could piece them together.

“Listen, Tilly. One of the types of insanity least vulnerable to any known treatment is the true psychopath. It’s as though the person were born with some essential part missing. Conscience. The psychopath has no understanding of right and wrong. To him, the only thing is not to get caught. Has reasonable-sounding motives for all his actions.

“This type of person, if displeased with service, will set fire to a hotel and think nothing of the consequences as long as he is not apprehended. Entirely blind to the other person’s point of view. Many murderers caught and convicted and sentenced are true psychopaths. Motive for crime often absurdly minor. True psychopath shows high incidence of endowment of brains and charm of manner. Is often outstanding. Often basically arrogant.

“Delights in outwitting others. Capable of carrying on long-range planning. Constantly acts in the presence of others. Often a liar as well, with amazingly intricate and well-conceived fabric of untruth. Society has no good answer as yet to the true psychopath.”

I put the notebook away. She frowned at me. “But Joe! He’s such a sweet guy! Gentle, understanding. He was so nice to me after Ted... died.”

“High endowment of charm of manner. Constantly acts in the presence of others. Delights in outwitting others.”

“But with all he’s got on the ball, he’d be almost as big without... going to such crazy lengths.”

“Motive for crime often absurdly minor.”

“But to kill... just for the sake of fraternity house politics. Joe, it’s crazy!”

“A true psychopath is an insane person. He hides among us normal jokers because he looks and acts and talks just like one of us... up to a point.”

“Will the police listen to you?” she finally asked.

“They’d laugh in my face. What proof have I got? We’ve got to show that each murder helped him, even though it helped him in a minor way.”

She crossed the room. “Hold me tight, darling. I’m scared. I don’t want to think about him. I wish it were Bill, or Step, or little Jay Bruce, or even Al Siminik. Anybody except Arthur Marris.”

“We’ve got to get hold of Harv Lorr, the fellow who was president last year. He can help us straighten out the timing on those other deaths. He’s probably in North Dakota or some equally handy place.”

“He’s a Tampa boy. He’s working in the family cigar business. With luck, Joe, we can be talking to him in an hour or so.”

Harv Lorr came across from the door to our booth. “There he is,”. Tilly said. I looked up and saw a tall man approaching. He was prematurely gray and there were deep lines bracketing his mouth. He wore a light sport coat and an open-collared shirt.

“It’s nice to see you again, Tilly,” he said. His smile was a white ash in his sun-darkened face.

I had slid out of the booth. “Meet Joe Arlin, Harv,” she said. We shook hands and murmured the usual things. We all sat down.

Harv ordered beer. He sat beside Tilly. He turned so he could look at her. “You sounded a little ragged over the phone. What’s up?”

“It’s about Brad,” she said.

Harv frowned. “I read it this evening. Terrible thing. How do I fit?”

Tilly looked appealingly at me. I took over. “Mr. Lorr, I want to ask you some pretty pointless-sounding questions. If you stop me to ask me why I’m asking them, it will just take that much longer. Believe me, there’s a definite pattern in the questions. First. The two sophomores who were killed in that automobile accident. Were they of any particular importance in fraternity politics? Were they active?”

Harv looked puzzled. “They were two votes. At the election of officers the previous June they’d voted for me as house president for the next year, rather than Ted Flynn.”

“We’ll move on to the next question. We weren’t particularly interested in those two sophomores anyway. The next guy we care about is Rex Winniger. Was he active?”

“He was the outstanding man in the junior class. If he’d lived, I don’t think there was any doubt of his becoming house president during his last year. It was a blow to all of us.”

“He died in December. Then in March of this year it was Tod Sherman. He was a classmate of yours, as Flynn was. Was he active in house politics?”

“Everybody is to a certain extent, Arlin. When I won out over Ted, Ted gave up having any pronounced opinions. There is usually a couple of strong groups in the house. Tod Sherman was my opposition. We fought each other tooth and nail, but it was good-natured. At the time he died, we were pretty well lined up for the June elections. I wanted Arthur Marris for president and it was understood that Tod Sherman was pushing Brad Carroll.

