The Memorial Hall Murder (23 page)

“Mr. Maderna? This is Sloan Tinker. I wonder if you could help me out. I've just learned that the Harvard Planning Office hasn't reopened yet after the Thanksgiving break. I understand that you have on file a duplicate set of plans and elevations of some of the buildings in the North Yard. By any chance do you have a set of plans for Memorial Hall?”

“Why, yes, Mr. Tinker, we do. As a matter of fact—”

“Well, good. I'm meeting with the Vice President for Alumni Affairs. We'd like to look over the plan of the basement to see how extensive an office could be set up down there on the site of that explosion when work on reconstruction resumes in the spring. We're looking for more floor space for alumni affairs, and we just wondered if the space in Memorial Hall would be adequate.”

“Well, yes, of course, Mr. Tinker. You're welcome to anything you want.”

“Very good, Mr. Maderna. I'll come over to examine them later this afternoon.”

“You know, it's funny, Mr. Tinker. You're the second person today to want to look at those very same plans. Professor Kelly was in here just now, looking at them too. It never rains but it pours.”

“Mmmm, is that so? Oh, Mr. Maderna, it occurs to me that I may be tied up a little later this afternoon. What if I came over to look at them now?”

“Well, certainly, Mr. Tinker. Come on over. I'll be right here.”

Chapter Thirty-two

He carried his broom down the steps of the basement entry beside the south door and pushed it along the corridor, staring upward at the ceiling. According to the plans in Maderna's office, the pipe in Crawley's room had once been part of the ventilating system for the old kitchen, back in the days when the basement under the great hall had housed a whole underground population of kitchen staff. The ducts to the fan room had come from every direction. The one from the small dining room off the great hall, the room that was now Crawley's office, should have run along a line right about here. But if the duct still existed up there over his head, it was now hidden by the low ceiling. Well, then, where would it change direction? Somewhere it would make a ninety-degree turn into the room upstairs.

The ticket office. He turned around and looked at the window of the office belonging to the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. Then he leaned his broom against the wall and peered into the window, holding his hands beside his face to diminish the reflection from the surface of the glass. The room looked abandoned. Good. The orchestra must have moved its headquarters somewhere else. Then he smiled in triumph. There was the pipe, as big as life. A fat round pipe emerged from the northwest corner of the room and turned upward, disappearing in the ceiling. That was it. Upstairs it would reappear in the corner of Crawley's office.

So it was just a matter of disconnecting that elbow joint. Then, if there was any more banging on Dow's end of the pipe, the sound would be cut off right here. That is, if the fellow was still alive enough to hit the pipe at all. Chances were, he was gone by now. The knocking had apparently stopped. Maderna had told him, in response to the discreetest of inquiries, that there was no problem with Mr. Crawley's pipes any more. Dow's strength had been phenomenal, but after all, the interval had been so long—what, six weeks? Longer than six weeks. He couldn't have held out much longer. By now he was probably … So this maneuver was just for the sake of a little insurance. And then later on one would come back again and provide still another little increment of safety, that extra little push of effort that a good job required. It was only a matter of taking the trouble to be thoroughgoing. After all, that was what had got him where he was today. He wasn't a genius, he knew that. He didn't even have a long string of degrees after his name. It was just thoroughnèss, that was it. Doing a job well, no matter how big or small it might be. That, and a commonsense understanding of how to choose the simplest means to an end, whether the task at hand was the selection of a president of Harvard or the repair of a blown-out fuse.
Economy of means for maximum effect.
The only question remaining was what means to apply in this particular case. Something odorless, of course—that was beyond question. Odorless, but highly effective. Carbon monoxide would do the trick. It was so simple, after all, so perfectly simple. People committed suicide with it every day in the week by merely shutting the garage door and starting the engine of the family car. As soon as he could lay his hands on a small pressurized tank of carbon monoxide he would come back, reconnect the pipe in the ticket office, and let himself into the room upstairs during Crawley's lunch hour so that he could work unobserved. The broad pane of glass in the ticket window of this basement room was too thin and transparent a barrier. Two doors protected Crawley's room from observation, and the windowless outer door could be locked. Then it would simply be a matter of tapping the pipe in Crawley's office and inserting the nozzle of the tank into the hole.

He unlocked the door of the ticket office, stood on a chair, jerked the elbow of the pipe free at both ends, and stuffed the open ends of the pipe with wadded sheets from a newspaper that was lying on the counter.

Now let Dow hit the pipe with all his might and main. Nobody would ever hear him again. The pipe went nowhere at all. It was connected to nothing.

Chapter Thirty-three

It was Miss Plankton's last lesson before the concert. Miss Plankton sat in the middle of the stage on one of the old Sanders chairs and struggled through the most disastrous of the rapid passages for the second violins.

“No, Miss Plankton,” said Vick, “you start upbow here, you see. Look, I've got an idea. Why don't you just leave out this prestissimo part altogether? I'll put a parenthesis around it, and you just stop playing when you come to the parenthesis, okay? Then you can come in strong on the quarter notes at measure 77.”

