Strangled Prose (18 page)

“Who?” Maggie asked with a nervous gesture, no doubt thinking the mental strain had finally pickled my brain.

“Never mind.” I murmured a good-bye and went upstairs to stare out the window at the dark campus across the street. Douglas had manipulated us; that much I accepted. Yet there was still an uncomfortable sense of manipulation by an invisible hand, as though we were puppets. Acts one and two had been played; the third and final act remained. And Douglas was no longer the puppet master.

At last I went to my bedroom and undressed. A mug filled with foul-looking coffee was on the table; I picked it up to study the face of the Professor himself, dear Derek. The moisture from the cup had blurred his features, and his smile was more soggy than arrogant. Stephanie still desired him, however. She glittered at him with an adoration that could not be defrayed by condensation.

I opened the book to the dog-eared page and began to read.

Several hours later I closed the book. It seemed that Stephanie's first love had left her at a Monte Carlo altar in order to smuggle drugs on his yacht. Once on campus, she had nearly been erased by a chicken truck, along with that charmer Martin Carlow, who was. Immediately after the teary memorial service at the campus chapel, Blane Britton had whispered the threat concerning Stephanie's sister. Stephanie failed freshman composition, but her honor remained intact—for the moment.

She sought comfort at the Women's Center. Two pages later, Margaret Holburn tried the thigh gambit. No success. Stephanie's knees were held together by epoxy. Derek was wearing down her resistance by parading around the classroom in tight jeans that emphasized his gender. Stephanie had a difficult time concentrating on Restoration drama.

Just as I thought that my mind would go down with the adverbs, I arrived at the predictably happy ending. The drug runner sank, and the unscrupulous faculty members were exposed. Derek produced the proper solvent, Stephanie's knees sprung open, and they spent at least twenty-five pages on an undulating water bed. Undulating. I survived a bout of sea sickness, but only with a major effort.

Stephanie O'Hara and Derek Dark. A union contrived in heaven and consummated at sea.

Douglas must have modeled Derek on himself, I decided. He was the most ardent believer in his own virility, and the tight jeans would have appealed to his inflated ego. But who had inspired Stephanie? I picked up the book and studied the cover, wondering if there might be a resemblance to someone I knew. If there was, I didn't see it.

The parallels were impossible to miss, yet I was missing the most vital one. Derek was infatuated with the girl. Perhaps she was one of Douglas's notorious coeds. I needed to check the most current list.

I went into the living room and called the police station. I was told that Lieutenant Rosen was at home; did I want his number? I considered mentioning that I had his number—in the metaphorical sense—but amended it to a meek acquiescence.

I dialed the first six digits, faltered, and hung up. I didn't want to wake up his wife or their children, I told myself as I retreated to the kitchen to make tea. I then told myself that I was behaving like an adolescent, turned off the burner, and went back to the telephone. To hell with his wife, I added sweetly. Let her worry about calls from women in the middle of the night. He could use his limited wits to pacify her; it was not my problem.

Sherlock answered on the twelfth ring. “Yeah?”

“Did I wake you up?” I said, very polite.

“No, that's all right. I fell asleep in front of the television. Do you know who won the football game?”

“This is a bit more important than twenty grown men jumping on each other to capture a porcine ball,” I said, less polite.

“Twenty-two.”

I gave the receiver a puzzled frown. “What are you talking about? Are you sure you're awake?”

After a pause, he said, “Each football team has eleven players. Eleven times two is twenty-two.”

“I have no interest in football, Lieutenant Rosen, nor in simple arithmetic functions. Don't you think you ought to be more concerned about the identity of the person who murdered the Twillers?”

This time the pause lasted a full minute. Finally, sounding more awake, he said, “Do you know who it is?”

“No. Do you?”

“I don't even know who won the Houston game,” he growled.

“Are we back to that? If you prefer to discuss games, wake up your wife. I'll wait until you've worked it out of your system, and then we can move onto more important things.”

