Scoop to Kill (12 page)

“So what do you do now?”

Cal shook his head. “Not much they can do. The detectives in charge are still talking to students and faculty, everyone who knew Bryan, but unless someone other than the killer knows something—or the killer decides to confess—they’re at a standstill.”

“What about motive? Who would have wanted to kill Bryan?”

“Other than Emily Clowper?” Cal asked with a wry smile. Then he sighed. “I don’t have the heart to tell Marla this, but it turns out people didn’t really like Bryan much.”

An understatement to be sure, but I didn’t editorialize.

“The undergraduates thought he was too tough in the classroom, his fellow graduate students thought he was pompous and too competitive. The only people who haven’t said anything bad about the kid are Landry and Gunderson.”

Which begged the question whether Landry and Gunderson actually liked Bryan, or whether they had a reason to hide their animosity. From what Reggie had said, Landry and Gunderson both had issues with Bryan, but they were apparently being more diplomatic with the authorities. Again, though, it didn’t seem like the time to push Cal on that question. After all, I was asking as a friend, not a meddler.

Cal pushed his food around, and then let the fork fall to the plate with a clatter. “No one liked him, but no one had a real reason to kill him. Except for Emily Clowper. And that’s why she may not be an official suspect, but she’s certainly in our crosshairs. Sorry,
their
crosshairs,” he amended.

“Detective McCormack?”

I looked up to find Jonas Landry standing by our table. Up close, I saw that he had sharp features and dark, penetrating eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles that he hadn’t been wearing at the funeral or at the bar. His clothes made him stand out in the denim and seersucker crowd at Erma’s: a pair of gray pleated trousers, a long-sleeved white dress shirt, and a natty black vest buttoned high on his chest.

Cal stood up to greet the newcomer, extending a hand. “Professor Landry,” he said.

“Please, call me Jonas.”

“Jonas. And I’m Cal. This here is Tally Jones,” he said, gesturing in my direction. “We were just talking about the benefit for Bryan’s scholarship fund.”

Jonas Landry offered his hand, and I reluctantly took it. I didn’t much care whether Sally Landry tolerated her husband’s philandering or not. I thought his behavior was pretty scummy, and I didn’t particularly want to socialize with the man.

“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Jones,” he said, his voice as smooth and seductive as warm
dulce de leche
. “You were involved with the Honor’s Day program, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I run the Remember the A-la-mode. We were serving ice cream at the event. My niece, Alice Anders, is a student at Dickerson.”

His face lit up. “Oh, yes, Alice! I’ve heard excellent things about her. I’m hoping to convince her to take my seminar on midcentury European cinema next year.”

“Cinema? Aren’t you in the English department?”

He chuckled that “oh, how quaint” chuckle I was coming to loathe from these academics.

“Yes, I’m actually the chair of the English department. But my specialty is in the study of cinema. I’m a bit of a relic, I suppose,” he said, again with the chuckle of superiority, “as I am a firm believer in the auteur theory of film criticism. I study the works of great directors, authors, and artists who use a visual medium to tell their story rather than the written word.”

“Oh.”

Cal nodded. “Jonas here wrote a book that got him on all sorts of talk shows, on NPR and such. And now it’s up for a big national award.”

Landry blinked rapidly three or four times. “How . . . how did you hear about that?”

Cal smiled. “No need to be bashful. Bryan mentioned it one evening at dinner.”

The last word I would have used to describe Jonas Landry was “bashful.” But he did seem taken aback by the fact that Cal knew about his work. Or the fact that Cal knew about the award. Maybe he was superstitious and didn’t want to jinx his chances by talking about it.

Indeed, Jonas waved off the topic. “It’s really nothing,” he said. “Tell me about the plans for the benefit.”

“There’s not much to tell right now,” Cal said. “I was just asking Tally here if she’d help with the planning.”

Both men looked at me expectantly, and I did the only thing I could do.

I said yes.

A
s her wedding date approached, Crystal Tompkins grew increasingly more self-possessed. I’d seen plenty of brides melt down into bratty children over their impending nuptials, but Crystal seemed more serene every day, as though she was becoming more and more confident of her feminine power.

