Murder Misread (34 page)

Authors: P.M. Carlson

Tags: #reading, #academic mystery, #campus crime, #maggie ryan

BOOK: Murder Misread

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Someone was tugging him
backward. Nick. The red haze was retreating. Maggie was scrambling
from behind the big steel desk as though she’d been hiding there.
She knelt by Walensky. The captain was on the floor, his head and
chest rawboned with tatters of red like Sonny Corleone in
The Godfather
, like
Bonnie and Clyde. He was making ugly wheezing sounds.

Someone else was holding
Charlie now. Officer Porter, that’s who it was, handcuffing
him.

Paramedics burst into the
room and surrounded Walensky. Maggie backed toward the broken
window.

Sergeant Hines was looking
at Walensky, shaking his head. “What the hell happened
here?”

“
I—I shot him,” Charlie
said, explaining to himself as much as to Hines.

“
Why?”

“
He burned—”

Maggie broke loudly into
his sentence. “We were explaining to Captain Walensky that Charlie
Fielding killed Tal Chandler.”

“
Chandler too?” Hines looked at him, but this time Charlie
didn’t answer because he was remembering now. Short-Eyes. He
mustn’t tell. And Walensky’s words,
The jury will sympathize…. You’ve never even assaulted anyone
before.

Now they’d think he’d
assaulted two. Killed two. Or tried to. The paramedics were
carrying Walensky out.

Hines asked, “Think he’ll
make it?”

The paramedic holding the
door open said, “With brain injuries like this? If he’s lucky he’ll
die. But his vital signs are strong, poor bastard, so we’ll have to
put him on the machines. Just don’t be expecting him to
testify.”

Charlie stared at the
floor, trying not to see the spattered blood, listening to Maggie
explain how he had shot Walensky, and shot Tal Chandler. Hines was
careful, checking each point she made, and by the time they were
ready to lead Charlie to the squad car he knew her story was almost
impossible to refute. Walensky might live, so that would be a
lesser charge. Even so, her story meant that Charlie would be
locked away a long, long time for killing Tal.

But one tiny cheering
thought occurred to him at last. Maybe they wouldn’t charge him
with Tal’s murder after all. There was still Bart’s pipe. The
prosecution would say Charlie had left it to frame Bart. But it was
still a loose end of sorts. And Hines was a professional, a
plodding, thorough kind of detective. Hines would keep
looking.

And if he kept looking, he
might find the one thing Maggie couldn’t explain away. He might
find the real killer.

Whoever it was.

After Sergeant Hines and
the man from the district attorney’s office left, Anne checked her
watch. Plenty of time to start a grocery list. She had the
refrigerator open, counting eggs, when the doorbell rang
again.

“
Hi,” she said to Nick and
Maggie and the children. “I hoped you folks would stop
by.”

“
Your daughter’s coming
tonight, right?” Maggie asked.

“
In about an hour. I’ll
meet her at the airport and bring her home. Meanwhile, if certain
bright-eyed little persons would like to swing some
more….”

Sarah’s delighted smile
was answer enough. They went out to sit in the late afternoon sun.
The children ran from the terrace to the swing set.

As soon as they were out
of earshot Anne lit a cigarette and said, “I heard that Charlie
shot Walensky.”

“
It was terrifying,”
Maggie said soberly. “Walensky was his partner. The man in the
slicker. And Charlie said he was the one who hit the Hammond
kid.”

“
God, no wonder Tal
couldn’t get him to investigate!”

“
Right. When he told
Charlie he’d burned the photos and mementos of his little
girlfriends, Charlie went berserk. Blindsided Walensky, got the gun
from him, emptied it out before Nick could reach them.”

“
God. And I was worried
that no one would believe Charlie would shoot someone!”

“
Yes. It pretty much
guarantees that he’ll get a long sentence, and we won’t have to
bring the girls into it. They threw the films into the bushes, but
Nick got them out before the police noticed them.”

Anne shook her head.
“Hines said Walensky wasn’t dead.”

“
No. I guess in Charlie’s
state he wasn’t shooting straight. Slight wounds in the shoulder
and hip, but two wounds high in the forehead….”

“
The forehead. So he’ll
probably end up a vegetable.” Anne shuddered. “Time was I was ready
to hang whoever hit the Hammond kid. But this… Tal used to say that
the worst fate would be to damage your mind and have your body stay
alive. He said he’d rather be shot in the brain stem.”

“
Well,” said Maggie
carefully, “he got his wish.”

Anne tapped her cigarette
against the ashtray and said softly, “So. You figured out who
really killed Tal.”

“
Yes,” Maggie said gently.
“That’s why we can use it against Charlie.”

“
Damn bastard,” said
Anne.

“
Yes.”

“
How did you find
out?”

“
It took a while,” Maggie
said. “From the beginning the death seemed so—theatrical. It was
right on the border between two police jurisdictions. And there
were so many clues, all pointing at different people, all with dark
secrets that Tal might have known. Yet you kept saying it was the
children that really troubled him—Jill Baker, the Hammond
boy.”

“
Yes. He knew there was a
problem.”

“
But he didn’t know who,
and it’s terrible to accuse an innocent person. Walensky was
discreet, but he was so discreet he sometimes refused to
investigate, Tal thought. Probably ignored some of Tal’s other
suggestions too. So the goal of the killing was to pull a competent
outside police force onto Walensky’s turf. Walensky would keep
things discreet, but someone had to be willing to take a hard
squint at the education department.”

“
That’s right,” said
Anne.

