The Campus Murders

5

In the dimness of the raftered bar at the Red Harbor Inn, McCall sipped a weak gin-and-tonic and considered what he had found out so far about Laura Thornton.

He was alone in the bar except for the square-faced bartender with the middle-aged paunch. McCall ached for a cigarette. He had tried cutting down, found it didn’t work for him, and so he had quit in the middle of a pack. Throwing away the pack had been an act of sheer heroism. But smoking was an act of stupidity, he kept telling himself. Something in the stuff contracted the blood vessels. He’d be a candidate for atheroscelerosis soon enough.

Still, it was hell.

He nibbled at a cube of sharp cheddar on the bar. That was another thing. You stopped smoking, you shifted your neurosis to eating. He pushed the plate of cheese away and bit deeply into his adulterated gin. Maybe I’ll wind up an alcoholic, he thought, and grinned at the thought. He ordered another. Weak, too.

“Get many students in here?” he asked the barman.

“We get ’em.” The man poured with a professional nip. “Friday and Saturday nights especially. Some beauts.”

“The hippies any trouble?”

“Listen,” the barman said. “We get some of the longhaired ones, sure. But the way people talk, you’d think they’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But what’s so different? Remember zoot suits, for chrissake? Peg pants? How girls acted in Prohibition? That was before your time, buddy, but any time’ll do. I was just thinking of the Thirties. Dance marathons. Six-day bicycle races. Jitterbug. The Dipsy-Doodle. Benny Goodman. Crazy, the kids went crazy. Later, Boom-Boom-Didem-Dadem-Wadem-Chew, f’gawd’s sake. Mairzey-Doats and Doazy-Doats and Li’l Lambs Eat Ivy. Yech!” He flung his bar rag down. “And the drinking. Everybody was stoned. Sex-mad, too.” The barman half shut his eyes. “My old man was a Methodist preacher. Tie that. And I was a real high flier. Kept a jug of corn in my locker in high school. Had a Model A, and it rocked, man, you believe it. And all those sweet pickings.” He chuckled with nostalgia. “There was a party every night, and what went on in those back bedrooms was something. Kids are healthier today. More honest. The skirts came up just as easy in those days, and there was always Peggy Pregnant the All-American Roundheels. And, hell, smoking weed, too. I tried it and went back to booze. I hit a dozen alcoholic wards before I wised up. Reefers, they called them then, bombers. You’d buy a tobacco-can full.”

The bartender stopped to refuel.

“But the colleges didn’t have the problems they have now,” McCall argued.

“This has been coming a hell of a long time, friend,” the bartender said. “By the way, my name is Grundy.”

“You don’t sound it,” McCall said.

“What?”

“I mean, never mind. McCall’s mine. How do you figure?”

Grundy reached to the back bar, brought up a bottle of Jack Daniels, and poured himself half a slug in a shot glass. He drank it quickly and washed the glass. “That’s how I do it now — my quota for today. How do I figure, Mac? I figure the kids are in the last half of the twentieth century, and the colleges are still back in the nineteenth. And that’s how the kids figure. That’s what this unrest is all about. I wish there were more of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the real rebels, the revolutionaries, the ones who’ll stop at nothing to overturn the system. They’re only a handful.”

“You’re on their side?”

“Sure. Why not? I’m against the Establishment — any Establishment. But even the college kids who aren’t activists are more intelligent and serious than my generation was. But nobody listens to them. Jesus. Just half a shot glass and listen to me. Another one and I’d be a poet.” He looked at McCall’s drink.

“No more now,” McCall said, finishing it.

“They’re all right, those kids,” the barman said. “Make no mistake about that.”

“Count on me,” McCall said. “Name’s Mike, Mike McCall. Nice talking with you, Mr. Grundy.”

“Call me Joe,” the barman said. “Joe Mozzarella, the spaghetti king. Out of Joe Cacciatore, fifteen to one.”

“Which is it? You told me Grundy.”

“Ah, sweet mystery of life.”

“You sure it’s bourbon in that bottle?” McCall asked.

“I knew a doctor once drank ether. All the time. Smelled terrible.”

“No kidding, Joe, what is your name?”

“Vermicelli.”

“Have it your way. Seeing you.”

“Mike, Mac, McCall, does it make any difference as long as I don’t call you Sally?”

In his room, McCall put a call through to Governor Holland. The governor was not at the mansion; nobody seemed to know where he was. McCall left a message and said he would call back if anything developed.

He sat on the bed, wishing for the lethal weed and thinking more about Laura Thornton. Whoever had been with her at the Greenview Motel had played it cosy. The girl had done the dirty work, registering, paying for the room. Could it have been Damon Wilde? He very much wanted to talk with young Mr. Wilde.

He checked the book, called Dean Gunther’s office, and asked if anything had clarified the mystery of the missing clothes.

“Not a damned thing.” Gunther sounded troubled and fretful. “Why would they do it? I know it was one of them.”

“One of who?”

“One of our gentle students.”

“I just met a guy who likes them.”

“Likes them?” He could almost see Gunther shaking his head. “I always considered myself reasonably libertarian. Do you know I get threatening letters from them?”

Gunther’s voice dribbled away.

“You sound kind of shot,” McCall said. “I won’t hold you to that dinner engagement, Dean Gunther.”

“Floyd, remember? Wouldn’t hear of it, Mike. And my wife’s looking forward to meeting you. I’m anxious to talk this mess over in depth. I’ll try to give you the total picture.”

