The Campus Murders
Who bludgeoned the co-ed and killed the dean?
To find out, McCall had to risk riots. Yippies and the dark mysteries of today’s student unrest...
1
McCall was accustomed to police resentment, but one look at Pearson’s frozen face told him that this chief of police was going to pose special problems. His politeness was painful.
“Have a seat, Mr. McCall.”
The visitor’s chair was straight, hard, and cramped for a man of McCall’s size, which was not large. But the chair was uncomfortable not by accident. Nothing in this office happened by accident. Pearson had green eyes that looked as if they had been boiled in salt water.
“So you’re Governor Holland’s man Friday.”
“You left out the six other days, chief,” McCall said with a friendly smile.
Chief Pearson did not smile back. “You’re a pretty tough guy, I hear.”
“Not really. I don’t care for violence. Do you?”
“It’s not what I like, Mr. McCall. It’s what my duty calls for.”
“I’m glad you’re a man who takes his responsibilities seriously,” McCall said. “That’s going to make my job easier.”
The boiled eyes looked at him.
“I’m glad you brought that up,” Pearson said. “Just what does bring you to Tisquanto?”
“The trouble at the college, for one thing.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” The chief permitted himself a smile of unbelief. “What’s happened to Sam Holland? He used to be a pretty tough guy himself. Now he sits in that office of his upstate and jitters like a little old lady just because a bunch of snotnose college kids make like great big conspirators. Look, Mr. McCall, in my job, in my time, I’ve handled everything on that campus from what they used to call hazing to a fraternity ruckus where the boys had to have the beer flushed out of their tummies with stomach pumps.”
“From what I hear, chief, this isn’t quite the same thing.”
“Sure it’s not. But I’m handling it. Tisquanto’s a good town. And it’s my town.”
“Nobody’s trying to take it away from you,” McCall said with another friendly smile.
“Then what are you doing here?”
McCall did not answer. He liked to feel his way in one of these things, where virtually everything was an unknown; he had found that the less he said the less he muddied events.
As he’d predicted to himself, Chief Pearson could not stand silence. “I’m not saying there’s no trouble,” he said. “Some of these kids are just out-and-out commie revolutionaries, I swear to God! I don’t know where they come up with these ideas. Most of them come from good solid homes, from good solid people, which you’d think couldn’t produce kids like these in a thousand years. But you can tell Governor Holland not to fret his head. If that’s what you’re here for, Mr. McCall, you can go right on back to whatever you were doing before the Governor sicked you onto me.”
“There’s something else,” McCall said.
This time it was Pearson who was silent. He had a ferret face to go with his teddy-bear bottom; it sharpened wonderfully, sniffing for danger.
“This Laura Thornton disappearance,” McCall said.
The pencil in Pearson’s fist struck the stainless steel water bottle on the desk and bounced to the linoleum. As it bounced Pearson bounced, too, to his feet.
“Look here,” the chief exploded. “There’s absolutely no need you being here, McCall. Absolutely none! Not about that. You hear me?”
“We’ve apparently got off on the wrong foot, chief,” McCall said. “Why don’t you sit down and cool it? I didn’t come to Tisquanto to step on anybody’s toes, or usurp your prerogatives, or do anything but observe what’s going on for the private information of the governor. You’ve got a job, chief, so have I. And mine is Assistant to the Governor for Special Affairs — or, to put it plainly, Sam Holland’s troubleshooter. Between the goings-on on campus and this disappearance of a girl student, the governor’s worried. And you know my credentials — they give me carte blanche anywhere in the state. If you don’t want to honor them, just say so and I’ll report that to the governor. He’ll take if from there.”
Pearson glared at him. He had returned to his overstuffed chair at McCall’s suggestion, and he seemed to be struggling with the impulse to jump out of it again. But he mastered the impulse.
“All
“Let’s hope she does. Just the same, I’d like what information you have. I understand she hasn’t been seen since Friday. Today is Wednesday. That’s a long time.”
“For the kids these days? She’s probably shacked up with her boyfriend somewhere, turning on with LSD or something.”
“Oh, she has a steady boyfriend?”
“A creep named Damon Wilde.”
“What does this Wilde boy say?”
“Look, Mr. McCall. Why don’t you talk to the two officers working on the Thornton girl’s case? They’ll give you all the information available.”
“Who are they?”
“Lieutenant Long and Sergeant Oliver.”
“Where do I find them?”
“Long’s across the hall.”
McCall rose. “Thanks, chief.”
“One thing,” Pearson said. McCall looked down at him. The man looked blue with cold; it had a chilling effect on his surroundings. “Maybe you ought to wise me up, Mr. McCall. There’s something in this that don’t smell kosher to me. This Thornton girl is Brett Thornton’s daughter. Thornton’s trying to take the party renomination away from Governor Holland. Everybody in the state knows they’re enemies. What’s Holland’s angle? What’s he so anxious to find Thornton’s kid for?”
“That,” McCall said, “is a crack I don’t like!” He felt the old fury rising and fought it down. He had it pretty well under control these days except where Sam Holland’s interests were concerned. The governor called it his one weakness.
“No offense,” Chief Pearson said coldly. “But we’re not exactly a bunch of hicks in Tisquanto, Mr. McCall, no matter how they regard us in the capital. We keep score. What’s behind this?”
“Nothing! Thornton and Holland are political enemies, true, but they’ve always respected each other as men. If the governor can help find Thornton’s daughter, he very much wants to do so.”
“If you say so. But better sit down again, Mr. McCall. I’ve got a few more things on my chest about what’s going on at the college.”
McCall sat down again. Apparently Pearson was having second thoughts.
“Actually, the situation is pretty bad. Wade’s half out on his mind, and Floyd Gunther is as nervous as a mother bird.” Wolfe Wade was president of the college, and Floyd Gunther was dean of men.
“There have been threats against the administration.”
“Personal threats?”
“Especially against Dean Gunther.”
“Anonymous, I suppose.”
“Hell, no. They carry signs on their picket lines — bold as brass. We’ve had them in for questioning, but of course they’re smart enough to avoid a charge we can make stick. The truth is, we’re sitting on a powder keg here, Mr. McCall. We can handle it, all right — don’t get me wrong — but on second thought maybe it’s just as well the governor knows the real situation. We’re expecting anything.”
“How many students are involved in the nasty stuff?”
“A small group, relatively. Or rather a number of different small groups.”
“Hippies? Yippies?”
“And kooks and agitators and Lord knows what else. Some of the hippie crowd are okay, though they all turn my stomach.”
“What’s their beef?”
“Who knows? More say in administration, the right to pick the curriculum — you know, it’s countrywide. They come on hard at the sight of a blue uniform, start throwing things. The other day I thought they’d tear down the administration building stone by stone. So far we’ve handled them without too much trouble. I figure to keep it that way. You can tell the governor.”
McCall rose. “I’ll talk to Long and Oliver.”
Pearson cleared his throat. “You seen President Wade?”
“Not yet.”
The chief reached for one of his phones. He began to dial. He did not look up or wave goodbye or even grunt.
Dismissed, McCall thought. He did not let the grin show until he reached the hall.
Tisquanto’s police headquarters smelled like police buildings the country over. Dried sweat, stale cigarette smoke, germicide, and a certain metallic odor that defied identification. The walls were the universal pale dirty green.
Two officers stood in an open doorway across the hall. McCall asked one of them, a beanpole in plain clothes, where he might find Lieutenant Long.
“I’m Long.”
“I’m Micah McCall, Governor Holland’s special assistant.”
Long’s marbly eyes immediately went into hiding. A pretty girl typing at a desk inside the room looked up with interest, caught McCall’s glance, flushed, and bent back to her machine. The man with Long came alive.
“Sergeant Oliver,” Lieutenant Long said. McCall shook Oliver’s hand. Long kept his to himself.
“Now,” the Lieutenant said. “What can I do for the governor’s special assistant?” He made it sound like an off-color joke.
“I’m here on this Laura Thornton disappearance,” McCall said. “Chief Pearson said you would tell me whatever you know.”
“He did?” said Long. Long was a sneerer; his cheeks hollowed and his thin mustache bunched a little. Everything about him was drawn out. I can’t picture having a beer with this guy, McCall thought, or exchanging a confidence; I can imagine how he strikes these college kids. Long began rocking on his heels like a house dick on a dull night. “Do tell.”
“Look,” McCall said. “Let’s not make it a war, lieutenant. I’ve been all through that scene with your chief. I’m no J. Edgar Hoover. I don’t know a damned thing about the scientific stuff; I’m sure any first-grade detective on your payroll could do a better job of tailing or following up a hard lead. I’m really not a detective at all. I’m more of a hound dog. I smell ’em out. Navigate by the seat of my pants and an occasional squint at the stars. I’m not going to look over your shoulder, lieutenant, or get under your feet. Just tell me what you’ve got so far and I’ll jump out of your hair.”
“We don’t have much,” Sergeant Oliver put in hurriedly.
McCall turned his attention on the sergeant. Oliver looked human. Medium height, face round, bunches of crow’s feet around the eyes. He wore tired-looking clothes, too. Whatever else he is, he’s not on the take. An honest cop?
Sergeant Oliver avoided glancing at his superior.
“In fact, what we have we can give you pretty quick,” Lieutenant Long said with a smile.
McCall immediately wished he wouldn’t. His smile was worse than his sneer. “I’d appreciate it if—”
“I’ll bet you would,” Long sneered. Maybe he was taking a night seminar in Immediate Assumptions. “I would myself. But the fact is we haven’t got a goddam thing. Nothing. She’s just gone up in smoke. Or made a clean getaway, if she’s done anything. We don’t even have a line on that theory. She could be anywhere, as a result of anything.”
“You think she’s dead, lieutenant?”
“Who cares what I think? You ask me straight out, I’ll say yes, I think so. But what good is an opinion, even a lieutenant’s? Where she is, in what condition, is anybody’s guess.”
“Who saw her last?”
“Her roommate, a girl named Nina Hobart. On Friday. And that’s it.”
“What about Laura’s boyfriend? The Wilde boy.”
“He says he last saw her some time Thursday. He doesn’t seem concerned any. He’s probably lying, but we haven’t been able to crack his cool. We’re working on it is all I can say.” He rocked on his heels. Still sneering. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it, McCall thought.
Sergeant Oliver said nothing.
“And that’s all you’ve got, lieutenant?”
“You want a written report? Look, that’s all we’ve got, and if you’ll let us go back to work we’ll try to get more. Okay?”
“Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it. Why don’t you stroll around and take in our lovely campus? ‘Oh, dear gray elms of yesteryear’ and all that jazz. You might even catch a protest meeting or two.”
McCall stared at him. Long’s squint held steady, baleful.
McCall turned on his heel. The hell with Long. And Pearson, too. Sam Holland had warned him: “Don’t expect a lot from the Tisquanto police, Mike. Pearson’s a hard case.” It checked out, all right.
There was plenty to do before he could dig his teeth into the situation — singular or plural. A place to stay. Then the administration building; he would have to talk with President Wade. Most of all he wanted to look up the dean of men.
“Mr. McCall?”
He turned in the slanting morning sunlight at the entrance. Sergeant Oliver was coming after him at a fast shuffle.
“Yes, sergeant?”
Oliver maneuvered him away from the doorway to a spot where they were not visible from the hall.
“I don’t like to step on the lieutenant’s toes, Mr. McCall,” the sergeant said. “He’s a little touchy. The truth is, I’m on this thing maybe more than he is. I think this Damon Wilde boy knows a lot more than he’s telling, but I don’t believe anything’s happened to the girl — certainly not anything drastic.” The sergeant’s surprising baritone lowered even more. “There’s just nothing to tell you right now. That’s on the level.”
“Thanks,” McCall said.
Oliver nodded and stepped back.
McCall hit the sunshine. He had rented a black Ford sedan at the airport. As he slipped behind the wheel he glanced back at the entrance to the police building. Sergeant Oliver was still standing there, watching him.
On the way to police headquarters McCall had spotted what looked like a pleasant place to stay. Called the Red Harbor Inn, it stood at a bend in the river, just outside the business district. He avoided motels when he could, and he associated most hotels with the smell of dust. The modern ones reminded him of hospitals. Inns were most to his taste.
A fender-bent silver sedan raced past him. It was plastered with flower cutouts. The he-driver wore shoulder-length hair and a goatee. A girl who looked like a statue sat beside him as they careened down the street. The sidewalks were crowded with students of both sexes — long hair and beards were frequent, a lot of the girls wore wide-bottomed pants, and some of the boys necklaces. Didn’t anyone go to class?
McCall turned off the main drag and took a side street which soon brought him to the Red Harbor Inn. He carried his bag across the parking strip to the rustic-nautical entrance and went in. The Inn was a two-storied building of gray shakes with red trim, surrounded by old elms and oaks and chestnuts. It was a fine spring morning.
At the desk in the shadowy lobby, which smelled pleasantly of malt and cheese, he signed the register. He paid no attention to the dark bar in the adjoining room, not even filing it for future reference. Alcohol was not his bag.
“Fabulous morning,” the clerk said, a small man with big round eyeglasses.
“Beg pardon?” McCall said, cupping his ear. It discouraged further conversation. The clerk rang for a bellhop.
Then he was in a comforter sort of room, all maple and pine and chintz curtains, the kind McCall liked best. It could be a happy omen, but he doubted it.
He tipped the bellhop, latched the door, took off his jacket and tie, and lay down catercornered on the bed. His mind was keyed to questions. His reception at Tisquanto police headquarters bothered him not at all. He had paid his courtesy call, made his presence known, and that was that.
McCall took stock.
First, there was this trouble at Tisquanto State College. It wasn’t just innocent “unrest,” in spite of Chief Pearson’s first allegations. McCall had done some homework before coming. Along with reports of widespread dormitory sex, the spreading use of LSD, marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates, and other drugs (at least one documented case involved STP; it had sent a girl student over the brink into a mental hospital, where the prognosis was poor), there was outright, outspoken defiance of the Establishment, threats against the administrative authority, a minor revolt of some of the younger faculty, and at least one medium-sized campus riot that had hospitalized ten students and one of Pearson’s officers.
“I want you to fly down there and check it out, Mike,” Governor Holland said. “See if it’s as bad as reports claim. Or if it’s worse. Finish up that Mafia report first. Next week will do.”
But the next afternoon the governor called him in again.
“A complication, Mike, one that might be nasty. You’ll have to leave for Tisquanto right away. Turn the Mafia report over to Bill.”
The governor was worried.
“What’s this about, sir?”
“Brett Thornton just left.”
“Thornton — here?”
“Surprised me, too. It was obviously not a social call. He came to me for help.”
“To you? It must be a personal matter.”
“It is. Characteristically, of course, he doesn’t ask for my help, he demands it.”
“He threatened you? With what?”
“He said if I didn’t help him he’d use my ‘negligence’ — his word — in his nomination fight against me. Of course, it’s silly — I’d help him in a matter like this under any circumstances. But he’s under great stress, Mike. I feel sorry for him.”
“What trouble is he in?”
“It’s his daughter. You met Laura once, I think. She’s in her sophomore year at Tisquanto State. The girl is missing, hasn’t been seen since last Friday, Thornton says. He’s half out of his mind.”
Brett Thornton was a highly successful corporation lawyer and Sam Holland’s chief opponent in the state party organization. Governor Holland was up for renomination for the gubernatorial plum. Ordinarily his incumbency would have made renomination automatic. But the necessity to raise taxes, statewide riots in the ghettos of the cities, and other hard issues had made him the target of the opposition, and he faced a fight for the renomination from the conservative element of his party, of which Thornton was the outstanding figure.
They had been friends for many years. But the political bug had bitten Thornton, and with his bold, adamant, opinionated nature he swept friendship off the board. It had hurt Sam Holland, a sentimental man.
“Why did he come to you?” McCall demanded.
“You, Mike.”
“Me?”
The governor grinned. “Somewhere he’s developed a high opinion of your talents. Or maybe your publicity has oversold you.” Then his mouth went grim. “The police seem to be getting nowhere, he says. He wants you to find Laura. Get to the bottom of it.”
“Has he any idea—”
“No. He’s simply staggered. Brett’s like most parents these days — we think we know our children until one day we wake up and find they’re strangers. He can’t even imagine what’s happened to her, except that he’s sure it isn’t her fault, whatever it is. Me, I’m not so sure, Mike. Not with the way young people are today. God knows what you’ll turn up. Do you suppose you can do this discreetly?”
“I can try. Why did he threaten you?”
“I’ve never seen Brett so shaken up. I’d like you to do it, Mike, for Laura’s sake. I’ve known her since she was a little girl. She still calls me Uncle Sam.”
“Do you have a photo, governor? I don’t remember her.”
Holland produced a Polaroid color closeup of a sweet-faced girl with straight dark hair falling below her shoulders. She had direct blue eyes and a winsome smile. She looked about nineteen.
“Pretty,” McCall said. “Any facts at all?”
“She phoned her mother last Thursday afternoon saying she’d be home for the weekend Friday night. Thinking back on the conversation, Mrs. Thornton is inclined to believe Laura was unhappy about something — more than that, worried. She hadn’t sounded like her usual bubbling self, Mrs. Thornton says. When she didn’t come home Friday night, Thornton called the college, but no one was able to locate her. The police were notified, they instituted an immediate investigation, and by Sunday night the girl was officially declared a missing person.”
“How about boyfriends? A girl as pretty as this must be swamped.”
“Not surprisingly, the Thorntons know very little about Laura’s social life. The only boy they knew about was one she had once brought home to meet them, Damon Wilde, who also attends Tisquanto State. Neither Brett nor Mrs. Thornton liked him, Brett says. Arrogant, erratic, too demonstrative with Laura — remember, this is Thornton’s characterization. He put the boy down as a troublemaker, a radical in student politics.”
“I can imagine how that went down with Thornton,” McCall said. “If Laura brought him home, she must have liked him a lot.”
“Apparently she did. Anyway,” Governor Holland said, “Thornton talked with Laura’s roommate, a girl named Hobart, Nina Hobart, but Miss Hobart threw no light on Laura’s disappearance. Nor did Damon Wilde.”
McCall flew to Tisquanto early the next morning.
There was still an hour before noon.
McCall unpacked, went downstairs, and drove across town to the campus.
The last time he had seen Tisquanto State College had been before the modernization boom, when the buildings were still the original ivy-covered, blackened red brick with white trim, and there was a bell in a belfry that tolled the hours. Now the traditional old buildings cowered in the shadows of immense glass-and-steel office-type buildings, almost forgotten. The beautiful old landscaping had largely vanished, although there were still enough lawns and winding walks and ancient trees to bridge the past. McCall preferred his memories.
He checked signs and made his way to the towering administration building.
Students were all over the campus, and McCall looked them over carefully. Most of them were conventionally clad — the timeless open-throated shirt-and-pullover combination of colleges down the years, and for the girls the skirt-and-blouse look that varies from generation to generation only in the length of the skirts. This was the short-skirt generation, which McCall found very pleasant.
But dotting this cake like bits of glacéed fruit were the exotics of the hippie generation, whites and blacks — stylists of the far-out, psychedelic color studies in cloth, ponchos, beads, Nehru jackets, long-chained necklaces on the men, American Indian outfits on some of the girls... a riot, McCall thought, not without humor. One long-haired young man swathed in a royal blue velvet cloak stood in the middle of a walk flaunting a sign across his chest that said I AM A STUDENT, DO NOT FOLD, BEND, OR MUTILATE.
There were signs on young people all over the place — KEEP ON THE GRASS — WHO’S AFRAID OF BIG BAD WOLFE? — TURN ON DEMOCRACY, TURN OFF AUTHORITARIANISM — and the like. One sign on the back of a boy solemnly picketing the steps of the administration building said simply: SMOKE POT.
A head of auburn hair bobbed into view on the other side of a tall privet hedge. Something inside McCall bobbed with it. There had been an auburn-haired girl on the campus of his youth... but when this girl came around the hedge, the auburn turned to carrot, and the girl was a freckle-faced plain Jane. McCall laughed and stepped around the boy with the SMOKE POT sign. A fat, broken-nosed young man in too tight jeans and an orange sweater, with streaming blond hair, chased a miniskirted girl. The girl was shrieking with real fear. The boy hurled a book at her and shouted an obscenity.
“Isn’t love beautiful?” the boy with the sign said.
McCall entered the building. Five minutes later the President of Tisquanto State College rose from behind his gleaming desk. He did not offer to shake hands. “Well, Mr. McCall,” Wolfe Wade said. “Doesn’t the governor trust us to take care of our own affairs?”
2
Wolfe Wade was a big man, a tall man, high on beef. He looked as if he either were a heavy drinker or suffered from high blood pressure. He was smartly, even sportily, dressed in tones of gray, as if to go with his thick gray hair; there was even a certain grayness about his lips. Success spurted from every pore. But his eyes were bloodshot and there were lines of fatigue at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
McCall decided to put him on the defensive. He stuck out his hand. Wade hesitated, then shook it. The man’s hand felt cold, fat, and dry, like raw pork out of a refrigerator.
“Sit down, Mr. McCall. Cigar?”
“I’m not smoking this week, Mr. Wade,” McCall said.
“Oh.” The president of the college laughed uncertainly. “I see. Yes, I’ve had my difficulties in that direction, too. Really, Mr. McCall, I must say I’m surprised.”
“Surprised?”
“I mean, by your appearing like this. I find it hard to believe, with what’s going on all over the state, that Governor Holland is stepping into our affairs.”
“I assure you the governor sent me, if that’s what you mean, Mr. Wade.”
In the silence McCall looked about. It was an MGM version of an office, all done in high-polished ebony, straight lines, and lemon-yellow leather. The books looked out of place.
“I share your dislike,” President Wade said suddenly. “The architects hired by the state didn’t bother to consult me when they planned this building and its decor. I prefer the old-time religion, as it were. The good old days, if you’ll forgive the cliché.”
“Is it possible, Mr. Wade, that that’s what’s the matter?”
The bloodshot eyes looked wary. “I don’t follow.”
“The good old days. These aren’t the good old days. Good or bad, they’re the new days. They’re today. Maybe that’s what’s got the students up in arms.”
With all its splendor, the room exuded the faintest odor of mothballs. It puzzled McCall.
“No doubt.” President Wade had begun drumming with his manicured fingernails on the glossy desktop. “At least that’s what people keep telling me. Yet I’m convinced that the fundamentals of a college education remain constant, regardless of changing tastes and attitudes. What was your alma mater, Mr. McCall?”
“Northwestern.”
“Then you must realize what we’re trying to cope with.” Wade had a naturally heavy voice that made everything he said sound slightly threatening. “What did you study, may I ask?”
“Law.”
“And you’re from the Chicago area, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m rarely wrong — detected it in your speech.” Wade’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. He’s stalling, McCall thought. Avoiding the issue he knows is coming. “From your build I assume you were an athlete?”
“Played a little football.”
“At what position?”
“Halfback.” McCall stared at him. “If there are no other questions about me, Mr. Wade, one of my reasons for visiting Tisquanto is Laura Thornton.”
Wolfe Wade’s face turned a shade beefier. “Laura Thornton. Yes. The girl student who’s taken off for somewhere.”
“Is that statement based on information, Mr. Wade, or is it an assumption?”
“Well, hardly information. I mean, what else could it be?”
“A great many things.”
“Yes. I suppose so. Well, I don’t know anything about it, Mr. McCall. See Miss Vance. She’s the dean of women. Aren’t the police taking care of this?”
“Are you really as indifferent as you sound, Mr. Wade? Somehow, I don’t make you out the unconcerned type.”
“I strike you as unconcerned?” Wade stared.
“You seem to me to be avoiding things.”
The heavy gray brows rose. “Really? I had no idea. I’m very much concerned, Mr. McCall. It’s just that—” he looked down at his desk — “well, I don’t like thinking the girl’s in serious trouble. There are so many changes... all this drug abuse — this preoccupation with sex... it’s got to stop. I won’t stand for rioting, I tell you! This is an institution of higher learning, not an urban ghetto!” He was almost shouting. He began to pound the desk with his puffy fist, little rigidly controlled poundings. “I know what’s best for them. Their demands are outrageous — insolent — insulting — I won’t stand for this sort of thing. They won’t trample all over me and my college! Students — junior faculty — demanding a voice in administrative affairs!” His voice, choked with impotence and rage, sputtered out.
McCall studied him. He had heard that Wolfe Wade was a hard-line educator of the old school, but watching him, listening to him across a desk, he wondered that the students didn’t tear the campus up out of sheer frustration.
“I’m sorry,” Wade said with difficulty. “My nerves these days... yes, yes, Laura Thornton. You’d be well advised to see Dean Vance, Mr. McCall. Frankly, even aside from this business of the missing student, your visit isn’t entirely unexpected. I knew the governor would be concerned. I’ve been sitting here this morning mulling things over and not liking my thoughts.” He shook his big head. “I don’t like it, Mr. McCall. I don’t like any of it.”
“I’ll run along. Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Wade.”
“Any time.”
McCall left Wade slumped behind his magnate’s desk. In the outer office the president’s secretary, a sharp-eyed woman of forty, was standing by her desk holding an open box of mothballs.
“Is President Wade all right?” she asked anxiously. “He sounds so upset. He takes these things so much to heart.” He was watching the mothballs. She was rattling them around in the box. Were they turning on with mothballs now?
McCall left and went on a hunt for the office of the dean of women. He never did find out what the mothballs were for. Probably Wade’s ideas.
“Dean Vance is busy now,” the secretary in the outer office of the dean of women said. “Oh, here’s Miss Cohan, Dean Vance’s assistant. This gentleman says he’s Mr. McCall, Miss Cohan. From the governor’s office.”
The first thing McCall noticed was that she had auburn hair — the real McCoy this time, not out of a bottle or a vegetable bin. The rich locks were shoulder length, and his first absurd impulse was to go over and bury his nose in them. It was thick, glowing, honest-to-goodness auburn hair.
The next thing was her eyes. They were a sort of Alice blue, almost violet, big and direct and... well... you had to say it. A total gas.
He completed the inventory rapidly. Pretty as sin. On the Irish side. Turned-up little nose. Lips asking for it. A good stubborn chin. Slim but shapely, good breasts, dress short but not extreme, marvelous legs. Watch your step with this babe, brother...
“I do believe I’ve heard of you, Mr. McCall,” she said, and her voice made everything perfect. Low and sexy but honestly so, a woman’s voice as it should be. “I’m Kathryn Cohan. What brings you to our little corner of hell? Don’t bother to tell me — I was almost afraid to ask. The dean’s tied up right now. We can talk over here.” She went over to a modest desk stacked with folders and papers, sat down behind it, and nodded to a plain chair nearby. “Won’t you sit?”
“You’re beautiful,” McCall said, and sat.
“Now I
“He’d be a fool if he didn’t,” McCall said.
“Oh?” The milky Irish skin reddened the least bit.
“I don’t mean to scare you, Miss Cohan. I don’t go around scaring women or children. It’s just that you kind of took me by surprise. May I smoke?”
“Certainly.”
“I forgot. I’ve stopped smoking.” He looked sheepish, and she smiled. “Well, I might as well talk it over with you. The governor has asked me—”
“The riots?”
“Well, primarily Laura Thornton. Do you have any information?”
“On her disappearance?”
“Yes, and also what she’s like. Boyfriends. Enemies. Anything... excuse me. Your hair stops me cold. It’s gorgeous.”
She stared at him. Her lashes were so long that he wondered if they were removable, and then felt disloyal for wondering. What was it with this babe? She opened a drawer of her desk, took out a pair of heavy dark-rimmed eyeglasses, and slipped them over her nose.
“Now I can see you,” she said. “I like your hair, too. Thick and black, with a touch of salt. There. Can we get down to cases now, Mr. McCall?”
He felt ashamed.
“Laura. What do you know about her?”
“Not a great deal. I know her only slightly. She’s no kook. On the serious side, in fact. Taking liberal arts. Good student. Strong desire to paint — I’ve seen some of her work. She has originality. A terrific way with color. Especially light — she can paint light on canvas so that, well, it’s real.”
“Boyfriends?”
“Pretty much this Wilde boy, about whom I’m sure you’ve heard.” She frowned. “He’s kind of an oddball. She’s too heavy for Damon, I’d say.”
“You think Wilde knows anything?”
She shrugged. The glasses slipped down her nose. She left them there. He liked that.
“Do you have any opinion as to what happened to the girl, Miss Cohan?” When she hesitated, he added, “Based on anything at all. Even feminine intuition.”
“I don’t think that’s a fair question to ask me, Mr. McCall.”
“Then you do have a hunch?”
“Let’s say I’d rather not guess.” She turned, he thought, with relief. “I think Dean Vance is free now.”
A well-built, rather good-looking man in his forties, with thinning hair, hurried out of the inner office. The glance he gave Kathryn Cohan was preoccupied, and he seemed not to notice McCall at all. Nevertheless he waved, said, “Hello, Katie,” and left briskly.
“Would you come in, Mr. McCall?” the assistant said.
A catastrophe had apparently struck the office of the dean of women. File drawers hung open like stuck-out tongues. Three chairs stood about in an arrangement that no amount of art could have calculated; it was the beauty of sheer chance. There were too many pictures and diplomas and certificates on the walls, most of them crooked, and the floor was almost a design of crushed cigarette butts; blue smoke hung like fog over the desk. The desk cringed under the weight of high piles of manila folders and papers.
“And who is this, Katie?” Dean Vance said.
She was a tenor. McCall’s first impression was that she had been fashioned by some drunken sculptor out of putty and flung against a wall, picked up, and carelessly reshaped. She had a doughy face out of which shone two great black and quite beautiful eyes. Her body descended from the head in waves of fat, overcontained by the hideous red dress she was wearing. She smoked in spurts of energy; she was a mess; and her eyes made up for everything.
“Did I hear you say McCall?”
“Yes, dean,” Kathryn Cohan said.
“Then he’s the Angel of the Lord the grapevine has already informed me about,” Dean Vance said, seizing his hand and shaking the life out of it. “Sit down, Mr. McCall, and don’t bother to tell me what the governor is worried about. I can guess.” She flung herself into her swivel chair and motioned him impatiently into one of the visitor’s chairs. “It’s our student troubles, isn’t it?”
“Partly.”
“He’s here about Laura Thornton, too,” Miss Cohan said.
“Really? That’s interesting.”
“Why, dean?” asked McCall.
“It’s interesting that the governor should concern himself about one student, when the place is crawling with defectors. Somebody just threw a trash can through one of the windows at McNiel Hall. Why? Nobody knows. Just for the hell of it, I guess. There’s something in the air this morning. It’s like coffee, you can smell it brewing. Probably another riot in the breeze.” She ground the cigarette in an immense flat lavender ceramic ash tray, and immediately lit another from a square, mannish case. “You may be able to give Governor Holland an eyewitness report, Mr. McCall. Now what can I tell you about Laura Thornton?”
