Poisoned Pins (19 page)

It was approaching five o'clock, which meant Caron was likely to be working herself up to a fine figure of a snit. My meandering had deposited me at the door of Guzman Hall, home of the law school; unlike the other buildings, it was lighted, and students were visible inside a lounge and a library. I decided to hunt up a pay telephone to tell Caron that she could close the store—if she could find a key in the drawer below the cash register . . . or in any of my desk drawers, or in the box of junk on the filing cabinet, or in a similar container in the cramped bathroom. If she had no luck on this jolly little treasure hunt, she'd have to call a locksmith and wait until he arrived. My head began to throb steadily as I imagined her response to the final option.

I entered the building with the due caution of a civilian entering a lion's den. The students brushing past me appeared normal, even nondescript, but I was keenly aware of their chosen careers and kept my face averted as I prowled for a telephone. The main office, an adjoining room apparently used for moot trials, and the dean's office beyond it were all dark. No one was home to offer aid at the legal clinic. I heard distant laughter from around the corner of the hallway, and surmised it came from the lounge I'd glimpsed through the window. Surely there was nothing in the
corpus juris
of the library worthy of a laugh, or even a tiny chuckle.

A lounge was the logical place for vending machines, uncomfortable furniture, merriment and telephones. I turned—and gasped as I found myself once again confronting the eerie white face of the man in the moon. My eyes wide and my mouth flapping mutely, I recoiled into a water fountain before I realized it was only a portrait attached to the wall, the last in a string that decorated the hallway like pretentious ancestors.

Once I'd regained my composure, I went to the portrait and managed to make out the words on the brass plaque beneath it: John W. Vanderson, Dean of the Guzman Center for Law, 1983- . I frowned at this, and then at his depiction, trying to convince myself that I was muddled, addled, mistaken, in the throes of a concussion, just plain crazy. But I wasn't. His face was distinctive and easily recognizable, although in this case he was beaming genially at me from behind a broad, uncluttered walnut desk, with bookcases, framed diplomas, and an American flag in the background.

I made sure I was alone, then sat down on the opposite side of the hall and gazed up at John W. Vanderson, dean of the law school, husband of the Kappa Theta Eta house corps president (whatever that was), parlous pedestrian, and skilled prowler. Despite my efforts to the contrary, I could produce not one flicker of doubt that he was the man who'd stopped in front of the Kappa house to rub his jaw, the man who'd looked down at me from the third floor the next night, and the man who'd only a short time earlier knocked me into a tree and fled. He was the leading candidate for the anonymous caller.

I rubbed my jaw much the way he had as I tried to make sense of this, but I might as well have been sharing my secret whistle with him. I understood why Winkie had recognized him from my description; she would have met him when he escorted Eleanor to alumnae functions at the sorority house, or at the Vandersons' house. Her reticence was more difficult to
understand, but for all I knew, it was based on a dictum from National or arose from an anagogic rite of sisterhood.

Clanks, clatters, and bits of conversation from the direction I'd come caught my attention. I stood up, and after a parting frown at Dean Vanderson, retraced my path to the main hall. Offices that had been dark were now lit, and within the nearest I saw a man emptying a wastebasket into a large plastic container, and a second wheeling a bucket into an inner sanctum.

The door of the dean's office was ajar. If he could prowl, so could I, although I chose to do so with a great deal less impunity. I waited until the custodians were both out of sight, then darted into the office. I froze behind the door, and only when my heart stopped bouncing did I smugly conclude I had accomplished this minor intrusion unnoticed and unchallenged. What I now intended to do was a good question, but I saw no reason to pester myself with such paltry details.

The reception room contained a desk, a computer covered with a plastic hood, filing cabinets, and two straight-backed chairs on either side of a small table with journals and a bowl of mints. The door on the far side was closed, but not necessarily locked, I told myself cheerfully as I glanced at the still-deserted hallway and hurried across the room.

Seconds later I was inside Dean Vanderson's private office, gripped by a sensation of déjà vu until I realized his portrait portrayed the room right down to the leather accessories on his desk and the diplomas on the wall. Beyond the windows was an expanse of lawn, and in the distance Farber Hall rose imposingly above the treetops.

