Murder Misread (5 page)

“
You’re… sure?” she
faltered.

“
The X-rays were as clear
as they could be. He’s winning, Anne!”

“
John… thanks.” She hung
up, dazed. Braced to deflect the worst, she found that this good
news could not penetrate her defensive walls either. She was
adrift, unable to believe or disbelieve.

And Tal? Maybe this was
why he hadn’t called, this inability to believe. Anne slung her bag
over her shoulder, locked her office, and hurried out into the June
sunshine.

The air was pleasantly
tepid, scented with the first blooms on the rose plants around the
Modern Languages building.
To hell with
you, roses, with your little pink smell.
She pulled out her Gauloise and lit it defiantly, sucked the
delicious stinking smoke deep into her chest, then spewed it
contemptuously at the blossoms.

To hell with you, too,
cancer.

The Ed Psych office was
locked when Anne arrived, the halls nearly deserted in this
peculiar between-semesters slack.
Les
vacances
, the French said:
vacation, vacancy. Tal’s office, as it turned out, was vacant too,
locked and dark. Puzzling over her next move, she wandered back
toward the door. Maybe she shouldn’t have canceled that meeting
about next year’s French film season. But she couldn’t face Ken and
his need for mothering today.

At the door she met Cindy
Phelps approaching from the library walk. “Oh, Cindy! Just the
person I wanted to see!”

“
Really?” Cindy’s light
blue eyes looked kindly at Anne from under shelves of enhanced
black lashes. She dragged her rose-colored cardigan from her
shoulders and tossed it over her forearm, then reached into her bag
for the office key. “What can I do for you?”

“
I’m looking for my
wayward husband.”

Cindy glanced over her
shoulder at the hall clock. “Twelve-thirty. He’ll still be at
lunch.”

“
Yes. But do you know
where he is?” Anne followed Cindy into the departmental office.
Eric, the plastic brain model on the shelf, stared at them with
blank blue eyes.

Cindy stowed her bag and
hung up her cardigan. “For once, yes. He said he’d be at Plato’s.
Invited me to come with him and celebrate.”

“
Celebrate?” An avalanche
of hurt battered Anne’s heart, stirring buried memories of that
horrible long-ago winter when she’d discovered Tal’s affair with
that bosomy premed student.

Cindy laughed, preening.
“Oh God, that sounded wrong! This wasn’t like a tryst or anything.
A bunch of people went. He asked Bernie too, but Bernie had to have
lunch with some computer people from Japan. I couldn’t go, so Tal
said he’d save me some champagne.” The hand patting her exuberant
hairdo into place slowed, and she frowned at Anne. “Are you okay? I
mean, he said you had an appointment. How come you’re
here?”

“
Oh, it got canceled.”
Anne smiled at Cindy, the weight lightening. It was true—Tal had
known about her lunch with Ken. Still, why hadn’t he called? “So
he’s at Plato’s?”

“
Right. Say, what’s he
celebrating? His birthday? Seventieth, right?”

“
Right, you might say
that. Cindy, I tried to call him this morning but he didn’t
answer.”

“
Well, he got in late.”
Cindy lifted the cover from her typewriter. “And he was running
around the halls, in and out of everyone else’s office. Busy busy.
So you didn’t have much of a chance of getting through.”

“
Well,” decided Anne, “I’m
going over to Plato’s. If I happen to miss him again, tell him I
want to talk to him, okay?”

“
Sure thing.”

“
Cindy, how are you
doing?”

For an instant their eyes
locked. “Okay,” said Cindy. “It’ll be okay.” Then her gaze slid
away and she glared at the smiling man who was pushing a wire cart
laden with manila envelopes into the office. “Oh, damn, here comes
the mail to sort.”

Anne waved good-bye and
walked back out into the sun. She was jumpy today, wasn’t she,
unable to make phone calls, thinking of that curvy premed for the
first time in years. Well, months. She crossed the parking lot,
surprisingly full for vacation time. Probably people who usually
had to park at the peripheral lots, taking advantage of
les
vacances
. A high
proportion were the old rusting hulks driven by grad students,
instead of somewhat newer Toyotas or Vegas favored by the faculty.
The undergraduate Porsches were probably off to the
beach.

