The Campus Murders (8 page)

“I can't stay,” President Wade said.

“One drink, Wolfe?”

“Next time, thank you. We'll take severe disciplinary action, Floyd, you may be sure of that. We won't let this one get by.”

“I certainly hope not! It isn't much of a jump from the effigy to the man it represents. I tell you here and now, Wolfe, I intend to protect myself!”

“It's all right, Floyd. Don't worry about it.” On this doubtful note, the president of the college left.

“I really wouldn't blow this up out of proportion,” McCall said.

“Is that what I'm doing?” Gunther muttered. “Well! Rose has mixed a pitcher of martinis, and I detest warm martinis, don't you?”

McCall could not help feeling sorry for him. Gunther's hands shook as he poured, something that in McCall's experience rarely happened to people except during bad hangovers, and the dean had not been drinking. He stared into his martini and then gulped it down as if it had come out of a tap. It occurred to McCall that Floyd Gunther was either an advanced neurotic or a Class A coward. Or—McCall added speculatively in his thoughts—maybe Floyd sniffed something in the winds of Tisquanto that, so far, he had not.

“I'm sorry, Mike. Forgot to ask you to sit down. This thing has me all upset.”

“Naturally. Mrs. Gunther?”

Rose Gunther sat primly down and sipped her drink, eyes on her husband. It was a comfortable, not showy, room with a few modest antiques, some original student oils and water colors hanging on the walls, and books towering eight feet high on the walls flanking the fieldstone fireplace. Gunther was patrolling his hearth like a restless housedog.

“Aren't you making more of this than it deserves?” McCall remarked.

“You don't know what's been going on!”

“What?”

“The turmoil—student boycotts—”

“I know all about that. I mean concerning you. You've been the target of actual threats?”

“What do you call what happened just now?”

“Not the same thing at all—”

The front doorbell chimed, and kept chiming.

“Now what?” Gunther exclaimed.

“Would you like me to get it?” McCall asked.

The dean seemed ashamed. “My own home? Certainly not, thank you!”

Mrs. Gunther slipped out of the room. A moment later she called, “Floyd?”

It appeared to McCall that Gunther hesitated. He rose and said, “Like me to go with you?”

The Dean flushed. “Nonsense. Yes, honey?”

A student in a white shirt and cable-stitch pullover burst into view, stopped short in the doorway. He was very dark, almost purple black, but with Caucasoid features. He looked nineteen or twenty. He had been running.

“Graham,” Dean Gunther said. With relief, and a sort of added dimension of pleasure that told McCall of a working relationship.

“Dean, I'm sorry to break in on you this way, but something's come up I don't think can wait. I mean—”

“What is it?”

The young man's eyes went to McCall.

“Of course. Excuse me a minute, Mike. My study, Graham.”

They went out.

“Now what on earth,” Rose Gunther complained, “can that boy want? They never leave Floyd alone.”

“He's been under a strain, I take it?” McCall said, finishing his drink. He set it on an end table politely.

“Oh, yes!. Terrible. And the worst part is I don't know what I can do to help.” She sat down on the sofa like a bird perching on a twig. She made distressed motions with her hands. “You can't imagine how bad it's been, Mr. McCall. Especially of late. He hasn't been able to sleep, prowls half the night. I keep asking him what's wrong, but he says it's nothing—just the turmoil on campus. And now this horrible business tonight.”

“And, of course, that girl student disappearing,” McCall said sympathetically.

“Yes, I'd forgotten that. Do you suppose that accounts for—?”

The door across the hall opened with an explosion. It was the Dean, motioning. He looked ill.

“Mike. Do you mind …?”

He sounded ill, too.

Gunther's study was obviously his refuge. Where the rest of the house was mathematically prim and orderly, as far as McCall had seen, the study was a manly shambles. Here, McCall thought, Floyd Gunther asserts his constitutional rights to be his own man.

The black student stood by the piled-high desk.

“This is Graham Starret,” the Dean said abruptly. “He's one of our very best students, and a young man I admire very much. I think you'd better hear what Graham's just told me. I've told him who you are.”

