The Square Root of Murder (30 page)

I needed a new tactic. My best guess was that like the majority of her peers during that era, the dean had experimented with marijuana. My not-very-vast knowledge of harder drugs told me that there would be more lasting effects and those users would have a much harder time entering the mainstream.

Good thing no student in my applied statistics class was looking over my shoulder and copying down my methods today.

I entered “marijuana” followed by the dean’s alma mater and the date range.

Much better. The first hit was a link to an article on a survey taken at the school in nineteen sixty-nine. An overwhelming eighty-one percent of students had tried marijuana at least once. The profile was of a twenty-one-year-old social sciences major at the college. The dean had majored in sociology. So far so good.

I tried not to get caught up in all the graphs, a weakness of mine. I did stop to read the caption of a cartoon depicting a cop arresting a student. His partner says, “If pot gets legalized, we’ll have to start chasing real criminals again.” Not that the magazine was left-leaning at all.

I skipped down to an article on marijuana arrests and read an article excerpted from a nineteen sixty-seven issue of a liberal magazine. The editors decried the excessive number of “pot busts” as they were called and the travesty of smearing the records of respected professionals. The article specified, without naming them, an English professor in New York, a NATO diplomat’s son, and a theology instructor in Illinois. I didn’t see a mention of “a future college dean.”

For a moment, I thought I’d reached a file with sound. I’d moved to a photo search and it seemed one of the students being dragged away from a protest rally was screaming out at me.

I’d gone past my two-hour Internet limit and it showed.

I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and clicked my phone on to talk to Ariana.

“What’s new on the handwriting front?” she asked.

How rude of me. I should have called Ariana immediately after my handwriting meeting with Virgil. I excused myself on the basis that the probable result—that Hal Bartholomew was a murderer—was too hard to bear.

I gave Ariana a rundown without naming names. In case the FBI was listening. I promised details when we were together in person.

“Virgil said he’d give the project to their specialist.”

I heard something like a “humph” and then, “Whatever.”

“Right now I’m buried in my computer investigating my dean,” I said.

Ariana listened through a briefing on my latest thoughts on why Dean Underwood was so anxious to have the material in Keith’s office.

“You think she was arrested for something?”

“Yes,” I said, in a voice weakened by the lack of evidence to support my theory. “It’s just a guess. I don’t think she posed for a centerfold, or anything like that.”

Ariana laughed. “You mean she didn’t make Miss January Nineteen Seventy?”

“Ha.”

“Maybe she was a ‘working girl’,” Ariana said, prompting a burst of schoolgirl giggles on both ends of the call.

Ariana let me whine for a couple of minutes, about how arrest records were not available to the public, the search engines had been no help, and I didn’t have time or energy to hire a PI to track down all of Phyllis Underwood’s college friends. Whine, whine.

“Bluff it,” Ariana said.

“Excuse me? How do I do that?”

“I do it all the time. Not with you, of course. Tell her you know what she did in college and see how she reacts.”

“It sounds like a horror movie.” Bruce would have been able to give me the title.

“Why don’t you come over? Mondays are always slow. We can role-play.”

It was the best offer I’d had today.

 

 

On the way to A Hill of Beads, I queried myself. What would I do with information on the dean’s past even if I had it? Confront her with it? Why? I no longer saw her strange behavior around the boxes as evidence of her guilt as Keith’s murderer. To my distress, Hal seemed to have the lock on that. I was simply curious.

On the other hand, what if I could use the information to my advantage? I needed all the leverage I could get when negotiating with the dean.

This train of thought was beginning to sound like a reverberating blackmail scenario. The dean had said she’d hold up my promotion if I continued to investigate. Now I might say, if you don’t hold up my promotion, I won’t tell everyone about your sordid past.

It seemed I was taking over one of Keith’s projects—find dirt on everyone and use it against them. I wasn’t happy about it.

