Experiment in Crime (16 page)

The game stopped in mid-inning. They ran up to him.

"Is it true," one boy asked in excitement, "that you captured French Paul without even a gun?"

The awe was such as the professor had never before experienced. "Some day soon," he said, "if I'm around, I'll tell you an about it."

"Just us kids?
Promise?"

He smiled at a freckled face. "It's a promise."

There were cars in front of Bedelia's house. One was a grey convertible and a girl sat in it.

"Hello, Martin!"

"Connie! What in the world. . . ?"

"Bill's inside--Double-O. And President Tolver."

"President Tolver!
"

"They're having a conference. They threw me out. Also"--she smiled--"Bedelia said you'd be coming along--and I wanted to see you a second. Hop in!"

He put the paper sack on the ground, against the trunk of a poinciana tree, and sat beside the girl. Anxiety and amazement confusingly filled his mind. Why had Tolver come to Bedelia's house? What would Tolver think when he found the gambler there?

And why had the gambler and his niece called, anyway? Probably to offer unwarranted thanks.

"I had lunch with Marigold Macey," Connie saw.

He started. "I didn't realize you knew her!"

"I didn't. But I called her up. Nice girl."

"Somewhere, in the log jam of his thoughts and emotions, the professor felt a lifting of painful stress. "You aren't--upset--about. . . ?"

Connie understood him. "Martin, I'm very fond of you. But what I'm in love with, I guess, is glamour. I know it doesn't exist--in my mind. I suppose I have to learn it doesn't, in my feelings--before I can care about just one guy."

He said, in a low voice, "Oh."

"Remember the first night I kissed you?"

He would never forget. He nodded.

"Martin, I think you need some advice."

"I need barrels."

"The man--not the girl--is supposed to do the kissing. To begin, anyhow. With a gal like Marigold--"

He flushed. "I know. Once--I--I--"

"Once isn't enough! That's my barrel of advice. And you better go in. They're waiting for you."

President Tolver was a man with reddish hair and light blue eyes. A very large man, but graceful--and gracious. A former science professor with an intuition for diplomacy and a talent for administration. He rose when the professor came out on the porch. Double-O occupied the settee with Bedelia. Between them, they strained its capacity.

"Burke!" the president said. "I tried to phone all morning! But Bedelia fenced you in. I wanted to be first to congratulate you--instead of last."

The professor swallowed. "I appreciate it, Doctor Tolver."

"Magnificent feat! Has the eyes of the whole country on the University! I suppose you're getting--offers--from everywhere--"

"He is," Bedelia said. "But he doesn't know it yet. I've kept him busy."

The president went on hurriedly. "--but I'd like to have mine among them, Burke.

Your friend"--he nodded toward Double-O--"has made the University a most generous gift. Insists it be anonymous. It will enable us to establish at once a tip-top department in your subject. Naturally, we'll offer you the Head. Your salary, as a Department Head, would be doubled."

The professor looked at the gambler. He swallowed harder. "That--that is--

damned fine of you. . . ."

Double-O's adze-like eyes moved out toward the variegated foliage--a stagey green in the last, level bars of sunlight. "Mighty little, considering."

The professor struggled for composure and said to the president. "I'd expected that--my notoriety--would make me undesirable as a faculty member. Quixotic folly!"

"Notoriety! Great heavens! Fame is the word for it! Not Quixotic, man!

Homeric!"

"I'm grateful for the offer. And also for the confidence you showed in me, Doctor, when MacFalkland and the others were 'explaining' me in the Sunday magazine sections."

"I never believed that rubbish," the president said. "I deeply appreciate the fact.

But I can't teach."

"Can't teach!"

All three people were astounded.

He went to a chair and sat down. He stared at the floor--for a moment. "Don't you understand? I have lost my faith in my own scientific position." He had to clear his throat. "I was a believer in intellect. In pure reason. My career was postulated on that. I held crime to be, in essence, a symptom of inferiority. It was an axiom of my lectures.

But--in the past three weeks--" he sighed unevenly.

