Murder is an Art (9 page)

“Where do you think you're going, fella?” the uniformed cop asked. He was a short, blocky man with thick black hair on the backs of his hands.

“Back to my office,” Jack said.

“Nobody leaves the premises,” the officer said. “Right, Chief Desmond?”

“It's all right for him to go,” Desmond said. “He didn't find the body. He just wandered onto the scene.”

The officer didn't look happy to hear that news, but he told Jack that he could leave.

Jack left the building again and headed back to his office. For the first time, he began to feel the full impact of what had happened. Val Hurley was dead. And he wasn't just dead; he'd most likely been murdered.

For a moment or so, Jack thought he might be sick to his stomach. He'd seen dead bodies before, sure, but they'd always been in funeral homes, safely stowed in caskets. And they'd all died of what people liked to call “natural causes.” They hadn't been lying on their office floors, and they certainly hadn't been conked in the head with little statues of
Winged Victory.

Or maybe Val hadn't been conked in the head at all. On some of the crime shows that Jack had seen, there were very clever criminals who planted false clues to throw off the police. Maybe that's what the statue was—a false clue.

Somehow, though, Jack didn't think so. He thought it was a real clue, and he was sure that Desmond and the two local cops would think so, too.

Which meant that there was a killer in Hughes, Texas, maybe even on the college campus right that minute. That thought made Jack's stomach churn a little faster.

As Jack walked back to his office, James Naylor passed him going the other way. Naylor's head was down, and the dean looked distracted. Jack didn't blame him. Fieldstone had probably called him with the bad news.

Jack turned to see where Naylor went. Sure enough, the dean was headed straight for the president's office. Naylor was slick, smart, and had a way with words, as Jack well knew, but no amount of fast talking was going to smooth over the murder of a faculty member.

For the first time, Jack wondered who'd done it. A couple of suspects immediately popped into his head, and he wondered who else knew what he did about certain members of the faculty.

He also wondered whether he should tell the police. He decided that he would if they asked. Otherwise, he was going to keep his mouth shut.

If he didn't, someone might start to think that
he
had a motive to kill Val Hurley, which was, of course, totally ridiculous. Unfortunately, the police might not see it that way, since he had practically the same motive as a couple of other people had.

Better not to think about it. Better to think about his Buddy Holly article, which was almost finished. He could go back to his office and polish it up a bit more, and then grade a few papers before his World Literature class, which would be discussing
Medea.

For some reason, thinking of
Medea
brought him right back to Val Hurley. He knew he was making some kind of unconscious connection between Val's death and the tragedy of Jason, not that Val was any mythological hero. But Medea had killed Jason's sons out of revenge. What was that line in the play? Something about how a woman wronged in love was capable of anything.

Jack shook his head as if trying to shake the thought out of it, but it was no use. He couldn't quit thinking about Medea and her revenge. It was going to be a long day.

13

Sally Good popped the last bite of the Hershey bar into her mouth, leaned back in her chair, and savored the sweet taste of the chocolate and the crunch of the nut. She'd had a hard day, as well as a long one, and if anyone at Hughes College deserved a Hershey bar with almonds, she did.

After a few seconds of savoring the chocolate, Sally took a few swallows of water from the plastic bottle on her desk. It wasn't really designer water, though it had a designer label. She'd drunk the original water, which had tasted just fine, but since then she'd refilled the bottle several times from her home water faucet. That water was a lot cheaper, and Sally didn't notice much difference in the taste.

She set the bottle back on the desk and allowed herself to think about what had happened to Val Hurley. Poor Val. The police had concluded that he'd been killed by the little statue of
Winged Victory
that she had seen on his desk so many times.

“Crime of opportunity,” Eric Desmond had said. “Someone came in, saw the statue, and clobbered him.”

The local plainclothesman, whose name was Weems, hadn't agreed. “Crime of passion, most likely. Someone had to be pretty upset to hit him hard enough to crack his head open.”

Weems was tall, thick-waisted, and sure of himself. He spoke as if he investigated murder cases all the time, though Sally knew that there were very few murders in Hughes.

Sally wondered what Val had done to make someone angry enough to kill him. And she wondered who the someone could possibly be. Could there be any connection to the missing picture?

“It's always a possibility,” Weems had said when she'd asked him about it during what had seemed to be an endless question-and-answer session.

But it was clear that he didn't really think so. It was also clear that he wasn't going to take any suggestions from some woman English teacher who didn't know the first thing about police investigative procedures.

So Sally had answered all his questions as best she could, though she wasn't of much help. It wasn't her fault that she didn't know about Val's enemies—or whether he even had any. She'd been his division chair, not his best friend.

Of course, there were always the Thompsons. Weems's eyes lit up like halogen lamps when Sally mentioned the Thompsons. Here was something he could believe in.

Sally wasn't sure how much of the story she should tell, but Fieldstone wasn't around to advise her about the best interests of the college, and it was a murder case, after all. So she told the whole thing, only slightly edited for the protection of the school.

“I'll bet the husband was really pissed when he found out his wife was posing nude,” Weems said.

He was so pleased with the possibility of real suspects that he was practically rubbing his hands together. To Sally, he looked like a man who badly wanted to make an arrest and get things all tidied up before the news of the murder even got out. Fieldstone and Naylor would love him.

“I have no idea what the husband thought,” Sally said. “I tried to call him last night, but I wasn't able to get in touch with him.”

“He's skipped?” Weems said, looking more pleased than ever. “That's Very interesting. Excuse me for a minute.”

The uniformed policeman, assisted by Desmond, had been going over the crime scene, taking pictures and measurements, maybe even dusting for fingerprints. Sally wasn't sure about that part, since Weems had asked her if there was somewhere they could go for a chat. They had been sitting in an empty classroom, which Weems now left.