McCall offered his hand. The young man seemed amused. His clasp was quick and withdrawn.

“Go ahead, Graham!”

“Well, my date and I were parked over by the river, Mr. McCall. Lots of the students park down there. We were a little off the beaten track. I had to excuse myself to go down to the riverbank, and … well, I noticed something lying half in the water, half up under a bush on the bank. I took a quick look and … it's the body of a girl, Mr. McCall.”

“He thinks it's Laura Thornton,” Dean Gunther said hoarsely.

A few folks up at the capital, McCall thought, are going to have a bad night tonight.

“Aren't you sure, Graham?”

“I wasn't at first glance,” the boy said, “but on a closer look I thought I recognized her. Her condition … her face, I mean … pretty bad.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

“Not even my date, Mr. McCall. I took her home and came right here.”

“Then you haven't notified the police?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

It seemed to McCall that Dean Gunther looked annoyed through his worry, as if McCall had asked an irrelevant question.

“Why not?” Graham Starret repeated, and he smiled. “You want a straight answer, Mr. McCall?”

“Always.”

“Okay. I don't have any use for policemen.”

“That puts me in my place,” McCall said with an answering smile. “Well, you'd better show me where the place is, Mr. Starret. Do you want to come with us, Floyd?”

“Well, perhaps not,” the Dean said. He was very pale. “I can't stand unpleasantness, Mike. I mean this sort of thing—and I shouldn't leave Rose alone—”

“Let's go, Starret. By the way,” McCall said, “was she dead?”

Graham Starret looked startled. “I really don't know. I just assumed she was. I didn't touch her.”

McCall sprang for the door.

7

McCall knelt on the riverbank.

“Turn on the flash.”

“I'm afraid it's not much,” Graham Starret said. “Batteries are low.” He flicked the light on. A pale yellow beam, more shadows than light, struggled on the black water.

McCall took the flash from the student and played it on the girl's face. She was lying half out of the water. The eyes were closed. The hair looked like seaweed. Her mouth hung open. Bruises and darkened swellings distorted her face.

He put his ear to her heart, felt for the carotid artery with his right hand.

“Is she dead?” Starret whispered.

“No, she's alive. Barely, I'd say. Give me a hand.”

Between them they dragged the girl up on the bank. Her dress, which had once been white, was soaked with mud to her hips. She wore a thin black cardigan over the dress, which was ripped across her breasts.

“She's taken a bad beating.” McCall stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around her. “Starret, go find a phone and call the police. Ask for Lieutenant Long. And have them rush an ambulance.”

The student had come in his own car; McCall had followed in his rented Ford. Graham Starret left on the run. McCall watched him peel off, headlights slicing through trees and shrubbery, and vanish down the dirt road.

He returned his attention to the girl. There was nothing he could do for her now but wait for the ambulance.

McCall touched her hand. It was icy and damp. No wonder: lying in river water all this time. Mercifully she had lost consciousness.

What had happened?

Someone had beaten her savagely. One eye was frightfully swollen. Her mouth was puffed grotesquely over her teeth. Her cheeks were lumpy and contused, her arms striped with cuts and bruises. He gently inspected her head. Blood clots had formed on the scalp. She had been repeatedly struck over the head. It was a wonder she was still breathing.

He reached for a cigarette, remembered, and flashed Graham Starret's failing light across the river. It was narrow here; the water ran as if it were deep. The stream made small secretive sounds between its banks.

Spring.

Would Laura Thornton ever see another?

In the moon-deserted night, with black water rushing by as if to a conspiratorial rendezvous and a battered human being at his feet awaiting dissolution, McCall could not repress a shiver. Death he had seen in plenty in his youth; it was not death that bothered him. It was the dying. When it was all over, what was left? You threw it out like so much garbage. But to stand by and witness the struggle, the failing, the going out … like the batteries in young Starret's flashlight … this he had never been able to bear. He had had one interminable night in Korea holding the hand of a Marine buddy who was dying of a stomach wound inflicted by a mortar round, and he could still feel the loosening clutch and hear the fading moans in his dreams. The company was pinned down in the barrage, the medic had been killed, and there was nothing to do for the Marine but watch him die.

