Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 20 - Compound Murder (6 page)

“I don’t guess I ever thought about it.”

“Everybody needs a break,” Benton said. “Have you read
East Texas Terror Attack
?”

Rhodes wasn’t a fan of the books, but Jan and Claudia always sent him a signed copy of the latest one. Ivy had read it. Rhodes hadn’t. When he told Benton that, Benton said, “You should. It’s about a terrorist plot to destroy the Big Thicket.”

Rhodes couldn’t imagine why the terrorists would want to do that. He also didn’t know how the Big Thicket had moved to the county where Sage Barton was the sheriff. He wasn’t going to ask, however.

“There are lots of explosions,” Benton said. “Every good book has lots of explosions.”

Rhodes wasn’t sure about that, but he wasn’t a literary scholar. Neither was Benton, for that matter. Rhodes changed the subject. “Did you find anything on the computer?”

“No,” Benton said. “Just the usual stuff. I thought there might be something encrypted or secured by a password, but everything’s right there in plain sight. You’re not going to find anything helpful there.”

“I need a copy of his class rosters.”

“You’ll have to get them from the dean. I’m not sure that I’m allowed to pass along that kind of thing, even if I am a deputy.”

Rhodes looked through the desk drawers and found a folder marked
ATTENDANCE.

“I won’t need the rosters,” Rhodes said, removing the folder. He opened it to be sure it held what the cover said, and it did. “I have what I need right here. Let’s make a copy on your printer.”

“You’ll never be able to interview all those students.”

“I’ll narrow things down.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something,” Rhodes said, though he had no idea of what it might be. He put the rosters back in the drawer. “Or not. I don’t think this was a student argument, anyway. Let’s check the messages on the phone.”

“I can do that,” Benton said, but he didn’t find anything. All the messages, if there had been any, were gone.

“Now what?” Benton asked.

“If I were Sage Barton, I’d blow something up and that would solve everything.”

“You keep telling everybody you’re not Sage Barton, though.”

“Sometimes I wish I was,” Rhodes said.

Chapter 5

Only one person was in the dean’s office waiting for Rhodes, and he wasn’t there voluntarily. The dean introduced him as Harold Harris, the chair of the English Department. He looked like an athlete who’d let himself go a little, and he was dressed like Rhodes expected a college teacher to be dressed. He wore a navy blazer, a striped tie with a light blue shirt, khaki slacks, and penny loafers. His hair was brown with a little bit of gray at the temples. He had even more gray in his Vandyke. Or maybe it was a goatee. Rhodes had never been clear on the differences.

“I asked Dr. Harris to come by to talk to you about Dr. Wellington,” the dean said. “He was Dr. Wellington’s department chair. I’ll leave you two alone now.”

“I’ll need to keep the key to Wellington’s office,” Rhodes said, “and I need to know one other thing from you. Which car in the lot belonged to Wellington?”

The dean frowned. “I suppose the office is not to be opened.”

“That’s right. Now about that car.”

“I don’t know about the car. We don’t require parking permits. Maybe Dr. Harris can tell you.”

She left, and Harris moved immediately to the chair behind the dean’s desk to assume the seat of power. It didn’t work out too well, because Rhodes stood beside him and loomed over him.

“I have a lot of questions,” Rhodes said, “but we’ll start with the car first.”

“Wellington drove a little Ford Focus,” Harris said. His voice was deep, deeper even than Seepy Benton’s. He seemed nervous. Rhodes didn’t blame him. “Red. There aren’t too many of those in the lot, I’m sure.”

“I’ll find it,” Rhodes said. He could get the license plate number later if he needed it, which he doubted. There couldn’t be more than a couple of those cars in the whole county. “What about family? Did Wellington have any kin that you know about?”

“That information would be in the HR office,” Harris said. “He was originally hired for the home campus, and he just came here at the beginning of the spring semester this year. This is only his second semester on this campus.”

“Why did he come here?”

Harris rubbed his hands together. “We needed another full-time instructor, and we advertised the position. Wellington was teaching part-time at the main campus, and he was one of the applicants. He had a good reputation there and seemed solid. The hiring committee voted to recommend him.”

