The Square Root of Murder (29 page)

“I thought marijuana was decriminalized a couple years ago.”

“They go back and forth, the state legislature. Right now a small amount of marijuana is just a ticketable offense, except Henley passed a town ordinance prohibiting smoking it in public. The state law is so complicated and basically unenforceable that most uniforms ignore it, unless someone makes a nuisance of himself.”

“Like Dweezil.”

Virgil nodded. We walked back to the office area where it was significantly quieter.

“Funny how different people turn out,” Virgil said. “My dad has newspaper photos on his office wall of himself and his buddies with their arms locked, protesting this and that. You can tell they’re yelling at the cops and you know my dad must be pretty proud of his past or he wouldn’t be displaying the pictures. But probably a couple of years after the pictures were taken he goes to law school, then he marries my straight-arrow mom and ends up a prosecuting attorney. He’s probably the same age as Dweezil.”

“It was an interesting generation,” I said, my mind wandering to my own mother and her political activism in her heyday.

Then my renegade mind wandered farther from home. To Dean Phyllis Underwood. There had to be some important reason why she wanted whatever was left in Keith’s office. Could her motive have to do with a crime that Keith found out about? She did, after all, belong to the generation that was known for activism that sometimes led to violence.

I ran the numbers. How old was she, other than the one hundred and ten years old she seemed to most of us? I remembered a discussion at a faculty meeting about extending the mandatory retirement age for administrators. I wished I’d paid more attention. My best recollection was that the dean, a case in point at that meeting, was in her early sixties, making her now about sixty-five or–six. That put her smack in the late sixties as a college student. The college website would give her year of graduation.

What if she did something back then that wouldn’t look so cool now for a college dean? Something she wouldn’t be proud of or want shown off as Virgil’s dad did? I pictured the young, if she ever was, Phyllis Underwood. Smoking pot, protesting, maybe even getting arrested. I would have laughed hysterically if I weren’t surrounded by cops who might misunderstand my behavior and carry me away.

Virgil and I took seats at a small table in Interview One. Whew. My ex-student Terri had been right about the difference between this room and Interview Two. Interview One was air-conditioned, even cooler than the outside areas, and the chairs stood even on four good legs.

“Are arrest records available to the public?” I asked Virgil.

He raised his eyebrows. “Anyone in particular?”

“Just curious.” I pointed to my bag of cards and notes. “It’s about another matter entirely.” Maybe, maybe not, I said to myself.

Virgil sat back. “On the arrest records, yes and no. You have to have a ‘need to know’ such as the press would have, but your average citizen would not. The press is entitled to the report for factual information, like name, age, date and time of the arrest, but we can limit what else they can see.” He gave me a questioning look. “Does that help?”

“A ‘yes’ would have been more help,” I said.

“Well, there are some exceptions, like with Megan’s Law where you can find out if someone has been arrested for certain sex crimes. In fact, you can check that on the Internet. But if your car is stolen and the police recover it being driven by someone they arrest, you’re entitled to the theft report but not to the arrest report. Once the case was charged by the DA’s office for a criminal prosecution, it used to become a public record, but not anymore. There’s this thing called ‘probable cause’—”

I held up my hand. “Thanks. Any more is too complicated.”

“And you teach math.”

“Trust me, the Chi-square test is much simpler.”

 

 

It flashed by me that breaking into a police department or courthouse records office would be harder than slipping into Keith’s office in Franklin Hall. I’d have to come up with another way to dig into the dean’s past.

I couldn’t fault Virgil for his pleasant cooperative attitude. He’d mounted the crime scene photographs on a small bulletin board that he’d propped up on the table. We sifted through card after card and note after note. Some were easy to dismiss.

I’d found only one sample of Lucy’s handwriting, on a sign-up sheet for the picnic potluck in the middle of June. Why the month-old sheet was stuck between other notes, I had no idea, except to guess that I’d scooped up and moved a pile of pages to be filed from my campus office desk to my home office desk, making the latter even messier.

