The Campus Murders

13

“I’m damned if I know,” McCall said. “Billy-be-damned. You’re a witch.”

“Did I hear a labial?” Katie asked.

“You’ve witched me. What is it? I never went for Irish girls before. I’d like a refill, please.”

She raised her head again. Their lips touched and then there was pressure, and acceleration, and hands and chests and racing blood until Katie gasped and jerked away and said, “My God, what if somebody walked in? What’s the matter with me? Get over on the other side of that desk, McCall, before I yell rape.”

“You’re something,” McCall said, not moving.

“Right this instant.”

He obeyed.

She sat back and felt her hair. “You’ve ruined me. Just like a man.”

“Have you known many men?”

“In what sense?”

“You know in what sense.”

“You mean how many men have I gone to bed with? You know something, McCall, I ought to kick you in the you-know-where for daring to ask me a question like that on a twenty-four-hour acquaintance!”

“I have a reason for asking,” McCall said doggedly.

“Sure you do. Male ego. What presumption! But as long as you’re asking,” Katie said with a toss of the locks, “no, I haven’t known ‘many’ men. Just enough.”

“Oh,” McCall said, not knowing whether to be disappointed or relieved.

“Just enough to know that what you have in your mind, Mr. Investigator, has nothing to do with campus unrest or murder. In fact, Mr. Investigator, you’re rather crudely on the make. Is that a fair statement of the facts?”

“Pretty fair,” McCall said, “though I don’t think of myself as crude.”

“Naturally not. What man does? Well, I’m not buying today, McC. You took me by surprise, and I may have responded a little more warmly than I would have ordinarily, but don’t take it as setting any precedents. If Ina Vance had walked in on us I’d probably have lost my job.”

“What is she, anti-love?”

“Love?” Those delicious brows rose. “She’s anti-smooching on the college’s time.”

“I’m sorry,” McCall said. “You really shouldn’t look the way you do.”

“Oh. Well.” Miss Cohan felt her hair again. “After all, there’s a time and a place—”

“When? Where?”

She laughed. “Go away, Mike. I have work to do.”

“I came in here for something—”

“I know you did. Did you get to see Damon Wilde?”

He told her about his talks with Wilde, Sullivan, and Eastman.

“Eastman’s a queer bird. They’re all queer birds, when you get right down to it, but Perry... he was flying. I smelled pot in his room, and I suspect he’s on speed, too.”

“Oh, come on, Mike, where have you been the past couple of years?” Kathryn said. “A majority of these kids smoke grass — some just to try it, true, but a lot of others as a steady diet; and there are plenty of acid heads, too. How did our latest riot strike you?”

“Frightening. It was directed. Like a movie scene. Who’s behind things like this on campus? Outsiders?”

“Et tu?” she asked scornfully. “Next thing I know you’ll be looking under my skirt for Communists. No, Mike, not outsiders. There’s a small group of militant student leaders who are — or claim to be — true revolutionaries. They’re the ones who direct these attacks.”

He nodded and felt for a cigarette. When he realized what he was doing he sat down on the edge of her desk. “Do you know Graham Starret?”

“Not really. I’ve seen him around, of course. He’s the student who found Laura, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Lieutenant Long pulled him in on suspicion — I expect he’s had to let him go by this time. Long’s a racist, did you know that?”

“I’ve suspected it.”

“Interesting that Starret came running to Dean Gunther with the news rather than to the police. After seeing how Long handled him, I begin to understand why... I’m pretty sure Laura’s beating and Gunther’s murder cross somewhere. I certainly can’t tie Starret in to Gunther’s death. Still, I can’t forget him. Finding Laura as he claimed he did seems to me a bit pat.”

“Which reminds me,” Kathryn said. “I meant to tell you and didn’t get the chance. There was some trouble between Dennis Sullivan and John Snyder.”

“Who’s John Snyder?”

“An English professor. I don’t know exactly what it was about, but it wasn’t nice.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“He hit John with his fist — I mean Sullivan did. Maybe you ought to talk to Snyder. It might have had something to do with something.”

McCall made a mental note.

“You know a Veronica Gale?” he asked.

“Yes. What has she done?”

“Eastman claims Damon Wilde’s been sleeping with her. And Sullivan told me his girl is a Pat Reed.”

“Pat’s a knockout. Marvelous singing voice. I didn’t know she and Dennis Sullivan were cosying it up.”

