Death by Dissertation (9 page)

This wasn’t the kind of thing I cared to know about someone’s private life, but if we were going to figure out the puzzle of Charlie’s murder, we were going to have to wade through the muck, whatever our feelings. “What do we do next?” I asked. “Do you want to talk to the police about your suspicions?”

“No,” Rob replied, almost violently. “I tried to broach the subject with Herrera, but he just laughed at me. I can theorize all I want, but he’s not going to pay any attention until I hand him some physical proof.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I need to look through the apartment. The police went through Charlie’s room and took a couple of his notebooks. But I have a feeling they’ve missed something important, and I’m going to check out my suspicions.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I told him, “but be careful. You don’t want Herrera accusing you of tampering with evidence.”

“I’ll be careful,” Rob promised. “And while I’m looking, there’s something I’d like both of you to do. Have you received your copy of the most recent
Medieval Quarterly
yet? Charlie’s came yesterday.”

I nodded. “So did mine, but I haven’t had a chance to read it. I did notice Whitelock has an article in it.”

“I haven’t read it either,” Maggie said. “I wasn’t in the proper masochistic mood.”

Rob spoke quickly. “That’s the article you should read when you have a chance, and see if anything about it strikes you as odd.”

“Okay,” I replied, baffled. What could an article in a scholarly journal have to do with Charlie’s murder?

Rob stood up. “I’m pretty whacked out right now. And I’ve got an afternoon class that I’d better start getting ready for.”

Maggie stood and gave him a hug. I rose and held out my hand to him, and he clasped it warmly. Our eyes met.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see you later.” His eyes offered some sort of promise, but I didn’t want to interpret it.

Maggie followed him, and when they were gone, I leaned against the front door. Overwhelmed by the morning’s events, I couldn’t think what to do next.

I looked at my watch. Well past one, and I hadn’t had lunch yet. My head was throbbing. If I appeased my empty stomach, my head might feel better. In search of sustenance, I headed for the kitchen.

I had plenty reading to do that afternoon, including the newly arrived journal, though I dozed off a few times, thanks to a full stomach. Eventually I surfaced from reading to have dinner, then relaxed for a couple of hours with an old movie before going to bed.

Sometime later, I woke to the sound of a ringing phone.

Chapter Eight

“Andy, are you there? Did you hear me? I said I think someone tried to kill me!”

That cleared the fog out of my brain. “Good lord, Rob, are you all right?” I grabbed my glasses off the bedside table and peered at the clock—2:04 A.M.

A snort came over the wire. “Is this Andy Carpenter, or a refugee from the
Twilight Zone
?”

“I’m sorry, Rob, I was sound asleep, and it’s taking me a while to focus. What happened?”

“When I got home after class this afternoon, I was exhausted. I unplugged the phone and took a mild sleeping pill and went to bed,” he explained. “About an hour ago, I woke up. I was kind of fuzzy, but I had to have some water. When I came downstairs, I heard a noise in the living room, so I went in. There was enough moonlight coming through the window to see somebody fiddling with the videotapes beneath the TV set.

“I guess I made some sound at that point,” Rob said. “I was so out of it, I probably giggled, because I vaguely remember thinking that surely no one had broken in to steal Charlie’s ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ tapes. Whoever it was didn’t see the joke, because he came at me with the largest and longest flashlight I’ve ever seen. I yelled and ducked, and he came down on my left shoulder like a ton of bricks. I went woozy for a minute or two, and by that time, the guy was gone—out the patio door. I was in no condition to hold him back, even if I had wanted to.”

“Good lord, Rob, he could have killed you!”

“My point precisely!” He laughed tiredly. “Anyway, when I could concentrate again, I got up and looked around. Whoever it was really snooped around. Books and knickknacks were out of place, that kind of thing. I have no idea what he was looking for. Surely if it was a simple burglary, he would have taken the VCR and gone away, right?”

“Probably. The whole thing sounds odd. Have you called the police yet?”

“Oh, yes, right after that.” Rob laughed again, amusement in his voice this time. “The boys in blue were here in half an hour, and they weren’t very quiet when they banged on the front door. I can’t believe you slept through all the commotion.”

