The Book of 21 (4 page)

“Look,” John snapped, “I’m keeping it. It
interests
me. I have some things to check out that might put me in some better neighborhoods than I normally get to frequent. When I’m done, I’ll sit down and write it up.”

Shalby stood up, dug a dollar out of his pocket, and flipped it on the counter. “Just remember I tried to help you out on this.” As he walked away, Shalby hefted his cell phone to his ear and muttered, “Fucking ingrate.”

John was about go after Shalby and tell the jerk to get bent. He realized, however, that if he just kept his mouth shut, he would be rid of the boor sooner. He watched the Shalby leave.

As Shalby opened the door, the man’s snide tone echoed in the glass vestibule. “No he’s gonna keep it. It
interests
him…” Shalby’s voice died away as the man left the vestibule and the doors swung shut behind him.

John glared at the door and tried to calm his anger at the bigot.

“Here you go, one omelet,” Effie purred as she slid the grass and fungus special across the counter. “Ketchup or Tabasco?”

For a moment, Dunglison’s blood-soaked den flashed through his head. “Neither, thanks.”

“Your friend is a prince. Does he have a brother?” she said as she eyed John with a smile and winked.

“I sure hope not.”

John was about to take his first bite of omelet when his cell phone started to vibrate. He looked up at Effie as he unclipped the phone from his belt. The caller ID showed it was Lieutenant Murphy.

“Sorry, Effie, I better take this.” John held the phone to his ear and said, “Hello.”

Murphy replied in a clear, deep tone that carried an inner city accent. “I just wanted to warn you that Ben was on his way to see you. He told me he felt bad, and that he thought it wasn’t right that you got stuck with this. We don’t normally swap cases like playing cards, but I thought it would make Ben feel like he did a good deed. It’s odd for him to show any initiative, so I figured, why not? Either way, it’s up to you.”

A frown crept across John’s face. “Didn’t he just call you?”

“No. Why?” Murphy asked.

John thought for a moment. He never actually heard Shalby address Murphy during the phone call. Shalby could have been calling a friend, or another cop.

“Never mind. It’s nothing,” he replied. “Anyway, I just talked to him, and I’m going to keep it.”

“Good, that will make him feel like he tried to do a good thing, and he won’t actually have to do anything. It’s a win-win.”

“I’m not so sure. He seemed kind of irritated that I didn’t accept his offer.”

“Just talk, I’m sure,” Murphy said with a laugh. “What are you looking at? Is it a murder-suicide, or do you actually have something to investigate?”

“I think I may have some actual police work on my hands. I told the commissioner’s press manager that it looked like a murder-suicide, but we were still investigating. Let’s just say, though, that Shalby’s conscience is not the only weird thing I saw so far today. We’ve sent a car over to Hallman’s apartment to find the super and get it secured. I’m going to swing over to Penn Commonwealth, once they open up, and see if I find anything in Dunglison’s office that might be of interest. By the time I am done there, Harry should be wrapping things up at the Dunglison place, and we’ll sweep Hallman’s apartment.”

“Good. Keep me informed.”

“No problem. Talk to you later.”

John closed the cell phone and clipped it back to his belt. He looked up at Effie.

Effie slid the check across the counter. “Duty calling again?”

John smiled. “Always.”

Chapter 3:
The Ivory Tower

At Chestnut Street, the towering steel and glass buildings of University City yielded to the low, ivy-covered flagstone structures of Pennsylvania Commonwealth University. The architecture gave John the feeling that he was stepping into history. The people, however, reminded him he still lived in a modern city; far from the elegant dress of last century, they wore everything from the latest designer clothes to sweatpants. Even worse, cell phones and digital music players seemed to be permanently attached to the heads of about half of them. Here, the tides of change washed against the rock of continuity, as was common in Philadelphia.

The behavior of the students varied as greatly as their apparel—a few were loud and irreverent, while others were more quiet and reserved. He watched them as he made his way across campus. Their behavior told John which students there because they were smart, which students wanted an opportunity to build a career network, and which students had rich parents.