“But if Wilde’s been romancing Veronica Gale, and Sullivan’s been shacking up with this Reed girl, why were they both after Laura?”

“Were you a one-girl chaser in college, Mr. McCall?”

“I’ve forgotten,” McCall said sadly.

“These kids today get around. They tumble in and out of bed like acrobats on a trampoline. No sexual hangups go with their degrees! They’re a lot better off, too.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“Then why don’t you act that way?”

“Not in my office, Mr. McCall. We’d better get back to cases, don’t you think?”

“Can I get their addresses? I mean Veronica Gale’s and Patricia Reed’s.”

She got up and went to a bank of filing cabinets. She had to stretch, pulling the kelly green skirt high and tight across her bottom. He watched with pleasure and respect.

She came back with the addresses.

“Where do you go from here, Mike?”

“For the time being Wilde’s my number one,” McCall said. “It seems to me he was closest to Laura. And he resented me. I also think he’s more hip to what’s going on at the college. Sullivan struck me as a phony. Perry Eastman’s probably the brightest of the three.”

“They’re all bright. Don’t underestimate any of them, Mike. Damon Wilde’s a big man on campus, but so is Sullivan. Damon had a lot to do with the disturbance this morning. He’s leader of the non-hippie, non-Yippie malcontents.”

McCall nodded absently. “I’d better drop in on this English professor, Snyder. Where do you suppose I can find him at this time of day?”

“Well, his desk is in the English faculty room over in the liberal arts building.”

“You know what I hanker to do right now, Miss Cohan, don’t you?”

“Don’t spell it out,” Kathryn said coldly. “I read that look in your lecherous eye loud and clear. Goodbye.”

“It’s just what I’d like to do,” McCall said. “You don’t see me trying to do it, do you?”

“Is this your patented approach to all females who don’t stop clocks, Mr. McCall? If so, you’ll have to develop a different one for me. I like a little subtlety with my seductions.”

“Truth is beauty,” McCall said. “See you tonight?”

“Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“Unless I can scare up a chastity belt in the meantime.”

“Try the museum, medieval section,” McCall said. “Look, you’re in absolutely no danger. I’ll take a slug of saltpeter or something.”

“That’s a myth. I mean about saltpeter acting as a damper.”

“Then I give you my word. No attacks, no taking advantage. I’ll let you set the pace.”

“I’m not so sure I can trust myself, either,” Kathryn said ruminatively. “Well, maybe.”

“Then it’s a date.”

“Will you get out of here?”

“I like those glasses on you. They’re cute as hell.”

She threw a look at him that would have melted glass.

McCall left the administration building whistling. A student pointed out the liberal arts building, and he retrieved his Ford and headed that way.

He found the English faculty room without difficulty, but no Professor Snyder. A bearded young man, whom McCall mistook for a student and who turned out to be an instructor, told McCall that John Snyder was conducting a class.

“Where?”

The instructor directed him to Room 321.

A girl in a brief leather skirt came down the third-floor hall. McCall stopped her as she was about to enter 321.

“Excuse me. This is Professor Snyder’s class, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Please, I’m late.”

“Do me a favor. Tell him he’s wanted out here by Micah McCall. Tell him it’s important.”

“He’ll be furious. He has a rotten disposition.”

“I’ll chance it,” McCall smiled.

She smiled back and dodged into the classroom.

A slim thirtyish man with a doge’s profile stalked out of 321 a moment later, scowling. His lips were almost as pale as the eyes bulging out at McCall from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “I’m Snyder,” he snapped. “What do you want?” He was dressed in rather sporty fashion, a man who evidently took pains at his mirror in the morning. His manner and tone were so disagreeable that McCall pegged him as vulnerable.

“I’ll keep you just as short a time as I can, professor,” McCall said. “I suppose you’ve heard that I’m here for Governor Holland on the Laura Thornton case. You know about her?”

“Certainly I know about her. Everybody at ’Squanto does. Why do you come to me?”

McCall smiled wanly at him. “I don’t really know. I’m pretty much at loose ends, and I’m following up every lead I can get. You see, I’m here about Dean Gunther, too.”

“Gunther?” The pale eyes were set in concrete. “Are you intimating—?”

“My dear professor, I’m not intimating a darned thing. My only reason for questioning you is that I hear you had a fight with Dennis Sullivan, a student here who knows Laura Thornton. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it has anything to do with my investigations. I’m simply asking. Could you tell me what happened, and why?”

