The Campus Murders

8

A light shone in an upstairs window. McCall stepped onto the porch. The front door was open, the hall in a dim light.

“Dean Gunther?” McCall hesitated. “Floyd?”

A tiny breeze scudded across the porch and a few winter leaves eddied about his feet. Some blew into the front hall as he held the door open. He called again.

McCall stepped in and shut the front door. He stood listening.

After a moment he checked the living room and dining room. The dining table was set, a tall candle burning. He looked into the kitchen. Food was on the range, warming. He returned through a back passage to the entrance hall, hesitated again, and glanced into Gunther’s study. The desk lamp was on, but the room was empty. He stepped inside and made for the desk.

He heard a light step behind him and turned sharply.

It was little Rose Gunther. She had changed into a blue flowered dressing gown. Her heavily made-up eyes were worried.

“Where’s Floyd, Mr. McCall?”

“I thought he was in here,” McCall said. “The front door was open, Mrs. Gunther, so I came in. I called but nobody answered.”

“I was upstairs lying down. Where can Floyd be?” A tiny hand was plucking at the neck of her gown. “He hasn’t been himself lately, Mr. McCall. But I told you that, didn’t I? Where can he have gone? He was here when I went upstairs. Oh, dear, I haven’t even asked you about Laura Thornton. Is she dead?”

“No, she’s alive, although she’s unconscious. She’s suffered a bad beating.”

The dean’s little wife shuddered. “What a world we’re living in. We never know what’s going to happen to our children, do we, Mr. McCall? Even the best-brought-up ones. You’ll have to tell me all about it.” She kept fluttering like a hummingbird. “What am I thinking of!” she exclaimed. “You haven’t had any dinner, your coat is soaked — would you like a cup of coffee while we’re waiting for Floyd? Not that dinner is going to be any good, it’s absolutely ruined...”

“Coffee?” McCall had moved over to the desk, on the side away from Mrs. Gunther. There was an envelope lying on the Navajo Indian rug, unsealed; a bit of wrinkly paper stuck out of the flap. “You took the word out of my mouth, Mrs. Gunther. I’d love a cup of hot coffee. No cream or sugar, though if you have some saccharine I’d appreciate it. Two tablets, please.”

She left the study. McCall pounced on the envelope.

The envelope was smooth. The note was wrinkled. Evidently the notepaper had been angrily crumpled after the recipient read the note, and jammed back into the envelope.

The message was typewritten:

Lady G?

McCall rammed note and envelope into his pocket just as Rose Gunther appeared again in the study doorway.

“It’ll be ready in a minute, Mr. McCall.”

“I’m afraid I can’t stay after all,” McCall said ruefully. “Just remembered something I forgot to take care of.”

“What a shame.”

“I’ll make it as fast as I can, Mrs. Gunther. You keep the coffee hot. Bargain?”

She smiled more openly now.

“If Floyd gets back before I do, ask him to wait for me.”

“I do hope everything’s all right...”

“Now don’t worry, Mrs. Gunther.”

He drove fast toward the campus, blessing Kathryn Cohan for having pointed the Bell Tower out to him earlier in the day.

Blackmail? He blanked his mind. No point in speculating. He’d know in a few minutes. Past the Student Union McCall made a quick turn. Moments later he saw the towering trees, then the music building. The Bell Tower thrust against the night sky like a wind-testing thumb.

He killed his engine and jumped out. The campus was ridiculously peaceful after the turbulent events of the evening. There was no one about at all.

He walked across the lawn toward the silent building. In the semidarkness close to the building, he checked the trees. A small oak stood beside the tower. That couldn’t be the one. He moved carefully around to the rear of the building and saw a giant oak looming in the dark. He paused to listen.

Nothing.

At the same instant he spotted the figure on the ground, a blacker blackness against the lawn, and sprang forward.

Dean Gunther’s yellow-ivory face glowed in the moonlight. Something about the frosted-over sheen of his wide-open eyes told McCall that Gunther was dead.