“What you know about her, Dean Vance.”
“She’s a sexy one. They can’t fool me, these shy types. It’s in Laura’s eyes. She’s making it with somebody. That smug look women get — an I-made-it sort of look — self-satisfied, you know? But so what? She’s a nice girl. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. Personally, I don’t think anything has. Katie disagrees.”
McCall looked at Miss Cohan. Miss Cohan flushed her Irish flush.
“Katie thinks something pretty bad has happened to the girl.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” McCall said.
“I’m sorry,” Kathryn said. “I thought you should work it out for yourself.”
“What makes you think it’s bad, Miss Cohan?”
“A feeling. Nothing more than that.”
Dean Vance shot smoke like a disgusted dragon. “Feminine intuition! It could be, Katie, but I like something more substantial. Laura is pretty much sex-obsessed, Mr. McCall, and if I were you I’d concentrate on Damon Wilde. Her shacking up with him is a fact. If anything’s happened to her, it could be because she ditched Damon and shacked up with somebody else.”
“Any evidence of that?”
“No. But I’m glad you’re here, Mr. McCall. It’s been days, and she’s still missing. I can’t see that the police are doing a thing. Katie will fill you in on whatever you want to know about Laura’s record and activities here, and perhaps you’d better check with Floyd Gunther, our dean of men. That was Dean Gunther who just left my office. He’s pretty upset by all this.”
“Thank you, Dean.” McCall rose. “I won’t keep you.”
“Rubbish. Sit down. It isn’t often I get to talk to a man of your age who’s as attractive as you are.” Ina Vance lit a fresh cigarette from the ember of her last, scratched her wild black head, leaned back, and smiled like a cherub. “Stick around, Mr. McCall, and you’ll get to know the lot of them as Katie and I do.”
“The student body?”
“Our student body, yes. Oh, Christ, I shouldn’t carry on like this! We have plenty of good students, kids as conventional as bathwater, who are here for instruction as well as fun and games. But we have the new breed, too — the troublemakers. The ones with murder in their hot little hearts.”
“I’ll see Dean Gunther.” McCall rose again.
“Some escapade is my guess,” Dean Vance said. “She’ll turn up. Does that satisfy you, Mr. McCall?”
“No.”
She smiled at him. He smiled back.
“I like you,” she said. “Come see me again.”
“Thank you, Dean Vance.”
In the outer office Katie Cohan took off her heavy glasses. From being merely adorable she immediately became bewitching again. “Would you like me to show you where Dean Gunther’s office is, Mr. McCall?”
“Does little Timmy Duck run after Mama Duck?”
“Mr. McCall! That doesn’t sound much like a gubernatorial troubleshooter.” Her cheeks were flaming. “It’s just down the hall, really. But I can use the exercise.”
“You,” said McCall devoutly, “can’t use a thing. You’re perfect.”
“Is McCall Scottish or Irish?”
“Which do you think?”
“Irish. No Scotsman would be so blatantly romantic.”
They swung down the hall side by side without further conversation. McCall was beautifully at peace. If not for the girl’s disappearance, this would be a pleasure.
Katie touched his arm. “Good luck.”
He was very conscious of her as he went into Dean Gunther’s outer office.
It was empty, and he crossed to the door marked PRIVATE and knocked.
“Come in, Mr. McCall.”
McCall went in. The well-built, good-looking man with the thinning hair was leaning back in his chair, big hands folded over his abdomen. He was looking quizzical.
“Been expecting you,” he said.
“I didn’t think you noticed me back there in Dean Vance’s outer office.”
“Noticing people without seeming to do so is the essence of my profession,” Dean Gunther said. “I should be surprised if it weren’t yours, too. Well, sit down, Mr. McCall. It isn’t every day Governor Holland sends his bloodhound to our campus.”
For all the raillery Gunther was nervous. He had a harried look, as if hunters were after him. He was the bow-tie type — in a previous generation he would have parted his hair in the mathematical middle. He rose from his chair behind the leather-topped desk and leaned across it to shake hands. He had a good handshake. He waved McCall to a chair, and they both sat down.
“Now maybe we’ll get some action. I’ve heard you’re here not only about the student trouble but also about Laura Thornton. Forgive me for sounding like an old fogy, but I don’t know what our colleges are coming to. It’s all anyone can do to exercise some control over these people. If you can call it control.” He scowled. “Something drastic has got to be done, Mr. McCall. Frankly, I don’t know what the solution is.”
“Let’s take one thing at a time, Dean Gunther,” McCall said. “About this Thornton girl. Her father is understandably in a sweat over this, and your local police don’t seem to have got anywhere. Governor Holland sent me here as a personal favor to Mr. Thornton.”
“I don’t pretend to understand political people,” Gunther said, shaking his head. “Forgive me if I can’t equate the temporary disappearance of a single student with the gravity of a general situation that has turned this college into a battlefield. Anyway, I’m sure it ties into it somewhere.”
“You mean the girl’s being missing is a result of what’s going on on campus?”
“I don’t see how it can fail to be. ‘Student unrest’! What an understatement. Tisquanto’s a play yard for hippies and Yippies and lefties and commies, a training ground for commandos, and how is a mere cadre of administrators expected to cope? We try to keep the trouble under wraps so as not to disturb the community. Campus agitators are thick as rats in a dump. There’s no peace — ever. They claim they want to improve education. What a farce!” he snorted. “What they want is turmoil — anarchy, Mr. McCall!” He slicked what was left of his hair back. “Student power. Academic freedom. Bull! The decent — the clean — students take it in the neck. You can’t cross the campus without having stupid handbills forced on you advocating everything from better desserts in the Student Union to violent revolution. Academic freedom! They want everything their own way. They’re a bunch of screaming children with bricks in their little fists.” He paused to wipe a fleck of spittle off his lip. “Mr. McCall, we have an average of two rapes a week here at ’Squanto, would you believe that? Just last week a pretty young librarian working late in the stacks was attacked by a masked hoodlum. She didn’t report it. A friend found her at home in hysterics, got the story out of her, and reported it to Dean Vance. She fought the boy off — it was a boy, she insists, not a man. He satisfied himself with her like an animal three times in an hour. She was a virgin, and she’s Roman Catholic, and she says that at first she fought. But then, she told her friend, she found herself responding, going wild. She had several orgasms. Afterwards, of course, she broke down with guilt and remorse. At this moment she’s in a sanitarium, practically a mental case.”
“Has the rapist been found?”
“Are you kidding? No more than any of the others. I cite this, Mr. McCall, not as an exceptional example but as symptomatic of what’s happening on this campus. We’ve had to put eight more men on the campus police force.
“Student demands are outrageous. This militant element is drunk with power. And even the ones who aren’t militant among the hippies — the ‘do-your-thing’ crowd, ‘tell-it-like-it-is’...” Dean Gunther shuddered. “I could cheerfully kill the Madison Avenue evil genius who started that ‘like’ syndrome! Anyway, they come to class high on grass, they drop acid, the chronic heads are increasing in number. Property means nothing to them. They never heard of self-discipline, let alone the other kind. Forgive me for running on this way, but I’m fed up.” He ground his teeth. “And helpless.”
“You expect more rioting?” McCall asked. The poor guy was really in a sweat.
“It’s bound to happen. Don’t you know it’s the in thing, Mr. McCall?” He ran his hand over his hair again. “We’re getting right up there with Berkeley and Columbia.”
“What about President Wade? Is he as helpless as he sounds?”
“Certainly he is. We all are! Wolfe still had dreams of the Halls of Ivy and the Groves of Academe, Mr. McCall. It’s where he was raised and got his background. He’s caught in a trap, for all his intelligence and experience. He doesn’t know how to deal with the situation we have here. He’s headed for a breakdown, or a resignation like Kirk of Columbia and Kerr of Berkeley. The students ridicule him.”
“But this troublesome element, I’m told, is a small minority. Can’t the other students help?”
“Some do, but there’s no organization of effort such as the militants display. The conforming students are caught in the current, midstream. If their classes are disrupted, what can they do?”
McCall did not comment. “About Laura, Dean Gunther. I heard that a boy named Damon Wilde is close to her, but denies knowing anything about her disappearance.”
“Those are the allegations. Me, I’m suspicious of everything and everyone these days. Say, what’s your first name?”
“Mike is what my friends call me. Stands for Micah.”
“Mine’s Floyd. How about a drink, Mike? I have a bottle in my desk. For God’s sake don’t tell Wolfe Wade.”
“Sure thing.”
“You have sympathetic ears.”
Gunther produced a quart of bonded stuff. They had two drinks apiece. McCall consciously gave every evidence of enjoyment. He was that rare specimen of adult American, a spare drinker by choice. He simply did not like alcohol. He drank only when his job called for it, or it served some ulterior purpose.
“Mike,” Floyd Gunther said, leaning back, “you sure as hell have a job ahead of you. Damon Wilde isn’t the only hot number in Laura’s book. Two other boys have dated her heavily to my knowledge.”
McCall nodded. He always preferred to keep his mind open, assume nothing until he had every fact, or until some spark set him off.
“Who are they?”
“There’s Perry Eastman. There’s Dennis Sullivan. I know them both, to my regret. Sullivan’s chasing seems rather perfunctory — a because-she’s-there sort of thing. Eastman, however, has been hot after Laura for some time.”
“How do you know all this, Dean? — Floyd?”
Gunther showed his teeth in a grin. They were rather bad teeth. “It’s my business to know, Mike. I wish to hell I were better informed! I can only hope you find her and that she’s all right.”
“What are Eastman and Sullivan like?”
The Dean of Men shrugged. “Sullivan is mixed up in the student agitation. He’s the cocky sort — you find yourself wanting to punch his face in. Perry drinks a lot and I suspect takes drugs. I’ve talked to him about it, but of course he denies it.”
McCall questioned him in depth and soon concluded that the man knew nothing that might help. Gunther seemed under considerable strain, but this was probably because of what was going on.
“Maybe your presence here will accomplish some good,” Gunther said. “It might make them cool it while you’re on campus and give us a breather. But somehow I doubt it. If things don’t improve, one of these days the governor is going to have to call up the National Guard, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” The Dean glanced at his watch, a black-dialed, skin-diver’s chronometer, and McCall rose.
“I’ll be on my way, Floyd. I know you’re busy.”
“It’s not that,” Gunther said quickly. “Perry Eastman’s supposed to see me right about now. Disturbance in class; ridiculing a professor; drinking.”
“It’s lunch time anyway,” McCall said. “And I want to check Laura Thornton’s room. Where do I find the Sigma Alpha Phi house?”
Gunther gave him directions. “How about coming to dinner tonight, Mike? My wife’s a great cook, and we could explore the situation more thoroughly.”
McCall made the usual demurral, the Dean insisted and named eight o’clock. “We eat late these nights,” he said with a forced smile, and McCall turned to leave.
A tall, slat-built, round-shouldered young man was lounging beside a desk in the outer office, smoking.
“Come in, Perry,” Dean Gunther said.
Eastman wore snake-tight Levi’s and an enormous white terrycloth pullover that sagged like a wet horse-blanket. His black hair hung to his round shoulders, and bangs just missed his eyebrows. A brass necklace dangled on his chest. He wore leather sandals over dirty bare feet.
“Hi, Deanie,” Eastman said. He eyed McCall from puffy slits. “What’s with the system today? We getting down to the nitty-gritty?”
McCall stepped into the hall and shut the Dean’s door with a conscious effort at self-control. He was suddenly aware of the generation gap and the surge of aggression in the naked ape.
He thought of President Wolfe Wade and Dean Vance and Dean Gunther and wondered how they stood it.
3
The Sigma Alpha Phi house stood on an elm-guarded street just off campus, a squatty frame building of Victorian vintage with yellow shutters and lots of wooden embroidery and a gallery of windows rubbernecking in the sunshine. The reception room inside reminded McCall of an undersea grotto, blue lights glowing on bluish walls. There were carnivorous-looking plants in fancy tubs (did they eat only males? he wondered), feminine furniture, thick silky rugs; his nose was assailed with bath oils, perfumes, garlic from something cooking, and a not quite successful deodorizer. A slithery young woman with a bad complexion, dressed in a pajama-like East Indian lounging outfit, showed him in.
He explained who he was and asked to see Laura Thornton’s room.
“Naughty-naughty,” the girl said. “No dice, bud. We’re off-limits, according to the Great God Square in the ad building.”
“You’re all perfectly safe from me,” McCall said solemnly. “In my job sex is irrelevant.”
“I’ll bet,” the girl said, looking him over. “Oh, Prissy.”
A tall mannish girl in red bell-bottoms had drifted in to stare at him.
The pimply girl said, “This is Mr. McCall, Prissy. He wants to see Laura’s room.”
“You know that’s impossible, Cuddles,” the tall girl said. She had no hips and almost no breasts, and McCall got a sudden overwhelming charge of sexual hostility from her. Her voice had a point to it, like an icicle. “You’ll have to leave,” she said to McCall.
“Oh, don’t be like that, Priss. Remember the fuzz invasion?”
“I’m a kind of fuzz myself,” McCall said.
“Oh?” the mannish girl said, raising her unplucked eyebrows. “Then I suppose you’ve got credentials. Or something.”
“I should have shown it to you right off.” McCall brought out his shield case, with its impressive special gold governor’s seal. “Will this do?”
“Oh,
“Goodness!” Cuddles said. “Of course not, Priss. I’ll take him up. Follow me, Mr. McCall?” And the girl led him quickly down a blue-suffused hall and up a carpeted staircase in the grand manner. “It’s this one,” she said, stopping at a closed door. “Nina’s not here just now, Mr. McCall, but I guess it’s okay. I mean Nina Hobart, Laura’s roomie.”
“I’m not going to steal anything,” McCall smiled, “if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Oh, I don’t mean anything like that!” She weighed him again, shrugged slightly, opened the door, and pointed. “That’s Laura’s side. Mr. McCall?”
“Yes?”
“Think anything bad’s happened?”
“I certainly hope not. If Miss Hobart gets back while I’m here, please tell her I’d like to see her.”
“Okey-pokey.” She lingered. He stared at her, and she shrugged again and slithered away. He shut the door and took a long look about the room. This was the real beginning of his assignment.
The room was big and airy, with big windows covered with yellow-flowered marquisette curtains which threw a saffron light over everything. The left side of the room was a mess, bed unmade, piled with clothes; a psychedelic-colored rag rug hung over a chair; from an open dresser drawer dangled a black bra. A crude red-lettered poster on the wall above the bed announced: LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF SEXINESS. Another, in violet, read: OPEN FOR BUSINESS. WE NEVER SLEEP. The third half-wall displayed a chaster sign, with the cryptic inscription: KITTEN.
But the untidy side was not Laura Thornton’s side; it was Nina Hobart’s. The missing girl’s bed — McCall identified that side as hers from the initials on the trunk under the bed — was made with almost professional neatness, and the spread was a neutral écru affair. The wall space of Laura’s half of the room was covered almost completely with unframed canvases in brilliant colors. It was non-representational art, for which McCall had no particular liking; but he recognized a high and unusual quality. If these were examples of Laura’s painting, Kathryn Cohan had not exaggerated her talent.
A desk against one wall at about the center line seemed to be in neutral territory and therefore probably shared; but then McCall changed his mind. In a corner near a closet door, on Laura’s side, stood a small flat desk painted black.
He checked the nightstand, the bed, the closet, with no particular hope — Chief Pearson’s men had been over the room, and he had to assume that if there had been anything of significance they would have appropriated it — but out of routine thoroughness; one never knew. There was no clutter. He went through the little black desk. Nothing; a few books. The top of the desk was bare except for a portable typewriter and a thick stack of white typing paper.
He was about to turn away when he noticed something about the stack of paper. It seemed to hump slightly. He separated the pile and found a packet of paper matches lying in the middle of the stack. The cover was white, with green and black lettering; the packet had never been used. It was a souvenir of a motel called the Greenview. McCall remembered passing a Greenview Motel on his way to the inn. It was on the outskirts of Tisquanto.
Never used. Stuck away in a pile of clean typing paper. Almost as if hidden there. If so, it had been successful, because the Tisquanto police had obviously not uncovered it in their search of Laura Thornton’s things. It had been saved for some reason.
A sentimental keepsake?
It might be a lead.
He pocketed the match packet just as the door opened and a young girl almost fell into the room.
“They told me downstairs you were poking around in here,” she panted, leaning against the door. “What’s the name again?”
“McCall. You’re Miss Hobart?”
She examined him owlishly. “Nina Hobart. You’re a big wheel, aren’t you? From upstate?”
“The governor sent me.” He showed her his shield. She stared at it.
She was as slim as a mannikin, with greened eyelids and silver lips; the toenails peeping out of her sandals were painted green, too. Her impish face was almost corpse-like in its heavy pale makeup. Surprisingly heavy thighs showed almost to her crotch under the red miniskirt; then he decided that they were a surprise only because the rest of her was so thin. She wore a white ruffled blouse and a gray corduroy vest with leather thongs. And on her ash-blonde hair was perched, of all things, a man’s top-hat. She carried a tan leather dog leash at the other end of which was nothing. McCall could hardly believe the evidence of his eyes. She looked like a freak. Or she was putting the world on.
“So you want to know about Laura,” she said. She had a little-girl voice and a trick of narrowing her eyes; the expanse of green eyelid thus exhibited made her look like a frog. “I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already told Chief Pearson’s pigs.”
“Pigs?”
“I beg his pardon. Fuzz.”
“Whatever you can tell me, Miss Hobart.”
She ripped the tophat from her head and sailed it onto her unmade bed.
“Hat on a bed,” McCall said, smiling. “Bad luck.”
“You believe that traditional crud?”
“No. I just wanted to give you a chance to collect your thoughts.”
“They don’t need collecting! I have nothing to hide. But I’ll bet Damon Wilde does. Damon the Damned, he’s known as. Her boyfriend. You know? Heard of Damon yet?”
“All over the place.”
“Then don’t bother with me. Go talk to him.”
“At the moment I’d rather talk to you, Miss Hobart. Is Laura in love with Wilde?”
“Love, shove. Who knows? He thinks she is, is more to the point. Hell, it might be Perry Eastman. Or Christ knows who else. You’ll hear Laura’s the quiet type.” The girl giggled. “Well, you know what they say about the quiet types.”
“Has she acted differently from usual lately, Miss Hobart?”
Nina picked up the tophat, set it on her head, plumped down on the bed, and crossed her legs.
“Yes,” she said, “Laura’s been worried about something. She’s the secretive type, but I read her. Lately she’s been extra-hush-hush. Especially last Thursday. She acted real funny Thursday. Kind of absent-minded, dig? Preoccupied.”
“When did you last see Laura?”
“Friday just before noon. She was taking a painting back to the fine arts department. They loan out paintings like library books to fine arts students. She was worried about something, and I asked her what’s bugging you? But she was like mute. That’s the last I saw her.”
“What do you think happened to her, Miss Hobart?”
“How should I know? Anything. That chick is the kind who could get into real trouble. You look at me and you think, there’s a real swinger, because of the way I dress and talk. Okay, so I swing some, but Laura’s type—” She shook her head. “You’d have to know her. Deep, she’s real deep. Deep trouble.”
“Do you have any concrete reason for saying that?”
“Well... no. But look. She’s arty. She digs poetry. She’s gullible. She’s...
“Exactly what time was it when you last saw Laura Friday?”
She thought about it. “Maybe eleven-fifteen A.M.”
“I take it those paintings on the wall were done by Laura?”
“Oh, sure. Everybody says they’re groovy, but me, I dig these.” She jumped off the bed and dashed to Laura’s closet. She dived in among the hanging dresses and came out with a large portfolio. “There’s some real energetic stuff of hers in this.” She untied the portfolio on Laura’s bed.
McCall had already seen its contents before the girl’s arrival. Nevertheless he examined the drawings — chiefly crayon and charcoal sketches — as if for the first time. They impressed him as much now as before. These were all representational and apparently had been done for a drawing class; they were really good, free, spirited, economical in line.
“I see what you mean,” McCall said. “By the way, you say Laura was worried recently, especially Thursday and Friday when you saw her last—”
“Panicky would be more like it Friday.”
“You’re sure she gave no reason why? No hint?”
“If she had a secret,” Nina said, “she hugged it to her like one of those Playboy Bunny costumes. Real uptight.”
“I see. Well, thank you, Miss Hobart. Would you please put the portfolio back where you found it?”
It was almost one o’clock, and McCall was hungry. There would be at least a cafeteria in the Student Union. Well, it was one hunger he could satisfy. The other, the one that was gnawing away inside his head, was apparently going to have to wait for a long time the way things were going. Or not going would be more like it.
He crossed the campus under swelling trees. He found himself searching out the conventional students. The ones he saw were quiet, in a hurry, and seemed edgy.
A well-larded man in a tan uniform and chinstrap helmet, wearing a badge, came toward him. A campus policeman. Middle-aged and no doubt wishing he were holding down a safe desk job somewhere.
“Pardon me, officer. Where’s the Student Union?”
The man eyed him and gave him gruff instructions. As McCall walked away he heard a male voice say something about “three little pigs.” He turned. A lanky student in a red sweatshirt was jogging past, laughing. The campus cop flushed and turned heavily away. McCall noticed his hands; they made fists.
In the Student Union cafeteria McCall took his tray with its freight of beef stew, French bread, apple pie, and coffee over to a table. Through the hum and clatter he began tucking it away. He ate as if the stew were tasty, keeping his eyes open, and his ears. He had expected to find the cafeteria bulging at this hour, but it was not. Students huddled, heads together, about tables, islands of conspiracy in empty space. There was an occasional outburst of angry talk. And no laughter at all.
Two students were arguing nearby. One had red hair to his shoulders, wore a
“Why don’t you take a bath?” the square jeered.
“Cleanliness!” The hippie spat into his spaghetti. “It’s a put-on, man, don’t you know that? They’ve been feeding you that crap since they trusted you out of didies. What’s wrong with a good healthy mess?”
And he picked up his platter and hurled it at the nearby wall of the cafeteria. The plate smashed mightily, sending spaghetti and tomato sauce showering over diners and painting a mobile abstract on the wall. The hippie student laughed, saluted, and ran from the cafeteria, pursued by a bellowing campus policeman. A sober-faced, thirtyish man, evidently a member of the faculty, hurried after the offender and his pursuer.
Students were staring at the design on the wall. Others were wiping their clothes with paper napkins. Nobody seemed surprised or offended. A sort of good humor settled over the cafeteria. At one table a student held up a placard on a long pole: BUG THE BOARD. A fat young man hurried over to the wall carrying a poster. He hung it beside the spaghetti stains: HEADS — STAY OUT OF SIGHT; grinning.
Abruptly at another table five students jumped up.
“Ready—” one shouted.
“Aim—” another shouted.
“FIRE!”
Five plates smashed against the wall decorated by the spaghetti. Cheers rose from other tables. The five sprinted for the door, sending chairs flying.
A student in a stained apron walked from behind the food counter carrying a mop and pail. He looked pale and tired. He began cleaning up the mess.
McCall finished his lunch, wiped his mouth, and headed for the door. He almost bowled over Kathryn Cohan.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi, yourself.” After the incident of the wall, she looked good enough to eat.
“I thought I’d find you here,” she said, “knowing men’s stomachs. I ducked just in time. How do you like the younger generation?”
“Have you had your lunch?”
“Ages ago. In the far corner, where it’s relatively safe. Any progress?”
They left the Student Union and headed for the administration building. There was no sign of any of the food-throwing students. Their hands brushed accidentally, and McCall looked down in surprise. She jerked her hand away as if she had felt something, too.
“You didn’t answer my question, Mr. McCall.”
“I’ve barely started to dig in. Is that scene in the cafeteria just now typical, Miss Cohan?”
“Listen,” she said with some heat. “Don’t get the idea that the student body as a whole goes in for stupid things like that. Even among the so-called agitators it’s frowned on as frivolous and childish, which it is. I don’t agree with most of the minorities on campus, but they’re sincere. It’s a fringe group that does things like this.”
“Is it just the fringe group that riots?” McCall asked dryly.
“No... but, well, they think they’re right. And they do have legitimate grievances. Not that I approve of rioting or any of these militant measures. But please don’t lump all the students with convictions as freaks and anarchists, the way some of the faculty and administration do.”
“Are you sure you’re not a spy for the other side?” McCall asked with a smile.
“It’s not funny, McCall!” Kathryn stamped her foot. “Most of the students aren’t here for trouble. But there’s trouble in the air. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Something very odd’s happened to Dean Gunther.”
McCall stopped short. “Oh? I just saw him and he didn’t mention anything.”
“He didn’t know about it then. Mrs. Gunther phoned him, I guess after you left him. Somebody’s burgled their house.”
“What was taken?”
“That’s the odd part of it. A suit of clothes.”
“That’s all?”
“A shirt and a pair of shoes, too.”
McCall stared at her. “The Dean’s suit?”
“Yes. An expensive one, he says.”
“And the shirt and shoes?”
“His, too. Mrs. Gunther went to lay out his good suit for tonight. It seems a gentleman named McCall is invited to dinner.”
McCall was frowning. “And nothing else was taken?”
“Apparently not. Mrs. Gunther says drawers were yanked out of the dean’s bureau and shirts scattered all over the floor, but that seemed plain spitefulness, she says — several pairs of his shoes were tossed around their bedroom, too.”
“And she didn’t hear anything?”
“She was out shopping. Does it make any sense to you?”
“If I were Sherlock Holmes I could probably make some profound deduction but, frankly, I’m stuck. I can’t imagine who the devil would want to steal a man’s clothes and leave other things of more negotiable value untouched.”
“You’re some detective, you are.”
“I never claimed to be.”
“I expected a brilliant solution right away.”
“So you’re disappointed in me.”
“In one way.” Her remarkable eyes washed over him. “In another, I’m relieved.”
“Why?”
“You’re human.”
“Oh, yes,” McCall said.
For some reason both fell silent.
A bell had been pealing. It stopped now, the overtones lingering on the campus. McCall turned and saw a picturesque stone building much weathered and covered with old vines. Immense trees flanked the building. A round bell tower dominated the roof. A small old man dressed in gray came around the building with a broom and began sweeping the walk.
“What’s that?” McCall asked.
“The music building. It’s better known as the Bell Tower. That’s old Burell, the custodian. He’s a fixture around here.”
They walked on. At the administration building McCall said, “I wish the campus were larger.”
“So do I,” Kathryn said mendaciously. “I hate being cooped up in an office.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She laughed. “I’m acting female, for God’s sake! Anyway, I thought you ought to know right away about Floyd’s clothes being stolen. It was probably some vagrant who took a chance, broke into the house looking for money, didn’t find any, and just grabbed something and ran.”
“Possible.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“Frankly, no. And what I don’t understand I don’t like. Thanks for taking the trouble to notify me.”
Those extraordinary violet eyes held him again. “Well, I’d better get in to work or Ina will chew my head off.”
“See you.”
She did not answer. Instead, she engulfed him with a tidal-wave smile and hurried into the administration building.
McCall walked over to where he had parked his rented car. He found his feet dragging.
He warned himself that he had better keep his mind on his work.
4
McCall headed across town toward the Greenview Motel. The book of matches was probably meaningless, but at this stage of what seemed an increasingly baffling game any lead was worth following up.
Driving through Tisquanto’s broad streets in the spring sunshine McCall found his thoughts, which should have been busy with Laura Thornton and student unrest, wandering to Katie Cohan. He reined them in sharply.
Self-discipline played a big part in Micah McCall’s makeup. He had developed it as a boy on his home turf, Chicago’s South Side, where survival was an art. Whether it had been keyed into his genetic code, or arose as a defense against his environment, McCall’s ability to resist temptation had been toughened rather than weakened by his early life. Self-defense, of course, became a matter of necessity; he learned how to take care of himself in street fights, and when he decided that his general size and build put him at a disadvantage with the big boys, he learned judo. “The bigger they are,” his teacher told him, “the harder they fall. Remember that.” He never forgot it. When he was older he graduated to karate. He had seen too many broken heads and slashed faces to enjoy violence; but if circumstances forced him to fight, he was not going to be the one to wind up on his back.
After the South Side and a rough-and-tumble high school, the Marine Corps seemed the logical next step. Four years later he was out and at Northwestern in Evanston, pursuing a sudden dream of power-through-knowledge. And then a law degree, and a decision against practicing; not enough action. He went to work for a national detective agency and did so well that three years later he opened his own agency. That was how he had met Sam Holland.
A candidate for the state legislature had been murdered, and the police — under strong political pressure — sat on the case. The dead man’s widow hired McCall to get some action. One of McCall’s first contacts was Sam Holland, then a state senator and a friend of the murdered legislator. Between them they cracked the case, and in doing so developed a mutual respect and liking that soon became close friendship. So that when Holland ran for governor and won, one of his first acts was to offer McCall a job as his assistant for confidential affairs, his troubleshooting righthand man. Holland was a millionaire and he paid McCall a very large salary out of his own pocket, thus keeping him out of the clutches of the political machines and even the civil service, where interference and prying were not unknown.
They drew closer with the years. Holland had found an honest man he could trust absolutely, and McCall had found an honest man he could conscientiously serve.
He had never married. Sam Holland often chided him about it. “I’m not interested in women as a long-term proposition, governor,” McCall said. “One-night stands only.”
With auburn hair, he might have added.
Then why was he fighting off the need to think about Katie Cohan?
McCall was rather surprised at the Greenview Motel. He had expected a seedy-looking place, a hot-pillow joint in need of a coat of paint. Instead he found a modern complex of thirty units in immaculate tan brick and freshly painted red trim, with a lot of glittering glass and well-tended landscaping.
He parked his rental and walked into the motel office, resisting his feeling of disappointment. You couldn’t tell a matchbook by its cover at that.
The clerk on duty was an encouragement. He was an unhealthy-looking character with a shifty eye, bad breath, and unmistakable b.o.
“Do for you,” he said. Then he squeaked. “Single? Double?”
“No room,” McCall said. “Information.”
“I don’t know.”
“I haven’t asked you anything yet. Does the name Laura Thornton mean anything to you?”
“Never heard.”
“You didn’t give yourself a chance,” McCall said. “Think a little. Laura Thornton? Ring a bell?”
“On that one,” the clerk said, “I’m deaf.”
“Would a slice of the green stuff improve your hearing?”
A ten-dollar bill appeared in McCall’s palm.
The clerk licked his sour lips. “I wish it could,” he said. “I sure do.”
“Laura Thornton ever register here?”
“Even if she did, I can’t give out information about guests.”