McCall looked up at the star-salted sky, felt the chill spring breeze on his cheek, and shivered again.

Faced with the body of the girl, he felt an urgency. He wished he had been able to talk with Damon Wilde. Now it would have to wait. And there was Perry Eastman, in Dean Gunther's office: cocky, contemptuous. And Dennis Sullivan, the other student mentioned in connection with Laura Thornton. McCall ached to get at them. There was something to go on now.

He would have to contact Governor Holland, too, hand the governor the dirty job of reporting this to Laura's father …

Two police cars, preceded by Graham Starret's yellow Mustang, shot in under the trees. A patrolman got out and stood by his car, looking back. And there were Lieutenant Long, the sneerer, and Sergeant Oliver. They hurried toward him. Another officer focused a spotlight on the girl's body at his feet.

Long covered ground in a peculiar long-striding, knee-bending way. McCall almost laughed; the lieutenant's stride made him think of Groucho Marx. When he came up to McCall he threw his head back and stared accusingly.

“Who found her?” he demanded.

“Starret did. Didn't he tell you? Didn't you bring a doctor? And where's the ambulance?” With a character like Long you threw five questions to every one of his.

“Sure I told him,” young Starret said. “Is she still alive?”

Long stooped over the girl, sneering. Sergeant Oliver said, “She's still breathing. This is a break, a real break.”

“Doc!” Lieutenant Long called.

An old skin-and-bones got out of one of the police cars and trudged toward them. He was carrying a medical bag. He paid no attention to McCall or the police officers.

“This is our M.E.,” Oliver said, “Doc Littleton. Mr. McCall.”

Dr. Littleton grunted. “Don't involve me in your lousy politics. Stand back, will you?” He squatted beside the girl's body.

“Where's that ambulance?” McCall said.

The medical examiner flicked an eyelid, dug sharp fingers into the girl's neck, nodded, snapped his bag open, snatched a stethoscope, placed it under her left breast. His bony fingers went here and there.

“How is she, doc?” Oliver asked.

“Call that ambulance again and tell them to make time. This girl's barely vital.” He began to massage her wrists. Then he plunged into his bag, came up with a disposable hypodermic and a vial. He filled the syringe, squirted some liquid into the air, and stroked the needle into the girl's arm. “No telling,” he said abruptly. “Miracles have been known to happen, though not by me.”

“Will she live?” Long asked.

“You tell me, lieutenant. You're the wonder boy of the 'Squanto police department.”

“What's eating you?” Long asked angrily.

“First get that goddam ambulance here,” Dr. Littleton growled. “I'll be glad to fill you in on my personal feelings afterwards.”

Long loped away, glaring. McCall said to Littleton, “No prognosis yet, doctor?”

“Not without a thorough examination. At that she must have the constitution of a racehorse.” The M.E.'s eyes in the spotlight glittered like ice at Sergeant Oliver. “And you wonder boys still haven't come up with any lead to this thing?”

“No,” the sergeant said stiffly. “How about you, Mr. McCall?”

McCall resisted the temptation to point out that he had been on the case less than nine hours. He said, “Nothing, sergeant,” and turned to Littleton. “Has she been lying out here since Friday, doctor? That seems a hell of a long time.”

“Too long. She couldn't have survived. I'd give it two days at the outside. Even that would be a stretch no matter how healthy the girl is.”

“Two days,” Oliver said reflectively.

“Right now she's critical.”

Lieutenant Long came striding up. “They're on their way. Held up by a three-car accident on the west side.” As he spoke they heard the ambulance siren. “Start checking the ground around here, Oliver. If any clue that might have been here hasn't been wiped out by Mr. McCall and his boy Friday.”

“I'm not anybody's boy Friday,” Graham Starret said. “In fact, lieutenant, I'm not anybody's boy but my mama's and papa's.”

Long gave him a long look, then turned away. Oliver moved off, flash probing.

“Any idea what she was beaten with, doctor?”