Murder & Sullivan Read online

  “I’ve been thinking about that business with Professor Ucello’s experiment.”

  “Uh-huh.” She ladled stew onto her plate. “What about it?”

  “I feel kind of caught in the middle.”

  “You?”

  “Sure. Because of Steve. You know. You were here.”

  “I’m sure I was, but I’m too tired to remember.”

  “You will. Steve and I signed up as subjects in Ucello’s experiments. He pays us out of his NSF grant.”

  “That’s good.” But the rest of it came back to her, even as she said it.

  “Right. But Steve could see from the results Ucello published that he misrepresented at least some of last year’s data—the data he collected from Steve. He left out the stuff that didn’t fit his model.”

  “I remember now.”

  “Steve’s not going to blow the whistle on him, because he needs the money. So do I, but I don’t want to get it dishonestly.”

  “Uh-huh.” Let him tell me, she thought.

  “So I have this ethical dilemma, see? I don’t know that he’s going to mess with any of my data. I could wait and see. Or I could turn him in because I do know what he’s already done. I can’t prove it if Steve won’t talk, but I know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s not as if it’s hurting anyone—that’s what Steve says, anyway. So is it right to hurt Steve by telling? He didn’t do it; he’s just an innocent bystander, but he depends on the money.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Only I keep thinking that Ucello’s making his results look more important than they are, and that’s going to give him an unfair advantage compared with other people who want NSF grants.”

  Andrew was getting there on his own. “Trouble is, I can’t think of any way to be fair to those people that won’t hurt Steve.”

  “Has Steve talked to Ucello?”

  “Talked to him? Like threatened him? He wouldn’t do that.”

  “No,” she said. “But he could give Ucello a chance to fix it himself. He’d end up with egg on his face, but it wouldn’t be as bad as if someone else turned him in, as you put it.” That had been the essence of the honor code at Oberlin when she was a student. Mostly, of course, it had meant a great freedom compared to her public high school. Professors weren’t allowed to proctor exams or even be in the room during them, and Joan could blow her nose during a test without worrying about being suspected of using a cheat sheet. To her relief, she’d finished four years of college without ever having to apply the code beyond writing and signing the pledge at the end of her blue books: “I have neither given nor received aid on this examination.” But she knew that it had conferred an obligation on her beyond her own personal honesty, and she’d often wondered whether she could have made herself turn in a fellow student to the student-run honor court, or even ask a cheating student to confess.

  That was not far from the position Andrew was in right now, only without the support of the formal honor code. Even with it, she had dreaded such a confrontation. How much harder would it be for Andrew and Steve?

  “I see what you mean,” Andrew said. “I don’t know if Steve could do that, or if I could. I could talk to Steve, though. You think Professor Ucello might keep his grant if he did that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. That was the hard part, and there was no way to make it easy for him. Honesty at all costs could be painful, even if you excepted social fibs. Her dad had lived by that awkward honesty, as had Ken, and she had loved them both for it. Now here was Andrew, working his way through it. Look at the men in my life, she thought suddenly. No wonder I’m falling for a cop.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Andrew said. He took another bite of stew and chewed slowly. “Is this how you feel when you tell Fred Lundquist something that might get someone convicted of murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you make yourself do it?”

  “It’s easier with murder, Andrew.”

  “Yeah, they couldn’t say no one got hurt, could they?”

  “No. But you don’t want to make a mistake about it, either.”

  “If I knew anything that would help catch the person who killed David Putnam, you bet I’d tell. That little girl is so sad. She doesn’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. He was a good man, Andrew. And from all I’ve seen, he was almost always a nice one. Good or otherwise, some people can be so annoying you can understand the urge to kill them. But no one has talked like that about David.”

  “Henry said he was full of beans when he was a little boy. But you’re right. He made a point of saying that David’s pranks were never malicious. He liked to make people laugh. That’s what Henry said, anyway. I wish I’d known him better.”