“Not even for this?” McCall waggled the bill. “Let me look at your register and I’ll double it.”
“I can’t do it.”
McCall produced his open sesame. The clerk’s jaw dropped.
“You that McCall?”
“You can read, can’t you?”
“Yes, sir. The only thing is, I don’t care who you are, I can’t let you look at the register. It’s the law, Mr. McCall. I’m not going to get in trouble with the law. Not in this town.”
“All right, forget the register. Maybe you’ve forgotten the name.” McCall produced the photograph of the Thornton girl and showed it to the clerk.
“Nope.”
“You mean nope you’re not sure, or nope you don’t remember?”
“Nope period. I never laid eyes on this chick.”
“You’re absolutely positive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Think about it,” McCall said stubbornly. Something told him to keep going. It was not that he didn’t believe this malodorous specimen with the fear of the ’Squanto fuzz in his heart; it was even less tangible. The place. She had been here. Why? When?
“Maybe,” the clerk said, “maybe the night man would know.”
“Oh, you’re never on nights?”
“Day man is my job. I like my nights for sleeping.”
“Who’s the night man?”
“A man named Mott.”
“I’d like his address.”
“He lives right here at the motel.”
“Go get him.”
“He’s sleeping now...” The door opened behind the counter from some rear room of the office and a stout man with a red face waddled out. He was wearing a snappy chocolate brown suit and a brown shirt with a yellow tie; the rest of him was gray, gray hair, gray mustache, unpleasant gray eyes. “Oh, Mr. Galupian. This man wants information about a guest.”
“Who are you?” the newcomer demanded.
McCall again offered his credentials. Mr. Galupian examined the shield very carefully. Then he handed it back.
“So you’re from the governor. Well, I’m the manager of this motel, and I know the law. We just can’t allow it. We got a license to protect.”
“I have a very special authority, Mr. Galupian. From the governor himself. You can’t get into any trouble.”
“That’s what you say.”
“I’m inquiring about a girl who might have taken a room here recently,” McCall said patiently. “It’s information I’ve got to have. Maybe this photo will help.” He showed the stout man the picture of Laura Thornton.
“Never saw her,” the manager said.
“You’re a liar,” McCall said. “So is your clerk here. Her photo’s been all over the Tisquanto paper for days. She’s Laura Thornton. She’s on the front page of that rack of newspapers in the corner right now — I can see her picture from here. Do you know Chief Pearson?”
“Sure I know Chief Pearson.”
“How would you like some of his men to toss this place?”
“You don’t have to get tough, mister—”
“Or should I get Pearson to burn you down for what I suspect is going on here? Make up your mind, Mr. Galupian. Questions and answers. I can do it.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t answer any questions. I just had to be — well, sure, know what I mean?”
“You’re pretty good, Mr. Galupian.”
Galupian’s smile did not touch his gray eyes.
“But not good enough,” McCall said. “How many joints like this do you run? All shiny on the outside?”
“That one of the questions?”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
The stout man sighed. “Okay. What is it?”
“I’d like to talk to your night man.”
“Ted. Get Mott.”
Ted took it on the run.
Galupian came out from behind the counter and sat down in a green leather chair. He stared out the plate glass window, frowning. McCall said nothing.
After a while the outer door opened and a skinny character in a T-shirt, chinos, and bare feet came out followed by Ted of the Bad Breath.
“Hell of a note,” the barefoot one grumbled. “You the one got this pinhead to wake me up?”
He had muscles, and he flexed them. I’ll bet he practices in front of his mirror, McCall thought.
“I’m sorry,” McCall said, “but this couldn’t wait for tonight. Did a girl by the name of—?”
“He’s the manager,” Mott said, jerking his thumb Galupian’s way. “Ask him.”
“I’ve asked him. He says he doesn’t know. Maybe you do.”
“I don’t know from nothing—”
“Cooperate,” Galupian said to the night man.
Mott blinked and shut up.
“—by the name of Laura Thornton register here recently? If Ted here is to be believed, it was probably on the night shift.”
“Laura Thornton,” Mott said. “No dice. And I got a natural memory for names, too.”
McCall showed him Laura’s photograph.
“Never seen her.”
Galupian said, “Did I just tell you to cooperate, you stupid ass?”
“What?” Mott said.
It’s a quickie joint, all right, McCall thought, and Mr. Mott the night man, uninformed as to the protocol, is still manfully keeping the cover.
“Tell him!” Galupian said, and turned away.
“Okay, okay,” Mott said. “So I remember her. Jesus, what’s going on here?”
McCall said abruptly, “She took a room here?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Short time ago.”
“Just once?”
“A few times.”
“You’re sure of this.”
“Now he wants to know if I’m sure! Listen, bud, she’s too much chick not to remember.”
“Chicks!” Galupian muttered, obviously suffering.
“With the same man?” McCall asked.
“I don’t know,” Mott said. “She always comes to the office herself. Signs the registration, see, while her — well, husband waits in the car. I never laid eyes on him. She did the paying. Always had a wad a foot thick. You know these rich chicks.”
“Did she use the name Laura Thornton?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What name did she use?”
“Something like... here.” Mott went behind the counter, opened a filing cabinet, and began to look through cards. “Yeah, I thought I remembered. Addison.” He handed the card to McCall across the counter.
The legend on the registration card was “Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Addison.” The date was recent.
“You say she registered several times. I’d like to see the other registrations.”
Mott dug out four more cards. All four were signed “Mr. & Mrs. Joseph Addison” in the same neat, cool hand, and all were of recent date.
“Do you remember how she acted?” McCall asked the night clerk.
“The way they all do on the way in. Rarin’ to go.”
“Shut up!” Galupian said. “Listen, Mr. McCall, we got to put up with certain things. These college kids want action.” He slapped his forehead. “They’re kooks! Believe you me. Sometimes like to tear the place apart. What can you do? Personally I’m against how they act. Coming on with all this long hair and beads and junk. I run a clean place, Mr. McCall. Once I caught two of ’em tripping out. I gave ’em the heave, believe you me. All those hot chicks, like this Laura. Wasting it on pinheads.” He laughed. The sound died in the quiet. “Okay, okay,” he said. “So I don’t appreciate you, either. The hell with you. And you want to know something? I don’t like Governor Holland, too. The hell with him. So Laura Thornton come here with a guy. So what?”
“She came here and now she’s disappeared,” McCall said, “that’s so what. I’ll just keep these registration cards,” McCall said.
Nobody said anything as he left.
5
In the dimness of the raftered bar at the Red Harbor Inn, McCall sipped a weak gin-and-tonic and considered what he had found out so far about Laura Thornton.
He was alone in the bar except for the square-faced bartender with the middle-aged paunch. McCall ached for a cigarette. He had tried cutting down, found it didn’t work for him, and so he had quit in the middle of a pack. Throwing away the pack had been an act of sheer heroism. But smoking was an act of stupidity, he kept telling himself. Something in the stuff contracted the blood vessels. He’d be a candidate for atheroscelerosis soon enough.
Still, it was hell.
He nibbled at a cube of sharp cheddar on the bar. That was another thing. You stopped smoking, you shifted your neurosis to eating. He pushed the plate of cheese away and bit deeply into his adulterated gin. Maybe I’ll wind up an alcoholic, he thought, and grinned at the thought. He ordered another. Weak, too.
“Get many students in here?” he asked the barman.
“We get ’em.” The man poured with a professional nip. “Friday and Saturday nights especially. Some beauts.”
“The hippies any trouble?”
“Listen,” the barman said. “We get some of the longhaired ones, sure. But the way people talk, you’d think they’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But what’s so different? Remember zoot suits, for chrissake? Peg pants? How girls acted in Prohibition? That was before your time, buddy, but any time’ll do. I was just thinking of the Thirties. Dance marathons. Six-day bicycle races. Jitterbug. The Dipsy-Doodle. Benny Goodman. Crazy, the kids went crazy. Later, Boom-Boom-Didem-Dadem-Wadem-Chew, f’gawd’s sake. Mairzey-Doats and Doazy-Doats and Li’l Lambs Eat Ivy. Yech!” He flung his bar rag down. “And the drinking.
The bartender stopped to refuel.
“But the colleges didn’t have the problems they have now,” McCall argued.
“This has been coming a hell of a long time, friend,” the bartender said. “By the way, my name is Grundy.”
“You don’t sound it,” McCall said.
“What?”
“I mean, never mind. McCall’s mine. How do you figure?”
Grundy reached to the back bar, brought up a bottle of Jack Daniels, and poured himself half a slug in a shot glass. He drank it quickly and washed the glass. “That’s how I do it now — my quota for today. How do I figure, Mac? I figure the kids are in the last half of the twentieth century, and the colleges are still back in the nineteenth. And that’s how the kids figure. That’s what this unrest is all about. I wish there were more of them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the real rebels, the revolutionaries, the ones who’ll stop at nothing to overturn the system. They’re only a handful.”
“You’re on their side?”
“Sure. Why not? I’m against the Establishment — any Establishment. But even the college kids who aren’t activists are more intelligent and serious than my generation was. But nobody listens to them. Jesus. Just half a shot glass and listen to
“No more now,” McCall said, finishing it.
“They’re all right, those kids,” the barman said. “Make no mistake about that.”
“Count on me,” McCall said. “Name’s Mike, Mike McCall. Nice talking with you, Mr. Grundy.”
“Call me Joe,” the barman said. “Joe Mozzarella, the spaghetti king. Out of Joe Cacciatore, fifteen to one.”
“Which is it? You told me Grundy.”
“Ah, sweet mystery of life.”
“You sure it’s bourbon in that bottle?” McCall asked.
“I knew a doctor once drank ether. All the time. Smelled terrible.”
“No kidding, Joe, what
“Vermicelli.”
“Have it your way. Seeing you.”
“Mike, Mac, McCall, does it make any difference as long as I don’t call you Sally?”
In his room, McCall put a call through to Governor Holland. The governor was not at the mansion; nobody seemed to know where he was. McCall left a message and said he would call back if anything developed.
He sat on the bed, wishing for the lethal weed and thinking more about Laura Thornton. Whoever had been with her at the Greenview Motel had played it cosy. The girl had done the dirty work, registering, paying for the room. Could it have been Damon Wilde? He very much wanted to talk with young Mr. Wilde.
He checked the book, called Dean Gunther’s office, and asked if anything had clarified the mystery of the missing clothes.
“Not a damned thing.” Gunther sounded troubled and fretful. “Why would they do it? I know it was one of them.”
“One of who?”
“One of our gentle students.”
“I just met a guy who likes them.”
“
Gunther’s voice dribbled away.
“You sound kind of shot,” McCall said. “I won’t hold you to that dinner engagement, Dean Gunther.”
“Floyd, remember? Wouldn’t hear of it, Mike. And my wife’s looking forward to meeting you. I’m anxious to talk this mess over in depth. I’ll try to give you the total picture.”
“It’s this Laura Thornton business that’s principally on my mind at the moment, Floyd—”
“Of course. I mean it’s difficult for me to forget sometimes that we have over sixteen thousand students... Laura Thornton. Yes... oh, I’m late for an appointment, Mike. See you tonight.”
As he showered and dressed, McCall went through the low of a manic phase. Joe Grundy-Mozzarella-Whatever hadn’t exactly given him a lift. Tisquanto State was a long way from Berkeley and San Francisco State College, in climate as well as geography. At least that was what McCall had come to town thinking. This part of the state wasn’t what you’d call revolutionary country, unless you were thinking of the Rebellion of 1776. The kids — and most of the students at Tisquanto were relatively local — came from staunch middle-class homes... potatoes and gravy, Grange and 4-H club activities, big whing-dings at the parish house Saturday nights, and the strap in the woodshed only one generation in the past... Or am I way behind the times? Maybe that’s the trouble. Maybe that’s what they’re rebelling against. All that virtue.
He tried to remember how it had been when he’d been at college.
A hell of a lot different from today!
Laura Thornton.
Something told McCall she had found big trouble.
It was dark as he drove back toward the college. Gunther lived at the other end, not far off campus. He decided to drive through the campus.
Tisquanto seemed a nice enough town. At this hour it was quiet and cool with a breeze ruffling the tops of the trees, playing them against the streetlights. Cars hissed past, an occasional pedestrian strolled by. It was a fine spring evening. For a moment it brought back some memories of his perishable youth. He dismissed them sternly.
As he approached the administration building McCall braked. No peace here! Something was up.
Young people covered the campus like ants around a disturbed nest. They seemed unorganized, darting here and there. The astonishing thing was the lack of noise. Astonishing, and ominous. There was no shouting, either in high spirits or anger. Just those dartings about, like feints in a prize ring. What was going on?
McCall parked and slipped into the crowds. Here he immediately vanished as an individual. Invisibility was one of his most valuable assets. He carried his own protective coloration, changing automatically with his background. It was an inborn, not an acquired, talent — an ability to blend with people so that nobody remembered him afterwards. Governor Holland had once remarked that it was a good thing for the law enforcement arm that Mike McCall had no stomach for crime.
Here and there were groups of whisperers. Most of these were fringe students — hippies, Yippies. The students in conventional clothes, many carrying books, were hurrying along, for the most part in silence. They were headed somewhere, too.
McCall headed somewhere with them.
Then he saw it, a mob of students carrying a dummy. They were holding it high over their heads. It was the effigy of a fully clothed man.
They had reached the quadrangle now.
Suddenly they began to yell.
They had the makings of a bonfire set up — McCall saw some perfectly good chairs and at least one new-looking wooden filing cabinet in the debris. Someone had rigged a beam above the pile of wood. Two students seized the dummy and fastened it to the beam.
Kerosene splashed. A roar went up as someone flipped a match. Flames spread, leaped, took hold. Fire began nipping at the legs of the dummy.
And then McCall saw the neatly lettered sign, black on white:
DEATH TO TYRANTS.
AND WE MEAN YOU,
DEAN GUNTHER!!!!
And McCall solved the mystery of Dean Gunther’s stolen suit of clothes.
He began to circulate.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the ceremony.
“It’s reactionary,” McCall heard one boy say. He was with another boy and a pretty girl. They were all dressed conventionally. “They think this is the cool thing to do,” the boy went on. “It’s stupid and juvenile. Where does it get them?”
“It’s satisfaction,” the girl argued.
“Like a kid beating his dolly to death.”
“How else can they get through to him? You can’t even get in to see him half the time.”
“It’s a big student body,” the other boy said. “The dean has his hands full.”
“I’m not defending him,” the first student said. “It’s just that these kid antics make me sick.”
“You’re right. It’s stupid. They’re a bunch of clots.”
McCall moved along. One boy in a large group was shouting, “It gets us nowhere! What’s the point? This is no confrontation. It’s a farce — Gunther isn’t even here. Systematic disruption!” He actually spat. “This sort of thing was done a generation ago. It’s ancient history. We’re
“Ah, knock it off, Demosthenes.” There was a general hoot and laugh. “Let him burn. I wish it were real.”
“It’s perfectly in accord with the movement,” a girl confided to another girl. “And it eliminates hangups. Really it does. If you don’t take action —
“Watch out for pig meat!” a boy yelled.
Another boy said, “Nobody gives a damn. They won’t listen. The dean’s a cramp. So it’s a responsible protest.”
“I don’t agree,” another said, a Negro boy. “This just isn’t the way to go about it.”
“Separatist,” a white girl said.
“Okay, okay,” the Negro said. “Call me what you like, but I mean it.”
“Oh, baby,” the white girl said, patting his cheek. “I love you and you know it.”
“I’ll go along with that,” the Negro boy said, and patted her back.
“Watch out, burrhead,” a white boy said, “or your friends will start calling you Tom.”
They grinned at each other.
McCall glanced at the fire. The dummy was burning fiercely. Yells and cheers. They used to celebrate football victories this way. He wondered which students had instigated the affair.
He came upon a little congregation of long-haired boys and girls dressed in weird conglomerates. They stood off by themselves rather sadly, McCall thought. He put them down as flower children, who would not enter into the activist business of effigy-burning. Some hippies went along with the mob and some held back. Camps within camps.
He started back for his car and his dinner engagement with the man the students were destroying by proxy.
6
Dean Gunther looked very much unburned. In the porch light over the front door of his Tudor-type house his eyes told McCall that he had long since heard the declaration of the auto-da-fé and its subsequent execution on his effigy.
“I still think I shouldn’t have come,” McCall said. “Wouldn’t you rather I made it some other time, dean?”
“Floyd, I told you!” Gunther said. “Don’t be so tender of my feelings, man. Come in.” McCall stepped into the foyer, and Gunther shut the door rather consciously, he thought — he half expected to hear a bolt slip home. “Did you see the show?”
“Yes.”
“Let me have your hat.” The dean hung it in a closet. When he turned around McCall saw that his handsome lips were pale. “They got a big bang out of it, no doubt.”
“Some of them seemed to be enjoying themselves,” McCall said, “yes.”
“You’d think I was Savonarola!”
“I said some of them, Floyd. Most of them just passed it by.”
“Tell me how many defenders I had.”
“Oh, come, a bunch of hopped-up college kids—”
“I can see you don’t know much about colleges these days,” Dean Gunther said grimly. “Come on in — oh, Wolfe.”
President Wade appeared from an alcove off the foyer. The gray eyes under the gray hair looked wet — there was a jellyfish dampness about the whole man that piqued McCall.
“Good evening, Mr. McCall.” He smiled damply, too. “I’m afraid poor Floyd’s still in shock. One never seems to get used to these things. It’s especially hard on the women. I was just telling Rose—”
“Floyd?”
A doll-like woman with quite expert makeup appeared, high heels clicking. She halted at sight of McCall, a little warily.
“Honey,” Gunther said. “This is Micah McCall. Mike, my wife Rose.”
“Oh, I’m happy you’re here, Mr. McCall,” Rose Gunther exclaimed. “You’re from the governor’s office or something, aren’t you? I do hope you can do something about these horrible goings-on. Floyd, you’ve just got to try to put this out of your mind.”
“Now how the hell do I do that, dear heart? I’ve never gone to the stake before.”
She stood close to him, looking up helplessly. He laughed suddenly, patted her as if she were a child, and said, “Well. Let’s drown my sorrows, gentlemen.”
“I can’t stay,” President Wade said.
“One drink, Wolfe?”
“Next time, thank you. We’ll take severe disciplinary action, Floyd, you may be sure of that. We won’t let this one get by.”
“I certainly hope not! It isn’t much of a jump from the effigy to the man it represents. I tell you here and now, Wolfe, I intend to protect myself!”
“It’s all right, Floyd. Don’t worry about it.” On this doubtful note, the president of the college left.
“I really wouldn’t blow this up out of proportion,” McCall said.
“Is that what I’m doing?” Gunther muttered. “Well! Rose has mixed a pitcher of martinis, and I detest warm martinis, don’t you?”
McCall could not help feeling sorry for him. Gunther’s hands shook as he poured, something that in McCall’s experience rarely happened to people except during bad hangovers, and the dean had not been drinking. He stared into his martini and then gulped it down as if it had come out of a tap. It occurred to McCall that Floyd Gunther was either an advanced neurotic or a Class A coward. Or — McCall added speculatively in his thoughts — maybe Floyd sniffed something in the winds of Tisquanto that, so far, he had not.
“I’m sorry, Mike. Forgot to ask you to sit down. This thing has me all upset.”
“Naturally. Mrs. Gunther?”
Rose Gunther sat primly down and sipped her drink, eyes on her husband. It was a comfortable, not showy, room with a few modest antiques, some original student oils and water colors hanging on the walls, and books towering eight feet high on the walls flanking the fieldstone fireplace. Gunther was patrolling his hearth like a restless housedog.
“Aren’t you making more of this than it deserves?” McCall remarked.
“You don’t know what’s been going on!”
“What?”
“The turmoil — student boycotts—”
“I know all about that. I mean concerning you. You’ve been the target of actual threats?”
“What do you call what happened just now?”
“Not the same thing at all—”
The front doorbell chimed, and kept chiming.
“Now what?” Gunther exclaimed.
“Would you like me to get it?” McCall asked.
The dean seemed ashamed. “My own home? Certainly not, thank you!”
Mrs. Gunther slipped out of the room. A moment later she called, “Floyd?”
It appeared to McCall that Gunther hesitated. He rose and said, “Like me to go with you?”
The Dean flushed. “Nonsense. Yes, honey?”
A student in a white shirt and cable-stitch pullover burst into view, stopped short in the doorway. He was very dark, almost purple black, but with Caucasoid features. He looked nineteen or twenty. He had been running.
“Graham,” Dean Gunther said. With relief, and a sort of added dimension of pleasure that told McCall of a working relationship.
“Dean, I’m sorry to break in on you this way, but something’s come up I don’t think can wait. I mean—”
“What is it?”
The young man’s eyes went to McCall.
“Of course. Excuse me a minute, Mike. My study, Graham.”
They went out.
“Now what on earth,” Rose Gunther complained, “can that boy want? They never leave Floyd alone.”
“He’s been under a strain, I take it?” McCall said, finishing his drink. He set it on an end table politely.
“Oh, yes!. Terrible. And the worst part is I don’t know what I can do to help.” She sat down on the sofa like a bird perching on a twig. She made distressed motions with her hands. “You can’t imagine how bad it’s been, Mr. McCall. Especially of late. He hasn’t been able to sleep, prowls half the night. I keep asking him what’s wrong, but he says it’s nothing — just the turmoil on campus. And now this horrible business tonight.”
“And, of course, that girl student disappearing,” McCall said sympathetically.
“Yes, I’d forgotten that. Do you suppose that accounts for—?”
The door across the hall opened with an explosion. It was the Dean, motioning. He looked ill.
“Mike. Do you mind...?”
He sounded ill, too.
Gunther’s study was obviously his refuge. Where the rest of the house was mathematically prim and orderly, as far as McCall had seen, the study was a manly shambles. Here, McCall thought, Floyd Gunther asserts his constitutional rights to be his own man.
The black student stood by the piled-high desk.
“This is Graham Starret,” the Dean said abruptly. “He’s one of our very best students, and a young man I admire very much. I think you’d better hear what Graham’s just told me. I’ve told him who you are.”
McCall offered his hand. The young man seemed amused. His clasp was quick and withdrawn.
“Go ahead, Graham!”
“Well, my date and I were parked over by the river, Mr. McCall. Lots of the students park down there. We were a little off the beaten track. I had to excuse myself to go down to the riverbank, and... well, I noticed something lying half in the water, half up under a bush on the bank. I took a quick look and... it’s the body of a girl, Mr. McCall.”
“He thinks it’s Laura Thornton,” Dean Gunther said hoarsely.
A few folks up at the capital, McCall thought, are going to have a bad night tonight.
“Aren’t you sure, Graham?”
“I wasn’t at first glance,” the boy said, “but on a closer look I thought I recognized her. Her condition... her face, I mean... pretty bad.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“Not even my date, Mr. McCall. I took her home and came right here.”
“Then you haven’t notified the police?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
It seemed to McCall that Dean Gunther looked annoyed through his worry, as if McCall had asked an irrelevant question.
“Why not?” Graham Starret repeated, and he smiled. “You want a straight answer, Mr. McCall?”
“Always.”
“Okay. I don’t have any use for policemen.”
“That puts me in my place,” McCall said with an answering smile. “Well, you’d better show me where the place is, Mr. Starret. Do you want to come with us, Floyd?”
“Well, perhaps not,” the Dean said. He was very pale. “I can’t stand unpleasantness, Mike. I mean this sort of thing — and I shouldn’t leave Rose alone—”
“Let’s go, Starret. By the way,” McCall said, “was she dead?”
Graham Starret looked startled. “I really don’t know. I just assumed she was. I didn’t touch her.”
McCall sprang for the door.
7
McCall knelt on the riverbank.
“Turn on the flash.”
“I’m afraid it’s not much,” Graham Starret said. “Batteries are low.” He flicked the light on. A pale yellow beam, more shadows than light, struggled on the black water.
McCall took the flash from the student and played it on the girl’s face. She was lying half out of the water. The eyes were closed. The hair looked like seaweed. Her mouth hung open. Bruises and darkened swellings distorted her face.
He put his ear to her heart, felt for the carotid artery with his right hand.
“Is she dead?” Starret whispered.
“No, she’s alive. Barely, I’d say. Give me a hand.”
Between them they dragged the girl up on the bank. Her dress, which had once been white, was soaked with mud to her hips. She wore a thin black cardigan over the dress, which was ripped across her breasts.
“She’s taken a bad beating.” McCall stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around her. “Starret, go find a phone and call the police. Ask for Lieutenant Long. And have them rush an ambulance.”
The student had come in his own car; McCall had followed in his rented Ford. Graham Starret left on the run. McCall watched him peel off, headlights slicing through trees and shrubbery, and vanish down the dirt road.
He returned his attention to the girl. There was nothing he could do for her now but wait for the ambulance.
McCall touched her hand. It was icy and damp. No wonder: lying in river water all this time. Mercifully she had lost consciousness.
What had happened?
Someone had beaten her savagely. One eye was frightfully swollen. Her mouth was puffed grotesquely over her teeth. Her cheeks were lumpy and contused, her arms striped with cuts and bruises. He gently inspected her head. Blood clots had formed on the scalp. She had been repeatedly struck over the head. It was a wonder she was still breathing.
He reached for a cigarette, remembered, and flashed Graham Starret’s failing light across the river. It was narrow here; the water ran as if it were deep. The stream made small secretive sounds between its banks.
Spring.
Would Laura Thornton ever see another?
In the moon-deserted night, with black water rushing by as if to a conspiratorial rendezvous and a battered human being at his feet awaiting dissolution, McCall could not repress a shiver. Death he had seen in plenty in his youth; it was not death that bothered him. It was the dying. When it was all over, what was left? You threw it out like so much garbage. But to stand by and witness the struggle, the failing, the going out... like the batteries in young Starret’s flashlight... this he had never been able to bear. He had had one interminable night in Korea holding the hand of a Marine buddy who was dying of a stomach wound inflicted by a mortar round, and he could still feel the loosening clutch and hear the fading moans in his dreams. The company was pinned down in the barrage, the medic had been killed, and there was nothing to do for the Marine but watch him die.
McCall looked up at the star-salted sky, felt the chill spring breeze on his cheek, and shivered again.
Faced with the body of the girl, he felt an urgency. He wished he had been able to talk with Damon Wilde. Now it would have to wait. And there was Perry Eastman, in Dean Gunther’s office: cocky, contemptuous. And Dennis Sullivan, the other student mentioned in connection with Laura Thornton. McCall ached to get at them. There was something to go on now.
He would have to contact Governor Holland, too, hand the governor the dirty job of reporting this to Laura’s father...
Two police cars, preceded by Graham Starret’s yellow Mustang, shot in under the trees. A patrolman got out and stood by his car, looking back. And there were Lieutenant Long, the sneerer, and Sergeant Oliver. They hurried toward him. Another officer focused a spotlight on the girl’s body at his feet.
Long covered ground in a peculiar long-striding, knee-bending way. McCall almost laughed; the lieutenant’s stride made him think of Groucho Marx. When he came up to McCall he threw his head back and stared accusingly.
“Who found her?” he demanded.
“Starret did. Didn’t he tell you? Didn’t you bring a doctor? And where’s the ambulance?” With a character like Long you threw five questions to every one of his.
“Sure I told him,” young Starret said. “Is she still alive?”
Long stooped over the girl, sneering. Sergeant Oliver said, “She’s still breathing. This is a break, a real break.”
“Doc!” Lieutenant Long called.
An old skin-and-bones got out of one of the police cars and trudged toward them. He was carrying a medical bag. He paid no attention to McCall or the police officers.
“This is our M.E.,” Oliver said, “Doc Littleton. Mr. McCall.”
Dr. Littleton grunted. “Don’t involve me in your lousy politics. Stand back, will you?” He squatted beside the girl’s body.
“Where’s that ambulance?” McCall said.
The medical examiner flicked an eyelid, dug sharp fingers into the girl’s neck, nodded, snapped his bag open, snatched a stethoscope, placed it under her left breast. His bony fingers went here and there.
“How is she, doc?” Oliver asked.
“Call that ambulance again and tell them to make time. This girl’s barely vital.” He began to massage her wrists. Then he plunged into his bag, came up with a disposable hypodermic and a vial. He filled the syringe, squirted some liquid into the air, and stroked the needle into the girl’s arm. “No telling,” he said abruptly. “Miracles have been known to happen, though not by me.”
“Will she live?” Long asked.
“You tell me, lieutenant. You’re the wonder boy of the ’Squanto police department.”
“What’s eating you?” Long asked angrily.
“First get that goddam ambulance here,” Dr. Littleton growled. “I’ll be glad to fill you in on my personal feelings afterwards.”
Long loped away, glaring. McCall said to Littleton, “No prognosis yet, doctor?”
“Not without a thorough examination. At that she must have the constitution of a racehorse.” The M.E.’s eyes in the spotlight glittered like ice at Sergeant Oliver. “And you wonder boys still haven’t come up with any lead to this thing?”
“No,” the sergeant said stiffly. “How about you, Mr. McCall?”
McCall resisted the temptation to point out that he had been on the case less than nine hours. He said, “Nothing, sergeant,” and turned to Littleton. “Has she been lying out here since Friday, doctor? That seems a hell of a long time.”
“Too long. She couldn’t have survived. I’d give it two days at the outside. Even that would be a stretch no matter how healthy the girl is.”
“Two days,” Oliver said reflectively.
“Right now she’s critical.”
Lieutenant Long came striding up. “They’re on their way. Held up by a three-car accident on the west side.” As he spoke they heard the ambulance siren. “Start checking the ground around here, Oliver. If any clue that might have been here hasn’t been wiped out by Mr. McCall and his boy Friday.”
“I’m not anybody’s boy Friday,” Graham Starret said. “In fact, lieutenant, I’m not anybody’s boy but my mama’s and papa’s.”
Long gave him a long look, then turned away. Oliver moved off, flash probing.
“Any idea what she was beaten with, doctor?”
“Hard to say, Mr. McCall. Might have been a piece of two-by-four.”
“You want me to stick around?” McCall asked Long.
“For a while,” Long said. “You can sit in your car.”
McCall started for his Ford. The black student fell into step with him. “Do you think I ought to stick around, too, Mr. McCall?”
“Judging from Lieutenant Long’s attitude, I think it might be wise. If he gives you a hard time, get word to me. Either through Dean Gunther or at the Red Harbor Inn, where I’m staying. I know it’s hard, but don’t hand him any lip, Graham. There’s no percentage in giving him an excuse to clap you in a cell.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. McCall,” young Starret said, grinning. “We’re experts at handling the man when we set our minds to it.” Then he said soberly, “I sure hope she lives.”