After a few seconds, he was back. “I called in to have a check run on the Thompson guy,” he said.

Sally wondered what they would find out. Probably nothing.

Weems continued to question Sally for a while, but she finally convinced him that she'd told all she knew. He gave in and said that she could go but that she should “keep herself available” for further questioning.

Sally said that she would be right there on campus or at home and left the gallery. What she wanted right then more than anything was a Hershey bar. Or two.

She'd settled for one. After she licked the last traces of the chocolate from her fingers and wiped them on a tissue from her purse, she tossed the tissue in the trash can.

*   *   *

It was time to go home. She'd been hiding behind the closed door of her office for most of the afternoon, and she hadn't answered any of her calls, not even the one from Fieldstone. The calls had been picked up by her answering machine, and she could return them tomorrow.

If she felt like it. Only the one from Fieldstone really mattered. The others were from faculty members who'd heard about Val and wanted to find out what Sally knew.

She wasn't sure how much she knew, but she was sure that she wasn't going to tell anything. One thing she'd learned in her tenure as a quasi-administrator was that the less she said about anything the least bit controversial, the better off she'd be in the long run.

She looked at her desk and thought for a millisecond about trying to straighten it. No, she wasn't that desperate for a distraction.

She told herself not to worry about Val's death. The police were on the job, and they'd soon figure out who'd killed him. She knew that Desmond had taken the guest register from its white column, and she supposed it was always possible that the killer had been stupid enough to sign in.

She thought she could figure out Desmond's reasoning. To him, it was a crime of opportunity. Someone had come into the gallery, signed the book, and later happened to see Val in his office. The murder had happened and the killer had left, forgetting in his haste to rip out the register page with his name on it.

Sally wondered why she was thinking of the killer as “he.” Val had had plenty of relationships with women. Vera Vaughn for one. He could just as easily have been killed by one of them as by a man. While Vera might object to being considered a suspect, she would have to admit that Sally should give her an equal opportunity.

It was too bad that the gallery didn't have a security camera. Sally had suggested that one be installed a year or so earlier, but no one had thought that student paintings were worth the expense.

Desmond had been the leader of the opposition, in fact, arguing that to cover the gallery properly, at least three cameras would have to be installed.

“And who'd want to steal any of that stuff?” he'd said. “Amateur art is what it is. Some of that stuff looks like they just threw the paint on the canvas and smeared it around with their fingers, like kids in kindergarten.”

Fieldstone and Naylor had agreed with him, so there had been no cameras installed. Now, however, the camera might have proved its usefulness, and Sally would have bet a month's salary that one or two or three would soon be put in place. The school was great at closing barn doors after the horses had already disappeared.

Sally wondered again about the missing painting. There was a student painting gone now, and it certainly wasn't any masterpiece. Why had someone taken it? She might not even have noticed that it was gone if there hadn't already been a problem about it, but now she felt that it was a part of the solution to the crime.

Find out who took the painting, she thought, and you'd have Val's killer.

Not that she had any intention of trying to find out who had taken the painting. All she wanted to do was go home, give Lola a kitty treat, and take a nice warm bath.

But of course, she didn't get the chance.

14

Ellen Baldree was standing just outside Sally's office door, her hand raised to knock. Both she and Sally were startled, and Ellen dropped her hand, narrowly avoiding hitting Sally in the face.

Not that she tried too hard to avoid it. Ellen was Sally's one genuine enemy among the Hughes Community College English faculty. She had applied for the division chairmanship before Sally's hiring, and she was still thoroughly resentful that an outsider like Sally had been chosen instead of herself.

Nothing that Sally did met with Ellen's approval, and Ellen often worked in subtle ways to undermine any changes that Sally tried to make. Sally had once overheard Ellen saying, “I've outlasted two other department chairs, and I'll outlast this one.” Sally had been tempted to say, “We'll see about that, dear,” but she had refrained. She didn't want to be accused of eavesdropping.

“Oh, you're still here,” Ellen said, smiling, as if to imply that Sally left the campus early every afternoon. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about a little matter that's come up.”

“Certainly,” Sally said, resisting the urge to heave a heavy sigh. “Come in and have a seat.”

Sally sat at her desk, and Ellen sat in the chair beside it. She was a short woman of about fifty-five with dark eyes and short hair that was dyed an amazing shade of black, so black that it almost seemed to absorb the light around it.

“I suppose you've heard about Val Hurley,” Ellen said.

Sally nodded. “Yes. I've heard.”

Ellen turned slightly sideways and leaned on Sally's desk, or rather on one of the piles of paper that lined the edge.

“You know, of course, that he was playing around with a student,” Ellen said.

Sally frowned, not trying to hide her disapproval of the direct statement.

“I don't believe that's been proven.”

“Ha,” Ellen said, showing what she thought of the necessity of proof. “You're his division chair, and as you must know, you're responsible for his behavior. So naturally, I thought you'd be informed about what was going on.”

Sally took a deep breath. “I'm not responsible for Val's behavior any more than I am for yours.”

Ellen drew back. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I'm not anyone's keeper. What people do on their own time is no concern of mine.”

“We're talking about a student here. And an incident that occurred on school property. In any lawsuit, you could be held liable.”

Sally didn't want to get into a discussion of the law with Ellen Baldree, who probably knew even less about it than Sally did, if that was possible. But she was beginning to get an idea of why Ellen had come by, so she decided to cut through the nonsense.

“Are you hoping that I'll be fired because of Val's murder?” she asked.

Ellen pretended to be shocked. “Of course not! How can you say such a thing? I was simply concerned about you. A person in your position can't be too careful.” She stood up huffily. “I can see that you don't want my sympathy or advice, however, so I'll be going.”