Experiment in Crime (5 page)

Professor Burke conducted his last two recitation classes with unusual vivacity.

His students, being themselves in good spirit, attributed it to the same cause: imminence of the holidays. Had they known that on the previous night he had defied and successfully outsmarted five members of the Maroon Gang, with the aid of a blonde who looked not unlike a movie star, they would have been flabbergasted beyond precedent.

They had, of course, no such knowledge. He intended to divulge it months later--

when he was thoroughly detached from it. A professor could mention gambling "last year" with decorum. "Last night" was far too recent.

At noon, he finished his seminar on freshman socio-psychology and started across the footpath through the Bermuda grass to the College Inn Tearoom. Here, he encountered Miss Marigold Macey--because she had been waiting for him.

"Hello," she said. "I wanted to ask you a couple of questions." This was a mild deceit for he was meant to presume the questions referred to his science.

He said, "I was just about to have lunch. Perhaps. . . ?"

"That would be divine!"

Professor Burke did not, as a rule, dine with students. Their "gay banter" seemed, to him, insufferable twaddle. Miss Macey, being somewhat older, might be looked upon as an exception.

The tearoom smelled like the hot raisins in its infinitudes of muffins-a large chamber with oak pillars where the waitresses were semicostumed in starched, colored aprons. They found, luckily, a table for two.

Miss Macey had seen to it that her curly-casual hair-do was in proper condition, her lipstick was on straight, and her white sandals were immaculate. As she had said to Wally Stratton, she was not an extraverted Southern belle. Thus she was not able to sit on his desk casually--pat his hand, hold his arm, call him "honey" in a becloyed manner, bat her eyes at him, or switch herself about. The circumstances did not leave her without certain resources.

After they had ordered lunch, she looked up at him with a polka tempo in her large, brown eyes. "I'm getting a great deal out of your course, Professor Burke."

"I'm delighted!"

"I really wanted to apologize for being so impertinent, yesterday. I wish I hadn't been."

If she only knew!
he thought. He beamed at her. "Argument is the staircase on which knowledge climbs." It sounded fuddy-duddyish. He wondered what fuddy-duddy had said it--and realized he had coined the maxim himself! "You know," he said, in a less sententious tone, "it's very dull when there isn't any--criticism or resistance. You get the feeling that you're not really teaching anybody anything. Just setting up echoes from sources that won't retain the sound at all."

"I never thought of that. It must be discouraging." She returned to her

"impertinence." "What I did yesterday was very unfair. Nobody in his right mind expects a professor to do the sorts of things he presents in theory."

He found himself trembling, slightly. Miss Macey possessed the power to affect him. And what she had just said supplied a perfect opening for an exchange of such affects. He ate a forkful of creamed chipped beef. "As a matter of fact," he finally said,

"and in the strictest confidence, I--understated the case yesterday. I wouldn't want it to get beyond you--"

Her lips were parted. The expression in her eyes now was entirely uncontrived.

"Of course not!"

"--but I've had a good deal more--ah--vivid experience with the world of crime-with gangsters, gambling, and so on-than most people."

"No! You--Professor?"

He raised one shoulder and let it fall. "I've won--and lost--" he added hurriedly,

"at roulette. Not--recently, of course. I've seen gunplay--"

"Gunplay! Where?" He was unsure that the use of firearms merely for hold-up constituted "gunplay" in the technical sense. He hastened away from the subject. "One or two of the nation's foremost criminals know me. At least one is somewhat beholden to me."

"Why--that's the most wonderful ever!"

He frowned. "Wonderful?" He was beginning to feel that he had overstepped. But the effect on Miss Macey was a pleasing radiance. The brevity of his sleep on the previous night had, no doubt, made him slightly toxic--and the toxins had perhaps produced a lightheadedness.

"Wonderful--of course," she said. "But you know"--her eyes were disturbingly bright--"I think I sort of suspected it. I had a hunch that inside--underneath--you were entirely different."

"No man," he replied, "keeps all the cards of his personality face up." He felt the figure was particularly apt. "No man--and especially, no professor."

"Couldn't you come over to my house, sometime? Dad and Mother would love to meet you. I've often talked to them about you. Or--wouldn't it be fair for me to get an extracurricular education from you?"

