…A Dangerous Thing (10 page)

"Nobody but you would smoke Cost Cutters," Tomlin said.

Fox bent down and started picking up the butts.
 
"You two help me with these.
 
You're in this as deep as I am."

"Not until you tell me about Walt
Melling
," Burns said.
 
"Then maybe I'll help you."

Fox straightened, dropping the butts back on the floor and dusting off
 
his hands.
 
"All right.
 
It was last Thursday, just after Assembly.
 
I was going through my desk to get notes for class when
Melling
came in.
 
He was upset, all right.
 
His face was just about as red as Mal said it was."

"I thought he was going to have a stroke," Tomlin said. "I mean, he was
red
."

"Why?" Burns asked, though he thought he had a pretty good idea by now.

"He said that Henderson had been hitting on Dawn," Fox said.
 
"He said that he was going to, and I'm quoting here, 'beat the little worm to a pulp.'"

"Why come to you?" Burns asked.

"Because I'm his department chair," Fox said.
 
"He wanted me to have a talk with Henderson before the beating was administered.
 
I got the idea that if I was effective, maybe the beating wouldn't even be necessary."

"Does Boss Napier know about this?" Burns asked.

"I didn't tell him," Fox said.
 
"But I advised Henderson to go to Dean Partridge.
 
She should know about things like that.
 
Has Napier talked to her?"

Burns didn't know.
 
Things didn't look good for
Melling
if Partridge remembered
Melling's
feelings and reported them to Napier, however.

"What about it, Burns?" Tomlin asked.
 
"You think it was
Melling
?
 
He could've gone to Henderson's office and confronted him.
 
Melling's
a pretty big guy.
 
He wouldn't have much trouble knocking a twerp like Henderson through a window."

"I don't know," Burns said.
 
"
Melling
doesn't seem like the type."

"Anybody's the type," Tomlin said.
 
"Besides, he probably didn't mean to kill him.
 
He just wanted to bust him in the chops.
 
Right, Earl?"

"Don't ask me," Fox said.
 
He pulled out another Cost Cutter and lit it with his green
Bic
.
 
"I suppose it could have happened like that."

"I bet that's just what Eric Holt wants everyone to believe," Tomlin said, getting out a Merit Menthol.
 
He lit it and blew a smoke ring.

"What do you mean by that?" Burns asked.
 
He was beginning to wish he hadn't quit smoking.

"You're supposed to be the hot-shot crime solver," Tomlin said.
 
"You figure it out."

Burns looked out the front door of the boiler room.
 
Students were beginning to walk by on their way to class.
 
"We don't have all day," he said.
 
"Why don't you just tell me."

"Maybe you've forgotten about Henderson thinking he knew Holt," Tomlin said.
 
"But I haven't."

"I talked to Henderson about that," Burns said.
 
"He couldn't place Holt.
 
Holt probably just looked like someone Henderson knew at one time."

"Or somebody he'd seen," Tomlin said.
 
"Like on TV."

"TV?" Burns said.

"
Unsolved Mysteries
," Tomlin said.
 
"
America's Most Wanted
."

"Oh," Burns said.
 
Recently, Tomlin had become a devoted fan of "reality" television, especially the kind of shows that related to law enforcement.
 
He was a loyal viewer of
Cops
as well as the two shows he had just mentioned.

Then Burns thought of something else.
 
Where had Holt been last night?
 
He had a class in Main on Tuesday evening, but he had been nowhere to be seen during all the excitement.
 
Burns would have to ask someone about that.
 
He didn't think he would mention it to Fox and Tomlin, though.

Instead, he changed the subject back to Henderson.
 
"Is there anything else you haven't told me, Earl?
 
Anything that might be useful to the investigation, I mean?"

"What do you think might be useful?"

Burns had in mind the student he had seen running from Henderson's office earlier in the semester.
 
"Harassment of students.
 
That kind of thing."

"I really shouldn't talk about that," Fox said.
 
"It's confidential."

"Not now," Tomlin said.
 
"Henderson won't care.
 
He's dead."

"Right," Burns said.
 
"So what about it?"

"Well," Fox said, taking a drag off the Cost Cutter and then tossing it on the floor, "as you probably know, Henderson was a very strict grader.
 
So naturally there have been complaints about him.
 
There always are when someone tries to maintain high standards."

"What about other kinds of harassment?" Burns asked.
 
"We've established that Henderson liked women."

"There's been one complaint this year," Fox said, making Burns think again of the girl who had left Henderson's office in tears.
 
"But I'm sure that had nothing to do with Henderson's death, and I'm not going to tell you the woman's name.
 
She wouldn't have killed anyone, and certainly not Henderson.
 
She probably wouldn't have gone near his office with a bodyguard, much less alone."

"Did you talk to him about the woman?" Burns asked.

"Of course.
 
He tried to pass it off as a student upset about a grade, but I think he got my message.
 
I haven't had any complaints since then."

"Maybe no one killed him," Burns suggested.
 
"Maybe it was an accident, or suicide."

"Sure it was," Tomlin said.
 