“In a house that size the cronies of the pres get the gravy. You know that. Tilly said over the phone you were in the fraternity up at Wisconsin. You know then how a president on the way out through the graduation route tries to get one of his boys in for the following year.”

“And so after Sherman died, Ted Flynn took over the opposition.”

“If you knew all that, why ask me?”

“I didn’t. I just guessed.”

“I don’t see how you could guess a thing like that. Ted was quite a boy. He went to work on the membership. It began to look as though Brad was going to give Arthur a very close race or squeak in himself in Arthur’s place. But, of course, it was all shot to hell when Ted killed himself. In fact, we had to vote by mail during July, after school was out. I handled it.

“Arthur made it by a good ten votes. If Ted had lived to give his little talk in favor of Brad, it might have been a different story. Probably would have been, as Arthur sometimes makes a pretty poor impression in spite of his ability.”

I leaned toward him. “And what would you say if I told you that Brad had organized a pretty effective resistance to Arthur and was hamstringing him very neatly by having acquired a majority of the voting strength?”

Harv gave me a quizzical look. “Now wait a minute, Arlin, let’s not go off—”

“Can’t you see the picture? First Winniger, then Sherman, then Ted, and now Brad. Which did each death help. Which man? Arthur. Every time.”

He gave me a long scornful look. “Now hold it up, Arlin. That’s kid stuff and you know it. Sure, the boys play politics. It’s a game. It’s good training. But nobody — nobody ever took it that seriously! Man, are you trying to tell me that old Arthur goes around killing people so he can get to be house president and then so he can keep his authority.” He turned to Tilly. “You ought to know better than that!”

Tilly counted if for him on her fingers. “Winniger, Sherman, Flynn, Carroll. All in the way, Harv. All dead, Harv. You know the law of averages. If you don’t care for our answer, give us your answer.”

I could see it shake him a little. But he kept trying. “People, you don’t kill guys for that sort of thing. Look! It’s a college fraternity.”

Then Tilly carefully explained to him about psychopaths. I was surprised at how much she remembered. She told it well. When she was through, Harv Lorr knew what a psychopath was.

“It seems so incredible!” he complained. But I saw from his eyes that we had him.

“If it was credible,” I said, “somebody would have found out a long time ago. If there’d been a million bucks at stake or something like that — some motive that everybody would be willing to accept, the whole thing would have looked fishy and friend Arthur would have been stopped in his tracks. But this way, for a goal that seems unimportant to the common man, he can hack away almost without interference.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked humbly. He had given up. He believed us.

“Just sit tight,” I said. “Be ready to give over the facts when they’re called for.”

“What do you two plan to do?” he asked.

I looked at Tilly. I kept my eyes on hers. “We’ve got to give the guy a new reason,” I said, “and then jump him when he jumps.”

Her lips formed a soundless, “No!”

“There’s no other way,” I said. And there wasn’t. I wanted her to talk me out of it. I was ready to be talked out of it. I wanted no part of it. But she saw the logic of it, the same as I did.

“Keep your guard up,” Harv said.

“I’ll make him be careful,” Tilly said.

I looked at my watch. “If we can make fifty miles in fifty minutes, you stand a chance of not being expelled, Miss Owen.”

We left. I got her back in time. I went out to my place on the beach and wished I was in Montreal. I wished I was in Maine looking at the girls in their swim suits. I wore myself out swimming in the dark, parallel and close to the shore. I had a shot. I tried to go to sleep. I had another shot. I went to sleep. I dreamed of Arthur Marris. He had his thumbs in my jugular...

I waited for the coroner’s jury. I told myself it was the smart thing to do. They might force the issue. Then they returned a suicide verdict and sad-eyed people shipped Brad to his home state in a box. Laura went abroad...

Call it a ten-day wonder. A small town might have yacked about it until the second generation. A college has a more transient sort of vitality. Life goes on. Classes change. New assignments. Next Saturday’s date. Call it the low attention factor of the young. A week turns any college crisis into ancient history.