Jane Plankton's cheeks were pink with disappointment. “Oh, too bad. Oh, don't you think if I were to practice harder? That part, it's so thrilling! I mean, where he's singing about the refiner's fire and the violins are like little flames! Oh, I do love that part! I feel so sure I could do it with just a teeny bit more practice!”

“Well, all right, then. Let's just take it again. Slowly.
TEEdeedeedee deedeedeedee, TEEdeedeedee deedeedeedee
…”

SQUEEscrawscrawscraw scrawscrawscrawscraw, SQUEEscrawscrawscraw scrawscrawscrawscraw.
Vick leaned back and watched Miss Plankton's bow flop across the string. Miss Plankton was pretty bad, but it was the altos who really worried Vick. She felt her fingers stiffen with worry as she thought about the altos. There were places where they brayed like donkeys. And they just couldn't seem to manage those long passages of sixteenth notes in
He shall purify
and
Unto us a child is bom.
The sopranos were just great. They could lilt out those sixteenth notes like little pieces of icicles. But the altos were sloppy and heavy. They blurred the sharp edges and messed the whole thing up.

There was only the one rehearsal left, that was the trouble. She should have had plenty of time to prepare the Christmas concert, they had begun working on
Messiah
so early in the fall. But the Collegium had been invited to join the Glee Club in the football concert with Princeton, and then she had been so worried about the performance with the Boston Ballet that she had set aside a lot of rehearsal time for that—too much, because the
Carmina Burana
had turned out to be child's play. Well, she had planned the entire schedule badly. The last rehearsal would be the first one with orchestra and chorus together. There simply wouldn't be time to go over those sloppy melismas again. She would just have to hope the altos would somehow turn over a new leaf.

Miss Plankton's lesson was over. She jumped up, loosened her bow, popped bow and fiddle into her violin case, and began pulling layers of sweaters and jackets over her moth-eaten tweed suit. Then she pulled on her brown rabbit-fur hat, and her small face peeked out beneath it like that of some clever little forest animal.

“Oh, Miss Plankton,” said Vick, “wherever did you get that wonderful hat?”

“It is wonderful, isn't it?” said Miss Plankton. “It's Brother Wayland's. He shot the rabbit himself, as a boy. When Cambridge was all woods and fields out where all those traffic circles are. And Brother Evvie caught fish in Fresh Pond. Isn't that remarkable? So different now! Thank you so much for the lesson, dear Victoria. Oh, how I shall practice!”

Vick followed her to the door. “Where do you live now, Miss Plankton?” she said. “In the same house? Do you live in the same one you grew up in?”

“Why, yes, of course.” Miss Plankton swept her violin case in a generally westerly direction. “It's over there a ways.”

“You know, if you wanted to, you could live here.” Vick spoke cautiously, looking over Miss Plankton's head at the pointed arch above the north door. “There are all these rooms downstairs, and I think I could probably fit you into one. It's rent-free, you know. It's just a matter of—”

“Oh, goodness me, my dear, thank you. But I have a
perfectly
good home of my own.”

I'll just bet you do, thought Vick. A cold-water flat somewhere. Some bare little walk-up. Miss Plankton was probably living on next to nothing. Too proud to admit she needed help. In the great gray rectangle of the open door she was a queer silhouette, all angles and knobs beneath her furry hat. “Oh, doesn't it look like snow?” gushed Miss Plankton. “Oh, I do hope it will snow! Oh, doesn't it feel like Christmas?”

The dear old soul. How brave she was. What a hard life it must always have been for her. Even in the old days. The family must have kept themselves alive by hunting and fishing. They must have lived like pioneers in the old days in Cambridge. Oh, if only the old dear could stay on pitch. If only she wouldn't try to play the tricky parts. If only the altos would shape up …

Vick pulled the string of her key out of the neck of her blouse and ran the whole length of the corridor. She turned the key in the lock of the instrument storage closet and took out her cello. She would practice for a while to fill up time. She had to do something to keep her mind off the concert until three o'clock, when Rosie Bell and Mr. Proctor were coming to work on Mr. Proctor's aria. Rosie was perfect on the trumpet part, of course, positively dazzling, but Mr. Proctor went all haywire there at the end, so Rosie had volunteered to help him out.

Vick carried her cello back to the stage, jerked it out of its case, set up her music, tightened her bow, tuned her strings, flipped the pages of her music, and began practicing the most fiendish of the Popper exercises Ham had assigned at his last lesson. Popper would take her mind off the conceit. Oh, those God-awful double stops in thumb position. Vick jammed the side of her thumb down hard across the A and D strings, working her way up the scale of D flat in thirds, diminishing the interval a fraction of an inch as the scale rose higher and higher. Oh, look out, that G flat was sharp. Watch out. Try again.
Thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck, thuck.