The Campus Murders

19

The hammer clicked emptily. It had happened too unexpectedly for McCall to react; he would pay for it, he knew, much later, in his nightmares.

It was an old Beretta Cougar .380, known in the handbooks as “the official arm of the Italian Army and Navy.” This one was extra-fancy, a chromed job with a pearl stock. God knew how old it was. But it looked oiled and ready for business. The question was if it was loaded. The Beretta Cougar, McCall knew, held eight cartridges when fully loaded, seven in the magazine and one in the chamber. Sullivan might well have inserted a loaded magazine and forgotten to put the extra cartridge in the chamber. McCall decided that he did not care to play Russian roulette with a speed freak at the controls.

He found that unconsciously he had eased off a bit, getting his legs well under him and his feet raised at the heels, weight balanced forward.

“That’s a pretty dangerous thing to be playing with, Sully,” McCall said, smiling. “Have you checked to see if there are any cartridges in the magazine?”

“Why don’t I pull the trigger again and find out, Mr. McC?” the student asked, grinning back.

“No, thanks,” McCall said. “I don’t think either of us would enjoy the experience. Let’s dispense with the firearm, shall we? What do you say, Sully? Put it away?”

“Not till I find out what you want, ol’ fuzzy-wuzzy-buzzy. How’d you know where I was?”

“I ran into somebody who said he thought you might be out here at the shack,” McCall said. “So I took a chance and drove out here. I’d like to talk to you.”

“We had our talk.”

“Not one like this, Sully. In this one we’ll have to get down to the nitty-gritty. Come on, tuck the pistol away and let’s go at it like civilized people.”

Young Sullivan blinked at him. He was evidently slipping into another phase of drug reaction.

“So talk.” He dropped the automatic to the table.

McCall studiously avoided it.

“It was Inferno did you in, Sully,” McCall said. “Remember?”

“Inferno,” young Sullivan repeated owlishly.

“That painting? All in shades of red? An abstract that looks like flames licking the roof of a cave?”

“Inferno,” Sullivan said, nodding. “Did me in? How d’ye mean?”

“I first saw that painting in your room, Sully,” McCall said gently. “It was one of a group borrowed from the fine arts department that you had leaning against your desk. For some reason — was it because you liked it? — you held onto it for a few days before you returned it. Or maybe you were too high on speed to make a very smart criminal.”

Sully’s mouth was open. He seemed fascinated. “Yeah?” he said.

“Because it was Laura who originally borrowed Inferno from the fine arts department. I know that for a fact because when it became overdue Miss Smith sent a letter to Laura asking for its return. And my information was that when Laura was last seen — you told me that yourself, Sully — she was carrying a painting to return to the department. Obviously, Inferno. Days later I find Inferno in your room. So you lied, Sully, about having dropped Laura off with the painting at the liberal arts building. You didn’t drop her off at all. You took her somewhere and held her prisoner — maybe here, for all I know — and beat the living hell out of her. Why?”

Sully’s mouth was still open. “Why?” he repeated. “Why?”

“Chinky-chink shows, as the kids used to say in Chicago. Inferno, Sully. Very appropriate. What you should have done with that painting was not return it at all, ever. You should have destroyed it. Then I’d never have known that you were Laura Thornton’s beater-upper. You must have been very high, Sully, very high indeed, to try to beat her to death. In fact, I’m sure that’s what you thought when you left her down at the river — that she was dead. You’re a bungler, Sully, and you know what you’ve got to thank for it. Drugs, probably the same stuff you’re on right now.”

Young Sullivan’s breathing became shallower and more rapid.

“The question is why you set out to beat Laura Thornton to death,” McCall said. “The answer ties in to Dean Gunther’s death.

“A series of threatening letters was sent to Floyd Gunther, hinting that he had engaged in hanky-panky with some coed. A number of them were signed ‘Thomas Taylor.’ One of them was signed ‘Lady G.’ Why were those aliases chosen by the two blackmailers? Well, what does ‘Lady G’ suggest? Lady Godiva, for one. And ‘Thomas Taylor’? Well, if Lady Godiva was a principal in the case, Peeping Tom — Thomas — was certainly another. And what was Thomas’s trade in the legend? He was a tailor! So ‘Thomas Taylor.’

“It’s wonderful how the human mind traps itself, Sully,” McCall said to the boy. “Lady Godiva — nudity. Peeping Tom — the man who looked on secretly. Translate it into terms of the blackmail letters and Floyd Gunther’s predicament, and what do we have? A college dean caught fornicating with a coed, and somebody secretly watching in order to be able to blackmail later. Now blackmail in a fornication case has no teeth without evidence. What is the most damning kind of evidence you can have in a fornication case? Photographic. So that’s what Peeping Tom — the secret watcher, the coed’s confederate — was doing: he was snapping pictures of the event! And who do we know in this setup is a photographic bug? Why, young Dennis Sullivan.

