A Death Most Cold Read online

  And evidently it remained so. First, she whisked away her personal effects, and now the furniture.

  In hindsight, Myron wondered what Nadia had told her mother about her pending breakup. He had no doubt of Mrs. Karpovich’s reaction: “I told you so,” and “when are you coming home?”

  For his part, Myron had not yet informed his mother. No sense in unduly disturbing her until he was sure that the marriage was unsalvageable. Then, he would announce the news as gently as possible.

  ***

  Morton took another puff from his pipe and glanced at his watch. Enough brooding: time to go to work. He was almost out the door when the phone rang. It was Ted Mack, whose office was next to his. “Myron…ah…you coming in soon?”

  “Right away. I’ve got a nine o’ clock class.”

  “Good…ah…there’s a couple of students here who have been banging on your door wondering where you are.”

  “Hell…” Myron suddenly remembered. “I told them I’d be in early today…talk about their essays. Totally slipped my mind.”

  “Okay then. If they’re still camped outside your office, I’ll tell them you’re on your way. By the way, we’ve had some excitement at the college this morning.” Ted’s voice suddenly oscillated to a higher frequency.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It’s like a Mountie convention here. They’ve cordoned off the bunker and the parking lot — yellow tape all over the place.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Can’t be sure, but apparently Dworking is dead.”

  “What!”

  “That’s what I heard — froze to death.”

  Chapter Three

  On his way to the college, Myron tried to absorb what Ted had told him but discovered nothing dramatic came to mind. Dworking’s passing created no emotional upheaval or great void to be comprehended or bridged. Indeed, he felt disturbingly hollow, but then he had been feeling that way for quite some time now. It wasn’t that he did not care; he did and was shocked, as anyone would be who had known and worked with a person who suddenly died. But that was the extent of it.

  Oddly enough, he had gotten to rather like Dworking, although that wasn’t always the case. He clearly remembered his first encounter with her and the turmoil she caused with him inadvertently caught in the middle. It was about a year after he replaced Knolls; being relatively naive and trusting, he let himself be talked into running for president of the Faculty Association, a thankless position, he soon discovered, with no time release or remuneration. He won (by acclamation, it turned out, since there were no other candidates) and soon thereafter had to confront “Attila the Hen,” whose deficit recovery strategy included the termination of five faculty members.

  They had a number of tense meetings, to the point that when he was summoned to her office one late afternoon, he thought: This is it! I’ve aggravated her enough! She’s going to get rid of me, a junior, untenured instructor foolish enough to be on the firing line representing his increasingly frightened and belligerent colleagues.

  Dworking’s door was open; she sat staring out with a distinctly dour expression, a lit cigarette in her in her right hand menacingly beckoning him to enter. Said the spider to the fly, he mused grimly.

  Myron wasn’t sure what came over him at that moment, but he stopped resolutely in the doorway and solemnly declared, “If you’re going to fire me, I’m not coming in!”

  She blinked twice at him and let out a huge guffaw, then she went into a smoker’s coughing/laughing fit. For a moment he had visions of having to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save the president from her coughing/laughing/possibly choking spree. Quite unexpectedly, Myron had made her day! And somehow, the ice between them had been broken; they came to an unspoken understanding that each would make the other’s life easier, within limits. Thereafter, Myron had gotten along about as well as one could with the very private president.

  “Your students didn’t stick around,” Ted informed Myron as soon as he arrived at his office.

  “Just as well,” replied Myron, hanging his parka on a hook behind the door and slinging his briefcase sideways onto his battered, paper strewn desk. “I’ve got a class in fifteen minutes. I noticed the cop cars and the flags at half-mast.”

  Ted Mack, MBA, CA, was a large teddy bear of a man in his midforties. He possessed thick, reddish hair attached to a roundish face dominated by a lumpy nose. These detracting features, however, were more than compensated for by lively brown eyes and a toothpaste commercial smile. He had a booming voice, which, when matched with an imposing physical presence and quick intellect, made him a formidable instructor who could dazzle or cause to cower commerce students and colleagues alike.

  Myron and Ted hit it off, so to speak; certainly, Myron got to know Ted extremely well. Aside from adjoining offices and frequent conversations, they had during the “good” months — spring through summer and fall — when on campus, taken to going on extended walks as sort of reprieves from the workday routine. Usually, they’d stroll out the college’s south doors and make their way through an older (some would say seedier) part of the neighbourhood dominated by tiny, mostly rundown homes. The area was known unofficially as College Park. Their destination invariably was Robin’s coffee shop.

  Like the Walrus and the Carpenter, on these walks they spoke of many things, mundanely on the most profound and sometimes quite profoundly on the most mundane. From office politics to global affairs, they’d voice opinions, dole out wisdom, inject caustic wit, and even solve a long-percolating problem or two besetting the human race. Ted gave as good as he got in the repartee, always with an interesting insight or observation. Moreover, he actually possessed genuine corporate/financial analytical skills that he could summon with considerable force and alacrity.