  “Me, too.” They fell silent, and she wondered what Andrew would end up doing about his ethical dilemma. It occurred to her that she ought to tell him what she’d already done. “Andrew, about Professor Ucello.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think it will come out in public unless it turns out he had something to do with David’s murder, but I did tell Fred he fudged the data.”

  “Why?” Andrew didn’t sound upset.

  “I don’t know. He was onstage at the right time, and Fred needs all the information he can get about those people. If you like, I can tell him your concern about Steve.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  He’s already decided he’s not going to keep the secret forever, she thought.

  “I’ll talk to Steve,” he said. “And I think I’ll have to talk to Ucello if he won’t.”

  26

  It isn’t pleasant to have a fellow constantly jumping down your throat—especially when he always disagrees with you. It’s just the sort of thing I can’t digest.

  —MERCURY, Thespis

  This is no everyday offense, and this is no everyday victim. We’re talking about the cold-blooded murder of a judge, for God’s sake! You’ve wasted almost a week, and you don’t have so much as a suspect in custody. I don’t want excuses, I want results!” Mayor Deckard’s words carried clearly through the walls of Captain Altschuler’s office. Fred could picture the cords standing out on the mayor’s neck, and knew that he was pounding Altschuler’s desk during the last sentence. Warren Altschuler, who never made excuses, would be coming to a slow boil.

  A man with common sense would find a good reason to leave the building before the meeting broke up, Fred thought, but he stayed put. When the mayor finally left, Altschuler was going to need to yell at someone, too.

  And I’m it, he thought gloomily. I caught this one fair and square, and I blew it. I was so sure. I never considered the possibility that the thing sticking out of his back wasn’t the murder weapon. I established where it came from and thought I had a handle on what was going on. Instead, I let the real weapon get away with the man who used it.

  Or woman, he reminded himself. It could be a member of the chorus. It could be almost anyone. The mayor’s right. I’ve wasted most of a week, and we still don’t have a solid lead. Everything peters out for lack of evidence, if it even makes sense in the first place.

  Not for lack of trying, he knew. They had interviewed and reinterviewed all the witnesses and suspects, but learned little that hadn’t been apparent almost from the beginning. The best he’d been able to do was eliminate a few possibles. Not good enough.

  The mayor’s voice had subsided and Fred was digging into the reports on his desk when he heard the knock. He steeled himself.

  “Come in.”

  Altschuler left the door open. Great, Fred thought. Not only am I going to get a reaming out, but it’s going to be public. Well, why not? What I just heard was public, too, whether you know it or not.

  But Altschuler dropped his stocky body onto a straight chair and put his feet up on Fred’s desk, a favorite posture of his. Fred leaned back against the wall with his hands behind his head, catching his toes under his desk as insurance against the day his old oa
k swivel chair would give up altogether. It creaked in protest.

  “Politicians!” Altschuler said, and grimaced, as if he weren’t already homely enough.

  Fred came as close as he could in his precarious position to nodding.

  “Deckard’s been raking me over the coals about the Putnam thing. He seems to think we can pull a suspect out of a hat, just to make him look good. I wish.”

  Fred could scarcely believe his ears. After that session, Altschuler was going to be nice about it? He let the old swivel chair crash forward and leaned toward Altschuler before he could lose his nerve. “Warren, it’s my fault.”

  “Oh?” Altschuler left his feet on the desk. It was like a yawn.

  “I didn’t search anyone the night of the murder.”

  “Search them for what?”

  “That’s what I thought,” Fred said. “We had the knife in the body. But you know how that turned out. If I’d searched them all right then and there, we would have found the other weapon.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not. He could have hidden it anywhere and come back for it later.”

  “Maybe. Either way, we didn’t find it because we didn’t look.”

  “Nonsense,” Altschuler said. He put his own feet down and stood up. “You wouldn’t have known what you were looking for. The citizens would have objected, and you know you’d never get a warrant for a fishing expedition like that.” Fred did know. Though maybe with a judge as the victim, another judge might have bent the rules. “I would have done the same in your shoes. Deckard has no idea what we’re up against, and I’m not about to give him anything to whip us with. You keep on digging.”