She sat across from me at one of the A-la-mode café tables, leisurely licking a double-chocolate waffle cone while I scribbled “Crystal’s Wedding” across the top of a blank legal pad.

“So tell me about this groom’s shake idea,” I said.

Crystal’s cupid’s bow mouth turned up in an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. “All my mom,” she said. “Personally, I don’t care much about the tradition. It’s supposed to be a gift from the bride to the groom, right? Well, trust me, I’m giving Jason a gift. Just not in public.”

She licked her ice cream again, the tip of her pink tongue darting out to catch a drip of chocolate before it ran down the side of the cone. Apparently the nut didn’t fall far from the tree, and Crystal had more than a trace of her mama’s devilish nature.

“Well, whether it’s your idea or hers, your mama’s got her heart set on these milk shakes, and I want to make them special for you.”

Crystal chuckled. “Oh, and I appreciate it, Ms. Jones. Jason loves ice cream, and he’ll get a kick out of having his very own milk shake flavor.”

“What’s he like?”

“Jason?” She screwed up her features in concentration. “He’s a pretty simple guy, really. Laughs a lot. He likes watching football and playing computer games, tinkering with cars. All the boy stuff.”

“What about food? Anything special he likes?”

She smiled. “He’s a Texas boy. Barbecue and chili and Tex-Mex. In fact, our first date was a barbecue.”

“Really? Tell me about it.”

“Well, I guess it wasn’t our first date. I mean, we’d known each other for years, but the first time I thought ‘Wow, he’s cute,’ was at a big barbecue we had for debate my freshman year of high school. We were going to the state championship that year, and we had this big fund-raiser.”

That would have been the year that Bryan Campbell was the captain of the team. Deena had mentioned the team’s triumph at Bryan’s funeral.

“Anyway, we all brought food to sell. Jason brought brisket smothered in his homemade sauce.”

“He made his own sauce?” That seemed pretty ambitious for a high school boy.

Crystal laughed. “He’d done 4-H and FFA for years, but Jason’s not really a manly man, you know? He always gravitated to the cooking and canning competitions. His barbecue sauce is impressive.”

“What’s he use?”

Crystal waggled a finger at me. “Oh, now, Miz Jones, you know that a Texas man won’t share his barbecue recipe with anyone but his horse.”

“Mmmm-hmmm. But something tells me Jason wouldn’t dare keep secrets from you.”

She winked. “I’ll give you a hint. His secret ingredient is Dr Pepper.”

“Really?”

“Yep,” she said with a satisfied nod. “Dublin Dr Pepper.”

Dr Pepper is the unofficial state beverage of Texas. Older than Pepsi, RC, or even Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper originated in Waco, Texas. The Dublin variety of Dr Pepper is made with the old formula, using cane sugar instead of corn syrup. It’s harder to find, but worth the hunt. I jotted “Dr Pepper” on my legal pad.

“What did you bring to that barbecue?” I asked.

“I brought a red raspberry pie. My mom had just taught me to make pastry crust, and we had raspberries out the yin yang that year. Jason always told me that my pie caught his eye, but my smile won his heart.”

I sighed as I scribbled “raspberry” on my notepad. Such a sweet story.

“You’ve been dating a long time.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. A lot of our friends figured we’d get married right out of high school. But we both wanted to wait.”

“That was smart. It’s hard to know whether high school crushes are real love or not.”

Crystal looked at me like I was nuts. “Oh, we knew it was real love. Love is love, no matter how old you are. But we both have plans, ambitions. We were afraid that if we got married, we’d start feeling obligated to buy a house and have babies and all the rest of it . . . and then we might not both get to go to law school.”

Jason had just finished his third year and would be taking the bar exam later in the summer, and Crystal planned to start school in the fall.

“Weren’t you afraid that Jason would meet some girl up at Tech?”

That mysterious womanly smile returned. “No, ma’am. I always knew Jason would come back to me. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”

I envied her that certainty. Maybe if I’d been as confident about Finn’s love, certain he would come back to Dalliance for me, I wouldn’t have married Wayne Jones. But then again, maybe what Finn and I had wasn’t as strong or as real as the love Crystal and Jason shared.

