A Function of Murder (13 page)

“I remember reading that there were competing bids,” I said, wishing I’d cared more
at the time about who’d be hauling away my trash on Friday mornings.

Kira nodded. “There’s the W. Thomas Company that Edward prefers, and the Stewart Brothers
that Mr. Sizemore wants to give the contract to,” Kira said. “It was strange, because
they’d always been simpatico on contracts. Mr. Sizemore would do his management consultant
thing, making assessments and all, and then make a recommendation, and Edward would
agree. But not on this waste management deal. Then, the next thing I know, Edward
decides to award the contract to W. Thomas, never mind Mr. Sizemore’s recommendation
of the Stewart Brothers, and then terminate Mr. Sizemore himself.”

“Wouldn’t a city contract just go to the low bidder?” I asked.

“It’s not that simple. Let me tell you, it’s impossible to keep bids secret anymore.
So they have to offer up other value-added things. Like, Thomas would add an extra
pickup at the holidays, and the Stewart Brothers would provide a special green waste
container free of charge. That kind of thing.”

Kira went on a bit about waste management, impressing me with her understanding of
city businesses. I’d never considered how lucrative the waste business was until I
heard her expound in what were probably words she’d heard from the mayor.

“Think about it,” she said. “You pay them to take away your trash, and then they turn
around and sell it.”

It was obvious as Kira explained it. There were all sorts of ways to sell waste, whether
as recyclables or as fodder for research into chemical treatments.

I found myself imagining Kira doing doctoral work as an extension of her undergraduate
thesis, applying mathematics to politics. I saw her extending the work she did, moving
on to analyzing strategies and voting systems using sophisticated statistical methods.

I tried to imagine what the real relationship was between Kira and the mayor. He seemed
to have confided in her a great deal, perhaps simply because she was smart and would
provide an excellent sounding board.

In my mental meanderings, I’d missed the fact that Kira was now quietly sobbing. I
took her hand and uttered a soothing platitude.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I miss talking with him.”

It was clear that the mayor of Henley had loved my student for her mind. I wished
I could ask him what his other intentions had been.

The arrival of a wave of people in small clusters, most likely from the event at the
city hall, made it impossible for Kira and me to continue our chat. It was just as
well. Our session had run its course.

A gaggle of young people surrounded our table, and Kira introduced me to her friends
from Mayor Graves’s campaign headquarters, mostly young women. I recognized one or
two from campus, but none were my students. As we greeted one another with expressions
of sympathy and disbelief at the loss of their hero, I couldn’t help assess their
potential as killers. Could the mayor’s murderer have been the guy in the black cargo
pants who had a suspicious, glassy-eyed expression? Or the one so well built that
he could easily apply great force to the handle of a letter opener? Or the tall blond
girl with yellow and white plastic daisies on her flip-flops who avoided making eye
contact with me?

It was a wonder cops and homicide detectives like Virgil ever trusted anyone. Maybe
they didn’t.

Eventually I was able to slip away from the Coffee Filter, amid much hugging and many
tears. I felt comfortable leaving Kira with her friends, notwithstanding the fact
that one of them might be a murderer. Until now, my political naiveté had made me
immune to the idea of strife in a political campaign. I’d imagined a campaign headquarters
as a hotbed of goodwill with enthusiastic, dedicated citizens, young and old, all
pulling together for the same candidate, in a spirit of camaraderie. I remembered
Kira talking about a cake her coworkers brought in to recognize that she’d taken in
more pledges of contributions than any other volunteer.

I supposed many people thought of college campuses similarly—a peaceful community
of teachers and students, all after enlightenment and knowledge for its own sake—which
was far from the truth. While I never regretted my decision to leave the world of
software start-ups, I had to admit that campus politics were every bit as complicated
and often as nasty as at any institution outside the ivory tower. Every faculty senate
meeting had its share of petty grievances and intense turf wars. Should the History
Department take the Modern Languages Department’s schedule into account when planning
its curriculum? Since the Chemistry Department offers “Science for Poets” to fulfill
the science requirement, why doesn’t the English Department offer “Shakespeare for
Scientists” for the language requirement?

The recent faculty debate over commencement speakers came to mind, and brought me
back to our deceased mayor.

I imagined that, more than for most citizens, the list of suspects for the case of
a murdered mayor must be as long as the city phone book. Poor Virgil and his colleagues
at the HPD.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I left Bruce’s car behind the Coffee Filter
and headed for my campus office
on foot. My plan was to walk down Main Street to the northwest pedestrian gate, directly
outside Franklin Hall. I could thus avoid laying my eyes on the bloody fountain. It
would forevermore be bloody to me, I realized, no matter what kind of filtering system
or treatments the hazmat team brought to bear on it. I’d enter Franklin, retrieve
my things, and return to Bruce’s car by the same route. Lugging my robes and briefcase
back to the car, even as the day grew warmer, seemed light duty compared to being
drawn to the tainted center of campus.

People were still streaming from the city hall toward the Coffee Filter, among them
some faces I recognized. The most unexpected were those of Monty Sizemore and his
sister, Chris. They were dressed as if for tennis and, come to find out, that’s exactly
where they’d been—playing on the college tennis courts across the street. They looked
even younger, with Chris’s long hair in a ponytail and pink scrunchie, and both in
designer white shorts and tank tops. I remembered the balloons that adorned the teachers’
cafeteria when Monty turned thirty last year. I hadn’t taken the time today to change
my clothes before rushing out to meet Kira, and now my old khaki capris seemed to
emphasize how long ago my own thirtieth birthday was.