They had paused in the path, and McCall said, “Graham, do you have any notion who might have done this?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t understand it at all. I mean why anybody would want to beat up a girl like that. It’s way out, man.”
“Did you know Laura Thornton well?”
Starret shrugged. “I knew her, that’s about it. I wish I hadn’t found her. I wouldn’t put it past Long to try to mix me up in this.”
“I don’t think he’d try any raw stuff with the governor’s personal representative on the scene, Graham. If you had nothing to do with it, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
The student turned back, shrugging again, and McCall went on to his car. He slid under the wheel and sat there, hungering for a cigarette. Maybe if he took up pipe smoking...
The ambulance arrived and two white coats ran down the path with a stretcher. A police officer walked over to McCall and handed him his jacket. It was wet and muddy and he did not put it on.
Lieutenant Long was talking to Sergeant Oliver. Oliver seemed startled. Then he moved quickly over to where the Negro student was standing. They spoke for a moment and went toward one of the police cars.
And there was Long, at the Ford, sneering. “I’ll want a full statement from you, McCall, at headquarters. Meanwhile, we’re taking Starret in.”
“For what?”
Long winked. “For questioning. Wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out he’s our boy. So then you’ll be able to go on home, McCall, and tell the governor he can stop worrying about Tisquanto.”
“You think Starret did it?” McCall said incredulously. “You haven’t really questioned him! On what grounds, lieutenant?”
“My nose,” Long said. “I can smell ’em out a mile away.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“He knows too much. Found the girl too easy. We’ll break him down soon enough.”
“But he’s the one reported the discovery. Would he have done that if he’d had anything to do with this?”
“Who’d he report it to, tell me that? The police, like he ought to? No, he goes running to his pal Dean Gunther. If you hadn’t happened to be there we’d probably not know about it yet.”
“You’re a racist,” McCall said. “I’m not going to let you coldcock that student, Long.”
“Sure, Mr. McCall,” Long said with a smile. “I sure will remember. Racist, am I? Look, I know the facts of life, you’re one of those do-gooder liberals like our dear mushy gov who’s responsible for what’s going on these days. Give ’em a finger and they want everything.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, lieutenant. Just remember what I said.”
“He was after her,” Long snarled. “Niggers go for white meat, any hep white man knows that. She repulsed him and he lost his head — went after her with everything he had. I’m betting we find she’s been raped.”
“Maybe she was,” McCall said. “That’s a long way from proving that Graham Starret did the raping. You know what I think, lieutenant? I think that after you’ve questioned Starret and Chief Pearson gets a full report, you’re going to decide to let the kid go.” He started his engine; the ambulance was moving off. “One other thing. If I find out that so much as a finger’s been laid on Starret, you’ll wish you’d never become a cop.”
McCall shot across the clearing after the ambulance. He heard Long call out something in a vicious tone but he could not make out the words.
Tailing the ambulance into town, McCall considered the case of young Starret. The thought of the student’s possible guilt had crossed his mind at once. His argument to Lieutenant Long that Starret’s announcing his discovery of the girl’s body took him off the hook hardly held water. He could have panicked and abandoned her originally, expecting her to be found quickly, and when she was not found quickly, his fear that she might die could well have caused him to “find” her, with his date (who on investigation would no doubt back his story up) as a witness. But there was nothing — so far — to tie Starret in with Laura Thornton’s increasingly mysterious life. No, it was more complicated than Long wanted it to be. The lieutenant was looking for a quick and simple — racist — solution.
The Tisquanto Memorial Hospital was an old-fashioned-looking yellow brick structure built in the Twenties, four stories high. It sprawled over a considerable area. McCall parked his car near the emergency entrance and hurried over to the drawn-up ambulance.
They had already removed the girl. He went in. At the admitting desk he said, “Laura Thornton. The emergency case they just brought in. Where did they take her?”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you that information,” the pretty girl in white said.
McCall dug out his credentials case. The girl’s eyes widened.
“The police said not to give out any information, Mr. McCall—”
“I’m working with the police.”
“Well, she’s in Emergency Room C. Dr. Edgewit is attending her.”
He found the girl under an oxygen tent, with two nurses busy over her. Dr. Edgewit, in a green surgical gown, looked absurdly young. He was examining Laura Thornton intently. Dr. Littleton stood by, watching his every move.
McCall introduced himself.
“No time,” the young doctor said without looking up.
“Will she pull through?”
“She’s in coma. Concussion, shock, you name it. She’s taken an unholy beating.”
“I’ll get out of your hair, doctor. Dr. Littleton?” He took the medical examiner aside. “Is Dr. Edgewit competent?”
“He’s the chief resident. Fine doctor.”
“Do you happen to know if the girl’s had a personal physician in town here? It would be better for all concerned if she were seen as quickly as possible by her own doctor.” He was thinking of Brett Thornton.
“I’ll find out, Mr. McCall.”
McCall hunted up a pay telephone and dialed the governor’s private number in the capital. Holland himself answered, as he often did.
“All right, Mike,” the governor said with open relief at McCall’s news. “You stick with it and report developments. I’ll notify Thornton right away. He’ll no doubt fly down there tonight — he has his own private plane. Dig into this hard, Mike. Find out who beat Laura. Whoever it was, I want him! And not just because Thornton’ll have my hide if we don’t turn him up. You understand?”
“I’m way ahead of you, Governor.”
“I wish I could get down there myself, but it’s just not possible. I’m tied up here. But I’ll be down as soon as I can, especially if an emergency develops. By the way, don’t tangle with Thornton. He’ll land down there loaded for bear.”
“I understand, Governor.”
“And Mike? I can’t trust the local police on this student rebellion. That’s why I wanted you there in the first place. The truth is, I don’t know whom to trust in good old ’Squanto. So I’m relying on you and your judgment.” The line went dead.
The governor’s tone had been light. McCall was not fooled. The old man’s really worried, he thought, Thornton must be applying a lot of pressure. He knew how much Sam Holland wanted a renomination; he felt that his work for the people of the state, faced as he was with an unpredictable legislature, needed at least another term for completion of his program of social legislation.
McCall turned away from the telephone to see Dr. Littleton hurrying up the corridor toward him.
“The girls at her sorority use a Dr. Williams,” the M.E. said, “but there seems to be doubt that she’s ever seen him for anything. Personally I wouldn’t recommend him. He’s more interested in his golf handicap than in what’s going on in medicine.”
“Then we’d better let Dr. Edgewit handle it till Mr. Thornton gets here and makes his own decision. Thanks, doctor.”
8
A light shone in an upstairs window. McCall stepped onto the porch. The front door was open, the hall in a dim light.
“Dean Gunther?” McCall hesitated. “Floyd?”
A tiny breeze scudded across the porch and a few winter leaves eddied about his feet. Some blew into the front hall as he held the door open. He called again.
McCall stepped in and shut the front door. He stood listening.
After a moment he checked the living room and dining room. The dining table was set, a tall candle burning. He looked into the kitchen. Food was on the range, warming. He returned through a back passage to the entrance hall, hesitated again, and glanced into Gunther’s study. The desk lamp was on, but the room was empty. He stepped inside and made for the desk.
He heard a light step behind him and turned sharply.
It was little Rose Gunther. She had changed into a blue flowered dressing gown. Her heavily made-up eyes were worried.
“Where’s Floyd, Mr. McCall?”
“I thought he was in here,” McCall said. “The front door was open, Mrs. Gunther, so I came in. I called but nobody answered.”
“I was upstairs lying down. Where can Floyd be?” A tiny hand was plucking at the neck of her gown. “He hasn’t been himself lately, Mr. McCall. But I told you that, didn’t I? Where can he have gone? He was here when I went upstairs. Oh, dear, I haven’t even asked you about Laura Thornton. Is she dead?”
“No, she’s alive, although she’s unconscious. She’s suffered a bad beating.”
The dean’s little wife shuddered. “What a world we’re living in. We never know what’s going to happen to our children, do we, Mr. McCall? Even the best-brought-up ones. You’ll have to tell me all about it.” She kept fluttering like a hummingbird. “What am I thinking of!” she exclaimed. “You haven’t had any dinner, your coat is soaked — would you like a cup of coffee while we’re waiting for Floyd? Not that dinner is going to be any good, it’s absolutely ruined...”
“Coffee?” McCall had moved over to the desk, on the side away from Mrs. Gunther. There was an envelope lying on the Navajo Indian rug, unsealed; a bit of wrinkly paper stuck out of the flap. “You took the word out of my mouth, Mrs. Gunther. I’d love a cup of hot coffee. No cream or sugar, though if you have some saccharine I’d appreciate it. Two tablets, please.”
She left the study. McCall pounced on the envelope.
The envelope was smooth. The note was wrinkled. Evidently the notepaper had been angrily crumpled after the recipient read the note, and jammed back into the envelope.
The message was typewritten:
Lady G?
McCall rammed note and envelope into his pocket just as Rose Gunther appeared again in the study doorway.
“It’ll be ready in a minute, Mr. McCall.”
“I’m afraid I can’t stay after all,” McCall said ruefully. “Just remembered something I forgot to take care of.”
“What a shame.”
“I’ll make it as fast as I can, Mrs. Gunther. You keep the coffee hot. Bargain?”
She smiled more openly now.
“If Floyd gets back before I do, ask him to wait for me.”
“I do hope everything’s all right...”
“Now don’t worry, Mrs. Gunther.”
He drove fast toward the campus, blessing Kathryn Cohan for having pointed the Bell Tower out to him earlier in the day.
Blackmail? He blanked his mind. No point in speculating. He’d know in a few minutes. Past the Student Union McCall made a quick turn. Moments later he saw the towering trees, then the music building. The Bell Tower thrust against the night sky like a wind-testing thumb.
He killed his engine and jumped out. The campus was ridiculously peaceful after the turbulent events of the evening. There was no one about at all.
He walked across the lawn toward the silent building. In the semidarkness close to the building, he checked the trees. A small oak stood beside the tower. That couldn’t be the one. He moved carefully around to the rear of the building and saw a giant oak looming in the dark. He paused to listen.
Nothing.
At the same instant he spotted the figure on the ground, a blacker blackness against the lawn, and sprang forward.
Dean Gunther’s yellow-ivory face glowed in the moonlight. Something about the frosted-over sheen of his wide-open eyes told McCall that Gunther was dead.
McCall got out his pencil flash and flicked it on. He made a face. The Dean’s chest and throat were something out of an abattoir. He had been stabbed with a knife over and over, all over the neck and chest and well down into the abdomen. The right leg hooked under the body in an unnatural position. The mouth gaped bloodily. The back was arched, the chest thrown out in an almost comical military posture.
McCall deliberately put Rose Gunther out of his mind. That would come later.
There was a twinkle of light near the body. He sought its source, squatting on his heels. It was a bone-handled hunting knife. The blade was stained, all but the steel near the hilt. He did not touch it.
So now Floyd Gunther, dean of men, had been murdered in an act that by the very violence of its savagery linked it inescapably with the beating of Laura Thornton. The dean had been lured to this dark oak behind the Bell Tower of the Music Building and his death — the “F.G.” in the salutation made it clear that the note had been intended for him. But who was “Lady G?” There had been a threat with teeth behind it in the note. What connection could there be among “Lady G,” the note, Gunther’s murder, and Laura’s beating?
He hurried back to his Ford and drove over to the Student Union; he remembered a row of telephone booths near the entrance.
He caught Sergeant Oliver at police headquarters and broke the news.
“Okay, Mr. McCall, you wait there,” Oliver said; McCall could tell nothing from his tone.
“I’m phoning from the Student Union.”
“I mean go back to the dean’s body. Don’t leave it till we get there.”
McCall returned to the scene of the murder, keeping well away from the body on the grass. He did not touch the hunting knife, although he knew it would yield nothing in the way of clues. It had a rough bone handle that would not take fingerprints, and it was a common knife purchasable anywhere for a few dollars.
Apparently there was the field to choose from in looking for Gunther’s killer. Judging from the effigy-burning of the evening and from the scraps of conversation McCall had picked up on campus, the dean had been despised, resented, had become perhaps the focus of student bitterness in the disputes that were tearing Tisquanto State College apart. But bitterness to the point of murder? And a murder as sadistic as this? That might be the answer. A psychopath vents his psychosis according to its internal energies, not its chance object.
If things had been bad before, there would be hell to pay now. He could imagine Wolfe Wade’s expression when he heard. And Governor Holland’s.
Waiting for the police under the great oak, McCall yearned for a smoke... Dean Gunther had been acting peculiar. More strained than would be accounted for by the commotion on the campus. He was mixed up in something nasty — “Lady G’s” note pointed to that. But what?
Some coed? If she had deliberately lured Gunther to his death, she had had a confederate. No mere girl or woman had wielded that knife. The blows had been delivered by a man’s hand, either a powerful man or one made powerful by rage.
He heard sirens. Headlights slashed the night. Two police cars screamed to a halt before the music building. Feet pounded.
“Over here!”
And, of course, it was Lieutenant Long who led the pack, ferret-face pale, lips curling.
“Well,” Long said. “You certainly get around, McCall.”
McCall said nothing. The officers’ flashlights converged on what lay on the grass. They moved over to the body.
“Tell me about it, big shot,” Long said.
McCall, chewing the lining of his cheek, related how he had come to find Floyd Gunther’s body. The lieutenant read “Lady G’s” note in the light of Sergeant Oliver’s flash, muttered, “A setup,” then carefully pocketed it. McCall stood by, watching Dr. Littleton for the second time that night examine human wreckage.
“I can’t tell much in this light,” the M.E. said, “but somebody sure vented a lot of spleen on this poor man. I’ll have to haul him over to my morgue for a detailed examination. Oh, hello again, Mr. McCall. Busy night.”
“I want to talk to you at headquarters,” Long said abruptly.
He was glowering at McCall.
It was an unpleasant session, and it lasted a long time. Chief Pearson drifted in and out with malevolent detachment, keeping an ear on things. Long insisted on going over the same ground half a dozen times.
“You still haven’t given me a good reason why, when this black boy came running into Gunther’s house with his yarn about finding Laura, you didn’t notify us on the spot,” the lieutenant said. “That was police business, Mr. McCall, and you damn well know it! No, instead you go shooting off down to the river on your own. I want to know why!”
“Because the girl might have been alive — as it turned out she was — and every minute counted,” McCall said patiently again. “At the back of my mind, I suppose, I was expecting Gunther or Mrs. Gunther to notify the police. I’ve told you all this, lieutenant.”
“I don’t buy it,” Long said nastily. “It sounds fishy to me.”
“I don’t give a damn how it sounds to you,” McCall said. “Look, I know you and Pearson dislike my charging in here on your turf, but I’m tired of being treated like a suspect in a lineup. You keep up these tactics, lieutenant, I’m going to phone the attorney general.”
Finally Long let him go. He returned to the Red Harbor Inn, changed to a fresh jacket, and headed for the hospital.
McCall found Brett Thornton outside a private room in the V.I.P. pavilion on the third floor, pacing. It was past evening visiting hours by now, and the shining corridors were deserted except for an occasional hurrying white uniform.
Laura’s father was one of those bantam-sized men who make up for their lack of physical impressiveness by sheer glowering will. He had a bony, almost skeletal, face, all ridges and wales, with a blade of a nose and jet eyes as unwinking as a snake’s. His mouth was a wound, and words shot out of it like pus.
“How is she, Mr. Thornton?” McCall asked quietly.
“Don’t you know?” Thornton spat. “I thought this was what Holland sent you down here for.”
“It’s been a busy evening, sir. The last report I had, your daughter was in a coma.”
“She still is. She’s in terrible shape. Dying, for all I can tell! They don’t know anything in this one-horse excuse of a hospital! I’m waiting for my own doctor now. What have you found out? Who attacked her?”
“We can’t guarantee instant solutions, Mr. Thornton,” McCall said. “We’re doing the best we can. It’s not going to help getting angry.”
“I’ll get anything I damn please! It’s Holland whose policies have generated the atmosphere that allows a thing like this to happen. And I’ll have his hide for it.”
“Do you hold him responsible for what’s going on in California, New York, Paris, Tokyo? This student unrest is worldwide, Mr. Thornton. You know that. Naturally you’re upset. Anybody would be. Is Mrs. Thornton with you?”
“She’s home under a doctor’s care. Everything’s gone to hell. Christ, my baby girl.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
Thornton ignored him. He sprang to the door of Laura’s room, opened it a crack, peered inside. Immediately he was back in the hall.
“The same. She’ll die, McCall. I feel it in my bones.” He began striding about, taking his frustration out on the inlaid linoleum. “It’s these damned students! I warned Holland they were getting out of hand. But did he do anything? — kick the troublemaking Communists out of the college, for instance, as I suggested? Why, some of them are here on scholarships, for God’s sake!” Thornton seized McCall’s lapel. “Well, I tell you here and now, McCall, you’d damn well better pull this off. Or I’ll make things so hot in this state for your governor that Antarctica won’t cool him off!”
“I’ll do my best,” McCall said.
Thornton glared. But there was no irony in McCall’s tone. It seemed to mollify Thornton. When he spoke again it was more rationally. “Laura was obviously involved in something with someone.” He turned the glare on the door of her room. “The question is in what? With whom? Have you found out anything at all?”
“I just got here this morning, Mr. Thornton. I’m afraid not yet.”
Thornton turned on his heel, muttering. The door opened and Dr. Edgewit came out of Laura’s room.
Thornton pounced. “Any change?”
“No change, Mr. Thornton. She isn’t responding as yet. But she’s not losing ground, either.”
“Isn’t there a competent doctor in this hole?” Thornton howled.
“Dr. Madigan, our chief of staff, has taken personal charge. He’s in there now, sir.” Dr. Edgewit plodded off.
McCall followed him, leaving Laura’s father alone. He was thinking what a mercy it was that the governor had been unable to fly down. The mere sight of Sam Holland in this hospital corridor might have brought on a physical attack from Thornton and made headlines all over the state.
A young nurse crossed McCall’s path, smiling at him. He paused to watch her crisp walk, listen to the swish of her starched uniform. After Thornton, it was a joy.
9
At the Gunther home a uniformed man stood at the door.
“Sorry. No visitors.”
McCall told him who he was.
“Oh. Then I guess it’s okay, Mr. McCall.”
McCall went in. Another officer stood in the hallway, a heavyset older man. McCall identified himself and asked, “Where’s Mrs. Gunther, officer?”
“Upstairs in bed. A doctor’s with her.”
“Then she’s been informed about her husband?”
The man nodded. “Worst case of hysterics I ever saw. She’s under heavy sedation. They got a nurse up there with her, too.”
McCall made for Floyd Gunther’s study. The light over the desk was still on. The shadows in the room hung heavier than before.
McCall stood there.
This was where Gunther would come when he wanted to get away from people (from himself?).
He began to prowl the study.
He finally settled on the desk. Nothing on top of significance. He checked the drawers, with their freight of folders pertaining to college matters and Gunther’s duties as dean of men.
He had the bottom right-hand drawer open and was running through the folders there when he was struck with something. The drawer itself seemed short; it came little more than halfway out. It must be stuck.
He pulled, but it would not budge. He reached in and under the top of the drawer, felt around, and touched a steel bar. He jiggled it and thought he detected a slight sideward movement. He pushed the bar to the right as far as it would go and heard a click. He yanked, and the drawer slid out.
There was a rear compartment, which had a lid that was secured by a miniature padlock.
McCall glanced toward the door. He could not see the officer in the hall, but the man was still out there — McCall heard him clear his throat.
It wasn’t much of a lock.
On the desktop lay a large lump of clear heavy plastic shaped to resemble a boulder. Protruding from the boulder was a little Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword in miniature. Gunther’s letter-opener. It was made of stainless steel, and McCall thought it would do. He drew it from its sheath and inserted it under the lid of the secret compartment close to the little padlock. He listened for the cop, heard nothing, and jerked. The lock snapped with a loud snap.
He heard footsteps and sat down in Gunther’s leather chair. The police officer appeared.
“Oh. Yes, officer?” McCall said, looking up. From the policeman’s position he could not see the open drawer.
“I thought I heard something break in here.”
“Break?” McCall said. “Oh, it must have been this letter-opener. I was sitting here thinking and playing with it, and dropped it out of my hand.”
The man stared at him. I don’t give a damn if he buys it or not, McCall thought.
“I don’t know if I ought to let you stay in here, Mr. McCall,” the patrolman said finally, in an uneasy voice. “My orders were—”
McCall gave him his coldest executive look.
The man backed off. “I guess that was out of line, Mr. McCall,” he mumbled, and went back to his post.
McCall raised the lid of the compartment.
There were some documents. He looked through them. Family papers, two wills, some insurance policies. But, beneath, an unmarked folder. McCall seized it. It contained three sheets of ordinary white typing paper. Their contents were typewritten, like the “Lady G” note.
They were threatening letters, all in the same vein. The last one was typical:
The letter was signed, “
Dean Gunther bedding coeds? Then the woman who had written the note that lured Gunther to his death was probably the “young coed,” the “mutual friend” whose “cooperation” had laid the original trap.
Blackmail.
No wonder Gunther had been nervous!
There was a photocopier on a stand in the corner, and McCall warmed it up and ran the three notes through the machine. The copies he tucked into his inside breast pocket; the originals he replaced in the secret compartment of the desk.
By whatever hand Gunther had come to his nasty death, the fatal attack had been a surprise to him. He had obviously considered himself safe from bodily harm, or he would have left a record of his fears in the most logical place — the secret drawer in which he kept the “Thomas Taylor” blackmail notes.
Whoever “Thomas Taylor” was — and that was a false name, McCall was certain, over which Pearson, Long, and Oliver could break their heads — he was undoubtedly the man who plunged the knife into Gunther’s body so many times... Gunther’s blackmailer-killer.
Queer... blackmail was almost invariably a matter of squeezing money out of the victim. The three notes signed Taylor suggested something else. “So you had better see that everything goes without a hitch for me.”
Whatever that meant, it did not suggest money.
McCall left. He had something solid to chew on at last.
He drove back into town and stopped in at police headquarters.
Lieutenant Long was still on duty; McCall found him in the main corridor talking with another officer.
“You again,” Long said.
“Can I talk to you alone, lieutenant?”
The officer moved away at Long’s nod.
“Well?” Long said. “You going to hand me a killer or two, Mr. McCall?”
“Hardly. But I’ve got a clue for you.”
“Oh?” said Long. “What clue?”
“Have you examined Dean Gunther’s study?”
“Haven’t had a chance—”
“I thought not, or you’d have found it, too. If you’ll look in the bottom right-hand drawer of Gunther’s desk, you’ll find a secret compartment at the rear. It was secured with a small padlock, which I had to snap. In the compartment I found some personal papers — wills, policies, the usual — and a folder containing three typewritten notes. They’re threat notes, lieutenant. And they seem to implicate Gunther in something pretty nasty.”
“Where are they?” Long howled. “Gimme!”
“I’d hardly removed the evidence,” McCall said with a shake of the head. “I handled them with great care, lieutenant, so any prints you find on the notes won’t include mine—”
But Long was already sprinting for the entrance.
Not even a thank-you, McCall thought.
He was tired. He drove back to the Red Harbor Inn, ordered a weak gin-and-tonic in the bar, left half of it, and went to his room and bed.
He dreamed immediately and woke up in a sweat. He had been skiing on a black river which miraculously supported his weight, and his skis were made of two glittering swords. He was rushing along pursued by unseen things of great dreadfulness toward the jaws of unseen things of even greater.
10
The next morning at eight-thirty McCall intercepted Kathryn Cohan at the entrance to the administration building. He took pleasure in watching how she approached with her slow and easy female walk, how the sun flicked sparks off her auburn hair. She was wearing something short and free in kelly green and she seemed to McCall to bring with her the essence of the spring.
“Hi, Mike!”
She was glad to see him, and this warmed him. He wanted to take her hand and had to lecture himself.
“You’ve heard, I take it,” he said.
“About the girl’s being found? It’s all over ’Squanto. And poor Floyd... it’s a nightmare. I hear Rose Gunther’s absolutely prostrate, poor thing. Is Laura all right?”
“Last night she was still in a coma. I haven’t heard yet this morning.”
“Mike. Is there any lead to who murdered Floyd?”
He allowed himself a neutral shake of the head. “I want to catch Damon Wilde before he goes to his first class, if I can. Where’s the Phi Delt house?”
She gave him directions. “You’d better hurry if you want to catch him. Good luck, Mike.” She touched his arm. “I’ve got to fly. Ina gets to her desk around eight. I’m her cross, she says.”
“Happy the guy who’s crucified on you,” McCall heard himself say with a flight of gallantry that astounded him.
“Why, Mr. McCall!” Then Kathryn laughed and ran into the building.
The Phi Delt house looked like money, a huge ranch-type fieldstone with a sweeping drive, standing on grounds heavily landscaped with flowering shrubs and flower beds. A stone mountain lion snarled on the front lawn; it was spattered with red paint. The house looked asleep. Maybe it’s the silence, McCall thought.
McCall parked in the drive, crunched across blue and white gravel, and pressed the bell.
He deliberately emptied his mind. He had found that preconceptions were almost always upset by the reality, indeed, got in the way. Instead, he concentrated on the Thornton girl lying yellow-pale in the hospital bed, barely breathing; on how Floyd Gunther’s torn body had looked lying under the oak behind the Bell Tower.
The door opened and a round young face poked out. The face was attached to a round young body swathed in an orange sweater and adhesive pants. All McCall could think of was an up-ended pumpkin. With a handlebar mustache.
“Is Damon Wilde in?”
“Oh, Christ, another one,” the young man said. “Okay, come in.”
The boy stepped aside. McCall entered. It was cool in the house; there was a faint unwashed odor. The student pointed down the hall. “Damon’s in number nine.”
“Thank you.” To the right was an immense room, high-ceilinged, black-beamed. The ashes of a dozen fires were piled up in a huge fieldstone fireplace.
Somebody was playing a guitar somewhere. The tune was “Poor Butterfly.”
“Don’t mind that corn,” the boy in the orange sweater said. “He simply isn’t with it.”
McCall walked down the hall and knocked on the door of number nine.
“Sack the rattle!” somebody called. “Yes?”
McCall opened the door. “Damon Wilde?”
A well-muscled young man, blond and crew-cut, naked to the waist, with lather on his face, stood in a doorway beyond the mussed bed, razor in hand.
“Yeah?”
McCall flipped open his credentials case.
“I’m impressed,” Wilde said.
McCall stared at him. “I hope so. It should make our talk more agreeable.”
“Oh, sweet Jeese,” Wilde said. “Is it all right if I finish shaving?”
Wilde moved back into the tiny lavatory and began scraping away.
“You and Laura Thornton have been very close,” McCall said.
“That’s no secret,” Wilde said. “Next?”
McCall leaned against the jamb. “I don’t think you fully understand what you’re up against, Mr. Wilde,” he said. “Flippancy isn’t going to get you anywhere. This has gone far beyond the smart-crack stage. I suppose you’ve heard that Laura’s been found. She’s in a coma. She may very well die. I think a little seriousness is called for.”
Wilde did not reply. It seemed to McCall that the boy was nervous — he had difficulty keeping the razor steady as he shaved his upper lip — but there was a defiant thrust to his jaw, a veiled something that might have hidden a fear.
“You may be up to your ears in jam,” McCall said.
Wilde finished shaving. From the depths of a towel he mumbled, “Okay. So go ahead.”
“When did you see Laura last?”
“Thursday night.”
“At the Greenview Motel?”
He knew he had struck pay dirt from the elaborate way Wilde tried to be nonchalant. McCall watched him open a bureau drawer, select a white shirt, put it on, button it, tuck it in, open a closet, pick out a sweater, slip it over his head.
Finally he said, “What makes you say that?”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“The answer is no.”
“You weren’t at the Greenview Motel Thursday night?”
“No.”
“How about before last Thursday night?”
Wilde shook his head.
“I have a feeling we could get along,” McCall said, “if you’d play ball.”
To his surprise Wilde burst into laughter. “Holy cow and twenty-three skiddoo,” her jeered. “You’re leaving out ‘A Message to Garcia.’”
“Look,” McCall said, “flattery will get you nowhere. I know you’ve been at the Greenview Motel with Laura Thornton, Wilde.” He was certain he was right. “You registered a number of times under the names Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Addison. Or rather Laura did the registering. You apparently didn’t have the guts to do it yourself.”
The blond boy flushed. “It wasn’t that... all
“Around by the river?”
“No! We didn’t go near the river.”
“Where did you go?”
“Oh, hell, just around.” He glanced nervously at his wristwatch with its white and black mod strap. “You’ll have to continue this in our next, McCall, I’ve got a class and I’m late now—”
“You’ll have to miss it. This can’t wait.”
“For God’s sake, I’ve been questioned by the fuzz till it’s coming out of my ears!”
“You haven’t been questioned by me. Sit down!”
Wilde sat down on the bed, shrugging.
“Have you heard about Dean Gunther?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that all? Just yeah?”
“What do you want me to do, tear my clothes?” Wilde said sullenly. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Any ideas?”
“No!”
“Did you notice anything different about Laura Thursday?”
“No.” Too quickly.
“Come on, Damon.”
“Come on where?”
“She did act differently, didn’t she?”
“Well, so what? It bugged me a little. She was thinking about something else all the time. Or somebody. All the time we were making out.”
“And you didn’t like it.”
“Who would? Her heart wasn’t in it. I mean, she wasn’t with it... I don’t go for this, Mr. McCall. I don’t like you a whole lot, to be frank. I don’t like talking about this. I had nothing to do with what happened to Laura.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“You’re all alike, every one of you!” Wilde jumped up and planted a big shoe on the bed. “The voice of authority. You think you’ve got life sewed up. The security bag. Wow. Give the man a badge and he comes on like Prince Albert.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ever smoke Prince Albert?”
“No.”
“You’re not with it, dad... it always jells out the same way. We get stomped, one way or another.”
“Who does?”
“The students!” He was growling now. “Why are we here? What’s it accomplish but keep us out of the army?”
“That’s not what I’m interested in this morning, Wilde.”
“You’re telling me. Who is interested? Any time? That’s just the effing trouble. Look at this poor excuse for a college.”
“All right,” McCall said, dragging over a chair. “Tell me about it.”
“What have we got to say about anything? Nothing! It’s going to change. You better believe it. Why the hell are we militant? Because nothing else works. The New Left is one way, but it has to be backed up with imagination. Maybe what happened last night would have helped.”
“You mean burning Gunther in effigy?”
“That’s right. We wanted to get under his skin, make him react. Maybe if he felt a hurt he’d show some sympathy with our problems, take some positive action. The last thing in the world we wanted was for somebody to murder him. All that means is that we have to start in all over again on somebody else in authority.”