"You just keep right on thinking that.
 
But I'm betting it was murder, and I'll be surprised if that Holt wasn't mixed up in it."

Burns thought about the movement he had seen in Henderson's office.
 
Was it just a shadow?
 
Or had someone been in there?
 
Burns wished he could be sure, one way or the other.

Burns was about to defend Holt again when a bell rang.

"Ten minutes till class," Tomlin said.
 
"Gotta go."

"Me too," Fox said.
 
"See you later, Burns."

"Yeah," Tomlin said.
 
"You still have a lot of stuff to tell us."

"What, for instance?" Burns asked.

"You haven't mentioned what Henderson looked like when he hit the sidewalk," Tomlin said.

"I don't think you want to know," Burns said.
 
He didn't like to think about it, and he couldn't imagine why anyone else would want to hear such a description.
 
But then you never could tell about Mal.

Tomlin and Fox went out of the boiler room, but Burns stayed behind for a minute, picking up the cigarette butts that Fox seemed to have forgotten about.
 
Burns wasn't afraid of being caught in the company of smokers, but he didn't like to be an accomplice of litterbugs.

He tossed the butts into a trash can near the door of the boiler room and went outside, patting his palms together to get some of the ash off them.
 
Since the night before, springtime had arrived in full force.
 
The sun was shining, birds were singing in the pecan trees, and the air was filled with the smell of cow manure.

The maintenance crew was spreading the manure on the grounds, and Burns knew it would produce quite green grass in the near future.
 
It always did, though the smell was certainly unpleasant for a few weeks.
 
Franklin Miller had discovered, however, that manure was much cheaper than commercial fertilizer; in fact, it was given to the college free by Harley Gibson, a part-time teacher of agriculture courses.
 
Harley's real job was raising cattle, and his feed lot was full of manure that he needed to get rid of.
 
So the college got green grass, and Harley got rid of his manure.
 
It was an arrangement that suited everyone except maybe those who had the scent of manure in their nostrils every day.

Burns decided that on such a beautiful day there was no need to go back to his office.
 
He didn't have a class for fifty minutes, so he had time to pay a visit to the library.
 
What better to do on a lovely spring day?

As he walked toward the library, Burns reflected that in a way teachers lived their lives backward.
 
For most people, spring was a beginning, and the fall was the end of something.
 
But for teachers, spring was the end of the year.

Graduation might symbolize a new beginning for the students, but for the faculty it meant that another class was gone, with most of the students never to be seen again.
 
Fall, with its incoming freshmen and the first days of class, was really the beginning of the adventure.

Poor Tom Henderson.
 
Spring had really been the end of things for him.
 
He wouldn't be seeing any more freshmen or starting any more classes.
 
Burns supposed that he ought to pay a sympathy call on Henderson's wife, though he really didn't know her that well, and he hated doing things like that.
 
Maybe, he thought, Elaine Tanner would go with him.

T
he last person Burns expected to see in the library was Boss Napier, but of course the police chief wasn't there to look at the books.
 
He was looking at Elaine Tanner.

"I'm sorry," Burns said, stopping in the doorway of Elaine's office.
 
"I didn't know you had company."

"That's all right," Elaine said.
 
"R. M. and I were just talking about the case."

"Is that so?" Burns looked at Napier.
 
The police chief was sitting in the chair by Elaine's desk, and there was a bowling trophy at his feet.
 
He didn't appear any happier to see Burns than the English teacher was to see the cop.
 
"What do you have to do with the case?"

Elaine pushed her glasses up on her nose.
 
"Well, I don't really know, but I
am
associated with the college, and R. M. says that a person might know something important without realizing it."

It bothered Burns that Elaine referred to Napier as "R. M."
 
It bothered him that she seemed to be fascinated with police work.
 
And it bothered him that Boss Napier was sitting there in her office when it should have been obvious to anyone that she knew absolutely nothing about Tom Henderson.

He didn't say any of those things, however.
 
He leaned casually on the door frame and said, "That's certainly interesting.
 
Have you been able to tell the Chief anything?"

"Not about the case.
 
But we've been talking about the baseball team.
 
Have you been to any of the games?"

Burns had not.
 
HGC's baseball team wasn't much better than the football team, which had won one game in the last two years.
 
But that suddenly didn't matter to Burns.

"I've always been a baseball fan, though," he said.
 
Napier looked at him darkly, which encouraged Burns to go on.
 
"In fact, I played for a couple of years."

That was true.
 
He had played second base in Little League more than twenty years before.

"Let's forget about baseball," Napier said.
 
Burns thought the man was obviously jealous in the face of a genuine athlete.
 
"Let's get back to Henderson."

"I'd better leave," Burns said.
 
"I don't want to get mixed up in that."

"What do you mean?" Elaine asked.
 
"Why you're one of the best assets R. M. has here on the campus.
 
You've helped him out more than once."

Burns smiled modestly and kept his mouth shut.

Napier wasn't smiling, but he surprised Burns by saying, "She's got a point, Burns.
 
You remember that I told you to let me know if you found out anything?
 
So what have you found out?"