The Campus Murders

16

McCall — bleary of eye, heavy in the leg and brain-was at the Sigma Alpha Phi house early. The tall cool number he had seen there before stopped him downstairs.

“I don’t care whom you want to see,” she said. “We have rules here, even if some of the girls don’t stick to them. I’m on the House Committee and if you want to talk to somebody, tell me who and I’ll get her down here in the drawing room. If she wants to see you, that is.”

“It’s all right with me,” McCall said. “I don’t get my kicks peeping into girls’ bedrooms, if that’s what’s worrying you. I want to see Veronica Gale.”

“In that case,” the girl said, “go on up. Second door to your right.”

“Wait a minute,” McCall said. “You just said—”

The girl was laughing at him. “Talk about squares. Who gives a flying damn any more about Miss Peachy’s Young Ladies’ School rules? You can go up there and take an effing leap at her for all I care. I was putting you on;”

“Hadn’t you better tell her I’m asking for her?”

“Tell her yourself.”

She strode away. She was in skintight pajamas and her strut was mocking.

The kook generation.

McCall went upstairs shaking his head.

He stood outside the door fighting his eyelids. He had taken half a bennie; it had not yet begun to work. Popping bennies! Even as he knocked he felt the first stirrings of the pill. His head shifted gears. He was thinking of Kathryn when the door opened.

“Miss Gale?”

“Veronica to you.”

“Already?” McCall smiled.

“How long does it take? Come in, Mr. McCall.”

“You know me.”

“You’re famous around here.” She stood aside. She was brown-haired and very pretty, with a perky figure that challenged the male world. She was in silk pajamas and barefoot.

He went in.

“We’re kind of rumply this morning,” Veronica Gale said. “Sit down, Mr. McC. How would you like to become a member?”

“Of what?”

“Of our sorority. Man, that would be boss.”

“I’m afraid the dean of women wouldn’t allow it.”

The girl told him what he could do with the dean of women. “I can see you don’t want to play. All right, why are you here? Why li’l ol’ me?”

“A few questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like Damon Wilde.”

He watched the veil come down over the hazel eyes, bright little eyes in a bright little face as unreadable as a beach at high tide. She turned her back on him.

The walls were covered with wild posters, one showing a human phallus. There were two beds, unmade. A shreak of sunlight illuminated dust motes.

“Did I startle you?” McCall said.

She whirled. “Startle me? Certainly not!”

“Then why are you snapping at me?”

“I don’t go for wit this early in the morning!”

“Sorry, Veronica.”

“Miss Gale!”

“A minute ago — skip it. You know Wilde?”

“Sure I know Wilde. Everybody at ’Squanto does. He’s the head guru here. Or, as your generation would say, the big squeeze.”

“You like him?”

“That’s my business.”

“And my business is getting answers. The only way I can do that is by asking questions. I asked you if you like Damon Wilde.”

“Sure I like Damon Wilde. Where did you pick up those scratches on your face, Mr. McCall? Out with a cat?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

Why was she on guard? What was she worried about? The room was much clearer now, and so was his head. He should have eaten breakfast. After no dinner the night before. Coffee wasn’t enough. Especially that lousy coffee.

Could she have been one of the kids who jumped him in the buff?

“On second thought, we don’t like you,” the girl said.

“Who’s we?”

“All of us. Who directed you to my room?”

“A tall number. Knockout, but mannish.”

“Prissy. She’s the biggest put-on in the world. We don’t like you, McCall. Dig?”

“Why do you come on so hard?”

“You’re part of the system. What’s Governor Holland ever done for us?”

“I’m told you and Wilde are very close friends.”

“Get out of my room.”

She pointed to the door dramatically. “And don’t come back!”

“All right, Miss Gale.”

She slammed the door after him.

Tall Prissy appeared from nowhere, sailing.

“Leaving?”

“Kicked out.”

“You poor man.” She laughed, preceding him downstairs. At the front door she touched his arm. “Veronica showed her pretty molars?”

“Very uncooperative, Prissy.”

“Damon put her up to it. Dig?”

“If that’s the truth, thanks.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I feel sorry for you. Because not all of us are... never mind. You’d better go.” Her stunning eyes were full on his.

He went. Prissy had salvaged the morning.

He drove to a freshly painted clapboard three-story with a broad porch, the address of Patricia Reed, Dennis Sullivan’s girl. The house was painted pink and green, each a poisonous shade.

