An Act of Murder Page 8

  Chapter Nine

  Dan Fox said that Austin must have been wearing gloves the night of his death because they were missing from the theater. He assumed, and so did I, that the gloves were taken with the body. But what if, in fact, the gloves weren’t with Austin? What if their disappearance were a clue to his death? The first thing we needed to ascertain was whether the gloves had ended up in the morgue with the body, and that we could do with a quick phone call to the coroner’s office.

  “Oh, so you want me to do your dirty work,” Lenny said when I asked him to make the call.

  We were crossing the street—he’d left his car at the theater—and his breath came quickly as we scurried along. Students were disappearing into classroom buildings now, but a few remained outside the student center, smoking cigarettes or eating sandwiches in wrappers from the Express, a convenience stop that carried mostly pre-packaged goods but also sliced pound cake with lemon icing that melted in your mouth. Whenever I had a need to go to the student center, usually to visit the bookstore, I couldn’t resist buying at least one piece, carefully wrapped in cellophane.

  Lenny was still frowning, and it puzzled me. He was never bad-tempered. “You’re a bit cross.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t get breakfast. I’m a maniac without food.”

  “I’ll buy you lunch after this, I promise,” I said.

  “At Harry’s,” he said decidedly.

  “Okay, at Harry’s.” Harry’s was actually the Main Street Grill, but everyone called it Harry’s because it was run by a little old man named Harry who liked to sip whiskey while he tended bar. He never appeared drunk, however, just easy-going and helpful. No matter what anyone asked, he would have a useful answer or story. The Main Street Grill also offered onion rings good enough to make it semi-famous. Unfortunately, the place was also famous for its pervasive odor of spilt beer, and the tables were always sticky with soda and rum. The food was sometimes worth the residue—the gossip, always. Harry himself made sure of this. He had an endless supply of news that in the course of an hour would pass from the bar to the surrounding booths and tables. He didn’t make a big deal of it, just passed tidbits along as if it were his duty.

  “Why do you want me to call, anyway?” asked Lenny.

  I pretended to readjust my scarf to take his attention off what I was about to propose. “I thought you could say you are Dan Fox, from the theater, looking for your lost gloves. Of course you have to do it from the main office so it can’t be traced by Caller ID back to us.”

  “Emmeline!” he said sternly, stopping in his tracks.

  Several students looked in our direction, surprised that teachers could have anything going on in their own lives worth raising their voices about.

  “Are you crazy?” he continued. “I’m pretty sure they call that … something I could be arrested for.”

  I grabbed his arm and resumed walking. “Keep your voice down. It’s called ‘interfering with an investigation,’ and you won’t be. It’s just Dan Fox calling about his gloves; that’s all.”

  “Unless they find out I’m not Dan Fox. Then it’s called ‘Lenny Jenkins is out of a job.’ ”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” I said. “It’s not as if we don’t have good intentions. When we find out what really happened, you’ll be a local hero. They might even name a classroom after you.”

  “Yeah, Jenkins’s Jail Cell,” Lenny mumbled. “This is what happens, kids, when you interfere with an official police investigation.”

  “Maybe they’ll locate it in the Criminal Justice Department.”

  Lenny finally smiled. “Cute.”

  “Hey … there’s André. He’s coming this way,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. André was walking briskly toward us in a charcoal coat and matching hat, his maroon scarf whipping furiously in the wind. He saw us and waved.

  “Oh, come on,” said Lenny. “What is that, a beret?”

  “Shhh,” I hissed, waving and smiling.

  “Maybe he could make the call. ‘Yez, thiz eez Dan Fox. I am a looking for zee gloves. You have seen them, no?’”

  “Good god, you sound like Count Dracula,” I said under my breath. André was only a few steps away now.

  “Bwahahah!” Lenny said, doing his best to imitate Count Dracula’s laugh.

  “Emmeline, Lenny, good afternoon.” André shook both our hands vigorously. “It is cool out today.”