  By any measure, Ted was not your average number cruncher who pored over indecipherable ledgers, chewed on pencils, and played with adding machines; his interpretative knowledge of Canada’s byzantine tax rules and regulations made him a high-demand item come tax return time. People lined up to consult with Ted, Myron included. Nowhere were his skills more appreciated than in board–faculty collective agreement negotiations. He was a relentless negotiator who at one moment could be a demure, understanding facilitator and in the next an unleashed junkyard guard dog. He had an explosive temper and didn’t suffer fools gladly, particularly government bureaucrats, colleagues riddled with stupidity, and college administrators.

  But perhaps his least appreciated quality was his ability to ferret out information; he was a walking sponge who could absorb, digest, store, and regurgitate all manner of communications. He especially thrived on gossip and rumour collection. It didn’t bother him that what he gathered sometimes had a reliability problem. For him, that was a separate issue; he just reported the news, true or false. All things considered, though, he had a good track record; generally, where there was smoke, there was a fire in the making, and Ted was a good smoke detector.

  Myron became cognizant of Ted under less than auspicious circumstances. He had just arrived at the college and along with Nadia was attending his first “welcome back” barbecue, an annual event put on in late August by the board of governors. The college concourse was packed with new and returning employees, their spouses and significant others. Suffused with food, liquor, and an upbeat selection of canned music spun by a local DJ, a merry party was in progress.

  Suddenly, a few feet from where Myron and Nadia were mingling, a disturbance broke out. Myron couldn’t see who was doing what to whom other than a short little guy (an artist from the Fine Arts Department, as it turned out) taking a wild swing at someone in the middle of the crowd. A further brief scuffle ensued before all parties were restrained. The little fellow was led away, slightly dishevelled and obviously distraught. Ted emerged from the milling coterie minus his shirtsleeve, torn away from the shoulder.

  “Sheesh!” Myron heard Ted’s distinctive voice. “All I said was that it might be herpes.”
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  “Yeah, but you said it to his wife!” someone retorted.

  Nadia took in the scene and shook her head ruefully. “So…these are your new colleagues. What do they do for an encore…”

  Now, attired in a powder blue jacket and red polka-dot tie, Ted plunked his large frame into the visitor’s chair in Myron’s office. His voice had lost some of its excited edge. “They just packed her off.”

  “Any more details on what happened?”

  Ted shifted in his seat and scratched his bulbous nose. “I’m just a rumour monger, so I really don’t know anything for sure, but I heard that the Mounties are suspicious. Maybe she didn’t freeze on her own.”

  “Who told you that?” Myron stopped leafing through his lecture notes; he assumed that Dworking’s death had been an accident, a cardiac arrest or something of that nature.

  “That’s what’s floating around the corridors.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “I kid you not. Old Wesley in maintenance overheard one of the cops talking over his walkie–talkie about foul play being involved.”

  “But no one knows for sure?”

  Ted shrugged. “Not yet, but they’re obviously suspicious. I certainly would be. She wasn’t exactly Mother Teresa around here, you know.”

  “But for someone to kill her.”

  “Could happen. You have to admit peoples’ careers, maybe even their personal lives, have been screwed by her decisions. Who knows? Someone might have gotten really ticked off and decided to settle the score once and for all. Read about it all the time — fired employees walking into their bosses’ offices and blowing them away.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” Myron reluctantly conceded.

  Hurrying to his class, Myron grappled with the thought that someone — someone he knew — could have bumped off the president. Premature…yes, but in theory, Ted was right; there were plenty of potential culprits. Dworking miffed a lot of people, but surely not to such a drastic extent. Those things happened only in whodunits.

  Myron observed that the college personnel generally seemed to be coping admirably with the tragedy. Individuals went about their business — not even the classes had been cancelled!

  Still, the atmosphere had changed. There were huddled groups sombrely conferring in reverent tones and shaking their heads. It wasn’t like the Vatican after a pope expired, but there was a palatable expression of regret nonetheless.

  Evidently, not everyone shared this sentiment. Myron rounded a corner and almost collided with the institution’s profoundly eccentric mathematics instructor, Orville Wishert. Myron couldn’t help but notice that Orville, a short, sour, pudgy man in his middle fifties, who normally walked as if both feet were encased in cement shoes, had a gleeful spring in his step and an ecstatic glaze over his face that matched the shine on his bald head. What gave it away, though, was the song he was singing under his breath: “the witch is dead, is dead; the wicked witch is dead…”

  Orville was an original. From a distance, his bespectacled face usually carried a pained expression, as if his pet turtle had died or he was suffering from an acute hemorrhoid attack. Up close, he liked to park himself directly below your nose and with hands on hips spit out sharp, precise sentences.

  In conversation, he was the type that talked at you, not to you. There was a subtle distinction, since the former implied a sermon and the latter suggested an exchange of views.

  Since he tended to ignore those around him, people tended to ignore him, which in a perverse way caused Orville great distress. He acquired a persecution complex and was constantly on the lookout for dastardly administrators and wayward colleagues who were out to get him. Orville was the classical misfit — a person of great mental ability, well-read but narrow in vision, limited in scope, and totally incapable of dealing with his fellow man on a rational level. A dangerous man to have in any position of power for, quite unintentionally, he would abuse it. Nevertheless, he was well suited for the teaching profession.

