Murder Misread (16 page)

“
Yes, that’s true too.
What’s the second general possibility?”

“
What we were talking
about yesterday. That Tal managed to learn something that someone
didn’t want known.”

“
Have you thought of
something?”

“
Just that some things
are… not worse, really, but more of a problem in an education
department than in other departments. Because we work with
children.”

“
Like what?”

“
It’s just that no one
gets excited any more if a math professor smokes pot or drinks
himself to sleep every night. But people who work with little
children can’t have even the ordinary vices.”

“
Right. Or suppose there
was something… well, there have been stories in the newspapers
about child molesters. If Tal knew something like that—”

“
God, nobody would—not in
an education department! Kids are so fragile. We know
that!”

“
Kids get molested all the
same.”

“
Not by people who know
kids. I can’t imagine—” Charlie shook his head. He’d never been
able to understand how there could be people who would force such
horrors on a child. Yet he knew such people existed. But not in the
department! “Anyway,” he continued, “I didn’t mean anything like
that. But good parents are very protective. They want the people
who work with their children to be good role models even in small
things, and that’s good. And you have to look out for the
department’s reputation. But the main thing is the children. Each
child is unique. Being drunk at the wrong time could so easily—” He
was squeezing his empty mug ferociously. He eased his grip. “Well,
adults can shrug things off. Children can be hurt.”

She looked at him silently
a moment, the blue eyes so intent on his that he dropped his gaze.
She said softly, “You were hurt, weren’t you?”

He was saved by the
arrival of the eggs and toast. The waitress was nervous, half her
attention on George, who stood behind the bar with a critical eye
on her. When she’d rattled the plates and cups into place Maggie
made an OK sign toward the proprietor, who beamed. Then she drank
her orange juice before asking, “Why does Cindy needle
you?”

“
Cindy?” He broke off. The
waitress was back with a coffeepot.

But when she’d left again
Maggie said insistently, “And you needle Cindy. It’s not just a
game.”

“
Sure it is. Now it is. We
had kind of a fight a few years ago, but we get along.” He
shrugged.

“
What was the fight
about?”

“
Nothing. It’s all blown
over.”

She forked in a mouthful
of eggs and mumbled, “You don’t want to say what
happened?”

Charlie put jam on his
toast. “No. Really, it’s not relevant. It’s over.”

“
If Tal had learned about
it would Cindy be worried?”

“
No!
There’s your proof, you see. Tal
knew!
Tal showed me! It’s been years
since… well, anyway, it’s not relevant. Not worth stirring
up.”

“
But there’s a lot of
emotion around it still.” She munched for a moment, then asked,
“Okay, Charlie, what would you do if you found out someone in the
department was using coke? Or maybe sleeping with his
students?”

“
Nobody’s doing
that!”

“
We’re just supposing.
What would you do? Report it to Walensky?”

“
No. It would depend. The
chairman, maybe. Yeah, I’d probably go see Reinalter.”

“
And what would Reinalter
do?”

“
He’d… I don’t know. Call
the person in. Maybe go to the police. He’d make sure it stopped
but he’d want to keep it quiet so the scandal wouldn’t rub off on
the rest of us. And it would, you know, if it got out.”

“
But the person involved
still might lose his job, maybe go to jail.”

“
Yeah. Depends on how bad
it was.”

“
Okay. Now, this thing
with Cindy that’s not relevant, does Reinalter know?”

“
No.” Charlie could feel
his jaw muscles clenching.

“
And if he did, what would
happen to Cindy? Would he say, it’s all over, it’s not
relevant?”

“
Maybe.”

Her gaze sharpened. “Look,
I’m trying to help. I can’t help you figure out who’s framing you
if I don’t know anything about you or your possible enemies or the
enemies of your enemies.”

Hell, he’d thought this
high-powered consultant was on his side. Now she reminded him of
Aunt Babs, nagging at him to find out why he was late getting home
from hockey practice. He thumped his mug down onto the table so
hard that coffee splashed out. “Damn.” He swabbed at it angrily
with a paper napkin. “Okay, look, Bernie Reinalter is really into
appearances. It’s good for the department, I suppose. But you’re
right, he might come down pretty hard on Cindy, even after all this
time.”

“
Okay.” She sipped some
more coffee and leaned back in the booth. She’d finished her
breakfast, he saw. He picked up his own toast. She continued, “Next
awkward question. Can you tell me about Lorraine?”

“
Lorraine?” He ducked his
head to hide his growing anger.

“
Charlie, I’m sorry. Look,
maybe we should just leave it to the police.”

“
Good idea!” But the fears
were nibbling again. The murderer. And almost as bad, Hines with
his neutral questions and obsidian eyes. Charlie drained his coffee
mug and said in a more conciliatory tone, “Look, Lorraine is at
Queens now. Not around here. How could she be involved?”

“
I know. It’s probably
crazy to suggest that she may be trying to get back at you after
all this time.”

“
Not only that—she was
very fond of Tal. She wouldn’t—”

“
Charlie,
everyone
was fond of Tal! You yourself suggested someone
who was so fond of him she married him!”

“
Oh, hell. I know.” He
leaned back in the booth, arms crossed, glaring at the sugar
container. “Yeah, okay, go ahead. I’ll try. What about
her?”

“
Well, for starts, there’s
usually some bad feeling when there’s a divorce.”

“
Some.” He kept his voice
neutral, trying to look at it objectively. “But we respect each
other. We’re adults. It just didn’t work out the way we
expected.”

“
You
thought she’d be different than she turned out to be? Or you
thought
you’d
be different?”

