Dead Letter (24 page)

"There’s a guy in the lobby says he wants to
talk with Stoner."

"What’s he look like?" I asked him.

"A big black dude. Must weigh three hundred
pounds."

"That’ll be Bullet Riley," I said to
Lurman. "The man who helped me out this afternoon."

Lurman pocketed his pistol as if it were a briar pipe
and said, "Show the man up, Russ."

A few minutes later, Bullet walked into the room. He
looked ruffled and angry. As he cleared the door he glanced back over
his shoulder, as if he weren’t quite I sure that the smaller man
wasn’t standing in his shadow.

"Man," he said. "I can’t say I think
much of your friends."

"Not nice guys like yours?" I said.

"It ain’t funny, Harry. One of those crackers
’bout blew my head off down there."

"Sorry, Mr. Riley," Lurman said. "We’re
all a little edgy after last night."

"That’s Agent Lurman, Bullet," I said,
nodding at Ted. "My protection."

"Charmed," Bullet said.

We settled down again in the living room; and, after
a bit of idle talk about stereos and booze, Bullet cleared his throat
and made motions that meant he had something important to say to me.
In private.

"Is this pantomime about Chico Robinson?" I
said. He gave me a sour look and nodded.

"Might as well come out with it, then," I
said to him.

“
Lurman’s going to hear it, anyway."

"All right. He ain’t found Grimes yet. But
he’s got him a lead. Some junkie in east Walnut Hills who used to
be O’Hara’s pal in the days of love and peace. Chico thinks he
might be able to pin your man down for you by tomorrow night."

"Swell," I said. "Will you be relaying
the word?"

"He’ll call here. After six tomorrow. Whether
he’s found Grimes or not."

"I’ll be in," I said to him.
 

21

First thing in the morning I had Lurman drive me up
to the University so that I could ask some more questions about
Charles McPhail. I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted to ask the
questions. But with the spy business a dead letter, I needed another
angle, and Charley McPhail’s death seemed like the most promising
possibility. Suicides like Claire Lovingwell’s and the McPhail
boy’s leave very bad memories. Sometimes they leave survivors like
Sarah, too. Survivors who live in hate.

I stopped at Christ before going on to campus, to
check on the girl. They wouldn’t let me see her, save from behind
that window on the sixth floor. And that was one view I never
intended to see again. So I told the duty nurse I’d try to get back
later in the day and, with Lurman in tow, drove up McMillan to
Clifton Avenue and the University complex. I parked on campus,
dropped Lurman off at the Student Union, and told him I’d pick him
up in an hour. It was a bright blue morning and the sun was shining
ferociously on the snowy walks. By the time I got to McMicken Hall, I
was squinting from the glare.

Up the wide staircase, on the second floor, was the
English Department office. Just a cubbyhole, racked with mailboxes
and partitioned off by a short wooden counter. Behind the counter sat
Felicia Earle, a short, olive-skinned woman of about thirty, with the
bland, abstracted face and long, coal-black hair of a postcard
madonna.

Once we’d settled in a rather stuffy coffee room
across the hall from her office, she began to tell me the story of
her life in a voice as smokey as a slice of provolone. She’d not
had a good time of it for the past few years, and it showed in her
dress. A sweater out at the elbow, a blue blouse stained red on the
breast, torn stockings, drab un-ironed skirt. In my experience people
who don’t care how they look are either very idealistic or very
angry. As it turned out, Fell Earle was a little of both.

"I want to explain why I’m willing to gossip
with you about Charley McPhail," she said, staring down at the
dark wood table we were sitting at. "You probably think it’s
because I liked Charley. But that’s not all of it. Look around you,
Mr. Stoner. And tell me what you see."

I surveyed the room. It was an ornate, rather tired
place, lined with dusty portraits of chairmen and alumni and the kind
of sprung furniture you sometimes see in the lobbies of second-rate
hotels. It looked rather like a smoking room in a men’s club that
had seen better days. I told her that and she frowned at the
tabletop.