“For one thing,” I replied, “I really zonked out, and besides, my bedroom is in the back, so I didn’t see or hear anything.”

“Lucky you!” Rob snorted. “Well, at first, the police took me seriously, but when I told them they might need to contact the Rice campus police, and why, they suddenly got suspicious.” His voice turned querulous. “They saw no connection between this and a murder case at Rice. I’m sure they think I made all this up to divert suspicion from myself. Even when they found the lock forced on the patio door, one of them, acting like he was whispering but intending me to hear, said that it was easy enough to force a lock like that, even for a guy with a limp wrist.”

This was worse than I expected. If the police believed he had faked a break-in, that made Rob’s position even more difficult. Or was it simply the homophobia of some members of HPD? Would Herrera act the same way?

“How can we convince the cops the break-in was legitimate?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he responded wearily, “and I’m too tired to think about it right now.”

“I know. Do you want to come over here for the rest of the night?” I wasn’t sure he should be alone, despite my reservations about having him living even temporarily under the same roof.

“No, I’ll be okay. I’ve got an ice pack on my shoulder, and the police said they’d drive by every once in a while to keep an eye on things. I’m not sure I believe them, but it’s a moot point, anyway. No one’s going to try to get back in here tonight.” He paused, then continued with a different note in his voice. “Could I take you up on that offer tomorrow night, though? I don’t think I can stand to stay here for a while.”

I responded immediately to the uncertainty in his voice, ignoring my misgivings after my impulsive offer. “Of course you can. Larry’s going to be gone for at least a couple more weeks, and I know he wouldn’t mind you having his room.”

“Thank you,” Rob said quietly. “This is getting too weird, too fast, and I need all the support and help I can get.”

“See you tomorrow.” I said goodbye and hung up, switched off the lamp, and tried to get comfortable in bed.

My mind hummed with all sorts of chaotic thoughts, and I knew I’d never get to sleep again. Most of the afternoon I had done my best to keep Rob and the big scene between us out of my mind, but now the whole thing came flooding back. The anxious note in his voice just now, the note of dependence, frightened me. Earlier, I had been swept away by emotion and Maggie’s determination to make things right between Rob and me, but in the darkness of my bedroom, at two- thirty in the morning, all the potential problems assailed me.

I had acted impulsively in the hay barn ten years earlier, led by my heart and my hormones, and he had reacted with devastating cruelty. He had hurt me badly, and after that day we avoided each other. Later I realized that I had something, at least, to be grateful for—Rob hadn’t told anyone about it. Nor did he do anything to out me in our small community. I’d been so stunned by what happened that I withdrew even further, trying to suppress my feelings and the truth about myself, though that didn’t last long.

Rob’s words to Maggie and me, the day before, had struck a definite chord. I knew exactly what he meant. We both had come to terms with our sexuality, and it hadn’t been easy. Coming out to my family had cost me dearly, because my father hardly spoke to me, and my mother called only when he wasn’t around. One brother talked to me, the other was uncomfortable around me. Suddenly I wondered about Rob’s family and whether they had reacted any differently from mine. Had he even told them?

The whole situation was nuts. I didn’t know what Rob wanted from me. Did he simply want to be friends? Was he looking for some way to assuage his guilt? He said that I was—once upon a time—the person he loved most in the world. Every time I thought about that, my stomach hurt. Despite what he had done, and the way it affected me, I still had strong feelings for him. And the basic physical attraction was there, as it had always been. Could I put aside ten years of anger and well-nourished resentment to get to know him as he was now? Could I let my memories go? And what would be the outcome?

That was as big a mystery as the identity of the person who killed Charlie. The attack on Rob frightened me, since it forced me to consider that Charlie’s murder might not be the only one, if the killer wasn’t caught soon. Was his killer the person who broke in next door? If so, what was he searching for? Did Charlie have some sort of record of his alleged blackmail schemes? Or was this simply a coincidence?

Earlier in the day, I’d been skeptical of Charlie’s possible blackmailing activities, but after I looked over that issue of the
Medieval Quarterly
, I decided that Julian Whitelock might have had a motive to murder him.