  “A bit breezy,” I said, wishing I wouldn’t have fooled around with my scarf. It had formed a fairly large knot right at my throat that I was sure looked less than chic.

  “Ah. The wind. One gets used to it here,” said André.

  “It’s as sure as death and taxes,” added Lenny.

  “Where are you on your way to?” asked André.

  “We are on our way to make a very important—and very illegal—phone call,” said Lenny. “How about you?”

  André looked at me, and I rolled my eyes, dismissing the comment completely.

  “I am going to the copy shop. I, too, am in the midst of something illegal.” He winked at Lenny. “The grant office wants evidence of our French Department? I will give them evidence.”

  “Come on, André. You know Ms. Prather over here is banking on Paris. You’re not going to disappoint her, are you?”

  “I’m banking on no such thing,” I said, but I doubted André could hear me over his own protests.

  “Oh no, no. I will not screw up the thing. I will fix the thing,” André said. Then he turned to me and smiled. “You shall see Paris … or bust.” He laughed at his own joke.

  I didn’t know what to say and felt myself turning pink. Hopefully the brisk wind had reddened my cheeks already. “Well, thank you. That would be nice.”

  “Come on, Em,” said Lenny. “We can’t stand here blushing all day. We have laws to break. See you around, André.”

  “Yes, I must go too,” he said. “Bonne chance, mes amis.”

  “You, too, André,” I said. “Let me know how it goes.” This I practically called out over my shoulder as Lenny was already walking briskly toward Harriman Hall.

  Harriman Hall was quiet, as usual, for there were no real classrooms in the building except the few scattered in the basement. Most of the building was office space, where professors worked silently on papers or quizzes.

  Lenny and I walked up the back steps to the second floor. Jane Lemort met us halfway up the stairs, looking vaguely gothic in her black dress, black tights, and long string of black pearls. She continued walking past us and then stopped. I knew with the skid of her big toe that she thought she had something clever to say; of course she never did.

  “You two are unusually serious today. Why so quiet?” she asked with a dramatic question mark hanging over the end of her sentence.

  Lenny smiled a little too widely. “We could tell you, Jane, but then we’d have to kill you.”

  She laughed in a high, lilting way. “Oh dear. One must keep one’s secrets then.”

  Lenny kept walking, dismissing her completely. He turned left at the top of the stairs, toward his office. As he opened the door, an odor of pickle and onion wafted out.

  “Why can’t we talk in my office?” I asked, plugging my nose.

  “We’d have to sit side by side,” answered Lenny.

  “And why doesn’t the janitor empty your garbage?” I asked, motioning toward the overflowing Dodger’s wastebasket in the corner.

  “It’s an un-standard trash receptacle. He’s trying to force me to comply, but I refuse.”

  “That will teach him,” I said.

  “So what do I look up here? C for coroner?” asked Lenny.

  “Use the Internet. Google it. It will be much faster.”

  He turned to his keyboard and typed in coroner and Copper Bluff.

  “Hey, what do you know? There it is,” he said. He wrote the phone number down on a piece of paper.

  “What are you going to say? Do you want to … practice on me?”


  “What? Do you mean like an accent?” he asked.

  I was a bit nervous. They would figure it was a college student pulling a prank if Lenny called up using his unconvincing Irish brogue. “Not an accent, exactly. You’re just going to try to sound like Dan Fox, right?”

  He unzipped his coat. “Right. How does he sound?”

  I gave this some thought. “He talks a bit more quietly than you do. His voice is softer, not quite so deep.”

  “Right, let’s go.”

  We moved into the main office, after determining that Barb was on a break. Lenny had become adept at determining her break times, in order to avoid her, and this was one of them.

  “Oh christ, Em. What are we doing? I can’t do this. What if Barb or someone walks in?”