McCall got out his pencil flash and flicked it on. He made a face. The Dean’s chest and throat were something out of an abattoir. He had been stabbed with a knife over and over, all over the neck and chest and well down into the abdomen. The right leg hooked under the body in an unnatural position. The mouth gaped bloodily. The back was arched, the chest thrown out in an almost comical military posture.

McCall deliberately put Rose Gunther out of his mind. That would come later.

There was a twinkle of light near the body. He sought its source, squatting on his heels. It was a bone-handled hunting knife. The blade was stained, all but the steel near the hilt. He did not touch it.

So now Floyd Gunther, dean of men, had been murdered in an act that by the very violence of its savagery linked it inescapably with the beating of Laura Thornton. The dean had been lured to this dark oak behind the Bell Tower of the Music Building and his death — the “F.G.” in the salutation made it clear that the note had been intended for him. But who was “Lady G?” There had been a threat with teeth behind it in the note. What connection could there be among “Lady G,” the note, Gunther’s murder, and Laura’s beating?

He hurried back to his Ford and drove over to the Student Union; he remembered a row of telephone booths near the entrance.

He caught Sergeant Oliver at police headquarters and broke the news.

“Okay, Mr. McCall, you wait there,” Oliver said; McCall could tell nothing from his tone.

“I’m phoning from the Student Union.”

“I mean go back to the dean’s body. Don’t leave it till we get there.”

McCall returned to the scene of the murder, keeping well away from the body on the grass. He did not touch the hunting knife, although he knew it would yield nothing in the way of clues. It had a rough bone handle that would not take fingerprints, and it was a common knife purchasable anywhere for a few dollars.

Apparently there was the field to choose from in looking for Gunther’s killer. Judging from the effigy-burning of the evening and from the scraps of conversation McCall had picked up on campus, the dean had been despised, resented, had become perhaps the focus of student bitterness in the disputes that were tearing Tisquanto State College apart. But bitterness to the point of murder? And a murder as sadistic as this? That might be the answer. A psychopath vents his psychosis according to its internal energies, not its chance object.

If things had been bad before, there would be hell to pay now. He could imagine Wolfe Wade’s expression when he heard. And Governor Holland’s.

Waiting for the police under the great oak, McCall yearned for a smoke... Dean Gunther had been acting peculiar. More strained than would be accounted for by the commotion on the campus. He was mixed up in something nasty — “Lady G’s” note pointed to that. But what?

Some coed? If she had deliberately lured Gunther to his death, she had had a confederate. No mere girl or woman had wielded that knife. The blows had been delivered by a man’s hand, either a powerful man or one made powerful by rage.

He heard sirens. Headlights slashed the night. Two police cars screamed to a halt before the music building. Feet pounded.

“Over here!”

And, of course, it was Lieutenant Long who led the pack, ferret-face pale, lips curling.

“Well,” Long said. “You certainly get around, McCall.”

McCall said nothing. The officers’ flashlights converged on what lay on the grass. They moved over to the body.

“Tell me about it, big shot,” Long said.

McCall, chewing the lining of his cheek, related how he had come to find Floyd Gunther’s body. The lieutenant read “Lady G’s” note in the light of Sergeant Oliver’s flash, muttered, “A setup,” then carefully pocketed it. McCall stood by, watching Dr. Littleton for the second time that night examine human wreckage.

“I can’t tell much in this light,” the M.E. said, “but somebody sure vented a lot of spleen on this poor man. I’ll have to haul him over to my morgue for a detailed examination. Oh, hello again, Mr. McCall. Busy night.”

“I want to talk to you at headquarters,” Long said abruptly.

He was glowering at McCall.

It was an unpleasant session, and it lasted a long time. Chief Pearson drifted in and out with malevolent detachment, keeping an ear on things. Long insisted on going over the same ground half a dozen times.

“You still haven’t given me a good reason why, when this black boy came running into Gunther’s house with his yarn about finding Laura, you didn’t notify us on the spot,” the lieutenant said. “That was police business, Mr. McCall, and you damn well know it! No, instead you go shooting off down to the river on your own. I want to know why!”

