Shortest Day (27 page)

Shit! The fucking body was still there
.

Standing on the corner of Berkeley Street and Phillips Place, Palmer took only a few minutes to decide what to do. He'd make an anonymous phone call to the office of the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, which was right around the corner. “I'm afraid the person is dead,” he would say gravely. “I rang the bell, but I couldn't rouse the occupants, and I have an emergency in my place of business, so I'm calling from work. Perhaps you could send someone over to take a look?”

The stratagem worked perfectly. “Good heavens,” said the scandalized Dean of EDS. “Thank you very much for calling. I'll take a look right away.” In his excitement he failed to asked who was calling, hung up, threw on his coat, and ran across the street.

Good Lord, there
was
a body on the Henshaws' front porch. The Dean knelt over it, lifted back the blanket, and looked in horror at the dead face of Albert Maggody. A homeless man, obviously it was an old homeless man. The poor soul had hoped to find refuge from the cold in the warm house of Harvard's Vice-President for Government and Community Affairs, but Henshaw had turned him away.

Grimly the Dean rang the bell. At once Helen Henshaw came to the door and jerked it open, then started back in surprise at the sight of the body of Maggody. She gaped at the Dean. “What on earths? Who's this?”

“I'm afraid this man has frozen to death on your doorstep,” said the Dean, not without a feeling of reproachful satisfaction. “A homeless man, I think. Perhaps you'd better call the police.”

“But he can't have been here long. Ernest would have seen him when he left for work.” Then a suspicion dawned on Helen. Turning away from the Dean, she cried, “ERNEST?”

There was a muffled thump in the cellar. Helen abandoned the Dean and the dead man at the door, ran down the hall, threw open the cellar door, and called loudly, “Ernest, are you down there?”

Sheepishly Ernest Henshaw emerged from behind the furnace and followed his wife upstairs. In shaking fury Helen spoke to the Dean, who was still standing in the open door, silhouetted against the sunlit snow. “Won't you come in and shut the door? I suppose we have to leave the—the body just where it is without disturbing it.”

“No, thank you,” said the Dean. “I won't come in. I'll just stand here and watch beside the poor old soul.”

Why this remark should have inflamed Helen's anger is a mystery. She was about to say something sharp when there was a scream from the garage.

E
rnest Henshaw's instinct to vanish from the face of the earth was a good one, but the vultures of the press soon found him and tore at his bowels.

“Is it true, Mr. Henshaw, that your office of Government and Community Affairs has failed to respond to the pleas of the homeless community camped out on Harvard property in the bitter cold? Is it also true that you failed to open your own door to this pitiful old man, with the result that he froze to death on your front porch? Is it also a fact that a homeless teenager gave birth in your garaged?”

Well, it was superb. Palmer Nifto was delighted. There it was on the national news, the grim follow-up to the hilarious sofa story of the day before. In ecstasy Palmer watched the camera zoom in on the body on the doorstep, with joy he gazed at Ernest Henshaw blanching and stuttering at the camera and Ellery Beaver blustering in his office in Massachusetts Hall, his boiled eyes bulging.

Of course it wasn't true about Gretchen Milligan. Her baby was born in Saint Elizabeth's Hospital, not in the Henshaws' garage. When a scandalized Helen Henshaw discovered Gretchen in Ernest's Mercedes, shrieking in the throes of childbirth, she simply called a taxi and popped her into it, thus rescuing from unspeakable abominations the clean cushions of the car.

W
hen the news began spreading among the members of the Revels cast on Saturday that the old black man at Harvard Towers had frozen to death during the night, Mary and Homer Kelly were dressing in the great hall for the afternoon performance. They looked at each other grimly and swore, and Mary quoted William Blake. “It puts all Heaven in a rage.”

“Right you are,” said Homer gloomily. “I guess Heaven was occupied with something more important last night.”

And that was the trouble, thought Mary. There had been no rage at all. Everyone had let the matter drift.

