The Campus Murders

6

Dean Gunther looked very much unburned. In the porch light over the front door of his Tudor-type house his eyes told McCall that he had long since heard the declaration of the auto-da-fé and its subsequent execution on his effigy.

“I still think I shouldn’t have come,” McCall said. “Wouldn’t you rather I made it some other time, dean?”

“Floyd, I told you!” Gunther said. “Don’t be so tender of my feelings, man. Come in.” McCall stepped into the foyer, and Gunther shut the door rather consciously, he thought — he half expected to hear a bolt slip home. “Did you see the show?”

“Yes.”

“Let me have your hat.” The dean hung it in a closet. When he turned around McCall saw that his handsome lips were pale. “They got a big bang out of it, no doubt.”

“Some of them seemed to be enjoying themselves,” McCall said, “yes.”

“You’d think I was Savonarola!”

“I said some of them, Floyd. Most of them just passed it by.”

“Tell me how many defenders I had.”

“Oh, come, a bunch of hopped-up college kids—”

“I can see you don’t know much about colleges these days,” Dean Gunther said grimly. “Come on in — oh, Wolfe.”

President Wade appeared from an alcove off the foyer. The gray eyes under the gray hair looked wet — there was a jellyfish dampness about the whole man that piqued McCall.

“Good evening, Mr. McCall.” He smiled damply, too. “I’m afraid poor Floyd’s still in shock. One never seems to get used to these things. It’s especially hard on the women. I was just telling Rose—”

“Floyd?”

A doll-like woman with quite expert makeup appeared, high heels clicking. She halted at sight of McCall, a little warily.

“Honey,” Gunther said. “This is Micah McCall. Mike, my wife Rose.”

“Oh, I’m happy you’re here, Mr. McCall,” Rose Gunther exclaimed. “You’re from the governor’s office or something, aren’t you? I do hope you can do something about these horrible goings-on. Floyd, you’ve just got to try to put this out of your mind.”

“Now how the hell do I do that, dear heart? I’ve never gone to the stake before.”

She stood close to him, looking up helplessly. He laughed suddenly, patted her as if she were a child, and said, “Well. Let’s drown my sorrows, gentlemen.”

“I can’t stay,” President Wade said.

“One drink, Wolfe?”

“Next time, thank you. We’ll take severe disciplinary action, Floyd, you may be sure of that. We won’t let this one get by.”

“I certainly hope not! It isn’t much of a jump from the effigy to the man it represents. I tell you here and now, Wolfe, I intend to protect myself!”

“It’s all right, Floyd. Don’t worry about it.” On this doubtful note, the president of the college left.

“I really wouldn’t blow this up out of proportion,” McCall said.

“Is that what I’m doing?” Gunther muttered. “Well! Rose has mixed a pitcher of martinis, and I detest warm martinis, don’t you?”

McCall could not help feeling sorry for him. Gunther’s hands shook as he poured, something that in McCall’s experience rarely happened to people except during bad hangovers, and the dean had not been drinking. He stared into his martini and then gulped it down as if it had come out of a tap. It occurred to McCall that Floyd Gunther was either an advanced neurotic or a Class A coward. Or — McCall added speculatively in his thoughts — maybe Floyd sniffed something in the winds of Tisquanto that, so far, he had not.

“I’m sorry, Mike. Forgot to ask you to sit down. This thing has me all upset.”

“Naturally. Mrs. Gunther?”

Rose Gunther sat primly down and sipped her drink, eyes on her husband. It was a comfortable, not showy, room with a few modest antiques, some original student oils and water colors hanging on the walls, and books towering eight feet high on the walls flanking the fieldstone fireplace. Gunther was patrolling his hearth like a restless housedog.

“Aren’t you making more of this than it deserves?” McCall remarked.

“You don’t know what’s been going on!”

“What?”

“The turmoil — student boycotts—”

“I know all about that. I mean concerning you. You’ve been the target of actual threats?”

“What do you call what happened just now?”