Ariana was with a customer when I arrived at her bright, attractive place of business. I stepped into the back to wait for her and noticed she’d changed the beaded curtain that divided the sales room from the rest of the shop. Today, if you took the long view, you could make out a large stem of purple irises springing from a background of many shades of green. I thought of the staggering number of small beads it must have taken to make up the design.

And Ariana thought it took patience when I worked through a mere six pages of mathematical proof.

Ariana’s customer was an older woman in shorts that would have looked better on Lucy. She carried a small tray around the shop while Ariana helped her add selections to it.

“I need five small blue ones,” the woman was saying as Ariana smiled “hello” to me.

“Five small blue ones,” Ariana echoed, setting the beads in the woman’s felt-lined tray.

“And one large purple,” the woman continued.

Ariana plucked a large purple bead from a cloth-lined organizer on a table that held a set of them in different sizes. “There you go.”

“Maybe I only need four small blue ones,” the woman said.

Ariana removed one of the blue beads. “How’s that?” she asked.

The woman frowned and shook her head. “Mmm. I’m not sure now.”

I turned away. There was a reason I wasn’t a shop owner. I’d have had choice words for this customer and sent her packing to some other bead store. Not good for business.

I did enjoy filling in for Melissa, Ariana’s part-time employee, now and then, however. But even then, I preferred stocking inventory and wiping down cases to dealing with customers, probably because I was hopeless at offering design help unless the person was trying to model an arithmetic series in a bracelet.

I amused myself by looking around the shop. Ariana had sectioned off one area with a new line of crafts products, many related to scrapbooking and stamping. I turned rotating racks of two- and three-dimensional stickers, rolls of ribbon, glue cartridges, stencils, novelty rubber stamps and pads, and small cans of spray paint. I knew it had been hard for Ariana to make the decision to move away from a beads-only shop, but the need to diversify to stay in business had taken over.

About ten minutes and nine other changes of mind later, the woman left the store with a tiny bag of beads.

“You’re so good with pesty people,” I said to Ariana.

She smiled. “Lucky for you.”

Whatever that meant. I poked her in the arm in case she’d just insulted me.

With the luxury, or maybe the curse, of an empty store, Ariana and I sat on folding chairs in front of a glass counter that held a more expensive inventory of gems and charms.

“I’ll be you and you be the dean,” Ariana said.

I was nervous already. “I’ll give it a try.”

“I found something very interesting as I was cruising online, Dean Underwood,” Ariana said.

“I would say ‘browsing the Internet’ not ‘cruising online’,” I corrected.

Ariana rolled her eyes. “Okay, browsing the Internet, but try to concentrate on the big picture, Sophie.”

“Sorry. Can I get a bottle of water from the back?”

Ariana checked her watch. “Not for another ten minutes. We need to get this started.”

“You’re cold.”

“As I was saying, Dean, I was looking up some examples of statistical surveys that I could use in class and I found many of them were carried out in New York City in the sixties. Studies of marijuana use, disorderly conduct, trespassing, that kind of thing, and I was so surprised to see your name come up.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, playing a thunderstruck dean.

Ariana gave me an exaggerated, skeptical look, then waved her hand dismissively. “It’s probably a different Phyllis Underwood, a sociology major who graduated in nineteen sixty-eight. One of your classmates?”

She was good. “I give up,” I said lowering my head and weeping.

“Wasn’t that easy?” Ariana said.

“I see where you’re going with this. I just let her tell me exactly what it was. And if I really am wrong, well, I won’t be any worse off than I am now.”

“You go, girlfriend,” my mentor said.

If only the dean would follow the script, I’d be one happy mathematician.

A tinkling sound interrupted us. Two customers, a mother and teenage daughter, entered. I hoped they’d be easier to deal with than the old woman in shorts.

I left Ariana to her business and went through the sparkling curtain to the back. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and sat down to check my emails and phone messages. Way too many emails for only about an hour and a half. I scrolled through them to prioritize. I deleted a few newsletters without opening them and flagged a couple from applied statistics students. I’d get to them later.

