A Function of Murder (8 page)

I pulled up to my house and parked Bruce’s car in front. My little blue cottage was
dark except for the small floodlight that clicked on when I walked toward the door.
I’d hoped to find candles burning in the window and Bruce waiting with a cold drink.
Or a hot drink. Anything to welcome me. You’d think I’d been the needy one lying in
a hospital bed, or called to duty on my evening off.

I could almost smell a little bruschetta snack. It had been a long time since my stuffed
scrod dinner, and the clerks at Jimmie’s didn’t make milk shakes as generously as
they used to.

Inside, I was tempted to walk past the blinking number eleven on my answering machine
and head straight for the shower. I was sure my cell phone, now turned back on, also
was bursting with voice mails and texts. I didn’t think I could handle them, especially
after the grueling interview with Virgil. I’d get to them later. Right now I had to
clean
up. Though I knew it was physically impossible, I felt I had poor Mayor Graves’s blood
splatter all over my clothes.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

But even at a few minutes before midnight, I couldn’t ignore a summons in the present,
especially when I saw that it was Bruce calling from his landline. Uh-oh, he’d gone
home. There’d be no shared drinks tonight.

“Hey, Sophie. I’ve been leaving messages everywhere. You okay?”

“I just got in. I had my phone off while I was being grilled by Detective Mitchell.”
I hoped I sounded lighter and breezier than I felt.

Bruce chuckled. “I left the hospital just as Virge was coming in.”

I couldn’t believe I’d been whining about going home when Virgil still had a long
night ahead of him.

“Is the mayor…?” I held my breath.

“Gone.” One word, in a voice that was soft and low.

I carried my phone to the den, flicking lights on all the way, and fell onto the couch.
My body seemed to sag another six inches, from the inside out. “How awful, Bruce.”

“Yeah, everyone did their best, though it didn’t look good from the start. He suffered
an intrathoracic hemorrhage when his right lung was penetrated.”

“By the letter opener?” I couldn’t imagine a benign instrument like the Henley College
letter opener being the cause of a mortal wound. It never seemed that sharp when I
used it for its intended purpose. “How could a simple letter opener do all that damage?”

“Anything can do a lot of damage in the right hands. Or the wrong hands. Guys in prison
use whittled down soap, remember. It’s a matter of the amount of force, in the right
spot, with the right…” Bruce paused. “You don’t need to know this right now, do you?”

No, I didn’t. “It’s okay. I’m so sorry. What a terrible thing for his family.” I felt
I should also offer condolences
to Bruce, who’d lost two people in one day, first a little boy’s father in a car accident
and now the mayor. I couldn’t imagine the letdown if your job description was to keep
people alive and you failed. “You must be beat.”

“Uh-huh. I came straight home. One of the EMTs was coming my way and drove me. Hope
that’s okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. I wish I could do something for you. I can swing by with your
car anytime tomorrow,” I offered.

“Nuh-uh. That won’t work. Larry’s going to pick me up in a few hours. We all have
to be boots-to-the-ground first thing. There’s no telling how people will react when
they wake up to this news. It’s all over the Internet already, but most Henley citizens
are sleeping.”

“They’re not expecting riots in the streets, are they?”

“You never know what backlash there might be. The murder of a city official is not
your everyday crime.”

There it was.
Murder.
The official word from a more or less official person, though I’d already lost all
hope of a freak accident as Virgil was questioning me.

“The more tension, the more potential for accidents,” Bruce continued. “Plus, until
they know why this happened, security will be beefed up for everyone on the mayor’s
staff and family and the whole city council. Every kind of emergency vehicle is going
to be on standby.”

“Medevac helicopters included,” I said.

“This is me, saluting.”

I could hear Bruce’s voice fading. And though I had many more questions—How is the
city’s First Lady holding up? Who is the mayor’s successor? Do the police have any
leads on who killed him or why? Were there fingerprints on the letter opener?—Bruce
didn’t need my particular version of grilling, even if he might know more than I did.

I told myself it was good that Bruce wasn’t worried about me. Why should he be? It
wasn’t as if a good friend
of mine had died. As I’d told Virgil, the mayor and I weren’t even on a first-name
basis. And as long as wishing he would disappear from the stage during his speech
didn’t count as inflicting bodily harm, I should be able to get on with the weekend
without a debilitating reaction.

The self-to-self pep talk didn’t take. An unexpected wave of guilt washed over me.
True, I’d had nothing to do with the mayor’s stabbing, but had I done everything I
could to help him? At least Bruce and the team of medical workers could say that they
had.

I had to ask. “Did he regain consciousness?”

“No, he never…” Bruce paused and I knew he’d figured out my predicament. “Sophie,
I know what you’re thinking. There was nothing you could have done to save the man.
Less than nothing.”

Instead of a small lecture on what
less than nothing
meant, mathematically speaking, it was my distress that came rushing out. “I should
have gone to the hospital with you, or at least when I was finished with Virgil. Maybe
I’d have been able to talk to him, find out why he said my name.”

“Sophie, about your name—”

“You can’t deny it, Bruce. If you told Virgil about it, you must have been pretty
sure that’s what he said. What if he wanted something from me? Something that could
simply have made his last moments peaceful, or even helped ID his killer?” I paused,
entertaining a flash of a thought. “In fact, why didn’t he say his killer’s name instead
of mine?”