“It’s this Laura Thornton business that’s principally on my mind at the moment, Floyd—”

“Of course. I mean it’s difficult for me to forget sometimes that we have over sixteen thousand students... Laura Thornton. Yes... oh, I’m late for an appointment, Mike. See you tonight.”

As he showered and dressed, McCall went through the low of a manic phase. Joe Grundy-Mozzarella-Whatever hadn’t exactly given him a lift. Tisquanto State was a long way from Berkeley and San Francisco State College, in climate as well as geography. At least that was what McCall had come to town thinking. This part of the state wasn’t what you’d call revolutionary country, unless you were thinking of the Rebellion of 1776. The kids — and most of the students at Tisquanto were relatively local — came from staunch middle-class homes... potatoes and gravy, Grange and 4-H club activities, big whing-dings at the parish house Saturday nights, and the strap in the woodshed only one generation in the past... Or am I way behind the times? Maybe that’s the trouble. Maybe that’s what they’re rebelling against. All that virtue.

He tried to remember how it had been when he’d been at college.

A hell of a lot different from today!

Laura Thornton.

Something told McCall she had found big trouble.

It was dark as he drove back toward the college. Gunther lived at the other end, not far off campus. He decided to drive through the campus.

Tisquanto seemed a nice enough town. At this hour it was quiet and cool with a breeze ruffling the tops of the trees, playing them against the streetlights. Cars hissed past, an occasional pedestrian strolled by. It was a fine spring evening. For a moment it brought back some memories of his perishable youth. He dismissed them sternly.

As he approached the administration building McCall braked. No peace here! Something was up.

Young people covered the campus like ants around a disturbed nest. They seemed unorganized, darting here and there. The astonishing thing was the lack of noise. Astonishing, and ominous. There was no shouting, either in high spirits or anger. Just those dartings about, like feints in a prize ring. What was going on?

McCall parked and slipped into the crowds. Here he immediately vanished as an individual. Invisibility was one of his most valuable assets. He carried his own protective coloration, changing automatically with his background. It was an inborn, not an acquired, talent — an ability to blend with people so that nobody remembered him afterwards. Governor Holland had once remarked that it was a good thing for the law enforcement arm that Mike McCall had no stomach for crime.

Here and there were groups of whisperers. Most of these were fringe students — hippies, Yippies. The students in conventional clothes, many carrying books, were hurrying along, for the most part in silence. They were headed somewhere, too.

McCall headed somewhere with them.

Then he saw it, a mob of students carrying a dummy. They were holding it high over their heads. It was the effigy of a fully clothed man.

They had reached the quadrangle now.

Suddenly they began to yell.

They had the makings of a bonfire set up — McCall saw some perfectly good chairs and at least one new-looking wooden filing cabinet in the debris. Someone had rigged a beam above the pile of wood. Two students seized the dummy and fastened it to the beam.

“Burn him!”

Kerosene splashed. A roar went up as someone flipped a match. Flames spread, leaped, took hold. Fire began nipping at the legs of the dummy.

And then McCall saw the neatly lettered sign, black on white:

And McCall solved the mystery of Dean Gunther’s stolen suit of clothes.

He began to circulate.

Not everyone was enthusiastic about the ceremony.

“It’s reactionary,” McCall heard one boy say. He was with another boy and a pretty girl. They were all dressed conventionally. “They think this is the cool thing to do,” the boy went on. “It’s stupid and juvenile. Where does it get them?”

“It’s satisfaction,” the girl argued.

“Like a kid beating his dolly to death.”

“How else can they get through to him? You can’t even get in to see him half the time.”

“It’s a big student body,” the other boy said. “The dean has his hands full.”

“I’m not defending him,” the first student said. “It’s just that these kid antics make me sick.”

“You’re right. It’s stupid. They’re a bunch of clots.”

McCall moved along. One boy in a large group was shouting, “It gets us nowhere! What’s the point? This is no confrontation. It’s a farce — Gunther isn’t even here. Systematic disruption!” He actually spat. “This sort of thing was done a generation ago. It’s ancient history. We’re here — now. Or we’re supposed to be. What we need are modern tactics to carry out a modern strategy!”

“Ah, knock it off, Demosthenes.” There was a general hoot and laugh. “Let him burn. I wish it were real.”

“It’s perfectly in accord with the movement,” a girl confided to another girl. “And it eliminates hangups. Really it does. If you don’t take action — some action — you just go mad.”

“Watch out for pig meat!” a boy yelled.

Another boy said, “Nobody gives a damn. They won’t listen. The dean’s a cramp. So it’s a responsible protest.”

“I don’t agree,” another said, a Negro boy. “This just isn’t the way to go about it.”

“Separatist,” a white girl said.

“Okay, okay,” the Negro said. “Call me what you like, but I mean it.”

“Oh, baby,” the white girl said, patting his cheek. “I love you and you know it.”

“I’ll go along with that,” the Negro boy said, and patted her back.

“Watch out, burrhead,” a white boy said, “or your friends will start calling you Tom.”

They grinned at each other.

McCall glanced at the fire. The dummy was burning fiercely. Yells and cheers. They used to celebrate football victories this way. He wondered which students had instigated the affair.

He came upon a little congregation of long-haired boys and girls dressed in weird conglomerates. They stood off by themselves rather sadly, McCall thought. He put them down as flower children, who would not enter into the activist business of effigy-burning. Some hippies went along with the mob and some held back. Camps within camps.

He started back for his car and his dinner engagement with the man the students were destroying by proxy.