A Little Class on Murder (24 page)

“The suicide must have really shaken her,” Max surmised.

Peggy pressed her fingertips briefly against her temples. “She was distraught when she came home Wednesday afternoon, there’s no other word for it. And I feel dreadful. I should have been more understanding. But her room is—was—just above mine. All night long, she paced, up and down, up and down, and the floor creaked. You can imagine. She was
so
heavy. I went up there once and banged on the door and told her, for God’s sake, to stop making all that noise. But she wouldn’t come to the door.” She swallowed jerkily. “I never
saw her again. She didn’t come down for breakfast Thursday morning, but I was still furious with her. After I’d finished the morning dishes, I worked in the garden, then went on errands. When I came back, just before noon, she was gone.”

“So you don’t know what time she left the house Thursday morning?” Annie asked.

“No.” The landlady looked at her anxiously. “Do you think it matters?”

“It might.” Annie wasn’t sure of it. But the more they knew, the more likely they were finally to pull the thread that would unravel the whole. “Do you suppose any of the other students would know?”

Peggy looked toward the stairs and figured aloud. “Let’s see. Paul has a nine o’clock. Mary, too. Johnny goes to work at seven. Chris has a ten o’clock. Edwina works in the mornings and has all afternoon classes.” She turned back toward Annie and Max. “I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone would have been here to see Emily leave. But, if you’d like, I’ll ask them.”

They made their thanks and were at the front door when Max asked abruptly, “Do you suppose we could see her room?”

Peggy looked uncertain.

“We won’t bother anything,” he said quickly.

She hesitated for an instant longer, then shrugged. “It can’t hurt anything. She didn’t have any family. She grew up in an orphanage not too far from here.” Turning, she led them upstairs, talking as they climbed. “That’s why she was older than most of the students. She’d worked her way through school, all on her own. She was almost twenty-five and would have been a senior next year. So there isn’t anyone to come and get her things. I thought I would ask the police what to do. If it’s all right, I’ll give whatever’s usable to the Salvation Army.”

Emily’s was a small room at the very back of the second floor. Mrs. Simpson unlocked the door, turned on the light, and stood aside for them to enter. She remained in the hall. “I don’t think I want to come in. Not right now. You won’t touch anything, will you?”

“We won’t,” Max said reassuringly.

The room smelled like chocolate, doughnuts, and licorice. There were food containers everywhere, everything from pizza to wonton soup cartons.

“She didn’t need to go down for dinner,” Annie commented to Max.

“Do you suppose it was always this messy?”

“Probably,” Annie said. “It looks like it’s been this way for a long time.”

Magazines and paperbacks littered the floor and the two chairs. Copies of
Cosmopolitan
and
Redbook
. Stacks of romance novels. Huge caftan-style cotton dresses were draped over chair backs, flung carelessly on the floor.

Careful not to step on anything, Max prowled the circumference of the room, looked under the bed, peeked into the wardrobe, checked beneath it, stood on tiptoe to scan its top.

Annie watched him curiously, then surveyed the room and its contents carefully. What was Max looking for? What was there to see but evidences of uncontrolled gluttony, sloth, and loneliness?

She waited until they had made their good-byes and were almost to the car before she asked. “What were you looking for?”

He looked at her soberly. “Any traces of gunpowder.”

Annie stopped short, stared at him.

He opened the car door for her. “I didn’t find any.”

As Annie climbed in, Max said quietly, “But maybe she was very clever indeed.”

The auburn-haired secretary stared at them superciliously over half-glasses. “You don’t have an appointment?”

“No,” Max said agreeably. “But I think President Markham might like to talk with us. Will you give him my card, please, and tell him that Miss Dora Brevard, the trustee, has asked us to investigate the problems in the journalism department.”

The secretary returned quite quickly. “If you’ll come this way, please.”

Charles August Markham’s office was magnificent. The college
buildings may not have been built until after World War II, but they were a reflection of the glory days of South Carolina. The doorways echoed the formal design of the three-quarter windows. Slender recessed columns with decorative acanthus capitals were set off by an architrave with iris and honeysuckle in relief. The iris-and-honeysuckle motif was repeated in the ceiling plasterwork. A shower of light from a glittering crystal teardrop chandelier illuminated the delicate cream-and-gold design of the Aubusson rug and the rich green of the floor-length silk damask curtains.

Markham rose from his desk as they entered and came around to greet them, hand outstretched. “Mr. and Mrs. Darling.”