On to my voicemail.

I drew in my breath. A message from Virgil came in only a few minutes ago. I hoped no one was looking as I clicked on his voicemail before the one from Bruce and the three from Rachel. It might appear that I’d become a police groupie. One of the badge bunnies, as I’d heard Virgil refer to women who followed cops around.

Virgil’s message was cryptic. “Heads up, Sophie,” he said. “Our conclusion was correct. Give me a call.”

I pressed the phone against my warm forehead. Virgil could only mean one thing: that his expert had submitted his analysis and the handwriting on Rachel’s draft thesis pages was a match to Hal Bartholomew’s.

I felt a wave of nausea and lowered my head, supporting it on the table with my sweaty arms.

How did the results come back so quickly? What happened to the underfunded, understaffed police department where you had to wait three months for fingerprint analysis? I realized I was now angry at the efficiency of the Henley PD.

A callback to Virgil wasn’t going to cut it. I had to get to the police station and see and hear for myself what Virgil had learned.

Ariana was busy with the mother and daughter pair. I was glad to see that they’d amassed a considerable amount of supplies. I blew Ariana a kiss and motioned with my hand to my ear that I’d call her, a lot easier than explaining anything right now.

 

 

Driving to the police station, I parsed Virgil’s message. First, did “heads up” mean he’d told only me and not the rest of the Henley college family? Had he told Rachel? Her three messages might be shouts of joy that she was no longer in danger of losing her freedom. I couldn’t handle “joy” at the moment, not even Rachel’s if that was the case.

And “conclusion” could have meant anything. Virgil and I had drawn many so-called conclusions, including the fact that the handwriting analysis might shed no light on the killer. I played the message again in my head. Aha, Virgil had not actually mentioned the word “handwriting.” Also, Virgil had sent samples from others’ along with Hal’s. I asked myself would I be less rattled if the results had come back “Fran Emerson’s handwriting is the match?” Or Pam’s or Judith’s? Of course not.

When Virgil ended the message with “Give me a call” he might have meant there’s nothing new, just let’s Bruce and you and me get together.

I reminded myself of my students, many of whom stayed up at night analyzing the last thing their boyfriends said that evening.

“Do you think ‘see you later’ means he will or will not call me back?” was a common question in the dorms.

I could hardly wait to hear what Virgil meant by his message.

 

 

Too anxious to walk at a normal pace, I jogged part of the three blocks from where I parked my car to the police building, fast becoming home to me. The heat had let up by five o’clock, but not so much as to matter to me in my soaked shirt.

Mercifully, Virgil did not make me wait this time. I was ushered back to his desk by a uniformed officer as soon as I arrived, maybe because I looked scary. Or maybe the trick was to arrive unannounced.

I accepted a glass of iced tea, nothing so exotic as lemon zinger, and sat once again in front of Virgil’s desk.

“How did you get the report so quickly?” was my first question. I knew it sounded like a reproof, that perhaps the analyst’s work had been done too hastily, the results shoddy, therefore.

“We didn’t. It is too soon for the results from our handwriting expert. But we don’t need him. Your friend Dr. Bartholomew confessed.”

I nearly choked on the generic iced tea. “What?”

“We called him and asked him to come down to answer a few more questions.”

I wanted to ask if Hal were tortured. If so, I was sure it would have been Archie. I held back. “Just questions?” I asked. “He wasn’t arrested or anything?”

“Not arrested, but we did have the thesis pages handy and placed them so he could look at them. One ‘does this look at all familiar?’ from me and he broke down.”

“And confessed to murdering Keith Appleton?”

Virgil nodded. “And confessed to murder.”

“Why would he do that? He’s smart enough to know that some scribbles on a few pieces of paper would be inconclusive, worth even less than a polygraph would be.”

Suddenly my great faith in handwriting analysis was down the tubes, along with belief in psychics and palm readings. Ariana would not be pleased.