Medieval Murders (16 page)

37

Elkins spent a restless day, bothered by a nagging headache and fatigue. By late morning one of the nurses had him up and walking, at first a challenge, every muscle in his body crying out in pain. He felt better after showering and fell into an uneasy sleep that absorbed most of the afternoon. When he next opened his eyes, Charlene Pascoe was at his side. As he worked to pull himself to full consciousness, he asked, “What time is it?”

“It’s just after five.”

Elkins was suddenly fully awake. “Arden, is she all right?”

“Not bad. Shaken by the events, and she needed some stitches to close a cut. She spent last night here. Now she’s staying with your neighbors, the Chestertons. Mrs. Chesterton picked her up midday. I explained the situation to Jack Kackmeister. He has promised to keep their house under close surveillance.”

Elkins rubbed his eyes with his left hand. “I’m glad you’re here, I was thinking about the things I needed to tell you, things I should have written down.” Carefully, he recounted his conversation with Jane Arden. “Have you learned anything about Arlin Merchant?”

“I went out to Branch County and talked with Mike Ney, the sheriff. Do you remember him, looks to be in his late sixties, short, and fairly stout?”

“Yes.”

“I called his office this morning. He wasn’t in, but I talked with the shift commander. I told him about the shooting and asked if they would pick up Merchant for questioning. I drove out there without confirming that they had taken him into custody. I needed something to do. I can’t stand sitting around and waiting. As it turns out they couldn’t find him. According to his parole officer, Merchant hasn’t shown up for his job for a week.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“Ney gave me the history of the Merchant clan. I don’t think that you would call it a completely unbiased history. I showed him a copy of the letter. He was impressed by its literary quality. Long and short of it is he doesn’t think Merchant is our man. Says Merchant’s a thief, but this shooting is out of character with the Arlin Merchant he knows.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’ve looked at his arrest record. His problems with the law involve alcohol, stealing cars, and selling off parts. There’s no mention of his ever having a weapon of any kind in his possession. And there’s no record of sex offenses or drug possession. He was in the juvenile system by the time he was fourteen. He’s gone to trial twice for motor vehicle theft, the first time he got off because he wasn’t Mirandized. Ney didn’t mention that fact. The second time Merchant wasn’t as lucky. He got three to five, did the minimum. I’ve got his records. He was a model prisoner and earned 21 hours of college credit.”

Pascoe looked over at Ray. His attention seemed to be flagging. “Elkins, can you answer some questions, or are you getting too tired?”

“I’ll try to stay awake. I’m really exhausted, and I have a headache.”

“I got a statement from Jane Arden this morning. I need to go over the same ground with you.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Arden said that you arrived about 9:00 P.M.”

“I’m not sure it was that late, but it was at least 8:30. I think I had told her I would be over about 6:00, but I was running late. I called and suggested that perhaps I should come by another time, but she wanted me to look at the locks, and she offered me dinner. I checked the locks and told her what needed to be done. She was making dinner. The storm hit about the time we were sitting down. The lights went out, but she had some candles going. I remember the breaking glass, pushing her to the floor, and calling for help. I went out the patio door. I thought I saw someone sprinting along the hedge at the back of the complex. I took off after them. Then there was a locomotive and then everything gets very jumbled.”

“Can you remember anything about the person you were chasing?”

“I can remember the brilliant light of the locomotive and a figure. It was almost like a shadow.”

“Tall, short, fat, thin, male, female?”

“Don’t know about the sex, but I would say tall and thin. That’s only an impression. Maybe you should interview Oscar Miller.”

“Who’s that?” pressed Pascoe.

“He’s the tenured medievalist in the English Department. He’s supposed to be a very unpleasant person.”

“What connection does he have to this case?”

“No connection at all, far as I know. Just something I was planning to do.”

“Oscar Miller. Okay, I’ll have a talk with him. What am I supposed to ask him?”

He shook his head. “You’ll think of something. And see what you can find out about Jane Arden.” Then he closed his eyes.