  I dismissed his concern with a wave of my hand, trying to appear more confident than I truly was. “You’ll be fine. It’s one question: do they have the gloves? I’ll watch at the door.”

  He nodded slowly as if trying to convince himself.

  “I’m going to go now,” I said.

  He nodded again, and I left the office.

  Outside Barb’s door was a long rectangular table stacked with old books nobody wanted. There was an eclectic mix of textbooks, handbooks, novels—mostly written by retired professors—poetry collections, and pamphlets discussing the myriad causes one might support. I skimmed the assortment, trying to focus on some of the titles, but it was no use. My straining ears must have put my eyes out of focus because all I could see was the blur of black on white pages.

  I heard a noise down the hall and noticed Giles walking in my direction. I tried to appear engrossed in a pamphlet on saving the white owls until he stood directly behind me.

  “I didn’t know you went for that environmental propaganda,” he said, repeating the same language I had used last year at the Christmas party.

  I tucked the pamphlet into my coat pocket. “Who isn’t concerned about white owls? I certainly am. I’ve been a big fan ever since the Harry Potter series came out.”

  He smiled. “And how did your class go? Did your students have questions about Austin?”

  “They did, but I didn’t have any answers. I told them about the student services available on campus—typical administrative blabber.”

  Giles fastened the dark leather button on his corduroy jacket, and I found myself admiring his casual ways. I had seen him take close to a minute to retie one of his boots once while an entire class of students waited on an answer to a question.

  “Very appropriate. Some of them might have been close to Austin.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Like the clowns in the back row? One of them called him a ‘pussy’ for volunteering in the theater. You’d think it were the 1950s, wouldn’t you?”

  “The 1950s—the dark ages,” he sighed. “They’re one in the same to you youngsters.”

  I smiled. I didn’t think being twenty-eight made me a youngster, exactly. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  We stood in awkward silence, now that I had put away my pamphlet and he had finished asking his questions. He looked in Barb’s office and then back at me. “Are you waiting for Barb?”

  “Yes,” I said, “though I’m not sure she’s in there.”

  He motioned for me to go first.

  “I just have a question about ….”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “The coffee fund.” I could think of nothing I wanted to talk to her about less, but it was the first thing that came to mind.

  He looked again at Barb’s door. “Is someone else in there?”

  “Hmm?” I pulled at my scarf. “Yes, Lenny,” I said just as the office door opened.

  “Em! He doesn’t … oh, hi, Giles. What’s up?” Lenny was flushed to the tips of his ears.

  Giles crossed his arms. “Hello, Lenny. What’s up with you?”

  “I was looking for Barb,” Lenny said. “She always wants to know Harry’s pie of the day. But he doesn’t have pecan today. And on the cusp of fall. Can you believe it? Em’s buying me lunch. Do you want to come?”

  Despite his lie, Lenny sounded quite convincing, and I had a feeling he could go on like this for several minutes if he had to.

  “No thank you. I try to avoid that gossip mill around lunch hour. It breeds indolence.”

  Lenny looked at me.

  “Laziness,” I said.

  Giles shook his head and walked into Barb’s office.

  Lenny quickly pulled his own door shut and led me several steps down the stairs before saying another word. “They don’t have them. The gloves. They don’t have them.”

  “Do you know what this means?” I whispered.

  “Of course I do.”

  But I couldn’t resist saying it anyway. “We find the gloves, and we find the evidence that someone else was involved in Austin’s death—someone with something to hide.”

  Chapter Ten

  Harry’s was always packed this time of day, and today was no exception. The pub thrummed with life, its clientele ranging from old men in woolen caps to college kids in stocking caps. Only in a college town could you go into a grill on a weekday afternoon and witness men and boys alike drinking beer and eating peanuts—carefree, content, happy.