“You’re a hard case, Damon.”
“Golly, man, the words you come on with. I’m awed. Look! I don’t swing out all the way. I mean, it’s not my bag. But you ought to get with it a little bit. Who condones murder, for Chrissake? You’re barking up the wrong oak tree. It’s just that we’ve got to have a voice. Can’t you dig that? It’s like being inside a cage yelling your head off, pounding on the bars, and nothing happens, nobody lifts a finger, just stands around in silence. Wolfe Wade sits there behind his desk combing the worms out of his hair. He’s in a wet dream of yesterday. This is
McCall nodded. “Of course I do.”
“Just a voice is all. We have ideas, some good ones. It’s time people got over the stupid notion that youth doesn’t know. I’m not a Yippie, or even a hippie, I’m just a student. But I want them to listen to me, and their ears are stuffed with wax.”
“Let’s get back to the issue, Damon.”
“Laura.”
“Yes.”
“And the dean. You think I did that to Laura?”
“I’ll find out if you did.”
Wilde smacked the bed with his fist. It was a formidable one, and McCall watched it. “Oh, baby. You sound like my father. Bugger it! You want to know something? I didn’t like Laura that much. She thinks she’s so great. Come to think of it, I don’t like her at all.” He glanced at his watch and turned away.
McCall knew he had struck a chord somewhere. The boy figured he had said too much and had tuned out.
“I have to go now,” Damon Wilde said.
“I may want to see you again.”
Wilde said suddenly, “I don’t know what you or the fuzz are going to do about Laura, but we don’t like that sort of thing. Dig? What happened to Laura will... well... take care of itself.”
“Somebody forming a vigilante group?” McCall asked, smiling.
“Don’t partronize me,” Wilde barked. “Look, why don’t you go bug Denny Sullivan or Perry Eastman? They’ve been sucking around Laura, too.”
“I intend to do that,” McCall said.
“Fine,” Wilde said. “And the hell with you.” And he rushed out, cursing.
McCall glanced around. There was no point in searching Wilde’s room; the police had undoubtedly done so, and besides Laura’s boyfriend did not strike him as dull. An eye-hurting psychedelic poster hung over a cluttered desk. Above the bed glowered blowups of Humphrey Bogart and Malcolm X.
He heard the front door open and bang shut.
He started down the hall. The young pumpkin with the handlebar mustache was waiting for him with a solemn expression.
“He’s something of a challenge, isn’t he, Mr. McCall?” the young man said. “I mean Damon. Ballsy. Look, I’m James Tuttle the Third. They call me the Trinity around here. I know about you. Everybody does. We’ve been waiting for you to come around and run Damon through the computer. Look, Damon’s sore because Laura was seen with another guy Friday noon. If you think he acted kind of funny, that’s the reason.”
McCall did not even blink.
“Who was the other fellow, James?”
“Dennis Sullivan.”
“As long as you’re being so informative,” McCall said, “just how close were Sullivan and Laura? Damon mentioned something about his ‘making out.’ Was Sullivan, too?”
“You’d better ask him.” Tuttle waved a delicate forefinger. “In fact, Mr. McCall, you’ll have to find out anything else all by your V.I.P. lonesome. I’m no fink, and you better believe it.”
“Then I take it,” McCall said, smiling, “you don’t care for Mr. Sullivan.”
“You can take it,” James Tuttle the Third smiled back, “and, sir, you can stuff it. The egress is this way.”
McCall stepped outside.
Immediately he reopened the door and stepped back inside. Young Tuttle had disappeared. McCall went into the big common room. Nobody was there. He made for the phone he had spotted near the door.
He got Kathryn Cohan without difficulty and she supplied him with Dennis Sullivan’s address. “How about getting together soon?” McCall asked.
Kathryn said, “Oh, but you’re too busy, Mr. McCall,” and he heard her laugh as she hung up.
Dennis Sullivan lived in a rooming house a few blocks off campus.
Driving along, McCall chewed his cud. The beating of Laura Thornton and Dean Gunther’s murder were connected. He did not know why he was sure of this, but he had always been a hunch player... he wondered if he should not have questioned Wilde about the notes and decided that he had been wise not to. If the student had knowledge of them, he would hardly admit it; the only result would have been to alert him that McCall — and probably the police — knew about them.
Had Dean Gunther really been playing around with one of these attractive college kids? Gunther was the right age for that sort of thing; he dimly glimpsed that Rose Gunther was a washout. And one never knew what another man was capable of.
He had to assume, in view of the notes, that Gunther was guilty of indiscretions if not downright flagrancy. What could have happened last night? Gunther had sneaked out to meet a coed whom he had been having an affair with. He had met death instead.
McCall stopped at a curbside phone booth to call the hospital.
Laura Thornton’s condition was unchanged.
11
The house was an old mansion gone to seed. It smelled of bitter coffee. Sullivan’s room was on the third floor.
McCall found it off an alcove and knocked on the door, freshly painted black.
He knocked again.
“All
The door opened, and McCall was a little startled. The young man who stood there had long brown hair sweeping to the neck and curled low across the forehead. He wore a heavy gold earring in his left ear and, like Damon Wilde, he was naked to the waist. He was also barefoot. He wore black, very tight jeans that almost embarrassed McCall. Long sideburns framed his cheeks like parentheses.
“Dennis Sullivan?”
The young man stared; he had bright, fixed blue eyes. “You’re McCall.”
“That’s right. May I come in?”
Sullivan shrugged and stepped back.
McCall entered a small arty room walled with paintings and photographs. The rest was litter and dirt.
“Excuse me,” the young man said. “I was just dressing.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
Sullivan went into the bathroom. He shut the door.
“I suppose you’re here to question me about Laura Thornton,” he called.
“Yes,” McCall said.
Silence.
McCall prowled the room looking at the photographs and the paintings, the beat-up furniture, the textbooks on the shelf above a desk. Most of the pictures on the wall were photographs, blowups of the campus, crowds, a number showing violent action, principally by white-helmeted police wielding their clubs on students (taken apparently during the riot). McCall noticed a good deal of photographic equipment lying about; either it was Sullivan’s hobby or photography was part of whatever curriculum he was taking. A few unframed canvases leaned against the desk. McCall went through them. They were all violent abstracts. One was a study in yellows; another was in blues, black, and purples. One that especially drew his eye was in various shades of red; it made him think of flames scorching the walls and roof of a cave. The artist’s name was scrawled in the righthand lower corner of the painting, but he could not make it out.
He leaned the canvases back against the desk and went noiselessly to the bathroom door. He heard a soft, derisive whistling. He shrugged and surveyed the walls again. Two enormous blowups had obviously not been snapped by young Mr. Sullivan: one of Humphrey Bogart, the other of W. C. Fields. Fields was in his Micawber costume, Bogart in his Harry Morgan character from
Dennis Sullivan stepped back into the room fully dressed. He had put on a black shirt and a fawn-colored vest; the shirt was buttoned at the neck, but he was tieless. Instead, a large round silver medallion on a leather thong hung to his chest.
“I couldn’t get to first base with her,” Sullivan said.
“With Laura?”
“Who else, man? She was uptight. At least as far as I was concerned.” He fingered his medallion. There was something smoothly nervous about him, like a lid over a can of eels. McCall stared at his gold earring. It was for real; the lobe had been pierced.
“You don’t seem much broken up about what happened to her.”
“Should I be? I’m sorry somebody beat her up, of course, but teasers lead a dangerous life.”
“She’s a teaser?”
“Opinions differ. Anyway, what happened to Dean Gunther grabs me more than Laura’s beating. His death affects the situation here at school, and that’s something that concerns everybody. Conditions are rotten bad, Mr. McCall.”
“Let’s stick to Laura. How well do you know her?”
Even standing still there was a swagger to Sullivan; he had a certain flair. “Biblically I struck out. Socially, it’s relative, like everything else.”
“Answering nothing.”
“I mean she’s a good enough chick, but we don’t really get on. She likes me, all right, but that’s as far as it goes. What I’m concerned about is the way ’Squanto is run. The students are the majority, shouldn’t they have a voice in what goes on? I think so. But they say the system offers you a route and you’ve got to take it or bug out. Take pot, for instance. Why shouldn’t we be able to smoke pot if we like? Why in hell can’t it be legalized? Or LSD? Or speed? Whose rights am I trampling on when I take a trip?”
“That has nothing to do with ’Squanto,” McCall said. “That’s a matter of law.”
“But it’s an example.”
“The trouble with you campus radicals, Sullivan, is that you don’t focus. You’re like the general who got on his horse and rode off in all directions.”
“Focus? I reserve all my focusing for my photo lenses.”
“Yes, I see you’re interested in photography.”
“I’m studying photographic journalism. But like I say, you focus
“I don’t have the time to listen to your philosophy just now, Sullivan,” McCall said. “Meanwhile, you may have been the last one to see Laura Thornton before she was attacked. You were seen with her Friday noon.”
“Oh, that,” Sullivan said. “Laura was walking over to the liberal arts building and I gave her a lift.”
“You didn’t see her after you dropped her off?”
“No.”
“Why was she going there, do you know?”
“Well, they have a department that operates like a library, loaning out paintings like books. Students borrow them. Laura was returning a painting.” He seemed to consider something, hesitated, then said, “That’s all I know. I dropped her off there, and that’s it. We hardly talked on the way.”
“Oh?” McCall said. “Did you have a spat?”
“It had nothing to do with me. I remember thinking she must be off her feed or something, because usually she’s talkative. When I let her out with the painting she took off fast, and I went about my business. You know, it gives you an eerie feeling at that, realizing you may have been the last to see her.”
“You’re talking as if she’s dead, Sullivan.” McCall was watching him closely.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way! I meant...” Whatever it was he meant, he did not explain. “I wonder why she was clobbered like that.”
“Whoever did it must have had a powerful reason, wouldn’t you say?”
“But to be so brutal,” Sullivan muttered. “And now the dean. Stabbed to death. Almost like the two things are tied in somehow. And then there’s that blackmail — those notes.”
It struck McCall like a blow. “How do you know about that, Sullivan?”
“Didn’t you read the morning papers? All about those letters. They say you found them.”
McCall hid his anger. It had never occurred to him that the police would publicize the letters while their discovery was still steaming. What could Chief Pearson be thinking of? Unless it hadn’t been Pearson but Lieutenant Long. Either way, it was not going to help the situation on campus. To the stew of campus unrest was now added the spice of a dean who was accused of having played around with coeds — a dean, moreover, who had got himself murdered as a result of it.
“Groovy, man,” Sullivan said with a grin. “Old Gunther making like Humbert Humbert. Wait till I get Pat’s reaction! She’ll love it.”
“Humbert Humbert?” McCall said.
The student stared. “The guy in
“Lolita was hardly the college-student age,” McCall said shortly. “Who’s Pat?”
“Well, you could call her my steady. Patricia Reed.”
“I thought you were hot after Laura Thornton.”
“That was for kicks,” Sullivan explained patiently. “Pat and me, we’ve got a thing going. And speaking of going, that’s just what I’ve got to do. You through with me, Mr. McCall?”
“For now.”
“I’d like to talk to you in depth when we’ve got more time. You know, like about drugs, sex, Vietnam, the whole bag. You being the gov’s man Friday and all, you could maybe give his excellency the inside on what’s really cooking at ’Squanto, and why.”
“Yes, we’ll have to do that. Can I drop you somewhere?”
Sullivan politely declined the offer, and they parted on the walk before his rooming house. Sullivan had a Bolex slung over his shoulder.
McCall drove slowly back to the administration building, thinking young Sullivan over. He was another opaque one. No matter what came out of their mouths, when you analyzed it it amounted to nothing. Was it part of the scene, or were these deliberate opacities, for personal reasons? McCall shook his head. He had never felt so alienated in his life. It was like dealing with extraterrestrial beings.
Something was brewing on campus again. It was overrun with students. Placards waved wildly. There was a great deal of shouting, and little scuffling eddies where disagreements broke out into violence. Before one building McCall saw something that made him think he was back in the colleges he had known — a snake dance. But it was only in mockery; the students were actually on a picket line. They danced to the accompaniment of a derisive chant. The only word in the chant McCall could make out clearly was “pig.” Scanning the faces of the campus police, McCall had no doubt whom the students meant.
Kathryn Cohan was not in her office. A secretary told him that she might be attending a faculty meeting at McNiel Hall.
McCall checked the front office for Perry Eastman’s address and was just stepping out into the corridor when he heard a crash of glass. A coed walking by shrieked and broke into a run.
A man came running up the hall. McCall stopped him. “What’s going on?”
“They’ve started again!”
McCall stepped across broken glass. Students were boiling around the entrance to the administration building; all he could see were enraged faces and gaping mouths. They were shouting obscenities. They wheeled like a stampeding herd of range cattle and started back across the campus.
The man McCall had stopped in the hall joined him on the steps.
“I’m Dean Gunther’s assistant,” the man said nervously. “You’re Mr. McCall, down from the capital, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve just had to call for the regular police, Mr. McCall.”
“What’s this one about?”
“What’s it ever about? They want to run the college! If I were in charge, I’d kick the lot of ’em the hell out.”
At this moment President Wade came out of the building, looking hunted. He paused on the steps and stood there helplessly. He did not notice McCall.
A group of students separated themselves from the crowds and began silently to form ranks. They were all blacks. They broke into a run, shouting.
McCall turned to Gunther’s assistant.
“Where’s McNiel Hall?”
“You don’t want to go over there, Mr. McCall. That’s the center of the trouble. There must be a thousand students there trying to tear the place down.”
“Where is it?”
The man told him.
McCall left on the run. He soon had to slow to a walk, using his shoulders, slipping through the shrieking crowds. There were man-to-man fights all over the place. It had the looks of something nasty, all right.
McNiel Hall was a round arena-like building. It was under attack from students hiding behind the thick privet hedges bordering the building. They were hurling rocks at the windows. Wherever McCall looked he saw broken glass.
The campus police were taking shelter in the entrance to the Hall. They were largely middle-aged men; some were white-haired.
“Pig meat!” screamed the students.
One grizzled cop broke his cool. He lunged down the steps, waving his billy. A strapping student in a white sweater rose from nowhere and slugged him in the face. The man fell over with a bleeding mouth and began to scramble away. The student kicked him in the rump, laughing. Then he went back to throwing rocks.
McCall suddenly spied Damon Wilde leading a group toward the entrance, evidently to storm it. He kept waving them on, shouting encouragement.
Then McCall heard the sirens, and a moment later police cars roared into view.
It was miraculous how quickly the campus turned from crashing chaos to peace. The Tisquanto police piled out of their cars with their riot guns and tear gas and plunged into an immediately ambling, quiet student body. The group headed by Damon Wilde simply melted into the crowd.
Their discipline impressed McCall. The police mingled with innocent-looking students, baffled. There were no targets for their clubs and canisters. Everybody moved away from McNiel Hall as if a rally had been called, held and concluded. The most curious murmur, an almost silence, settled over the campus. It seemed to say, “We have the power to exercise — or not — as we see fit.”
Behind the almost-silence lay a threat.
It became evident to McCall that Damon Wilde was a force to be reckoned with; he must certainly be one of the inner ring of the student rebellion leadership. He was an articulate, directed young man with clear ideas and a strategic sense. By contrast Dennis Sullivan was a disjointed sophomore. McCall sensed that Sullivan was a follower, on the periphery of the unrest, being swung along with the rest.
McCall turned back toward the administration building. The way the students had turned meek and mild at the appearance of the regular police disturbed him almost more than their previous violence. This thing is organized, he thought. Today they preached a sermon; tomorrow they might call for blood.
As he slid under the wheel of his car, McCall thought of Kathryn Cohan and wondered if she had been inside McNiel Hall during the trouble, and how frightened she must have been. By God, I’m feeling protective! he thought, and hastily turned to thoughts of Perry Eastman, next on his list, and what he would be like. Would young Eastman offer a lead?
McCall drove away longing for a cigarette.
12
He drew up to a four-storied brick building with a patchy lawn in front and three diseased elms. The building looked dirty and old, like a skid-row derelict. It was only two blocks from Floyd Gunther’s house. The contrast in neighborhoods was depressing.
Someone was playing Bach as rendered by the Swingle Singers. Well, that was one thing in the joint’s favor.
About to mount to the porch, McCall glanced over a rusty iron railing and saw a door under the porch marked “1.” Number one was Perry Eastman’s apartment.
Basement affluence.
He went on down. The Bach became louder. Dirty windowpanes were darkened further by heavy drapes. He heard laughter that sounded hysterical.
There was a brass knocker on the door in the shape of a naked girl. McCall lifted the girl and rapped her backside against the panel.
McCall opened the door and stepped into a cavern-like place, shadow-filled from candles that burned everywhere. One huge brass candelabrum before a yellow-brick fireplace was taller than McCall. Posters covered the walls; a heady incense filled the room, but it did not entirely blot out the acrid odor of marijuana. The incense was curling lazily from a brass Indian urn on the mantelpiece, at least five sticks’ worth. The pixillated Bach was coming out of a cheap record player.
“Bet you’re McCall. Sure. I saw you in the dean’s office. So you’re here in my pad. So be it. The moment of truth, eh?”
Eastman, who was on his spine in a cracked red leather chair, wavered to his feet. He looked more than ever like a slat, and he was in the same pullover and tight jeans he had worn the day before. He badly needed a shave, and his long hair had not felt a comb for a week. It occurred to McCall that he might have been up all night.
Eastman took a step toward McCall, bowing. He almost fell. He was obviously high. McCall quickly glanced over by the chair. An ashtray held a smoldering butt that, from the odor, was marijuana. And from the looks of his eyes he might also have been using crystals, or methedrine. McCall did not admire speed freaks. They were notoriously unreliable and might explode like land mines. “I’ve seen the papers,” Eastman said. “Gunther... it’s a crusher, man. Y’know? The dean wasn’t a bad deal, just square. And this business of Laura and Lady G and all. It grabs you, doesn’t it? I mean, we have so much to contend with at ’Squanto, we hardly need murder and beating up on chicks. Do we, Mr. McCall?”
Eastman was tripping, all right. He spoke and moved dreamily. He stepped over to the mantel, took down huge round sunglasses, put them on.
“Now I can see you, Mr. McCall. Won’t you sit down?”
There was a chair, and McCall sat down. Eastman kept moving as if he were wading through surf.
“You no doubt want to know all about me, and why not? What is more absorbing than the study of man? Essentially, Perry Eastman — that’s me — deals in truth, Mr. McCall. The basics. A, B, and C. The foundation that props us, the motivations that afflict us. Truth is a mighty hard thing to come by. You ever really try to dig it, Mr. McCall? Prolly you’re the type who might dig me. But it’s a fact, people don’t dig that even when we think we’re speaking truth we’re glossing it over. What does McLuhan say? I forget. The hell with McLuhan.”
McCall said nothing.
“Why, you ask? Because if you deal in truth you never have a hangup. And who needs hangups? Not I, sir!”
He kept speaking dreamily, drifting about the dismal room, peering at McCall as if through smoke. The record player suddenly turned itself off.
“I knew Laura Thornton, yes,” young Eastman said. “I just winked behind my shades, Mr. McCall. Of course, you couldn’t see it, so it wasn’t effective, but I winked just the same, and that makes me secure.”
“You feel secure?” asked McCall.
“You bet. This is a happening. If it could be on a stage, it would prolly be very entertaining.”
“How well did you know Laura?”
Eastman waved a coy finger. “She thought Damon Wilde was such a great guy. The faithful swain. Horse-balls, Mr. McCall. All the time he’s sleeping with Veronica Gale.
“Thanks,” McCall said. “Dean Gunther got rather tough with you, didn’t he, Perry?”
“Now, now, there you go, Mr. McCall. I
“Who had it in for Gunther? Hated him enough to kill?”
Eastman threw his head back in a spasm of laughter. It lasted only a moment. “Everybody had it in for Gunther. Even me a little. He was a clot.”
“I thought you said you liked him.”
“Dichotomous, y’know? I disliked him, too.”
McCall had begun to detect a wariness under Eastman’s dreamy exterior.
“Did you kill him, Perry?”
“Straight to the nitty-titty, I’ll give you that. No.”
“Where were you last night? Around nine?”
“Oh, wow.”
“Come on, Perry.”
Eastman flapped his arms. “I was right here in my pad. Believe it, man. All alone, too, meditating.”
“Do you get down to the river much?”
“Where the lovebirds go? You’re trying to pin me down, McCall. I don’t like it.”
“You ever take Laura down by the river?” McCall asked patiently.
“No,
“You wouldn’t beat up on a girl, would you, Perry?”
“Me?” He laughed again. “That’s funny. My mother raised me to respect womanhood, Mr. McCall. No, I wouldn’t.”
“You stick pretty much to yourself, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Well, maybe.”
“How about girls generally? You pretty successful?”
“I’m normal, if that’s what you mean.”
“How about Laura? Did you make her?”
“As a gentleman,” began the boy, swaying.
“How about Laura, Perry? You can cut out the cute routine. I want answers.”
Eastman moved over to the leather chair and fell into it. He pushed the sunglasses up and stared at McCall with his muzzy eyes. “I’m through talking to you. Take off, fuzz.”
“I could turn you in for smoking grass.”
Eastman did not reply. His eyelids had come down, and he lay sprawled in the chair as if he had fallen asleep.
“I’ll be seeing you, Perry.”
Eastman began to snore.
McCall left, frowning. It was not that he had expected more from Eastman than he had got out of the others. He had long since realized that, whatever lay behind the beating of Laura, no one was going to make it easy for him to find out. Rather, they all seemed to project a general air, as much of mockery as of evasion, as if they were all enjoying a secret joke at his expense.
One thing had emerged from his otherwise unproductive talk with Eastman: the student had almost nakedly threatened his personal safety. The second threat in two days.
Somebody was afraid of what he might find out.
But why? He was getting nowhere. Didn’t they know that?
McCall drove slowly along the coils of the road winding through the campus, bound for the administration building. He parked and made his way to the entrance, stepping around broken glass. Workmen were already busy repairing windows. The college must spend a fortune in glass, he thought.
For the first time McCall was troubled with a premonition of failure. It was pretty early in the game to be feeling that! But there it was. He had still to find a lead. Each person he had questioned seemed to be withholding something. Perry Eastman’s leering, fogged manner lingered. Damon Wilde had cut it short, abruptly gone his own way. And Dennis Sullivan had been laughing at him. They all resented him. Was it because he was over thirty?
He entered the offices of the dean of women with relief.
“Well, Mr. Investigator.”
Kathryn sat behind her desk, dark glasses on her absurd nose, hair burning under the fluorescents. The office was beautifully peaceful, and he thought how lovely she looked. He felt again a ridiculous itch to run his hands through her hair.
“Busy?”
“Not very. I’m all alone.”
That seemed fortuitous. He wondered. Was it a come-on? But then he approached the desk and looked for the answer in her face. It was solemn and friendly, nothing more. He decided to let it go with a fatuous “I’m glad.”
For some reason that made her flush slightly. “Getting anywhere, Mike?” she asked, glancing at her typewriter as if it contained something earthshaking.
“I’m not even going backward. Dead center, Katie.”
He was moving around the side of her desk, and she turned her swivel chair — quite naturally — toward that side. He felt a thickening in his throat. By God, it’s like the first time. Her knees were crossed and he could see almost all the way up a noble thigh. There was the faintest frown between her eyes, a certain innocent air of expectation.
“Katie?”
“Yes?” she said, raising her head. She had to do that, because he was leaning over her.
He kissed her. His arms went around her and his right hand closed over her breast.
She pulled away, smiling.
“Just what,” she asked, “are you investigating, Mr. McCall?”
13
“I’m damned if I know,” McCall said. “Billy-be-damned. You’re a witch.”
“Did I hear a labial?” Katie asked.
“You’ve witched me. What is it? I never went for Irish girls before. I’d like a refill, please.”
She raised her head again. Their lips touched and then there was pressure, and acceleration, and hands and chests and racing blood until Katie gasped and jerked away and said, “My God, what if somebody walked in? What’s the matter with me? Get over on the other side of that desk, McCall, before I yell rape.”
“You’re something,” McCall said, not moving.
“Right this instant.”
He obeyed.
She sat back and felt her hair. “You’ve ruined me. Just like a man.”
“Have you known many men?”
“In what sense?”
“You know in what sense.”
“You mean how many men have I gone to bed with? You know something, McCall, I ought to kick you in the you-know-where for daring to ask me a question like that on a twenty-four-hour acquaintance!”
“I have a reason for asking,” McCall said doggedly.
“Sure you do. Male ego. What presumption! But as long as you’re asking,” Katie said with a toss of the locks, “no, I haven’t known ‘many’ men. Just enough.”
“Oh,” McCall said, not knowing whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“Just enough to know that what you have in your mind, Mr. Investigator, has nothing to do with campus unrest or murder. In fact, Mr. Investigator, you’re rather crudely on the make. Is that a fair statement of the facts?”
“Pretty fair,” McCall said, “though I don’t think of myself as crude.”
“Naturally not. What man does? Well, I’m not buying today, McC. You took me by surprise, and I may have responded a little more warmly than I would have ordinarily, but don’t take it as setting any precedents. If Ina Vance had walked in on us I’d probably have lost my job.”
“What is she, anti-love?”
“Love?” Those delicious brows rose. “She’s anti-smooching on the college’s time.”
“I’m sorry,” McCall said. “You really shouldn’t look the way you do.”
“Oh. Well.” Miss Cohan felt her hair again. “After all, there’s a time and a place—”
“When? Where?”
She laughed. “Go away, Mike. I have work to do.”
“I came in here for something—”
“I
He told her about his talks with Wilde, Sullivan, and Eastman.
“Eastman’s a queer bird. They’re all queer birds, when you get right down to it, but Perry... he was flying. I smelled pot in his room, and I suspect he’s on speed, too.”
“Oh, come on, Mike, where have you been the past couple of years?” Kathryn said. “A majority of these kids smoke grass — some just to try it, true, but a lot of others as a steady diet; and there are plenty of acid heads, too. How did our latest riot strike you?”
“Frightening. It was directed. Like a movie scene. Who’s behind things like this on campus? Outsiders?”
He nodded and felt for a cigarette. When he realized what he was doing he sat down on the edge of her desk. “Do you know Graham Starret?”
“Not really. I’ve seen him around, of course. He’s the student who found Laura, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Lieutenant Long pulled him in on suspicion — I expect he’s had to let him go by this time. Long’s a racist, did you know that?”
“I’ve suspected it.”
“Interesting that Starret came running to Dean Gunther with the news rather than to the police. After seeing how Long handled him, I begin to understand why... I’m pretty sure Laura’s beating and Gunther’s murder cross somewhere. I certainly can’t tie Starret in to Gunther’s death. Still, I can’t forget him. Finding Laura as he claimed he did seems to me a bit pat.”
“Which reminds me,” Kathryn said. “I meant to tell you and didn’t get the chance. There was some trouble between Dennis Sullivan and John Snyder.”
“Who’s John Snyder?”
“An English professor. I don’t know exactly what it was about, but it wasn’t nice.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“He hit John with his fist — I mean Sullivan did. Maybe you ought to talk to Snyder. It might have had something to do with something.”
McCall made a mental note.
“You know a Veronica Gale?” he asked.
“Yes. What has she done?”
“Eastman claims Damon Wilde’s been sleeping with her. And Sullivan told me
“Pat’s a knockout. Marvelous singing voice. I didn’t know she and Dennis Sullivan were cosying it up.”
“But if Wilde’s been romancing Veronica Gale, and Sullivan’s been shacking up with this Reed girl, why were they both after Laura?”
“Were you a one-girl chaser in college, Mr. McCall?”
“I’ve forgotten,” McCall said sadly.
“These kids today get around. They tumble in and out of bed like acrobats on a trampoline. No sexual hangups go with their degrees! They’re a lot better off, too.”
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
“Then why don’t you act that way?”
“Not in my office, Mr. McCall. We’d better get back to cases, don’t you think?”
“Can I get their addresses? I mean Veronica Gale’s and Patricia Reed’s.”
She got up and went to a bank of filing cabinets. She had to stretch, pulling the kelly green skirt high and tight across her bottom. He watched with pleasure and respect.
She came back with the addresses.
“Where do you go from here, Mike?”
“For the time being Wilde’s my number one,” McCall said. “It seems to me he was closest to Laura. And he resented me. I also think he’s more hip to what’s going on at the college. Sullivan struck me as a phony. Perry Eastman’s probably the brightest of the three.”
“They’re all bright. Don’t underestimate any of them, Mike. Damon Wilde’s a big man on campus, but so is Sullivan. Damon had a lot to do with the disturbance this morning. He’s leader of the non-hippie, non-Yippie malcontents.”
McCall nodded absently. “I’d better drop in on this English professor, Snyder. Where do you suppose I can find him at this time of day?”
“Well, his desk is in the English faculty room over in the liberal arts building.”
“You know what I hanker to do right now, Miss Cohan, don’t you?”
“Don’t spell it out,” Kathryn said coldly. “I read that look in your lecherous eye loud and clear. Goodbye.”
“It’s just what I’d like to do,” McCall said. “You don’t see me trying to do it, do you?”
“Is this your patented approach to all females who don’t stop clocks, Mr. McCall? If so, you’ll have to develop a different one for me. I like a little subtlety with my seductions.”
“Truth is beauty,” McCall said. “See you tonight?”
“Definitely not.”
“Why not?”
“Unless I can scare up a chastity belt in the meantime.”
“Try the museum, medieval section,” McCall said. “Look, you’re in absolutely no danger. I’ll take a slug of saltpeter or something.”
“That’s a myth. I mean about saltpeter acting as a damper.”
“Then I give you my word. No attacks, no taking advantage. I’ll let you set the pace.”
“I’m not so sure I can trust myself, either,” Kathryn said ruminatively. “Well, maybe.”
“Then it’s a date.”
“Will you get out of here?”
“I like those glasses on you. They’re cute as hell.”
She threw a look at him that would have melted glass.
McCall left the administration building whistling. A student pointed out the liberal arts building, and he retrieved his Ford and headed that way.
He found the English faculty room without difficulty, but no Professor Snyder. A bearded young man, whom McCall mistook for a student and who turned out to be an instructor, told McCall that John Snyder was conducting a class.
“Where?”
The instructor directed him to Room 321.
A girl in a brief leather skirt came down the third-floor hall. McCall stopped her as she was about to enter 321.
“Excuse me. This is Professor Snyder’s class, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Please, I’m late.”
“Do me a favor. Tell him he’s wanted out here by Micah McCall. Tell him it’s important.”
“He’ll be furious. He has a rotten disposition.”
“I’ll chance it,” McCall smiled.
She smiled back and dodged into the classroom.
