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by Albert Ashforth
"You can't be serious!" The words came sputtering out of the speaker's mouth like the sound of a motor not hitting on all its cylinders.
"You'll find out whether I'm serious or not, Binbridge. At next week's department meeting!"
They were going at it like Ali and Frazier in Manila. But the difference was, when professors of literature tangle, they throw words not punches.
"Start looking for another job, Binbridge."
"Who are you telling to ..."
Trying not to splash water on my blue custodian's uniform, I removed my mop from the pail and continued to swab the floor just outside the English Department staff room. I did my best not to make any noise. Inside, it was still Slam! Bang! Pow!
"If you say anything Mackay, I'll fix you ... good."
"You will? You're not a spook anymore, Binbridge. Threats don't mean anything here."
I looked up just as Millicent Fainsworth slowly rounded the corner and headed up the corridor in my direction.
"Good morning, Thomas."
"Good morning, Professor Fainsworth."
Hearing the argument inside the office, she arched an eyebrow, touched a finger to her blue hair, sniffed. Then she resumed the trip down the corridor to her own staff room.
"You can leave now, Binbridge,. Get out of my office!"
"Sure Mackay, but before I'm through --"
When, a minute later, the door to the staff office banged open and a purple-faced Professor Mark Binbridge stormed out, I was ringing out my mop and bucket at the far end of the corridor. In the twelve years I've been on the Blue Ridge College maintenance crew, it's been my policy to hear no evil and see no evil.
I continued to swab corridors, observing profs and students checking in for another day in the intellectual salt mines. At eight thirty, my break time, when I went out to the parking lot to retrieve the sandwich and apple I'd left in my car, I noticed that the faculty parking area was already full.
It was my grandmother who once told me that a smart man never found a dead one. But later that morning, when I came across the still warm body of Professor Arnold Mackay in the building stairwell, I didn't see where I had any choice but to report the discovery. With a loud thump, I dropped the huge plastic bag of trash I was carrying, and headed back up the stairwell to the English office to announce the grisly news.
#
"Nothing like this has ever happened before at Blue Lake College, Lieutenant. I can guarantee you of that. I expect you to solve this crime quickly. Professor Mackay was an esteemed colleague, a person who -"
The speaker was Maxwell Kilbury, the chairperson of the English Department at Blue Lake. His normally flushed face appeared even redder then usual, and as he spoke he nervously ran his fingers through his thinning silver hair. The person he was lecturing on how to do his job was a broad-shouldered, beetle-browed police detective. A second later, Professor Kilbury nearly bowled me over in his rush to return to his office.
The servant of the people, whose name I'd already learned was Lieutenant Benda, waved me into Mackay's office with his massive mitt, shut the door, and emitted an exasperated grunt. Benda looked like someone who was more at home in the urban jungles than in the academic groves.
"You're Hathaway, the guy who found the body."
I said that was correct.
"This Mackay, tell me about him," Benda said in the tone of someone who's used to having his commands obeyed.
I scratched my head, not sure of whether I should be diplomatic - or honest. Another detective, looking very baffled, was sifting through the countless stacks of books and papers contained on the room's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. With all the dust he was raising, he could well have used a gas mask.
"Don't you people ever clean in here?" Benda asked, as he threw open the office window.
"Every day, Lieutenant," I said. "But the professors don't like it when you move their books. If you move a book or some papers and don't replace them exactly as you found them ..."
"You'll hear about it, is that it?" When I nodded, he said, "I get the picture. Tell me about Mackay."
"He was at the college for nearly thirty years."
"According to everyone here," Benda said, "Mackay was loved and respected and oozed the milk of human kindness. But if everyone loves and respects you, you don't get yourself bumped off."
I permitted myself a knowing smile. "Not too many people will miss Mackay, Lieutenant. Not in the English Department, anyway. Mackay had it in for everyone."
Benda nodded. "I figured." He placed his flattened hand against the back of his neck. "Someone tagged him right here. Very hard. A karate chop. It looked like the work of a professional. Anyone around here trained in martial arts, Hathaway?"
I continued to hedge. "I'm only a member of the maintenance crew, Lieutenant."