John made his way to Logan Hall. Logan was a large tan building built in the Victorian Gothic style. It held several departments under its gray roof, including the one that Dunglison belonged to—Folklore and Folklife.

Experience had taught John that calling ahead was always a good move in the slow-moving world of academia, and he had done so before leaving the diner. Academics tended to shy away from the police, and though they knew a lot about their subject areas, they understood little about the law. That led to fear. As a result, they usually wanted to clear everything with the university before they spoke too much or allowed John to look at anything. A call to campus security usually meant a contact would be identified and ready to cooperate, by the time he arrived.

More selfishly, it meant minimal tears; campus security delivered the shocking news of a colleague’s death, so John avoided dealing with dramatic scenes. The drama of such episodes usually yielded little of interest and took up time. He would rather use that time finding pertinent information, or even sitting on his ass and staring at the wall.

He went up a flight of stairs to the office of Anita Brinker, who was the Administrative Assistant for the department. John found a chubby white woman with gray hair sitting behind a large maple desk. She was eyeing papers on her desk through bifocals that sat on the end of her nose.

“You must be Detective McDonough,” Brinker said, as she peered over her bifocals.

John gaped at the deepness of her feminine tone, which gave her voice an odd mixture of warmth and authority. He was thinking that her voice was perfect for someone in her position; she had a lot of responsibility to get things done, but little authority over the faculty. He asked himself whether it was a natural tone, which made her a perfect fit for the position, or if it was a learned affectation, which she assumed in order to snap professors out of their intellectual malaise and prompt them to get things done.

To recover from the air of stupidity that his silence conveyed, he spoke warmly and at a bit lower volume than normal. “You must be Anita Brinker.” He stepped forward and extended his hand. While waiting for her to take his hand, he realized his countenance was that of an old dog waiting for its master’s approval, and this response was what Brinker’s demeanor was craftily intended to evoke.

She stood slowly and grasped his hand. While delivering a firm handshake with her right hand, she laid her glasses onto her desk with her left. “This is not one of the things I had planned on doing this morning.”

“I know, ma’am. I’m sorry for the imposition.”

“I hope you catch whoever did this,” she said, with a long pause. “Allow me to open Dr. Dunglison’s office for you. Campus security told me that I should keep everyone out until you arrived, so I followed orders. Dr. Smolniczek is coming back from a conference today, so she will unfortunately not be back in the office until tomorrow.”

It sounded like she expected to impress him by merely mentioning Smolniczek’s name. John knew from his chat with campus security that Linda Smolniczek was the department chair. Perhaps it was a big name on campus, but to John it meant squat.

“I’ll get to Dr. Smolniczek later. Right now, I’d like to talk with you about Dr. Dunglison and then look around.”

“Certainly,” she declared. Brinker sat down and waved for John to sit on a wooden chair by her desk.

“I’m wondering what you can tell me about Dr. Dunglison.”

Brinker looked at the wall blankly and put one hand up to her chin in thought. The air of warmth and authority was getting to be a bit much. John wondered whether the mannerism might be the result of a genuine feeling of self-importance. If it was, he could manipulate that to get information from her.

After a few seconds, Brinker announced, “Not much. He usually kept to himself.”

John gave a half-smile and lifted one eyebrow very slightly. It seemed like a lot of effort on her part to say something commonplace. She did work in academia, though, where it took a lot of thought to get a modicum of action. The pomp was amusing to John, but he knew that his expression, rather than revealing his true thoughts, conveyed that he felt she knew more than she was saying.

Brinker leaned forward to her desk and stared at her desk blotter. “I don’t keep up with the faculty’s research,” she confessed with a lighter tone. “I’m not a folklore groupie. What I know, is that Richard gave me whatever he needed to give me, and he did it before any deadline I put in place. He realized that the university had a lot of bureaucracy, with which I dealt on his behalf. He was always on time or early with anything he needed to file. That was the way in which I knew him.” She looked at John. “It was a very cold way to know someone, I imagine.”

