Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_03 (14 page)

Kitty pressed trembling hands to her once-again flaming cheeks, then clasped them convulsively in her lap. “I thought you ought to know what she was like.”

“I appreciate your coming to see me, Kitty. Yes, I'm trying to find out everything I can about Maggie.”

And who was the real Maggie: my brilliant and ambitious student, Eric's passionate lover, Buddy's comrade in words, Kitty's cruel slut? Which Maggie was murdered?

I folded Kitty's note. “And I'm trying to find out more about Wednesday night. I didn't see you in the newsroom.”

Now the anger was gone, leaving her vulnerable face limp and bereft. “Wednesday night? Oh”—she moved uncomfortably—“I just kind of hung around.”

Maybe it was intuitive. Maybe it was the forlorn timbre of her voice. “Were you waiting for Dennis?”

Kitty's lips quivered. She tried to speak, couldn't. She came to her feet, a hand pressed against her mouth, and blundered toward the door.

In the newsroom, Dennis Duffy hunched at his computer. He didn't even notice as Kitty bobbed her way clumsily past his desk.

 

I blinked against the sharp white flash of the strobe.

“Turn a little to your left, Mrs. Collins. And if you would lift your chin just a fraction…that's good, ver-y-y good. Now, just a few more shots…”

I'd had no luck engaging Leonard Cartwright's one-time roommate, Cameron Rodgers, in a coherent conversation. The photographer's smooth patter was impervious to interruption, a nonstop monologue designed to entertain and relax his subjects. “…now you don't want people to confuse this picture with a shot of West Point cadets marching! Come now, let's have a little smile, then a big smile, then, hey, what's the problem, have the teeth police been by here? Oh, now, that's good, that's better, that's…”

Rodgers was fortyish, balding, with a cherubic smile and aloof gray eyes. He bounced around the studio with surprising agility for his bulk. He was under six feet and must have weighed two hundred pounds.

We had the large studio to ourselves. Banks of lights, assorted backdrops, and several cameras on tripods crowded the big room.

“That's it. We got some good ones.” He gave me a final bright smile. “Mrs. Collins, you can pick up your proofs next Wednesday. I'm sure you'll find some perfect shots for your family.” He turned to lead the way out of the studio.

I didn't move. “Mr. Rodgers, if you have a moment, I'd like to talk to you about your years at the University. And about your fraternity.”

Slowly he turned to face me. “My years…” His face was abruptly wooden. “Collins.” He looked at
me sharply. “Collins,” he said again. His face flattened, the professional charm vanishing. “You're the reporter, the one they had the story about on Friday. On page one.”

Duffy would be pleased to know how carefully
The Clarion
was read.

“Yes, and I'm here because I want to know what happened to Leonard Cartwright the night before he died.”

The color seeped out of his face. “I don't want to talk to you.” He said it firmly, his voice grim. “That's what I told that girl, and that's what I'm telling you. Look, I've taken the shots. We're finished. If you want to come and get your proofs, fine. If not—”

“Mr. Rodgers, do you have any children?”

He scowled. “Why? What the hell does that have to do with anything?” His voice rose angrily.

“Life. Death. Justice. Maybe you don't care, Mr. Rodgers, but Maggie Winslow was young, just getting started. Maggie had a brilliant career ahead of her and someone killed her because she wanted to write about those people, those unsolved cases. Maybe you don't have any children, maybe it doesn't mean anything to you that Maggie died, but I'm asking you to help me find her killer.”

Rodgers turned away from me. He walked heavily to a chair beyond a bank of lights and flung himself into it.

I stood motionless, waiting and watching.

Finally he looked up.

It took me a moment to realize that the shine in his eyes was the glitter of tears.

“Funny you asked if I had a kid.” Roughly he swabbed the back of his hands against his eyes.

I stepped a little nearer.

“My boy. Cameron Junior.” Rodgers looked up at me defiantly, as if I had challenged him. “He's a good kid. He's a hell of a kid.”

I didn't reply.

There was no sound in that big, quiet, shadowy room.

