Murder Misread (10 page)

“
Yes, that’s right.” It
was vivid yet—the bubbly water, Bart’s lumpy hulk on the bridge.
Charlie added, “Also, while you people were talking to us I looked
over at her and saw a Campus Security guy talking to
Maggie.”

“
So he’d come down from
the campus side. Okay, thank you, I’ve got the picture.” Hines
switched topics abruptly. “Now, I’d like you to look at some things
here, see if you recognize them.”

Charlie licked his lips
again and tried to concentrate on the objects in the evidence bags
that Hines was showing him. A red baseball cap. A muddy pipe. A
plastic ballpoint pen. A card-sized scrap of paper with a fragment
of a bibliography printed on it. A pair of big black rubber
overshoes in the box.

“
Does anything look
familiar?” Hines prompted.

“
Well… Bart has a pipe of
that general type, but lighter colored, as I remember. And the
little card looks like what you find in the library for scrap paper
to jot down call numbers. They cut up excess copies of old handouts
and leave them in little boxes for people to use when they’re
looking up books.”

“
I see. The boots don’t
look familiar?”

“
Not really. I’ve seen
that kind before, it’s common enough. They’re a pretty large size,
aren’t they?”

“
Size twelve.”

“
I’m a size
nine.”

“
Thank you.” Hines pulled
his own large oxfords under him and stood up. Porter, at the door,
shifted to attention too. “We’ll be back to you soon, Professor
Fielding. I’d sure appreciate it if you could remember exactly when
you misplaced your memo book.”

Charlie shook his head.
“I’ve told you all I can remember.”

“
Well, let me know if
anything occurs to you. We’ll have to hold onto it for the time
being, I’m afraid. See you soon, Professor Fielding.”

Charlie nodded weakly and
watched Hines and Porter out the door.

What the hell should he do
now? Tal shot: unbelievable. His own memo book on the lower trail.
How had it gotten there? And where was it? He’d been unable to tell
from Hines’s impassive expression whether his movements down the
trail with Bart could account for where it had been found. He
closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct those terrible moments.
Tracking shot: Charlie Fielding hurrying down the steps next to the
College Avenue bridge. Down into the leafy gorge, Bart crashing
along close behind. The damp earth packed behind railroad-tie
steps, the jar of each footstep—that could have bounced his book
from his pocket! Would Hines have worried about something found so
far away? Maybe. But Charlie had gone much closer to Tal. Could it
have fallen out closer? Think! On down the trail, still very steep
but sloped now, no actual steps. Across the little stone
footbridge, three feet wide, gray stones assembled in a gentle arch
over the creek, WPA project, the aging mortar cracked in places.
Maggie’s distant figure off to the right, sky-blue sleeves flapping
like semaphores. But wait a minute. Coming off the footbridge, two
stone steps down to the trail. Could the book have jounced from his
jacket then? Would Hines be interested in something found by the
footbridge?

Maybe.

Tracking on: moving toward
Maggie, noting the lump of gray tweed at her feet with no conscious
understanding of what it was, but looking away hastily even before
she spoke, some inner director crying,
Cut! No more, no more!

Don’t think about that.
Stick to the memo book.

If it had fallen from his
pocket earlier, while he was looking down at the lower trail from
the upper footbridge, it might have landed closer. Pushed by the
breeze, maybe, or ricocheting off a branch. But he couldn’t
remember any time that—

“
Hi,” said Maggie. She
glided into the office and dropped a flat white box onto his desk.
A puff of air from its landing lifted the pages of his grant
proposal. “I bribed what’s-his-name, your assistant—Gary, right?—to
go get us a pizza. What some?”

“
God, I hadn’t thought
about eating.” But the aroma of onions and sausage set his recently
parched mouth to watering.

“
Yeah, I’d forgotten too,”
she said soberly. “But my ridiculous stomach never quits. It told
me a couple of dolmas were not enough for lunch no matter what. Go
ahead, have some.” She perched on the edge of the chair Hines had
used.