The woods were lovely,
washed by yesterday’s rain, each leaf defined in the chiaroscuro of
June sun and deep shade. The noises of civilization—motors, sirens,
voices—faded rapidly as she descended. Birds called, a squirrel
ranted in high-pitched hoarse indignation, foliage rustled. Almost
nice enough to take that old bastard Rousseau seriously, all his
drivel about getting close to nature. Anne tramped stolidly down
the path, her bag swinging from her shoulder, her face turned up to
catch the occasional dazzle of sky beyond the rippling
leaves.

She heard the voices
first, from the fork in the path. Men’s voices, gruff working-class
voices, down by the creek. As she hiked along the upper path, she
tried to peer down through the ragged screen of young maples to see
what was happening. Nearing the bridge, she could glimpse flashes
of light and paused, squinting. A photographer of some sort? She
pushed aside a young branch so she could survey the
activity.

The photographer was
squatting, stretching, clambering onto logs and rocks, even into
the stream in a strange ritual ceremony around a quiet heather-gray
form on the path. Well outside the circle of his dance, others
stood watching: men in uniforms, the gray of the campus safety
officers, the navy of the city police, the white of ambulance
attendants who stood with a stretcher vertical between them. Beyond
them, clumps of university people—tweeds, blue jeans, Aran
sweaters. A tall black man in a blue blazer was talking to the
largest of the tweedy ones. Looked like Bart, Anne thought. Next to
them, a lanky young woman with black curls had a comforting arm
around a sobbing female student in a jeans jacket.

Anne stepped back onto the
path, letting the branch spring back across the view. With
shivering hands she pulled a cigarette from her pocket, lit it, and
inhaled deeply. Then she marched back to the fork in the path and
down toward the crowd.

She was stopped after a
few yards by a big gray-jacketed safety officer, young, taut-faced,
a trace of acne on his jaw. Dixon, said his badge. “I’m sorry,
ma’am,” he croaked hoarsely, and cleared his throat. “Please use
the other path. This one is closed.”

“
Someone’s hurt?” asked
Anne, drawing in the sustaining smoke. She knew it was a dumb
question. The ambulance attendants had been standing idly by,
waiting.

“
Someone’s been shot and
killed!” confirmed the youthful officer, his murky blue eyes
troubled and lively in his stiffly held face. “So we have to ask
you to go the other way until they’re finished with the
body.”

“
But you see,” explained
Anne, enunciating carefully for the benefit of his dazed young
ears, “I think I’m married to that body.”

4

Charlie stood smacking his
fist rhythmically into his other hand, an ineffectual release for
his fury and confusion. Tal could not be dead! “I just saw him this
morning,” he’d protested stupidly to big Sergeant Hines, a line
from a million B movies. But he couldn’t accept it. He’d taken one
look at that lump of gray tweed and turned away. Couldn’t be zesty
little Tal. Tal had been like a father, no, more like a playful
uncle, from the time Charlie had first joined the department. He
couldn’t be dead. This was a nightmare. A horror flick. Not
real.

But the cops were real
enough. There were gray-shirted men from the Campus Security
Office, and solid fellows in navy uniforms from the Laconia city
police. And there were plainclothes detectives moving through the
little crowd. Sergeant Hines was in charge, a big black man with a
light blue summer blazer stretched across his muscular shoulders.
As Reggie Hines he’d been a running back for Syracuse, Charlie
remembered someone saying. A smart player, not quite good enough
for the pro leagues but graduating with a good record and working
his way up through the Laconia police steadily. He’d been calm and
efficient questioning Charlie, his face stolidly neutral, as though
carved in ebony, but his questions were alert and to the point.
O.J. Simpson turned cop.

