Crime is Murder (6 page)

“So that’s the answer,” Johnny said. “Suicide. But was Howard Gleason suitor number one or number two?”

“And what happened to the other one?” Lisa asked.

Masterson House was a good place to brood over the puzzle. It was beginning to be more livable now; the last crate had been opened and cleared away, and enough furniture had been uncovered and shifted about to make the rooms in use comfortable if not luxurious.

But Johnny still didn’t like it.

“I can’t sleep nights,” she complained. “You aren’t sleeping well, either. I can hear you moving about.”

“The nights have been warm,” Lisa said.

“Then why don’t you move to another room? We certainly have plenty of them. I’ve never understood why you picked that little cubbyhole next to the playroom. It was probably meant for a nurse or a governess.”

Lisa didn’t answer; her mind was busy with many things. Howard Gleason had shot himself. Why? A suicide always raised speculation, and whether or not that cute little girl reporter knew what she was talking about when she insisted that Gleason and Marta Cornish had been engaged, the fact remained that a young musician of enough merit to win the Cornish Award one year had ended his life in a most dramatic fashion the next. That left one very interesting year to be explained.

“You might ask the professor,” Johnny suggested. “He must have known Gleason if they both taught at the high school.”

“Ask the professor?” Lisa smiled at the thought. “Professor Dawes poses questions; he doesn’t answer them. What’s more, he used to teach at a university.”

Johnny looked puzzled. “I suppose you mean something by that remark, but I don’t get it,” she said.

“I don’t either. Why the demotion?”

“Maybe he got fired.” And then Johnny’s puzzlement gave way to a mild form of shock. “You’re not suggesting that
he’s
unbalanced?”

“ ‘All the world’s mad, sister, save thee and me,’” Lisa murmured. Then she laughed. “No, that’s not what I think, and I’m not going to pursue the matter further because you’ve given me an excellent suggestion. The high school, of course. That’s the place to start laying the ghost of Howard Gleason.”

Bellville High School was at least twice the size Lisa would have expected to find in the deceiving little community, deceiving because it wasn’t nearly so little as it appeared to the eye. Seeing it for the first time, she remembered Tod’s explanation of the extent of the school township; then, too, Bellville was growing. Tod Graham was on hand to see to that.

The campus was a scene of great activity. Lisa had restrained a natural impulse to put Johnny’s suggestion into action immediately. A few facts on Howard Gleason were needed first. They came as a result of some surreptitious telephoning to a friend on a New York newspaper. Surreptitious if anything could be surreptitious in Bellville. And so it was several days after that first board meeting when Lisa parked the station wagon in one of the few available spaces alongside the athletic field—parked it painfully after long dependence on Johnny. Too long, she had decided. It was time to act alone.

Across the field, much activity was in progress. True to his word, Joel Warren had started the bleacher construction job immediately. Several construction trucks and a load of lumber were already on the scene; and as Lisa stepped from her car, she became aware of two familiar figures standing on the grass only a few yards away. Joel blocked the view somewhat with his back—twice as broad, it seemed, in shirt sleeves, but not so completely but that she could glimpse Marta, piquant in bright yellow cotton, poised before him in that too-defiant manner. She wore her anger like a battle flag.

Lisa hesitated at the edge of the walk. She didn’t want to intrude, and she didn’t want to leave. The voices coming to her across the grass were too interesting.

“I gave the committee my promise to have this job done, and I intend to keep it!” Joel said. “I always keep my promises!”

“And I don’t, I suppose!”

Silence. Sullen silence. Across the field, a line of dark clouds was beginning to rise up slowly along the horizon. It made quite an appropriate backdrop to the scene.

“I only know what your mother said,” Joel answered.

“My mother!”

Marta turned away abruptly, leaving Joel to stare at her poker-straight back. A workman called out from the lumber truck. Joel didn’t answer. The call came again.

“All right, I’m coming,” he shouted. “Keep your shirt on!’ But the last remark, the lower one, was meant only for Marta’s ears. “I guess I have to keep working even if nobody else does.”