"You found it different," Double-O said mildly.

"I found it different. Ingenious. Imaginative. Resourceful. Highly organized.

Skillfully employing the most modern techniques. Anything in the world but stupid!"

"Nevertheless," President Tolver put in shrewdly, "you succeeded in trapping them. A man with a higher education, but no experience whatever in their environment.

Doesn't that clinch your hypothesis?"

The professor leaned back in his chair. His body seemed lifeless. He shut his eyes.

Only his voice had a spark. "On the contrary. I used very little intelligence. Cunning, yes.

But what motivated me? What forced stratagems into my consciousness?
Emotion.
Pure
emotion!"

Bedelia said, "Rats, Martin! Harmon himself thinks you're headier than any of his own men!"

"Consider the facts, not Harmon's flattery," the professor answered. "Why did I think--at the start of this whole business--of mailing the money back to Double-O here?

Because I was infuriated at the idea of being robbed! Why did I note the marl on the tires of the sedan and seize a handful of frond ends? Because I was determined to revenge myself on that fat Alsatian, if I could!"

He leaned forward, now, and scowled at them. "Why didn't I give the evidence to the police, or the F.B.I. ? Vanity! Egotism! Why did I spellbind Chuck with the data Double-O gave me? Because I was afraid to die--and stalling off the moment! Why did I think of the stratagem which got me out of that pesthole in Cuba? Because I was crazed with rage over what I thought was murder of Bedelia. Why--even at the end--did I risk Marigold Macey's life to find that launch? Because I had grown to detest the Maroon Gang with all my soul! Nothing of the abstract mind about it! Pure instinct produced such ideas as I had! And that is contrary to everything I have taught!"

There was a moment of silence on the porch. The last bar of orange sunlight faded and the evening was grey.

"Still," the president said, "when you've thought these things over, won't you feel that the social psychologist has a function?"

"Function?" Professor Burke hesitated. "Yes. He has the function of showing that the potentiality of what we call 'crime' exists in every human being. His function is to prove that crime is intellectual
disease
--not inferiority. That apathy toward evil is criminal! A college graduate needs to know more than merely to refrain from crime; he needs to be a lifelong crusader against crime! His emotions--his
instincts
--should be permanently aroused. And that, Doctor Tolver, is as much an inspirational function as a function of teaching. I am afraid such classes would scandalize many faculty members!"

The president, like the gambler, was looking into distances. "Has it occurred to you, Professor, that you're in an ideal situation to launch precisely such a course? A position that would--truly--inspire?"

"It will," Bedelia said, "when he reads his telegrams."

The professor looked incredulously at the president. "You mean, you'd stand for that sort of teaching?"

"We shall welcome it!"

The doorbell rang. Bedelia looked at the watch on her fleur-de-lys pin. "That's the reporters. I told them to come at five thirty." She left the porch before the professor could reply. President Tolver announced the new appointment.

MacFalkland, accompanied by another man, called soon after the others had left.

There was no boom in MacFalkland's voice. His hands trembled. He immediately--and nervously--introduced the stranger. "This is George Drufton, publisher of the
Inter-World
Press.
The Sunday supplement that--appears in so many papers."

Professor Burke said, "Come in."

"My firm," said Mr. Drufton, "owes you amends."

The professor was feeling in a less somber mood. "I should say so!"

"I'm--hideously sorry--" MacFalkland began.

"So I suffer from overrepression!" The professor said, his eyes gleaming. "As a result, I am a bi-cerebral! What in hell is that, MacFalkland?" His colleague had turned scarlet; the publisher was fidgeting. "I am the schizoid type of renegade! My early childhood inclined me, by the law of controposite-neurotic-reflex'--to take up crime!

Gibberish!"

"We realize," Mr. Drufton put in urgently, "that you have grounds for a damage suit, although we have stopped the series. Such suits, of course, are expensive."

Professor Burke now stared at the publisher. "I was 'dead'--so you weren't worried! Not even relatives to fight for my reputation! And MacFalkland here--dreaming up that half-baked psychological explanation of how I came to be a smuggler! I should say I have a suit! However, I won't sue. Rest your minds about that."