Snyder flashed startling gray teeth. His breath was pungent.

“That’s taken care of. All over with.”

“I’d still like to hear about it.”

“There was some trouble, but it had absolutely nothing to do with... Sullivan’s not doing well in a course he’s taking under me. He became irritated when I spoke sharply to him, and he lost his head.”

“What did he do, Mr. Snyder?”

“He knocked me down.”

“After class?”

“During class. He just stepped, up to me and lashed out with his fist. He has an extremely short fuse, that young man.” Snyder’s tone was murderous.

“What did you do?”

“I reported him to Dean Gunther at once. When I got back here Sullivan was waiting for me in the hall.” He licked his gray lips. “He was waiting to apologize. He was almost groveling. Seemed genuinely sorry for what he’d done. That’s the whole bit. May I return to my class now, Mr. McCall?”

“Sorry to have bothered you, professor.”

Snyder stalked back into his classroom, and McCall headed for the elevator. The only light Snyder’s story shed on anything was what it revealed about Dennis Sullivan. A short-tempered, possibly unstable kid who was torn between his shallow hostilities and his desire to remain at Tisquanto State. There was no other explanation for his abject apology, if Professor Snyder was to be believed.

At a phone booth in the lobby McCall checked with the hospital. He was told that Laura Thornton was still in coma, between life and death.

So he phoned Sam Holland and brought the governor up to date.

“I was afraid Brett Thornton would be like that,” the governor said. “Don’t let him get you down, Mike. There’s a lot of bluff in his bark. For the rest, we can only hope and pray that the girl pulls through. So you think Gunther’s murder and the attack on Laura are related?”

“Yes.”

“I hear there was another student outbreak this morning.”

McCall told him about the strange riot. “It’s not good, governor. As far as I can make out it’s a small segment of the student body that’s causing the trouble. But they suck the others in, and soon everybody gets sticky under the collar. Frankly, I can understand some of the kids’ attitudes after talking to President Wade and some others here. Whatever the students get they’ll certainly have to fight for. How is Mrs. Thornton?”

“Not good. Well, Mike, do what you can. I want that killing cleared up fast, and some decent resolution to the Laura Thornton affair. As for the campus situation, I’ll step in if I have to. But I’m hoping it won’t come to that.”

“I wish you’d give me an easy assignment once in a while!”

Holland sighed and hung up. McCall had a taunt, urgent feeling that would not go away, he knew, until he came up with some right answers.

He consulted his memorandum and drove over to the Sigma Alpha Phi house again. He asked for Veronica Gale, the girl who was reportedly sharing Damon Wilde’s bed. But she was out, he was told, and was not expected back for several hours. Using the sorority phone, he rang up Patricia Reed’s rooming house. A woman who identified herself as the landlady answered. “Patricia isn’t here. Is this Dennis?”

“No,” McCall said. “Could you tell me when Miss Reed will be back?”

“I have no idea,” the woman yipped. “And if this is Dennis, you’ve got your nerve! Keeping Patricia up till all hours like you do. I don’t like it, mister. It gives my house a bad name!” She slammed the receiver.

Back at the Red Harbor Inn McCall shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the bed, and went into conference with himself. He found himself arguing in circles. It was like trying to handle smoke.

Again and again he found himself coming back to Graham Starret, the black student who had discovered Laura’s unconscious body on the riverbank, and wondered why. There was certainly no reason to suspect Starret of having had anything to do with the beating of the girl beyond the fact that he had reported finding her body — a fact that, in McCall’s view, gave him an appearance of innocence. Yet he kept picking away at Starret. The thought struck McCall that he might be motivated by the same racist psychology as Lieutenant Long. It was an appalling thought, and McCall spent an uncomfortable few minutes wrestling with it. Was he looking for primitive — easy — solutions, too? The scapegoat psychology that moved Long?

On impulse he reached for the phone and asked the desk clerk who answered to connect him with police headquarters and Lieutenant Long.

“This is McCall, lieutenant. What’s doing?”

“Nothing,” Long said. He would have sounded nasty asking for a drink of water. “How’s the genius from upstate making out?”

“About as well as you. How’s your case coming against the Starret boy?”

“We had to let him go. A mouthpiece showed up from the NAACP or something.”

“Then you had no evidence,” McCall said cheerfully. “Did you check out his story with the date he had that night? The girl in the car with him?”