“So here, Sully, we have you again — the one who beat up Laura Thornton for a reason not yet adduced, and the one who with your coed girlfriend was blackmailing Dean Gunther. That would obviously be Patricia Reed. Pat Reed stripped to the buff and seduced the poor sucker in her busy bed, and you were right there hidden behind something clicking away, and eventually — maybe because Gunther couldn’t take the pressure any more and was threatening to expose both of you even if it meant his own ruin — Pat, at your instigation, lured Gunther behind the Bell Tower where you stabbed him to death in another one of your drug-induced frenzies. And later, when it all apparently became too much for the girlfriend and she threatened to spill the whole thing, you got Pat to meet you in the Bell Tower and you throttled and hanged her there. You’re quite a lad, Sully. Tell me: what part did Laura Thornton play in all this, and what were you trying to squeeze out of Dean Gunther?”

McCall almost did not reach the Beretta. As it was, their hands collided and the pistol smashed to the floor. Their chairs overturned, the table went crashing, and they were facing each other with no more than a yard between them. Then both fell on the gun. Incredibly, Dennis Sullivan got to it first.

McCall jumped in under Sullivan’s arms. He caught the boy’s wrist and twisted. The gun exploded into the floor; again. McCall kept applying pressure. Sullivan gasped and the pistol dropped from his hand. McCall immediately came up with his fist and caught Sullivan’s underjaw. The head rocked back and for an instant he thought it was over. But Sullivan howled and came back fighting like a wounded wolf. He was raging, spitting fire, mouthing obscene threats, and all the time his eyes remained faraway, as if they belonged to another place and time.

McCall, who had no desire to harm the boy, began to wonder if he might not have to kill him.

Sullivan dived at his knees. McCall caught him under the ears, using the boy’s own momentum, and sent him crashing to the floor. He slid on his knees, sprang erect and about in a display of agility that widened McCall’s eyes, and came back to the attack. But it was a feint this time. At the last instant he swerved and lunged for the weapon on the floor.

McCall kicked at it and in the same maneuver chopped at the student’s neck. Sullivan went down again.

“You dumb ox,” McCall panted, not without admiration, “don’t you ever give up?”

But the boy popped back like a jack-in-the-box. McCall decided that he had had enough exercise for one day. He chopped down across the nose and followed up with a stiff jab to the midsection and a chop to the throat. Sullivan reeled, his mouth wide, nose bleeding. And still he tried to come at McCall. It was almost frightening. McCall’s hand flashed up and he caught hold of the gold earring in the boy’s pierced ear and stepped behind him, circling his throat with his forearm and exerting a steady pressure on the earring, down and backwards.

Sullivan screamed and his body stilled.

But he had one more shot in his locker. He wriggled like a seal and came up and at McCall’s eyes. The unexpected movement tore the earring from his ear, and he screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, clapping his hand to his lobe. McCall brought the heel of his hand up and Sullivan sat down on the floor with a thump and began to cry.

“You know something, Sully?” McCall said. “You’re your own worst enemy. Don’t you know when you’ve had enough? Or is it that damned drug? You all right?” He stooped and retrieved the Beretta and dropped it into his pocket.

“You tore my ear half off, goddam you,” Sullivan cried.

“Don’t keep blaming other people for your mistakes,” McCall said. He hauled Dennis Sullivan to his feet and dropped him into the chair. The student produced a handkerchief and began to minister to his nose. His eyes were not as glazed as before; the drug seemed to be wearing off.

“All right, Sully.” McCall stood over the boy alertly. “Why were you blackmailing Dean Gunther?”

“I had to graduate,” Sullivan whispered.

“Graduate?” McCall was utterly confounded.

“You wouldn’t understand, you cop-fink.”

“I’d like to, Dennis.” I’m dreaming this, he thought.

“My old man’s a demon on failure. He’s a self-made man and I’m his only son and he wants me — he expects me — to do even better than he’s done. He’s got a million-dollar business and I’m the heir apparent. He wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale but I couldn’t make it scholastically, wound up at Tisquanto and the old man swore if they zapped me from here he’d beat me the way he used to when I was a kid. He’d beat me once, twice a week till I was black and blue. I still get nightmares remembering. He broke my ribs twice. He’s a big man — six-six and two-forty-five, and he keeps in shape. He could kill me with one hand tied behind his back.”

McCall could hardly credit his ears.

“So I had to graduate,” the boy said. “I had to.”

“All right,” McCall said softly. “You had to graduate. What did that have to do with Dean Gunther?”

“He was going to expel me. I couldn’t let him do that. Because I’d have to face my father, and I couldn’t do that.”

