1 Picking Lemons (17 page)

Betsy h
ad snared a seat towards the middle of the room, having cancelled her afternoon class. As an adjunct she knew that she was expected to sit at the back of the room for a seminar, but she didn’t care. Betsy had been following this drama since the day it started and wanted to be able to see all the major players. The ruffled egos would have to cope.

Mary Beth, overcome with curiosity, had thought she would slip in and watch the proceedings. However, Walter spied her as she came into the room. Unable to control C.J., he wasn’t going to let this transgression of rank go unnoticed. “Do you want something Mary Beth?” he asked acidly.

“Uh, no?” she answered, uncertain of what to say. She wanted a seat, but she was pretty sure Professor Scovill wasn’t offering her one. He was using his mean voice.

“Were you planning on sharing your astute and erudite comments on Professor Johannson’s seminar?” Walter asked snidely.

“Um, well, I’m not sure...” Mary Beth faltered. She didn’t know what “astute” or “erudite” meant, so it was hard to say.

“Then I suggest you get back to your pho
tocopy machine where you belong.”

The rest of the faculty was
waiting impatiently. The atmosphere in the room was tense, quiet and edgy. Throats were cleared. Legs were crossed and uncrossed. Smart phones were unattended, like unloved children abandoned in a parking lot. The department had lived under the cloud of a killer for too long. They were more than ready for it to end.

C.J. strode in at three minutes after two, dressed much as she had been the first day she came to work after receiving tenure. Pin
k cowboy boots, turquoise skirt, and, today, she had finished the ensemble with an orange-spangled cowgirl shirt.

“Well, a full house
and it’s only a few minutes after two. I feel flattered, gentlemen.” C.J. turned to Walter, who was still pacing at the front of the room. “You see, you can get them to arrive on time. You just have to kill a few of them off first.”

Walter closed his eyes. Babies. All women left work to have babies.

“Walt,” said C.J. in a friendly tone, “go rest your patootie. This is going to take some time.”

Walter remained standing, glared, and finally, reluctantly, took the only seat available, a folding chair at the back of the room vacated for him by a graduate student. He would deal with this outrage later.

C.J. turned to Peter, whose seminar she had hijacked. “Thanks for the loan of the seminar.”

Peter
nervously ran his hand over his scalp and then nodded his head in acknowledgement. He couldn’t actually remember being given the opportunity to turn her down.

C.J. then turned to address the room. “We all know why we are here today. Two of our own have been killed, and we want to know
who is responsible. That person may be sitting right here amongst us now.”

People glanced ar
ound surreptitiously at their neighbors.

“Oh please, don’t try and be subtle. We’ve thought of nothing else since this started. Which one of us is the killer? For a bunch of supposedly bright Ph.D.’s, we should be able to work it out. It’s just a case of being able to pick the lemon.”

Charles cleared his throat. “Young lady, what are you talking about? What lemon? Why are we talking about fruit?”

“Charles, h
ave you ever bought a used car?”

Charles nodded. “Oh yes. A fine 1965 Ford Mustang. Picked that baby up for just over a grand. What a car.” Charles sighed at the memory.

C.J. smiled. “So, it was a good car?”

“A good car?” Charles sounded almost affronted at this faint praise. “It was a dream on four wheels.”

“That’s great to hear. How did you know it was a good car when you bought it?”

“What do you mean, how did I know? I know abou
t cars. I looked under the hood and test drove it. It was, obviously, a great car.”

Betsy followed this exchange with interest. What was C.J. doing? Why was she trapping Charles into her lemon theory? Was she proving that Charles was
a murderer after all?

C.J. was still focused on Charles. “Charles
, have you ever bought a second-hand car that turned out to be a dog?”

Charles squirmed in his seat. “Well, I guess. It happens.”

“Of course it happens,” C.J. enthused. “It’s happened to us all. What happened in your case?”

“It was a 1970 Plymouth Fury. Cherry
red. Must’a been in an accident or something before I bought it. Because that thing just never drove right.”