"Sure, Hathaway. But for twelve years, right? You've seen them come and go, I'll bet." A perceptive guy, the Lieutenant. I definitely felt flattered. "And from what I understand, Hathaway, your daughter is a student here at Blue Lake." When I nodded, Benda said, "I'll bet you've forgotten things around here that other people have never known."
I admitted Benda could be right.
Benda looked at a list in his hand. "Kilbury gave me a run-down of the people in the department and of their schedules. We can omit quite a few of Mackay's colleagues as suspects. Some were in classes giving their courses when he was killed. A few more were on sabbatical and weren't anywhere near the college."
"Who does that leave?" I asked.
"For one, the Fainsworth woman. She says she was meditating near the nature grove. Seeking solitude to rejuvenate her spirit. She says she needs inspiration for her course on ..." Benda frowned, trying to decipher something in his notebook.
"That's 'Nature Images in Transcendental Writers,' Lieutenant."
Benda looked at me with new respect. "Yeah. Well, what about Professor Fainsworth?"
"She and Mackay hadn't been on speaking terms in years. He tried to have her fired at one point. Later, he wrote a critical review of her teaching. At a meeting he once called her a 'reprehensible gasbag.'"
Benda did some writing in his notebook. "Can you spell that?"
After I'd given him some help with "reprehensible," Benda asked me what else I could tell him.
"Well Lieutenant, Mackay was in a stormy argument with another teacher this morning ..."
Benda looked up quickly. "Who was that?"
Although I had nothing against Professor Mark Binbridge personally, I felt I had to mention the shouted threats I'd heard while mopping the corridor. I had just finished my account when Professor Alden Sales arrived. Sales is tall, very thin, and wears rimless glasses. As usual, he was wearing a three-piece tweed suit and was carrying an armful of books. He seemed out of breath.
"I'm shocked," Sales said. "I couldn't believe it when I heard. No matter what you may have heard about Mackay, Lieutenant, he was a decent, considerate person."
Benda asked Sales how well he knew Mackay.
"We've been friendly ever since I've had the office next to his."
"Where've you been, Professor?" Benda asked, gazing at the books Sales was carrying.
"In the stacks, Lieutenant."
"Stacks of what?"
"The library stacks. I'm researching a book on the eighteenth-century poetic influences on the modern psyche. People don't realize the impact -"
"I'm sure they don't," Benda said.
Sales looked at his watch. "I have a class now. But if there's any way I can be of help..."
"We'll let you know, Professor." After Sales had left, Benda asked me about him.
"Like Binbridge, he's a tenure candidate. That means he was in line to be voted into a permanent position at the college."
"How are his prospects?"
"Good. Last year he wrote a book that was highly praised. It was called 'The Symbolic Interpretation of..."
"Got a second, Lieutenant?" The other detective in the office had some folders in his hand which he wanted to show Benda. I took that as my signal to leave.
Forty-five minutes later, while I was replacing a light fixture in one of the classrooms, through a window I saw Benda and a couple of uniformed policemen leading Professor Mark Binbridge across the faculty parking lot in the direction of a waiting squad car. Professor Binbridge, I also noticed, was wearing handcuffs.
#
"Oh Daddy, how could you?" Nicole said. "How could you do something like that?"
Nicole is my twenty-year-old daughter and a student at Blue Lake. We were at dinner, and I had just finished telling her and my wife, Jane, all about the day's excitement, concluding with the arrest of Professor Binbridge.
"Professor Binbridge is the nicest teacher," Nicole said. "I was planning to take his course next term -"
"It wasn't just my story which led to Professor Binbridge's arrest," I said defensively. "Binbridge had a free period when Mackay was killed, and he maintains he went for a walk off-campus to let off steam."
"That would be logical, wouldn't it?" Jane said. "If he'd had an argument with Mackay, he might have been tense."
"Unfortunately, no one saw him."
Nicole made a pouting sound, something like she used to make when she was twelve and couldn't have a second helping of dessert. "If Professor Binbridge doesn't give the course, I'll have to take it with ..."
