The Luck Runs Out (6 page)

As I understand, Professor Stott was there, so she asked him, too. Wasn’t that the way of it, Stott?”

“It was. Miss Flackley seemed surprised, though pleased, by the invitation. I myself was of a similar sentiment Mrs. Shandy is a lady of excellent heart and great skill in the culinary art. She spoke of noodle pudding. I accepted with alacrity.”

“No doubt,” said the state policeman doggedly, “but what were you and Miss Flackley doing together at the time?”

“Miss Flackley was trimming the off hind hoof of Odin, one of our college horses. I was making my way toward the pigpens to visit Belinda, about whom I had been experiencing a slight anxiety. Having respect for Miss Flackley’s acumen in such matters, I paused to ask her to accompany me. Miss Flackley subsequently diagnosed Belinda’s ailment as nothing more than a touch of colic and prescribed a slight modification in diet Belinda has a sensitive stomach.”

A spasm that was more than colic passed over Stott’s nobly porcine countenance. “And while we stand here bandying trivialities, God knows what may be happening to her.”

“You call murder a triviality, Professor?”

“No,” replied Stott, “I call it infamous! And I call it equally infamous to be kept here answering irrelevant questions when I ought to be out hunting for my sow. Sir, I can no longer submit to this interrogation. I, too, have my duty.”

The police lieutenant shrugged. “Okay, go ahead and search. Officer Partinger here will go with you. Don’t try to lose him.”

“Why would I do that?” asked Stott in all innocence. “We need every searcher we can muster. Shandy, are you coming? President?”

“Shandy can’t come,” said Svenson. “I’ll be along later. Right now I’m going to call a general assembly and put the fear of God and of Me into every student on this campus. You want action, Stott. You’ll get it.”

T
HERE WASN’T AN EMPTY
seat in the bleachers. All the students were decently covered, since Sieglinde Svenson was not one to stand for any nonsense about freedom of expression, but the coverings ranged anywhere from a bathrobe to a bedspread. A general assembly sprung on them at a quarter to six on a Saturday morning had left no time for titivation.

Down in front of the stands stood Thorkjeld Svenson. They’d had no time to rig a microphone, but he didn’t need one. Even in the farthest reaches of the topmost seats, nobody was missing a word.

“I’m holding each and every one of you personally responsible for finding Miss Flackley’s murderer and bringing back Belinda of Balaclava safe and sound,” he roared. “I’m not accusing you. I can’t imagine any member of this college pulling such a damn-fool stunt, but if you know anything about who did, if you saw or smelled or even thought about anything fishy going on around the pigpens last night you’d better spill it fast. This is no time for false loyalties. You know where your duty lies, and by yiminy, you’re going to do it!”

He reached over and grabbed the state police lieutenant, who, although a big man, looked puny beside him. “If you have anything to say, stop on your way out and say it to Lieutenant Corbin here. If you find out anything later, come and tell me, or Professor Shandy, who’s going to be acting as liaison with the police.”

That was news to Shandy, but he knew better than to argue.

“Now,” Svenson went on, “I’m declaring all classes and extracurricular activities suspended until we get some results. Every one of you, get back to your dorms and put on your working clothes. Get down to the cafeteria and eat your breakfasts, then form parties and start searching. You all know Flackley the Farrier’s van, and you ought to know what a pig looks like. And you’ve all got heads, or reasonable facsimiles. Use them. Stay out of trouble. Remember you’re dealing with one or more murderers. Don’t try to be heroes. Anything you find, you come back and report, fast. Dismissed!”

The stands emptied. Students surged down the field, gabbling among themselves. Looking at the sea of healthy young faces, Shandy felt a surge of pride. They were a remarkably decent lot, by and large.

None of them came forth with any information. That wasn’t surprising. Nobody would dare approach Thorkjeld Svenson with a futile question or a cock-and-bull story. Nobody bent on amorous dalliance would have been apt to choose the pigpens for a late-night rendezvous. Anyway, Balaclava students worked so hard they did little after-hours roistering, except on Saturday evenings. And if any student or students had by any chance got mixed up in a mess like this, they’d hardly come waltzing up to the President in open assembly and say so.