“Thank you
, Charles, for illustrating my point. Your Plymouth Fury was a lemon, but it was hard to know that because the seller didn’t tell you all the information. Our challenge here today is that we have a bunch of good people in this room, and we want to pick the lemon––the murderer.”

Charles nodded his head in understanding, as
did many of the other faculty. It had been many years since they had thought about any economic problem other than their own research agenda. It was good to get a refresher course.

“Now, this is an easy model to solve in theoretical economics land, where everyone is rational and behaves as they should
.” Here C.J. cast a disparaging glance over towards Walter. “But you folks are astonishingly irrational, highly emotional, and, I have to say, very secretive. You may not be murderers, but you have a lot of other crap going on that you don’t want people to know about. Which means you behave like a lemon, even if you didn’t kill anyone at all.”

Stephen decided he didn’t n
eed to put himself through this and started to ease himself to the door.

C.J. snapped her fingers at him
and pointed him back into the room. “So, if you are all ready, let’s start at the beginning, and sort this mess out.

“This all started with the death of Edmund DeBeyer, a man strangled in his office by his own Ph.D. hood. An office located in the fourt
eenth most violent city in America. Was this fact important? No. The violence of Elm Grove is gun violence and drive-by shootings. Edmund died a very personal, un-premeditated death. It was clear he knew his killer. This ruled out the students, as Edmund would never have a personal relationship with a student. Too demeaning. His ego demanded glamorous relationships, like that with his young, beautiful and successful wife, Lisa. Besides, we all would have heard if Edmund was sleeping with a student. The Eaton University rumor mill would have taken care of that.”

C.J. cast a meaningful glance in Walter’s direction. Did he really think they all didn’t know about his assignations with the
blonde, ponytail club?

“
A stranger would have arrived armed with a motive to rob or terrorize the professor in some way. But this, this did not happen. Professor DeBeyer was strangled with a weapon of opportunity. So we have our first pieces of key information. The killer must have been one of us or his wife.”

Again, the faculty began looking around,
evaluating each other as potential killers.

“It was easy to rule out Lisa DeBeyer. She was at her gallery in New York all day, seen by many clients and staff. She could not have driven up to
Elm Grove, killed Edmund and driven back. She would have been missed for that amount of time. Similarly, many of the faculty were also accounted for in the hour before Edmund’s death. They were teaching, like Peter here, or in Maui or some other idyllic location.” C.J. raised an eyebrow in the direction of her vacationing colleagues.

“But not all. We could not account for Stephen Choi, Walter
Scovill, Jefferson Daniels, Charles Covington III, and, of course, myself.”

Stephen shrank back even further into his seat. Charles looked intensely interested in where C.J. was taking this line of reasoning. Walter began to object vociferously. “Hey. What are you playing at? I did not kill the man. And I will not have any suggestion made that I did.”

The rest of the faculty looked much more cheerful now. Clearly, they were off the hook. It was either Stephen, Walter or Charles and, frankly, given his age, unlikely to be Charles. So that left Stephen or Walter. Given the last outburst, odds were clearly in favor of it being Walter.

“Mary Beth provided us with
one further piece of the puzzle,” continued C.J., ignoring Walter. “We were initially told Edmund died within an hour of our finding him at just after two o’clock. However, Mary Beth overheard an argument occurring in Edmund’s office at approximately one-fifteen. This argument could have been over the phone or in person, but it was indicative that the murder may have taken place at approximately that time.

“At
first, we all looked at Stephen as the suspect. The police arrested him the day after the murder. We all know there is no smoke without a fire. What evidence did they have? What had he done?”

Stephen, at the back of the room, was making himself as small as possible.

C.J. noticed this. “Stephen honey, don’t hide back there. Come on down.”

Stephen didn’t move.

