Death by Dissertation (17 page)

Rob was skeptical about the subject of Maggie’s research. “You’re going to have a lot of convincing to do,” he told her. “Everything I’ve read paints a very consistent picture of her. She gave a lot to the Church, and that was her main claim to fame. Other than belonging to the old West Saxon royal family, that is.”

“I know that’s the conventional view,” she answered patiently—for her. “But you have to realize that the standard portrait of Matilda has been painted mostly by men, some of them incredibly misogynistic, like R. H. C. Davis. He was downright waspish in the way he talked about her. But,” Maggie said with a feline smile, “if you actually look at the sources themselves—say, the chronicle of Abingdon abbey, or documents in the
Regesta Regum Anglonormanorum
—you find something different.”

Turned slightly away from Maggie, Rob winked and said, “If you say so. Though I’m going to take more than a bit of convincing.”

I should have warned her that Rob could be a terrible tease when he liked someone. Obviously he was feeling more and more comfortable with her, or he wouldn’t string her along in such a way.

Maggie seemed to catch on, though. “I’m not worried,” she said, sure of her research. “Just you wait and see!”

After lunch, Maggie and Dan returned to the library, while Rob and I made the trek to the campus police office. Lieutenant Herrera needed Rob’s fingerprints as well, so we went off together to do our duty. We assured Maggie that we would do our best to be finished in time for her paper.

Half an hour later, our fingerprints taken, Rob and I were leaving, when Lieutenant Herrera stuck his head in the room and asked us to come into his office. He waved us into two chairs in front of his paper-strewn desk, and we sat down. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. I was tempted to say something—anything—to break the unnerving silence, but I kept quiet, as did Rob.

“You two have been pretty busy,” Herrera finally said, his tone sarcastic. “Stumbling over dead bodies, finding mysterious videotapes, and so on.”

Rob and I stared mutely at him. What did he expect us to say?

“When someone is as involved in a case as you two seem to be, that makes me suspicious. Why do you keep turning up every time there’s trouble?” he mused.

“Bad luck?” I said, the words slipping out in spite of my best intentions.

Herrera stared at me. “I would have thought so, because I couldn’t figure a good motive for either of you to kill Charlie Harper or Professor Whitelock.” He reached into his desk and drew out a thick set of papers, stapled in one corner. “Take a look at this,” he ordered. “Don’t worry, it’s a photocopy, not the original.”

Hesitantly, I took the document from his hands. Rob and I had just put our heads together to examine them, when suddenly I felt Rob’s body go taut. So did mine.

Herrera had just handed us a copy of Charlie’s will.

Chapter Sixteen

Stunned, Rob and I stared at each other, not saying anything. If Charlie’s will contained what his letter to Rob had hinted at, then the shit had hit the fan.

“Where did you get this?” I finally managed to ask Herrera, my voice thin and strained.

“Anonymously,” he replied. “It popped up in my interoffice mail this morning. Aren’t you going to read it?” He gestured at the papers I was still clutching. “Or do you already know what the will says?”

Rob and I shook our heads.

“No, I don’t know,” Rob said, his voice firm and controlled. “I’ve never seen it before.” He pulled the papers out of my hand and shoved them back on the desk. “How the hell should I know what’s in Charlie’s will?”

Herrera laughed. “According to our anonymous benefactor, Harper’s will was in his desk, where anyone could have found it. And obviously someone did, or it wouldn’t have been sent it to me.”

“Doesn’t that make you suspicious, Lieutenant?” I asked indignantly. “It looks like someone is trying to point the blame away from himself or herself and at Rob instead.”

“Why do you assume the will points a finger at Mr. Hayward?” Herrera riposted smoothly.

I sat there, my mouth gaping open.

Rob stepped in, his voice steely. “Andy makes a logical assumption. You wouldn’t be interrogating us if that will didn’t contain something to do with us.”

Herrera nodded. “According to this will, Harper left the bulk of his estate to you, Mr. Hayward. You’re the chief beneficiary of several million dollars in trusts and real estate holdings.”

Rob went very still in his chair, and I struggled for a deep breath.

“That is,” Herrera continued, “if you’re not convicted of murder.”