  It was no secret that Orville despised Dworking. He came to believe that the president conspired with local businessmen and the Chamber of Commerce to eventually do away with the academic divisions of the college and promote vocational and trade programmes. As he explained to Myron shortly after his election as head of the faculty association, “Businessmen want a cheap labour supply in this area… They want to keep the young people here and not go off to university. Dworking is helping them; she’s anti-intellectual, you know. For her, academics are overpriced redundancies…”

  Orville did tend to exhibit signs of paranoia at the best of times, and his logic seemed a trifle dubious. Great Plains’ boom had burst in the early eighties, along with the gas and oil prices, and there wasn’t a labour shortage per se; in fact, bankruptcies were up and people were leaving town. Still, he did have a point of sorts. The president’s attitude toward the academics had been less than generous, and not only when it came to salary negotiations. She essentially saw them as rapacious eggheads who were always bitching and snapping at the hand that fed them. But she learned to tolerate them because they attracted the most student numbers that translated into FTEs (full-time equivalents), which was how the provincial government statistically measured institutional enrolment, a crucial factor in the government’s grant calculations.

  Myron was aware that there had been bad blood between Orville and Vanessa, especially since she tried to get rid of him, ostensibly because his student evaluations were below the accepted average. Orville, however, was well entrenched. Moreover, he was independently wealthy; he had a significant interest in his two brothers’ lucrative chain of motels across Western Canada. Thus, when he threatened to unleash a battery of high-priced lawyers on both the president and the board, Dworking prudently backed off.

  “A marvellous day, isn’t it?” was all Orville said, continuing his jaunty strides down the hall.

  Myron frowned; Orville’s behaviour was in bad taste, if not worse.

  ***

  Through his first couple of sessional years of trial and error, Myron discovered the art of delivering a good lecture. The key was in packaging it, presenting a concise, digestible topic, which focussed on three or four points, underscored by humorous footnotes. Today, however, the technique did not quite work. The subject was appealing enough — gin, sleaze, and Canadian politics, more specifically, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Pacific Scandal — but Myron wasn’t into it, and he flubbed some of his more poignant punch lines. The students too appeared restless and preoccupied. Of course, they had heard of Dworking’s demise, which, along with his own skewed thoughts, Myron surmised, produced an unsettling effect. Still, not to worry; he’d recapture them next class.

  Afterward, Myron checked in at his mailbox. Academics received enormous amounts of internal communications: notes, notices, minutes of meetings, memos, messages, and other generally unsubstantial but annoying epistles. He scanned the pile and promptly deposited the bulk into the nearest trash receptacle; the rest would go onto his desk to be further evaluated and disposed of. There was one item that got his attention. It came from Ms. Whitford, the secretary to the board of governors, informing him of a special “in camera” meeting of the board to be held that Wednesday evening. Myron, who was the duly elected faculty representative on the college’s governing body (a reward of sorts for his work as president of the faculty association), pondered this for a moment. No doubt, this special meeting related to Dworking’s untimely earthly departure. The board, he reasoned, would need to get a handle on the situation and make some decisions, the most urgent of which was putting in place a new chief executive officer.

  The rest of Myron’s day was uneventful. He encountered more “have you heard about Dworking” conferences, drank coffee, and commiserated with other colleagues. He gave his late afternoon class in “world history” — the new trend replacing the standard Western Civilization course, which was deemed too self-centred and parochial in a period of emerging “g
lobalization” — and decided that it was time to head back to his empty apartment. There was still some pizza lingering in the fridge.

  On his way out, he spotted his first tangible evidence that indeed the college had been the scene of a possible crime: a long-legged RCMP officer. She wore the typical blue parka and blue trousers with the wide yellow stripes down the side; her polished black boots were moving with a sense of purpose.

  On closer inspection, Myron figured she was about thirtyish. Peeking from beneath the regulation short-beaked cap were rich, dark strands of hair, some of which curled on her shoulders. Amber eyes, a slightly upturned nose, full lips with a hint of rouge and a nicely rounded chin completed the picture. Altogether an attractive face that drew an arresting stare from Myron. He had seen her somewhere before, although he couldn’t quite place where. He was one of those individuals who couldn’t always remember a name but never forgot a face. As she walked by, a clipboard solidly grasped at her side, he gave her a curt nod, and she responded with a smile, hesitated momentarily, and proceeded on her way. Myron had the distinct feeling she had recognized him as well.

  Chapter Four

  Tuesday evening

  Myron had his door slightly ajar, peeking out like a tentative tortoise from its shell.

  “Myron Tarasyn.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Corporal Freta Osprey. I saw you earlier at the college today but didn’t get a chance to speak to you.”

  “Oh yes…” Rather sheepishly, he swung the door open and stepped aside. He had become reluctant to answer unsolicited knocks on his door, particularly when he had not been forewarned via the intercom at the front entrance. His tepidness was easily explained; after all, it could have been Nadia returning with her minions to claim the dining table and matching chairs. And he didn’t wish to eat his future pizzas and Kraft dinners propped against the kitchen counter.