He hung up, which I found more than a little rude. I hadn't had a chance to ask him if Douglas had carried on with some coed named Stephanie … or with a name that might be twisted to Stephanie. I needed to discover the names of Douglas Twiller's last few conquests, from the secretary through the latest who had given him an alibi.

I climbed in bed and pulled the pillow over my head. Although I tried to concentrate on the characters in the book, my mind found a diversion that was irrelevant, trivial, and totally pointless: Did I wake up the insufferable man's wife, and did I care?

ELEVEN

I opened the Book Depot as usual the next day and put in several hours of labor on the paperwork. When my accountant called, I was able to tell him that I would drop off the ledger that afternoon. It was a bluff, a familiar one. He laughed, I laughed, and we hung up amid the glee.

The Farberville CID kept a civilized distance. During one of many lulls, I took a sports encyclopedia off the rack to see if football was indeed played by eleven neckless hunks, rather than ten, which would be an easier number to remember. Eleven. I wondered if the lieutenant had taken a lucky guess or whether it was public knowledge. Why eleven? Twelve would have made more sense—an even dozen. Azalea had written thirteen, a baker's dozen and not a propitious number for either Twiller.

Late in the morning Caron called. After a rushed promise that she was between classes rather than skipping one, she told me that Inez had not shown up for school. She sounded worried, as though she had forgotten all the snide comments she had been making since the spat began. I told her to go to class, and I unconsciously began to straighten books on the display shelves. All the copies of
Professor of Passion
were still there; not even the substantial, gruesome accounts in the newspaper were enough to move them.

Flattening Derek's dimple with my thumb, I squinted at the image of Stephanie, determined to find some hint. Nothing. She had a lovely face, if one preferred a total lack of character coupled with a certain dimness. An intellectual midget, but a passionate one.

My aged hippie shambled in to see if I had received any new science-fiction epics. I greeted him absently, already back to the ledger. I looked up when he made a rumbling noise. He was in front of the display where Derek and Stephanie sat three-deep, waiting to be banished to the paperback graveyard.

“That's the book!” he chortled, jabbing his finger at it.

“That's a book,” I corrected him with a trace of tartness. “In that this is a bookstore, there are many of them. The sci-fi is on the second row.”

He gave me a wondering look. “I read this, you know.”

“So did I, and it wasn't very good.”

“But it was interesting,” he said under his breath. He looked as though he might be considering buying all the copies for some obscure reason. The idea was obscene: Derek and Stephanie in every corner, on every table, on every bookshelf.

“Why was it interesting?” I said, coldly prepared to explode whatever myth he had about the book and get him back to the science-fiction rack.

He scratched his beard. “Well, that woman was quite a bitch. All the men kept after her, but I wouldn't have trusted her as far as I could throw a laser eradicator. And the things they did in bed … can people really do that?”

“If they have worked in a circus. Which woman?”

He put his finger on Stephanie's limpid face. “Her.”

I took the man's arm and led him to a new arrival that featured giant armadillos in battle with a gelatinous clump of brain cells for supremacy over a sandy asteroid.

“This is on me,” I said, gave him the book, and shoved him out the door of the Book Depot as graciously as possible.

Stephanie quite a bitch? I shook my head. Stephanie was a sweet, simple-minded soul who was forever having to resist amorous advances. Douglas knew the rules of the genre; he wouldn't have added anything that would risk the necessity of revisions. He had known precisely how much he earned for each hour at the typewriter. He would not have written something that might water down the figure. Not consciously, anyway.

I went home for a sandwich and a cup of tea. An envelope was taped on the door, the handwriting familiar. I carried it to the kitchen table and sat down to read it.

Dear Claire,

“The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beast.” Heywood Campbell Broun, 1888–1939. It seems I failed to make the distinction. Despite appearances, frivolity was never my forte. The little girl lied about her age, among other things, but it was clearly my fault. “Leave-takings are but wasted sadness. Let me pass out quietly.” Jerome Jerome, 1859–1927.

