Murder is an Art (2 page)

No, it would never work. Fieldstone could never get it past the Board. Unless, of course, he reminded them of the payroll reductions involved …

Sally shook her head and smiled to herself. The Board would never go for it, but it was a pleasant fantasy. Now, however, she had to do something practical.

Like warn Val Hurley that A. B. D. was on the warpath.

2

Sally pushed aside the stack of papers that nearly covered her telephone and pulled the phone across the desk to her. She could never remember whether she was right-brained or left-brained, but whichever it was, she simply couldn't manage to keep her desk uncluttered for more than twenty minutes.

Things just seemed to pile up, and her desk was always nearly hidden beneath piles of student papers and exams, syllabuses, schedule forms, books, purchase orders, magazines, memos, letters, empty envelopes, class notes, the odd Hershey wrapper, and God knows what else. Her old college transcripts might be in there somewhere for all she knew, though she certainly hoped not. She wouldn't want anyone to find out about that D she'd made in algebra when she was a freshman.

She punched in Val Hurley's number and let the phone ring five times before hanging up. She couldn't remember Val's schedule, and God knows where her copy of it was, but she didn't believe he had a class at eleven o'clock on Tuesdays. He could be anywhere, however—in the restroom, in the art lab, in the library, in the bookstore. There was no use trying to track him down. He'd just deal with it if A. B. D. got to him before Sally did.

Sally pushed the phone back across the desk through the accumulation of papers and looked around her office. She had been at Hughes Community College for six years, and she had brought all her books with her from her previous school. With those added to the ones she had acquired since arriving, the bookshelves were as bad as her desk. Worse, maybe.

There were books stacked on top of books and in front of books. There were books on the typing table and on top of the IBM Selectric that hadn't been used since Sally moved into the office. There were books on the filing cabinets and on the computer desk. There were even books in a grocery bag on the floor.

Sally was wondering what she was going to do if she ever got any more books, which of course she inevitably would, when the telephone rang.

She dragged the phone back through the papers, picked up the receiver, and said, “Sally Good.”

“Please hold for Dr. Fieldstone,” said the voice of Eva Dillon, Fieldstone's secretary.

A chill went through Sally as it always did when Fieldstone called, despite the fact that Eva had a very pleasant telephone voice, the kind that made you think she was probably a svelte brunette of dignified mien.

The dignified part was right, and Eva was definitely a brunette, but she wasn't svelte. She had a serious chocolate habit and kept a bag of king-size Snickers bars in the bottom drawer of her desk. She had once confessed to Sally that she ate at least three a day. Sally could identify with this, though she managed to keep her own chocolate consumption down to one Hershey bar with almonds a day. Well, most days, anyway.

While she was waiting for Dr. Fieldstone to come on the line and give her the bad news, whatever it was, Sally said “shit” under her breath a couple of times. She was afraid that instead of writing a memo, A. B. D. had gone straight to Fieldstone's office to complain about Val Hurley's new chair. That would be even worse than writing a memo. Although Fieldstone liked to talk about his “open-door policy” in every faculty meeting and go on at length about how faculty members were always welcome to drop in to see him, he didn't actually like for them to drop in on him at all. He especially didn't like for them to drop in if they had complaints.

“Dr. Good?” Fieldstone said.

That was a bad sign. When he was in a good mood, he used her first name.

“Yes?” she said.

“Could you please come over to my office for a moment?”

Uh-oh. A really bad sign. Otherwise, he would have had Eva ask her to come over. That damned A. B. D. Johnson.

“Of course,” she said. “I'll be right there.”

“Thank you.”

Fieldstone hung up, and Sally leaned back in her chair, which didn't seem quite as comfortable as it had earlier. She sat for a few seconds and straightened some of the papers on her desk, a futile task if ever there was one. But she wasn't going to give Fieldstone the satisfaction of her rushing over.

