(2012) Cross-Border Murder (3 page)

“He only sees people by appointment,” she said. Obviously my business card had not impressed her. The names on the card, including mine, were probably unknown to her. Or maybe she had been instructed to stay clear of the press. Most secretaries are. Most bureaucrats are understandably jittery of any publicity they don’t initiate themselves.

“I’ll mention that in the paper tomorrow. I’m sure everyone will be impressed.”

She was not amused. Her boss was an important person. I was just someone to be viewed with suspicion. I went and sat down in one of the three chairs provided for those who were fortunate enough to have scheduled appointments with the Dean.

The three chairs were empty.

The secretary frowned in displeasure. After a few moments she offered what she may have thought was a civil concession. “If you want to phone later I can try to make an appointment for you.” I just shook my head. “I’ll wait until he turns up or comes out that door,” I said, as if I had all the time in the world. I prefer to talk to people before they’ve had a chance to rehearse all their answers. But I was not about to explain that to her.

A buzzer rang on her desk. She rose, went to the door, and after a polite knock, went through it. She shut it very carefully behind her.

In the photo, he had looked too young to be a professor. I assumed he was reading my card and debating whether to see me. In a few minutes, his secretary re-emerged. With a studied indifference she said, “He can see you, but only for a few minutes. He has a meeting at eleven.” She stood aside to let me through, then closed the door behind me.

It was the change in the way he was dressed which struck me first. In the photo he had been wearing a pair of crumpled cords and a cotton t-shirt with some writing on it. He was now dressed like the CEO of a power utility. All I could see as he rose from behind his desk was a blue blazer with silver buttons and a pink striped shirt with a starched white collar. The tie that went with it had been carefully selected to match. He had also gained weight and his blonde hair had begun to thin.

As he motioned me towards a chair, his slate-gray eyes studied me: but like my usual first meeting with a banker, they were careful to reveal nothing: not even curiosity. “So what can I do for you?” He said as he sank back into his chair.

I went straight to the point. “I’ve decided to re-examine the circumstances of professor Monaghan’s death.”

His only response was a slightly raised eyebrow.

“I gather you were part of a group he hung out with around the time of his death.”

There was a hint of a frown. “I wouldn’t quite put it that way. He was one of my professors. I was one of his graduate students.”

“But you attended some of the same parties.”

“I suppose so. A few. We all did. But it would surely be an exaggeration to say that we hung out together, as you put it. May I ask just what reason motivates you to, as you put it, re-examine the circumstances surrounding Professor Monaghan’s unfortunate death?” I felt his slate-gray eyes boring into me. For the first time I actually felt uncomfortable.

“Because Professor Frank Montini died recently.”

He stared past me as if he was trying to recall the last time he had heard Frank Montini’s name mentioned. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said finally in a distinctly neutral tone of voice, “but then I hardly knew him. He was in a different department.”

“He protested his innocence to the very last,” I said.

“To be expected, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. But if he had really been guilty, he could have simply remained silent.”

He shrugged his indifference.

“Did you have an opinion at the time?” I asked.

“About his guilt or innocence?”

“Yes.”

“No. Not really. Why would I? None of my business really. Which brings me to what is indeed my business now, and my reason for agreeing to see you on such short notice.” He leaned forward. There was just a hint of a smile. “My responsibility is to the department of Engineering as it exists today, not to whatever might have happened decades ago when Professor Monaghan was prominent in it. I don’t mean to seem unfeeling,” he said, “but Monaghan and Montini are echoes from a distant past. Almost all of my present faculty were not around then, and as for the students, most of them were probably in kindergarten. A pointless replay of a scandal would be needlessly unsettling.”

As a reporter I had heard so many similar speeches that I just ignored it. “Did the police question you at the time?”

A shade of annoyance had crept into his voice. “No. Why should they?”

“I’m bothered by the fact that the charges against Montini were dropped very suddenly. And that no one else was ever charged.” I tried to make it sound ominous. But he just shrugged. “As I’ve said before, none of my business really.”