Charlie took off his
glasses, rubbed his nose, blinked nearsightedly down at his plate.
“Some of both. You start these things with a vision, you know? How
great the world is going to be. Who can tell what goes wrong?
Lorraine and I helped each other a lot at first. This project I’m
working on now is partly her doing. She said, you’ve got all these
sophisticated ideas about skilled reading. Why work with beginners?
Doesn’t it make sense to make sure that’s really the way skilled
readers do it? And she’d heard about someone using video
techniques. She put me onto that line of research. She was right:
I’m damn good at it. Smart woman, Lorraine.” He replaced his
glasses. “But personally… well, it just didn’t work out. Hell, if I
knew why I’d have fixed it! After a while we just stopped
pretending.”

“
What was her relationship
to Tal?”

“
Friendly. No, more than
that, really. She took a class or two from him when she was a
student here. And after we were married and she got her degree, he
hired her at the instructor level. Part-time. Not a great job, but
of course there was nothing full-time in her field around here. And
it gave her time to finish some research projects. That’s what
really got her the tenure-track job at Queens.”

“
Had she done anything…
well, like Cindy, anything that Tal knew about and that might hurt
her career?”

“
Lorraine? God, no!
Sometimes she smoked pot on weekends. That was it. So did I. So did
you, I bet!”

Maggie grinned. “Touché.
And I agree, that’s not a dark enough secret to inspire a crime,
because these days the consequences are about zero. Unless you want
to work for the CIA, maybe. Even Bernie Reinalter probably expects
his younger faculty to have a little pot in their
background.”

“
Yeah. Nobody’s trying for
security clearance.”

“
Good. Is Lorraine’s
specialty reading too?”

“
No, cognitive
development. She was doing some work on semantic categories and
took my reading seminar the first year I taught it. That’s how we
met.”

“
I see. Do you ever talk
to her now?”

“
Hardly ever. We see each
other at conventions sometimes.” He pushed his plate away. “Look,
if you’re finished, let’s pay George and get on to
campus.”

She smiled sunnily. “Good
idea. Let’s go.”

10

The basement of Van Brunt
Hall was even blander than the ground floor: white ceiling, white
walls, white doors, white vinyl tile. Charlie unlocked his
experiment room and switched on the fluorescent lights. Maggie
glanced around curiously at the worktable, cardboard boxes of
supplies, terminal, and curtained experiment area. “Sorry to put
you to the trouble,” she said, “but I do a much better job of
interpreting scores when I have some idea of what people were
actually doing to get the scores.”

“
Sure,”
said Charlie. “It’s good that you’re interested.” He’d planned on
giving this demonstration yesterday afternoon, after he’d finished
introducing her to the computer personnel and explaining his own
coded data sheets. But then Tal—
Don’t think about that now, it’ll just choke you up.
He turned away, switched on the TV and selected a
tape. He cleared his throat. “Let me double-check that we’ve got
the right printer attached. Good. The other one’s been acting up.
Maybe I can get it fixed this afternoon. Okay, now, that’s where
the subjects sit.” He gestured to a chair before the TV.

“
I see.” Maggie looked at
the screen. “Now, I’m a subject. What am I supposed to
do?”

“
You’ll be reading several
short paragraphs, and afterward you’ll see a set of words, one at a
time. You’ll press this button if it was one of the words you read.
We call it the Yes button.” He indicated the bright red button on
the remote control fastened to the arm of the chair.

“
Got it.”

“
Now, you sit here and
wear these fancy goggles. Pretty much like having your eyes
examined.” He indicated the chair as he clamped a fresh bite board
into the head frame. “This gizmo in front of your nose is a bite
board. You bite it.”

“
Bite it?”

“
It keeps your head still.
It’s important because we’ll be photographing and measuring your
eye movements by bouncing a light off your cornea and into the
camera. If your head moves, it’s impossible to tell which letter
you were looking at.”

“
Okay.” Maggie plunked
herself into the chair and checked the location of the Yes
button.

“
You see the bite board is
coated with wax? Your teeth make an impression, so if we have
several sessions with the same person we can get things calibrated
more quickly.” He was adjusting the equipment to her height. “If
that feels all right, push the Yes button.”

She raised her eyebrows,
seemed to decide it wouldn’t get any better, and pushed the
button.

“
Okay, now I’ll calibrate
the camera. Look at the dot on the screen. As soon as you’ve
fixated it, push the Yes button. That tells the computer the exact
coordinates of your individual corneal reflection for that spot.
Then it’ll show you a new dot. Same thing, look at the dot and push
the button.” He watched carefully as she responded to a series of
dot positions on the screen. Finally the screen read “Thank you!”
and Charlie said, “Good. Now, if you’re ready to begin, push the
Yes button again.”

She signaled
yes.

“
Here we go, then. Read as
rapidly and as normally as you can. I know it’s hard in this
contraption, but try.” He started the tape. The short paragraphs,
all in capital letters, blinked on and off in sequence. Each was
followed by the appropriate set of test words. After ten minutes
the tape was done.

“
Well,” said Maggie,
leaning back in her chair, “I like George’s cooking better than
your bite bar.”

Charlie grinned. “No
doubt. I’d order chocolate-flavored if they made them. Here, we’ll
see how you did.” He took the record of her answers from the
printer and scanned it. “Good. Here’s a mistake. We’re interested
in the mistakes.”

“
Of course. I’ve worked
with psychologists for years. A perfect score is a dud from your
point of view. What did I miss?”

“
Burgundies. You said yes,
you’d seen the word.”

“
But I did! In the
paragraph about French wines!”

“
Here’s
the tape again.” He found the passage and froze it on the screen.
Like the others, this sentence was in capital
letters:
AMONG THE BEST-LOVED WINES
OF FRANCE ARE BURGLARIES, BOTH WHITE AND RED.