The Campus Murders (18 page)

“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
burn
. Can you forgive me?”

“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?”