Stork Raving Mad (26 page)

“No, I’m bringing you suspects and evidence because I keep stumbling over them, usually while on my way to a nap or the bathroom,” I said. “Just saying that you don’t really need to worry about me. If my running around brings on labor, it’s not a disaster.”

“And maybe a good thing?” he said, with a chuckle. “Still, take care of yourself. It’s—my goodness, nearly seven-thirty.”

No wonder I was so tired. Most nights I was in bed by eight, following my doctor’s advice that if sleep eluded me I could at least rest. And most days I didn’t do nearly as much running around as I had today.

“Not much more to do here today,” the chief was saying. “Though I’d like to keep this office available in case we need to work out here tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” I said. I waited to see if he had anything else to say. He did.

“Get some rest, Meg,” he said. “You look all in.”

“I will.”

He nodded, turned back to some papers on his—well, actually Michael’s—desk, and picked up the phone. I left and waddled through the long corridors to our front hallway.

There, I ran into my grandfather.

“So, rumor has it you’ve solved the murder,” he said.

“Rumor has it wrong, as usual,” I said. “The chief is a lot closer to solving it, thanks in part to some witnesses I nagged into talking to him. That’s all.”

“Right, right,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it. Mustn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.”

No use trying to straighten him out. I was planning to go upstairs—in fact, I was lifting my foot to the bottom step—when it occurred to me that I had something to talk to him about. Two somethings. I wasn’t sure I had the energy to do it now, but I wanted to get it over with. I turned back and sat down in one of the dining room chairs Sammy hadn’t taken.

“So, are you still interested in giving the college a building?” I asked.

My grandfather sighed.

“Probably not,” he said. “I’m beginning to think it’s not such a good idea.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like to cast aspersions on Caerphilly College,” he said. “After all, your husband teaches there; I know you must feel some loyalty to the institution.”

“My loyalty to the college is directly proportional to how well they treat Michael, and right now, I’m not exactly feeling the love.” I was tempted to share Kathy’s revelations, but I still felt enough loyalty—to Michael, if not to Caerphilly—that I didn’t want to broadcast them to a potential donor. “So cast as many aspersions as you want, and I’ll throw in a few of my own. What’s your beef with them?”

“Well . . . Caerphilly’s biology department is not really in tune with the most current scientific thinking in their own field,” he said. “No real environmental consciousness. No apparent awareness of issues such as global warming or the need to maintain biodiversity. From what I can tell, they and the agriculture department have both been completely co-opted by big agribusiness.”

“Big agribusiness can afford big donations. You only just found this out?”

“No.” His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked every one of his ninety-some years. “I knew it all along. I was hoping that through philanthropy, I could effect a positive change in their attitudes.”

“In other words, you were hoping to buy their loyalty to your causes.”

“If you want to put it that way, yes,” he said. “But if I can’t even get them to pay any attention to me when I’m trying to give them a building, it’d be unreasonable to expect them to do so after they’d already got their hands on the building. So no building for Caerphilly College.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” I said. “The biology department isn’t
the whole college. No building for biology—but what about drama?”

“The drama department needs a building?”

“You’ve been to a couple of plays in the Pruitt Theater—what do you think?”

“I thought it was a charming little theater.”

“Yes,” I said. “The operative word is ‘little.’ It’s a converted lecture hall. Nearly every show is sold out, but there are so few seats to sell that it’s rare for a show to break even, and the college bean counters are always complaining and trying to cut back on the number of productions. And talk about not being in tune with the current developments in their professions—the drama faculty would like to be, but they don’t have the facilities. The theater-technology students need to have a fully equipped modern theater if they’re going to learn the skills they need to be competitive in the job market they hope to enter. Instead, they’re back in the nineteenth century. What’s more, the lion’s share of the work out there is in television and film, not live stage. Just ask Michael how he feels about trying to teach film with no equipment other than a few Betacams one of the Richmond TV stations donated ten years ago, when they upgraded their own equipment.”