“I didn’t kill Charlie,” Rob said flatly, “and I didn’t kill Julian Whitelock. I knew nothing about this will, I swear to you. I didn’t have any reason to murder anyone.”

In a conversational tone, Herrera went on, “I see the case like this: You, Mr. Hayward, lived with Harper for a while, all comfy and happy. But next door to you was an old friend, another gay man. Something happened, and you rekindled your relationship, and the two of you, knowing that Harper was going to leave all his money to you, decided to get him out of the way. In order to divert suspicion from yourselves, you came up with these videotapes and other false leads to encourage me to look elsewhere. But all the time, you two plotted the whole thing.”

Stunned, Rob and I just sat there, staring at him. Herrera was nuts, I thought. He surely couldn’t think Rob and I were so devious and twisted.

But as my breathing returned to normal and my thoughts settled down, I could see that the situation made a mad sort of sense. Given the evidence at hand, Herrera, by twisting everything around slightly, made Rob and me look attractive as the murderers.

“If someone were to take that interpretation seriously,” I said—and my tone of voice made that doubtful, “he would also have to prove that either Rob or I knew the contents of Charlie’s will. Since we didn’t know what the will contained, we certainly would have had no motive to kill him.”

Herrera nodded. “As you say, I’d have to prove that you knew about the will. That might be tough. Just as tough as you proving that you didn’t know about

He had me there.

“Well, gentlemen,” Herrera stood up. “Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be in touch when I have further questions for you. And, by the way, don’t leave town.” He smiled wolfishly as he offered this last bit of instruction.

Rob and I stumbled out of his office. As we walked across campus toward the library, I asked him the questions running through my mind: What kind of game was Herrera playing? Why, if he was convinced of his own little scenario, would he stop the interrogation and just let us leave? And why did he question us together, rather than separately? Was he simply trying to upset us?

“Maybe he doesn’t really believe all that about the will,” Rob said, as we approached the front doors of the library. “Maybe he’s trying to warn us that someone wants to implicate us in the murder.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully.

Rob stopped in the shelter of the library’s cloistered walkway and looked at me intently. “You and I had better try to save our own asses. Whatever he’s after, we have to do what we can to figure this thing out. I don’t want to be arrested, and neither do you.”

I nodded emphatically. “I’m with you on that.”

He smiled. “Good. But now, of course, I’ve got work to do before we go hear Maggie’s paper. I hope I’ll be able to concentrate.”

I followed him inside, and we parted ways on the fourth floor. It was only two o’clock. That little interlude with Herrera had seemed to last forever, but we’d been in his office less than thirty minutes. The Medieval Club gathering wasn’t until four, but, too restless to work in my carrel, I trotted up to the fifth floor to see what was going on.

Lindy and Thelma were busy typing in the department office, but Azalea wasn’t in, and I wasn’t unhappy about that. Facing her from now on was going to be difficult, and not just because of what had happened between us a few hours earlier. I wasn’t sorry about blasting her, but I had to figure out a way to get through the days until the murder investigation was complete. In the meantime, she had been tainted forever in my mind by my suspicions.

As I stood irresolutely just inside the doorway of the office, Selena came in with Wilda Franken, one of the junior professors in the department. In her vivid clothing, Wilda—as she insisted everyone call her, abhorring academic titles as pretentious—presented quite a contrast to Selena, though both had blonde hair and a compact, athletic figure. Maggie swore that Wilda got her fashion tips from music videos on MTV, and I couldn’t argue with that. The colors she wore made my head ache.

Her clothing made Wilda stand out in person, and the courses she taught made her stand out in the college catalog. Every year the history department fielded countless questions about the courses with titles like “The Politics of Menstruation in Preindustrial Societies” and “The Symbology of Female Castration in the Western Historical Tradition.” The department’s resident Marxist and radical feminist historian, Wilda thrived on being the center of attention, usually controversial. But her courses were popular with the undergraduates, and her scholarship was generally considered impeccable by her peers—the three or four people in the scholarly world, that is, who actually understood what she was talking about. And cared.