Tilly and I talked. We talked ourselves limp. The conversations were all alike.

“We’ve got to get him to make the first move, Tilly.”

“But to do that, Joe, you’ve got to be a threat to his setup. You’ve got to take Brad’s place.”

“You don’t think I can engineer a strong opposition move?”

“I know you can. That’s the trouble.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“You fool! I don’t want you being a target.”

“The other boys didn’t have their guard up. Not one of them knew until the very last moment. It must have been a horrid surprise. He won’t be able to surprise me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“By never being off guard.”

“People have to sleep, don’t they?”

“Now you’re handing me quite a sales talk, Till.”

We talked. At the drive-ins, between races at the dog tracks, on my small private beach, riding in the car, walking from class.

I didn’t tell her, but I was already starting the program. I took over Brad’s sales talk. I buttonholed the brethren and breathed sharp little words into their ears.

I racked up a big zero.

It was funny. When I had no axe to grind, I was Rod Arlin, a nice guy, a transfer, a credit to the house. As soon as I started to electioneer I became that Arlin guy, and what the hell does he know about this chapter, and why doesn’t he go back to Wisconsin...

Arthur tapped me on the shoulder after dinner. “Talk for a while, Rod?”

“Why, sure.”

We went to his room. He closed the door. I glanced toward the closet. I sat down and the little men were using banjo pics on my nerves. But I worked up a casual smile. “What’s on your mind, Arthur?”

I didn’t like him any more. That warm face was a mask. The deep-set eyes looked out, play-acting, pretending, despising the ignorance of ordinary mortals.

He stood by his desk and tamped the tobacco into his pipe with his thumb. He sucked the match flame down into the packed tobacco with a small sound that went paaa, paaa, paaa. He shook the match out.

“It pleased me that you transfered here, Rod. I liked you when I first met you. I considered you to be a well-adjusted person with a pretty fair perspective.”

“Thanks.”

“Lately you’ve been disappointing me.”

“Indeed!” I made it chilly.

“This job I have is fairly thankless. I try to do my best. I could understand Brad Carroll when he tried to block me in my job. Brad was a professional malcontent. Not mean — just eager. You know what I mean?” He was bold. He half sat on the edge of his desk.

“I know what you mean.”

“When you try to operate in the same way, I fail to understand you, Rod. What have you got to gain? You’re only spending one year in this school. I want this chapter to run smoothly. The least thing we can have is unity among the members.”

“And you’re the great white father who’s going to give it to us.”

“Sarcasm always depresses me a little, Arlin.”

“Maybe you depress me a little. Maybe I think that if you can’t run the house right, a voting coalition should take the lead away from you.”

“Look, Arlin. You have your own place on the beach. You have a very pleasant girl to run around with. You have a full schedule of classes. If you still have too much energy left over, why don’t you try taking on a competitive sport?”

“Is it against the house rules to buck the pres?”

He sighed. “I didn’t want to say this. But you force me. You may have noticed that there is a certain coolness toward you among the membership.”

I nodded. I had noticed it.

“The membership feels that you are stirring up needless conflict among the more susceptible boys. We had a small closed meeting of the seniors the other day. It was resolved that I speak to you and tell you to cease and desist. If you had any chance of being successful, I wouldn’t speak to you this way. But you have no chance. You just do not have enough influence as a transfer.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then I can swing enough votes to deny the privileges of the house to you.”

“That takes a three-fourths majority.”

“I have more than that.”

I knew that he did. It was no bluff. I made my tone very casual. “Well, you’ve taken care of me a lot easier than some of the others.”

He took his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t think I quite understand that, Rod.”

“Then we’ll drop it right there.” I stood up.

He put his hand out. “No hard feelings?”

I ignored his hand. “Isn’t that a little trite?”

He was good. He actually looked as though he wanted to weep. “That isn’t the Gamma U spirit, Arlin.”

“You take your job pretty seriously, Marris.”

“I do the best I know how.”

“What man could do more!” I said breathlessly. I turned and walked out.