“Why did the dean want to expel you, Sully?”

“I was goofing off. Marks way down. And then when I hit that creep Snyder... that tied it for Gunther. My campus activities didn’t help, either. Anyway, he called me in and said I’d have to leave ’Squanto. I begged him not to kick me out. I practically sucked. I even apologized to Snyder. I’d have got down on my knees if I’d thought it would help... you’d have to know my old man. One big muscle, up to and including his head. A jerk, the King Kong of jerks. With fists like jackhammers.”

The boy’s fingers unconsciously explored his jaw.

A wave washed over McCall. He was no sentimentalist, but there was something in the story, the little-boy tone, the way the fingers kept feeling the jaw, that made McCall want to grip the boy with paternal warmth and tell him everything was going to be all right. When it obviously was not going to be anything of the sort.

“So when you couldn’t talk Gunther out of it you decided to frame him with Pat Reed’s help?”

“It wasn’t hard,” young Sullivan said with a whining laugh. “I had this chick, Pat Reed, eating out of my hand — she had a real thing for me, she dug me. And a nympho besides. I explained to her what I wanted and she went for it right off, thought it was a gas. The idea of getting old Deanie Gunther to take his pants off in her room and get all hot and bothered while I snapped pictures from a hidden vantage point really grabbed Pat. So she gave him a cock-and-bull story about how my parents wanted to meet him in private — in her place as neutral territory — to discuss my ‘case,’ and don’t you know the fathead fell for it? I was all set up behind my blind, and the minute he shows up she locks the door and starts stripping, and there’s Gunther standing there with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out like he can’t see enough — getting hotter by the second and at the same time afraid — and when she’s all naked—”

“All right, I can imagine the rest,” McCall said. Sullivan brooded at his bloody handkerchief. After a while McCall said, “How did Laura Thornton get into the act?”

“That happened before I had to kill Gunther, I mean while we still had him under our thumb. Damon Wilde was Laura’s steady, and she got jealous because he was playing around. Damon started out for here one day, probably to get some joints, we’ve got a cache of grass here at the shack for the in group. Laura followed him, thinking he was meeting some other chick. When Damon saw Pat and me here, he took off. Laura, thinking he was here, sneaked up and overheard Pat and me talking about the Gunther situation. She heard everything and beat it, scared as a rabbit. But when she had time to think it over she came and told me what she’d heard. Man, was she shaking. Kept saying, ‘It was a put-on, Dennis, wasn’t it? Tell me it was a put-on.’ I told her yes, it was, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I knew when she’d had time to think it over she’d go running to Wade.”

“So that Friday, instead of dropping her off at the liberal arts building, as you claimed, you kidnaped her? Brought her out here?”

“There’s a toolshed out back of the shack here. I tied her up in there till I could figure out how to shut her mouth. I didn’t know what else to do. I was all wound up, like. Y’know? I left her there from Friday noon till Monday night. Then... I took her to the river.” His eyes flamed briefly. “I thought she was dead. Christ, she looked dead enough. She should’ve been. The bitch.”

“Very inconsiderate of her,” McCall said. “Oh, you left out one thing, Dennis.”

“What’s that?”

“The part where you beat her up.”

“I don’t remember that, Mr. McCall, honest to God I don’t,” Sullivan said earnestly.

“Are you denying that you beat her?”

Sullivan was beginning to look sullen. “All right, so I beat her.”

“It didn’t bother you?”

“I thought she was dead!” the boy shouted.

“I see,” McCall said. He was sure he was going to wake up any moment, or find that he had been living in an Alice-in-Wonderland episode. “And the painting? Inferno?”

“She had it with her when I took her out to the shack — she’d been intending to return it to the fine arts gallery, like I said. To tell you the truth, Mr. McCall, I took it to my room, where I had some other borrowed canvases, and forgot about it. I should have returned it right away, or burned it. But I wasn’t thinking very straight those days.”

“Yes,” McCall said. Or subsequently, he added to himself.

“I did all right, though. Till you showed up. The local fuzz weren’t getting anywhere. I was going great. You spoiled everything.”

“Let’s stick to the chronology. The photos you took the night you staged that lovely scene in Pat Reed’s room were what you held over Gunther’s head to keep him from kicking you out of college. What made him change his mind?”

“I talked with him over the phone and the son of a bitch says he can’t live with himself any more. Spouted a lot of high-and-mighty crud about conscience and moral duty and courage and how society would not blame his weakness when he explained how he had been tricked and framed and teased beyond endurance, and that type spiel. That’s when we began writing those letters, to keep him in line. It worked for a while, but then I got wind he was starting expulsion proceedings. So what could I do? I had Pat write that Lady G note to him, telling him to meet her behind the Bell Tower. He didn’t even fight, really, just fumbled around. And I nailed him. It was like sticking cheese.” The words tumbled out now. “I couldn’t stop sticking him. It was boss. It was like wild, man!... And you kept snooping around, maybe getting close... I have friends, dig? We didn’t want you on campus, Mr. McCall. So I got a crowd together—”

“Nature’s Children.”