Wilda and I had had one tense encounter, my first week on campus, when I mistakenly opened the door to the library for her. I had to endure a ten-minute lecture on the insult I had offered her. When she finally ran out of breath, I told her—with remarkable calm, I thought—that only an idiot would mistake common courtesy for chauvinistic behavior and that I would have opened the door whether she had been male, female, eunuch, or gerbil, simply because I had reached it ahead of her. If she had reached it ahead of me, I continued, then I fully expected her to hold it open for me. Even Miss Manners would approve my calm response in the face of such provocation.

Since then, Wilda had always been friendly to me—maybe I was the only man who had ever said anything to her after one of her little lectures. Even so, I didn’t take any pains to seek the woman out. With her, feminism was more a weapon than anything else. She didn’t mind “exploiting” Lindy and Thelma; if only she could hear the way the two of them talked about her last-minute demands for typing and copying tests with never a thank-you!

At the moment, Wilda looked more upset than I had ever seen her, and Selena had a hand on her arm in a gesture of comfort. They were oblivious to Lindy, Thelma, and me, and I suppressed the urgings of my finer nature and stayed to listen.

“I’m sorry you had to hear it this way,” Selena told her. “I had no idea you knew Julian so well.”

Wilda wiped a stray tear from her cheek. “Well, only recently were we able to get past those unfortunate incidents that clouded our early relationship. Lately I discovered that Julian wasn’t quite the unregenerate sexist I thought, and I was enjoying the revelation.”

Belatedly, the two realized they weren’t alone, and Selena hurried Wilda out of the room. Thelma and Lindy grinned, and I flashed a smile and disappeared before they could say anything.

I decided to check out the periodicals room, so I headed downstairs to the first floor. While mindlessly thumbing through a recent issue of the English Historical Review, I thought about Wilda and the scene I had just witnessed. Surely she couldn’t be one of Julian’s women? I had easily subscribed to the idea that there was more than one woman on those tapes. Until Herrera decided to tell us about them—if he paid any attention to the tapes at all—there was no way to know for sure. After our little session with him, I was growing more nervous about the direction of the lieutenant’s investigation.

I whiled away the time, thumbing through journals and speculating, with little result, on the two murders. The number of suspects seemed to be growing, and it was looking more hopeless all the time that we could actually solve the killings. But we had to, now that Charlie’s will had surfaced.

At ten minutes before four, I trotted upstairs to the room on the second floor where the Medieval Club held its gatherings. Rob and I sat together at the front to give Maggie encouragement, but once she got started, she needed little.

Her paper spoke for itself, with a clearly reasoned, succinctly stated presentation of evidence and conclusions. She took a number of questions when she finished, and we didn’t get out until after five-thirty. Rob was too preoccupied to tease Maggie with questions, and she glanced his way more than once, expecting him to say something.

Ruth McClain had waited to say a few words to her before leaving. Then Dan Erickson congratulated Maggie, and she thanked him with more warmth than usual. Flushed with success, she was happy with everyone right then. Dan made a remark about getting back to work, but he stopped to talk to Bella and Bruce, who were among those still milling around outside the meeting room.

“May Rob and I treat you to dinner?” I asked Maggie. “You’ve earned it with that paper.”

She grinned. “Sounds good to me. Let’s go. And then maybe you can explain why you didn’t challenge me on anything!”

Rob smiled. “How about I was just too dazzled by your evidence and your presentation?"

Maggie caught something in his tone. “I’d like to think so, but there’s more to it than that, I suspect."

“We’ll fill you in later,” I promised her.

Waving to the others, the three of us went down the stairs to the main door of the library. Outside, the air was heavy, as usual. The humidity curled into every opening it could find in my clothes, and it wasn’t long before my shirt clung damply to my body. The late evening sunlight bathed the campus in a mellow light, and the architecture looked its loveliest. For a moment, I imagined that I was walking around Oxford or Cambridge. I returned to the present with regret.

Maggie wanted to go home and change out of the clothes she had worn to present her paper, and we agreed to meet an hour later at her favorite Italian restaurant in the Village. Rob and I didn’t have to change, so we wasted time at a record store about a block from the restaurant, looking at all the CDs we couldn’t afford, until time to meet Maggie. Resolutely we avoided the subject of Charlie’s will while we ate. When all this was settled, Rob would be able to afford all the CDs he wanted.