“I’m coming over,” Bruce said.

That’s all I needed to hear. “No, no. I’m sorry I brought it up. I’m exhausted myself
and I’d be asleep before you got here,” I lied. “And anyway, you don’t have a car.”

“I could take the helicopter.”

No wonder I loved him. Who else could have had me laughing at the end of this conversation?

“Good night, Bruce,” I said. “Call me if you need anything.”

I hardly heard his “Thanks. I love you” before the dial tone.

I, on the other hand, was fully wired, even after a shower and a cup of warm, purportedly
sleep-inducing tea. I made a note to tell Ariana her special no-fail green brew had
failed me.

There was no dearth of items on my to-do list. I had a stack of resumes to review
for the new associate professor position we’d budgeted for in the Mathematics Department,
and deadlines to meet for the magazines I submitted puzzles to on a regular basis.
I needed to sketch out a couple of exercises for my last week at Zeeman Academy and
recover my momentum on my differential equations research, which always suffered at
the end of a school year.

None of these projects called out to me.

Maybe a little TV would do it. I plopped on the couch in the den and scrolled through
the programs I’d recorded. I hadn’t realized how many crime dramas were on the list.
Usually they were my favorite genre, but not now, when there was a real crime drama
in my life. I had a feeling the murder of Mayor Graves would take considerably longer
than one hour to be solved.

Feeling the need for more personal contact, I decided first to call Ariana, who was
winding up her business at a bead show in California. The night was young for Ariana,
where it was only a few minutes before ten o’clock. She was my best friend and owner
of A Hill of Beads, my venue for exploring my creative side, as she called it. As
if making a bracelet from wire and pieces of glass was more creative than composing
a wordplay puzzle or solving a fourth-order differential equation.

I was surprised to hear her voice. Could my socially
intense friend be alone in her hotel room on a Saturday night?

“Another bomb of a date,” Ariana explained. “Besides that, I’ve seen enough new products
to last a year. One more tray of hammer-faceted beads or pewter findings and I’ll
be dizzy. I did pick up lots of great beading books for the bookrack in the store,
though. You might like to look through them first.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I hear your attitude. Anyway, I have great hopes for tomorrow. I signed up for volleyball
on the beach.”

“Of course you did.” I pictured Ariana in an outfit that showed more of her piercing
and ink than usual. For the trip, she’d highlighted her long blond hair with green
stripes in honor of Aestas, the Roman goddess of the summer.

“Get it, Sophie?” she’d asked, showing me her latest look as I drove her to the airport.
“Aestas is often pictured standing by an emerald throne.”

She knew I’d never get it, and also that it didn’t spoil our friendship one bit.

“I got your text messages,” Ariana told me now. “Boring graduation speeches, huh?
What do you expect from a—”

“You need to hear what happened, Ariana.” I stopped her before she’d regret a putdown
of a man, or category of a man, who was now dead.

I hated to spoil my friend’s good mood, but I knew she’d want to hear what was going
on in her hometown. I briefed Ariana on the murder of our mayor, stopping for a long
breath now and then. I left out the parts about his thorax, but included the part
about his calling me by name.

Ariana was silent, most likely invoking Aestas. I gave her time.

“I’m just so, so glad you and Bruce are safe,” she said, her voice soft and full of
relief.

What? Why wouldn’t we be? Had Ariana misunderstood
my story? It was Mayor Graves who’d been attacked, not Bruce or me.

With a start I saw that Ariana’s mind had gone in a direction that had never occurred
to me—the stabber could have been wandering around the hallowed halls looking for
victims, with a stash of letter openers, scissors, knives, or other weapons at the
ready. Maybe the mayor wasn’t targeted at all, but was simply a handy, random victim,
the first of many. I wondered if Virgil had thought of that. Now I realized that Bruce
had thought of it—when he stood and surveyed the campus, he wasn’t just stretching,
he was scanning for the attacker.

I swallowed hard and got up from my sofa. It wouldn’t hurt to take a look around my
own house. “We’re fine,” I told Ariana, carrying only my cell phone as a weapon against
an intruder.

“I wish I were there, Sophie. Do you need me to come home?”

I expected nothing less from my sweet friend who was willing to give up volleyball
on a sunny beach to take care of me. “No, no,” I said, still making my sweep of the
small three-bedroom house I grew up in. “It’s not like the mayor and I were close
friends. I don’t know why this is hitting me so hard.”

“Why wouldn’t it? It happened on your campus, right in front of you. And, most important,
he called out specifically for you, Sophie, as he was dying. You can’t take that lightly.”

“I guess not.” I finished a circle of the kitchen and the hallway of bedrooms, one
of which I’d outfitted as my office, ending up mildly at ease, back on the den sofa.
“You know what, Ariana? I wish I could have kept all this from you until you got back.
I shouldn’t be putting a damper on your vacation.”

“Shhh. It’s a business trip. In case the IRS is listening.”

Ariana was always good for a smile. “Business trip it is.
We can talk about what’s going on here on Wednesday. We’ll have the whole ride back
from Logan, and then some.”

We agreed to let the matter go, though Ariana closed with, “Relax, Sophie.” Ariana
stretched out the word “relax” till it became a massage on its own. “I’ll pour cleansing
energy into the phenomenon.”

I knew better than to ask what she meant.