His grip was firm and warm. He was tall enough to stoop a little in his greeting. White-haired and blue-eyed, Markham had the genial countenance of a gifted fund-raiser, the domed forehead of an intellectual, and the tweedy air of a scholar.

This time they accepted coffee, and it came in a silver server on a silver tray and with china cups.

It was almost as good as the coffee at Death on Demand. Annie began to feel cosseted and in perfect equilibrium with her surroundings. She studied Markham with fresh interest. Here he was, a college president with an unholy mess unexpectedly dumped in his lap, and he appeared completely relaxed and unruffled.

After a ceremonial sip, he set down his cup and studied them. “I’ve always found Miss Dora, in her own original fashion, to be quite perceptive. She has supreme confidence in both of you.” He toyed with a bronze letter opener. “We have some very serious problems. A murder. Perhaps a second murder. If not, then an accidental death as a result of what I feel can rightfully be termed terrorism. And I have to wonder if the fault is mine.”

They looked at him in surprise.

He picked up the letter opener, tapped it against his palm. “An administrator is responsible for everything that occurs within his domain. Both successes and disasters. Why has a department chair been murdered? Why has the office of the
student newspaper been attacked? Did my hiring of R.T. Burke result in these horrors?” He balanced the letter opener on upturned fingertips. His blue eyes gazed without seeing at a bewhiskered old gentleman in an oil painting over the Adam mantel with its classic figures in stucco relief. “I had no sense”—now he looked at them directly, his eyes ablaze—“of such a possibility when I made the appointment. I know my faculty members. Oh, not perhaps as well personally as I might like. But I know of them, their work, their temperaments, their strengths. And their weaknesses. And I had no sense at all that I was introducing an insupportable strain upon the infrastructure of that department.” A dry smile. “I knew, of course, what I was doing. And I intended it. That department was losing its support from the state newspapermen. There was a sense of too much cerebration, too little professionalism. We need a balance. An educational institution must have the scholar’s work as its lifeblood, but, in this very real world we inhabit, there must be due appreciation of practicalities, especially in professional programs. For example, it’s all well and good to examine the criminal justice system as a dynamic societal institution. It’s also quite necessary for budding police administrators to understand precisely what procedural rights prisoners have. There must be a balance between the theoretical and the practical. I felt R.T. was the perfect man to tip the balance in the journalism department once again toward the professional. He was, as you may know, a superior newsman. Intelligent. Perceptive. Honorable. Reasoned. Relentless. And a man with a passion for language. He had a love of writing when I knew him as a young man in the war and he never lost it.” The letter opener slipped from his fingers and thumped on the desktop. “I expected controversy. I expected a furious faculty, which, hopefully, would be galvanized into an expression of creativity. I never expected murder.”

A sonorous, soft boom from the grandfather clock in the corner tolled the half hour.

“R.T. Burke probably generated controversy all his life,” Annie suggested gently. “He came to my store—” she looked at Markham inquiringly and he nodded “—and asked me to
teach this class on the mystery. I felt as if I’d been brushed by hurricane winds by the time he left.”

“And when Annie and I saw him Thursday morning, he was hell-bent to find out who had leaked the information on the faculty to the student editor,” Max added.

Markham nodded. “Yes, I talked to him on the phone early Thursday. He was determined and he had every intention, if he could, of filing charges against that person.”

“Charges?” Annie asked.

“Yes. Theft isn’t confined to objects,” Markham explained. “Information which is adjudged confidential can also be termed stolen, if taken by someone not authorized to have access to it.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Max said, with rising interest. “Sure. People can go to jail for stealing information. But it gets pretty ticklish saying it was stolen if the person who released it learned of it in an official capacity.”

Annie translated that. Burke would have a hell of a time convincing a prosecutor that the information was stolen if Kelly’s informant was a member of the personnel committee. Garrison, Moss, Norden, Tarrant, and Burke himself had every right to know the information. Could it be argued that releasing it without authorization constituted a form of theft? (She wasn’t sure this exposure to academia was doing much for Max’s ability to communicate.)

“So if Burke discovered the informant’s identity and made it clear he was going to file charges, that could be reason enough for someone to kill him,” Annie figured.

“That would also explain why the murder was apparently unpremeditated,” Max said.

Markham raised his white eyebrows. “Why do you believe it was unpremeditated?”