A slim thirtyish man with a doge’s profile stalked out of 321 a moment later, scowling. His lips were almost as pale as the eyes bulging out at McCall from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “I’m Snyder,” he snapped. “What do you want?” He was dressed in rather sporty fashion, a man who evidently took pains at his mirror in the morning. His manner and tone were so disagreeable that McCall pegged him as vulnerable.
“I’ll keep you just as short a time as I can, professor,” McCall said. “I suppose you’ve heard that I’m here for Governor Holland on the Laura Thornton case. You know about her?”
“Certainly I know about her. Everybody at ’Squanto does. Why do you come to me?”
McCall smiled wanly at him. “I don’t really know. I’m pretty much at loose ends, and I’m following up every lead I can get. You see, I’m here about Dean Gunther, too.”
“Gunther?” The pale eyes were set in concrete. “Are you intimating—?”
“My dear professor, I’m not intimating a darned thing. My only reason for questioning you is that I hear you had a fight with Dennis Sullivan, a student here who knows Laura Thornton. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it has anything to do with my investigations. I’m simply asking. Could you tell me what happened, and why?”
Snyder flashed startling gray teeth. His breath was pungent.
“That’s taken care of. All over with.”
“I’d still like to hear about it.”
“There was some trouble, but it had absolutely nothing to do with... Sullivan’s not doing well in a course he’s taking under me. He became irritated when I spoke sharply to him, and he lost his head.”
“What did he do, Mr. Snyder?”
“He knocked me down.”
“After class?”
“During class. He just stepped, up to me and lashed out with his fist. He has an extremely short fuse, that young man.” Snyder’s tone was murderous.
“What did you do?”
“I reported him to Dean Gunther at once. When I got back here Sullivan was waiting for me in the hall.” He licked his gray lips. “He was waiting to apologize. He was almost groveling. Seemed genuinely sorry for what he’d done. That’s the whole bit. May I return to my class now, Mr. McCall?”
“Sorry to have bothered you, professor.”
Snyder stalked back into his classroom, and McCall headed for the elevator. The only light Snyder’s story shed on anything was what it revealed about Dennis Sullivan. A short-tempered, possibly unstable kid who was torn between his shallow hostilities and his desire to remain at Tisquanto State. There was no other explanation for his abject apology, if Professor Snyder was to be believed.
At a phone booth in the lobby McCall checked with the hospital. He was told that Laura Thornton was still in coma, between life and death.
So he phoned Sam Holland and brought the governor up to date.
“I was afraid Brett Thornton would be like that,” the governor said. “Don’t let him get you down, Mike. There’s a lot of bluff in his bark. For the rest, we can only hope and pray that the girl pulls through. So you think Gunther’s murder and the attack on Laura are related?”
“Yes.”
“I hear there was another student outbreak this morning.”
McCall told him about the strange riot. “It’s not good, governor. As far as I can make out it’s a small segment of the student body that’s causing the trouble. But they suck the others in, and soon everybody gets sticky under the collar. Frankly, I can understand some of the kids’ attitudes after talking to President Wade and some others here. Whatever the students get they’ll certainly have to fight for. How is Mrs. Thornton?”
“Not good. Well, Mike, do what you can. I want that killing cleared up fast, and some decent resolution to the Laura Thornton affair. As for the campus situation, I’ll step in if I have to. But I’m hoping it won’t come to that.”
“I wish you’d give me an easy assignment once in a while!”
Holland sighed and hung up. McCall had a taunt, urgent feeling that would not go away, he knew, until he came up with some right answers.
He consulted his memorandum and drove over to the Sigma Alpha Phi house again. He asked for Veronica Gale, the girl who was reportedly sharing Damon Wilde’s bed. But she was out, he was told, and was not expected back for several hours. Using the sorority phone, he rang up Patricia Reed’s rooming house. A woman who identified herself as the landlady answered. “Patricia isn’t here. Is this Dennis?”
“No,” McCall said. “Could you tell me when Miss Reed will be back?”
“I have no idea,” the woman yipped. “And if this
Back at the Red Harbor Inn McCall shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the bed, and went into conference with himself. He found himself arguing in circles. It was like trying to handle smoke.
Again and again he found himself coming back to Graham Starret, the black student who had discovered Laura’s unconscious body on the riverbank, and wondered why. There was certainly no reason to suspect Starret of having had anything to do with the beating of the girl beyond the fact that he had reported finding her body — a fact that, in McCall’s view, gave him an appearance of innocence. Yet he kept picking away at Starret. The thought struck McCall that he might be motivated by the same racist psychology as Lieutenant Long. It was an appalling thought, and McCall spent an uncomfortable few minutes wrestling with it. Was he looking for primitive — easy — solutions, too? The scapegoat psychology that moved Long?
On impulse he reached for the phone and asked the desk clerk who answered to connect him with police headquarters and Lieutenant Long.
“This is McCall, lieutenant. What’s doing?”
“Nothing,” Long said. He would have sounded nasty asking for a drink of water. “How’s the genius from upstate making out?”
“About as well as you. How’s your case coming against the Starret boy?”
“We had to let him go. A mouthpiece showed up from the NAACP or something.”
“Then you had no evidence,” McCall said cheerfully. “Did you check out his story with the date he had that night? The girl in the car with him?”
“That piece of white trash?” the lieutenant growled. “She backed up his story, all right. What would you expect?”
“Thanks, lieutenant.”
“For what?”
McCall went back to his reflections.
Who had typed the letters? Girl and man? Who had lured Dean Gunther to the big oak behind the Bell Tower and made a pincushion out of him? If, in fact, they were the same.
And who had beaten Laura Thornton almost to death?
Suppose the two crimes were connected.
Suppose the two crimes
Veronica Gale...
Damon Wilde, student rebel leader, riot enthusiast (he could still see Wilde waving his arms in exhortation to his troops that morning in the assault on McNiel Hall), pursuer of Laura Thornton — so hot in pursuit that he had managed an invitation to the Thornton home and a vague state of “engagement” — all the time sleeping with Veronica Gale. What kind of arrangement was that, Katie Cohan’s lecture on the modern sexual mores of college students notwithstanding?
Had Laura found out? Maybe she had. Maybe she wasn’t as free and easy in her attitude toward freedom of the sexes as her boyfriend. Maybe she called him on it and got beaten to within an inch of her life for being such a square.
Was Wilde capable of such a thing? He was quick-tempered, certainly; he had resented McCall, answered a few questions, rushed away. He had been nervous. He had also been cryptic, on the one hand admitting having been with Laura in the Greenview Motel on a number of occasions under the false names of Mr. and Mrs. Jospeh Addison, and on the other confessing with every appearance of sincerity that he didn’t really care much for Laura. And, finally, voicing a threat. Watch out, fuzz...
It didn’t add up. Nothing added up.
McCall sighed, got back into his shoes and jacket, and went downstairs to the bar. This was one of those times when it would have been comforting to be a lush.
Joe Mozzarella-Cacciatore-Vermicelli-Grundy was on duty in the dim barroom, which was otherwise empty. He immediately told McCall he wasn’t feeling well. “It’s this weather,” the barman said.
“The weather? It’s been a gorgeous day.”
“For you, maybe. Me, I hate spring. It could be good old snow-and-ice winter all year long as far as I’m concerned. The minute it starts to warm up and the green stuff begins growing I get pains in the belly something awful. The doctors don’t know why. I feel like hell.”
McCall commiserated with him. “Maybe you need a drink.”
He shook his head. “Not with my history, Mac. What’s your pleasure? Weak gin-and-tonic again?”
After serving McCall, Joe retired to the end of his bar and sat down on a stool, hugging his belly.
Was Wilde a blackmailer? A killer? Anyone could kill given the time, place, and circumstances. That was one criminology lesson McCall had learned as far back as Chicago. And what could he have been blackmailing Gunther about?
People began drifting into the bar, Joe got busy, looking happier, and McCall waved off a refill and went into the dining room. Five minutes after he got back to his room he had to jog his memory to recollect what he had eaten.
The phone rang.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” McCall said gratefully. “Say something, Katie. I need the refreshment of your voice.”
“You tell the nicest lies. Mike, if you promise to behave, you may come over to my place tonight. Maybe I’m Miss Sucker, but I’ll take your word — this once.”
“You have it,” McCall said. “I need you tonight. I really do. I’ve been beating my brains out on this thing and getting absolutely nowhere. When do I show?”
“Like, say, right away?”
“Where do you live?”
She gave him directions.
“I’m practically there.”
He showered, dressed in his charcoal suit, which he had found in the room delivered by the valet down the street, selected his quietest necktie, and hurried to his Ford. He found her directions ambiguous and he had some difficulty locating the section of Tisquanto where she lived. He finally got on the track and began cruising along the residential streets, looking for the right one.
The roar of an engine startled him. He glanced at his rear-view mirror and saw the headlights of another car bearing down on him from behind like a juggernaut. In reflex he wrenched his wheel toward the right, sluing over to the curb. Stupid kids out on a tear!
He glimpsed another car...
But the first car did not pass and go its way. It shrieked by alongside and darted into the curb about twenty feet ahead, cutting him off. Fortunately he had already slammed on his brakes, and the Ford stopped a foot from the other car.
The second car was already parked beside him. He heard a man’s voice shout something. Car doors swung open. Bodies began climbing out. He jumped from his car, ready for anything.
He could hardly believe what his eyes were telling him. They were running at him, brandishing their arms, a grotesque crew of false faces leering under the streetlights. They were wearing Halloween masks.
And they were all — girls and men — naked.
14
He felt himself seized and he fought. But four naked young men smothered him by sheer volume.
“What do you want?” McCall heard his own voice thick with rage.
“Be a good square.”
“Nice daddy. Whoa, boy.”
A girl giggled.
He heaved and got an arm free and made a swipe at one of the masks. But the man retracted his head like a snake, and one of the others punched him in the abdomen.
“A real toughie, he is.”
“Sock it to him!” a girl’s voice yelled.
“Get him in the heap.”
He struggled again. But his captors had apparently been selected for their brawn. They had him effectively immobilized; he found no opening for a judo or karate maneuver.
“Walk over to that car,” somebody said. “Or we’ll throw you into it head first.”
“He’s cute,” a girl said. She ran close to him, breasts bobbing below the green monster mask; laughing in his face.
McCall took hold of himself. “Are you sure you people know what you’re doing?”
“We’re doing our thing, what else?”
“Do you know who I am?” They were hustling him over to the first car.
“The gov’s errand boy, aren’t you?”
“Open the door.”
“Somebody get in first.”
“I will,” the same girl said. “He’s cute.”
She piled into the car. He was shoved from behind and found himself half lying on the unclothed girl. Others leaped into the rear with them while the front seats filled. In a moment the car was packed.
“Get going.”
“How about the rest of the gang?”
Someone called from outside the car, “We’ll follow you. Step on it.”
The girl rubbed against him. “Sock it to me, grandpa.”
“Sack that,” a man said roughly. “Step on it, will you?”
The car lurched into motion.
“Do you know what the charge will be?” McCall said. “Kidnapping.”
A fist sank into his midriff again. McCall’s mouth opened and whoofed a burst of air. The pain was like a tidal wave. Even his jaws ached. They must be high on something. Nobody in normal command of himself would abduct the governor’s personal representative. He might be in considerable danger.
He inhaled and exhaled cautiously, mastering the pain, husbanding his strength. He might well need it later, all he could muster.
“It’s like we’re the fuzz and you’re the innocent public,” his assailant jeered. “Police brutality. How do you like it?”
“Cut it,” the one who seemed to be in charge said curtly.
“What’s the point of this?” McCall asked.
“You were warned to lay off. You didn’t.”
The car was speeding. He tried to see where they were going, watched for landmarks. But they were traveling dark streets in a residential area that meant nothing to him. The headlights of the other car held steady in the rear window.
“It’s hard for me to believe you’re college students,” McCall said. “You act more like a gang of hoods.”
“This cat is asking for it,” a man said. “I move we start the class.”
“Second the motion!” This from the one who had struck him in the abdomen. As the man spoke he swung again. McCall was ready for him. He twisted sharply on the seat. The big fist went whistling by, and McCall’s left came up in a short arc, with power. It smashed against the man’s jaw, and there was a cracking sound.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed, and slid to the floor. The other two men in the rear seat fell on McCall. One of them kneed him, the other swung at his face. He crumpled and collapsed in a burst of fireworks.
The girl in the corner asked with a giggle, “Can I have grandpa now?”
“He’s all yours, doll.”
She twined her arms about his neck from behind like a snake, half gagging him. The man who had kneed him laughed. “Hold him that way, baby.” The other man laughed and hit him in the face again.
“That’s enough for now,” the authoritative one said. “Let’s save our strength.”
“Yeah, we’re going to need it.”
“
“Stop that, baby. You’ll get your kicks in the woods.”
Someone pulled the girl off him; she had been smothering his face with her body. McCall noticed now that they were out in the country; the streetlights were gone. The headlights of the second car gave him an occasional glimpse of the black countryside.
The car careened, and McCall knew that they had turned off the main road. From the bumpy ride, they were traveling on a dirt road now.
“How much longer?”
“We’re almost there.”
“Where we taking him?”
“Over by the shack.”
“You going to give it to him in the shack?”
“Hell, no, then we’d only have to clean it up. We need it in a couple of days for the bash.”
“What bash?”
“Tell you about it later.”
“Here we are.”
“Is this deep enough in the woods?”
“Whoever comes here except us?”
“You’re going to love this, Snoopy.”
The car screeched to a halt and the door flashed open and the men piled out. One reached back and grabbed McCall’s ankle, as if to drag him from the car.
He kicked. The man yelped, backing away.
“Well, looky, looky,” the girl in the rear seat said. “Look at all this room they left us. You want to make out, fuzz?” and she grabbed his hand and put it on her body. A fist struck him in the groin and strong hands clamped on his legs.
Struggling, trying to kick, he was hauled from the car. The second car had pulled up and emptied, and it seemed to McCall that the entire student body of Tisquanto State fell on him.
“Where’s the rope?”
“Who’s got the rope?”
“Here.”
Through the wall of flesh lying on him McCall caught glimpses of other naked bodies shifting about in the moonlight, breasts, buttocks, genitals; and where faces should have been the grotesque monster-masks. It was like some witches’ sabbath.
“Okay,” the leader’s voice said. “You men, hold on to him. You girls — strip him.”
McCall rocked suddenly to his knees and sprang toward one of the men. He failed to arrive. Three others tackled him and brought him down with a crash. They were young and powerful. He felt panic for the first time. Could they actually be going to kill him? Four held him down, two by his legs, two holding his arms over his head.
“Get his pants off,” the voice said. “You. You’ve had plenty of practice.”
One corner of McCall’s brain, the residence of the neutral observer, remarked that at no time had any of them used a name in talking to others. This had been well planned.
The rest of him squirmed. But they held him fast.
Small fingers worked on his belt, unzipped his fly. He wriggled and twisted and arched his back trying to escape the soft little hands, but he was like a big insect caught in a bigger spider web, he could only struggle in vain. He stopped fighting to conserve his strength for what lay ahead.
He felt his trousers stripped off.
“Jacket, shirt.”
He put up no resistance as two girls removed his jacket, his tie, his shirt, his T-shirt.
“His shorts.”
The girl-hands ripped his shorts off.
He was naked except for socks and shoes. McCall had the silliest thought: he wished they would take those off, too. To be left in the raw, all but your ankles and feet, was somehow too grotesque to bear.
“Wow,” said one of the girls. “Oh, wow! Look at the way grandpa’s hung. Bigger even than you, Bobby.”
McCall heard a smack and the girl’s yelp. “No names! Don’t skid again.”
They yanked him to his feet. McCall blinked. Oddly, he did not mind his nudity now. In the country of the altogether-naked, the man with shoes is king... he almost laughed at the conceit. They were in a clearing. The moon was almost directly overhead.
“I want a joint,” one of the girls said.
“There’s some in the car.”
“Where?”
“Glove compartment.”
The girl hurried off, everything bouncing in the moonlight. When she returned she was lighting a cigarette. From the acrid odor, it was marijuana. The headlights of the second car filled the clearing like a stage set.
“Tie him to that tree,” the leader ordered.
He was hustled over to a young maple. They began lashing his legs to the tree. He grabbed one of the men by the ear and twisted. The man fell back with a shriek and sat down hard. He got up slowly, picking gravel out of his rear end.
“That’ll cost you, Mr. McCall,” he said in a very quiet way.
“He’s so damned
They finished tying him to the maple.
The girls crowded around. The one with the marijuana cigarette came closest. She rubbed against him. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Too bad there has to be a time and a place for everything. Here, have a drag.”
McCall averted his face. She tried to jab the joint between his lips. Two of the other girls laughed and tackled him from the sides, working on his jaws to get his mouth open. He bit one of them.
“The hell with you, Fuzzy Wuzzy,” the girl with the joint said. “You won’t smoke it, it’s going to smoke you.”
She rammed the lighted end into his groin.
McCall strained against the ropes as if he were in the electric chair. The girl stepped back breathing hard and fast, eyes glowing.
“All right, all right,” one of the males said. “You’ve had your jollies. One side.”
Where the cigarette had touched his flesh McCall felt a flow of lava. He chewed the lining of his cheek, deliberately diverting the pain.
“Now,” the commanding voice said, “we all take our licks. One crack a piece, ladies and gentlemen. Line up.”
“Who’s first?”
“I am. Ready, Mr. McCall? Lesson number one—” McCall felt a jolt under his heart, a heavy, heavy blow. He raised and twisted his head, breathing in. If this is the worst I can take it. I’ve got to take it. Brace...
“Next? Not his face, gentlemen. Just his body. Where he won’t advertise.”
They struck him one by one. Once McCall heard himself grunt, and he shook his head. He found himself sagging against the lashings.
“I don’t hit hard enough,” the girl who had burned him was tittering. “So I’ll just tickle.”
She began at his ribs, working down, ruthless, a demon. McCall watched himself from a distance, writhing, shrinking, fighting hysteria. He had always been ticklish, and this witch in female skin seemed to know his most sensitive zones. Through his helplessness a sense of outrage began to take shape, an anger at the humiliations, a slaver of yearned-for revenge. He fought them down. That wasn’t the way. Somebody was talking to him... I had better listen.
“We don’t want to have to get tougher with you,” the commanding voice was saying coldly. So they were through with him, and this was the moral lesson, the sermon at the end of the black mass. “But don’t ever think we won’t if we have to. And what’s going to make us feel we have to is if you keep snooping around ’Squanto where you’re not wanted. We can settle our own problems, we don’t need any help from Governor Holland or his muscle-head. Dig?”
He found himself staring into the mask.
“It’s all fouled up on this campus, Mr. McCall, like on all the other campuses. We’re going to clean it up — straighten the Establishment out. We don’t want interference from upstate. We’ve got hangups enough without you. And if the governor calls out the National Guard there’ll be so much blood spilled in Tisquanto he’ll never hold another elective office.”
“Dig, brother?” somebody jeered.
“You can go back to your governor and tell him he’s the system, and you’re the system, and we don’t dig the system.” A hint of warmth had invaded the cold voice. “We want respect around here. We’re not sheep or kindergarten kids, we’re grownup people. We’re sick of being told what to study, where to go to bed, whether to smoke pot, how to arrange our lives. It’s public money that’s being spent in this institution, and we’re going to have a say in how it’s spent.”
“Is this a sample of how you’re going to run things?” McCall asked. He was astounded to hear his own voice. “The only difference I can see between you and the Klan crowd is you’ve exchanged white sheets for exhibitionism.”
“Everybody does his thing his own way,” the man-boy said. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson, McCall. Report it. Maybe the freaky heads’ll wise up.”
“Did you and your friends beat up Laura Thornton? And kill Dean Gunther?”
An angry growl came from the crowd.
“Hold it!” the leader shouted; and the growl stopped.
“Did you?” McCall said.
“You’re the fuzz, you figure it out. Just remember, we could have killed you tonight.” The voice sounded bitter under the hideous mask. “Now you can rot here for all I care. When you work yourself loose you’d better take the advice I gave you and clear out of Tisquanto. All right, gang: Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Whooping, they ran to the two cars. The wild revving of the engines roared against the night. Headlights sliced trees. Then they were gone, and he was left in a silence.
He began to work on the ropes. The pain he had not been feeling began to invade his nervous system. He felt nausea...
Who had they been?
Katie Cohan... waiting for him...
The ropes bit into his flesh. He stopped, feeling exposed and violated in the darkness. After a while he resumed the straining and stretching. The rope around his chest began to loosen. He writhed and thrust against the bonds, finding new strength. He worked up and down, rubbing his flesh raw against the tree trunk. That girl who had pressed the cigarette butt against his groin... it burned like the hell it had come from.
His clothes... if he got free, could he find them?
He struggled in the tight embrace of the ropes, felt them loosening, redoubled his struggles.
After a while he stopped for a breather, peering around in the moonlight. To his right he saw a building, at the edge of the clearing. Their shack, he decided. Their playground off campus... get your hands free...
He worked his wrists against the tree. One wrist was freer than it had been. He strained, perspiring in the night air. Abruptly the hand tore loose.
Two minutes later he was free.
Three minutes later he was jogging back along the dirt road which he knew led to the highway to Tisquanto. He had found all his clothes except his tie and T-shirt. He had considered taking the ropes with him as evidence and decided against it. The cold-voiced young general wasn’t fool enough to use anything that could be traced back to him or his naked troops.
McCall reached the macadam road and turned toward town. He ran at a steady pace along the shoulder of the road, marveling at the response of his body after the punishment. His head felt light but the after-aches had not really yet begun and all in all he was in pretty fair shape.
He knew he was not very far from where he had been abducted.
When a car came along heading for town he ducked behind a tree until it passed. He was in no mood for explanations. Or lies, for that matter.
At last the streetlights began, strings of diamonds along the road.
It could have been a lot worse. They hadn’t hurt him badly. All but that damned cigarette-happy blonde.
McCall jogged on through the evening. After a while he slowed to a walk, breathing through his mouth.
15
The inside of the rented Ford was crammed with last winter’s mulch, a malodorous mess of damp and rotting leaves. The exterior had been used as a wall for the advertisement of graffiti, a display of obscenities deriding Governor Holland, McCall, President Wade, and authority generally. Perhaps significantly the graffiti had been written in soap.
McCall reamed out the interior as best he could and drove to an all-night garage. He was beginning to stiffen up from the beating, and he kept squirming behind the wheel.
“You’d better wash the car as well as clean the inside,” he told the attendant. “I’ll pick it up in an hour or so.”
“We don’t do car washes at night, mister.”
“I can’t run this thing in its present condition.”
“That’s your problem.”
“You don’t seem swamped with work. How about it?”
The man grinned. “What am I bid?”
“Does everybody in this town have the morals of a grave robber?” McCall growled. “All right, double the usual. But I want a good job.”
“You got the best, mister. What happened?”
“You tell me. Parked my car and when I got back it was like this.”
“These goddam college bums,” the garage attendant said. “You want a cab, use the office phone. I’ll put it on the bill.”
McCall gave the taxi driver Kathryn Cohan’s address. He was deposited at the foot of a meandering flight of steps that led up a hillside to the house perched at the top in a broad nest of trees and shrubbery. The front-door lights were on and he could dimly make out an unconventional redwood house all angles and ells.
Apparently she had heard the taxi. She was waiting in the doorway.
“For God’s sake, Mike, where have you been? I was beginning to get worried.”
“Here and there. Sorry I was delayed.”
“You could have phoned.”
“Not really,” McCall said.
She pulled him inside and inspected him in her foyer. “What happened, Mike? You look awful. Look at your clothes! You’ve been in a fight!”
“If I was, it was pretty one-sided. They don’t grow many sportsmen in old ’Squanto, do they? I mean, whatever happened to fair play?”
“Mike, will you tell me what happened!”
She clung to his arm. In the soft lighting her hair shimmered red gold. She was all in brown — bell bottoms in crushed velvet, velvet shirt, suede vest, and square-toed reptile shoes.
“You look delicious.”
“Mike.”
“Let’s go in there and sit down,” McCall said. “I’ve been running.”
It was a beautiful living room of naked hand-hewn beams, bright rugs, slapdash furniture, everything a bit oversized and comfortable-looking and surprisingly unfeminine. The walls were crowded with books and pictures.
McCall sank into a leather armchair.
“Bourbon?”
“I’m a weak-gin man.”
“How weak?”
“I hate the stuff, to tell you the truth. All right, this once make it bourbon. One jolt. Old grandma’s remedy.”
She brought him the shot and he gulped it down. She sipped hers, nestled at his feet. “Now tell me,” she said.
He told her.
“You poor, poor darling,” Kathryn whispered. “Those
McCall shook his head. “I’m all right. They were careful not to hurt me badly.” At the last moment he had decided to omit the part about the lighted cigarette and his groin.
“You’re sure?”
He nodded. “I think I could use one more drink.”
She jumped up and refilled his shot glass. This time he nursed the stuff. It burned its way down, and he made a face. She watched him with her head cocked.
“You’re a strange guy, Mike... It’s a known group, by the way. I mean, nobody can ever prove anything, and from what you say you can’t actually accuse individuals because you wouldn’t be able to identify anybody. They’ve been in trouble before with all their running-around-naked activities. They call themselves Nature’s Children.”
“Mother Nature spawned a litter of mean little bastards.”
“The police have hauled them in a few times. But they deny everything, nobody can ever make an identification — they always use those horrible masks — and anyway I’m sure if you accused them they’d come up with interlocking alibis for this evening, the way they always do. They’re a disgrace to the college.”
“Why aren’t they kicked out?”
“Because you have to have due process on campus as elsewhere,” Kathryn said dryly. “You can’t kick a student out without cause. No one’s ever pinned anything on them. A few have been dropped from Tisquanto for poor grades — they’re not very good students — but most of them manage to get by. They stick pretty close and avoid the other students.”
“Nature’s Children,” McCall said savagely. “I’d like to kick a few of their rosy little asses.” He winced, and she jumped up.
“You’re in pain!”
“I’ve felt fitter. Katie, I wonder if I might take a shower.”
“I should have thought of that right off! And while you’re taking it I’ll clean up your clothes. You follow me.”
He tagged her to a pink-and-white bedroom furnished in maple. Where she takes her clothes off, he thought, she wants it feminine; and felt an absurd relief. “There’s the linen closet,” she said, “and that door there leads to the bath. Leave your clothes out here and I’ll get busy on them. Oh, you’ll need a robe. Oh, dear, I don’t think any of mine would fit you...”
“A big bath towel will do fine, Kathryn.”
“Plenty of those in the linen closet. Throw your clothes out here when you’re undressed.”
He stripped in the bathroom and tossed his clothes out dutifully. Then he took a look at himself in the full-length mirror set into the inside of the bathroom door.
His body was a welter of bruises well on their way to lividity. I’m going to look like a working palette, he thought. The cigarette wound was nasty. He rummaged in the medicine chest and found a jar of burn ointment. This he applied liberally to the burn. Then he got under the shower and adjusted it for its gentlest spray. Even so, it hurt abominably. He dried himself gingerly, feeling like the sensitive Prince in the fairy tale who could feel the pea through sixteen mattresses.
He wrapped himself in a huge bath towel and went into the living room. She was clucking over the condition of his shirt.
“I’ll have to wash your shirt and shorts, Mike. They’re filthy. I’ve got a drier,” she added quickly. “It won’t take long.”
“When I go to the Turkish bath,” McCall said, “I put myself entirely in the hands of the attendant.”
“Feeling a little better?” she asked when she got back.
“Not much.”
“You sit down here. I’ll bathe those bruises.”
“It’s okay, Katie.”
“Do as you’re told.”
He sat down. She immediately began on his face. The rubbing alcohol burned like acid. Her extraordinary eyes kept watching him, concerned.
He told her suddenly about the burning joint and his groin. Kathryn blanched. “That can’t be true! You’re putting me on.”
“Do you want me to show it to you?”
“No! I mean — how
“Or Buchenwald,” McCall said. “I can only tell you that it happened. It’s all right, Katie, I put some of your burn salve on it.”
“Do you want another drink?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re really not a drinker, are you?”
“No.”
“I notice you don’t smoke, either.”
“I’m fighting it,” McCall smiled.
“You’re remarkably free of vices, Mr. McC.”
“Except one,” he said, and pulled her to, him.
Afterward she accused him of having raped her.
“I had a remarkable lot of cooperation,” McCall said dreamily.
“What’s more, you
“I’m sorry, Katie. I’d take it back if I could.”
“I’ll bet!” She tossed the flaming locks on his chest. “What I ought to do is jab you in that burn.”
“My God, no. You wouldn’t.”
She shivered and tightened her arms. “Is this all there is to it, Mike?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to take the Nature Children’s gentle hint and leave town and I’ll never see you again?”
“A, I don’t take hints. B, I have no intention of leaving town until my assignment is finished. C, even if I did, I’d see you again — if that’s what’s steaming around in that little old redhead.”
“Mike, they might hurt you again... worse the next time...”
He felt her convulse, protecting him with all her limbs, and he allowed himself to be consoled in the traditional way.
A taxi waited down in the street. They stood in the front doorway.
“I hate to leave you, Katie, but I’m dead for sleep. I want to check the hospital, too.”
“Take care of yourself, Mike.” She kissed the side of his jaw and gave him a hard push. “Get going, cowboy.”
“Cowboy?”
“You know what I mean, damn you!”
He grinned and trudged down to the cab. He had the man drive him to the garage where his Ford waited, gleaming and sweet inside. McCall gave the attendant a big tip and headed crosstown.
Tisquanto Memorial Hospital looked ominous in the spring night. The moon was down by now and the hulking place was largely a haunt of shadows. He hoped it was not prophetic.
He checked at the third floor desk, and the old blonde nurse with the withered lips said, “Still no change, Mr. McCall.”
“Could I look in on her?”
The nurse hesitated. “I suppose it’s all right. Just for a second.”
“Her father still here?”
“No, he went back to his hotel. The poor man was exhausted. We had to practically force him to leave.”
“Where you going?” McCall demanded.
“Mr. McCall,” the old nurse said, “this is the way I get my exercise.”
“You don’t trust me,” McCall said sadly.
“I just want to be able to say, if the doctor should question me, that nobody touched her.”
They were halfway up the hall when they heard a muffled shriek. It was cut off abruptly.
“What’s that?” McCall demanded.
“Blessed if I know.” The nurse began to hurry. “It sounded like it came from... from Miss Thornton’s room...”
So McCall ran, too. He burst through the door. A pale bedlight shadowed the unconscious girl. He saw a man’s leg disappearing over a windowsill, and a young nurse sprawled on the floor, looking dazed. A bed screen had been overturned. There was a pillow on the floor.
