The Campus Murders (20 page)

“Could you be a little more specific?” McCall smiled.

The young man smiled back. “Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“But I'm not going to.”

“I see. Well, thanks, Graham.”

“For nothing? Advice is cheap.” Then Graham Starret shrugged. “But you better take it, Mr. McCall. It would be a bargain at double the price.” He went into the rooming house, waving.

McCall drove out of Tisquanto, taking the macadam road. The mere thought of the clearing in the woods near the shack made the place on his groin itch.

He missed the dirt-road turnoff the first time and had to backtrack. Evil mood … uptight … he wondered what young Starret had meant.

He found the turnoff this time. It entered at a grassy knoll, then the road curled away in the woods. He was near the river, he knew. Not too far from where Starret had found Laura Thornton.

The clearing was deserted. McCall killed his engine and got out. Through the trees, some hundred yards away, he saw the log building. It had a railed porch.

He started toward it and stopped, looking down. He had stepped on his necktie. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket.

Half-grown fir trees flanked the shack. Then he saw a car, a bright blue fender-dented Corvair. It was parked at the side of the building. So Starret had been right.

McCall sprinted for the cover of the nearest fir tree. No sign of life from the shack. It looked like an abandoned lodge in need of repair; the roof was tacky and the porch sagged. A perfect hideaway for hell-raising college kids.

He made another quick dash to a tree nearer the porch, decided to chance it, leaped lightly over the rail and across the worn boards, and crouched at a window.

He heard muttering inside and risked a look.

It was young Sullivan in there, right enough. He was crouched in a chair staring into space, talking rapidly to some invisible audience. McCall could net make out what the student was saying. Not that it mattered; it was probably transcendental nonsense. The boy was high on some drug; turned on with a vengeance.

McCall kicked the door open and leaped inside.

Young Sullivan did not even look around.

“Sullivan,” McCall said.

It was nonsense, all right, a babble of incomprehensible impressions, a reaching out to a world beyond reality. The babble held steady.

McCall went over to him and shook him. “Sullivan!”

The stream of words dried up. The boy turned bloodshot eyes McCall's way and blinked.

“It's the upstate fuzz,” he said in a pleased way, but very slowly, as if a sensible statement required laborious thought.

McCall dragged a chair over and sat close; their knees touched. “Are you with it, Sully? Enough to understand plain English?”

Then he saw what the young man had been playing with under cover of the tabletop.

“Oh, yes,” Dennis Sullivan said, and he brought forth the pistol, aimed it at McCall's head, and pulled the trigger.

19

The hammer clicked emptily. It had happened too unexpectedly for McCall to react; he would pay for it, he knew, much later, in his nightmares.

It was an old Beretta Cougar .380, known in the handbooks as “the official arm of the Italian Army and Navy.” This one was extra-fancy, a chromed job with a pearl stock. God knew how old it was. But it looked oiled and ready for business. The question was if it was loaded. The Beretta Cougar, McCall knew, held eight cartridges when fully loaded, seven in the magazine and one in the chamber. Sullivan might well have inserted a loaded magazine and forgotten to put the extra cartridge in the chamber. McCall decided that he did not care to play Russian roulette with a speed freak at the controls.

He found that unconsciously he had eased off a bit, getting his legs well under him and his feet raised at the heels, weight balanced forward.

“That's a pretty dangerous thing to be playing with, Sully,” McCall said, smiling. “Have you checked to see if there are any cartridges in the magazine?”

“Why don't I pull the trigger again and find out, Mr. McC?” the student asked, grinning back.

“No, thanks,” McCall said. “I don't think either of us would enjoy the experience. Let's dispense with the firearm, shall we? What do you say, Sully? Put it away?”

“Not till I find out what you want, ol' fuzzy-wuzzy-buzzy. How'd you know where I was?”

“I ran into somebody who said he thought you might be out here at the shack,” McCall said. “So I took a chance and drove out here. I'd like to talk to you.”

“We had our talk.”

“Not one like this, Sully. In this one we'll have to get down to the nitty-gritty. Come on, tuck the pistol away and let's go at it like civilized people.”

Young Sullivan blinked at him. He was evidently slipping into another phase of drug reaction.

