Dead Soldiers (16 page)

He knows about the soldier
, Burns thought. But then so did Mason. Probably everybody in town knew.

“Why would she have killed him?“ Burns asked. “An affair she had with him years ago doesn’t seem like much of a reason.“

Stilwell nodded. “You’re right. I was just being vindictive. Forget it.“

“All right. But what about the soldiers? Was she really looking at them?“

“Hell, no. I was. I always like to look at them. They’re valuable, and they’re well made. I admire good workmanship. But I’d never take them.“

“Were you alone in the room for a while?“

Stilwell thought it over. “I might have been. I don’t remember.“

He could have taken the soldiers, Burns thought. There was no one else in the room, and he could simply have stuck them in his pockets. They were small, and no one would have noticed.

“How well did you know Matthew Hart?“ Burns asked.

“What does he have to do with this?“

“You’re the one who mentioned him.“

“Oh. Yeah.“ Stilwell paused. “Well, I have my insurance with him. Or I had it with him. I guess I have it with his wife now. She’s going to take over the business, or so I hear.“

Burns hadn’t heard, but then he was always the last to find out anything like that. He wasn’t plugged into the community the way someone like Stilwell was.

There was one other thing that Burns wanted to ask about. He said, “I didn’t know that just anyone could sell firearms, but you have quite a few of them out there.“

Stilwell tilted his chair forward and stood up. His eyes flashed with anger.

“That’s right, I sell guns. And I have an FFL, too, in case you were wondering.“

Burns didn’t know what an FFL was, and Stilwell must have realized it.

“An FFL is a Federal Firearms License. As I said, I have one, and I don’t sell to anyone who doesn’t have the special ’Curios and Relics’ FFL, either. I operate strictly within the law. And I don’t steal.“

“I was just interested,“ Burns said. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything.“

“It sounded to me as if you were.“

Burns decided that it was time to leave, but he didn’t apologize again. As he turned to leave, he saw a photo of a woman on the desk near the empty plastic bottle.

“Is that your wife?“ he asked.

“I don’t have a wife,“ Stilwell said. “That’s Penelope Ann Miller.“

Burns had heard the name, and the woman looked familiar, but Burns couldn’t quite place her.

“She played Margo Lane in the movie version of
The Shadow
,“ Stilwell said as if stating a fact that should have been common knowledge among all thinking beings.

“I don’t think I’ve seen the movie,“ Burns told him.

“It’s all right, but it’s not as good as the radio show.“ Stilwell seemed to have calmed down a bit. He reached over to the little stereo set and popped out the cassette. “Take this with you and give it a listen. You might even enjoy it. No charge.“

“First one’s free, kid,“ Burns said. “Is that it?“

“I don’t sell radio shows,“ Stilwell said, “but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, I think I’ll order some and put them out by one of the old radios. It will make a nice display, and there might even be a market for them. Thanks for the idea.

Burns thanked Stilwell and stuck the tape in his pocket, but he didn’t think he’d ever listen to it.

B
urns walked back to the campus, entered Main, and walked up the stairs to his office.
Bunni
was working at the computer, and she greeted him cheerfully when he entered.

He went to his desk and organized some of his notes for the next day’s class. Then he asked
Bunni
if she knew Steven Stilwell.

“I’ve been to some of his lectures on antiques,“ she said. “Someday I’m going to have a house full of antique furniture.“

Burns was tempted to ask what George
Kaspar
thought about that, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to get George in trouble.

“So you remember that he came to that party at the dean’s house?“

Bunni
thought it over a while before saying
yes
.

“How about Mary Mason?“

“Oh, I know her. She’s a real success story, a truly independent woman. She’s made so much money selling cosmetics that she’s practically a legend in Dora Hall.“

Dora Hall was the name of one of the women’s dorms on the HGC campus. Actually the full name of the dormitory was Dora Hall
Hall
, since it was named for Mrs. Dora Watkins Hall, a woman that a former college president had once hoped would give a generous donation to the school. Unfortunately, Mr. Hall had out-lived his wife, remarried, and moved to Maine, where he forgot all about any connection he might have had to Texas and Hartley Gorman College. The name of the dorm had never been changed, mainly because no other likely benefactors had come along.

“So the students here look up to Mary Mason?“ Burns said.

“Not all of them,“
Bunni
said.

Burns didn’t ask why. He could tell from
Bunni’s
tone that there were some things about
Mmmmm
of which even
Bunni
didn’t approve. Even an independent woman could get away with only so much.

“I think I’ll give her a call,“ Burns said.

Bunni
gave him a startled look. “Dr. Burns!“ she said.

“It’s business,“ Burns said, smiling, glad he was still able to shock
Bunni
. He’d thought he was probably far too old for that.

He looked up Mason’s number in the thin Pecan City phone book that he kept in a desk drawer and called.

“This is Mary Mason, and I sell Merry Mary. How may I help you?“

Now there’s a woman who knows how to answer a telephone, Burns thought. Dr. Partridge could have hired her to give us instruction.

“This is Carl Burns,“ he said.

“Why hello, Carl. I’m so glad to hear from you. Is there something I can help you with?“

“There might be. I paid a little visit to Steven Stilwell this afternoon, and he tells me he didn’t take those soldiers. He says you accused him because you don’t like him.“

“Why, that sorry— I beg your pardon, Carl. I almost let my feelings get the better of me. I don’t think Mr. Stilwell is very gallant.“

So it wasn’t
Stevie
anymore.

“He didn’t like being falsely accused,“ Burns said.