The nurse scrambled to her feet, holding her throat.
“A man,” she said, swallowing. “He choked me — tried to smother Miss Thornton...”
“See if she’s all right!”
McCall jumped for the window. “Call the police,” he said to the old nurse, and dived out.
The featureless figure of a man was speeding down the fire escape. As McCall started down after him the man reached the first floor. Running through McCall’s head was the thought that he was chasing the man who had beaten Laura up. Had he left her for dead at the river? This attempt to kill her pointed to that — to kill her before she could regain consciousness and identify him.
The man dropped from the short stretch of ladder to the pavement below. He ran like a whippet toward the parking lot at the rear of the hospital. His running made hardly a sound; he was in sneakers.
McCall finally reached the ladder and dropped. It’s a running night, he thought grimly, and sprinted with everything he had. He could no longer see his quarry.
He reached the lot. A few cars were parked there. McCall stood frozen, listening.
Nothing.
He had lost whoever it was.
McCall went over the lot and cars. A low wall surrounded the area. He found nothing.
Two special officers ran toward him wielding flashlights.
“Any sign of him?” one asked.
“He got away,” McCall said. “There’s no sense searching.”
He went back to the third floor. The old nurse was standing in the doorway of Laura Thornton’s room.
“How is she, nurse?”
“No damage. Apparently he’d just started when Miss Durham’s scream panicked him and he beat it. Some doctors are in there with Laura now, but she’s all right. At least she’s no worse than she was. He got away?”
“Yes. Where’s this Miss Durham now?”
“In the dispensary behind the desk.”
An intern was just concluding an examination of the young nurse’s neck. “You’ll live, Maggy,” he said, patted her fanny, and left.
“These damn interns,” she said angrily. “Oh, excuse me, Mr. McCall. You have to be dead before they get interested.”
“Drink some more of that coffee,” McCall said, “then tell me what happened.”
She took a sip and set the steaming cup down. “I was by the bed checking her pulse and respiration. I thought I heard the window open, decided I was hearing things, and didn’t even turn around. I regretted it right away. He grabbed me from behind, got a stranglehold on my neck with both hands, shook me like a doll, and threw me down. He yanked the pillow from under Miss Thornton’s head and started pressing it over her face. I heard myself scream, and he got scared or something and ran for the window. Then you and Mrs. Taliaferro came in, and that’s all.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“Hardly, when he choked me from behind. He could have been Dracula for all I know.” She shuddered. “He was so fast. Going and coming... they ought to have posted a policeman in here.”
“I thought they had.”
“I wonder why they didn’t.”
“They will from now on,” McCall said grimly. “Her father had better be notified.”
“Let the police do that, Mr. McCall. I’m not tangling with
Neither am I, thought McCall.
Sergeant Oliver stepped out of the elevator. He looked ashen. He had three officers with him.
“What in God’s name happened here, Mr. McCall?”
McCall told him. “He was a speedster, sergeant. He practically flew. I didn’t have a chance to get him.”
“This thing’s developing,” Oliver muttered. “And you seem to land in the middle of everything. What happened to your face?”
“A little accident,” McCall said. “How come you didn’t post a guard over Miss Thornton?”
“The lieutenant didn’t think it necessary.”
“As soon as Mr. Thornton gets here,” McCall said, “your lieutenant is going to have a change of heart. Good night, sergeant. I’m for some shuteye.”
Back in his room at the Red Harbor Inn, McCall undressed slowly, considering the events of the evening. None of it sounded rational. He slipped into bed and lay thinking about Katie Cohan. That banished sleep altogether. Finally, he sat on the edge of the bed and watched dawn pale the sky.
It had been a long and trying night.
Although — recalling Katie again — not without its compensations. What had she called him?
He grinned.
16
McCall — bleary of eye, heavy in the leg and brain-was at the Sigma Alpha Phi house early. The tall cool number he had seen there before stopped him downstairs.
“I don’t care whom you want to see,” she said. “We have rules here, even if some of the girls don’t stick to them. I’m on the House Committee and if you want to talk to somebody, tell me who and I’ll get her down here in the drawing room. If she wants to see you, that is.”
“It’s all right with me,” McCall said. “I don’t get my kicks peeping into girls’ bedrooms, if that’s what’s worrying you. I want to see Veronica Gale.”
“In that case,” the girl said, “go on up. Second door to your right.”
“Wait a minute,” McCall said. “You just said—”
The girl was laughing at him. “Talk about squares. Who gives a flying damn any more about Miss Peachy’s Young Ladies’ School rules? You can go up there and take an effing leap at her for all I care. I was putting you on;”
“Hadn’t you better tell her I’m asking for her?”
“Tell her yourself.”
She strode away. She was in skintight pajamas and her strut was mocking.
The kook generation.
McCall went upstairs shaking his head.
He stood outside the door fighting his eyelids. He had taken half a bennie; it had not yet begun to work. Popping bennies! Even as he knocked he felt the first stirrings of the pill. His head shifted gears. He was thinking of Kathryn when the door opened.
“Miss Gale?”
“Veronica to you.”
“Already?” McCall smiled.
“How long does it take? Come in, Mr. McCall.”
“You know me.”
“You’re famous around here.” She stood aside. She was brown-haired and very pretty, with a perky figure that challenged the male world. She was in silk pajamas and barefoot.
He went in.
“We’re kind of rumply this morning,” Veronica Gale said. “Sit down, Mr. McC. How would you like to become a member?”
“Of what?”
“Of our sorority. Man, that would be boss.”
“I’m afraid the dean of women wouldn’t allow it.”
The girl told him what he could do with the dean of women. “I can see you don’t want to play. All right, why are you here? Why li’l ol’ me?”
“A few questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like Damon Wilde.”
He watched the veil come down over the hazel eyes, bright little eyes in a bright little face as unreadable as a beach at high tide. She turned her back on him.
The walls were covered with wild posters, one showing a human phallus. There were two beds, unmade. A shreak of sunlight illuminated dust motes.
“Did I startle you?” McCall said.
She whirled. “Startle me? Certainly not!”
“Then why are you snapping at me?”
“I don’t go for wit this early in the morning!”
“Sorry, Veronica.”
“Miss Gale!”
“A minute ago — skip it. You know Wilde?”
“Sure I know Wilde. Everybody at ’Squanto does. He’s the head guru here. Or, as your generation would say, the big squeeze.”
“You like him?”
“That’s my business.”
“And my business is getting answers. The only way I can do that is by asking questions. I asked you if you like Damon Wilde.”
“Sure I like Damon Wilde. Where did you pick up those scratches on your face, Mr. McCall? Out with a cat?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
Why was she on guard? What was she worried about? The room was much clearer now, and so was his head. He should have eaten breakfast. After no dinner the night before. Coffee wasn’t enough. Especially that lousy coffee.
Could she have been one of the kids who jumped him in the buff?
“On second thought, we don’t like you,” the girl said.
“Who’s we?”
“All of us. Who directed you to my room?”
“A tall number. Knockout, but mannish.”
“Prissy. She’s the biggest put-on in the world. We don’t like you, McCall. Dig?”
“Why do you come on so hard?”
“You’re part of the system. What’s Governor Holland ever done for us?”
“I’m told you and Wilde are very close friends.”
“Get out of my room.”
She pointed to the door dramatically. “And don’t come back!”
“All right, Miss Gale.”
She slammed the door after him.
Tall Prissy appeared from nowhere, sailing.
“Leaving?”
“Kicked out.”
“You poor man.” She laughed, preceding him downstairs. At the front door she touched his arm. “Veronica showed her pretty molars?”
“Very uncooperative, Prissy.”
“Damon put her up to it. Dig?”
“If that’s the truth, thanks.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I feel sorry for you. Because not all of us are... never mind. You’d better go.” Her stunning eyes were full on his.
He went. Prissy had salvaged the morning.
He drove to a freshly painted clapboard three-story with a broad porch, the address of Patricia Reed, Dennis Sullivan’s girl. The house was painted pink and green, each a poisonous shade.
He checked the mailboxes, located the Reed girl’s room number, and tried the door. It gave to his nudge and he went into a dark hall that smelled faintly of pine deodorizer.
McCall went upstairs to the second floor, down a short dark hall, and knocked at a door.
“Just a minute.”
The door opened a crack; a long-lashed topaz eye peered out at him. The eye blinked down at his shoes, then traveled slowly up his body until it reached his face again.
“Oh, wow. Who are you?”
“My name’s McCall, Micah McCall. May I come in?”
The door swung slowly — he thought reluctantly — open.
She was a magazine illustration beauty of the Phoebe Zeitgeist class, tall, slim, big-breasted, with mathematically regular features that curiously made no impression. She was dressed entirely in black leather down to her high boots. Her hair was as black as her outfit; it hung glistening to well below her square shoulders, advertising its hundred brushings that morning. Huge onyx hoops dangled from her ears. Her lips were painted a pearly tone; her eyes were heavily made up. All she lacked was a bullwhip.
“You’re Pat Reed, I take it,” McCall said.
“And you’re the famous McCall.” She shut the door. “Sorry about the condition of this room. I wasn’t expecting company.” It was, surprisingly, just a room, as featureless and unmemorable as her face. “You’re here about the Laura Thornton thing and Dean Gunther, right?”
“Right.”
“Sit down. Just throw those things on the bed.”
He tossed an armful of lingerie to the bed and sat down in a captain’s chair covered with gouged-out initials.
“And you’re here because somebody told you Dennis Sullivan and I have a thing going, right?”
There was an undertone of coarseness in her speech that grated on him. McCall smiled. “Keep talking, Miss Reed.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“With a start like that,” McCall said, still smiling, “that’s something of an anticlimax.”
The girl shrugged. “Really. I’m not bracing you. I don’t know Laura awfully well. Some. Maybe as well as any girl in ’Squanto. But that’s little enough. I’m sorry about what happened to her. It must have been awful for her. I keep thinking about it. But that’s not going to do you much good, Mr. McCall, is it? Have you a line to who might have done it?”
Over the bookcase hung an abstract whose composition was oddly regular and forgettable. Like Patricia Reed herself. He glanced around. The few other pictures and photographs were also nondescript. Yet even against such a background it was her clothes and makeup that stood out, not she.
“No,” McCall said. “I thought you might be able to help me. Yes, I’ve heard you’re close to Dennis Sullivan. I understand he knows Laura quite well—”
“Yes, he does.” There was nothing to be read on her face or distilled from her voice.
“But if you and he are a twosome—”
“I don’t put clamps on my men,” Pat Reed said. “Dennis is all I’ve got. I mean, I don’t want anyone else. It was a passing thing, his interest in Laura. He told me it wasn’t serious. I believe him.”
“I see.”
He watched her. She gave forth a powerful effluvium of truth. She seemed to hold nothing back. It was appealing. Was it genuine or a technique?
“And me, Miss Reed? What do you think of my being here?”
“Some people are a bit wigged. I’m not one of them. For one thing it’s your job. For another, I like Governor Holland being interested in and concerned about what’s going on. The trouble is that people don’t try to understand other points of view. That goes for both sides.”
She came toward him, moving with a slow hip flow that was almost, not quite, an undulation. There was something powerfully enticing about the performance. She stopped rather close to him. He felt an all but physical assault on his masculinity.
“I sympathize with what you’re doing,” Pat Reed murmured.
Was she trying to make him? But he couldn’t tell. Behind that bland magazine exterior beat an obviously complex personality. It would take a long time to know Miss Reed. He began to understand how she held onto young Dennis Sullivan even in his restlessness.
She sat down near him.
“I’m darned glad to hear that,” McCall said. “It makes me feel that ’Squanto isn’t entirely the camp of the enemy. By the way, I wonder if you’ve ever heard anyone threaten Dean Gunther.”
Her lashes swept her cheek. “So you think I’m a fink because I gave you a kind word.”
“No—”
“Yes. Well, Mr. McCall, I testify against no one unless I’m in a position to nail him to the cross. All I’ll tell you is this: Floyd Gunther was pretty much disliked by the students. He was a hard, sometimes a nasty, man, and he was an administration brown-nose from the ground up. Right?”
“I’m listening, Miss Reed.”
“That’s all. It’s happened, it’s over, and when a thing is over I don’t give it much thought. I mean, I think about the leftover living, not the dead.”
She leaned toward him. He could feel her heat. Her eyes lidded again. Could he be wrong? Was he imagining all this? Or was she leading him on?
He suddenly wondered if he had walked into a trap. This could be dangerous. There was the unmade bed...
The next moment she knocked his suspicions galley-west.
“I’d like to continue this conversation, Mr. McCall,” she said, jumping up, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to split. I’m due at the music building in two minutes. Singing lesson.”
She went over to the bookcase and took down a black binder tied with ribbon. Sheet music projected from it. She smiled at McCall, waiting.
McCall rose. “Maybe we could talk again?”
“Any time, Mr. McCall.” She stood there, hip thrusting.
“Thank you, Miss Reed, for being so frank with me.”
She hadn’t been afraid to talk, she had talked with every timbre of honesty, and what had she said? Nothing.
As McCall drove off he reflected that perhaps he had misjudged the Tisquanto police.
No wonder they hadn’t come up with anything.
Driving onto the campus he noticed that the area before the administration building was again seething with students. Some were picketing the entrance, waving placards. Others marched in a phalanx as if to cut off a rear exit. He could smell trouble in the air.
A student in snaky jeans darted across the road in his path. McCall leaned on his horn, and the boy turned to grin. His hair brushed his shoulders, and McCall spotted the single gold earring. The student suddenly recognized him and started away.
McCall leaned out. “Dennis!”
Dennis Sullivan turned.
“Here a minute, will you?”
Sullivan came up slowly. He was carrying a different camera.
“Yeah?” He sounded truculent.
“Just talking with Patricia Reed. That’s quite a chick you have there.”
“Glad you think so,” the boy said dryly. “She’s private property, by the way. Anything new on Laura or the dean?”
“No.”
“Sorry to hear it. Well, I’ve got to run. Photographic session, we’re working up an exhibit for the library. Y’know?”
He hurried off. The gold earring caught the sun, winking.
McCall drove over to the Student Union and wolfed down a platter of bacon and eggs heaped with toast, a plastic-tasting Danish and three excellent cups of coffee. By the time he had returned to the Ford he had exchanged the frown for a scowl. He had never been so cold on a case, so far from any impression of proximity to a lead. And yet something kept nagging away somewhere deep in his head. A clue? Something whose significance he had missed?
By this time he felt a positive sympathy for Lieutenant Long and Chief Pearson.
The thought of Katie Cohan sent him over to the administration building. Pearson’s police had the situation in hand. He had to show his credentials before they would allow him to enter the building.
They were alone in the outer office.
He took her hand. “You look ravishing this morning.”
“I’m happy,” she said. “You made me happy last night. Talking about ravishing, I’ve decided you didn’t rape me, I raped you. How could I have been so selfish? You with that poor bruised hide. And that
“Any time,” McCall said, “lady.”
“I hate you. Anything new, Mike?”
He shook his head and told her about his visit to Patricia Reed. “I can’t make up my mind about her.”
“That’s bad,” Kathryn said jealously. “I don’t like her already.”
“Don’t you know her?”
“Just to pass in halls. I don’t have much personal contact with the girls — my work is more administrative — office drudge is what I am, if you must know. Let’s not talk about Miss Reed any more.”
“There’s nothing to go on,” McCall muttered. “It bothers the hell out of me.”
They went over Floyd Gunther’s murder, the letters, the aliases of the letter-writers. It was an exercise in futility.
“Starret still sticks in my craw for some reason,” McCall mumbled.
“Why not talk to him?”
“Where does he live?” She gave him the address. It was just across the campus, a small rooming house.
He was about to kiss her when Dean Vance walked in.
“Investigating my assistant, Mr. McCall?” she barked.
“I could do worse, dean,” McCall said, and left.
He was cutting across a stretch of lawn near the Bell Tower thinking of Katie Cohan, when he heard a shout and the sound of running on blacktop.
McCall turned.
A small man was scampering toward him from the direction of the Bell Tower, crossing the road, waving his arms.
“Wait!” the man screamed.
McCall thought it had something to do with what was going on at the administration building, where the demonstrating students were trying to rush the entrance, apparently with the intention of invading it. A solid line of police was drawn up in their path. The students were shouting, too.
He suddenly recognized the little man. It was the man Kathryn had identified as the custodian of the music building, Burell.
At arm’s length, mouth open, cheeks suffused, eyes popping, he became an old, frightened man.
“What is it?” McCall asked quietly.
The old man gasped, “Murder.”
“Who? Where?”
“A girl. In the Bell Tower.”
17
“Show me where,” McCall said, taking the old man’s arm.
Burell jerked away. “I can’t. I got to call the cops.”
“I’m a cop,” McCall said.
“I don’t know—”
“Let’s go.”
He took the man’s arm again, firmly. Burell seemed to recognize the touch of authority. He stopped balking and hurried along, muttering.
“Where did you find her?”
“Jesus Christ, wait till you see her.”
“Where?”
“She’s dead as a doornail. Wait till you see.”
It was an old, old building smelling of creosote, damp, and floor polish. McCall thought he detected the mortuary odor of dead flowers, too. Old Burell trotted down a hall to a flight of dark oiled stairs, and up to the top floor.
“In here,” he said.
He led the way across a very large room lined with chairs; there was an ancient grand piano on a dais at one end. Sun struggled through windows that looked as if the dust had been fused to the glass.
“Here,” the man said. He pointed a trembling finger.
McCall looked through an open doorway into the Bell Tower itself. A bellrope hung from an opening in the circular ceiling. From the lower part of the rope hung a girl. Her feet dangled a foot above the floor. She was revolving in a dreamy-slow dance.
It was Patricia Reed, black enamel hair poured over her shoulders, black leather garments reflecting the saffron sunshine coming through a slitted tower window. The palms were turned outward in a helpless way. One black boot was half off. Her face and throat were purple. Her eyes were large and staring. Her tongue hung from her mouth. The head was tilted at a sickening angle.
McCall dashed back into the large room and grabbed a chair. At the same time he clawed a pocket knife from his trousers.
Burell shrank out of his way.
McCall set the chair beside the girl, jumped on the seat, and began to work on the rope with his knife. The rope gave under his pressure and the bell in the tower began to toll. The bonging hurt his ears.
With his face almost touching hers, McCall knew that she was beyond reviving. But he kept sawing at the rope. It was thick and tough. He could see on the floor of the tower room, where it had fallen or been thrown, the black binder of music he had last seen in Patricia Reed’s room; sheet music was strewn about.
“Get hold of her,” he said to old Burell. “I’ve got the rope almost cut.”
“Do I have to?” the old man quavered.
“Please!”
The custodian embraced the girl’s legs, shutting his eyes. McCall sliced through the last strand and caught the body under the arms. They lowered Patricia Reed to the floor. McCall worked on the rope around her throat. It was deep in her flesh. He finally managed to loosen it. He felt the carotid artery, put his ear to her breast.
She was dead, all right. Already cooling.
The bell stopped.
“Is there a phone in this building, Mr. Burell?”
“Downstairs in the office. Wait! I ain’t staying here alone!”
Downstairs, McCall phoned police headquarters and got Lieutenant Long.
“You again!” Long said. McCall heard him groan. “It’s those goddam students! Trouble is all they want. Brother, if I had my way—”
“What would you do, lieutenant, machine-gun them? Why do you assume some student did it? It could have been anybody.”
“I don’t have to account to you, McCall,” Long bellowed. “Oliver’ll be right out there. You stick there, see? I don’t like the way you’re always around when a body’s found!”
“I’m almost willing to settle for your arresting me,” McCall said wearily, “just so this thing can be cleared up.”
Long banged off.
McCall said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go back upstairs and wait, Mr. Burell.”
On the way upstairs McCall said, “Have you told anyone else about this?”
“No. You was the first I saw after I found her.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“I’ve seen her around the building. She’s one of the students. I don’t know her name.”
A few minutes later McCall heard the sirens, and wondered why they were being used. It had always struck him as a sort of warning: here come de judge.
Sergeant Oliver and his harness bull team stamped into the tower room, followed by the ubiquitous Dr. Littleton.
“It happened within the past hour or so,” the M.E. said from the floor. “Did you take this rope off her neck, Mr. McCall?”
“Yes. I thought she might still be alive.”
The M.E. was peering at the marks on the dead girl’s throat. “Well, I’m pretty sure she was choked before she was strung up here. There seem to be fingermarks under the rope marks. My guess is she was at least unconscious at the time she was hanged, maybe already dead. I’ll be able to tell better on autopsy.”
“Some bloody bastard is sure on the loose,” Oliver muttered. He walked over to the body and stared. Then he dry-washed his hands and turned back to McCall. “Any ideas, Mr. McCall?”
“No.”
“You say you talked to this girl in the place where she lives?”
“Not much more than an hour ago, sergeant.”
“How’d she seem? Nervous? Something on her mind? Anything, for chrissake?”
“I can’t honestly tell you,” McCall said with a shrug. “I thought there was something queer about her, but I’d never talked to her before so I can’t say if it was her usual manner or not. She did cut our talk short, saying she had to dash over here to a singing lesson. You might find out if she ever took it.”
It turned out that she had not. Her teacher’s record noted Patricia Reed as absent for her lesson.
“Then she lied to you,” Oliver said.
“Or something sidetracked her when she got to the building.”
“Don’t you have any notion what’s going on, Mr. McCall?”
McCall shook his head. That elusive something was still gnawing away...
“And all in the middle of these nutty kids and their battle plans! They’re gathering their forces like an army. I think they’re set on taking over the administration building. The lieutenant’s about fit to foam at the mouth. So’s Chief Pearson. I can’t say I blame ’em, what with what’s going on.”
“Have you ever questioned Patricia Reed officially, sergeant? In connection with anything at all?”
“No. This is the first I’ve heard of her.”
“If you want me I’ll be around here somewhere.”
“The lieutenant might want you. He bites his lip half through every time your name’s mentioned.”
“Tell him I’m on his side, will you?”
The photographer and fingerprint man were hurrying up the stairs as McCall went down. Outside, the morgue wagon was just pulling up. A crowd was beginning to gather before the music building. The tussle before the administration building was dying down as the word spread; students were streaming across campus, banners discarded.
Well, McCall thought, whatever else your murder accomplished, Pat, not the least is that it broke up an attempted invasion and vandalism of state property.
That might well have led to the callup of the National Guard.
In her office Kathryn Cohan immediately said, “Something’s happened! What is it, Mike? You look awful.”
He told her.
She moaned, “That poor girl. I heard sirens, but they’re so common on campus nowadays... This is unbelievable. It must be some maniac.”
“All murder is off the beam, Katie, but that doesn’t help much.”
“There’s an administrative meeting at McNiel Hall. You should hear them. I’ll be over later.”
“I’ll look in. Won’t stay, though, I’ve got to stick to this. I want a kiss.”
Katie looked around. “So do I.”
He leaned over the desk and kissed her on the mouth. As he did so the door opened and Dean Vance burst in.
“What,” the Dean said, “have we here?”
She shut the door and set her ample back against it.
Kathryn Cohan’s face resembled a strawberry.
“Well,” McCall said, “you’ve found us out, Dean Vance. Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know where you’re going,” Ina Vance said, striding across the anteroom, “but me, I’ve got work to do, damn it.” She stopped at her private office door and winked at her assistant. “Nice going, Katie. Your looks and my brains and I’d have had him where I wanted him yesterday.”
She slammed her door.
“Well!” Katie gasped. “The old bag.”
“So you see,” McCall grinned, “you never know about people.”
18
The meeting was in progress when McCall entered the auditorium. He recognized the man talking onstage as John Snyder, the English professor he had questioned about Dennis Sullivan.
He took a seat halfway down the aisle. There was no one near him. They were all seated in the first four rows, probably administrators, heads of departments, and other personnel responsible for carrying out administrative policy.
Campus police guarded every entrance.
“...nothing is settled, nothing will be settled, until we take a last-ditch stand.” Professor Snyder’s left cheek twitched. His fist made little frustrated assaults on the lectern.
“John?” A woman rose in the first row. “We’ve just learned there’s been another murder on campus.” She was a broad-shouldered woman in a pale blue dress. She waved a sheaf of papers. “It’s a student this time, Patricia Reed. I think you have her in one of your classes. She was — it happened in the Bell Tower. Mr. McCall, the man Governor Holland sent up here from the capital, found her. She was hanged!” Her voice rang with horror and defiance. “How much longer can we allow this bloodbath to go on?”
Snyder tightened his thin lips. “The fight is really becoming personal. These psychos will stop at nothing!”
“What do you mean personal?” someone called out.
“I mean, we’re dealing with people who will stop at nothing to get at us. Oh, there’s honest rebellion. I recognize that. But there’s this barbarism, too. Responsible protest can be tolerated. But they’ve turned this campus into a shambles!”
A thin, taut woman came halfway out of her seat. “You know they’ve repeatedly asked for meetings with the administration on a give-and-take basis and been treated like children caught stealing cookies—”
“They’ve had their chances—”
Other voices chimed in, and soon the auditorium was in an uproar.
McCall listened for a while, then he slipped out of his seat and made his way out of the place. Wherever the answer lay, it was not going to come from people like these. President Wolfe Wade, stung by something the thin woman said, had come out angrily for the expulsion of all dissident students, out of hand. McCall made up his mind: one of his first recommendations to Governor Holland was going to be the replacement of Wade. He was the perfect college administrator — for the 1920s. Unfortunately, time had marched on, leaving Wade far behind.
He passed through the swinging doors into the foyer, crossed the gloomy lobby, and stepped into the sunshine. A few students were hanging about outside. They had not been invited to the meeting, even these worried-looking ones. It seemed to him that what the situation cried out for was student representation as a matter of right, the beginnings of a responsible dialogue, a meeting of minds on a level of mutual respect. The way things were going, Tisquanto State College was headed for holocaust.
Meanwhile, he had murders to challenge. Dean Gunther. Pat Reed. The near-death of Laura Thornton — if she was still alive.
He had missed something somewhere. Maybe he should start over again. Laura Thornton’s room, for instance. That was where he had found the book of matches that had led to the Greenview Motel and her liaison with Damon Wilde...
He drove through the winding streets, seeing students everywhere, lines picketing the science building now, other students milling, holding signs aloft, shouting their young heads off. How much longer before this all blew up in everyone’s face?
He could see nothing different in Laura’s room at first. He stood in the yellowish glow from the windows and tried to forget everything he knew...
Then he spotted the two letters on Laura’s bed. They had not been there on his first visit. He pounced and picked them up carefully. One was in a pale blue envelope with the return address of her parents — a letter her mother had mailed several days ago. He did not read it.
The other was in a long white envelope with a liberal arts imprint, posted the day before:
The note was signed,
McCall stood staring at the note. He stood for a long time savoring the taste of recognition. Every such denouement brought the same sense of mechanics: a computer with its memory banks full finally shuttling and clacking the answer in lightning maneuver. Peace, it was wonderful.
He took the letter and left.
He drove over to the liberal arts building and parked curbside. Seeking out the fine arts department, he was directed to a gallery-like room walled with paintings and other artwork. There was a desk, a young girl leaning on it reading a magazine.
“I’d like to see Miss Lucielle Smith.”
“Miss Smith?”
The girl went into a glassed enclosure and presently a middle-aged woman came out with her. She had untidy hair and she wore a green smock.
“You sent an overdue notice to a Miss Laura Thornton, a student here,” McCall said.
“Oh, Miss Thornton. The one—?”
“Yes.”
“We sent her an overdue notice? When?”
“It was apparently just received. Mailed yesterday.”
“That has to be a mistake. I’ll check.”
McCall handed her the letter. She went back into the cubicle and opened a file. She bit her lip, shut the file and, carrying the letter, came out again.
“Just a moment, please.”
She walked quickly across the room to an alcove. He could see her stooping there, riffling through some canvases in a storage closet.
When she came back she said, “As I thought, a foul-up. The painting was returned — I just checked. You know how offices are. We apparently missed checking off the painting and sent the notice routinely.”
“When did Miss Thornton return it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Could I see it? The painting, I mean?”
“Are you connected with the college, sir?”
He introduced himself.
“Oh, in that case! This way.”
He followed her to the alcove. Paintings were stacked along the wall and in the closet rack. Each canvas was numbered on the back.
“It’s this one,” Miss Smith said.
McCall viewed it tenderly, almost with love. It was the one he had seen once before, all right. The all-red job, an abstraction that managed to look like flames leaping to a cave roof; violent shades of red combined to assault the senses.
He straightened up, careful to show nothing to the curator, who was looking nervous. But inside it was like a holiday. Or a reprieve. His mind had snapped like a trap. It was a good feeling.
“Thank you very much, Miss Smith.”
“Would you care to borrow it? We restrict our loans to students and faculty, but in your case, Mr. McCall—”
“That won’t be necessary, thank you. I just wanted to see it. But I’d like you to take this painting out of circulation — put it somewhere for safekeeping till it’s called for by certain authorities. Under lock and key preferably, Miss Smith.”
“Whatever you say.” She clutched the painting as if it were trying to fly away. “How... how is Miss Thornton?”
“Still the same, I’m afraid.”
“We can’t get over it here. Have you any idea who assaulted her so brutally, Mr. McCall? Is it tied in with Dean Gunther’s murder?”
Apparently she had not yet heard about Patricia Reed.
“Thanks again,” McCall said, and left.
Instead of leaving the building, McCall climbed the stairs to the English department faculty room and asked when Professor Snyder was expected back from the meeting at McNiel Hall.
“He just rang up,” the young instructor said. “On his way over now. I gather it was something of a frost.”
“Yes,” McCall said, and sat down to wait.
The frenetic figure of John Snyder scuttled in a few minutes later. “Oh, Mr. McCall. Waiting for me? I’m very busy—”
“This won’t take a minute, professor,” McCall said. “I’m looking for information. It’s a long time since I sat in on an English course. It’s about that Godiva story of the — what was it?—”
“Eleventh century,” Snyder said. “Wife of Earl Leofric of Mercia. That’s the legend, Mr. McCall. Just a legend, please. It appears as one of Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ in Tennyson’s poem ‘A Tale of Coventry,’ and some other literary works. What do you want to know about it?”
“What was the name of the man who disobeyed the Earl’s order and took a good look—?”
“Peeping Tom.”
“I know that. What was his last name?”
“I don’t believe the legend has ever given him one. All we’re told is that he’s supposed to have been one of the townspeople, a tailor by trade.”
“That’s what I thought,” McCall said, and crushed the English professor’s hand. “Thank
McCall drove directly to Dennis Sullivan’s rooming house.
He rapped on the black door; rapped again. He tried the door. It was locked.