"All signs point to Binbridge as the murderer," I said. "It seems that Mackay had done some checking into Binbridge's past and discovered a gap in his résumé. During a period of three years, when Binbridge said he was contemplating and catching up on his reading, he was actually working for a government agency. Part of the time he was overseas." I lowered my voice. "He may have been an agent."
"Is that so awful?" Jane asked. "As long as he was on our side, I mean."
"The way I understand it, people in universities don't like that sort of thing because, years aback, when the Cold War was still on, some professors had used their occupations to cover intelligence activities. As a result, Mackay's revelations would almost certainly have doomed Binbridge's chances to become permanent at the college."
Nicole waved her fork excitedly. "I still don't feel that's a reason to charge him with murder."
I said, "I'm afraid there's even more evidence. It has to do with the way Mackay was killed. By a blow to the back of the neck."
Jane and Nicole both looked at me.
"The blow was delivered cleanly, professionally. It would have to have been a person with martial arts training. As part of his intelligence training, Binbridge would have been instructed in martial arts." I went back to eating my broccoli, but all of a sudden I had no appetite. I didn't like the way my wife and daughter were looking at me.
"I still say Professor Binbridge was the nicest teacher," Nicole said, standing up from the table. "And there's no one who can judge a teacher's character better than the students."
The funny thing was, although I'd never been to college, I had a feeling she was right.
#
Although the maintenance people are the first to arrive on campus, beginning work at six A.M., I was in even earlier the following day.
The material I was looking for was in Alden Sales's office, where I'd first seen it, neatly concealed behind the rows of books on the shelves. I'd first discovered them when I'd undertaken to do some dusting: Rows of spy novels. It was obviously a secret passion, something which Sales couldn't admit for fear it would damage his intellectual image and convey the impression that he didn't all his waking hours reflecting on the eighteenth-century psyche.
I did some further snooping. Using my master key, I opened Sales's desk drawer and found something else - a memo to Sales from Mackay reading: "Report to me at once." It was dated three days before.
I figured there might be something else, and that it would be in Mackay's office. Although the police detectives had gone through Mackay's books and papers, I had an idea this was a task they hadn't performed too effectively, largely because they had no idea of what they should be looking for. At the bottom of a stack of periodicals and folders, I found a copy of the book Sales had written on the eighteenth-century psyche. Leafing through it, I discovered numerous marked passages. Among the periodicals and photographed materials I found passages very similar to those in Sales's book. After reading through it, I had a slight headache. But I figured I had reason to call Lieutenant Benda.
#
"The first thing to make me suspicious, Lieutenant, was Sales saying he'd gone straight to the library after arriving on campus yesterday. I'd seen his car in the lot when I went down at eight-thirty to get my lunch. Since the library doesn't open until nine, I wondered."
Benda nodded. We were in Sales's office. I pointed to the desk drawer.
"When I saw the memo from Mackay ordering Sales to see him at once, I thought Mackay might have dug up something against him, just as he'd dug up something against Binbridge. Over the years, it had almost become Mackay's hobby, sandbagging colleagues. The book with the marked passages was the proof..."
"Mackay had discovered Sales had plagiarized a large portion of the book he'd written."
"Right. Mackay would have brought that up at the meeting and sabotaged Sales's chances of getting a permanent post at Blue Lake."
Benda nodded. "Sales confessed. He admits he was already in his office while Binbridge and Mackay were arguing. From behind the partition he could hear everything."
"Later, he spoke with Millicent Fainsworth and learned she had heard Binbridge threaten Mackay. Sales figured if he was going to act, this was the time. Binbridge would be the obvious suspect if anything were to happen to Mackay." I paused. "But I think his shrewdest move was to strike Mackay as though he'd been hit by an expert. Mackay had accused Binbridge of being an intelligence agent, and Sales knew Binbridge would have had hand-to-hand training."
Benda grimaced. "And that was something he had learned how to do from one of his spy novels." Benda shook his head. "You're a smart guy, Hathaway."
I shrugged, recalling the words of my grandmother about smart men never finding dead ones. "None of my high school teachers ever thought I'd make it to college."
"You fooled them," Benda said.
I stood up, reached for my mop and bucket. "Didn't I though?"
NMM
New Mystery Volume VII number 1
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