It was a good time to leave—quickly, before anyone saw her standing there. Lisa felt a bit guilty about her unintentioned eavesdropping. A lover’s quarrel was in a different category from what she’d overheard of that board room squabble from under the museum stairs.

She crossed the street and made her way toward the front entrance of the school, her stick tapping out the way. This wing seemed newer than the others. A cornerstone bore the date 1953. Boost Bellville. Lisa smiled to herself, wondering if Tod Graham was on the school board, too. Inside, she found an exhilarated senior to direct her. It was after school hours, but with Commencement Week in the offing the building was far from deserted.

And Miss Oberon was far from at leisure. Miss Oberon seemed incapable of leisure. For her life would be one crisis after another. Had she been Franz Schubert, the “Unfinished Symphony” would have remained unfinished due solely to an attack of last-movement hysteria.

“It’s the choral group,” she confessed, almost at the verge of tears. “Actually, it’s one of the finest in the state, Miss Bancroft, but at rehearsal today I thought I would go mad!”

Miss Oberon tried to shove a pencil behind her ear. Another pencil had already preceded it into a bird’s nest of bushy brown hair, and both of them clattered to the floor in a manner that annoyed poor Miss Oberon until the pitch pipe hanging about her neck swung crazily against her flat chest.

And what did the choral group think? Lisa wondered. Aloud she said, “I’ve always heard that a bad rehearsal is a good omen. And I’m sorry to trouble you on such a hectic day, but I did feel the need of your advice.”

“Advice?”

Miss Oberon was at once both intrigued and bewildered. Perhaps she’d never been asked for advice before.

“On procedure and such on the committee. I’m sure you’ve had a great deal of experience on the festival committee.”

Miss Oberon beamed. It was a weak beam, to be sure, but the spark was still there.

“As a matter of fact,” she admitted, “I’ve served on the committee since the first award was given.”

“Nine years ago,” Lisa mused.

“Why yes, that is, this will be the ninth. Of course, we planned it for several years prior to the actual event.”

“We?”

“Mr. Graham and Mrs. Cornish. But I was in on it almost from the beginning. We were delayed because of the war. Culture suffers so in wartime.”

“Among other things,” Lisa observed.

“But then we got started, finally, and it’s been such a satisfaction to assist those fine young talents. To watch them rise—”

Miss Oberon’s expression was almost beatific. Her thin fingers played idly with the pitch pipe, and her eyes glowed happily—and then darkened. Lisa caught the cue.

“Except for Howard Gleason,” she suggested.

“Criminal!” Miss Oberon exclaimed. “Criminal, that waste of talent!”

“And tragic,” Lisa added. “I wonder why a young man with such a promising career ahead of him chose to refuse the scholarship and stay on in Bellville to teach. He had no family, no obligations—”

“He had eyes,” Miss Oberon snapped, “and he was a man!”

Lisa had eyes, too. She saw the swift fury in Miss Oberon’s face, and the way her fingers suddenly froze on the pitch pipe. Not a reliable witness, perhaps, but better than none.

“Then it’s true that he was in love with Marta Cornish?” she asked.

“Of course it’s true,” the music teacher said. “Howard was deeply in love with that girl. He met her as soon as he came to the festival. That’s why he stayed on.”

“Then what happened?”

“What happened? What always happens where Marta Cornish is concerned? What is it, Miss Bancroft, that makes a beautiful girl so careless with love? Why do they throw it away?”

Aging Miss Oberon, unlovely and unloved, asked the question. She didn’t wait for an answer.

“She never cared for Howard, and he was a fine young man. It was the same with that other one—Pierre Duval. She never cared for him, either.”

Now Lisa was intrigued. She’d come asking of one suitor and stumbled across two.

“Pierre Duval?” she repeated. “I don’t believe I know the name.”

“Her music teacher, Miss Bancroft. Another fine young man. Mrs. Cornish brought him over from Paris, I think, about six years ago. He lived at Bell Mansion for the next three years and taught Marta all she really knows about music—if she knows anything.”