What Lucy had written was: “LUCY BRONSON—MEDIUM SIZE MACARONI SALAD.” Lucy had capitalized all the words describing her offering, with great flourishes for the Ms and the Ss. Like both Casey Tremel and Liz Harrison, Lucy had used tiny circles to dot her Is. None of the three samples were even close to the red markings on Rachel’s thesis pages.

Fran Emerson had a tiny scrawl of a style. No match. Robert, Keith’s chairman, had such widely spaced words in the sample that I made a note to check with Ariana about what it meant, besides the fact that Robert Michaels hadn’t tampered with Rachel’s yellow pages.

Dean Underwood’s handwriting checked out also as “no match.” If she did have an embarrassing blot on her resume it wasn’t enough for her to kill him. But maybe enough to snatch away what was in his files about her while she had the chance.

And so it went, with biology chair Judith Donohue and student leader Pam Noonan, and others who frequented Franklin Hall on a regular basis.

Until we came to the samples from the newly anointed Dr. Hal Bartholomew. Virgil and I agreed that of all the samples, Hal’s was closest to the markings on the sheets strewn over the crime scene. Besides the overall appearance and slant to the letters, Hal’s strangely curved capital A on his postcard with “All’s well in Bermuda” looked like a perfect match to the A in “Awful Data,” written on Rachel’s thesis. This, combined with a couple of other unique strokes, caused us to set aside Hal’s samples and create a new pile. When we’d gone through every card and note, Hal’s were the only samples in the pile.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Virgil said. “Neither of us is a professional, and we might be way off base.”

I wasn’t exactly hoping that Hal was a killer. What had I been thinking anyway, isolating all my friends as potential murderers? Now that it seemed one of them might actually be guilty, I was devastated.

I forced myself to skip past the high probability that Hal might have killed Keith. Whatever it meant, I was more than ready to see an end to the investigation. No matter what Virgil had said about how long he spent on a murder investigation in Boston, four days were enough for me.

Hal’s motives were legion. Over the years, Keith had ridiculed him, voted against a bonus for him, and challenged his eligibility to take a turn as physics department chair, to name a few affronts. Even Hal’s glee over receiving his doctorate was sullied because of Keith’s constant reminder of how many times Hal had had to redo the experiments his dissertation was based on.

I breathed a long, heavy sigh. “What’s next?” I asked Virgil. I meant “for Hal.”

“I’ll get our expert to look at this. I don’t see any reason to give him the whole bag, but I’ll pick a couple out of the pile and add them, just as a kind of control.”

“It sounds very scientific,” I said.

“Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“I’d never want to spoil your image.”

 

 

I stuffed all the “no” votes back in the grocery bag and headed out to my Fusion. I turned on the A/C and sat for a couple of minutes with my phone, checking emails and messages. The most exciting news was a “thumbs up” text from Bruce about his medical tests. I texted back, “Good 4 U. CU.”

On par with that was a text from Rachel: “Home again. THX.” Maybe the handwriting angle convinced Virgil who convinced Archie that Rachel was innocent. I was tempted to call and say THX to Virgil, too, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I did keep my phone on in case he called me with his expert’s results. I wondered if the turnaround time for handwriting analysis was as long as Virgil claimed it was for fingerprints and DNA evidence.

I hoped both Rachel and I had seen the last of the Henley police building.

Hal Bartholomew’s handwriting seemed to be scrawled across the heavy, humid sky over Henley, Massachusetts. I couldn’t imagine the mild-mannered physics teacher planning out a murder. And it was clear that Keith’s murder was not a spontaneous crime of passion. You didn’t just happen to have a needle with a lethal dose of poison in your pocket and use it in a moment of anger.

I thought of Hal’s family—hard-working Gillian and five-year-old Timmy, who adored his father—and the effect Hal’s conviction would have on them.

Maybe I was jumping the gun. I secretly hoped our amateur handwriting analysis was way off, like a data point on a graph that misses the average curve by orders of magnitude. It would mean back to square one, however, which might be where Rachel was standing. It seemed a no-win situation.

