The Book of Kills (26 page)

Kreps had read the account of Otto Ranke’s confession. He turned now to that. “Why did he do this?”

“He’s the man,” Kocinski said. “He admits it.”

Kreps narrowed his eyes. “I assume that the professor is no fool. Let us say we indict him and bring him to trial. This confession is our pièce de résistance. He repudiates it on the stand, says he made it for whatever reason, duress, a momentary madness. Where does that leave us?”

Jimmy liked Kreps. A man with a constant sense of impending disaster was someone you could work with. If he had any
beef against the Knights, it was their conviction that some at least of life’s mysteries could be definitively solved. But Phil was a good companion on the investigation and Roger from time to time chimed in with something surprising and useful.

“Roger asked if we had looked into Marcia Plant’s relatives,” Phil said.

“Does she have any? She was alone at the funeral.”

“Just one of Roger’s questions.”

But the two men observed a moment of silence, as if to convince themselves they had taken the question seriously if it later proved significant, but Jimmy certainly didn’t know what Roger was getting at. Nonetheless, he asked Donna de Laredo to check it out. She looked like a pair of glasses wearing a head, and spent the day hunched over her computer.

“What is the family name, sir?”

“I forget: They were married here, it should be on the license.”

Donna had not asked how to do her job. She pursed her lips, then turned back to the completely rational world in which she dwelt, where everything was reducible to combinations of plus and minus, and all errors were human ones.

After Phil left, Jimmy closed his office door, leaned back in his chair, and with closed eyes wrote a draft of an interim report to be stored in the hard drive of his brain.

Item
. Orion Plant, a graduate student of questionable talent, overstayed his welcome and was dropped from the doctoral program in which he had spent too many years.

Item
. Plant had married a local girl, Marcia whatever, dumping the daughter of Otto Ranke to do so.

Item
. Laverne Ranke worked at the check-out desk in the Hesburgh Library, Marcia whatever worked in the Huddle. (Donna could find the name in her Notre Dame records as well.) Orion had not ventured far afield in his quest for female companionship. Laverne had taken her repudiation hard, dwindling noticeably; already a taciturn young lady, she had become all but autistic until Orion renewed his attentions, whereupon Marcia sought consolation with Scott Byers.

Item
. Laverne had been recruited into Orion’s mad campaign to embarrass the university, a campaign that intensified when his protector in the history program, Professor Ranke, perhaps in retaliation, had stopped defending Orion and he had been dismissed from graduate studies.

Item
. When suspicion fell unequivocally on Orion, thanks to the inquiries of Roger Knight, and Orion was being sought, he had disappeared and his body was found near the Fatima Retreat House by Father James while feeding the ducks on a day when an unseasonal snow still lay upon the ground.

Item
. A tire print found at the scene had led to a painstaking effort to match it with a university vehicle which had surprisingly ended with the discovery that the telltale tire was on Roger Knight’s golf cart, the means of transportation of the oversize Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies.

Item
. Russell Bacon during routine questioning suddenly blurted out that he had removed the body from the area of
graduate student housing, using Roger’s cart for the purpose, but denied having murdered Orion Plant. He neglected to say that he had come upon the body on the doorstep of the building in which he and his wife lived, one of the buildings that a few years before had been redesigned for married students, the buildings that had been built for this purpose near the toll road—Fertile Acres, as they were called—being filled to overflowing, with a long list of married applicants seeking a residence on campus. The assumption to that point had been that the body had been found near Roger Knight’s golf cart, hoisted upon it, and driven into the night. This new information seemed to solve the puzzle as to why Bacon had gone to such trouble rather than simply sounding the alarm.

Item
. An additional motive for the deed Bacon admitted to was that he had taken part in a meeting at Plant’s in which Orion announced that he would undertake a solo act that would intensify the embarrassment of the university, namely, in Indian costume to break up a group saying the rosary at the grotto and reclaim the land for the natives from which it had been stolen.

Item
. Laverne Ranke had also been present at the meeting. Ranke said that he had followed his daughter there, watched her leave the meeting, and then followed Orion Plant when he set off for the grotto. He caught up with him, seized the tomahawk, and brought it down savagely on his head. He left him for dead on the doorstep of what turned out to be the Bacon’s building, Orion having sought refuge there when Ranke attacked him.

Item
. The arrest of Scott Byers, and the earlier one of Bacon, were thus rendered unjustified, at least so far as either of them being the murderer of Orion Plant was concerned.

Those were the pieces of the puzzle which, with Otto Ranke’s confession, fell neatly into place. They either confirmed or in any case did not conflict with his statement that he had followed Laverne and, in the circumstances he described, killed his former student.

Professor Ranke sat comfortably through the many grillings to which he was subjected with the serenity of a seminar director whose main interest was to help his interlocutors establish the truth of what he said.

“You were outraged by the events designed to bring the university into disrepute?”

“How could I not be?”

“And you formed the theory that Orion Plant was at the bottom of these episodes?”

“I did.”

“Why didn’t you wait for justice to be done?”

“It is in order that justice be done that I have stepped forward.”

“I refer to the time before Orion’s death. You knew he was under suspicion and that it was only a matter of time, a short time, when he would be charged.”

“I feared that he would escape your clutches.”

“Flee?”

“No. Recent litigation, both internal and external, had shown that the university was at a disadvantage when a conflict arose between the university and a student.”