I willed myself not to compare it to the tiny, crowded, dusty office at the back of the Book Depot, where I'd always wondered how the cockroaches fared in battle against the mice in the wee hours of the night. Beside the desk was a table, and on it sat a telephone. As long as I was in the midst of a crime spree, I decided
there was no reason not to compound the felony and save myself a dime.

I dialed the number and leaned against the desk to brace myself for a barrage of outrage. “Hi, dear,” I began as soon as Caron picked up the receiver. “I'm going to be a little late, so why—”

“A Little Late? We are talking one hundred and fifty-seven minutes late, Mother. I told you we had to do our hair before we went to Rhonda's. I called her earlier to tell her I wasn't going to limbo if she paid me, and she said Louis and some other guys on the football team are coming by after they go to a movie. Do you want me to walk in there as if I'd arrived on a watermelon truck? It's bad enough that . . .”

She may have added quite a bit here, but I wasn't listening; I was staring at a sliver of pink paper visible under the computer at the other end of the table. The color was familiar, evoking unpleasant sensations not unlike chilblain.

“Lock the store when you leave,” I said, hung up the receiver, and cautiously edged toward the computer. I was not tampering with evidence, I told myself as I tried to coax out the insidious pink cat. Not one of the police officials, campus or local, believed my story that I'd seen John Vanderson on previous occasions. Therefore, there could be no evidence because there'd been no crime, even of the
lex non scripta
variety. Half an hour in Guzman Hall and I'd already prepared my first brief, I realized, increasingly irritated that I couldn't get enough fingernail on its edge to pull it out.

I poked at it with a pencil borrowed from dear John's leather cup, but it was pinned firmly by the weight of the computer. Honest soul that I was, I replaced the pencil, studied the computer for potential handholds, and had hoisted it up a few inches when a cold, unfriendly voice said, “Put that down.”

I did.

“Whaddaya think you're doing, lady? If you want a
computer, go buy one at the store instead of stealing it from the college.”

I looked back at a middle-aged man who wore a gray uniform and brandished a mop. His expression was as unfriendly as his voice. “I was not stealing this,” I began, paused to clear my throat, and with more assurance than I felt, continued. “It does look odd, doesn't it? I feel awfully silly being caught like this, but all I was trying to do was . . . well, what may appear to be . . .”

“You work on it while I call the campus cops,” he said, shaking the mop so hard that drops of water rained on the floor. “Every time one of you steals something from the law building, the cops come sniffing at me. I need this job, lady. I've got a family just like everybody else, and three kids to put through college.” He glowered at me as if I'd announced an increase in tuition. “Three kids, all wanting to be something more than a janitor.”

“I understand,” I said soothingly. “I have a fifteen-year-old daughter who's demanding a car at the end of the summer. And the cost of four years of college is enough to—”

“Just stay there, okay?” He went into the front room and reached for the telephone.

I had all of ten seconds to lift the computer, grab the construction-paper cat, stuff it into my pocket, and rush into the front room before he hit the final button. “Wait!” I said as I grabbed his wrist. “Please don't call the police. The computer's still attached to everything; there's no way I could have moved it more than an inch or so without undoing cables and unplugging it. I swear I wasn't stealing it.”

He did not appear any more impressed by my logic than he had been by my previous attempt at parental camaraderie. “That's what they all say, lady. What were you doing? Moving it so you could dust? I don't remember hearing you'd been added to this building's crew.”

It hadn't occurred to me that I needed to concoct an
explanation before I made my unauthorized entrance into the dean's private office. Unlike glib characters in mystery novels, my mind went as blank as the top of John Vanderson's head. “I'm not—no, well—it's obvious that I'm not on the crew,” I managed to stammer.

“No shit, Sherlock.” He disengaged my hand and began to redial a number that would result in a veritable morass of complications for me.

He was on the sixth digit when I finally thought of something. I pushed down the button to disconnect him, lifted my eyebrows, and said, “I think Dean Vanderson will be very displeased if you bother the campus security department. Since I am his wife, I am more than entitled to be in his office. In fact, he asked me to come by and pick up a file for him. He thought it might be under the computer, but he was mistaken.”