He held his hands open, as if to say, well, there you have it, what else is there? He glanced at his watch. “And as I pointed out before, my responsibility is to today’s department which has more than tripled in size since then.” His slate-gray eyes seemed to be testing me. “I would like to see it protected from any spurious muckraking through the past.”

Although I wasn’t ready to concede that raking through the past was necessarily detrimental to any of his students or professors, I suddenly felt out of my league. I didn’t know where to go from here. I thanked him for his time and left. Once in the corridor I cursed under my breath. I had gone into his office on the vague assumption that I could get any academic talking. And I probably could. Most of them enjoy reliving the past, and the spicier the better. But he was now a bureaucrat, with a secretary who made sure that students, academics, and, of course, journalists knew their proper place. I knew I needed to be better prepared if I was intending to snoop around Winston University. I decided to go home and regroup.

When I got back to my seventy year old semi-detached house, there were two messages on my answering machine. One was from Gina. I decided to ignore it for the moment. Last night I had driven her to the motel where she was staying. I did not tell her that it was often used by prostitutes working at a strip joint a short distance down the road. Before she had got out of the car I had invited her to come to the baseball game with me that weekend. I told her I wanted her to meet the cop who had arrested and charged her father. In fact, my motive was the opposite. I wanted Phil Ryan to meet her and decide for himself whether he was still convinced that her father had been guilty.

The other message was from the university’s public relations director, Joe Gibbs. Dean Gooden had obviously not wasted any time. Joe Gibbs and I had met before. I liked him. I decided I would call Gibbs after lunch. A good public relations officer is not necessarily a reporter’s enemy.

I sat down at my computer and made a few notes about my encounter with Dean Gooden. By then it was lunch time. I placed my lunch on the kitchen table and went to retrieve the photo and addresses that Gina had given me. Before sitting down to my lunch I went out on to the balcony and refilled the bird feeder.

As I ate, I studied the photo. The sharp clarity of the enlargement suggested an expensive camera. Examining the accompanying list, I wondered why Mrs. Monaghan was not in the photo beside her husband. Perhaps it was she who had taken the picture. Dean Gooden I had already met. I wondered how much the others had changed. Next to Gina’s father was a short, gnome-like figure with sandy colored hair. He was smiling broadly: a forced smile as if he was anxious to please the photographer. To his right was Professor Monaghan, now long dead and buried, a big stout man smiling arrogantly into the distance. Next to him were, according to Gina’s notes, Steve and Stella Symansky. He was wearing slacks and an open necked shirt. She wore form fitting jeans, and a cream colored blouse and red jacket that put her in a class apart from the others. They looked like a very self-assured couple. The accompanying notes told me that he was now president of Boulder College in New England. At the end of the line was Gina’s mother. She had obviously been pretty back then. Maybe still was. But her smile was timid and uncertain. Was that a part of her character, or had she already known that her husband was having an affair with the person I presumed to be the photographer. On a pad I made notes of the questions that were beginning to occur to me. As I finished my lunch, I glanced at the bird-feeder. Two birds were perched on it, and below a squirrel waited patiently,

I placed a call to the university’s public relations office and agreed to meet Gibbs that afternoon at three. Then I called Professor Harold Hendricks, the gnome-like engineer in the photo. Apart from Dean Gooden he was the only one in the photo still working at the university. He agreed to meet me at the faculty club at four. I finally called Gina. She sounded annoyed. I would have been too, if I had had to sit around a second-rate motel room until well after lunch waiting for a phone call. I gave her an edited summary of my day so far and mentioned the two appointments I had made for that afternoon.

“I want to come along.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said sounding exasperated, “I want to hear for myself what these people have to say, not just get a filtered version from you.”

I hesitated. I had always preferred to work alone. I wanted as much as possible to keep her on the sidelines. I reminded her, as I had done the night before, that as a journalist I had a degree of protection that she didn’t have.