38

Early Monday morning Pascoe called Oscar Miller to arrange a meeting. There was no answer at his office number and no home listing in the faculty and staff directory. Then she called Alice Widdowson, Clifford Chesterton’s secretary, who provided her with a home number for Miller.

Later that morning at 11:00, Pascoe stood outside Miller’s third floor office door in Old West Foundation Hall. The door was closed. She could hear movement in the office and knocked. The door opened a crack and a wizened visage peered out at her.

“Miss Pascoe?”

“Yes.”

The door was opened farther, and she was ushered in and offered a chair. She was surprised by how short Miller was; she guessed that he was barely five feet tall. His head, compared to the rest of his frame, was disproportionally large. His long, gray hair was combed back. His face—nose, long, thin, pointed, with large nostrils that opened forward; forehead, sloping back to his hairline at an angle almost as steep as his nose; and chin, small, and dropping back from the line of his upper jaw—reminded her of the drawing of a weasel in one of her childhood books. His eyes, light blue, darted nervously back and forth.

After a few minutes of small talk, Pascoe explained what kind of information she was seeking. “Professor Miller, as you know, one of your colleagues, Jane Arden, had an attempt made on her life Friday night. We’re trying to develop a list of possible suspects in this case. Perhaps you could help us.”

“Why ask me?” scoffed Miller. His breath reeked of tobacco.

Pascoe thought it was a good question. She was interviewing Miller because Elkins had asked her to, but she wasn’t sure why.
How should I play this?
Pascoe thought, She glanced around Miller’s office. The two side walls were covered with bookcases. Two bumper stickers were pinned to the top corners of a bulletin board.

“I like your bumper sticker,” she said.

“Which one?”

She pointed to the one on the left,
Support Your Local Police.
“We need more of that. We really appreciate citizen support.” Pascoe hoped that she didn’t sound too insincere. She didn’t comment on the bumper sticker on the right,
This is a Republic, NOT a Democracy
. “That’s why I’m talking with you. We don’t have any good leads on why anyone would want to kill Professor Arden. We’re asking members of the faculty, especially members of your department, for help. Since you and Arden share the same specialty, I hoped perhaps you might have some thoughts on the matter.”

“Frankly, Miss Pascoe, strange as it sounds, I barely know Miss Arden. I don’t know anything about her personal life, and I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her.”

“How about her professional life?”

“Don’t know much about that either. She did her work in Ann Arbor, which isn’t the best place for studies in our field. That said, she’s a real expert in Old English. But, I was never asked to take part in her interview, or in any of the others, either.”

“Which others?”

“The other medievalists in the department: Bensen, Hendrickson, Dalton. We never needed those people. They were all second rate.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Bensen, for instance. Her dissertation was very pedestrian. She wrote on minor women writers of the late medieval period.” He continued in a mocking tone, “She didn’t have much to work with, and those writers would have been best left forgotten. It was the women’s thing, that’s what got her through. Her dissertation should have been rejected, but she cowed her committee. Damn feminists have everyone scared. Bensen tried to do the same thing here with her tenure. Good thing the department stuck to its guns.

“The thing you need to understand, Miss Pascoe, is there isn’t much enrollment in this area. I can barely get a load. Even before the others were hired, I often had to teach undergraduate survey courses in English literature.”

“How about Hendrickson, what kind of scholar was she?”

“She might have been a scholar, but her area of scholarship wasn’t literature. She was an authority on bourbon whiskey, not much else. And that was all experiential learning rather than book learning, if you catch my drift. She got hired because her father and our former chair were friends during their undergraduate days at Charlottesville. The woman was always half smashed, and she wasn’t much of a medievalist. Her dissertation had a title like
The Resonances of Latin Rhetoric in English Medieval Literature.
Her real interest was classical rhetoric, not medieval literature.”

“How about Dalton?”

“Dalton was a fairly adequate scholar. Her real interest was the stories conveyed by medieval stained glass, the windows of the great cathedrals. She really should have been in art history, not in English.”

“I’m impressed by how much you know about their dissertations.”