“We’d have gone to the service if we’d known about it,” Chris said, indicating the
crowds at city hall and seeming apologetic about playing while others mourned.

Monty swept his arm down to encompass his fit body and classy outfit, his look marred
only by a bandage around his calf. Or maybe that was also a fashion statement. “We
weren’t exactly dressed for something serious,” he said. “We play almost every Sunday
morning.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “But I don’t always beat the pants off my brother like today.”
She mimicked pounding his shoulder; he mimicked a severely painful reaction.

“A bad day at tennis is better than a good day working on your patio,” Monty said.

“He’s putting in a little brick wall and you’d think he was doing major construction,”
Chris told me.

“She’s a tough boss,” Monty told me.

“Not,” Chris said, with another playful punch to Monty’s shoulder.

The scene almost made me wish I had a brother.

“Hey, I called you last night, Sophie,” Monty said. “I wanted to see how you were
doing, after, you know, how awful it must have been to be right there when, you know,
the murder and all.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you. It was a rough night.”

“I’ll bet it was. Do the police know who did it? I mean, do they have any leads?”
Chris asked, as if I would know. Weren’t she and her brother the social media generation?

“Not that I know of.”

“We thought maybe since you were right there…” Monty said, letting the thought drift
off.

I shook my head. “I’m sure we’ll be hearing something soon.”

“Yeah, they’ve probably got everyone and his brother on this one,” Monty said. “Maybe
even bringing in the state?”

Since he appeared to be addressing a question to me, I answered. Sort of. “I have
no idea,” I said.

“I thought you had a good friend on the force,” Monty said.

“Do you want to join us for coffee?” Chris asked, relieving me of the burden of explaining
my relationship to Virgil. And also of informing Monty that even if I did know more
than he did, I wouldn’t be inclined to share it.

I declined the offer of drinks, explaining that I’d just come from the Coffee Filter,
and added, “I need to get my grades done if I want to take off for a few days at the
Cape next week.”

“Yeah, I read about your exam grade issue on Facebook,” Monty said. “You’ve got your
work cut out for you.”

“Excuse me?”

“Elysse Hutchins?” Chris said, in that way of saying something as if it were a question,
but that you should already know the answer. She might as well have asked,
Are you that out of it?

“I’m still not sure what you mean,” I said, then realized I might be confirming their
suspicions.

“Facebook? Elysse is pretty unhappy?” Chris said, again using her disbelieving tone.

“About what?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. I just needed to know if the
whole Facebook community knew about Elysse’s problem with me.

“It’s all over Twitter, too,” Monty said. “She started a Facebook page for it last
night and she had, like, two hundred Likes by midnight.”

Chris laughed and poked her brother. “And there’s another one. You and your ‘Likes.’”
She turned to me. “From what I read, it does seem like you were a little harsh, Sophie,”
she said.

I was dazed, and not just by the bright sun. “I was harsh?” I asked, glad that the
noisy crowd passing us on both sides masked my increasingly loud responses.

“You know, marking her down for a little slipup in formatting her answer,” Chris said.

“It really should be about content,” said Monty, who had all of two semesters of teaching
under his belt. “I try to look past the small errors and go for what the kid is really
trying to say. It’s the substance that matters.”

I made a conscious effort to relax my shoulders rather than take a swing at Monty,
which would have ended badly for me.

Like many adjunct professors, Monty taught only one class, “Marketing Research,” to
students in our newly added International Business major. His main occupation was
working for a management consulting firm in Boston, whatever that meant. I’d been
over my head reading both
his class description and the “about” paragraphs on his firm’s website during the
weeks when we on the hiring committee were reviewing his application. Terms like “estimates
of market potential,” “organizational sustainability,” and “outsourcing management”
were outside my wheelhouse. Nothing like a good, old-fashioned statistics class for
clear topics: sampling, estimation, testing.

I took a second deep breath. A crowded sidewalk on Main Street in Henley, Massachusetts,
was not the place to defend myself or explain my pedagogical philosophy. Especially
on a day like today, with mourners in various stages of grief and relief. Besides,
the Sizemore siblings each had seven or eight inches on me; it was hard to present
a good argument while straining to look up at your opponents.

“Is that how Elysse put it?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “‘A slipup in formatting’?
There’s a lot more involved than that.”

“Whatever,” Monty said, causing my jaw to tighten again, to the point of pain.

“She has perfect timing, too, huh? There’s only about two million students getting
grades this month, from somewhere or other,” Chris answered.

“And maybe ninety percent of them thinking they deserved a couple more points,” Monty
added.

“Make that ninety-nine percent of them, if they’re your students,” Chris said to her
brother, giving him a playful grin. One might almost think they’d rehearsed this skit.

“Well, at least they’re not on Facebook with it,” Monty said. Apparently the brother
and sister duo forgot I was there for a moment.

Monty addressed me again. “Don’t have to tell you about statistics, though, right,
Sophie?” When I didn’t answer, Monty continued. “Elysse has a great target audience.
If she had a product to sell, I’d say now would be the time.” At this point, he swung
an imaginary tennis racket
in the air and we all watched an invisible ball soar over our heads.

Chris seemed finally to realize that I wasn’t enjoying the banter. She stopped smiling
and looked at her watch. “I need some coffee,” she said. “Sure you don’t want to join
us, Sophie?”

“I’d love to”—I looked at my own watch—“but, wouldn’t you know, I’m late for a meeting.”

I’d had enough of Frick and Frack. All I wanted was to get to a place where I could
check out Elysse’s Facebook postings. And possibly unfriend the Sizemore sibs.