"I see an enormous case of arrested
development," she said. "A sanctuary where a lot of
frightened people hide from all those terrifying things that come
with grown-up life. Things like regular hours, supervised work, a
two-week vacation that goes like your twenties, the kind of noisy
decisions that drown out the whisper of nouns and the rubbing
together of two adjectives. You don’t know what I’m talking
about, do you?"

"In a way I do. But what makes you think this
place is any different from the rest of the world?"

"Oh, but it isn’t!" she said. "That’s
what’s so sad. Here we are, putatively surrounded by the best and
brightest minds in the city. And as minds go, they’re mostly what
they pretend to be. It’s how they act when their thinking caps are
off that offends me so deeply. I ’ve been around this university
for ten years, financing my own and my husband’s education; so I
know whereof I speak. And please believe me, what I’m going to say
about Daryl Lovingwell could be said with equal justice about any of
the lamed men who populate this institution. They don’t make very
good human beings, scholars. They don’t have it in them to care for
anything but themselves and their work. What I’m trying to say is
that Lovingwell was no worse a bastard than any of his colleagues,
just a more conspicuous one. And if you start
thinking
of what he did to Charley as a special case, you’d be dead wrong."

"When did you work for him?"

"Seven years ago, when he was chairman of the
Physics Department. I believe it was seven years ago. At this point
it’s rather hard to keep all of my time straight. Have you ever
done secretarial work, Mr. Stoner?" She looked at me for the
first time since we’d sat down in the coffee room. "You see
you don’t look up when you type. Just down and to your right."
She laughed bitterly.

"Like directions to a john. Down and to your
right. I guess that sounds self-pitying, but I do have a point to
make. You hear a lot of crap when you work in a departmental office.
And most of it you hear while hunched over a typewriter with one ear
to the dictaphone. Then there’s a lot of posturing and preening, a
lot of the stiff upper lip thing in the office that makes much of the
conversation sound like what you might hear at a lady’s tea. They
don’t really go after each other with razors until they’re
liquored up or locked in a meeting or in each other’s studies. The
point is that what I’m going to say can’t be documented. That’s
the reason for this preamble. I can’t prove a thing. I can only
tell you what I believe on the basis of ten year’s experience."

Fell Earle was a conscientious girl. I liked that.
Ready talkers rarely make good sense. I prefer the ones who have
thought things out. In a way, I prefer the ones with grudges, too.
Anger makes a nice focal point, that is, if it’s been studied on
like a textbook and if it’s accessible like Fell Earle’s was. I
told her that I appreciated her candor and asked her what she’d
hought of Daryl Lovingwell.

"There are two types of department chairmen,"
she said. "One pretends to hate his work, the other to enjoy it.
The truth is that both of them thrive on the perquisites of the
office. I haven’t met a departmental chairman yet who wasn’t a
secret fascist. Lovingwell was just more open about it. He loved
power and he exercised it with panache. But it was the list inside
the velvet glove sort of thing. And eventually it cost him his
position. In a way he was lucky it didn’t cost him more. I can’t
prove it, but I believe that Charley was driven to suicide by Daryl
Lovingwell."

I could believe it. I suppose, at that point, I was
eager to believe it. It made for such a brutal confirmation of all
that Sarah had told me. I told her to go on with something like lust
in my voice; and she heard it, the eagerness, and looked at me oddly.

"Did you know him?" she said. "Did you
know Lovingwell?"

"I knew him," I said, making my voice
calmer, more professional. "Tell me about Charley McPhail."

"He was an astrophysicist, working with Mike
O’Hara. In seventy-one O’Hara published a series of articles that
Charley helped research. They created quite a stir. O’Hara had been
cooperating for years with teams in England and at M.I.T. in an
effort to validate the big-bang theory of the universe. His articles
lent significant support to the theory; in fact, some of his data
helped pave the way to the study of background radiation.