I read his article carefully, and I was convinced that it was simply a rewrite of a seminar paper Charlie had written the year before. The writing style had definitely been Whitelock’s, but the arguments and evidence he used were lifted bodily from Charlie’s work. Whitelock had mentioned Charlie in a footnote, but that was little thanks for outright intellectual theft. No wonder Charlie had had a paper accepted at a prestigious conference where Whitelock had served as program chairman. Surely that was the least the old shit could have done. The wonder was that Charlie hadn’t tried to kill him.

I had been tempted to downplay Whitelock’s motive for murdering Charlie, despite the evidence of the plagiarized seminar paper. But the attack on Rob put things in a different light. I didn’t think someone was simply burglarizing the place, although Charlie had enough electronic equipment to make it worthwhile.

My head ached from all the speculation, so I made a conscious effort to turn my mind off and get some sleep. I began conjugating verbs in Latin. This did the trick, as usual. By the time I reached the subjunctive of morior, I was pleasantly hazy.

When the alarm sounded at six-thirty, I was being chased by a robed figure demanding the whereabouts of Bracton’s notebook. “Bracton who?” I kept asking, but to no avail. The pursuit was relentless, as well as senseless.

The steady beep-beep, beep-beep of my alarm finally roused me to semi-consciousness, and I stretched out a wobbly arm to shut it off. I smiled over the dream as I threw off the covers and sat up. One of the deadly dull books on medieval English law I had been reading had stuck with me more than I thought.

Fifteen minutes later, showered, dressed in underwear and T-shirt, and nearly coherent enough to confront the world outside my bedroom door, I went downstairs to microwave my breakfast. When it was ready, I carried breakfast and the newspaper upstairs and got comfy in bed. I turned on the TV and tuned in to “Bewitched,” which had just started.

During commercial breaks, I skimmed the newspaper. The university murder rated only a small article near the end of the main section; front-page coverage had been given, instead, to a grisly double homicide in the Memorial area, one of Houston’s most affluent neighborhoods. According to the newspaper, the university victim had apparently died after a blow to the back of the head with the traditional blunt instrument, in this case, left nameless. The article suddenly recalled the whole scene to mind, and I put my third sausage biscuit away uneaten. I took a long pull at my Diet Coke to steady my stomach.

What the paper didn’t state, of course, was the time of death, perhaps waiting for the autopsy. Who knew how long it would take to get an autopsy done in a city like Houston? Here homicides and violent death seemed like daily occurrences. More details might be released to the press, but since the murder seemed so ordinary, despite its setting, it had apparently aroused little interest. Charlie’s killing couldn’t compare with the mutilation murders of wealthy socialites.

Scanning the article again and ignoring the antics of Samantha and Darrin, I noted how little information about the murder the newspaper actually offered. I groaned; I would certainly be accosted by everyone I knew on campus, even though my name wasn’t mentioned. I’d have to thank Lieutenant Herrera. I was simply identified as “a fellow student.” Obviously the campus news office was doing its best to keep a lid on any adverse publicity for the university. And if that meant protecting the identity of a witness, that was all to the good for me.

I put away the newspaper and decided to concentrate on my morning TV schedule. Once I had watched the third episode of “Bewitched” (a rare one, which I remembered seeing only twice before), I reluctantly decided to get something done. Something constructive, like finishing that book on medieval English law that had contributed to my dreams.

Before I could move, the doorbell rang. I had barely made it to the head of the stairs, after quickly pulling on some jeans, when the doorbell pealed again. Somebody was in an all-fired hurry. And at just after nine o’clock in the morning, too.

“Rob,” I said when I opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

Rob, a wild, frantic look in his eyes, thrust past me and charged into the living room, waving a piece of paper. I caught up with him and grabbed his arm to slow his agitated pacing back and forth.

“Rob, what’s wrong?” I repeated. “What’s that you’ve got?”

“It’s a letter from Charlie!” he said. “And I think it’s going to get me in a lot of trouble.”

Chapter Nine

“I don’t understand, Rob,” I said. “Where did you get a letter from Charlie? Was it in the mail?”