“So talk.” He dropped the automatic to the table.

McCall studiously avoided it.

“It was
Inferno
did you in, Sully,” McCall said. “Remember?”

“Inferno,” young Sullivan repeated owlishly.

“That painting? All in shades of red? An abstract that looks like flames licking the roof of a cave?”

“
Inferno
,” Sullivan said, nodding. “Did me in? How d'ye mean?”

“I first saw that painting in your room, Sully,” McCall said gently. “It was one of a group borrowed from the fine arts department that you had leaning against your desk. For some reason—was it because you liked it?—you held onto it for a few days before you returned it. Or maybe you were too high on speed to make a very smart criminal.”

Sully's mouth was open. He seemed fascinated. “Yeah?” he said.

“Because it was Laura who originally borrowed
Inferno
from the fine arts department. I know that for a fact because when it became overdue Miss Smith sent a letter
to Laura
asking for its return. And my information was that when Laura was last seen—you told me that yourself, Sully—she was carrying a painting to return to the department. Obviously,
Inferno
. Days later I find
Inferno
in your room. So you lied, Sully, about having dropped Laura off with the painting at the liberal arts building. You didn't drop her off at all. You took her somewhere and held her prisoner—maybe here, for all I know—and beat the living hell out of her. Why?”

Sully's mouth was still open. “Why?” he repeated. “Why?”

“Chinky-chink shows, as the kids used to say in Chicago.
Inferno
, Sully. Very appropriate. What you should have done with that painting was not return it at all, ever. You should have destroyed it. Then I'd never have known that you were Laura Thornton's beater-upper. You must have been very high, Sully, very high indeed, to try to beat her to death. In fact, I'm sure that's what you thought when you left her down at the river—that she
was
dead. You're a bungler, Sully, and you know what you've got to thank for it. Drugs, probably the same stuff you're on right now.”

Young Sullivan's breathing became shallower and more rapid.

“The question is why you set out to beat Laura Thornton to death,” McCall said. “The answer ties in to Dean Gunther's death.

“A series of threatening letters was sent to Floyd Gunther, hinting that he had engaged in hanky-panky with some coed. A number of them were signed ‘Thomas Taylor.' One of them was signed ‘Lady G.' Why were those aliases chosen by the two blackmailers? Well, what does ‘Lady G' suggest? Lady Godiva, for one. And ‘Thomas Taylor'? Well, if Lady Godiva was a principal in the case, Peeping Tom—Thomas—was certainly another. And what was Thomas's trade in the legend? He was a tailor! So ‘Thomas Taylor.'

“It's wonderful how the human mind traps itself, Sully,” McCall said to the boy. “Lady Godiva—nudity. Peeping Tom—the man who looked on secretly. Translate it into terms of the blackmail letters and Floyd Gunther's predicament, and what do we have? A college dean caught fornicating with a coed, and somebody secretly watching in order to be able to blackmail later. Now blackmail in a fornication case has no teeth without evidence. What is the most damning kind of evidence you can have in a fornication case? Photographic. So that's what Peeping Tom—the secret watcher, the coed's confederate—was doing: he was snapping pictures of the event! And who do we know in this setup is a photographic bug? Why, young Dennis Sullivan.

“So here, Sully, we have you again—the one who beat up Laura Thornton for a reason not yet adduced, and the one who with your coed girlfriend was blackmailing Dean Gunther. That would obviously be Patricia Reed. Pat Reed stripped to the buff and seduced the poor sucker in her busy bed, and you were right there hidden behind something clicking away, and eventually—maybe because Gunther couldn't take the pressure any more and was threatening to expose both of you even if it meant his own ruin—Pat, at your instigation, lured Gunther behind the Bell Tower where you stabbed him to death in another one of your drug-induced frenzies. And later, when it all apparently became too much for the girlfriend and
she
threatened to spill the whole thing, you got Pat to meet you in the Bell Tower and you throttled and hanged her there. You're quite a lad, Sully. Tell me: what part did Laura Thornton play in all this, and what were you trying to squeeze out of Dean Gunther?”