“
Thanks.” Charlie grabbed
a napkin and took a piece, careful of the warm cheese dripping from
the sides. “Maggie, can you think of any time my memo book might
have fallen from my pocket on the lower trail? Maybe when we were
standing on the bridge looking down at that guy?”

“
So that Chaplin-design
memo book was yours, huh?” She frowned, hooked an ankle under the
rung of the second chair, and pulled it closer to prop her feet on
it. “I don’t remember you dropping anything. I was looking down at
the guy in the bushes, but I think I would have noticed if you made
a sudden movement big enough to dislodge something from your
pocket.”

“
Yeah,” Charlie agreed
gloomily. “I can’t remember anything like that happening either.
But how in the world did it get down there?”

“
Mm.” She was chewing
vigorously, her cheeks lumpy, her eyes clouded with thought. “Well,
I think of two things,” she said indistinctly. “First, don’t worry
about Hines. After all, we were together almost the whole
time.”

“
That’s right.” But
Charlie was not completely soothed. Hines hadn’t reacted as though
he believed he had an alibi. But then Hines hadn’t reacted at all.
He wasn’t stupid, though; he’d know Charlie hadn’t been down there.
Maybe he was merely curious, just as Charlie was, about how it got
to the lower trail.

“
But no one knew
beforehand that I’d be with you, did they?” Maggie mused. “I’d told
Tal I had to have lunch with the children. Hell, even I didn’t know
I was going with you until the last minute when Liz offered to take
them to McDonald’s.”

“
Yes, but the important
thing is that the police know I was with you.”

She paused, a fragment of
pizza still held in her hand, studying him intently. “Charlie,
could someone be trying to frame you?”

“
Frame me? My God, no!”
But even as he spoke his stomach clenched in cold fear. She was
right. Someone must have stolen his book. That’s how it got there.
But who the hell hated him that much? Hated Tal that much? It
wasn’t possible. He said wanly, “So you think I didn’t drop it at
the bridge.”

“
Maybe, maybe not. I’m
just a statistician, looking at another hypothesis that we haven’t
yet disproven. I’m thinking that you were racing through the halls
when I first saw you this morning. Could the book have fallen out
then?”

Charlie nodded unhappily.
“Sure. Or outside in the parking lot, or running up the
stairs.”

“
Did you have it in the
same pocket as your keys?”

“
Yeah. Right outside
pocket.” He patted his jacket.

“
I don’t remember anything
falling out when you pulled out your keys. But the kids were there
and we were both distracted.” She swooped another wedge of pizza
from the box, stringy cheese trailing behind it. She spun the
cheese spaghetti style onto her forefinger, lifted it high, and ate
it like Chaplin savoring his boiled shoelace. “But,” she mumbled,
mouth full again, “we’ve got a real possibility that someone got
hold of your book and used it as a backup plan.”

“
Backup to
what?”

“
Okay. Someone decides to
kill Tal. Doesn’t want to get caught. Drops your memo book there so
the cops will think it was you.”

“
Yeah, I
understand.”

“
But the guy has a high
opinion of you. Knows if you did such a thing you’d cover your
tracks. So he figures you would stage a suicide to throw the police
off. Okay so far?”

“
Uh… yes. So the killer
puts the gun in Tal’s hand. And that’s supposed to implicate me
too!”

“
Right. The killer
probably knew Tal was a cheery man and that his friends couldn’t
accept suicide without insisting on further investigation. And
further investigation would turn up your memo book.”

“
But why me?”

Maggie swallowed the last
bite of pizza, peeked regretfully into the empty box, and lounged
back into her chair again. “I don’t know why. Maybe nothing more
than opportunity. There was your book on the floor, just when he
needed it. And you’d be walking across the bridge alone, or so he
thought. Tell me, was it generally known that Tal was
left-handed?”