If
she knows anything? The inference was too plain to be ignored. “I thought Marta had the reputation of being quite talented.”

It could be jealousy. The thin smile on those tight lips wasn’t beyond such emotion. Lisa watched and Lisa listened.

“A reputation Mrs. Cornish never misses an opportunity to embellish,” the woman said bitterly. “Frankly, Miss Bancroft, I think it’s very much overrated. I think that’s the reason Marta never gets a composition into the judges. It’s just talk, that’s all. Nothing but talk!”

And then Miss Oberon’s slightly crossed eyes wandered over the wall until they came to rest on a framed reproduction of the painting in the Cornish museum. Martin Cornish hung just above a bust of Beethoven. The tone of the woman’s next words made it seem this arrangement was symbolic.

“She’s getting by on her father’s reputation,” she said, “but she doesn’t have his genius. His greatness. Can’t you feel it, Miss Bancroft? Can’t you just see it in his eyes?”

What Lisa could see in the eyes of Martin Cornish wasn’t nearly so interesting as what she could see in the eyes of Miss Oberon. A lonely woman living close to greatness.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

Miss Oberon didn’t look away from the portrait. “Not really. I came to Bellville a few years after his tragic death, but I feel that I know him. I know him through his music, the only way an artist can be known.” And then Miss Oberon remembered that she had an audience, blushed, and began to finger the pitch pipe again. It was a good time to change the subject.

“But what about Pierre Duval?” Lisa reminded. “What happened to him?”

She had to wait a moment for Miss Oberon to return.

“Oh, he’s dead,” she said.

Casually, as if everyone knew.

“But how?” Lisa asked.

“He was living at Bell Mansion, as I told you. It was assumed that he and Marta were—well, in love.”

That tight smile was returning, but Lisa had already done her mental arithmetic.

“Marta is twenty. Twenty-one this September.”
The professor’s words were only a thought away. “If Duval came from Paris six years ago, Marta could have been only fourteen, fifteen at the oldest.”

And still the tight smile. “But she was eighteen when he died, Miss Bancroft. A tragic thing, too. He fell down the stairs in that house and died instantly.”

Lisa didn’t have to ask what house. She did have to ask, “Merely from falling downstairs?”

“Duval had a plate in his skull, the result of a war injury. We all knew that.”

“We all knew that.”
The implication was too naked to be accidental. And then Miss Oberon seemed to regain her senses. She remembered who she was, and where she was, and to whom she was talking. Her hands became busy with some papers on her desk. Her eyes couldn’t meet Lisa’s even on the bias.

“If you’ll excuse me, I really must be getting on with my work. With commencement coming, and the festival after that, I really haven’t the time—”

“Of course,” Lisa said. “I should have realized.”

“And, Miss Bancroft—”

With her hand on the doorknob, Lisa turned back. Miss Oberon looked frightened. Actually frightened.

“You won’t repeat anything I’ve told you about Marta Cornish, will you? About—about her talent, I mean. I may have been too hasty.”

About which talent? Lisa restrained the desire to ask. She was only a schoolteacher, after all. With all her dreams of greatness, she was only a schoolteacher in a town founded and dominated by the family in “that house.”

“I’ll never repeat a word of it,” Lisa said. “You may depend on that.”

Lisa left the schoolroom deep in thought. Howard Gleason, Pierre Duval. Marta Cornish had two suitors and both were dead. It always came back to that. She’d been right from the beginning. The story was Marta.

But what was the story? One man had shot himself and another had fallen downstairs. Was there enough in that to arouse the suspicion of such a quiet, unemotional man as Curran Dawes? Lisa pondered the problem as she made her way down the corridor toward the doors. Not until she’d reached them, and was putting out her hand for a doorknob that suddenly wasn’t there, did she realize the subject of her pondering was so close at hand. Hat in hand and raincoat over his arm, Professor Dawes was preparing to end a busy day. She assumed it was busy by the quantity of textbooks under that raincoat-clad arm.