Britton

Well done. I gave him a few seconds of mental applause, then folded the note and put it in the drawer beside my bed. I was relieved that he had chosen to say good-bye in a note; I wouldn't have had enough self-control to see him in person. The little girl and Caron were approximately the same age, for God's sake. Puberty is hard, if not impossible, to hide. Or had Britton believed the girl was all of sixteen or seventeen?

The girl. Her abortion and death were now publicized nationwide, courtesy of paperback racks in every place from grocery stores to gas stations. Could someone have recognized the character and murdered Mildred out of some distorted sense of vengeance? Or, I added slowly, had the someone in question used Azalea's book to destroy Britton? A team effort, in which each conspirator was allowed to pick a victim.

At this point, I did something for which I shall always carry a gram or two of guilt. I searched Caron's room, from the dustiest corner under the bed to the crumb-infested top shelf in her closet. I was fairly sure she didn't have a silver medallion stashed somewhere, but I wanted to be certain. In the delivery room, mothers are given a few privileges in exchange for the unpleasantness; one is the inalienable right to pry.

While I was teetering on a chair to reach the back corner of the top shelf, the downstairs doorbell buzzed. Grumbling, I went to the living room window and looked down at the porch. The crown of black curls below belonged to none other than Lieutenant Rosen. I glanced at a nearby vase, certainly heavy enough to be lethal. Tut, tut.

I went downstairs to let him in. “No paddy wagon?”

“Farberville doesn't have a paddy wagon. It's on the list, after the thumb screws.” He smiled sweetly. “Is Miss Brandon here, by any chance? She seems to have misplaced herself since yesterday afternoon, and her mother is worried, as is the principal at the school.”

“Why would she be here? Caron's at school.” I mirrored his smile and tried to close the door. “Your foot, Lieutenant—it's in the way.”

“So it is.” He brushed past me, went upstairs, and waited on the landing for me to join him. “Coffee sounds good.”

“Are you here to arrest me or to suggest a kaffeklatsch?”

“Well,” he said as we went into the living room, “I haven't decided whom to arrest yet, but your name is on the list. However, there's no big rush. Tell me where everything is and I'll start the coffee. You ought to sit down; you're pale.”

It was too insane to handle. I sat down, meekly told him where the coffee was, and listened to him putter around my kitchen. My name was on the list. Was Caron's? While I worried, he puttered through the whole apartment and back to the living room.

“Miss Brandon isn't here,” he informed me cheerfully.

“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock. Did you look in all the closets and drawers, in case I chopped her up and put her in Baggies?” Not funny, but I was tired of his arrogance. Rosen and Derek. That brought me back to a question that hadn't been answered. “Did you ever find out whom Douglas Twiller was—er, seeing when Mildred was strangled?”

“I wish you'd stay out of this, Mrs. Malloy.”

“Why do you insist on dragging me in?”

He pursed his lips. “I don't know. If you'd like to get out of the game, you could simply stop hiding things from me and tell me what you know. Then you could run a bookstore and I could run an investigation.”

I made a pretense of yawning and said, “Is the coffee ready? I'm on the verge of a nap.”

He stomped into the kitchen, clattered my dishes with uncalled-for vigor, and reappeared with two mugs of coffee. “Why do you want to know about Twiller's girlfriend? She's not involved.”

“What's her name?” I persisted.

He consulted his notebook. “Andrea Piedmont. She transferred to Farber from the University of Florida. She claimed that her affair with Twiller began Sunday afternoon, when he showed up at her apartment. Other than that, she has no knowledge of anything even vaguely relating to the others.”

As adept as I am with anagrams, I couldn't get Andrea to Stephanie without stretching—severely. “Who before Andrea?” I asked, sipping the coffee and struggling for nonchalance.

He flipped through the notebook. “No one could suggest a name, although everybody agreed that there must have been someone. We tried to chase down a rumor about a secretary in the English department, but the secretaries clammed up.”

“It's someone who transferred out of the English department,” I said absently. “But Douglas told me that that affair was over months ago. He hardly ever let a week go by without finding a new victim.” Victim was a poor choice of words. There were already too many victims in Farberville for it to ever quite be the same.