None of them had seen it, that Maggody was the crux, the center, the hub around which the world should have been turning. Harvard University should have fixed its multitudinous clever eye on Maggody. He should have been the object of scholarly study, of laboratory investigation, of mighty decisions by the President and Fellows and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Board of Overseers. All the professors in all the learned disciplines, all the assistant professors and associates, all the teachers of syntactic typology and Chinese historiography and expository writing should have dropped their lecture notes and abandoned their blackboards and blue books and rushed to Maggody's aid. It was an appalling and general failure of imagination and justice and pity.

Mary took her long gown off the rack and greeted Arlo Field. “Hello there, Saint George.” With a touch of accusation in her voice she said, “I must say, you're looking awfully cheerful.”

“I am?” Arlo tried to wipe the grin from his face. A ray from the stained-glass window at the west end of the enormous room made a purple blotch on his nose.

Homer Kelly too was looking at him soberly. “Look here, Arlo, do you know which balcony Jeff fell from?” Homer disappeared for an instant as he pulled on his Father Christmas robe. When his head popped out again, he said, “What was he doing in the Science Center anyway? He wasn't a scientist, was he? I thought he was some kind of historian.”

“He fell from my balcony, I'm afraid.” Arlo buckled the belt of his Red Cross shirt. “Somebody saw him on the way down. I wasn't there, but it was my fault that all the doors were open. I don't know what the hell he was doing in our lab.”

“Homer?” said Mary Kelly. Her psychological analysis on the subject of jealousy and its deadly ramifications had mushroomed during the night. It didn't worry her that she had never studied the works of Sigmund Freud and knew nothing about criminal psychosis. After all, some things were obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense. She had been brooding about it all morning while helping Homer dig out the car. Sitting tensely beside him as they wallowed through the woods and skidded out onto Route 2 and plunged in the direction of Cambridge, she perfected her theory. Had Homer noticed, for instance—?

But Homer was gone. He was running down the length of the great hall to help the set designer manhandle a collapsing piece of scenery. At the other end of the enormous room a little girl fell off a table and began to howl. “Oh, well, never mind,” said Mary, looking sorrowfully at Arlo as he hopped on one foot, pulling on his long black hose.

Arlo grinned back, then tried to compose his expression to hide the glee he felt, in spite of the deaths of Jeffery Peck and that poor old homeless guy, and goddamnit, in spite of the failure of his year-long effort to capture the analemma on film.

Well, it had been sickening, his first look at the negative. This morning he had at last removed the film holder from his camera and dropped the negative into a tray of developer and then into hypo, and turned on the light to take a look. At once the forty-four suns were visible, thank God, making a lopsided figure eight, and the exposure for getting the tower of Memorial Hall in the foreground had turned out just right, but—Christ!—what was that pale blob in the foregrounds?

Arlo's heart sank. What did it mean, another whole year before he could get a decent result? He hung up the negative to dry and emerged gloomily from the darkroom to find Harley Finch staring at him.

“Well?” said Harley. “How did it come out?”

“Don't know yet,” mumbled Arlo. “Have to make a print.”

But even this blow had not destroyed the happiness that had kept him awake last night while the blizzard raged outside and the snowplows clanked and rattled along Huron Avenue. “Have you seen Sarah?” he asked Mary Kelly.

“No, not yet.”

“She must be here somewhere,” said Arlo dreamily, and he went off to look for her.

Mary gazed after him, making another instant psychiatric appraisal, feeling a little smug about her gift for probing the depths of human nature. It was too bad her husband, Homer, wasn't more aware of this kind of thing. Oh, of course, he was terrifically well informed about all sorts of areas of scholarly knowledge. He knew everything there was to know about the literary movements of nineteenth-century America, he was familiar with the social and scientific revolutions of the time, he was a Thoreau scholar of distinction, and in criminal investigation he had a genius for pouncing on the truth. But in understanding the springs of human motivation the poor man was just another meatball.

PART FIVE

THE LAMENT

Behold, behold, what have I done?

I cut him down like the evening sun
.

Traditional British Mummers' Play

CHAPTER 35