“I did the necessary legwork.” He held her in his gaze and continued sternly, “If you don’t have any say on who’s going be hired, you’ve got to make it your business to find out about them.” Miller got up and went to the bookcase that covered the wall opposite his desk. He removed four paperbacks from the far side of the bottom shelf. The books had identical light blue covers, and a title printed on a label and attached to the front. He handed the volumes to Pascoe. “These are their dissertations. I ordered copies from University Microfilms. I also have copies of all their published articles.” He motioned toward a metal file cabinet. “When they were hired I used the old boy network, people I knew at the schools they came from, to find out as much as I could about each of them. I was even able to get some of their former office mates on the phone.” He pointed the index finger of his hand at Pascoe and repeatedly gestured to emphasize his point. “If I were going to have to deal with these women, I had to know about them. I especially wanted to know if they were leftist.”

“And?” she asked, feigning interest.

“None were in really hard-core leftist groups, but Bensen was involved in that radical feminist stuff, which I think is about as subversive as you can get. She had that socialist, lesbo world-view. At faculty meetings she’d launch into these long diatribes on how the canon had to be changed, that we were just teaching the works of dead white men. She kept haranguing us about how we had to include women writers and the works of people of color. What she could never get through her head was that if these people had written anything worthwhile, we would be teaching them. It’s not like we’re prejudiced or exclusionary. These feminists don’t understand that women lack the same intellectual power. That’s why there aren’t women Chaucers, or Shakespeares, or Miltons. That’s why all the great chefs are male. That’s why all the great actors are male. It’s a truth they just can’t accept.”

Pascoe kept writing in her notebook, trying not to respond.

“The point I’m making is we shouldn’t have hired them. They all got their jobs by conniving, by making out that they were something they were not. They weren’t world-class medievalists, not one of them. And they’re all Catholic, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. The way you said that suggests there is something else I should know.”

“They were all in that parish run by that Jesuit priest. I think he calls himself Father Bob. You know about the Jesuits?” He pointed with his left index finger again, gesticulating three times as he slowly pronounced “Jesuits.”

“No, I don’t know much about Catholicism.”

“They’re a communist front organization from way back,” he proclaimed angrily. “They pretend to be a religious order. I have it on good authority that the Jesuits are headed by a bunch of Jews, all connected with the Rothchilds and George Soros. The Pope is in on it, too. They’ve organized resistance movements all over Latin America. We’ve been lucky that anti-communist generals down there have kept these bastards from taking over the whole damn region. Both Castro and Che Guevara were trained by the Jesuits.”

“I’m really impressed by how much you know on a variety of topics,” said Pascoe with schoolgirl awe. The conversation was going exactly in the direction she had hoped. “Is there anything else that I should know about?”

“I don’t know about Arden, but the other three women were queer. I guess I should call them lesbians. I’m the only one in the department who has the courage to call a spade a spade, the hell with political correctness.” Miller fell into a bout of coughing. He pulled a green glass bottle from a bottom drawer, opened it, and took several swigs. “Cough medicine,” he said. “Only thing that works.”

“It would be helpful if you could tell me how you acquired this information,” asked Pascoe, the air now filled with the scent of brandy.“Well, first, years ago when they were just new here, I asked both Bensen and Hendrickson out. Just as I suspected, they both refused me. I could tell they didn’t like men. And they were all involved in that radical feminist group, Sisters for a Shared Future.” He leaned closer to Pascoe and said in a low voice. “I have it on good authority that they’re all lesbians, all of them. They won’t let you in if you’re not.”

“Do you know if any of these women had enemies in the English Department or anywhere else in the university?”

“I can think of one person.”

“Who?”

“Seneca Carducci, our Negro, black lit, Miltonist homosexual.”

“Why?”

“Well, don’t you know,” Miller said in a tone that suggested that he was repeating a universal truth, “Queers always hate lesbians. It’s probably just self-hate, a transference of sorts. They are disgusted by the other’s perversion. Not that I take much stock in that Freudian stuff, but it clearly applies here.”

“That’s interesting,” said Pascoe innocently, “I didn’t know that. Professor Miller, you’ve been very helpful. Thank you so much for your time.”

“Glad to help, Miss Pascoe. Like that sign says, I’m always glad to help the police.”