Simon Said (25 page)

"Gates believes me, doesn't he?"

"He sure acts like he does. For one thing, you've got a twenty-four-hour guard outside your door. And he and that woman you've got the hots for are at your house with a team of forensic guys. They're looking for evidence somebody else was messing in your house besides you."

That was when Simon noticed that the door on the inside of his room had no handle on it. It didn't upset him the way the window bars had. It made him feel safe. "On second thought, I don't think I want to leave right now," Simon said. "Don't blame you, under the circumstances. What no one can figure out is why somebody would want to get rid of a stuffy, harmless history professor like yourself."

"I don't have any idea."
"Me neither."
"I feel awful."

"You're still full of drugs. Go back to sleep. When you wake up, I'll get you a milk shake. Maybe we'll know more then."

When Simon woke up again, it was dark outside. Marcus Clegg had taken Morgan's place. He was sitting in the visitor's chair, reading Rolling Stone. He owned every issue printed since .

"Am I still officially crazy?" Simon asked.

 

"Hi there," Clegg said. "No, not at all. You're going to stay up here because it's secure. At least until you're ready to be discharged."

 

"When is that going to be?"

 

"Maybe tomorrow, if you feel like it. David left you a milk shake. It's in the freezer. Want it? They won't take those tubes out of your arm until you start eating and drinking." "Sure," Simon said.

The texture of the chocolate shake was a little strange, since it had been frozen and then thawed in the microwave. It really didn't taste very good, but his nausea was gone and he knew he should drink it. He forced down about half of it.

"Did you manage to fend off my relatives?" he asked.

 

"Yes, but it wasn't easy. You should have heard Judy on the phone to your uncle. She was brilliant."

 

"What about my aunt in Boone?"

 

"They never found out about her. She's not listed in your personnel file. And I sure as hell wasn't going to tell them."

"So what do we do now?"
"Go to sleep."
"You don't have to stay," Simon said. "There's a policeman here."

"Don't be brave. It doesn't ring true. I've got dibs on the sofa in the waiting room. I brought my pillow and everything."

 

"Thank you."

 

Simon woke up only once during the night. He counted the drips from his IV bottle until he fell asleep again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine

ALL OF SIMON'S ENERGIES WERE CONCENTRATED ON KEEPING down his bland breakfast. Sgt. Otis Gates wasn't making it any easier by sipping on a cup of vending machine coffee. It smelled of burnt cardboard. Simon could taste it in his bowels.

Earlier in the morning, Dr. Ferrell had dropped in to tell Simon he could leave the hospital soon.

 

"If you didn't have such good insurance, I wouldn't mess with you," he said. "You're time-consuming."

 

"I understand that you and the psych resident had a falling-out over me," Simon said.

"A minor professional disagreement," Ferrell said. "We've had them before. He's one of these guys who believes the whole world is one big dysfunctional family just waiting for him to organize into group therapy and talk into personal revelation and mental health. The next time he tells me that he understands a patient of mine he's seen for five minutes better than I do, I'm going to stuff him down the laundry chute."

Ferrell told Simon he could go home that afternoon, after some test or another came back with the right reading.

 

"Please take care of yourself," Ferrell said. "One-hundred- percent-covered patients are hard to come by."

Simon hadn't wanted to talk to Sergeant Gates when he walked into the room a few minutes after Dr. Ferrell left. Simon was tired and a little anxious. He had almost died twice recently. But Gates sat down and began to drink his coffee, oblivious to the sensitivity of Simon's stomach.

"How are you today?" asked Gates.
"Tell me you have some idea what's going on," Simon said.
"Let's dispense with the niceties and get right down to business, shall we?" Gates said.

Gates took out his reading glasses and perched them on his nose. The glasses looked like doll accessories on his large face. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and began to flip through it.

"Let's go over what I've got and you can tell me what you think," Gates said.

This was not what Simon wanted to hear. He wanted Gates to tell him he had made an arrest and had a confession and it was someone Simon didn't know and that the police would lock the guy up permanently and Simon could go home and forget everything.