“Not the same thing at all—”

The front doorbell chimed, and kept chiming.

“Now what?” Gunther exclaimed.

“Would you like me to get it?” McCall asked.

The dean seemed ashamed. “My own home? Certainly not, thank you!”

Mrs. Gunther slipped out of the room. A moment later she called, “Floyd?”

It appeared to McCall that Gunther hesitated. He rose and said, “Like me to go with you?”

The Dean flushed. “Nonsense. Yes, honey?”

A student in a white shirt and cable-stitch pullover burst into view, stopped short in the doorway. He was very dark, almost purple black, but with Caucasoid features. He looked nineteen or twenty. He had been running.

“Graham,” Dean Gunther said. With relief, and a sort of added dimension of pleasure that told McCall of a working relationship.

“Dean, I’m sorry to break in on you this way, but something’s come up I don’t think can wait. I mean—”

“What is it?”

The young man’s eyes went to McCall.

“Of course. Excuse me a minute, Mike. My study, Graham.”

They went out.

“Now what on earth,” Rose Gunther complained, “can that boy want? They never leave Floyd alone.”

“He’s been under a strain, I take it?” McCall said, finishing his drink. He set it on an end table politely.

“Oh, yes!. Terrible. And the worst part is I don’t know what I can do to help.” She sat down on the sofa like a bird perching on a twig. She made distressed motions with her hands. “You can’t imagine how bad it’s been, Mr. McCall. Especially of late. He hasn’t been able to sleep, prowls half the night. I keep asking him what’s wrong, but he says it’s nothing — just the turmoil on campus. And now this horrible business tonight.”

“And, of course, that girl student disappearing,” McCall said sympathetically.

“Yes, I’d forgotten that. Do you suppose that accounts for—?”

The door across the hall opened with an explosion. It was the Dean, motioning. He looked ill.

“Mike. Do you mind...?”

He sounded ill, too.

Gunther’s study was obviously his refuge. Where the rest of the house was mathematically prim and orderly, as far as McCall had seen, the study was a manly shambles. Here, McCall thought, Floyd Gunther asserts his constitutional rights to be his own man.

The black student stood by the piled-high desk.

“This is Graham Starret,” the Dean said abruptly. “He’s one of our very best students, and a young man I admire very much. I think you’d better hear what Graham’s just told me. I’ve told him who you are.”

McCall offered his hand. The young man seemed amused. His clasp was quick and withdrawn.

“Go ahead, Graham!”

“Well, my date and I were parked over by the river, Mr. McCall. Lots of the students park down there. We were a little off the beaten track. I had to excuse myself to go down to the riverbank, and... well, I noticed something lying half in the water, half up under a bush on the bank. I took a quick look and... it’s the body of a girl, Mr. McCall.”

“He thinks it’s Laura Thornton,” Dean Gunther said hoarsely.

A few folks up at the capital, McCall thought, are going to have a bad night tonight.

“Aren’t you sure, Graham?”

“I wasn’t at first glance,” the boy said, “but on a closer look I thought I recognized her. Her condition... her face, I mean... pretty bad.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

“Not even my date, Mr. McCall. I took her home and came right here.”

“Then you haven’t notified the police?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

It seemed to McCall that Dean Gunther looked annoyed through his worry, as if McCall had asked an irrelevant question.

“Why not?” Graham Starret repeated, and he smiled. “You want a straight answer, Mr. McCall?”

“Always.”

“Okay. I don’t have any use for policemen.”

“That puts me in my place,” McCall said with an answering smile. “Well, you’d better show me where the place is, Mr. Starret. Do you want to come with us, Floyd?”

“Well, perhaps not,” the Dean said. He was very pale. “I can’t stand unpleasantness, Mike. I mean this sort of thing — and I shouldn’t leave Rose alone—”

“Let’s go, Starret. By the way,” McCall said, “was she dead?”

Graham Starret looked startled. “I really don’t know. I just assumed she was. I didn’t touch her.”

McCall sprang for the door.