  Fred had never appreciated his chief of detectives more. “Thanks, Warren,” he said.

  At the door, Altschuler turned back. “You be sure to tell me anything you come up with. First. I don’t want to hear it from Deckard.”

  “Yessir.”

  Fred closed the door and paced back and forth in front of his desk. There was nothing to tell. He was beginning to think there never would be. But the mayor was right. This was the kind of case that wouldn’t be forgotten, no matter what excitement took its place on the six o’clock news. Killing a judge was like killing a cop. And everyone had liked this particular judge.

  Almost everyone, he reminded himself. Somebody disliked him enough to go to great pains to kill him in a way that precluded sudden passion or a momentary impulse. Or did it? If Chris Eads and Liz MacDonald had another fight just before the second act, did Chris grab the first sharp object that came to hand and eliminate his rival for her affection? Just because we didn’t find the actual weapon doesn’t mean he didn’t. And just because Kleinholtz and Dolan didn’t see anyone near Putnam after he was in his frame and before they started the scene doesn’t mean no one did. Eads was in the next frame, or maybe he was only on the steps, about to go up. He could have waited for their backs to be turned, made his move, and run up his own steps before the curtain opened.

  Oh, sure. And what did he do with the weapon while he was onstage? Some of the others had boots, but Eads was wearing low shoes and tight pants—no hiding place there. He could have left it in his own frame, though. On the floor, likely as not. It wouldn’t show from a distance, and no one else looked at those frames until we searched after the murder. By then he’d have had plenty of time to move it.

  It was just possible, he decided, but only because Eads had been so close to Putnam. The next ghost was Pete Wylie, whose only apparent motive was the opportunity to take over Putnam’s role, and Fred couldn’t make himself take that seriously as a reason to kill.

  Besides, he thought, if it would be hard for Eads to zip over there without being noticed by Dolan and Kleinholtz, it would be that much harder for Wylie. Zach Yoder’s another story. He had such a good excuse for being on another ghost’s frame that they’d never have noticed him. But he had even less motive than Wylie.

  Not even the court case had checked out, flimsy as it would have been as motive for a murder. Chuck Terry had reported Zach’s laughter when he heard that the police were checking on his grandfather’s problems with the slow-moving vehicle emblem. Chuck said he sounded “really tickled,” and Fred trusted Chuck’s antennae.

  Fred was so close to the door that another knock made him jump. He reached for the handle and opened it to find Ketcham looking as startled as he felt.

  “You going out?” Ketcham backed away. “I can come back later.”

  “Come on in, Johnny.” Fred walked back to the swivel chair. “I’m not going anywhere, in more ways than one. I’ve been trying to think. I’d give a lot to have that weapon.”

  “Yeah, well, we just got the report back from Doc Henshaw. No blood on those tools we sent over.”

  “You knew that.”

  Ketcham nodded, sat down, and took off his wire rims. “We’ve got the dagger,” he said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “The killer had to get to it.” He blew on the lenses and polished them with his handkerchief.

  “They all passed it. One time or another.”

  “But some more than others. There was that sword fight. Maybe it was a cover. Either one of them could have bent down and picked up the dagger.”

  Ucello and Yoder. Hmmm.

  “What do you have on Ucello?”

  “Nothing much.” Ketcham hooked the glasses over his ears. “He’s a research type—psychology professor. Active in party politics. Some people think he’ll run for office—council, maybe—in the next election. Some people would like to see him run against the mayor. They say he’s keeping his hair cut shorter than he used to, and he’s quit wearing an earring in one ear. He grew that beard for the part, but they expect him to shave it off next week. Seems Mrs. Ucello doesn’t approve of whiskers, whether the voters would or not. I know her family wouldn’t.”

  “Her family?”