"Won't sue?" the publisher repeated, unbelievingly.

"No. All I ask is that Mac here attend my lectures for the next few months. As my subordinate, he has a lot to learn."

"I must say," the publisher murmured, "that's generous!"

MacFalkland seemed to choke.

Professor Burke walked over to him and slapped his back. Slapped it mightily.

"Buck up, old boy! All you need is to get out in the world more!"

"There was another matter--"

The professor turned to the publisher. "Yes?"

"No doubt you are getting offers for your life story. I mean--the real story. . . ?"

"Bedelia says so. I haven't looked into it yet."

The publisher seemed cheered. "I see. Well, in view of the fact that my supplement has such immense circulation, and was the medium which made so many misstatements about you--"

"Misstatements
!"

Mr. Drufton glanced at MacFalkland in a pained way. "Whatever you wish to call them, Professor. I deeply regret it. And I am eager to buy your story. Appearing in my supplement, it would undo the harm that's been done. I will pay twenty-five thousand dollars."

The professor's voice was high. "Twenty-five thousand dollars!"

"Don't accept," Bedelia called, marching unabashedly into the room. "You already have an offer for thirty."

"Thirty-five!" Drufton said instantly.

She smirked at him. "We'll let you know. Now, gentlemen, it's far past dinnertime--and the professor has an engagement at eight thirty."

The professor sat at the dining-room table. "Thirty-five thousand dollars. . . !" he muttered wildly.

Bedelia served soup. "Figure out the income tax, before you get too elated."

"What engagement have I at eight thirty?" he asked, after tasting the soup.

"I told Marigold you'd be over to see her."

He drove the shadowy blocks swiftly.

"She's in the garden," Marigold's mother said.

"Isn't it kind of chilly?"

"The barbecue fire is burning. And the house is full of people who want to meet you. So she went out there, when she heard your car."

The fire made some light and a considerable warmth. She was standing beside it.

"Hello."

The professor did not stop to reflect that he was following instinct rather than reason. He gathered up the girl and proceeded along the lines suggested by Connie Maxson.

"I trust," he finally said, "you won't mind being a professor's wife."

Her curls shook--horizontally. "Nope."

"Because if you did mind, you'd just have to bear it, somehow."

"Martin."

"Yes?"

"Will you promise not to hunt criminals again?"

He considered. "It seems unlikely I ever will. But promise? No. I won't promise."

Martin Burke had found himself. Intuitively, he knew it. He always would know--

now. It satisfied her and she put the satisfaction in simple words. "I guess you're boss--"

"You're darn right I'm boss!"

Their silhouettes became a unit which threw a complex shadow on the grass.

Impatiently, the judge strode to the hedge and leaned through the opening. They had stepped off the lawn and his pineapple was menaced again. He started to protest, grinned instead, and turned back to the house. His guests could wait. And the hell with the pineapple.

Professor Burke's first class of the new year was held, at the request of President Tolver, in Memorial Hall and attended by the faculty, by reporters, and by certain guests, among whom was a tall man with level grey eyes and his beautiful niece--a couple pointed out by hundreds. There were no absences among the regular students. All other undergraduates who could crowd into the hall were present. Bedelia sat on the platform.

"The topic of my last lecture," Professor Burke began, "was crime, vice and civic corruption. I am going to repeat that lecture because, since giving it, I have obtained new material on the subject."

The distinguished guests laughed. The undergraduates whistled and stomped.

Only Miss Orme--the student with ensnooded hair that resembled a beaver's tail and the firm life purpose of becoming a social worker--disliked the new course. It was too realistic, she felt: too harrowing--and not intellectual enough. Professor Burke had deteriorated, in her opinion. One day she entered his office to tell him so. She found him with Miss Macey in his arms.

"Come on in," he grinned at the shocked student. "Another branch of socio-psychology. Courtship. Fascinating study!"

Miss Orme fled, and in the next semester, changed over to economics.

THE END