He checked the mailboxes, located the Reed girl’s room number, and tried the door. It gave to his nudge and he went into a dark hall that smelled faintly of pine deodorizer.

McCall went upstairs to the second floor, down a short dark hall, and knocked at a door.

“Just a minute.”

The door opened a crack; a long-lashed topaz eye peered out at him. The eye blinked down at his shoes, then traveled slowly up his body until it reached his face again.

“Oh, wow. Who are you?”

“My name’s McCall, Micah McCall. May I come in?”

The door swung slowly — he thought reluctantly — open.

She was a magazine illustration beauty of the Phoebe Zeitgeist class, tall, slim, big-breasted, with mathematically regular features that curiously made no impression. She was dressed entirely in black leather down to her high boots. Her hair was as black as her outfit; it hung glistening to well below her square shoulders, advertising its hundred brushings that morning. Huge onyx hoops dangled from her ears. Her lips were painted a pearly tone; her eyes were heavily made up. All she lacked was a bullwhip.

“You’re Pat Reed, I take it,” McCall said.

“And you’re the famous McCall.” She shut the door. “Sorry about the condition of this room. I wasn’t expecting company.” It was, surprisingly, just a room, as featureless and unmemorable as her face. “You’re here about the Laura Thornton thing and Dean Gunther, right?”

“Right.”

“Sit down. Just throw those things on the bed.”

He tossed an armful of lingerie to the bed and sat down in a captain’s chair covered with gouged-out initials.

“And you’re here because somebody told you Dennis Sullivan and I have a thing going, right?”

There was an undertone of coarseness in her speech that grated on him. McCall smiled. “Keep talking, Miss Reed.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

“With a start like that,” McCall said, still smiling, “that’s something of an anticlimax.”

The girl shrugged. “Really. I’m not bracing you. I don’t know Laura awfully well. Some. Maybe as well as any girl in ’Squanto. But that’s little enough. I’m sorry about what happened to her. It must have been awful for her. I keep thinking about it. But that’s not going to do you much good, Mr. McCall, is it? Have you a line to who might have done it?”

Over the bookcase hung an abstract whose composition was oddly regular and forgettable. Like Patricia Reed herself. He glanced around. The few other pictures and photographs were also nondescript. Yet even against such a background it was her clothes and makeup that stood out, not she.

“No,” McCall said. “I thought you might be able to help me. Yes, I’ve heard you’re close to Dennis Sullivan. I understand he knows Laura quite well—”

“Yes, he does.” There was nothing to be read on her face or distilled from her voice.

“But if you and he are a twosome—”

“I don’t put clamps on my men,” Pat Reed said. “Dennis is all I’ve got. I mean, I don’t want anyone else. It was a passing thing, his interest in Laura. He told me it wasn’t serious. I believe him.”

“I see.”

He watched her. She gave forth a powerful effluvium of truth. She seemed to hold nothing back. It was appealing. Was it genuine or a technique?

“And me, Miss Reed? What do you think of my being here?”

“Some people are a bit wigged. I’m not one of them. For one thing it’s your job. For another, I like Governor Holland being interested in and concerned about what’s going on. The trouble is that people don’t try to understand other points of view. That goes for both sides.”

She came toward him, moving with a slow hip flow that was almost, not quite, an undulation. There was something powerfully enticing about the performance. She stopped rather close to him. He felt an all but physical assault on his masculinity.

“I sympathize with what you’re doing,” Pat Reed murmured.

Was she trying to make him? But he couldn’t tell. Behind that bland magazine exterior beat an obviously complex personality. It would take a long time to know Miss Reed. He began to understand how she held onto young Dennis Sullivan even in his restlessness.

She sat down near him.

“I’m darned glad to hear that,” McCall said. “It makes me feel that ’Squanto isn’t entirely the camp of the enemy. By the way, I wonder if you’ve ever heard anyone threaten Dean Gunther.”

Her lashes swept her cheek. “So you think I’m a fink because I gave you a kind word.”

“No—”

“Yes. Well, Mr. McCall, I testify against no one unless I’m in a position to nail him to the cross. All I’ll tell you is this: Floyd Gunther was pretty much disliked by the students. He was a hard, sometimes a nasty, man, and he was an administration brown-nose from the ground up. Right?”

“I’m listening, Miss Reed.”

“That’s all. It’s happened, it’s over, and when a thing is over I don’t give it much thought. I mean, I think about the leftover living, not the dead.”

She leaned toward him. He could feel her heat. Her eyes lidded again. Could he be wrong? Was he imagining all this? Or was she leading him on?