Extracurricular education. It was an interesting phrase. "I'm afraid--from what I've heard--that I'd have to fight my way through a swarm of male undergraduates."

Miss Macey laughed--and stopped laughing. She said gently, "You wouldn't have to fight at all, Professor."

That did it.

Women seldom acknowledge the fact; more often, they repress it vigorously; but the fact remains, as all men know: there is a certain contagion in romance, at least among males. The man who breaks down and kisses Girl A is more liable to kiss Girl B than the man who held himself aloof from A.

What was happening to the Professor was a variant of that phenomenon. He was looking at Miss Macey--thinking about Miss Maxson. He recalled, with the utmost clearness of detail, his sensations at the time of her kiss. Or kisses. He perceived that the same sensation--or possibly a different and even more powerful one--could be produced by, or elicited from, another: Marigold Macey. It is a shattering experience. He stared at the girl in a way which, he reasoned afterward, must have been appalling. She merely blushed a little and looked away. He decided to ask her when he might see her at home.

A hand pounded his back. "Wellll-Burke!"

The trancelike mood collapsed. He turned. Feebly, he said, "Ah. MacFalkland."

"What are you doing--flirting with my golf partner?" He saw surprise. "Yeah! She and young Stratton and Mrs. Ames and I have a foursome this afternoon, old boy. Hi, Marigold!"

"Oh, I see. Very pleasant."

"You ought to get out more, Burke," MacFalkland said. "Rode by your lecture hall yesterday. Heard you droning away. Well--see you by and by, Marigold!"

He strode away, waving heartily at people here and there in the room. Professor Burke sagged. MacFalkland was, after all, a natural leader--the sort of man who should head up a department.

"He's a friend of Daddy's," Miss Macey said uncomfortably. "Daddy's a judge, you know."

"I didn't."

"Yes. Mac--Professor MacFalkland--works with Daddy on several things. Slum clearance projects."

The luncheon regressed into a rather ordinary professor-student meal.

His schedule wound up, that day, at four. He walked home, reflecting on the range of moods which accompanied any regular route, such as his. Item one, Miss Macey. He could see her happily married to such a chap as that ex-pilot, Stratton. Item two.

MacFalkland. When the University could afford a full-scale Socio-Psychology Department, MacFalkland would be the director. He, Burke, would live in the imminence of that boisterous voice and sudden back-slap. The third item was more difficult to define: a vague, almost sad sense that a bright light had winked in his life--and gone out.

Bedelia called from the side porch. "Want tea?"

He came around the house.

"Your car's been hauled to the garage. The man estimated it would cost around a hundred dollars."

"Gosh." He munched a bit of orange cake.

"I sponged your dinner clothes. With alcohol--for the lipstick. And sent them to the cleaner this morning."

"Thank you, Bedelia."

"There were pieces of fern in the pocket."

"Fern? In the pocket?"

"I didn't know what it was, either. I took it to Alice Beardsley. She's secretary of the garden club."

"However--oh!" He smiled faintly. "Last night. I really was dramatizing myself, Bedelia. Looking for clues. Observing closely. All sorts of idiocy. That wad of plant stuff came from the hinge of the sedan that held us up."

"It did?" she leaned forward interestedly.

"What of it? Hedge somewhere."

"It only grows on certain Keys. A subspecies. The fronds are much wilder on one side than the other."

"You don't say!"

"Which means, of course, that car last night had very recently made a trip to the Keys."

"Marl."

"What?"

"I said 'marl.' There was whitish marl on the tires and wheels. The kind you see in ruts on those little side roads in the Keys."

"That proves it! Alice gave me a list of the Keys where the fern is known to grow.

Only four or five. We could drive down Sunday. . . ."

"Drive down? What on earth for?"

"Aren't you curious? Wouldn't you like to know just
what
a carload of gangsters were doing in the Keys? And
where
they did it?"

"Heavens, no! Why should I? Fishing trip, perhaps. Maybe they own a juke joint down there. What of it?"

"I would be mighty curious." She settled back. "Do you remember the tires?"