“You’re taking his word? Everyone knows that he’s a notorious liar.“

They’d come a long way from
Stevie
, all right.

“He says you had an affair with Matthew Hart.“

“Why, that no-good— I beg your pardon again, Carl. But I’m beginning to think you might not be nearly as nice as you seemed this morning.“

“My students could have told you that,“ Burns said. “And while I’m disappointing you, I might as well ask why you and Stilwell broke up.“

“That’s none of your business, Dr. Burns,“ Mason said and hung up her phone.

Burns hung up as well, more politely than Mason had, he thought, and glanced over at
Bunni
, who was giving him a wide-eyed look.

“That wasn’t like you at all, Dr. Burns,“ she said.

“You weren’t listening in, were you?“

“No. Yes. I was. I know it was wrong, but you didn’t ask me to leave the office, and I couldn’t help what I heard. I never heard you talk like that before.“

“Some people bring out the worst in me,“ Burns said. He had a feeling Mason wouldn’t be attending the softball game on Saturday. “I’m going over to the library, and I won’t be back this afternoon.“

“All right,“
Bunni
said.

B
urns was determined to set Elaine straight about what she’d seen on the elevator, but she wasn’t in her office. Burns didn’t try to find her. He just went home, where he fixed himself a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. It was so good that he had another one. He told himself that walking up those stairs to his office every day would take the calories off in no time.

 
After he ate the sandwiches, Burns thought he might as well listen to the tape Stilwell had given him. He put it in his tape player and was treated to the maniacal laughter again. The episode was called “Caverns of Death,“ and Welles informed him that the weed of crime bore bitter fruit. Burns hoped that was true for the person who had killed Matthew Hart and shot at Mal Tomlin.

Burns found that he enjoyed the show in spite of its melodramatic excesses. When it was over, he got ready for softball practice. Or as ready as he could get. He didn’t think he’d ever be really ready, not in the way Mal Tomlin and some of the others were.

As he pulled on his old running shoes, Burns thought again that he really should do something to get in shape, but he knew he wouldn’t.

He drove to the softball field in his Camry and parked behind the backstop. The field was located in what the local newspaper often referred to as Pecan City’s “industrial park,“ but the fact of the matter was that not a lot of industry was located in Pecan City. There were a few large buildings scattered around it, but one of them was vacant, and the others were home to industries that Burns didn’t really think produced big money for the town. One of them manufactured wire of some kind, and the other produced plastic flowerpots and similar items. Probably plastic lawn gnomes. Well, there was no law against that. There was a furniture-making plant that employed more people than the other two places combined, but even that one didn’t have a large economic impact on Pecan City. Taken all together, however, the three of them did provide jobs the town needed, and there were a few smaller plants as well. Most of them could be seen from the softball field, thanks to the hilly terrain.

The industrial park had once, during the Second World War, been one of the largest Army camps in the country, and there were still signs of the old camp to be found. Now and then some rancher would even discover an old unexploded shell in the field where his cattle were grazing, and in the places where tanks had been serviced there were still concrete roads and grease pits. Most of the roads were now cracked and hidden by mesquite trees, but some of them were still passable, and generations of Pecan City teenagers (and not a few adults) had changed their cars’ oil in the grease pits without much regard for the damage the old oil would do to the environment if it spilled out into the pit.

 
A little creek ran through the industrial park and passed along just behind the softball field’s outfield fence. There was a regular little woods of mesquite, pecan, oak, elm, and hackberry trees behind the fence, but it didn’t hamper the game. Though a couple of balls had gone over the fence in batting practice, no one had hit one into the creek, much less far enough to have it get lost in the trees beyond.

Past trees the vacant factory building stood on a little hill. To the left of it was the Pecan City golf course, and of course there were a number of pricey homes around the course, the kind of homes that teachers at Hartley Gorman College couldn’t afford. Burns knew that the Balls, Harvey and Karen, who were on his list of toy soldier suspects, lived in one of the bigger ones, and he could see it from the parking lot.

The rest of the team was already on the field, and today Dawn
Melling
was pitching. Burns wondered how she could get her pile of black hair under a baseball cap, and when he went through the gate, he could see that she hadn’t managed it. The cap was sitting amid the hair, which straggled out all around. Nevertheless, she still looked pretty good out there on the mound in her tight jeans and a white HGC T-shirt that was filled to capacity. She had worn the shirt to an earlier practice, and Mal Tomlin, who was not nearly as sensitive to women’s issues as Burns had suggested that the initials should be changed to HGD, at the very least.

“Come on, Burns,“ Mal called out from the infield. “Make it snappy. We need to give Dawn a little workout so the old soup bone will be ready for Saturday.“

Burns was picking up the lingo faster than he was picking up any real baseball skills, so he knew that “the old soup bone“ was Dawn’s arm. He didn’t think it would need too much work because he was confident that the student batters, at least the males, would be so distracted by Dawn’s appearance that they wouldn’t be able to hit anything smaller than a regulation NBA basketball. In
Burns’s
opinion, Dawn was the faculty’s secret weapon, and his real hope was that because of her flashy form there would be few balls hit in any direction, much less his.

Of course that wouldn’t excuse him for being a poor hitter himself, but he thought maybe the faculty wouldn’t need more than a couple of runs if the student team didn’t score any at all.

“You can bat,“ Tomlin told Burns when he approached the playing field.

Mal seemed a little jittery, and Burns didn’t blame him a bit. Burns didn’t think he’d be at baseball practice if he’d been shot at the night before as Mal had.

“You’re holding us up,“ Mal said. “Come on. Get in the box.“