“Hmm.” It sounded like a “How do I say no gracefully?” kind of hmm, but at least he wasn’t rejecting the idea outright. Probably a measure of how eager he was to put his name on a building—and how frustrated he was by his quest’s failure to date. “A theater’s a nice idea, but I’m not sure I see
how this fits in with the Blake Foundation’s environmental mission.”

“It could be a state-of-the-art green theater,” I said. “Constructed with environmentally sensitive materials and designed for minimal energy use. You could put solar panels on the roof so it doesn’t just generate enough energy to power itself, it could actually give back to the grid.”

“Hmm,” he said again. I’d been hoping for a “Yes!” but at least this was a more thoughtful, positive-sounding “hmm.”

“And I’m sure you can find a way to encourage synergy between the drama curriculum and environmental issues.”

“The hell with synergy. If I built them a nice professional film-production facility, you think I could get the college to let me use it whenever I needed to do some studio work on one of my nature programs?”

“You could probably even have a lot of the work done by student interns,” I said. “Get someone on your staff to develop plans for a student internship program, and it’s a win-win. You get affordable service and they get solid experience for their resumes.”

“Hmm.” Now Grandfather looked thoughtful. “The Blake Drama Building. The Montgomery Blake Theater. Yes, it has a nice ring to it. Who do I talk to?”

“Let me find out.” I heaved myself out of the chair. “Don’t say anything to anyone—especially not the annoying Dr. Blanco—until I can find some more information about how to get this done efficiently.”

“Excellent,” he said. “Nothing would please me more than doing an end run around that annoying twerp. Keep me posted.”

“Oh, one more thing,” I said. “Did you hear about Sammy Wendell’s dog being run over?”

“Yes,” he said, looking thunderous again. “Hell of a thing, someone running over a dog and not even stopping to see if the poor beast was hurt.”

“We’re collecting donations,” I said.

“To pay the vet’s bill?” He reached into his coat pocket. “Sure. How much do you need?”

“And the cost of a DNA test to help convict the perpetrator when we catch him,” I added.

“Just tell me how much you need,” he said. “Better yet, just have them send a bill to my office. So, you coming to the show?”

Show? It took me a few minutes to realize he meant Ramon’s rehearsal.

“I’ve seen it,” I said. “I want to see the inside of my eyelids for a while.”

“I’m going to snag a good seat before things get too crowded,” he said, and strode off toward the kitchen.

I followed, planning to retrieve the doggie bag I’d made myself in the barn, which I’d left on the counter in all the excitement over the purse. By the time I reached the kitchen, the back door was already slamming behind him.

The kitchen was still a mess, but not nearly as bad as it had been the last time I’d seen it. In fact, it hadn’t looked this good in weeks. There were still about a million dirty dishes, but they’d
been stacked neatly on the right side of the sink, and someone had actually scraped and rinsed enough of them to load and start the dishwasher. I could see clutter everywhere, but no half-eaten food, and there were two black plastic garbage bags, neatly tied, beside the nearly full garbage can. The air smelled floral, more so than the half-dozen little dishes of potpourri scattered around on the counters could possibly account for. Rose Noire had probably been spritzing essential oils to supplement the potpourri. A welcome change from the fish odor, whatever it was, and not annoying to my hypersensitive nose.

“Hey, Mrs. Waterston!” A couple of students were passing through the kitchen. “Can we save you a seat?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Going to bed.”

“Good night!” they called as they galloped out the back door and slammed it behind them.

I glanced out the back window. Occasionally, when the barn door opened, I could catch a burst of talk and laughter, so the noise level inside must have been very loud indeed.

“Ms. Langslow?”

I turned to find the chief standing in the doorway.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I’ve just talked to the DA,” the chief said. “He’s asked me to put Mr. Oh and Ms. Borgstrom under arrest now. Mr. Oh asked if he could talk to you for a couple of minutes before he leaves.”

“No problem,” I said. “As long as this doesn’t take the place of a phone call to his lawyer.”

“His lawyer will be meeting him down at the station,” the chief said.