A few more minutes and I’d have been able to convince myself that the handwriting expert would tell Virgil he’d never seen a poorer match in all his years of experience. I stopped short of thinking what that would mean for Rachel or for finding the real killer.

What to do next?

With the afternoon free for research, a good mathematician would immerse herself immediately in her field. Follow-up papers weren’t expected sooner than eight to nine months apart, but even that schedule required steady application to the work. I told myself I could afford a short break, having mailed my latest differential equations paper so recently. And what better way to keep research skills sharp than to comb through decades-old newspaper articles?

One part of me admonished: The dean is right; this obsession with the kind of investigating best left to the police was distracting me from what it took to be a full professor. Nonsense, said the other part of me, you’re smart; you can do it all. And what if the dean wants you off the trail of Keith’s killer so you won’t find her own involvement under the next rock?

I pulled out into traffic and headed home, stopping on the way for a veggie sandwich to go at a deli. The tantalizing smells distracted me and I spent a couple of minutes shopping for a good aroma to take with me for dinner. A container of mushroom sauce and a package of handmade pasta seemed perfect for a non-cook to create a special meal for Bruce tonight. Last night’s pizza feast with Virgil, while an information windfall for me, interrupted our tradition of a nice dinner on Bruce’s first night off shift.

I’d made my decision about the afternoon. I’d spend two hours on the Internet looking through archives to see what I could unearth about the dean’s past. If nothing surfaced, I’d drop that line of inquiry.

Arguments were so much easier to settle when it was Sophie vs. Sophie.

 

 

While I chewed on cucumber slices, sprouts, avocado, Monterey jack cheese, and very thick wheat bread, I finished the police-themed children’s crosswords I’d started in the PD waiting room. Later I’d print out my standard cover letter and send them off to New York.

I brushed crumbs from my shirt and headed for the computer in my office.

I was about to vet our dean. I blinked away the vision of her pinched face and forties hairstyle, and her reproachful eyes. I knew why she was wagging her finger at me.

The good news was that the dean had gone to college in New York, where there was an excellent chance that the newspapers maintained archives as far back as I needed.

Whenever it came up that Dean Underwood’s alma mater was in Manhattan, many of my colleagues and I wondered how she’d managed to come away from that experience with such an unimaginative, stale outlook on life. Now I entertained the idea that she was a reformed hippie and, like many from that era, rued her reckless youth. I considered it my job to find evidence of any chinks in her straightlaced armor.

I clicked away and found newspaper archives back to the eighteen hundreds. I smiled. “She’s not that old,” I said to my computer screen.

I asked for a range of dates between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy for starters. The dean never married. It was hard for any of us to think she’d even dated, so Phyllis Underwood would have been her name then also. Unless of course she was in the witness protection program. As fascinating as that would be, I hoped it wasn’t true.

At the top of the list delivered by my search engine was an obituary for a Phyllis L. Underwood in nineteen thirtythree. A great aunt? Not important.

The Internet was a major source of diversion for me. I’d often start out looking for one item, say, casual shoes, click over to an article listed in the margin on how footwear has affected the progress of women’s rights, and then stop to read statistics on clothing manufactured in the U.S. vs. in China. What should have taken ten minutes often took an hour. I’d once sat down to order plane tickets to Philadelphia for a conference and ended up a half hour later with new bedding for the guest room.

Today I tried to stay focused to meet my self-imposed deadline of three o’clock. I didn’t know exactly when Bruce would come by, and there was always a chance Ariana would drop in. She’d been very solicitous through this ordeal, dropping sweet-smelling bath products and healthy baked goods at my doorstep several times.

Searching for the dean’s name didn’t get me far. Phyllis Underwood had apparently done nothing worthy of newspaper reporting in the range of years I’d plugged in. Typing her name in the general search engine, on the other hand, got too many hits. I’d have to open link after link to determine if any of the thousands of hits applied to the dean.