“That piece of white trash?” the lieutenant growled. “She backed up his story, all right. What would you expect?”

“Thanks, lieutenant.”

“For what?”

McCall went back to his reflections.

Who had typed the letters? Girl and man? Who had lured Dean Gunther to the big oak behind the Bell Tower and made a pincushion out of him? If, in fact, they were the same.

And who had beaten Laura Thornton almost to death?

Suppose the two crimes were connected.

Suppose the two crimes weren’t connected.

Veronica Gale...

Damon Wilde, student rebel leader, riot enthusiast (he could still see Wilde waving his arms in exhortation to his troops that morning in the assault on McNiel Hall), pursuer of Laura Thornton — so hot in pursuit that he had managed an invitation to the Thornton home and a vague state of “engagement” — all the time sleeping with Veronica Gale. What kind of arrangement was that, Katie Cohan’s lecture on the modern sexual mores of college students notwithstanding?

Had Laura found out? Maybe she had. Maybe she wasn’t as free and easy in her attitude toward freedom of the sexes as her boyfriend. Maybe she called him on it and got beaten to within an inch of her life for being such a square.

Was Wilde capable of such a thing? He was quick-tempered, certainly; he had resented McCall, answered a few questions, rushed away. He had been nervous. He had also been cryptic, on the one hand admitting having been with Laura in the Greenview Motel on a number of occasions under the false names of Mr. and Mrs. Jospeh Addison, and on the other confessing with every appearance of sincerity that he didn’t really care much for Laura. And, finally, voicing a threat. Watch out, fuzz...

It didn’t add up. Nothing added up.

McCall sighed, got back into his shoes and jacket, and went downstairs to the bar. This was one of those times when it would have been comforting to be a lush.

Joe Mozzarella-Cacciatore-Vermicelli-Grundy was on duty in the dim barroom, which was otherwise empty. He immediately told McCall he wasn’t feeling well. “It’s this weather,” the barman said.

“The weather? It’s been a gorgeous day.”

“For you, maybe. Me, I hate spring. It could be good old snow-and-ice winter all year long as far as I’m concerned. The minute it starts to warm up and the green stuff begins growing I get pains in the belly something awful. The doctors don’t know why. I feel like hell.”

McCall commiserated with him. “Maybe you need a drink.”

He shook his head. “Not with my history, Mac. What’s your pleasure? Weak gin-and-tonic again?”

After serving McCall, Joe retired to the end of his bar and sat down on a stool, hugging his belly.

Was Wilde a blackmailer? A killer? Anyone could kill given the time, place, and circumstances. That was one criminology lesson McCall had learned as far back as Chicago. And what could he have been blackmailing Gunther about?

People began drifting into the bar, Joe got busy, looking happier, and McCall waved off a refill and went into the dining room. Five minutes after he got back to his room he had to jog his memory to recollect what he had eaten.

The phone rang.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” McCall said gratefully. “Say something, Katie. I need the refreshment of your voice.”

“You tell the nicest lies. Mike, if you promise to behave, you may come over to my place tonight. Maybe I’m Miss Sucker, but I’ll take your word — this once.”

“You have it,” McCall said. “I need you tonight. I really do. I’ve been beating my brains out on this thing and getting absolutely nowhere. When do I show?”

“Like, say, right away?”

“Where do you live?”

She gave him directions.

“I’m practically there.”

He showered, dressed in his charcoal suit, which he had found in the room delivered by the valet down the street, selected his quietest necktie, and hurried to his Ford. He found her directions ambiguous and he had some difficulty locating the section of Tisquanto where she lived. He finally got on the track and began cruising along the residential streets, looking for the right one.

The roar of an engine startled him. He glanced at his rear-view mirror and saw the headlights of another car bearing down on him from behind like a juggernaut. In reflex he wrenched his wheel toward the right, sluing over to the curb. Stupid kids out on a tear!

He glimpsed another car...

But the first car did not pass and go its way. It shrieked by alongside and darted into the curb about twenty feet ahead, cutting him off. Fortunately he had already slammed on his brakes, and the Ford stopped a foot from the other car.

The second car was already parked beside him. He heard a man’s voice shout something. Car doors swung open. Bodies began climbing out. He jumped from his car, ready for anything.

He could hardly believe what his eyes were telling him. They were running at him, brandishing their arms, a grotesque crew of false faces leering under the streetlights. They were wearing Halloween masks.

And they were all — girls and men — naked.