"I don't have to remind you that this has happened once before, and that we chalked it up to vandalism," Gates said. "I think that we can discard that theory. It's hardly vandalism to walk into somebody's house and dump pills in an open soda bottle."

"The two could be unconnected," Simon said.
"That's possible, of course. But for safety's sake, we should assume the worst." "I can live with that."
"First possibility: You are trying to commit suicide."
"No."

"Your doctor and your friends say you're fine. And it's pretty hard to fake mental health. Besides, we've found evidence of an intruder at your house."

 

Simon was taken aback even though he had expected to hear this. Absurdly, he found himself worrying about his cat.

"The doorknob on your back door and your prescription bottles were wiped clean of prints. Why would you do that? Also, we found a tire track in the parking space off your alley that doesn't match your car or anyone else's in the immediate vicinity. There was a partial footprint a few feet from your back porch that belongs to a foot about five sizes larger than yours."

Tessa had wanted Simon to fill in that low spot in the yard for years. It was always damp. Now he was glad he hadn't ever gotten to it.

 

"Also," Gates said, "you are a brilliant researcher who would need about half an hour in the library to figure out how to kill yourself successfully."

 

"Fifteen minutes," Simon said.

"Second possibility: You are not trying to kill yourself; you are only trying to get attention. This is a distinct possibility. You've been, or are, depressed. And again, you are smart enough to figure out how to attempt suicide without actually accomplishing it."

"I've had enough attention to last a lifetime."

"Thing is, the docs are undecided as to whether or not the amount of drugs you ingested would have killed you. Your size makes that hard to figure out. If you didn't want to die, seems to me you would have been more careful on the dosage side."

"We're running out of possibilities."

"Be patient. Third possibility: Someone was trying to make it look like you are suicidal. To make you seem psychologically unstable so that you lose your job. This is serious professional jealousy we're talking about here. This is a real possibility, because Alex Andrus, who hates your guts, accused you of being incompetent right before the first incident."

"It can't be Alex. He's a basket case. And he had an alibi for the first time."

"I wouldn't exclude him from being involved. Besides, you have plenty of other enemies to choose from. Seems you're the favorite to become chair of the department of history after Walker Jones retires."

Simon was thunderstruck. "That's nonsense," he said. "If the college doesn't choose someone from outside the department, there are three other people on the history faculty senior to me."

"Two of them are out of town for the summer, and the other one is Vera Thayer," Gates said, consulting his notes.

 

"This is crazy," Simon said.

 

"Maybe Professor Thayer figured if she took you out of consideration, she could have the job after all. Where does she live?"

"Around the corner and down two on Benehan Street—about two blocks from me." Simon knew Vera was mean enough to do anything to get the chair, but he had a hard time visualizing her with her beehive and ultrasuede suits under his car, rigging a booby trap.

"Your secretary told me you'd be shocked," Gates said. "She said you hate departmental politics and never know what's going on. I think the expression she used was 'babe in the woods.' "

"I don't believe this."

"According to her, you're a Pulitzer Prize winner, you generate great publicity for the college at regular intervals, you're a popular teacher, and you're fair and easy to get along with. Oh, and you're cute. In short, you're the history faculty's ideal compromise candidate. Nobody wants Professor Thayer, and you get everyone else's vote after themselves."

"So your theory is that these two so-called suicide attempts of mine are somebody's way of taking me out of the running for chairman, or out of the college altogether? By making me look psychologically unstable and unfit for the job?"

"It seems possible."
"I can't deal with this."
"You'd better deal with it. There's always the fourth possibility."
"What's that?"
"The perp doesn't just want you out of the way; he, or she, wants you dead."

Chapter Thirty

THE UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN WATCHING SIMON'S HOUSE MADE him nervous. No one in full position of his faculties could mistake this guy for a student on a bicycle. Every time he hit a cobblestone in the alley, he practically fell off. His blue jeans, T-shirt, and athletic shoes were brand-new and looked like he had bought them at Sears. His haircut came from the shop opposite the police station, which offered a special price to anyone in uniform. His sunglasses screamed "cool Clint Eastwood-type lawenforcement person." Plus, he kept stopping and fiddling with an earpiece that obviously wasn't connected to anything. He didn't have a backpack or books in his bicycle basket. Simon hoped he had a gun in it—a really big gun, like the bad guys had on television.