Rodgers slumped in the seat, misery in every line of his stocky body. “And he's gay.” His face twisted. “And I know what's going to happen to him, I know how he'll be treated. Sometimes I think it's God's way of getting even, making me pay for—Leonard.”

“What happened to Leonard, Mr. Rodgers?”

“Oh, Christ, if we'd only thought…If we'd only
thought
!” He pushed up from the chair, walked toward me.

He stopped a few inches away, folded his arms tightly over his chest. “You don't know brutal”—each word was as slow and heavy as a dirt clod striking a coffin lid—“until you've lived in a fraternity house. Any guy who doesn't cut it, everybody makes his life miserable, makes it hell.” His voice was as harsh as the clatter of metal in a salvage yard. “And all the guys, they have to fit in. Everybody's macho, you know, making girls, scoring, getting drunk, raising hell. Leonard was already considered kind of a drip. He didn't drink very much, and he never dated. But nobody thought he was gay.”

“How did you find out?”

“A bunch of us, we decided to spend the weekend in Saint Louis. Just for the hell of it. Do some bars. Pick up some girls. We ended up at a motel on the outskirts of town.”

And now I knew why there was a weekend unaccounted for in the life of Darryl Nugent. “You saw Dean Nugent and Leonard.”

“How'd you know?” He didn't wait for me to answer. He didn't care. It didn't really matter. “Yeah, yeah, we saw them. And we thought about breaking in on them. We were so fucking mad about it. How could Leonard do this to us, make us all look bad? But we were kind of scared of the dean. So we planned it. On Sunday night, when Leonard got back, a bunch of us would go to his room, we'd find out what the hell was going on. So we did. Five of us.”

He stared past me, his mouth trembling. “Like a pack of dogs. Like a mob. And once—oh God, I'll never forget it—when the guys were yelling at him, Lenny looked at me, we'd been roommates once, but I didn't want the guys to think I could be like that, so I just yelled at him too, like he was some kind of scum. I'll never forget the look in his eyes. The
hurt
. We took all his stuff and threw it out on the lawn and then we threw him out. The last time I saw him, it was about midnight and he was trying to cram everything in his car and we were yelling and swearing at him. And…” His voice shook. “Lenny…was crying.” Rodgers buried his face in his hands.

I reached out and touched his shoulder. “I'm sorry,” I whispered.

But it was no help.

Nothing would ever help.

 

Dusk was falling when I got back to the campus. And so was the temperature. It was going to get down below freezing tonight.

I crossed the street from the J-School to Old Central.

The wooden blinds were closed in the president's office, but light filtered through the cracks. No light shone from the southwest corner of the second floor, the office of the dean of students. More had changed in twenty years than just the occupant. Now some schools and departments were headed by women. Not many. Middle-aged white men still rule academia. But the present dean of students, Charlotte Abney, was both a woman and black.

I looked at President Tucker's office again. It was one floor below Charlotte's office and what had been Darryl Nugent's office. Then I circled around the building.

The bell tower rose into the darkening sky on the back side of Old Central. Lights glowed on all four sides.

An eagle spread stone wings in the niche beneath the north window. No gargoyle.

I didn't remember reading whether the gargoyle had been smashed in its fall. I don't suppose it was surprising the gargoyle had never been replaced.

I completed my circle, then walked up the broad shallow stairs, pushed in one of the heavy oak doors. The building featured a central open marble lobby. Wide corridors led east and west. Ornate, heavily carved stairs led to the second and third floors. A skylight with green glass roofed over the third floor. On a sunny day, the lobby glowed as richly, as serenely green as shallow water in the Bahamas. At dusk, it was as murky as the dark depths of a pond.

I had never been up in the bell tower. My steps echoed loudly in the hushed cathedral-like silence.
I wondered if anyone else was in the building. Most office workers are well ready to leave their posts at five.

It was this time of day when Dean Nugent was last seen in his office. Nugent must have been in an agony of distress—and apprehension. I doubted very much that Leonard had called, told him of the awful events at the fraternity house.