Svenson had mentioned in his talk that the security guards had not been aware of any disturbance. That was interesting. Now that former security chief Grimble had been fired for moral turpitude and neglect of duty, those who’d escaped the ax were more righteously vigilant than ever before. On duty last night had been Silvester Lomax and his brother Clarence, both of them sharp as tacks and straight as dies. They couldn’t be corrupted and they couldn’t be hoodwinked, but they might possibly have been dodged by somebody who knew how their rounds were scheduled. That would be tricky because the routes were changed on alternate nights, but not impossible because each had so much ground to cover.

There’d have had to be fast footwork at the pigpens, though, Belinda’s captors must have been either very well organized or very lucky. Shandy pondered the possibilities.

Pigs had something innately ridiculous about them.

One’s first impulse was to look on Belinda’s disappearance as a joke that had gone wrong, and one’s thoughts therefore turned naturally to some of the less dedicated students. Yet Belinda was in solemn fact an extremely valuable animal. Works of art were stolen not for resale but for ransom these days; why not a pedigreed sow? If professional crooks were involved, Miss Flackley’s murder didn’t seem quite so incredible.

But would real criminals fiddle around making phone calls in a sinister hiss and planting oddments of delicatessen on doormats instead of down-to-business ransom notes? Why hang around and take such risks of being spotted, unless somebody had a lot of gall and a perverted sense of humor?

Somebody did. This wasn’t the first sick joke that had been pulled in the past couple of nights. Shandy thought of those eight inverted horseshoes. That little caper hadn’t been accomplished in a minute, or without a certain amount of noise, and the security guards hadn’t caught the perpetrator then, either.

Helen had told him Stott suspected the Lumpkin Corners crowd of that one, and he himself had mentioned the Hoddersville team, only half in jest. If a bunch of the boys were whooping it up at Sam’s place or somewhere handy, they just might have got to thinking it would be a jolly idea to swipe Stott’s pet pig. They might also know how the security schedule was handled, because things did tend to get around in small villages like these. He couldn’t imagine any horseman’s cutting the farrier’s throat on purpose but a burly drunk struggling with a tiny woman might well do her an injury by accident, maybe without even noticing, and stuff her into the mash feeder thinking she’d only fainted from shock or something. It was farfetched, but not impossible.

So Shandy found himself juggling four possibilities: that the sow had been taken by students meaning a practical joke, by crooks looking for ransom, by competitors trying to demoralize their archrival, or by somebody else for some other reason. A fat lot of help that was.

At least Belinda was probably still alive, though she may well have been tranquillized to keep her quiet while she was being taken away. A sow the size of Belinda would be easier to transport alive than dead, and there had been no blood around except Miss Flackley’s. If Belinda’s throat had been cut, too, the place would have been ankle-deep in gore. “Bleeding like a stuck pig,” was no fanciful metaphor.

As to whether her safety would be enhanced by having several hundred young zealots out looking for her, he wasn’t so sure. However, he could see why Svenson had turned them loose. With the weekend coming up, they’d all have cut whatever classes they had and gone anyway. Organized groups were less apt to get into serious trouble than individual searchers.

Of course if this was a student prank gone wrong, what better cover could the perpetrators have than to be out scouring the woods with their classmates? Shandy wished he could honestly believe in those professional crooks or even the bunch of drunks from Hoddersville, but in ugly truth, the simplest explanation was apt to be the correct one.

He could see all too clearly how the abduction of Mrs. Shandy that same morning might give some muttonhead the notion of staging a parody, and how Belinda might be a logical target. He could see that Miss Flackley’s unaccustomed presence on campus during the evening would suggest the feasibility of using her van to transport the pig. He could envision her being flagged down after she’d left the Home Arts parking lot and asked to go up to the barns because some animal had been taken ill suddenly.

Perhaps the idea was to shut her in one of the barns while the pig was being taken off in the van, but Miss Flackley wouldn’t take kindly to being manhandled. She was a great deal stronger and smarter than might have been expected. Perhaps she’d snatched up the knife to defend herself, and somehow got her own throat cut in the melee. He could see the frantic pranksters who’d so abruptly and horribly become murderers, for certainly this could have been no one-person job, doubling up her body and thrusting it into the mash feeder to get it out of sight. But how could they then have gone ahead with kidnapping Belinda and sending those ridiculous tokens to Stott?