"Diamonds and dots," he said. "Alternating. But I'm not going on any wild-goose chase in the Keys. I'm going to finish up the marks for the month, and eat dinner, and read Conover's
Hidden Social Culprits
--and get a good night's sleep. I'm tired out."

He was not too tired to hurry down the stairs when, at six, she called him to the phone. There was something in Bedelia's voice. "Hello?"

"Hello, darling!" His reaction was like near-electrocution-short of fatal, but violent. "Miss--Maxson!"

Bedelia put the lid on the veal curry, quietly.

"I wheedled your number out of the University operator. What you doing this evening?"

"Well--I was--that is--"

"I'll pick you up around eight-thirty-after supper. . . ."

This time, he made it more effectual. "I really couldn't, Miss Maxson. I've got work to do. And--my dinner things--"

"The hell with your dinner things! Wear shorts, if you feel like it. A certain person wants to meet you."

He opened his mouth to say it was utterly out of the question. But the light had winked on again. And it was not his doing. He gave her the address.

Bedelia was elated. "You know, Martin, girls aren't any different now, from my time. They simply go out and act the way we merely used to feel."

"I have no business letting her do it."

"You have no business missing such an opportunity! Even if only for my sake--so I can get a look at her. I'll be at the window curtain, sure as shooting!"

Miss Constance Maxson drove up quietly, walked through the lush front yard, and knocked on the door. Bedelia answered, and called up the stairs for the professor. He came--rather nervously. "You've met?"

Connie nodded and Bedelia boomed, "Prettiest girl this house has seen in ages!"

The car at the curb was a convertible, long and grey and brand new. Connie drove toward Miami. She seemed to be serenely pleased with the world--and not inclined to talk.

"What happened?" he finally asked, breaking through their occasional amiable platitudes.

"Double-O will tell you. How do you like this car?"

"It's a beauty."

"It's yours."

He gasped. "Mine!"

"From Double-O. In repayment for your coupe!"

"I couldn't accept it! It's--fabulously magnanimous. But I couldn't think of such a thing!"

Connie smiled. "I told him you'd refuse it. You know, Professor, you're something of a sweetheart." After a while she said, "I suspect that Double-O may be a shock to you.

You better get set."

"I'm quite prepared to meet him on his own terms."

Connie turned over the new grey convertible to the doorman of the Bombay Royale, whisked the professor through the lobby so fast he only glimpsed the photomurals of Hindu temples, and took him to the roof in a private elevator. On the roof he could taste the sea and hear a rumba band playing in the patio far below. The girl knocked at the door of a small penthouse; it was opened by a butler.

"Come in, Miss Maxson. Professor Burke, good evening," the butler said.

The professor experienced a series of stupefactions. The room behind the butler was furnished with modern pieces and a few Eighteenth Century French chairs. A fire was burning on a marble hearth. There was a white cat curled under the piano. On the walls were etchings of cats by Peggy Bacon and a magnificent print of a Cézanne.

A man rose from a chair which was set in front of corner bookcases, beside a lamp and a small table. He turned a book face down. This he did slowly, unhinging his long frame-and smiling. The book was Professor Burke's own
Ruminations of a Socio-Psychologist.

"Very kind of you to come over," Double-O said. "I should really have called on you. I've been reading your collected lectures. Most interesting. Before the evening's over, perhaps I could add a few bits to your theory of crime. It was theoretical interest that brought you to the Egret last night, my niece says."

His eyes were twinkling. He held out his hand.

Professor Burke looked at Connie in a sort of frenzy. "Niece?" The tall, lanky gambler said, "Oh--oh!" He cocked an eyebrow at the girl and then at the professor.

"Who did she say she was?"

"I told him," Connie answered, giggling, "that I was a hostess. It's true enough. I think he assumed I was your moll, Bill. So 1 let him think so-for punishment."

The professor was scarlet. "I honestly--as a matter of fact--the truth is--I made no estimate."

Double-O walked to the grate to hide his grin. He poked the fire. "Women," he said, "are cads, Professor. Born bounders. Connie's mother is my half sister, and hardly proud of the fact. I'm the family black sheep. Connie herself, however, has a drop of the restless Sanders blood. This year--since no polite institution for young ladies could hold her--I hired her to keep people happy at the Egret."