“
I can only speak for
myself. I knew, yes, but I didn’t think about it much. You don’t
spend a lot of time watching other people write.”

“
Yeah. It certainly
wouldn’t be at the top of your mind if you’d just shot someone and
were arranging the scene to look like suicide.”

“
So you think Tal’s killer
waited in the bushes. Tal came along, he ran out and shot him,
stuck the gun into his hand, and ran off again. And he dropped my
book to make it look as though I’d tried to stage it all. But why
not keep the gun and hide it in my stuff somewhere?”

“
Maybe there wasn’t time
to hide it. Maybe he had to establish an alibi. So it was easier to
leave it, make it look as though you’d staged a suicide. Now, you
see, we’ve learned a lot about this killer.”

“
Well, we know he picked
up my book somewhere.”

“
Not any old somewhere.
Probably here, because he knew about Tal’s lunch. Knew Tal would be
on the gorge trail on the way to Plato’s. Thought you’d be using
the trail too, but alone. So you know this person,
Charlie.”

“
Me? But… well, yes,
you’re right.” Charlie took off his glasses and rubbed his nose.
“Somebody I know killed Tal. God, I don’t believe it!”

“
Killed Tal. And tried to
frame you with something you dropped right around here this
morning. So, next question: Who was around this morning who might
want to kill Tal?”

“
God.” Charlie put on his
glasses again and leaned back in his chair. “I was going to try to
think about that. But then Hines started asking about the memo book
and, I don’t know, I started feeling defensive.”

“
I know what you mean,”
said Maggie. “It’s happened to me, even worse than this time. Of
course I was already upset because someone had died, and the cops
came in like big computers, processing what I told them as though
it might not be true, checking my actions as though I might have
done it. I mean, that’s their job, they don’t have any choice, but
it’s still scary as hell.”

“
Yeah.” Charlie found her
words comforting. It was their job, after all. They had to check
everyone. But he’d felt so damn defensive. He noticed he was
holding his Donald Duck pen. He replaced it in the holder and said,
“But who the hell… well, I guess if a person is willing to kill
someone they won’t hesitate to frame someone else.”

“
Right. It’s still Tal at
the center of this. Can you tell me anything about his work? He was
retired, right? That’s what emeritus means.”

“
Yes, officially. Here, a
professor emeritus doesn’t have to do anything if he doesn’t want
to. But if he does want to stay around, he can have office space,
hold seminars, and so forth. Most of them wind down slowly, do a
little research, come in to catch up on the news a couple of times
a week. Tal was much more involved than that. In every day, doing
research, even teaching a seminar once a year. Loved students, and
they loved him.”

“
So his retirement was on
paper only.”

“
Right. Of course his
chair was awarded again, to Kenton, the personality development
man. And Tal didn’t have to serve on university committees
anymore.”

“
He probably didn’t miss
those.”

“
You said it!”

“
Who were his friends in
the department? Who did he talk to?”

“
God, everybody! Well, you
met him. He made the rounds of everyone in the department who was
on campus, just about every day. From Reinalter down to the
lowliest student. And he’d made a lot of friends in other
departments. Often had lunch at the faculty club across
campus.”

“
And was he always as
curious as this morning?”

“
Usually. He was always
asking questions, skimming grant proposals and papers,
gossiping.”

“
About things he’d learned
from other people?”

“
Yeah, the usual things.
Where Nora was going on vacation, how Bart had the flu, what kind
of car Reinalter was thinking of buying –that kind of stuff. But he
and I talked about reading research, mostly.”

“
So he didn’t seem to know
anyone’s dark secrets?”

“
Never passed any on to
me. But, uh, are you suggesting someone told him something and
then… but what could possibly be that dangerous?” He pushed his
glasses up his nose. “And if it was, why would anyone tell
Tal?”

“
And what would Tal do
with the information? Would he—oh, hello, Captain Walensky.”
Maggie’s head turned toward the door. “Have you come to tell us not
to talk about this case?”