Maybe they thought they had to, so they could pretend they’d left Miss Flackley alive and that her death had nothing to do with the joke they were trying to pull. The pigs’ feet and the pork chop had, after all, been delivered before the official announcement was made, so they might have been able to make out a case for themselves. Perhaps they’d even be telling the truth. Could she have been left shivering at the pigpens with or without her mohair stole, only to have somebody else come along and scrag her?

Who, for instance? What was the sense in trying to speculate before he had any data to work from? He might as well at least go call Helen and let her know he’d been delegated to the no doubt thankless task of pestering the police for information they wouldn’t want to give him. He went to the phone in the ticket office.

There was a local phone book beside it, and on impulse he spun the pages, looking for a Flackley listing. There was none. He thought about this a moment, then rang up Moira Haskins, who had taken the late Ben Cadwall’s place as comptroller.

“Mrs. Haskins, sorry to bother you so early, but something has come up and I’ve got to get at the records right away. Could you come over and open your office?”

Mrs. Haskins, who had no doubt been awakened from well-earned sleep, was not happy at the request. “Who is this, anyway? What’s happened?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s Peter Shandy, and I’m afraid the news is very bad. Miss Flackley, the farrier, has been murdered.”

“You’re kidding!”

“It’s not a subject on which I’d be likely to jest. She was found an hour or so ago, doubled up in Belinda of Balaclava’s feeding box.”

“You mean the pigpen? For God’s sake, why?”

“Apparently it has something to do with the fact that the pig has been kidnapped.”

The comptroller emitted a snort of laughter, than caught herself.

“This is crazy! None of the kids would steal Belinda. They’re all making book on how many babies she’s going to have. I’m betting on seven, myself.”

Shandy couldn’t help thinking what a refreshing change Moira Haskins was from Ben Cadwall, though she obviously didn’t know much about pigs.

“You haven’t a prayer,” he told her. “Seventeen would be more like it.”

“Yeah?” Mrs. Haskins sounded as if she were yawning, as no doubt she was. “Sounds like a plot by P. G. Wodehouse.”

“Wodehouse was funny. This is not. Mrs. Haskins, the state police have just carted Miss Flackley’s body off in a large plastic bag. Her van has disappeared. Nobody knows where she lived or how to reach her people, if she has any. Since you paid her bills, you must have her address.”

“Oh. Sorry, Professor. I’ll meet you there in about ten minutes.”

Shandy went back and explained his plan to Lieutenant Corbin, got a grunt of approval and an injunction to hurry back with the information, and walked up the long path to the administration building. He didn’t really expect Mrs. Haskins to be there in ten minutes and she wasn’t, but she arrived soon after, driven by her husband, who was unshaven, wearing a duffel coat over his pajamas, and agog for details of the murder. Shandy told them what little he knew, then left Haskins sitting in the car while he and Moira went into the aged brick building that had, once been almost all there was to Balaclava Agricultural College.

Sure enough, the files produced a sheaf of invoices, penned in a schoolteacherish hand on yellowed but elegant billheads the original Flackley the Farrier must have had printed back when they did such things with grace and panache. The address was simply, “Forgery Point.”

Shandy dimly remembered going there once with some of his colleagues on a fishing trip. The picture he retained was of mile after mile of grown-over slash, a few shabby clapboard houses, and a disproportionate number of wrecked automobiles. It seemed an odd sort of place for the impeccable Miss Flackley to spring from, though it did occur to him that “Forgery Point” might be related not to crime but to blacksmithing. Perhaps the Flackleys’ forge had been the original reason for the settlement. He wondered if the smithy still existed, and if Miss Flackley had ever used it herself.

The Haskinses gave Shandy a lift back to the animal husbandry area hoping, he suspected, to get a sight of the action. However, there wasn’t much to see except a couple of police cars and a few people milling around, not appearing to be doing anything in particular, although they probably were. He thanked the comptroller and her husband, mentioned that a giant pig hunt was in progress should they care to participate, and took his information back to Lieutenant Corbin as ordered.