McCall almost did not reach the Beretta. As it was, their hands collided and the pistol smashed to the floor. Their chairs overturned, the table went crashing, and they were facing each other with no more than a yard between them. Then both fell on the gun. Incredibly, Dennis Sullivan got to it first.

McCall jumped in under Sullivan's arms. He caught the boy's wrist and twisted. The gun exploded into the floor; again. McCall kept applying pressure. Sullivan gasped and the pistol dropped from his hand. McCall immediately came up with his fist and caught Sullivan's underjaw. The head rocked back and for an instant he thought it was over. But Sullivan howled and came back fighting like a wounded wolf. He was raging, spitting fire, mouthing obscene threats, and all the time his eyes remained faraway, as if they belonged to another place and time.

McCall, who had no desire to harm the boy, began to wonder if he might not have to kill him.

Sullivan dived at his knees. McCall caught him under the ears, using the boy's own momentum, and sent him crashing to the floor. He slid on his knees, sprang erect and about in a display of agility that widened McCall's eyes, and came back to the attack. But it was a feint this time. At the last instant he swerved and lunged for the weapon on the floor.

McCall kicked at it and in the same maneuver chopped at the student's neck. Sullivan went down again.

“You dumb ox,” McCall panted, not without admiration, “don't you ever give up?”

But the boy popped back like a jack-in-the-box. McCall decided that he had had enough exercise for one day. He chopped down across the nose and followed up with a stiff jab to the midsection and a chop to the throat. Sullivan reeled, his mouth wide, nose bleeding. And still he tried to come at McCall. It was almost frightening. McCall's hand flashed up and he caught hold of the gold earring in the boy's pierced ear and stepped behind him, circling his throat with his forearm and exerting a steady pressure on the earring, down and backwards.

Sullivan screamed and his body stilled.

But he had one more shot in his locker. He wriggled like a seal and came up and at McCall's eyes. The unexpected movement tore the earring from his ear, and he screamed like a pig in a slaughterhouse, clapping his hand to his lobe. McCall brought the heel of his hand up and Sullivan sat down on the floor with a thump and began to cry.

“You know something, Sully?” McCall said. “You're your own worst enemy. Don't you know when you've had enough? Or is it that damned drug? You all right?” He stooped and retrieved the Beretta and dropped it into his pocket.

“You tore my ear half off, goddam you,” Sullivan cried.

“Don't keep blaming other people for your mistakes,” McCall said. He hauled Dennis Sullivan to his feet and dropped him into the chair. The student produced a handkerchief and began to minister to his nose. His eyes were not as glazed as before; the drug seemed to be wearing off.

“All right, Sully.” McCall stood over the boy alertly. “Why were you blackmailing Dean Gunther?”

“I had to graduate,” Sullivan whispered.

“Graduate?” McCall was utterly confounded.

“You wouldn't understand, you cop-fink.”

“I'd like to, Dennis.” I'm dreaming this, he thought.

“My old man's a demon on failure. He's a self-made man and I'm his only son and he wants me—he expects me—to do even better than he's done. He's got a million-dollar business and I'm the heir apparent. He wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale but I couldn't make it scholastically, wound up at Tisquanto and the old man swore if they zapped me from here he'd beat me the way he used to when I was a kid. He'd beat me once, twice a week till I was black and blue. I still get nightmares remembering. He broke my ribs twice. He's a big man—six-six and two-forty-five, and he keeps in shape. He could kill me with one hand tied behind his back.”

McCall could hardly credit his ears.

“So I had to graduate,” the boy said. “I had to.”

“All right,” McCall said softly. “You had to graduate. What did that have to do with Dean Gunther?”

“He was going to expel me. I couldn't let him do that. Because I'd have to face my father, and I couldn't do
that.
”

“Why did the dean want to expel you, Sully?”

“I was goofing off. Marks way down. And then when I hit that creep Snyder … that tied it for Gunther. My campus activities didn't help, either. Anyway, he called me in and said I'd have to leave 'Squanto. I begged him not to kick me out. I practically sucked. I even apologized to Snyder. I'd have got down on my knees if I'd thought it would help … you'd have to know my old man. One big muscle, up to and including his head. A jerk, the King Kong of jerks. With fists like jackhammers.”