A door down the hall opened and a freckled face poked out. “You want Dennis?”
“That’s the idea, son.”
“Well, he’s not in, for chrissake.”
“Any idea where he is?”
“What am I, my brother’s keeper? Lay off the knocking, will you? I’m trying to sack out.”
McCall descended, preceded by a door slam.
He had to find young Sullivan. Perhaps the best bet was to check his schedule at the administration building. He started for his car.
“Hi, there! Mr. McCall?”
It was young Starret, the black student who had found Laura, just starting up the walk.
“You live here, Graham?”
“No. Just visiting.”
“I was hoping I’d find Dennis Sullivan in.”
“Oh, Sully’s out at the shack.”
The little building in the woods, near where he had been stripped and beaten.
“What makes you think he’s all the way out there, Graham?”
“I know the cat,” the black student said. He was toting an armful of books. “When Sully’s in an evil mood, watch out. You don’t want to go out there, Mr. McCall. Not right now, anyway.”
“What do you mean, ‘evil mood’?”
“Uptight, like.”
“Could you be a little more specific?” McCall smiled.
The young man smiled back. “Yes, sir.”
“Well?”
“But I’m not going to.”
“I see. Well, thanks, Graham.”
“For nothing? Advice is cheap.” Then Graham Starret shrugged. “But you better take it, Mr. McCall. It would be a bargain at double the price.” He went into the rooming house, waving.
McCall drove out of Tisquanto, taking the macadam road. The mere thought of the clearing in the woods near the shack made the place on his groin itch.
He missed the dirt-road turnoff the first time and had to backtrack. Evil mood... uptight... he wondered what young Starret had meant.
He found the turnoff this time. It entered at a grassy knoll, then the road curled away in the woods. He was near the river, he knew. Not too far from where Starret had found Laura Thornton.
The clearing was deserted. McCall killed his engine and got out. Through the trees, some hundred yards away, he saw the log building. It had a railed porch.
He started toward it and stopped, looking down. He had stepped on his necktie. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket.
Half-grown fir trees flanked the shack. Then he saw a car, a bright blue fender-dented Corvair. It was parked at the side of the building. So Starret had been right.
McCall sprinted for the cover of the nearest fir tree. No sign of life from the shack. It looked like an abandoned lodge in need of repair; the roof was tacky and the porch sagged. A perfect hideaway for hell-raising college kids.
He made another quick dash to a tree nearer the porch, decided to chance it, leaped lightly over the rail and across the worn boards, and crouched at a window.
He heard muttering inside and risked a look.
It was young Sullivan in there, right enough. He was crouched in a chair staring into space, talking rapidly to some invisible audience. McCall could net make out what the student was saying. Not that it mattered; it was probably transcendental nonsense. The boy was high on some drug; turned on with a vengeance.
McCall kicked the door open and leaped inside.
Young Sullivan did not even look around.
“Sullivan,” McCall said.
It was nonsense, all right, a babble of incomprehensible impressions, a reaching out to a world beyond reality. The babble held steady.
McCall went over to him and shook him. “Sullivan!”
The stream of words dried up. The boy turned bloodshot eyes McCall’s way and blinked.
“It’s the upstate fuzz,” he said in a pleased way, but very slowly, as if a sensible statement required laborious thought.
McCall dragged a chair over and sat close; their knees touched. “Are you with it, Sully? Enough to understand plain English?”
Then he saw what the young man had been playing with under cover of the tabletop.
“Oh, yes,” Dennis Sullivan said, and he brought forth the pistol, aimed it at McCall’s head, and pulled the trigger.
19
The hammer clicked emptily. It had happened too unexpectedly for McCall to react; he would pay for it, he knew, much later, in his nightmares.
It was an old Beretta Cougar .380, known in the handbooks as “the official arm of the Italian Army and Navy.” This one was extra-fancy, a chromed job with a pearl stock. God knew how old it was. But it looked oiled and ready for business. The question was if it was loaded. The Beretta Cougar, McCall knew, held eight cartridges when fully loaded, seven in the magazine and one in the chamber. Sullivan might well have inserted a loaded magazine and forgotten to put the extra cartridge in the chamber. McCall decided that he did not care to play Russian roulette with a speed freak at the controls.
He found that unconsciously he had eased off a bit, getting his legs well under him and his feet raised at the heels, weight balanced forward.
“That’s a pretty dangerous thing to be playing with, Sully,” McCall said, smiling. “Have you checked to see if there are any cartridges in the magazine?”
“Why don’t I pull the trigger again and find out, Mr. McC?” the student asked, grinning back.
“No, thanks,” McCall said. “I don’t think either of us would enjoy the experience. Let’s dispense with the firearm, shall we? What do you say, Sully? Put it away?”
“Not till I find out what you want, ol’ fuzzy-wuzzy-buzzy. How’d you know where I was?”
“I ran into somebody who said he thought you might be out here at the shack,” McCall said. “So I took a chance and drove out here. I’d like to talk to you.”
“We had our talk.”
“Not one like this, Sully. In this one we’ll have to get down to the nitty-gritty. Come on, tuck the pistol away and let’s go at it like civilized people.”
Young Sullivan blinked at him. He was evidently slipping into another phase of drug reaction.
“So talk.” He dropped the automatic to the table.
McCall studiously avoided it.
“It was
“Inferno,” young Sullivan repeated owlishly.
“That painting? All in shades of red? An abstract that looks like flames licking the roof of a cave?”
“
“I first saw that painting in your room, Sully,” McCall said gently. “It was one of a group borrowed from the fine arts department that you had leaning against your desk. For some reason — was it because you liked it? — you held onto it for a few days before you returned it. Or maybe you were too high on speed to make a very smart criminal.”
Sully’s mouth was open. He seemed fascinated. “Yeah?” he said.
“Because it was Laura who originally borrowed
Sully’s mouth was still open. “Why?” he repeated. “Why?”
“Chinky-chink shows, as the kids used to say in Chicago.
Young Sullivan’s breathing became shallower and more rapid.
“The question is why you set out to beat Laura Thornton to death,” McCall said. “The answer ties in to Dean Gunther’s death.
“A series of threatening letters was sent to Floyd Gunther, hinting that he had engaged in hanky-panky with some coed. A number of them were signed ‘Thomas Taylor.’ One of them was signed ‘Lady G.’ Why were those aliases chosen by the two blackmailers? Well, what does ‘Lady G’ suggest? Lady Godiva, for one. And ‘Thomas Taylor’? Well, if Lady Godiva was a principal in the case, Peeping Tom — Thomas — was certainly another. And what was Thomas’s trade in the legend? He was a tailor! So ‘Thomas Taylor.’
“It’s wonderful how the human mind traps itself, Sully,” McCall said to the boy. “Lady Godiva — nudity. Peeping Tom — the man who looked on secretly. Translate it into terms of the blackmail letters and Floyd Gunther’s predicament, and what do we have? A college dean caught fornicating with a coed, and somebody secretly watching in order to be able to blackmail later. Now blackmail in a fornication case has no teeth without evidence. What is the most damning kind of evidence you can have in a fornication case? Photographic. So that’s what Peeping Tom — the secret watcher, the coed’s confederate — was doing: he was snapping pictures of the event! And who do we know in this setup is a photographic bug? Why, young Dennis Sullivan.
“So here, Sully, we have you again — the one who beat up Laura Thornton for a reason not yet adduced, and the one who with your coed girlfriend was blackmailing Dean Gunther. That would obviously be Patricia Reed. Pat Reed stripped to the buff and seduced the poor sucker in her busy bed, and you were right there hidden behind something clicking away, and eventually — maybe because Gunther couldn’t take the pressure any more and was threatening to expose both of you even if it meant his own ruin — Pat, at your instigation, lured Gunther behind the Bell Tower where you stabbed him to death in another one of your drug-induced frenzies. And later, when it all apparently became too much for the girlfriend and
McCall almost did not reach the Beretta. As it was, their hands collided and the pistol smashed to the floor. Their chairs overturned, the table went crashing, and they were facing each other with no more than a yard between them. Then both fell on the gun. Incredibly, Dennis Sullivan got to it first.
McCall jumped in under Sullivan’s arms. He caught the boy’s wrist and twisted. The gun exploded into the floor; again. McCall kept applying pressure. Sullivan gasped and the pistol dropped from his hand. McCall immediately came up with his fist and caught Sullivan’s underjaw. The head rocked back and for an instant he thought it was over. But Sullivan howled and came back fighting like a wounded wolf. He was raging, spitting fire, mouthing obscene threats, and all the time his eyes remained faraway, as if they belonged to another place and time.
McCall, who had no desire to harm the boy, began to wonder if he might not have to kill him.
Sullivan dived at his knees. McCall caught him under the ears, using the boy’s own momentum, and sent him crashing to the floor. He slid on his knees, sprang erect and about in a display of agility that widened McCall’s eyes, and came back to the attack. But it was a feint this time. At the last instant he swerved and lunged for the weapon on the floor.
McCall kicked at it and in the same maneuver chopped at the student’s neck. Sullivan went down again.
“You dumb ox,” McCall panted, not without admiration, “don’t you ever give up?”
But the boy popped back like a jack-in-the-box. McCall decided that he had had enough exercise for one day. He chopped down across the nose and followed up with a stiff jab to the midsection and a chop to the throat. Sullivan reeled, his mouth wide, nose bleeding. And still he tried to come at McCall. It was almost frightening. McCall’s hand flashed up and he caught hold of the gold earring in the boy’s pierced ear and stepped behind him, circling his throat with his forearm and exerting a steady pressure on the earring, down and backwards.
Sullivan screamed and his body stilled.
But he had one more shot in his locker. He wriggled like a seal and came up and at McCall’s eyes. The unexpected movement tore the earring from his ear, and he screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, clapping his hand to his lobe. McCall brought the heel of his hand up and Sullivan sat down on the floor with a thump and began to cry.
“You know something, Sully?” McCall said. “You’re your own worst enemy. Don’t you know when you’ve had enough? Or is it that damned drug? You all right?” He stooped and retrieved the Beretta and dropped it into his pocket.
“You tore my ear half off, goddam you,” Sullivan cried.
“Don’t keep blaming other people for your mistakes,” McCall said. He hauled Dennis Sullivan to his feet and dropped him into the chair. The student produced a handkerchief and began to minister to his nose. His eyes were not as glazed as before; the drug seemed to be wearing off.
“All right, Sully.” McCall stood over the boy alertly. “Why were you blackmailing Dean Gunther?”
“I had to graduate,” Sullivan whispered.
“Graduate?” McCall was utterly confounded.
“You wouldn’t understand, you cop-fink.”
“I’d like to, Dennis.” I’m dreaming this, he thought.
“My old man’s a demon on failure. He’s a self-made man and I’m his only son and he wants me — he expects me — to do even better than he’s done. He’s got a million-dollar business and I’m the heir apparent. He wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale but I couldn’t make it scholastically, wound up at Tisquanto and the old man swore if they zapped me from here he’d beat me the way he used to when I was a kid. He’d beat me once, twice a week till I was black and blue. I still get nightmares remembering. He broke my ribs twice. He’s a big man — six-six and two-forty-five, and he keeps in shape. He could kill me with one hand tied behind his back.”
McCall could hardly credit his ears.
“So I had to graduate,” the boy said. “I had to.”
“All right,” McCall said softly. “You had to graduate. What did that have to do with Dean Gunther?”
“He was going to expel me. I couldn’t let him do that. Because I’d have to face my father, and I couldn’t do
“Why did the dean want to expel you, Sully?”
“I was goofing off. Marks way down. And then when I hit that creep Snyder... that tied it for Gunther. My campus activities didn’t help, either. Anyway, he called me in and said I’d have to leave ’Squanto. I begged him not to kick me out. I practically sucked. I even apologized to Snyder. I’d have got down on my knees if I’d thought it would help... you’d have to know my old man. One big muscle, up to and including his head. A jerk, the King Kong of jerks. With fists like jackhammers.”
The boy’s fingers unconsciously explored his jaw.
A wave washed over McCall. He was no sentimentalist, but there was something in the story, the little-boy tone, the way the fingers kept feeling the jaw, that made McCall want to grip the boy with paternal warmth and tell him everything was going to be all right. When it obviously was not going to be anything of the sort.
“So when you couldn’t talk Gunther out of it you decided to frame him with Pat Reed’s help?”
“It wasn’t hard,” young Sullivan said with a whining laugh. “I had this chick, Pat Reed, eating out of my hand — she had a real thing for me, she dug me. And a nympho besides. I explained to her what I wanted and she went for it right off, thought it was a gas. The idea of getting old Deanie Gunther to take his pants off in her room and get all hot and bothered while I snapped pictures from a hidden vantage point really grabbed Pat. So she gave him a cock-and-bull story about how my parents wanted to meet him in private — in her place as neutral territory — to discuss my ‘case,’ and don’t you know the fathead fell for it? I was all set up behind my blind, and the minute he shows up she locks the door and starts stripping, and there’s Gunther standing there with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out like he can’t see enough — getting hotter by the second and at the same time afraid — and when she’s all naked—”
“All right, I can imagine the rest,” McCall said. Sullivan brooded at his bloody handkerchief. After a while McCall said, “How did Laura Thornton get into the act?”
“That happened before I had to kill Gunther, I mean while we still had him under our thumb. Damon Wilde was Laura’s steady, and she got jealous because he was playing around. Damon started out for here one day, probably to get some joints, we’ve got a cache of grass here at the shack for the in group. Laura followed him, thinking he was meeting some other chick. When Damon saw Pat and me here, he took off. Laura, thinking he was here, sneaked up and overheard Pat and me talking about the Gunther situation. She heard everything and beat it, scared as a rabbit. But when she had time to think it over she came and told me what she’d heard. Man, was she shaking. Kept saying, ‘It was a put-on, Dennis, wasn’t it? Tell me it was a put-on.’ I told her yes, it was, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I knew when she’d had time to think it over she’d go running to Wade.”
“So that Friday, instead of dropping her off at the liberal arts building, as you claimed, you kidnaped her? Brought her out here?”
“There’s a toolshed out back of the shack here. I tied her up in there till I could figure out how to shut her mouth. I didn’t know what else to do. I was all wound up, like. Y’know? I left her there from Friday noon till Monday night. Then... I took her to the river.” His eyes flamed briefly. “I thought she was dead. Christ, she looked dead enough. She should’ve been. The bitch.”
“Very inconsiderate of her,” McCall said. “Oh, you left out one thing, Dennis.”
“What’s that?”
“The part where you beat her up.”
“I don’t remember that, Mr. McCall, honest to God I don’t,” Sullivan said earnestly.
“Are you denying that you beat her?”
Sullivan was beginning to look sullen. “All right, so I beat her.”
“It didn’t bother you?”
“I thought she was dead!” the boy shouted.
“I see,” McCall said. He was sure he was going to wake up any moment, or find that he had been living in an Alice-in-Wonderland episode. “And the painting?
“She had it with her when I took her out to the shack — she’d been intending to return it to the fine arts gallery, like I said. To tell you the truth, Mr. McCall, I took it to my room, where I had some other borrowed canvases, and forgot about it. I should have returned it right away, or burned it. But I wasn’t thinking very straight those days.”
“Yes,” McCall said. Or subsequently, he added to himself.
“I did all right, though. Till you showed up. The local fuzz weren’t getting anywhere. I was going great. You spoiled everything.”
“Let’s stick to the chronology. The photos you took the night you staged that lovely scene in Pat Reed’s room were what you held over Gunther’s head to keep him from kicking you out of college. What made him change his mind?”
“I talked with him over the phone and the son of a bitch says he can’t live with himself any more. Spouted a lot of high-and-mighty crud about conscience and moral duty and courage and how society would not blame his weakness when he explained how he had been tricked and framed and teased beyond endurance, and that type spiel. That’s when we began writing those letters, to keep him in line. It worked for a while, but then I got wind he was starting expulsion proceedings. So what could I do? I had Pat write that Lady G note to him, telling him to meet her behind the Bell Tower. He didn’t even fight, really, just fumbled around. And I nailed him. It was like sticking cheese.” The words tumbled out now. “I couldn’t stop sticking him. It was boss. It was like wild, man!... And you kept snooping around, maybe getting close... I have friends, dig? We didn’t want you on campus, Mr. McCall. So I got a crowd together—”
“Nature’s Children.”
“I didn’t tell ’em the real reason. Just that we ought to fix you good. It was a gas, jumping you like that. They swung, man. It’s a good bunch.” His face pulled down. “Then I broke into the hospital.”
“You wanted to finish the job on Laura?”
“Yeah. It was close. You almost got me.” He laughed. “And then Pat gets on me. All of a sudden she gets religious or something. Scared? Man, she’s shaking like she’s gone cold turkey. She almost spilled her guts when you talked to her. It was too close. I knew that when she tells me she’s going to the fuzz and try to get out from under.” He flapped his arms like a bird. “So again I got nothing else to do but... I asked her to meet me in the Bell Tower room at a time I knew old Burell was eating at the Student Union, and I... I did it. And that’s it.”
“You choked her? Then hanged her to the bellrope?”
“It was hard, too,” Dennis Sullivan muttered. “I had to keep the effing bell from bonging. You try it sometime.”
McCall touched the boy’s shoulder. The muscle under his finger felt like reinforced concrete.
“We’ll go now, Sully.”
“Go? Where?” the boy asked dully.
He was completely tractable walking to McCall’s Ford and on the drive to town.
“You know what you brought me?” Lieutenant Long said. “A lot of nothing is what!”
“Oh?” McCall said. They had Dennis Sullivan in handcuffs; he was sitting dejectedly in a chair at police headquarters studying the floor.
“Okay, so I book him on a few charges. Possession of a deadly weapon—” McCall had turned over to him the Beretta he had taken from the boy “—assault and so forth. But murder? All I have is your story of what he admitted to you, and if you think that’s evidence—”
“I know the legal bind, lieutenant,” McCall said. “Your big hope is Laura. Is she still out?”
“Still out. So if you expect thanks, Mr. McCall, you’re going to have a long wait.”
“My expectations in this world,” McCall said philosophically, “are few. But I can hope, can’t I?”
He watched them book young Sullivan to give his detention the stamp of legality, then they disappeared with him in an interrogation room. McCall had made his statement to Chief Pearson with a stenographer present, and he had already signed the transcript. So there was nothing to hold him at headquarters.
The last thing he saw as Sullivan was hustled out was the boy’s pale, scuff-eyed face, expressionless except for a slight groping look, as if the world were just a bit out of focus.
McCall slowly walked out. He had had word from the capital that Governor Holland was on his way to Tisquanto, and he was feeling a great relief. The state police had had to be called in under an emergency decree. Militant students had invaded a building on campus and occupied part of it; furniture was being thrown out of windows, they were wrecking the place; it looked like a long siege. Other students were drawn up in battle lines around the administration building, effectively keeping college personnel immobilized inside. The state police were being issued riot guns, and some tear gas was already drifting over the campus.
Was Katie safe? He had heard no reports of injuries to administrative people caught in the building, but anything might have happened... his step quickened.
There was a pitched battle going on before the administration building between hundreds of state police in gas masks, carrying grenade launchers and riot guns, and students hurling bricks and cobblestones torn from some of the ancient walks of the original quad of Tisquanto State. Bodies of injured boys and girls lay strewn about the grass like wounded on a battlefield. Students were being dragged by officers to paddy wagons and tossed in feet first. It reminded McCall of the convention in Chicago. Clouds of gas, more and more of it, hung over the campus. McCall caught a whiff and ran. No point in trying to break through to the administration building now; he would probably be taken for a student and clobbered, and be thrown into the jug suffering from exposure to tear gas besides.
He retrieved his Ford and drove back to police headquarters. He could not have said why, except that Dennis Sullivan’s face kept haunting him.
“You back?” Lieutenant Long scowled.
“How’s Sullivan?”
“You worried about him?”
“I don’t know. I can’t get him out of my mind.”
“Okay, Mr. McCall, why don’t we have us a look?”
The lieutenant’s face told him nothing but bad news. McCall followed the officer with a foretaste of unpleasantness. They went downstairs to the cell blocks. It was steamy here; there was a mingled odor of urine, vomit, and disinfectant.
Long stopped before a cell.
“I’ve sent for the shrink,” he drawled. “Kind of figured he might be needed.”
The young man was crouched at the far side of the cell, on the floor, gripping his wounded ear. He was staring at something not visible to normal eyes, and muttering obscenities in a mechanical, almost a ritual, way.
“What kind of dope is he shooting, anyway?” the lieutenant chuckled.
McCall turned away.
20
McCall spotted Sam Holland the moment he turned the corner of the third floor corridor at Tisquanto Memorial Hospital. The governor was deep in conversation with Brett Thornton.
“Mike.” The governor was looking pleased. “How did you know I was here?”
“I’d heard you were on the wing, and I figured this would be your first stop.” McCall turned to Laura’s father. “How is she, Mr. Thornton?”
“In my own way,” Thornton said, “I’ve been thanking God. She’s out of the coma, McCall. She’s going to be all right.” He looked years younger.
“I’ve just heard about this student Sullivan,” Governor Holland said.
“Already?” McCall exclaimed. “It just happened. What did they tell you?”
“Only that you brought him in and told the police that he’s been responsible for the attack on Laura and the two subsequent killings. How firm is this, Mike?”
“Firm, sir. But no case. It’s going to take Miss Thornton’s testimony. You haven’t been to the campus yet?”
The governor’s face darkened. “No, I’m going over there now.”
“All hell’s broken loose, Governor—”
“Mr. Thornton?” It was a nurse, in the doorway to Laura Thornton’s room. “Dr. Madigan and Dr. Stroud say it’s all right to come in now.”
Brett Thornton ran. Governor Holland put his hand on McCall’s arm. “Give him a couple of minutes, Mike.” Two minutes later Thornton appeared in the doorway. He was wiping his eyes. “Thank you, Governor. You can see her now, McCall.”
As they came in Dr. Edgewit held up two fingers, smiling. Two minutes.
She was well swathed and almost invisible, but the eyes were alive and her bloodless hand groped for her father’s with considerable hunger.
“Laura, dear,” Governor Holland said. “I’m so glad.”
“It was Dennis Sullivan,” she whispered. “He did it to me. He tied me up—”
“You can tell us all about it when you’re a little stronger, Miss Thornton,” McCall said.
He was at peace.
Chinky-chink showed.
A few minutes later, back in the corridor, Thornton’s mouth was the old trap.
“I’m grateful for the way things have turned out, Governor,” he said. “For sending McCall here and clearing this up you’ll get nothing but praise from me. But in all fairness I have to tell you—”
“I know, Brett,” the governor said with a smile, “in all fairness you have to tell me that politically nothing’s changed. You’re still going after the gubernatorial nomination, and you’re going to fight me for it tooth and nail.”
“Right.”
“Well, at least it won’t involve a personal attack.”
“No,” Thornton said, “that I can promise you.”
“That’s all I ask. Good luck, Brett.”
“I’m not that generous in spirit, governor. But I’ll shake your hand.”
When Thornton returned to his daughter’s room, the governor and McCall went downstairs. An aide reported the situation on campus. The immediate riot was over; there had been numerous arrests, especially of the invaders who had occupied the campus building.
Listening to the reports of casualties and property damage — with some uncensored details of the filth deposited in wastebaskets and liberties taken with files of private correspondence — Governor Holland’s considerable jaw grew larger.
“It’s Columbia all over again,” he said grimly. “Well, I’m all for freedom of expression, but there’s a big difference between free speech and taking over the campus!”
“There’s a meeting called at McNiel Hall, governor,” the aide said, “by a student group. President Wade wants to ban it.”
“Which students? Are they the ones who smeared that building with filth and obscenities and broke up all that property?”
“No, sir. It’s been called by a student named Damon Wilde—”
“Then I would certainly get Wade to allow it,” McCall said. “I think you ought to hear what this boy has to say, Governor.”
Governor Holland looked at him. Then he nodded. “All right.” He turned to the aide. “I want to talk to President Wade. I’ll see you at the meeting, Mike.”
He found Kathryn Cohan in her office, nipping at a bottle Dean Vance had just passed to her as McCall barged in.
“Shut that door, for God’s sake, Mr. McCall,” the Dean said. “Katie and I are restoring ourselves. We’ve had a wild time here. Do you drink?”
“Only when I have to,” McCall grinned. “Katie. I thought I’d find you in hysterics.”
“You should have seen me three quarters of an hour ago.”
“You can kiss her,” Dean Vance said, rising. “Give me my bottle, Miss Cohan. I have to put it back under lock and key. Wait till I’m off the premises, McCall, will you?”
They waited. When she was gone, Katie clung to him. “Oh, Mike, I practically prayed you’d come! Where were you?” He told her, and her violet eyes widened. “Dennis Sullivan! He sounds as if he’s gone psycho.”
“It’s the drugs. I don’t know what he’s been on but whatever it was it fuddled his brain and shattered his value system. Look, Katie, I promised the governor I’d go to McNiel Hall — a meeting’s been called by Damon Wilde—”
Kathryn shuddered. “Not another one!”
“I think this is going to be different. You want to come along?”
“No, but I’m not letting you out of my sight again. Lead on, McCall.”
Darkness was falling as they crunched across the broken glass and discarded placards on the campus. The lawns looked like something out of a photographic history of the Civil War. Students were hurrying toward McNiel Hall. Some bore hastily lettered posters:
This last one he spotted as a lingering whiff of tear gas made his eyes water.
The stream of students thickened as they converged on the meeting hall. Many had flashlights, which they shone on their signs as they walked. It resembled a convocation of fireflies. There was impressively little noise; for the most part it was a solemn procession.
The auditorium was full. They managed to find seats in the rear, at the extreme right. McCall saw Governor Holland sitting on the platform beside President Wade.
“Look at the big bad Wolfe,” Kathryn whispered. “He’s mad as all get-out.”
“Sam Holland is a powerful persuader,” McCall said dryly.
Damon Wilde was at the lectern, gripping the microphone. His skin was pale against his black sweater. He rapped for order, and to McCall’s surprise he got it almost at once.
“It’s been a rough day,” young Wilde said suddenly.
There were cheers.
“Mute the effort,” he said, and the silence fell again. “One of our number is in the clink tonight, ladies and gentlemen. Whether he’s guilty or not will be determined in the usual manner at the appropriate time. But one thing is a fact. A conscienceless, sadistic killer was let loose on this campus in the past week. The question is: To what extent did the indiscriminate use of drugs and the general unrest at ’Squanto contribute to the climate that made the events of this week possible?
“I don’t have the answer to that question.
“Do you?
“Is this the kind of campus we’re fighting for?
“Is this the kind of education we claim we want?
“To these last two questions I have a personal answer. It isn’t. It’s not what I want. It’s not what I’ve been fighting for. There are some on this campus whose purposes recent events suit exactly. I’m not one of them. I don’t believe that the Establishment is so bad it has to be leveled to the foundation — and below — before it can be rebuilt to the specifications of this generation.” He turned squarely to Governor Holland. “Our tactics may sometimes seem violent, Governor, but our strategy is to work out a peace at the conference table. We have been fighting because no one would sit down with us and listen to our complaints. Would you be here tonight, on this platform, under less hairy circumstances?”
Governor Holland was coming forward.
“If I may say a few words?” he said, stooping to the microphone.
Damon Wilde raised it to the governor’s level. “As many as you like, governor,” he said, and stepped aside.
“I want certain things understood,” Governor Holland said. “I am not here tonight to undercut the authority of the administrative officers of this college or the other duly constituted authorities of the state regents system. On the other hand, it’s obvious to me that there has been an almost total rupture of communications here, and if the governor of the state, at whose ultimate pleasure these authorities serve, can’t tender his good offices in a situation like this, he ought to resign the governorship.”
The audience laughed.
“I’m very happy to have heard Mr. Wilde’s opening statement. I think his ultimate aims and mine are identical. If that’s the case, we should have no trouble, as reasonable people, listening to each other’s grievances and statements of principle and arriving at an accommodation.
“One thing more before I sit down and start listening with both hairy ears. I would like to point out in self-confession that we, who have been entrusted by the people with the task of regulating a just, orderly, and prosperous society, have certainly failed to keep pace with the times in our institutions of higher learning.” President Wade was seen to go very pale indeed, and his lips became so highly compressed that they all but disappeared. “There are certain colleges where the problems being battled over here today were anticipated and solutions sought years ago, before our campuses erupted. Antioch College in Ohio, for instance, instituted a highly progressive program of curriculum, campus living, and student participation in administrative decisions when all was traditional sleepiness elsewhere, and it is significant that, while there are beefs at Antioch still, there have been no serious disorders on that campus, no riots, no seizures and destruction of property. My aim is to achieve such an adult meeting of student and administrative and faculty minds here at ’Squanto and other state colleges. But I tell you people now: I will not tolerate, and I will not permit the people authorized to administer this institution to tolerate, hoodlumism, vandalism, destruction of property, and all the other illegal and antisocial activities that have turned this campus into a shambles. If you people genuinely want a dialogue, my people and I are going to be here to engage in it with you. If you want bargaining, we’ll bargain. Reason will be met with reason, just as force will be met with force. The choice is yours, not mine. Now I’ll shut up and sit down while you tell me what’s on your minds.”
In the uproar that shook McNiel Hall, McCall slipped out of the auditorium with Kathryn.
“They’ll be eating out of old Sam’s hand before the night’s over.”
“But it seems so simple,” Kathryn protested as they hit the fresh spring night air. “Why couldn’t Wolfe Wade and Floyd Gunther achieve the same result? All they’d have had to do was use the same tactics.”
“You weren’t paying attention, Katie,” McCall said. “Tactics derive from strategy. Strategy comes from the whole man — his background, his experience, his social outlook, his philosophy of life. The Wades and Gunthers are traditionalists. They’re slaves to the past, business as usual, do-it-my-way-because-it’s-always-been-done-that-way. Sam Holland is a modern man. He sees things with an unclouded eye, and he doesn’t allow what built-in prejudices he has to befog his judgment or, or least, his willingness to listen. That’s why he’s a successful politician, and that’s why Wolfe Wade is going to find himself retired on a pension. End of speech. What are we going to do now, Katie?”
“How about going over to my place and I’ll fix us a dinner? I’ll even feed you by candlelight.”
He left her at her car, and he hurried for his rented Ford to follow her home.
He liked the promise of peace rising from the smell of growing new things on the campus, and from what he had just heard in McNiel Hall.
But that was peace — possibly — for Tisquanto State.
There would be no peace for him, Katie Cohan notwithstanding. Tomorrow he would fly back to the capital and sooner or later Sam Holland would have something new for him to step into.
Something urgent.
Something troublesome.
For trouble was his thing.
McCall grinned and shot away from the curb.