“I didn’t tell ’em the real reason. Just that we ought to fix you good. It was a gas, jumping you like that. They swung, man. It’s a good bunch.” His face pulled down. “Then I broke into the hospital.”

“You wanted to finish the job on Laura?”

“Yeah. It was close. You almost got me.” He laughed. “And then Pat gets on me. All of a sudden she gets religious or something. Scared? Man, she’s shaking like she’s gone cold turkey. She almost spilled her guts when you talked to her. It was too close. I knew that when she tells me she’s going to the fuzz and try to get out from under.” He flapped his arms like a bird. “So again I got nothing else to do but... I asked her to meet me in the Bell Tower room at a time I knew old Burell was eating at the Student Union, and I... I did it. And that’s it.”

“You choked her? Then hanged her to the bellrope?”

“It was hard, too,” Dennis Sullivan muttered. “I had to keep the effing bell from bonging. You try it sometime.”

McCall touched the boy’s shoulder. The muscle under his finger felt like reinforced concrete.

“We’ll go now, Sully.”

“Go? Where?” the boy asked dully.

He was completely tractable walking to McCall’s Ford and on the drive to town.

“You know what you brought me?” Lieutenant Long said. “A lot of nothing is what!”

“Oh?” McCall said. They had Dennis Sullivan in handcuffs; he was sitting dejectedly in a chair at police headquarters studying the floor.

“Okay, so I book him on a few charges. Possession of a deadly weapon—” McCall had turned over to him the Beretta he had taken from the boy “—assault and so forth. But murder? All I have is your story of what he admitted to you, and if you think that’s evidence—”

“I know the legal bind, lieutenant,” McCall said. “Your big hope is Laura. Is she still out?”

“Still out. So if you expect thanks, Mr. McCall, you’re going to have a long wait.”

“My expectations in this world,” McCall said philosophically, “are few. But I can hope, can’t I?”

He watched them book young Sullivan to give his detention the stamp of legality, then they disappeared with him in an interrogation room. McCall had made his statement to Chief Pearson with a stenographer present, and he had already signed the transcript. So there was nothing to hold him at headquarters.

The last thing he saw as Sullivan was hustled out was the boy’s pale, scuff-eyed face, expressionless except for a slight groping look, as if the world were just a bit out of focus.

McCall slowly walked out. He had had word from the capital that Governor Holland was on his way to Tisquanto, and he was feeling a great relief. The state police had had to be called in under an emergency decree. Militant students had invaded a building on campus and occupied part of it; furniture was being thrown out of windows, they were wrecking the place; it looked like a long siege. Other students were drawn up in battle lines around the administration building, effectively keeping college personnel immobilized inside. The state police were being issued riot guns, and some tear gas was already drifting over the campus.

Was Katie safe? He had heard no reports of injuries to administrative people caught in the building, but anything might have happened... his step quickened.

There was a pitched battle going on before the administration building between hundreds of state police in gas masks, carrying grenade launchers and riot guns, and students hurling bricks and cobblestones torn from some of the ancient walks of the original quad of Tisquanto State. Bodies of injured boys and girls lay strewn about the grass like wounded on a battlefield. Students were being dragged by officers to paddy wagons and tossed in feet first. It reminded McCall of the convention in Chicago. Clouds of gas, more and more of it, hung over the campus. McCall caught a whiff and ran. No point in trying to break through to the administration building now; he would probably be taken for a student and clobbered, and be thrown into the jug suffering from exposure to tear gas besides.

He retrieved his Ford and drove back to police headquarters. He could not have said why, except that Dennis Sullivan’s face kept haunting him.

“You back?” Lieutenant Long scowled.

“How’s Sullivan?”

“You worried about him?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get him out of my mind.”

“Okay, Mr. McCall, why don’t we have us a look?”

The lieutenant’s face told him nothing but bad news. McCall followed the officer with a foretaste of unpleasantness. They went downstairs to the cell blocks. It was steamy here; there was a mingled odor of urine, vomit, and disinfectant.

Long stopped before a cell.

“I’ve sent for the shrink,” he drawled. “Kind of figured he might be needed.”

The young man was crouched at the far side of the cell, on the floor, gripping his wounded ear. He was staring at something not visible to normal eyes, and muttering obscenities in a mechanical, almost a ritual, way.

“What kind of dope is he shooting, anyway?” the lieutenant chuckled.

McCall turned away.