After she had sorted some of her students' homework into separate stacks, she stood up, made sure her blouse was tucked in, and walked into the hallway, which was practically deserted, as it always was during classes. Most of the faculty members who weren't teaching at that hour were in their offices grading papers or surfing the Internet, and the students who didn't have class were either in the cafeteria drinking coffee or in the game room shooting pool.

Sally walked down the hall, the soles of her sensible shoes squeaking a little on the tiles. The only person in sight was Jorge “Rooster” Rodriguez, the only convicted killer of Sally's acquaintance. He had just come out of his office, and when he saw Sally, he stopped to wait for her.

“You get a call from the Big Guy, too?” he asked.

Jorge had a high-pitched voice that didn't fit at all with his appearance, considering that he looked like a walking advertisement for steroid consumption. His upper body was huge and solid, tapering down to a waist so narrow that Sally had more than once regarded it with a twinge of envy.

She wasn't envious of the rest of him, however. He seemed about to burst out of the dark suit that concealed the elaborate tattoos on his arms. Sally had seen the tattoos in the summer when Jorge wore short sleeves. His arms were covered with snakes that coiled around his biceps; hearts pierced by daggers; weeping eyes; skulls; spiders.

There was supposedly another tattoo on his back, the tattoo that had given him his nickname. Sally hadn't seen that one. She'd heard about it from Troy Beauchamp, one of Sally's English instructors, who had seen Jorge working out in the gym.

“I swear to God,” Troy had told her. “It just about covers his back. It's this huge rooster pecking on the eyes of a corpse. There's no color in it except for the red in the rooster's comb and the blood dripping from the corpse's eye sockets. Creepy? Amen. And Jorge's muscles? Jesus. You wouldn't believe the way he looks. He's like a Russian Olympic weight lifter.”

Weights had a lot to do with Jorge's appearance, all right. He'd done a lot of lifting while serving out his sentence in one of the high-security units of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He'd also earned three degrees during his stay there: his associate's, his bachelor's, and his master's.

Jorge, in other words, had profited from the two primary things that the state legislators, and not a few of the state's citizens, from time to time wanted to deprive prisoners of: weight lifting and education. He still worked out at least an hour a day in the college gym, and he was working on his doctorate at the University of Houston.

“Fieldstone called, all right,” Sally told him, “but he didn't say what he wanted.”

“Of course not. That's part of his technique, a power thing. Keeps people off balance.”

Sally silently agreed. Jorge had pretty good insights into people, a talent that had probably stood him in good stead while he was in the crossbar hotel.

“Did he say anything to you?” she asked.

“Just that he wanted to see me in his office. It must have something to do with the prisons, though, if I'm involved.”

Sally nodded. Hughes Community College offered classes in several of the nearby prison units. The program had begun in a small way, but it had grown to the point that it required its own coordinator. That was where Jorge came in. Who better to deal with inmates, wardens, and prison educational personnel than a product of the system? The college's personnel officer had begun recruiting Jorge even before his release.

“Any lockdowns?” she asked. “Escapes? Problems in any of the classes?”

Jorge shook his head. He had thick black hair pulled back into a little ponytail. With the ponytail and the bulging suit, he looked a little like a B-movie drug dealer. The tassels on his shoes only added to the picture. If he'd been carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster, he would have been perfect.

“If it's not any of the usual stuff, what could it be?” Sally asked.

“I guess we'll just have to wait and let Fieldstone tell us that,” Jorge said.

3

Fieldstone's office was in the Administration Building, so Sally and Jorge had to go outside, not always a pleasant prospect when you live near the Texas Gulf Coast. In the summer, the weather was generally intolerably hot and muggy, and in the fall and spring, it was lukewarm and muggy. There wasn't much of a winter to speak of, but it was muggy, too.

However, now and then a cool front would push through, the sky would clear, the sun would shine, and the air would be pleasantly dry. It was that way as Sally and Jorge crossed the quadrangle to the Ad Building.

“It's a great day to be outside, isn't it?” Sally said.

Jorge said, “Any day is a great day to be outside.”