  “The Coxes. Old Oliver family with money. They never expected him to amount to a hill of beans, but she fell for him in a big way when she was at Radcliffe and he was a graduate student at Harvard.”

  “How do you know all this?” Fred marveled at the wealth of hometown information Johnny Ketcham always brought to an investigation.

  Ketcham shrugged. “Barbara was in my sister’s class. Imagine, a family that dismisses a Harvard Ph.D. just because he’s teaching here. They look down their noses at him and Oliver College both—that’s why they sent their daughters to Radcliffe. And then Barbara came home with a man whose parents never even went to college. Hell, she might as well have married a cop.” He didn’t say “after all,” but Fred wondered. He didn’t ask.

  “I heard an odd bit about him from Joan,” he said, instead. “I’m wondering how it fits in.”

  Looking over his wire rims, Ketcham raised his eyebrows.

  “Seems Ucello took a shortcut in a research paper he’s just published, and Steve Dolan, who plays Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore, caught him out in what looks like a deliberate distortion of his results.”

  “Did he challenge him?” Ketcham asked.

  “I don’t think so. Dolan’s one of his experimental subjects, and they’re both dependent on grant money to fund the research. Joan says Dolan doesn’t want to jeopardize that, so he’s not telling. But her son is a subject in the same study, and she was there when Dolan read the paper and spotted it.”

  “I can hear the Coxes now if Barbara’s husband gets involved in an academic scandal.” Ketcham shook his head, but Fred thought his eyes sparkled.

  “All very interesting,” Fred said. “And if someone stabbed Dolan in the back, we’d have to check into it. But I don’t see any real connection to Putnam.”

  “Me either. Still, it’s a crooked side of him I hadn’t heard about—if it’s deliberate. He needs all the publications he can get. But maybe he just goofed, Harvard Ph.D. or no Harvard Ph.D.”

  “Maybe. Keep your ears open there, though, would you, Johnny? I’m going back to Yoder and Eads.”

  * *
*

  Fred found Chris Eads at home, splitting firewood. Long rows of beautifully stacked split wood stretched beside his small green trailer. In town, it would have been slum housing, but here, next to the state forest, it blended into the woods behind it. Eads stood between a large pile of freshly cut fireplace-length logs and a smaller heap of split ones. Sweat emphasized the well-defined muscles of his bare back. Blond as he was, he already had a good tan.

  “Hot day for that kind of work,” Fred said.

  “If I wait for good weather, I’m already behind.” Thwack. Eads tossed the split logs aside and stood another length on end. “Besides, I got better things to do in hunting season.” Thwack.

  “What kind of wood is that?” Fred wrinkled his nose. Eads laughed.

  “This old piss oak?” Thwack. “Burns great, but most folks don’t like the smell.” He reached back for a red log. “You’d probably rather have sassafras.” Thwack. He tossed one of the fragrant pieces to Fred, whose nose announced sweet kindergarten paste.

  “I’ll say. Why would anybody use the other stuff?”

  “Sassafras is fine for starting your fire, but it burns too fast. You want to keep warm all day, you need a hardwood like this oak. It’s not so bad when it dries out.” Eads leaned on his ax and wiped his streaming forehead with a bandanna. “I could make you a good price on a couple of ricks.”

  “Nothing to burn it in. I’m not here about wood.” Eads nodded and waited. “I’d like to run over Friday night one more time.”

  “I already told you. It was just the same as always. Nothing different until David keeled over.”

  “I know. But I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me one more time about what was the same.”

  Eads gave a last thwack and then started through the litany Fred had heard many times by now. He wasn’t likely to announce himself as the murderer, but if he had done it, there was always the chance he might slip up somewhere, get some detail wrong this time. Even if he hadn’t, he might add something so obvious no one had thought to mention it. Fred wasn’t holding his breath, but it was all he had left to try.

  He heard again about Biggy’s firm discipline, about the swordfight between Ucello and Yoder, and about Putnam’s last few words to Eads.