He suddenly wondered if he had walked into a trap. This could be dangerous. There was the unmade bed...

The next moment she knocked his suspicions galley-west.

“I’d like to continue this conversation, Mr. McCall,” she said, jumping up, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to split. I’m due at the music building in two minutes. Singing lesson.”

She went over to the bookcase and took down a black binder tied with ribbon. Sheet music projected from it. She smiled at McCall, waiting.

McCall rose. “Maybe we could talk again?”

“Any time, Mr. McCall.” She stood there, hip thrusting.

“Thank you, Miss Reed, for being so frank with me.”

She hadn’t been afraid to talk, she had talked with every timbre of honesty, and what had she said? Nothing.

As McCall drove off he reflected that perhaps he had misjudged the Tisquanto police.

No wonder they hadn’t come up with anything.

Driving onto the campus he noticed that the area before the administration building was again seething with students. Some were picketing the entrance, waving placards. Others marched in a phalanx as if to cut off a rear exit. He could smell trouble in the air.

A student in snaky jeans darted across the road in his path. McCall leaned on his horn, and the boy turned to grin. His hair brushed his shoulders, and McCall spotted the single gold earring. The student suddenly recognized him and started away.

McCall leaned out. “Dennis!”

Dennis Sullivan turned.

“Here a minute, will you?”

Sullivan came up slowly. He was carrying a different camera.

“Yeah?” He sounded truculent.

“Just talking with Patricia Reed. That’s quite a chick you have there.”

“Glad you think so,” the boy said dryly. “She’s private property, by the way. Anything new on Laura or the dean?”

“No.”

“Sorry to hear it. Well, I’ve got to run. Photographic session, we’re working up an exhibit for the library. Y’know?”

He hurried off. The gold earring caught the sun, winking.

McCall drove over to the Student Union and wolfed down a platter of bacon and eggs heaped with toast, a plastic-tasting Danish and three excellent cups of coffee. By the time he had returned to the Ford he had exchanged the frown for a scowl. He had never been so cold on a case, so far from any impression of proximity to a lead. And yet something kept nagging away somewhere deep in his head. A clue? Something whose significance he had missed?

By this time he felt a positive sympathy for Lieutenant Long and Chief Pearson.

The thought of Katie Cohan sent him over to the administration building. Pearson’s police had the situation in hand. He had to show his credentials before they would allow him to enter the building.

They were alone in the outer office.

He took her hand. “You look ravishing this morning.”

“I’m happy,” she said. “You made me happy last night. Talking about ravishing, I’ve decided you didn’t rape me, I raped you. How could I have been so selfish? You with that poor bruised hide. And that burn. Can you forgive me?”

“Any time,” McCall said, “lady.”

“I hate you. Anything new, Mike?”

He shook his head and told her about his visit to Patricia Reed. “I can’t make up my mind about her.”

“That’s bad,” Kathryn said jealously. “I don’t like her already.”

“Don’t you know her?”

“Just to pass in halls. I don’t have much personal contact with the girls — my work is more administrative — office drudge is what I am, if you must know. Let’s not talk about Miss Reed any more.”

“There’s nothing to go on,” McCall muttered. “It bothers the hell out of me.”

They went over Floyd Gunther’s murder, the letters, the aliases of the letter-writers. It was an exercise in futility.

“Starret still sticks in my craw for some reason,” McCall mumbled.

“Why not talk to him?”

“Where does he live?” She gave him the address. It was just across the campus, a small rooming house.

He was about to kiss her when Dean Vance walked in.

“Investigating my assistant, Mr. McCall?” she barked.

“I could do worse, dean,” McCall said, and left.

He was cutting across a stretch of lawn near the Bell Tower thinking of Katie Cohan, when he heard a shout and the sound of running on blacktop.

McCall turned.

A small man was scampering toward him from the direction of the Bell Tower, crossing the road, waving his arms.

“Wait!” the man screamed.

McCall thought it had something to do with what was going on at the administration building, where the demonstrating students were trying to rush the entrance, apparently with the intention of invading it. A solid line of police was drawn up in their path. The students were shouting, too.

He suddenly recognized the little man. It was the man Kathryn had identified as the custodian of the music building, Burell.

At arm’s length, mouth open, cheeks suffused, eyes popping, he became an old, frightened man.

“What is it?” McCall asked quietly.

The old man gasped, “Murder.”

“Who? Where?”

“A girl. In the Bell Tower.”