“What about Ted Hallman?”

She looked at him with a blank face, but John knew in the few seconds she stayed silent, her mind was probably flooded with a series of questions. To Brinker’s credit, she knew John would not answer any of those questions.

She pursed her lips and replied, “He was a quiet fellow.”

“Did Hallman and Dunglison associate outside of class?”

Brinker paused for a moment and then said, “Yes, they worked on research together. Ted had a research assistantship with Richard.”

“Anything else?”

“Not anything that was my business.” She thought for a moment, as if she were trying to find the right words. “They were very friendly.” She thought for a few seconds. “They seemed to be very good friends.”

“Did Dr. Dunglison ever have anyone visit him here recently? Perhaps a woman, someone who might be a love interest?” John asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

“No, Dr. Dunglison was not interested in women.” She lowered her head, conveying some guilt for betraying a sort of trust. “That was his business, and I didn’t see anything here that I didn’t see from any other faculty member.” She folded he arms and drew a deep breath.

Based on her body language, John felt Brinker was not ready to say much more on the topic, and she probably felt as if she had just said too much. He knew that, if he worked her right, she might open up again, but for that to happen he could not push her any harder right now. He shifted the topic.

“I’d like to see Dr. Dunglison’s office now,” he said. “Would you be so kind?”

“It’s just across the hall.”

Brinker stood and found the correct key, then led him across the large hall that ran along the spine of the building’s east wing. Brinker unlocked and opened the door. Instead of letting John proceed, however, she stood in the doorway, staring into the office.

Brinker let out a hum, then murmured, “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“I guess it’s nothing,” she replied.

He stood silently for a moment and looked in the office. Everything seemed to be in its place. He turned to her, and warmly prompted her, “If you noticed it, it’s probably something.”

Brinker folded her arms and then reached up to rub her chin with her right hand. After a few seconds, she sighed and began, “Dr. Dunglison was very organized. In my job, you see all types—the full range between the disorganized ones who lose everything, right up to the ones who have a system for everything. Richard was the second extreme—
very
organized. He once told me that his purpose as a folklore professor was merely to record and organize. He called himself a glorified filer. He always had a system for everything.” Brinker seemed touched by the man’s self-deprecation and lingered on it for a second. Through a bittersweet smile, she continued, “He said he expended enough energy trying to find and record folklore, so he didn’t need to expend energy trying to find it again in his own office.”

“Well, it looks organized enough in here,” John replied as he surveyed the office. “What’s odd?”

“He kept whatever book he was currently reading on his desk. After he finished it, he would put it over on his bookshelf in alphabetical order. He was odd like that.”

“So… his book is missing?”

She looked at the bookshelf along the left side of the office. “No, he must have finished it. There it is; it was the Dalton book on witchcraft in American folklore.”

“So is everything where it should be?”

“I guess. It’s just odd,” she begrudged with a knotted face. “Yesterday, he said he had just started a new book by Dalton, and that I could look forward to seeing it on his desk the next week or so. He was being sarcastic, because he held up the book and it had a horribly ugly cover. It made me cringe. I told him I would look forward to seeing it go on the shelf.”

Suddenly, Brinker’s face turned red, and John knew the reality of Dunglison’s death genuinely hit her. Her friend and colleague would not be across the hall to lend a bit of levity to her day, turn a caring hand to her simple requests, or give the simple nourishment of respect to her ego.

John walked over to the bookshelf and picked up the hefty book. On the cover, a big goat’s head inside a pentagram glared at him. He flipped it open and started fanning through the pages.

A folded stack of papers dropped out of the book and onto the floor. John could see writing on them in blue ink. With the organizational determination that Dunglison displayed in the rest of the office, John guessed the professor placed the papers in the book very intentionally and then planted the message in Brinker’s mind to cause their retrieval.

“You’re fairly observant, Ms. Brinker. Do you notice anything else out of place?”