“
But I wasn’t certain
until I saw the note.”

“
Yes. That’s what told me
too.”

“
Lambert is Tal’s
doctor?”

“
Yes.”

Maggie looked across the
table at Nick. “Anne got a note in this morning’s mail. The first
part said, ‘Tell Lambert 6/2 = 8/18.’ 6/2 is June second, Thursday,
the last medical examination he had. They must have done some kind
of test.”

“
X-rays,” said Anne. “You
know Tal. A million questions, always looking over John Lambert’s
shoulder at his own charts. John was a good sport about it. Taught
Tal to read them. I remember him coming home last year, saying how
good his August eighteenth X-rays looked.”

“
So he exchanged last
year’s good X-rays for the latest ones somehow.”

“
Wouldn’t be hard,” Anne
said. “Lambert and his partners don’t run a high-security office.
The technicians label the X-rays with little stickers and put them
in your file. You generally have to wait a while alone in the
examination room, with your file in a holder on the door so the
doctor can look it over before he comes in. Tal’s peeked a couple
of times in the past. He could have switched the sticky labels on
the X-rays if he saw the latest ones looked bad.”

“
I see,” said Nick. “He
looked at his X-rays, saw he was doing badly—”

“
Doomed is the word,” Anne
said crisply. “If it started spreading again, he knew that was it.
No more tricks in Lambert’s bag.”

“
So he expected to die
soon. And he exchanged the X-ray labels to trick his
doctor.”

“
Yes.” Anne watched the
smoke spiraling up from the cigarette into the twilit air. “Tricked
his doctor. Tricked me. Told his friends he was celebrating.
Spilled coffee on Nora’s desk so he could sneak her gun from the
drawer. Stole a few other items to leave in the gorge. Made some
big suspicious footprints and threw away the boots. And then he
took Nora’s gun in his right hand and shot himself in the
head.”

They were all quiet a
moment. Then Maggie said, “He accomplished his goal. Cops came from
every side. Stumbling over each other to investigate the
department, and investigate each other.”

“
And investigate me,” said
Anne. “Hines gave me the third degree. Hell, so did you, Dr. Ryan.”
She glared at Maggie.

“
Hey, can’t blame Tal for
that,” said Maggie. “He’d set it up carefully. He knew someone in
the department was hurting children, and that Walensky was
reluctant to investigate. I think on his own he’d narrowed it down
to four: Charlie; Nora’s wild brother; Bart, who ran the experiment
Jill was in; and maybe Bernie with his former arrest. So he asked
them all to lunch at Plato’s, so they’d be at the right place at
the right time. He couldn’t get Bernie, but as head of the
department, he’d certainly be questioned too. And there were two
people he thought were protected by lunch appointments on the other
side of campus. You, of course, Anne.”

“
Yes. And then I canceled
it, like a fool.” But he had planned for her. He had. She held the
thought like a small warm ember in her heart.

“
And Cindy. Her meeting
wasn’t the ideal source of alibis, but in case of need someone or
other would come forward to help her out. I imagine Tal thought the
question wouldn’t arise, because he’d left clues pointing to the
other people. He thought Cindy was protected. And you.”

“
Always the damn romantic
hero. Protecting damsels.” Anne let smoke stream from her nostrils.
She’d always had a secret sympathy for the dragons, herself. “Never
occurred to him that the damsels might prefer to have him around a
little longer.”

Nick said, “He was facing
an ugly end, Anne.”

“
Oh, God, I know. But
there must have been some other way!”

He rubbed his bald head.
“We men are cowardly creatures, Anne. We’re not bad at facing quick
and glorious deaths. But to go on—that requires a different kind of
courage. Deeper.”

“
Cindy’s husband is
right.” Maggie’s arm was around Anne’s shoulders. “It’s tough to go
on. But people are asked to go on all the time, especially women.
Hurts like hell. But generally, somehow, we find that deeper
courage.”

“
Yeah.” Anne stared down
at the floor.

“
There was a second part
of the note,” Maggie reminded her gently. “He said, ‘Gazette Five.’
That’s part of the message too.”

Anne nodded. Cyrano’s
Gazette: act five, scene five. His death scene. His farewell to the
beloved Roxane. She said gruffly, “Damn romantic hero.”

Nick’s brown eyes were
liquid, profound. He quoted softly, “‘Always my heart is with you,
always yours. And in the next world I shall love you still, beyond
measure, as long as time endures.’”

Anne’s chin was trembling.
She took a deep pull on the Gauloise.

“
What he did helped a lot
of little girls,” murmured Maggie. “If we can see it through the
courts for him.”

“
Oh,
yeah. I’ll see it through. I’ll go on. But God, that is so like
Tal, making the grand gesture.
Quel
geste
!
” She snorted, suddenly furious.
“Damn the man, cheating me of weeks of him!”

Maggie squeezed her
shoulders.

“
Still, what a gesture!”
Nick insisted. “‘Despite you all, old enemies who round me loom, I
bear aloft unstained, unyielding—my white plume!’”

Men. Anne ground out her
cigarette, straightened up, and prepared to go on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P.M. Carlson
(
www.pmcarlson.net)
taught
psychology and statistics at Cornell University before deciding
that mystery writing was more fun. She has published twelve mystery
novels and over a dozen short stories. Her novels have been
nominated for an Edgar Award, a Macavity Award, and twice for
Anthony Awards. Two short stories were finalists for Agatha Awards.
She edited the
Mystery Writers
Annual
for Mystery Writers of America for
several years, and served as president of Sisters in
Crime.