Simon thought he should probably warn the cop's night relief about the neighbors' intruder alerts. They were mounted on garages all up and down the alley. If the guy cruised all night, the alley would look like a lit-up Christmas tree. Someone might call the police.

Simon felt sorry for himself. He was sitting on the sofa in his living room, wrapped in a blanket, for comfort, not for warmth. This had been quite a year. His wife had left him. He had been accused of incompetency. Someone was trying either to get him committed or to kill him. Right now, a detective sergeant from the Homicide Division of the Raleigh Police Department was interrogating his friends and colleagues. If Alex Andrus and Vera Thayer disliked him before, getting hauled off to the police station certainly wouldn't help matters. He was especially embarrassed that his other friends, including Marcus Clegg, were being questioned, too.

The only bright spot in his barren existence was that Julia was coming to fix him dinner and protect him until around midnight. Then David was going to come and spend the night. Simon hadn't argued with either of them about this.

Simon answered Julia's knock on the door about :.
"I'm a mite anxious," Simon said, taking one of the shopping bags from her. She reached out and squeezed his arm.

"Don't worry," she said. "Otis will get to the bottom of this. When he turns his whole attention to a case, results happen. Besides, no one would dare try again, not after all this commotion has been raised."

"I hope not."

They carried the bags to the kitchen.
"What are we having?" Simon asked.
"Lamb chops, baked potatoes, salad, and—"
"Please say something chocolate."
"Chocolate decadence pie."
"Thank you, God."

"I hope you don't mind the meat and potatoes. The Irish in me just can't quite give it up."

 

"It sounds wonderful." He pulled a bottle of red wine out of one bag. "I guess I shouldn't drink any of this. I had my stomach pumped yesterday, after all." "Good. That means I get more."

 

Simon uncorked the bottle and poured the wine into one of his mother's old Waterford crystal wineglasses and gave it to her.

 

"This is wonderful," Julia said. "I don't know which is better, the wine or the glass. I wish," she said, "that I had thought to bring a change of clothes."

Julia was wearing a full suit of regulation office wear: suit, blouse, stockings, and pumps. Her hair was pulled back from her face. She looked hot, wrinkled, and uncomfortable.

"You can borrow some of my clothes," Simon said.
"I couldn't fit into a pair of your jeans if my life depended on it."

"Don't be insulted, but I have a pair of old overalls I think would fit you," Simon said. "They're pretty baggy."

"I am not at all insulted. Where are they?"
"In the bottom drawer of my dresser, right side," Simon said.

While Julia was upstairs, Simon washed the potatoes and put them in the oven. He tried not to think about her undressing in his bedroom. The happy domesticity of the evening so far gave him a familiar contented feeling, and he had to remember that they were just friends, so far at least.

Julia came into the kitchen in the blue denim overalls Simon had worn threadbare working on his aunt and uncle's Christmas tree farm near Boone. She had borrowed one of Simon's white T-shirts and was barefoot. Her hair was loose and pushed behind her ears.

"You look great," Simon said.

She knew it, too. She walked up close to him and her body requested a friendly kiss, which she got. But that was all she wanted. She backed away from Simon's move toward a longer embrace, politely detaching his arm from around her waist and leaning back on the counter.

"You put the potatoes on?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "Want to go sit outside?"

They went outside and sat on Simon's porch, he cross-legged on an old wicker rocker and she on a chaise lounge. They talked easily for an hour, until the potatoes were done. Julia went inside to fix the salad and Simon turned on the grill.

When everything was ready, they sat at the old table on the porch and ate. Simon hadn't realized how hungry he was. He hadn't had a square meal in days. He finished the half a lamb chop left on Julia's plate and had two pieces of pie.

There wasn't much to clean up, and with both of them working, the kitchen was straight in just a few minutes.