After a pause she said: “It’s my life.”

I thought that over. If her father had indeed been guilty, she had a right to come to that conclusion herself, not arrive at it second-hand. I agreed that she could sit in on my meeting with Hendricks. But I told her my courtesy visit to Joe Gibbs, the university’s director of public relations, would be more productive if I did it on my own. Joe Gibbs did not interest her. I arranged to meet her at the main entrance to the administration building at a quarter to four.

Joe Gibbs had an office that was better than anything I had ever had. It had hard wood parquetry flooring partially covered by an oriental carpet. The mullioned windows had heavy green velvet drapes. They had been pulled aside to let in the afternoon light.

“He didn’t waste much time contacting you,” I said. Joe Gibbs just gave me a vague smile. He stood at the window looking down at the campus.

“I wouldn’t read too much into that,” he said. “He’s a very efficient dean.” He motioned me towards a chair. “Universities have become aggressive, competitive institutions. Not like they were in our day.” Reluctantly he returned to sit at his desk. “Internally there are lobby groups, counter lobby groups, byzantine structures, legions of administrators, everyone zealous of their own turf and, of course, of their powers. And as if that were not enough, there’s anger lurking in every classroom, every meeting room, sometimes I think it has become worse than working in the political arena.”

I placed my hands on the polished arms of the chair. It was a very comfortable chair, designed to make one feel a part of a very important establishment. I said, “I presume the Dean explained the purpose of my visit.”

He nodded. “I got out the old PR file with all the press clippings this morning. It was before my time but I forced myself to read through them.”

Twenty years ago, he had been a reporter on a rival paper. But public relations had paid better. He had gone to work for a banking conglomerate but had eventually switched to the university: maybe searching for some of the tranquility and innocence that had been such a part of our lives as students. But you can’t return to the well of youth without finding that the water has turned brackish.

“So when are you planning to write something?” He smiled. “That is the first question my superiors always ask me.”

“Maybe never,” I said for openers. That caught him by surprise.

“I’m semi-retired,” I explained.

“So then why are you here?”

I explained about Montini’s death and the discomfort I felt about what I had written when the charges had been dropped against him. I mentioned that his daughter had approached me to help clear his name. “But I have no intention of just rehashing an old story. It’s too late for that now. I only intend to write something if I have a very solid reason to do so, and some new facts to back it up. If that doesn’t happen I won’t write anything.”

He inclined his head slightly to one side and nodded, as if he understood. Maybe he did.

“The powers that be, here at the university, are not going to believe that.”

“Do you mean the rector?”

“The rector and Dean Gooden in this case.”

I laughed. “And so I presume I can expect a phone call from someone to someone at the paper.” I was only mildly amused.

He shook his head. “We have a new rector. He’s more sophisticated than that.”

I nodded. But I was dubious. Power still functioned according to the old codes. But maybe he believed it.

“So I come back to my first question,” he said. “What would constitute a good story that you would write and the paper would run? And how soon would that happen, if it did?”

I gave that a moment’s thought and replied prudently. “If and when I come up with some new evidence that Monaghan’s murderer is still out there enjoying the good life.”

We both pondered the implications of what I had just said. I decided it was time to try my gambit. “Otherwise as I’ve said I won’t write anything. But for me to arrive at the right decision I need your help.”

A bemused look flickered across his face.

“There’s always a catch isn’t there?”

“But this time there’s a difference.”

“What difference?”

“If there’s a murderer, there’s a kind of justice to be done. And of course there’s a story. But I can say that the university co-operated. If there’s no murderer, there’s no story. The sooner I can decide that the better. For me, and for the university.”

He frowned.

“So what kind of co-operation would you want?”

“Access to some records from back then. About some professors who may know more than they’ve admitted. The courses they taught. The grants they received. Their class lists. The articles they published.” I had written out a list of those in the photo and handed it to him. “That kind of stuff.”