“His wife?”

“I am Eleanor Vanderson,” I said, articulating carefully and wondering what to do if he'd met her in the past.

We seemed to clear that hurdle, but we encountered the next one with dizzying speed. “You got any identification?”

“My dear man,” I said with the imperiousness of a Kappa Theta Eta alumna interviewing a rushee over tea, “I most certainly do have identification, but I have no inclination to show it to you. On the other hand, I will be happy to call the dean and explain that I was delayed because of your petty suspicions. We are due at a faculty engagement at six o'clock sharp. It's at Thurber Farber Manor, home of the president of the college. I have no quarrel with you, but I can only hope the dean doesn't file a complaint with your supervisor. I should hate for you to lose your job with those three college-bound offspring.”

He continued to entertain his petty suspicions for a long while, but at last he shrugged and said, “I dunno about this, lady. If you're really the dean's wife, you
would have said so in the beginning, instead of acting like a thief caught in the act. But I got work to do, and I'd like to catch the end of the ball game when I get home.” He picked up the mop and went to the door. “I'm gonna lock this office. Next time you come by on an errand for the dean, plan to show proper identification.”

“I shall impress the dean with your cooperation,” I said, still caught up in my role. I swept past him and sailed out the door of the Guzman Center for Law, and only when I was on the far side of the agri building did I sink down on a bench and allow myself to revel in the absurdity of the scene. I had no qualms about awarding myself an Oscar. Best actress in an
ab libitum
role seemed apt.

I took the folded construction-paper cat out of my pocket, smoothed it, and steeled myself for a sugary message. As expected, the photocopied line read: “Katie the Kappa Kitten Says Thanks!” The handwritten addendum was: “For remembering to pay your dues.”

Pay his dues? John Vanderson was not and never would be a Kappa, and his wife was hardly the kind to need cutesy notes to remind her of anything whatsoever. I doubted alumnae paid dues, although they were likely to be dunned by National on a regular basis right up until the opening strains of the funerary procession.

The handwriting was feminine in its swirls. I hadn't saved the two previous cutouts, but as best I remembered, this newest message was not written by the same hand. If I ruled out Jean and Pippa, I was left with Rebecca, Debbie Anne, and the other sixty or so Kappa Theta Etas who had access to what I envisioned as boxes and boxes of pink construction-paper cats. I examined it carefully, but there was no way to determine if it had been sent that day or six months ago.

The cat was in my hand, if not out of the bag, and it proved my theory that Dean Vanderson was in some
way involved. Perhaps not to Officers Terrance and Michaels, or even to Officer Pipkin and Lieutenant Rosen, who were having such a grand time on their joint task force that they were willing to work overtime.

I strolled across the lawn, the cat fluttering between my fingers, and paused on the opposite side of the street. Scaffolding had appeared on the front of the Kappa Theta Eta house, indicative of the imminent arrival of painters. If Ed Whitbred and his beetleheaded assistant had won the contract, they might well be there the next day. I had no idea what I needed to ask them, but I was confident questions would spring to my lips as easily as lies had in the law building. I would pin them down with no more mercy than a lepidopterist, wrench answers from their treacherous mouths, and walk away with some semblance of a hypothesis that would lead me to the whereabouts of Debbie Anne Wray, the murderer of Jean Hall, and maybe the definitive solution to global warming.

Much later the latest paper cat was propped against the coffee pot. A rusty key lay on the kitchen counter; I dearly hoped it fit the door of the Book Depot. No one had answered the telephone at the sorority house, so there was nothing I could do about my key ring for the moment. Caron's cosmetics case and sleeping bag were gone, as was she. I'd called Luanne and related the highlights of the afternoon, eliciting gurgles, snickers, sharp intakes, and a few brays of laughter. We'd agreed that my next assignment needed to be an appointment with John Vanderson. A package that had contained a low-fat, low-sodium microwave meal was discarded in the wastebasket, its contents having been made palatable with the addition of salt and butter.