I’d learned the hard way that there was no point living in the past, second-guessing the choices I’d made.

“I never doubted Jason,” Crystal continued, the smile fading from her lips, “but this whole thing with Bryan has made me glad we’re getting married now. Not waiting even longer. Jason, I trust. Life, not so much.”

“Your mom said you and Jason knew Bryan pretty well.”

“As well as anyone could know Bryan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was a tough nut. He had big dreams, wanted to be important and make money. But most people want to be good at something particular, like Jason wants to be a really great prosecutor, and my mom wants to be an amazing caterer, and my stepdad wants to raise the very best horses. Bryan didn’t seem to care what he was successful at, as long as he was successful.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said.

She tilted her head, a skeptical expression on her face. “I guess not,” she conceded, “but it meant Bryan was easily distracted. He’d be your friend, but then if he saw a better path to getting ahead, he’d never talk to you again. He wasn’t mean, just driven.”

“That sounds like a lonely life.”

She nodded. “Last time I saw Bryan was at a holiday party. A bunch of debaters got together and hit the Bar None for cocktails a couple of weeks before Christmas, right after a lot of us came back from school on the semester break. We were doing the whole ‘What are you up to?’ thing, and we got to Bryan. Everyone else had talked about school and significant others, even a few babies and weddings, and Bryan starts telling us about his five-year plan. How he’s going to graduate and get a postdoc and write a novel and sell a screenplay.”

I frowned, not sure what point she was trying to make.

“The rest of us were talking about what we were doing, then, at that time. Bryan never even mentioned what he was working on at Dickerson, his dissertation, his classes, anything. It was all what he planned to do. That was Bryan in a nutshell, so busy scheming three steps ahead of the game that he never got to enjoy what he’d already accomplished.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to talk about school because of all the trouble he was having with Dr. Clowper.”

Crystal scrunched her face. “Nah. Jason asked him about that, pulled him aside and said, ‘Hey, I know some lawyers if you need one.’ Bryan waved him off, said there was nothing to worry about, he had bigger fish to fry.”

“Just because he didn’t want to talk about his troubles with his old friends, doesn’t mean they weren’t weighing on him,” I insisted.

Crystal balled up a napkin and scrubbed at an imaginary spot on the café table. “I guess you’re right. And he did get pretty drunk that night. Hooked up with a girl who called him ‘Dr. Campbell.’” She snorted. “He left with her, without even saying good-bye to the rest of us.”

“Was she his girlfriend?” If Bryan had a girlfriend, the police needed to know. Maybe she wouldn’t be a suspect, but she might have information about other people who had bones to pick with Bryan.

“No,” Crystal said, her voice ringing with certainty. “Definitely not a girlfriend. Just a hookup.”

It crossed my mind to ask her how she knew, but I wasn’t sure I’d understand. Alice’s generation had strange ideas about boy-girl relationships, about what constituted dating as opposed to just “hooking up.”

Crystal glanced down at her wrist. “Oh, dear, I have to run. Jason was supposed to drop off the deposit check for the band, but he got a part-time job with a firm in town, so now it’s up to me.”

“That’s good news about the job,” I said.

“Yeah. He’s taking the bar in July, so he needs to study, but he’s hoping that Madeline and Kristen will hire him on permanently in the fall.”

“Jackson and Ver Steeg?”

“You’ve heard of the firm?”

I smiled. Dalliance really was a small town. “Only good things,” I said.

“Do you have enough for the milk shakes?”

I looked at my notepad. Dr Pepper and raspberries. Huh. “Do you trust me?”

Crystal grinned. “If that cone was a fair representation of your work, then, yeah, I trust you.”

“Well, if you trust me and you’re willing to be a bit adventurous, I think I have you covered.”

E
mily and Finn had already staked out a spot at the back of the A-la-mode that Friday evening, and both were busy tapping away at their laptop keyboards, when Alice stormed in. She covered the distance to their table in long, purposeful strides and let her backpack drop to the floor with a menacing thud.