He stepped aside, and Danny entered the kitchen. He was holding a sheaf of papers under one arm. The chief took up a position by the back door, and I could see a tall deputy standing just outside the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” Danny said. “I was supposed to be helping you and instead I ruined everything.”

I didn’t see any reason to disagree with him. If he was expecting me to pat his shoulder and tell him everything would be all right, he was doomed to disappointment.

“Helping you with what?” the chief asked, stepping forward.

“Investigating Dr. Wright and Dr. Blanco,” I said. “Before the murder happened, when we thought our only problem was keeping them from canceling the play and shooting down Ramon’s dissertation. I figured the more we knew about them, the better able we’d be to find a way to fight them. So I asked my brother to recommend someone to do the computer search. He steered me to Danny.”

The chief nodded and stepped back to his place by the door.

“I didn’t totally blow off your request,” Danny went on. “I started looking for information on Dr. Wright and Dr. Blanco. Mostly about Dr. Wright, of course, because I knew Bronwyn was so down on her. And I admit, I was thinking more about Bronwyn than Ramon.”

And perhaps he’d also instinctively realized that Dr. Wright was the real threat.

“And did you find anything of use?” I asked aloud.

“I think she and Blanco are—were . . . you know,” he went on. “An item.”

I glanced at the chief, who was listening intently and frowning.

“What makes you think that?” I asked Danny.

“Wright was always bonkers, hating drama students and giving them a hard time, but it wasn’t till about two years ago that she started pulling the really awful stuff. It’s like suddenly she knew she could get away with it.”

“Didn’t people complain?” I asked.

“At first,” he said. “But they figured out pretty quickly that complaining about Dr. Wright was not such a good idea.”

“Their complaints were ignored,” I said, nodding.

“Worse than that. Bad things happened. Their dorm room assignments got lost, their cafeteria access disappeared, their log-in to the campus computer system stopped working, they couldn’t get into the classes they wanted, their student-loan applications got lost in the system until after the deadline. Evil stuff like that.”

“And you think Blanco was responsible?”

“I can’t speak for the other departments,” Danny said. “But with the computer stuff, I know some of the guys who had to deal with cleaning it up, so I got the inside scoop. All the problems came from edits to the student data system made by various accounts in administrative services. Admin services unchecks the field that says you paid your dorm bill and bingo! Someone else shows up with all their stuff, expecting to move into your room. And no one much argues when it comes from admin services because you never get a straight answer—they blame
it on the system. Even when they’re talking to the people who design and run the system; they don’t care, because if you push them too hard, they can make the same bad stuff happen to you.”

“And since Blanco’s from admin services, he must be to blame?”

“Well, that plus it all started happening a few months after he came. I figured he and Dr. Wright . . . you know.”

“You could be right,” I said. Not about the romantic relationship—I’d seen the two of them together and hadn’t noticed the slightest spark of chemistry between them. If they were romantically involved, Michael should have recruited both of them to teach acting classes. The besotted Danny clearly had romance on the brain.

But as allies in university politics—yes, that made a lot of sense. It explained how Dr. Wright could get away with her abuse of drama students. Any of them who tried to protest would fall victim to the dirty-tricks campaign.

And why was Blanco helping Dr. Wright? If he shared her irrational hatred of the drama curriculum, the persecution would probably continue. But it was looking increasingly likely that his actions were just part of his campaign to ingratiate himself with as many powerful people as possible. He probably played golf with The Face, tennis with the dean of the business school, and bridge with the chair of the math department. And in between singing madrigals with the chair of the history department and hymns with the dean of the religious studies program, he helped
Dr. Wright persecute drama students. If that was the case, his opposition to Ramon’s play and degree would probably evaporate overnight. Or at a minimum, he’d scramble to stay neutral on all theater issues until the dust settled and he knew how Dr. Wright’s eventual replacement felt about the subject.

Which gave us—Abe, Art, and Michael, that is—a priceless opportunity to convince Blanco that it was in his self-interest to support the concept of an independent drama department.