“Had any of them read his rankings on ProfessoRater?”

“He had very few from his previous job,” Harris said, looking at the floor. “We have other ways of determining an instructor’s effectiveness.”

Rhodes wondered about Harris’s rankings. He didn’t mention Benton’s. It might be a good idea to talk to someone at the home campus about Wellington and see if there was some reason he’d been eager to leave town.

Rhodes sat on the edge of the desk and continued to loom.

“The dean said Wellington had been in a little trouble already. Tell me about that.”

“It was nothing, really,” Harris said, not quite meeting Rhodes’s eyes. “Earl was harmless, but he was also somewhat irascible. We have a few students who complain about anything they think is an unkind word, and several of them didn’t like the way Wellington handled certain things. He was very picky.”

“So I’ve heard,” Rhodes said. “Can you give me an example?”

“For one thing, he was very outspoken when students came late to his class. He believed they should be on time, every time. He didn’t hesitate to make some comment to any student who was late more than once. He was even more outspoken if a cell phone rang during a class meeting. He was quick to let the offending students know about their transgressions, and he did it in front of the class. The students were embarrassed.”

Rhodes recalled some of his own teachers and the things they’d said on occasion. There were any number of them who’d been outspoken when students did something they considered wrong, either in class or out of it. They didn’t care in the least if someone was embarrassed.

“Students complain to you if they’re embarrassed?” he asked.

“All the time,” Harris said, in a tone that indicated he was resigned to an endless stream of student complaints. “And it’s not just the students. It’s the parents, too.”

Rhodes tried to remember if his parents had ever complained about any of his difficulties at school. He couldn’t think of a single time that they’d ever even entered the building. Maybe they’d attended a PTA meeting or something, though he didn’t remember that, either.

“The parents complain?”

“If a student has any little grievance at all, the parents are in my office or the dean’s office almost instantly. ‘We pay taxes here,’ they say. ‘You can’t tell our child he has to be in class on time.’ Or, my favorite, ‘We pay taxes here. You have to see to it that my child doesn’t fail.’”

“Not that you’re bitter,” Rhodes said.

“I don’t mean to sound that way, but I suppose I am. I’m old enough to remember when my job was to teach classes, make schedules and budgets, and order books. Now I sometimes feel that I spend most of my time settling disputes.”

“What do you do about it when parents and students complain?”

“Usually I try to have the student talk to the instructor first. If that doesn’t work, then I talk to the instructor myself. When that doesn’t satisfy everyone, we have a meeting with the student. Sometimes the dean is in the meeting. Sometimes the dean and the instructor are there.”

“How did you handle Wellington? Any meetings?”

“I talked to him and told him to restrain himself during class. I told him to speak to students privately so they wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of their peers. Things usually went smoothly for a while after our little talks, but then he’d forget.”

Talking hadn’t relaxed Harris any. He dry-washed his hands as he talked, and he seemed happier when the topic wasn’t directly related to Wellington.

“Was Wellington irascible in other ways?” Rhodes asked. “I’ve heard he wasn’t well liked.”

Harris squirmed a little in the chair. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that neither the students or the faculty liked him very much. You must have had some complaints about his bad behavior.”

Harris was plainly uncomfortable with the conversation. “He did make some inappropriate comments to students. I handled all of those personally. I didn’t see any need to involve the dean. When I had discussions with him about the problem, he said he was only teasing the students.”

“Give me an example,” Rhodes said again, then realized it was the kind of thing his English teachers used to write on his essays when he was in school. Harris should have known to give examples. He was probably avoiding them deliberately.

“I can’t go into personnel matters,” Harris said, confirming Rhodes’s suspicions.

“You can when there’s a death involved. I’m going to need names.”

“I’ll give you an example, and then you decide whether you need the names. The most recent incident was with a young woman with red hair and freckles. She was very upset that Wellington referred to her as ‘his speckled friend.’”

“That’s it?” Rhodes said.

In his school days, teachers had said things that were considerably worse. Nobody had thought anything about it. Rhodes felt old and out of it.