Charlie was standing at
the bend where the trails angled up, partly because he couldn’t
look at the crumpled heather-gray heap farther down. The cops had
shooed everyone back up the trail, gray uniforms and blue uniting
in their insistence that civilians keep their distance. Hines had
arrived soon and taken charge. He’d set his own men to work
measuring, photographing, cordoning off a large area of the path
and woods, searching the trail and creek banks. He’d rounded up the
witnesses and put them under the supervision of a couple of Campus
Security cops, telling them all not to discuss the scene. One at a
time, he drew the witnesses aside and asked them his
questions.

Near Charlie, the young
woman student who’d found the body
had
stopped sobbing at last. She had caramel-colored hair and
square-framed glasses. Dorrie something, she’d said. Maggie’s arm
in the loose blue shirt lay across her denim jacket like a soothing
wing. Maggie was murmuring comfort, but her keen blue eyes were
panning across the scene, checking trail, woods, cops. Half Irish,
half eagle, she’d said. She saw Charlie looking at her and gave a
small sad shake of her head. He realized that she believed Tal was
dead and suddenly he began to believe it too. He smacked his fist
into his hand again and glared at Hines. What the hell was the man
doing? Why wasn’t he chasing down Tal’s killer instead of talking
to Bart? Tal deserved police helicopters, bloodhounds,
searchlights, SWAT teams. Instead Hines was asking Bart Bickford
the same calm questions he’d already asked Charlie and Maggie and
Dorrie. He’d taken Bart a few yards down the trail, but Charlie
could still hear most of it above the gurgling creek and the
whispering leaves.

“
Yes, he’d asked me to
meet him for lunch,” Bart said. He was fidgety, his big hands
knotted in his jacket pockets, his heavy brow thickened in a
frown.

“
Did you pass this part of
the trail on the way to Plato’s?”

“
I used the upper trail.”
Bart nodded at the green-painted bridge, dull against the
sun-sparkled foliage at the top of the ravine.

“
This was a few minutes
before noon?”

“
A quarter of, maybe,”
Bart amended. “I went early because I wanted to drop off some film
to be developed.”

Hines was making notes.
“In Collegetown?”

“
Yeah. That place around
the corner on Jefferson. A block off College. Quick
Prints.”

“
And then you went to
Plato’s?”

“
Yes. Pretty damn close to
noon.” Bart shifted his weight to his other foot.

“
Did you meet or see
Professor Chandler on your way?”

“
No. Saw a woman with a
little girl taking a walk down here on this trail. They were the
only ones on it.”

Hines’s expression didn’t
change, but Charlie sensed a new tautness in the broad shoulders, a
brightening interest. “Can you describe the woman?”

“
Young, slim, brown hair,
about—God, it’s hard to judge height from above, isn’t it?” Bart’s
sunken eyes squeezed closed with the effort to remember. “Some kind
of a checked shirt. Bluish, I think. Blue jeans. Gray sweater tied
around her waist.”

“
Good.” Hines seemed
pleased, scribbling in his notepad. “And the child?”

“
About five, I’d guess.
Red sweatshirt, jeans. Brown hair. Kept running over to throw
stones in the water.”

“
Fine. And no sign of
Professor Chandler?”

“
No. Nor of anyone else.
They were the only people I saw.”

“
Was anyone entering the
trail from the Collegetown side?”

“
No. Only a few people on
the street this time of year.”

“
Right.” Hines turned the
page. “Is there anything else you can add?”

Bart blinked at the big
detective. To Charlie Bart seemed a big, sad creature out of his
element, a Neanderthal puzzling over Cro-Magnon behavior. He said,
“No, I can’t think of anything. But if I do—”

“
Right. Let us know. We’ll
let everyone go in a few minutes. Bear with us a little longer.
We’ll want a formal statement later. You’ll be back at your office
today?”

“
Yes, until six o’clock or
so.”

“
Fine. Give your phone
numbers and address to Officer Porter.” Hines nodded at the
blue-uniformed cop who was taking notes nearby. Bart lumbered
toward Porter as Hines consulted his notes for the next witness.
“Ms. Peterson?”

“
Yes. Here,” said
Nora.

Charlie had hardly been
aware of her, standing silently in the shade of the maples nearby,
her navy blue suit as dark as the shadows. Now she stepped into the
dappled sunlight of the trail.