Scholar's Plot (19 page)

We had both sobered.

“So,” said Kathy. “Board member A, who asked the contractor to bribe him; Halprin, who plagiarized his thesis; Mabry and Bollinger, who changed the grades; and Professor Nilcomb. Five suspects, if you count blackmail a sufficient motive for murder.”

“Which most do.”

“But no connection to Benton, or the project he was working on.”

“We’ve just started looking,” I pointed out. “We need more information about all of these people. I wonder if the helpful Clerk Peebles would let us buy her luncheon.”

“Dinner,” said Kathy. “’Tis an hour past midday, so she’s likely eaten by now. Besides, if she agrees to dinner we can bring Michael and Benton along and catch them up on what we’ve learned.”

Clerk Peebles said she’d be happy to dine with us. Kathy and I snagged a hot pie from a street seller outside the campus gates, and spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down a sample of Professor Nilcomb’s handwriting.

It matched.

I wasn’t averse to dining with Mistress Peebles, but Benton suffered an attack of … not shyness, so much, as a perfectly understandable desire to avoid her pity, and he declined to join us. Given the way he colored up at the mention of Maddy Flynn’s name, I wondered how he’d have reacted had
she
been attending. But in order for Benton to have a love tangle with a scholar, he’d have to go back to being a professor.

Benton also pointed out, unhelpfully, that he could alibi professor Bollinger for the time of the lecture, and even if Hotchkiss was killed before that, he couldn’t believe the man could come straight from committing bare-handed murder and then calmly listen to the speaker.

There were two board members whose names began with A, Amliss and Arnoll. And Benton had no idea which of them was involved with the library renovations.

We took Mistress Peebles to the same tavern we’d been dining at, but for this Fisk rented a private parlor and paid for a nice salad, cooked beets in a sauce of mustard and honey, mashed potatoes, a whole roast goose, and fruit tarts for dessert. It must have set him back two silver roundels, but then he still had most of his share of the reward from Tallowsport.

I recounted some of Fisk’s and my more amusing adventures during the meal, Kathy supplied court gossip, and Fisk himself had the tact to speak only about neutral topics while we ate. ’Twas only as we finished up the sweetened cream that had topped our tarts that he expressed curiosity about one Scholar Franklin, whose name, he said, had “come up.”

“Franklin Mabry?” Clerk Peebles blinked in surprise. “He can’t have anything to do with what happened to Professor Sevenson. He was a law student here … what, ten, twelve years ago?”

“Ah.” Fisk sometimes delights in being uninformative. “Do you know where he is now?”

“Not for certain. I heard he’d finally become a judicar, in some town near D’vorin up on the north coast. That’s where his family’s from, I think.”

“What’s the last time he was here?” Fisk pressed on.

“After he graduated? Never, that I know of. He’d have no reason to return, except to enroll a son or daughter with us someday. That’s how I see most of the old scholars, if they ever come back.”

’Twas spoken matter-of-factly, but what would it be like to lose a son, and then to lose the children you befriended in his place, year after year? If we succeeded in restoring Benton’s reputation, I would tell him that we owed our triumph to this woman’s help, and that he should make it a point to seek her out in the future.

She would have at least one youth in her life who wouldn’t leave her.

Fisk went on to determine that some engineer in Crown City had also never come to visit the university, even though he was so near. Then Kathy took over, asking about the renovation of the library, what had been done there, who was the contractor, and how he’d been hired. If Peebles knew which board member A was involved, she didn’t say.

I wished there’d been time for Fisk and Kathy to report more details of what they’d discovered, but I’d spent most of the afternoon perusing Professor Dayless’ data on the project. She said if I insisted on seeing everything I might make myself useful, and set me to making a new copy of the trials of one of the formulas that had produced inconclusive results. In fact, inconclusive was a fair description of my whole day. I now understood, both how the experiment with the rabbits had been done, and why Benton found it so boring.

Fisk finished his interrogation by asking Mistress Peebles what she knew about Professor Nilcomb, and her lips tightened in distaste.

“I can guess what you’re talking about, but I don’t see how that … how any of this has anything to do with Scholar Benton.”

She’d been willing to relay harmless information about past students and building renovations, but she clearly wasn’t going to besmirch a man’s reputation without knowing why.

Fisk eyed her over the gravy stained plates and half-full goblets, and made up his mind.

“Master Hotchkiss was blackmailing the people I’ve asked you about. Which makes them suspects in his murder.”

“Blackmail?” Mistress Peebles’ eyes widened. “You mean, for money? No, of course you do. I’m sorry, this is silly of me, but somehow I didn’t think your investigation would involve anyone else.”

“’Tis understandable you’d be shocked,” I said gently, “that someone you knew would stoop so low.”

“Hotchkiss… He helped me get my job.” She picked up her goblet, but didn’t drink, staring down at her hands. “That was after Seymour died, and I needed it badly.”

“Then there must have been some good in him. I find people are seldom all one or the other. Benton told us of your son,” I added. “He says the professors still speak of his intelligence.”

“And how odd he was?” She looked up at me then. Her eyes were bright, but there were no tears. “They were the only ones besides me who saw it. How very smart he was. Most people took him for simple, but he had notebooks full of mathematical formulas, and even scribbled them on the walls of his room. A few years after he started studying here, he told me that numbers could define anything.”

She smiled, so sadly a heart of stone would have cracked.