“He’s just like a cat I once had,” C.J. observed. “So shy, but lovely once you got to know him. Anyway, we all knew Stephen hated Edmund. Blamed him for not getting tenure, though, Stephen darling, if we are being honest, you were never getting tenure. Your publication rate was well below par. And all those trips home to Asia. There is a time and place to see Mom, and it is not while you are a junior professor.”

Murmurs of agreement went around the room. C.
J. was gutsy and had said what others did not want to say to Stephen.

“But, the strange thing was that on the day of the murder, Stephen said he was in his office in the hours before the seminar. But he wasn’t. He was away from the building. Mary Beth saw
him going downtown at about one o’clock and getting back after two. In his office, he could have ducked out and killed Edmund. Away from the building, in downtown Elm Grove, he had a perfect alibi. So why hide it?”

C.J. left the question hanging. “Tell me Stephen, on your trips to Asia, did you even go to Korea to see your mother, or did you go straight to Macau?”

Stephen just shook his head, unwilling to answer.

“
Stephen isn’t a killer, he’s a recovering gambler. That explains the trips to Macau. The lack of time devoted to his research. The erratic swings in temper… sometimes very confident after a win, sometimes down and depressed. A little statistics knowledge and a great intelligence can be a dangerous combination. On Monday, between one and two, there is a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in town. Out of respect to the code of anonymity which Stephen tried so hard to follow, I won’t say where.”

Stephen finally spoke. “It’s true. I have a gambling problem. I was so angry at Edmund for not getting tenure
, I felt I could have killed him, but I just started going to GA meetings and am learning to accept that the responsibility is mine. It, um, doesn’t happen at once.” He laughed ruefully. “I came back that afternoon and started to write a letter of apology to everyone in the department. I am really sorry I didn’t give you all my full commitment and effort while I was here. It was a great privilege to work with you all.”

An uncomfortable silence settled on the room.
Most of the faculty had been so sure the young man had been a killer. Yet all this time, he had needed their help.

Charles asked
, “What are you going to do now, son?”

“Well, that is the question
, isn’t it? Everyone said that I was so smart I could have everything…well, I tried for everything, and now, I have nothing. So maybe, I need to think in a different dimension. I’ve applied to a program in Hawaii. To learn to be a fireman,” he ended with a self-conscious laugh.

If Stephen hadn’t been studying his shoes so intently, he would have noticed some of the faculty looked rather envious.
Betsy teared up with pride and smiled in his direction. If only people realized how important it was to do what they enjoyed doing. Forty years was a long time to fulfill someone else’s expectations.

C.J.
nodded reassuringly to Stephen and gave him a wink. Then she continued. “So, if it wasn’t Stephen, then who was it? My personal favorite was Jefferson. He had the physical strength and he had the opportunity. Sure, he was out running, but it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to pop in and do the deed. Mary Beth could not be certain what time she saw him come in from the run, because her new analog watch was proving so confusing. It could have been ten past one or one-fifty. If it was the former, Jefferson had plenty of time to commit the crime and could have been the person Edmund was heard arguing with at about a quarter past one.

“Furthermore, putting all the evidence of everyone’s movements together, it seems more probable that it was ten past one when Mary Beth saw Jeffie
. Mary Beth said she saw Jefferson come in before she saw Annika leave and Annika thinks she left 40 Knollwood at one-forty that day. So, it seems more likely that Jefferson came in at one-ten.

“But did he have a reason
to kill Edmund? I could imagine that if you spent that much time with Edmund, the urge to do him in would come eventually. Charles said money was the most powerful motive, and Edmund and Jefferson were favored to win the Nobel. I happened upon a letter that indicated that Edmund was systematically ruining Jefferson’s career and, therefore, Jefferson’s chance of sharing in the Nobel and its million plus prize money. That seemed like a financial motive and fit with Jefferson being the killer. But, then, Jefferson resigned to become an alpaca farmer. This meant Jefferson wasn’t motivated by his career or money after all. And then, tragically, Jefferson himself was killed, removing him completely from the suspect list.