Nugent and his youthful lover had parted in Saint Louis on Sunday. Leonard's body was found Monday morning.

The dean must have been stunned, bewildered. And frightened. What had happened to Leonard? And why?

I reached the third floor and the door to the bell-tower stairs.

I gripped the handle. The door opened.

I was a little surprised at this easy access. Had there been discussion, wrangling by the Board of Governors? Views always diverge. Ask anyone who's ever tried to run any endeavor.

I could imagine the positions, sharply and angrily espoused:

The bell tower must be closed to prevent future accidents.

Closing the tower would be an admission of University culpability in Cartwright's death.

The bell tower was a campus landmark that alumni and students should be able to visit at will.

A single tragic accident shouldn't prevent the Thorndyke family from enjoying a treasured retreat.

I started up gritty sandstone steps. Wall sconces provided a soft golden glow as I climbed.

I found the answer to my question when I reached the square tower level.

Iron bars stretched from the top to the bottom of the openings. No one ever again could fall—or jump—from these windows.

I walked to the north window. The cold, damp air smelled fresh after the close, musty stairwell.

I pressed close to the bars. A seventy-foot drop. When the window was barred only halfway, it would have been an extremely dangerous maneuver to climb over the bars and drape the green plastic lei over the gargoyle. The effort would require a student with no fear of heights and a gymnastic athleticism.

I stepped back from the window. I knew now, of course, that Leonard Cartwright certainly had not been involved in a prank that went terribly wrong.

No, Leonard had driven away from his fraternity house in tears and despair, his car jammed with his possessions, with no place to go, no one to take him in.

I didn't know what his family situation had been.

Obviously, the idea of driving home, telling whoever waited there what had happened—and why—had been unendurable.

I would never know where his odyssey led that night. I only knew that hours passed and toward dawn he finally came this way. Or had he come straight to the bell tower, spent his final hours pacing this high, bleak square, or huddled miserably against a cold wall?

But, sooner or later, he'd come to this building where he'd worked, where he'd been happy, and walked up these stairs, passing the dean's office, continuing his climb to the bell tower. He must have been exhausted, defeated, hopeless.

There is no agony in life that is not at its worst
in the hours before dawn. At a few minutes before six in the morning, he'd jumped. His body had not lain there long because blood still oozed from his crushed skull when Emmett Wolf arrived.

Leonard jumped, but he had left something behind in this gray, square tower. Something that David Tucker found—and took.

I looked around the flagstoned floor.

A note? A last good-bye to his parents? Or to Dean Nugent?

What else would Tucker have snatched up, taken to keep?

It had been 1976, so I understood why Emmett Wolf thought of drugs. But Wolf didn't know what had happened to Leonard that night.

Yes, Leonard could have left a note—

That's when I heard footsteps coming up the stone stairs.

The shadow came first, wavering, huge and distorted, in the golden glow of the wall sconce.

David Tucker was a big man.

He looked enormous as we faced one another.

Tucker's rounded head with its sparse tufts of gray hair seemed perched on massive shoulders, his throat hidden by a white silk muffler. He wore a navy cashmere coat. He stood with his gloved hands loose at his sides.

He stood between me and the stairs.

But the windows were barred. There could be no more “accidents” from the tower.

He took a step toward me.

I had trouble pulling my eyes away from his gloved hands. He was too big and too strong for me to elude. Should he move quickly, should those powerful hands seize my throat, I wouldn't have
time to get to my keys and the canister of Mace in my shoulder bag.

My hand dropped to my purse and its catch.

“What brings you up here, Mrs. Collins?” His tone was casual. His eyes were not.

“I might ask the same of you, Dr. Tucker.” Yes, my voice was thin and tight. Without looking down, I unlatched the flap of my bag, eased it up and slipped my hand inside.

“I saw you go up the stairs, Mrs. Collins. It seemed an odd time to visit the bell tower, when it's dark and there is no one about.”

There was nothing threatening in the words or tone, but the measured emphasis started my heart pounding.

Yes, it was dark and quiet and no one would hear me if I cried out.