Annie beat Max to it. “Because of the weapon,” she explained briskly. “It looks like someone decided in an instant that Burke had to be killed and grabbed up that iron bar.”

“Or, of course, perhaps the murder
was
premeditated and the decision made to use the bar
because
it was there and would indicate a lack of planning,” Max said.

Annie almost spoke, hesitated, then charged ahead. “Dr. Markham, we’ve made a lot of assumptions. But it occurs to me that there is another possibility.”

The college president looked at her attentively.

“What if Burke fed that confidential material to Kelly? What if someone killed him because
he
leaked that information?” Even as Markham was shaking his head, she persisted. “Burke was a scrapper. He went all out in everything he did. Look at the awards he’d received as a journalist. And before that, in the war. He was a fighter. Maybe he was frustrated by the intractable opposition of the faculty. Maybe he decided to blow it wide open, let some public pressure build to Support him in his efforts to revamp the program.”

Markham stopped shaking his head and stared at her soberly. “R.T. was a hell of a fighter. You’re right about that. And I know that the faculty was infuriating him, dragging their heels at any suggestions of course revision, trying to block changes in internal unit review procedures that would accord equal weight to professional attainments. But I would be astounded if he took such a backdoor approach.”

“Someone leaked that stuff,” Max said reasonably. “If it wasn’t Burke, then the list of possibilities is pretty short: the members of the personnel committee or a faculty member with a master key.”

“What about the young woman who died in the blast?” Markham asked. “She was the department secretary. Couldn’t she have obtained the material?”

“She could have.” Annie shook away Max’s muttered objection. Obviously, Emily could have prowled in that file closet when Burke wasn’t there. It could have been done. “But why would she? She had nothing to gain by it. Besides …” She described Emily’s distress about the revelations and Mrs. Porter’s subsequent suicide. “According to her landlady, she was truly distraught. So, I can’t see Emily as Deep Throat. Why would she try to hurt a professor she admired?”

“So that brings it back to the faculty,” the administrator said heavily. Markham sighed. He tapped a stack of folders. “I’ve been looking over their files this morning.” He picked up
the first one. “Malcolm Moss. Wanted to be chair, of course. An able man with an enviable record of scholarly publications, considered an authority on consumer behavior in response to advertising campaigns. But he has no rapport with state editors. And if he chairs the department, it will be a triumph for the academic over the professional.” He closed the folder. “However, he is the senior member of the department and I asked him this morning to serve as interim chair.”

“Did he accept?” Max asked.

“Of course.”

Annie leaned forward in her chair. “Would he kill to head the department?”

“A week ago, six months ago, Mrs. Darling, I would have found that question absurd. But the fact remains, someone did kill R.T.” Markham’s silvery brows drew down in a frown. “Malcolm certainly does have an inordinate will to power. He must dominate every situation.” He picked up the next folder. “Victor Garrison. Clever. Quick. Complex.” A thoughtful pause. “A man who thinks well on his feet.” Another folder. “Sue Tarrant. Sue doesn’t have tenure. She serves at the pleasure of the chair.” He stroked his high-bridged nose pensively. “I heard her speak recently at a meeting of Women in Communications. She made what I considered a rather bitter presentation about the difficulty older women face in the marketplace. I have always felt that Sue has a rather angry nature beneath a charming exterior. She has often expressed the view that her undoubted professional competence hasn’t received the respect it should. Perhaps she lost patience with the pace of R.T.’s struggle with the faculty.” He went on to the next folder. “Kurt Diggs.” He tapped the cardboard reflectively. “I do not care for Professor Diggs. He is, in my considered opinion, self-indulgent, amoral, a sensualist. I believe he would always do whatever he felt was necessary to further his own interests.” A pause. “I regret intensely that he was awarded tenure.” A wry headshake at the next folder. “Professor Crandall. It’s fascinating, really, how unworldly some people can be.” His observant eyes challenged them. “Not a state restricted to academia. It’s rather easy really to judge Frank to
be a weak person. But in this case, it might again be that familiar phenomenon, the cornered animal fighting with true ferocity.” He arranged the folders in a neat pile, picked up the last one. “Josh Norden. A fine man, a fine intellect. And a living example of the evils of alcohol. I do feel very strongly that Josh would never have done anything to cause distress to Charlotte Porter. They were old friends. Dear friends.” A troubled sigh. “But I cannot be at all certain what he might do if he discovered the person whom he considered responsible for Charlotte’s death …. ”