Sally immediately felt guilty. She was just making conversation; she hadn't meant to remind Jorge of his prison experience. However long it had lasted, and the rumors about that varied, it couldn't have been pleasant.

But Jorge hadn't spent his time in solitary confinement or whatever they called it now—administrative segregation, maybe. Sally wasn't always up to date on prison terminology. At any rate, Jorge hadn't been inside a building all the time; surely he had been allowed an occasional walk outside in the yard.

She thought about asking him, but she didn't know how to go about it. Neither did anyone else, for while everyone was curious about Jorge's prison experience, they found him too intimidating to ask about such a personal thing.

He wasn't deliberately intimidating, but his size put people off. He wasn't just muscular; he was tall. Sally was five-seven, but her head barely reached the top of Jorge's shoulders.

And it wasn't as if he'd been in the slammer because he'd been caught driving ten miles over the speed limit on the Interstate; he had served time for murder. He might have seemed more approachable if he had been imprisoned for some drug-related offense, or possibly even something more serious—armed robbery, say. But murder was a little tricky to work into the conversation.

Like the stories about the length of time Jorge had spent behind bars, the stories about the exact nature of his crime varied. Oh, there was no doubt about the murder. That was well established. But no one seemed to know for sure just exactly what the circumstances had been.

One story had it that Jorge had killed his wife's lover. Troy Beauchamp favored that one, and Sally had heard him tell it more than once in the faculty lounge.

“The way I heard it is that he came home early from work one day,” Troy had said. “And he caught his wife in bed with another man.”

“What kind of work did he do?” asked Vera Vaughn.

Vera was a tall, stout blonde who taught sociology and dressed in leather a lot—leather skirts, leather pants, leather jackets. Sally's opinion was that if the college ever did a stage production of
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS,
Vera would be a shoo-in for the title role.

Vera also had strong feminist leanings and occasionally expressed convictions that Sally thought were based more on emotion and speculation than on facts and research. For instance, Vera believed that the top women marathoners consistently finished behind the top men only because of social and cultural conditioning.

“Who cares what kind of work Jorge did?” Troy asked.

“It could be important,” Vera answered. “A man's self-image is often related to his job. Jorge could have been driven to murder because of low self-esteem.”

Troy grimaced. “I think he was a garage mechanic or something. He might have gotten his hands dirty, but he probably made more money in a week than I do in a month. Anyway, he came home early, and—”

“I don't think mechanics ever get off work early,” Gary Borden said.

Gary taught psychology. He, or at least his wardrobe, had never emerged from the 1970s. He wore Buddy Holly glasses and dressed like a member of the cast of
The Bob Newhart Show,
the one where Bob played a psychologist. The lapels of his sports jackets stretched nearly to his armpits, and his ties were almost as wide. He liked to joke that he was related to Bob's neighbor Howard.

“When I take a car in to get it fixed,” Gary went on, “I sometimes get a call to come by and pick it up at six-thirty or seven in the evening. Those guys put in long hours.”

“Who cares what kind of job he had or what kind of hours he put in?” Troy asked. “The thing is that whatever he did, he got off early, he went home, and he caught his wife in the bedroom with this guy. Pulled him right off her and beat him to a bloody pulp with his bare hands.”

Sally could almost picture it, Jorge standing there in greasy coveralls, his big hands like mallets, grease in the creases of his skin and under his fingernails. He was silently looking down at the battered body of the man who had been making illicit love to his wife. She wondered if he felt remorse.

“The wife called 911 while it was going on,” Troy said. “But by the time the cops got there, it was too late.”

“The cops always show up too late,” Gary said.

Vera had a different slant on things. “I thought that in Texas, it was perfectly all right to kill your wife's lover if you caught them in the act. A typical example of how males manipulate the law, in my opinion.”

“It's not all right,” Gary said. “I mean, it's definitely against the law. But I've heard you usually get no-billed by the grand jury. Anyway, that's not the story I heard about Jorge.”