“That’s it. She cried in my office.”

If that was what the student remark had to do with, Rhodes wasn’t at all sure it was the kind of thing that could lead to a scuffle that ended with someone dying. Maybe he didn’t need names after all.

“How did you find out about Wellington’s death?”

Harris brushed a hand across his forehead. “I arrived only a few minutes ago, and Dean King told me about it. Terrible, terrible. I can’t understand it.”

“What about enemies other than his offended students?” Rhodes asked, though he already knew the answer. Nobody ever had any enemies, at least not according to the people Rhodes questioned. “Faculty members, maybe.”

“Just Dean King,” Harris said.

“Tell me about that,” Rhodes said.

*   *   *

Dean King wasn’t any happier talking to Rhodes than Harris had been. Rhodes didn’t loom over her, however. He was tired of looming. She sat at her desk, and he sat in one of the chairs put there for visitors to the office.

“Wellington’s been quite a problem for you, hasn’t he?” Rhodes asked.

The dean nodded. “Yes, he has. I’ve found a replacement for him, though, and his grades are all in the computer and up to date, so the problem is solved.”

“That’s not the kind of problem I meant,” Rhodes said. “I meant that he’s been a problem ever since he came to the campus. Lots of complaints from the students.”

Dean King fidgeted. “Listening to students’ problems is part of my job. It’s not a part I enjoy, but I think I handle it well.”

“Parents, too?” Rhodes asked.

“Sometimes parents are involved, yes. Again, that’s part of the job.”

She seemed more philosophical about it than Harris did. Rhodes wondered if she really was or if she was just better at hiding her feelings. Or maybe Harris was able to take care of most of the complaints before they ever got to the dean’s office.

“You’ve talked to Dr. Harris about Wellington more than once. You even said that you wished he hadn’t been hired.”

The look on King’s face indicated that she might be wishing she hadn’t hired Harris, either.

“Sometimes we make a mistake,” she said. Rhodes figured she was talking about Wellington. “In spite of the interviews and the recommendations. It can happen.”

“What about ProfessoRater? Ever look at that?”

“You can’t believe those things. The only students who use them are the ones who want to praise an instructor or damn him. We have our own system for evaluation.”

“Did the problems turn up in those?”

“Yes, sometimes, but Dr. Wellington’s evaluations were mostly good ones. He’s been here only one full semester, though, and we prefer to look at several semesters before arriving at any conclusions.”

That seemed fair to Rhodes, but they weren’t going to have that opportunity with Wellington.

“Were you in on any discussions with Wellington and Harris?”

“Dr. Harris prefers to handle his departmental matters himself if possible. If there’s something he can’t resolve, then he comes to me.”

“I don’t suppose you ever had any disagreements with Wellington yourself?”

Dean King looked surprised that he would ask such a question. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean did you have any arguments that might have gotten a bit loud. Arguments that others might have overheard.”

Dean King sighed. “You’ve been talking to my administrative assistant.”

Rhodes had heard about the argument from Harris, who’d gotten it from the administrative assistant. So he said, “No, it’s general knowledge around here. What were you arguing about?”

“I wasn’t arguing. Dr. Wellington was.”

“What about?”

“Plagiarism. He’d accused one of his students of plagiarizing a paper. The student insisted he hadn’t done any such thing. I took the student’s side in the matter.”

That was interesting. Rhodes had always believed that administrators took the side of the instructor. He asked what King’s reasoning had been.

“We have ways of checking online to see if a student’s plagiarized a paper. In this case, Dr. Wellington couldn’t find any proof. I suggested that the student had simply worked especially hard on the paper. Dr. Wellington didn’t agree, but in light of the fact that we had no proof, I had no choice but to take the student’s side. Dr. Wellington just couldn’t let it go, however. I insisted, and that resulted in the argument.”

“Didn’t Dr. Harris handle this kind of problem?” Rhodes asked.

“He tried, but the student wasn’t satisfied with Dr. Harris’s answer. He insisted on a meeting with me.”

“I’ll need the name of that student,” Rhodes said.

“I can’t tell you that.”