“Because the girl might have been alive — as it turned out she was — and every minute counted,” McCall said patiently again. “At the back of my mind, I suppose, I was expecting Gunther or Mrs. Gunther to notify the police. I’ve told you all this, lieutenant.”

“I don’t buy it,” Long said nastily. “It sounds fishy to me.”

“I don’t give a damn how it sounds to you,” McCall said. “Look, I know you and Pearson dislike my charging in here on your turf, but I’m tired of being treated like a suspect in a lineup. You keep up these tactics, lieutenant, I’m going to phone the attorney general.”

Finally Long let him go. He returned to the Red Harbor Inn, changed to a fresh jacket, and headed for the hospital.

McCall found Brett Thornton outside a private room in the V.I.P. pavilion on the third floor, pacing. It was past evening visiting hours by now, and the shining corridors were deserted except for an occasional hurrying white uniform.

Laura’s father was one of those bantam-sized men who make up for their lack of physical impressiveness by sheer glowering will. He had a bony, almost skeletal, face, all ridges and wales, with a blade of a nose and jet eyes as unwinking as a snake’s. His mouth was a wound, and words shot out of it like pus.

“How is she, Mr. Thornton?” McCall asked quietly.

“Don’t you know?” Thornton spat. “I thought this was what Holland sent you down here for.”

“It’s been a busy evening, sir. The last report I had, your daughter was in a coma.”

“She still is. She’s in terrible shape. Dying, for all I can tell! They don’t know anything in this one-horse excuse of a hospital! I’m waiting for my own doctor now. What have you found out? Who attacked her?”

“We can’t guarantee instant solutions, Mr. Thornton,” McCall said. “We’re doing the best we can. It’s not going to help getting angry.”

“I’ll get anything I damn please! It’s Holland whose policies have generated the atmosphere that allows a thing like this to happen. And I’ll have his hide for it.”

“Do you hold him responsible for what’s going on in California, New York, Paris, Tokyo? This student unrest is worldwide, Mr. Thornton. You know that. Naturally you’re upset. Anybody would be. Is Mrs. Thornton with you?”

“She’s home under a doctor’s care. Everything’s gone to hell. Christ, my baby girl.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Thornton ignored him. He sprang to the door of Laura’s room, opened it a crack, peered inside. Immediately he was back in the hall.

“The same. She’ll die, McCall. I feel it in my bones.” He began striding about, taking his frustration out on the inlaid linoleum. “It’s these damned students! I warned Holland they were getting out of hand. But did he do anything? — kick the troublemaking Communists out of the college, for instance, as I suggested? Why, some of them are here on scholarships, for God’s sake!” Thornton seized McCall’s lapel. “Well, I tell you here and now, McCall, you’d damn well better pull this off. Or I’ll make things so hot in this state for your governor that Antarctica won’t cool him off!”

“I’ll do my best,” McCall said.

Thornton glared. But there was no irony in McCall’s tone. It seemed to mollify Thornton. When he spoke again it was more rationally. “Laura was obviously involved in something with someone.” He turned the glare on the door of her room. “The question is in what? With whom? Have you found out anything at all?”

“I just got here this morning, Mr. Thornton. I’m afraid not yet.”

Thornton turned on his heel, muttering. The door opened and Dr. Edgewit came out of Laura’s room.

Thornton pounced. “Any change?”

“No change, Mr. Thornton. She isn’t responding as yet. But she’s not losing ground, either.”

“Isn’t there a competent doctor in this hole?” Thornton howled.

“Dr. Madigan, our chief of staff, has taken personal charge. He’s in there now, sir.” Dr. Edgewit plodded off.

McCall followed him, leaving Laura’s father alone. He was thinking what a mercy it was that the governor had been unable to fly down. The mere sight of Sam Holland in this hospital corridor might have brought on a physical attack from Thornton and made headlines all over the state.

A young nurse crossed McCall’s path, smiling at him. He paused to watch her crisp walk, listen to the swish of her starched uniform. After Thornton, it was a joy.