"In most respects O’Hara was a decent enough
man, innocent of any thought outside his field. But he was very
ambitious to consolidate his position within the department, partly,
I think, in order to gain supporters for his theories. There had
always been a good deal of tension between him and Lovingwell. He was
the fair-haired boy and Lovingwell the old hand—the athlete and the
tweed coat. When O’Hara’s articles came out, the antagonism
worsened. Where they had disagreed before in a polite, professional
way, they began to go at it no-holds-barred and at every possible
occasion, from student parties to meetings of the executive
committee. I’ve seen it happen before, in every department I’ve
worked in, and it’s a melancholy thing. People take sides. Talk
becomes loose and flagrant. Egos are crushed like cigarette butts.

"Someone started a rumor that Lovingwell was
boffing O’Hara’s wife, which may have been true. With her,
there’s no such thing as an accurate body count. Although it was
rather amusing to imagine the two of them in bed. She’s bitchy,
handsome, and hedonistic. He was crabby, supercilious, and about as
out-going as hard stool. We figured he kept up a running commentary
while they made love, to let her know just how badly she was doing.
Then someone else started a rumor that O’Hara had plagiarized his
findings from Charley’s dissertation, which was what set the whole
ugly incident off.

"You hear stories all the time about professors
lifting their points and paragraphs from students’ papers. Two
years ago, the English Department almost hired a man named Teague who
actually did plagiarize most of his work. It was a real black eye for
the department and they got out of it as gracelessly as they’d
gotten in. Teague had already moved his family here when the tyros
found out that he’d lost his job at Cambridge because of the
plagiarizing business and canned him on the spot. You see, that’s
how little attention they pay to each other’s work, that’s how
much unexamined reputation means to them. They’re snobs of the
worst kind. Teague was famous, so nobody bothered to look at what
he’d written.

"When the rumor started about O’Hara’s work,
Lovingwell took it up like a cause. There would have to be an
investigation, he said. There were some public meetings and some
incredibly vicious private ones. And poor Charley McPhail found
himself caught between two raging egotists out for each other’s
blood. There’s a part of this that I’m not sure about. Whether
Charley did, in fact, go to Lovingwell originally to complain in his
quiet way about O’Hara’s appropriation of his work. Or whether
Lovingwell called him on the carpet to browbeat him into a
confession. Anyway, he recanted later. Publicly. And apologized to
O’Hara. There was something queer about that, too. Because it was
Lovingwell who made Charley recant, after he’d gotten him to
confess in the first place. After a time, the issue of O’Hara’s
integrity became secondary. And Charley himself became the issue.
Lovingwell failed him twice on his orals and made an ugly scene at a
party about Charley’s 'weak' character. Charley was a homosexual,
and Lovingwell played on that for all it was worth. Which would
surprise you in this enlightened place. Eventually, Charley resigned
from the Department. And a few weeks later, he cut his wrists in a
room in Daniels Hall."

Felicia Earle shook her head sadly. "That’s
the story of Charley McPhail. Some of it I saw myself. Some of it I
got through Leo, my husband, who was Charley’s friend. You should
talk to him if you want more details. He works at the Gargoyle Record
Shop on Calhoun until five-thirty. I’d better warn you, though, he
doesn’t like talking about it. It still makes my flesh crawl. I
must say you don’t seem as shocked as I thought you’d be."

"Honey," I said to her. "Nothing you
could tell me about Daryl Lovingwell could shock me anymore. What
about O’Hara, what do you think of him?"

"Not much anymore. He tries to act tough, but
he’s run by his wife. Or, at least, he used to be. He drinks a lot,
too. And he’s a bad sentimental drunk. I’ve had him on my hands
at many a faculty party. I will say this for him, he’s got a heart.
He took Charley McPhail’s death very hard."

"Sound like a man with a guilty conscience to
you?"

She shrugged. "It’s possible. But if he had
plagiarized Charley’s work, Lovingwell would never have let him get
away with it. Not in those days. Hell, he would have laid O’Hara’s
head at the foot of the cyclotron."