  The talk was as wonderfully diverse as the clothing. The farmer on the corner stool talked about soybean prices and the a.m. radio show while the boy in the next booth discussed Milton and his captivating portrayal of the devil in Paradise Lost. I felt myself cocooned in this blithe world when I came, unable to take much of anything seriously, and I suppose that was the source of Giles’s caution. But this afternoon, sitting across from a friend in a tall, sticky booth, I felt nothing could drive me away—even the threat of indolence.

  Lenny took a swig from his frosty mug, the foam gathering at his lips. “That’s better.”

  I sipped my beer carefully to avoid the foam.

  We sat for a while in silence, listening to the broken conversation of others. Once in a while we would smile at each other, hearing some student’s account of an awful class, an unfair test, or a boring teacher. Then Lisa, a large woman with an even larger chest, brought out our steaming hot onion rings, setting the plate down with a loud thump, and we were both startled out of our congenial quiet.

  Lenny untangled one of the onion rings from the top of the pile and held it close to his mouth. “Do you think we’re really onto something? With the gloves, I mean.”

  I set down my beer, nodding. “Yes, I believe we are.”

  “So what are we going to do about it?” He bit into the onion ring, which was probably still too hot. His quick reach for the beer confirmed my suspicions.

  “We’re going to find the gloves,” I said simply.

  His dark eyebrows were intense anyway because they were such a contrast to his light hair; now that they were furrowed, they gave him a portentous air. “But don’t you see? We’re talking about murder.”

  This word he said so quietly I could barely hear it. “Well of course,” I said, grabbing an onion ring. “That is the word for intentionally causing a death.”

  He continued, “I’m serious. Murderers don’t just walk into a small town like Copper Bluff and start killing students. For what reason?”

  “People kill people for all sorts of reasons—and not just in big cities. Maybe Austin made someone angry, or he threatened someone, or maybe he wasn’t the one who was supposed to die. Maybe it was Alex. He can be quite condescending. Look at Jane Lemort. Don’t tell me she doesn’t have it coming.”

  He put down his beer. “I can see you’ve put some thought into this.”

  I munched on another onion ring. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I ran several different scenarios in my head.”

  “Hey,” he said, taking the biggest onion ring for himself, “I’m just saying that if we’re really talking about murder then we’d better be careful—and not just for the reasons Giles mentioned. If Austin was murdered, then we hav
e a murderer living in town, maybe on campus. He might be willing to do it again if we start poking around.”

  “Or she. It could be a she,” I said.

  Now he was positively glowering.

  I took a sip of my beer and leaned back in the booth. “You know, I like this for a change—you being the serious one, all tangled up in knots.”

  “Well I don’t. It makes me feel responsible. I didn’t even know the damn kid and now you ….”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “You’re too damn charming. You … you’ve charmed me into it.” He grabbed another large onion ring.

  “I want to take that as a compliment, but you’re making it very difficult with that sour look on your face,” I said.

  He, too, leaned back. “Let’s just take it slow, okay? You have a tendency to … rush to conclusions.”

  “I do not!” I said hotly.

  Now he smiled.

  “Well, sometimes I do, but those conclusions are usually right.”

  Now he raised one eyebrow, a skill I’d never been able to master.

  I stood my ground. “Seventy-five percent of the time at least.”

  The waitress interrupted with two Reuben sandwiches, piled high with corned beef and sauerkraut, and crinkly French fries that were just as hot and tasty as the onion rings. Our conversation turned to insignificant things—old houses, old songs, old poets, and old games—from baseball to mahjong. We were too young for all this, but our pasts were somehow steeped with it, maybe from old books, maybe from this old town. It didn’t really matter, because we both understood, and neither one of us had to explain.

  A couple of the old men were shaking their heads and laughing as they talked to Harry, who was wiping glasses and hanging them above the bar. By contrast, Harry’s face was rather serious and set. I stopped listening to Lenny for a moment so I could catch what was being said.

  “There ain’t been nothing like that in these parts ever, Harry,” said the laughing man. He wore a red and white cap and under his overalls a red shirt, stretched tightly over his large belly.