“I asked him, ‘Even love? How big is love in numbers?’ Teasing, because he was always so logical. Emotions confused him. Frightened him, I think. He told me, ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ But then he kissed my cheek, because whatever he said, he knew it wasn’t nothing.”

Now her eyes had filled, but she shook her head sharply, defying grief.

I would definitely speak to Benton.

“Unlike Fisk, I’m looking into Professor Dayless’ project,” I said, giving her a chance to regain her composure. “Can you tell me anything about her and Professor Stint?”

“I don’t know much about Stint,” she said. “He’s only been here for two years. We’ve had the usual dealings, about course schedules and paying his salary and such.”

She was calmer by the time she finished speaking. For all her grief, her son had died long ago.

“What about Professor Dayless? Is she new to the university?”

“Oh, no. Monica was hired before I was, and I’ve been working for the university nearly twenty years. In fact, she was kind. There aren’t many women working here, and we tend to know each other better than the men.”

“We didn’t find any evidence of it,” Kathy said, “but could Master Hotchkiss have been blackmailing one of the professors who works on the project? You knew about Nilcomb’s … problem. Is there anything like that about either of them?”

“No, there isn’t. And if there was, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I don’t mind giving you harmless information, but I won’t repeat malicious gossip. Which might not even be true! There’s one thing you should know, however. For Professor Sevenson’s sake. The first of the scholars applying for his job was interviewed this morning.”

This was probably something she shouldn’t have shared with us, and her lips folded tightly over the words.

“How many candidates are there to interview?” Kathy asked. “How long before they make a decision?”

“Just two more interviews. One of them’s not even in town yet, but they’re talking to the other man day after tomorrow. So you may not have much more time, but I still hoped… Well.” She rose to her feet, declaring her intention to depart.

“You hope to help Professor Sevenson?” Fisk said swiftly. “Then would you be willing to supply a bit more harmless information, such as where some of these people live? We have to talk to them, and it will be less likely to damage them if we can do so privately than if we have to track them down on campus.”

That made her hesitate.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Come to my office tomorrow. I’d have to look up the directions to their homes, anyway.”

She said I didn’t need to escort her home, but I insisted. And as it turned out, her house was so nearby Fisk and Kathy were still at the table when I returned.

I thought Kathy looked a bit irritated, and Fisk can be annoying — though he usually wasn’t, with her.

“I don’t suppose you got any malicious gossip out of her,” Kathy asked.

“Whatever it is, Benton should be able tell us,” Fisk said. “Though it may be hard to sort gems from glass. Places like this are usually awash with gossip. I wonder why he hasn’t enlightened us already.”

“You don’t know Benton,” I said. “The only people he cares about have been dead for thousands of years. He only told us about Nilcomb when we pointed to the man’s initials and asked directly.”

“He probably tried to ignore all the gossip,” Kathy added. “I suppose we ought to sit down tomorrow and pry it out of him.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” said Fisk. “If you would. Tomorrow I want to find the homes of all the people on our list and ask their neighbors what they’re like when they’re not at work. Which means we probably ought to head home.”

He rose from the table as he spoke, and Kathy followed him as she said, “We don’t even know which board member A was being blackmailed. And if they’ve started the interviews for Benton’s job, we’re running out of time.”

“We may not have his name.” Fisk closed the parlor door behind us, and gestured to a maid that we were leaving. “But I’ll bet we can find out who the contractor was, and he can tell us.”

“Why would he?” I asked. “He paid that man a bribe to get the job.”

“A solicited bribe.” Fisk put on his sympathetic face, which is so good that Kathy looked startled. “That poor man, he must have been furious doing all that work for nothing, to get a job that he deserved, anyway.” The kindly expression vanished, like a candle flame blown out. “When people are furious, they want to talk about it. I’m not worried about getting our board member’s name.”

“And assuming Halprin and Mabry are out of town, that leaves Professors Bollinger and Nilcomb,” Kathy said. “Benton might know where they live.”

“And I want directions to the homes of Professors Dayless and Stint,” I added, as we stepped out into the dark street. It was cooler now, and both moons rode high in the sky. “Particularly Stint.”

“Why particularly?” Kathy asked.

“Because he’s new to the university, at least relatively, which leaves more room for secrets in his life. And he doesn’t much like the fact that Dayless was placed over him.”

“That sounds more interesting than trying to get Benton to remember gossip,” Kathy said wistfully.

Had I been truly noble I’d have volunteered to do that myself, and let her go with Fisk. There might be some gossip Benton would hesitate to repeat to our young sister, too. But I’d no doubt Kathy would drag it out of him, and I really wanted to learn more about Stint and Dayless, not to mention Fisk’s suspects.

Kathy wasn’t all that noble either.

“All right, I’ll do the dirty work. But you have to promise to tell me everything when you get home,” she said. “And that you won’t muck it up because of this stupid cock fight the two of you have—”

Four men emerged from the alley that led to Benton’s door, three of them pulling another along with them.

“Pepper in the soup,” he was saying. “The secret is moderation, not too much, not too little, or it sets the walls to sneezing.”

“Hey!” Fisk shouted, but I had already broken into a run.

They reached the street and tried to dash off, 
hampered by the jeweler who not only refused to run, but seemed to be struggling. We’d have caught them easily… In fact, we did catch them easily, whereupon two of them turned and pulled out short but effective cudgels.