Ranke reviewed for them the cases he had in mind. Internally,
the plagiarism accusation against Bacon more than sufficed. The man was as guilty as sin, yet he was brazen enough to destroy the evidence that proved his guilt. He showed no more compunction for what he had done than Orion Plant.

“The accused must be presumed innocent, of course, but the fact is that the guilty are usually judged to be innocent.”

There was more. Disgruntled faculty who had been denied tenure succeeded in having painstaking decisions reversed or extracting large amounts of money from the university. As for external cases, he referred his questioners to the way in which first the
Picayune
and then the other local paper had uncritically adopted the cause of those accusing the university of having illicitly procured title to the land on which it was built.

“Against this background, I had every reason to expect that Orion Plant would emerge exonerated and doubtless accorded the status of hero in the matter. I could not abide that thought.”

Ranke, while old, was a strong and healthy man. It did not strain the imagination that, fueled by a father’s wrath, he might have overwhelmed Orion Plant and brought the tomahawk crashing down on his head.

“I do not, of course, intend that anything I have said should be taken as an excuse for the dreadful deed I performed. I acted in the full realization that I was killing another human being and must face the consequences of what I have done. That is why I came to you and told the whole story.”

How tidy it all seemed. Yet Jimmy was not satisfied. Kocinski insisted that the arraignment be scheduled.

“The sooner we get an indictment, the sooner we will expunge the memory of those previous arrests.”

Kreps was impressed by Stewart’s reluctance to make haste in the matter. He adjourned the meeting and set an hour some days hence when he would meet again with those pursuing the investigation. He had clearly been impressed by Professor Ranke’s description of the ambience in which the prosecution would go forward.

“I want no loose ends,” he said.

“Such as?” Kocinski demanded, clearly annoyed by the prosecutor’s postponement of the inevitable. But Kreps stood, and bowed them out. The meeting was over. Kocinski went off in a huff and Stewart returned to his office. There was a note from Donna de Laredo on his desk. “Marcia Plant’s maiden name was Younger.” Of course. He had known that. Must not tell Donna.

PROFESSOR RANKE RE
ceived Roger with all the warm formality with which he would have received him in his office or at his home. He waited for Roger to get stabilized on one of the suddenly fragile looking chairs in the visiting room and then sat himself.

“We meet under tragic circumstances, Roger.”

“I stopped to see Freda. You can imagine her condition.”

A shadow of pain passed over the professorial brow. “The effect of this on her represents my deepest regret. But if ’twere done ’twere well ’twere done quickly. Why should I put off the evil day and wait for the police to work laboriously toward me?”

“Laverne is with her, of course.”

“A great consolation,” Ranke said, looking Roger in the eye.

Roger sought in vain for a way to bring up the matter of Ranke’s embryonic grandson. Indirection seemed indicated. “She seemed radiant.”

“Eventually Freda too will see that a great weight has been lifted from the family. Unforgivable as my deed was, Freda will come to see that I acted, in my way, honorably.”

“As a wronged father?”

“You know the whole sordid story.”

“Of course the renewal of the relationship between your daughter and Orion must have been the last straw.”

Ranke was permitted his pipe and he drew from it a great mouthful of smoke and then sent a series of neatly defined smoke rings toward the ceiling of the room.

“My testimony that I was acting in the name of a wronged university is not false. That a man who had failed to take advantage of the great opportunity offered him by this university should mount such a despicable attack on it was beyond bearing.”

“But any loyal son of Notre Dame had equal motivation with you.”

“I said it was not a falsehood that these outrages motivated me. I did not say they were my sole reason.”

“Or your principal reason?”

In answer, Ranke sent another series of smoke rings upward.

“When did you learn of your daughter’s condition?”

Ranke closed his eyes in pain. “There is no reason to make that more public than it already is.” He opened his eyes. “I beg you not to make this known to the police.”

“You were already sufficiently wronged as a father.”

“Exactly. That a married man should take up again with a girl he had treated so cruelly is more than sufficient for a father to take action. Moreover, I had professional dealings with the scoundrel. He abused my constancy in defending him against legitimate doubts that he was not in fact hard at work on his dissertation. If that had been the case, my colleagues and the graduate school were justified in bending the rules. Besides, they would not have wanted to act contrary to the wishes of the director of the dissertation. When I withdrew my support, Orion’s days as a graduate student were over.”

“Did he ever threaten you?”

Professor Ranke smiled through the cloud bank he had created.
“Ah. You are looking for extenuating reasons.”

“If you felt your life was in danger. . . .”

“Perhaps something could be made of the situation created by my being chiefly responsible for his dismissal. But I cannot testify that he actually threatened me.”

“Actually.”

“Delete actually. I am ashamed of myself. No, I will not try to hide behind the shield of alleged self-defense. A preemptive strike, as we used to say during the Cold War.”

And then, in what would have seemed incredible in the eyes of the uninitiated, the conversation turned to scholarly matters. Ranke wanted to know how Roger’s seminar in Barbey D’Aurevilly was going.

“Roger, I see you as carrying on the work in which I have been humbly engaged. The writing of history is always an ineffectual effort against the forgetfulness of the past. You must continue to give such seminars.”

“Did Orion ever talk to you about the records of Younger Real Estate?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“A room in his home was full of these records. Clearly they had provided material for his campaign against the university.”

“And who is Younger Real Estate?”

“Was. It was the business engaged in by Marcia Plant’s ancestors. Dating back to the nineteenth century while Father Sorin was still alive. Of course, it was not called that from the beginning. But the original Younger dealt in land transactions.”