The Cinco de Mayo Murder (14 page)

“Nice guy. Honest. Good sense of humor.” He grinned. “Like me.”

“Thank you for the self-analysis.” I was enjoying the conversation even more than the food.

We returned to the smaller room to select our hot dishes. From the repartee, it was clear that Martin McHugh was a regular here. The goodwill of the staff spilled over onto me, and I was coaxed into sampling far more than I had intended.

Back at our window table, I said, “I learned something yesterday that Heinz's mother found deeply upsetting.” I went on to describe the cache of letters and quoted the lines about K.

“Interesting. And she wouldn't talk about it?”

“She practically threw me out of her room. She became frantic. Whoever this K person was, she refused to acknowledge knowing him, but it was perfectly clear that she did.”

“K.” He rested his chin on his hands, making grumbling sounds as he thought. “Winter, you said?”

“Winter.”

“I knew a kid named Ken something.”

“I don't think this was a kid. I don't think it was someone who was regularly on campus.”

“Or he wouldn't have written home about it. You're right. Rimson was a small enough school that in a week, you ran into everyone you knew.”

“Someone may have seen them together. They shook hands when they said good-bye.”

“Not what undergrads did at Rimson. You shook hands with a visitor, an older person, maybe with your father if
you had that kind of relationship. K. You're not leaving all that food over?”

“It's a lot to eat, Marty.”

“The chef'll be upset.” He smiled. “They're saving berries and whipped cream for us.”

“Oh my.” I took another bite. It really was a shame to leave anything so good uneaten. “I don't suppose that Rolodex of yours has a card for Mr. K?”

“Not yet. But hey, we're just beginning.”

We walked to Fifth Avenue together when the glorious meal had ended. There Marty turned north and I continued one long block to my garage. I drove home wondering whether his promises were bravado or if he really intended to make an effort to find Steve Millman. I didn't think there was any chance he could locate K. But if he was in touch with enough former classmates, Millman might surface.

I thought about the plagiarism charge he had endured. In my teaching during the years since I'd left St. Stephen's Convent, I'd encountered one serious case. It had happened in my poetry class, the class I taught before my current one. The style of writing had been so blatant, it had nearly slapped me in the face. The student was a girl who previously had barely been able to put together a complete sentence. Suddenly she was writing sentences that flowed with vocabulary I could not believe were part of her language: deft comparisons, clever figures of speech, even cleverer arguments to prove her point. No one else in the class had a paper in any way resembling hers, and when I had a private conversation with her, she broke down in tears.

I wondered what kind of impression Martin McHugh had made on the professor who charged him but not the
real offender. Considering that he belonged to an expensive club and used its facilities regularly, I thought Rimson had lost a potentially generous donor.

There were no messages. I had been hoping that Mrs. Gruner would call to reopen our acquaintance. Who on earth could Mr. Kafka have been that she would react so stunningly? I changed from my black suit to my everyday casual clothes and went to pick Eddie up at his after-school activity. He was part of a group of children who were painting a backdrop for a forthcoming school play. From the look of his hands, I could see he had indulged freely in the paint.

“Are your hands dry?” I asked after we had kissed.

“I washed them with soap. The teacher made us. And I dried them, too.” He climbed into his seat and got belted in.

“That's some project you're working on, Eddie.”

“It's fun. Everybody has a color. Mine is dark blue.”

His hands indicated more than one color. “Where did the red come from?”

“I helped Sandy. She couldn't reach high enough.”

“That was very nice of you. But I think you'll have to wash again when we get home.”

“OK,” my son said breezily. It was all part of a day's work.

After the scrub-down, Eddie went to do his homework and I went back to my list of Rimson students. Andrew Franklin, the Minneapolis lawyer, had suggested I call Arthur Howell, who had been Steven Millman's roommate. I thought that was a good place to continue my search. If anyone would know what a young man was doing on his vacation, it would be his roommate.

Arthur Howell answered his own phone, and I gave him
a brief explanation of who I was. Then I said, “I wonder if you have a current address and phone number for your former roommate, Steven Millman.”

There were several seconds of silence. Then, “Is this a joke?”

“Excuse me?” I looked at my list. “Is this Arthur Howell?”

“It is and you're the second person to call me with that question this afternoon.”

So Martin McHugh had decided to call the obvious person. “I had lunch with Martin McHugh today,” I explained. “He said he would try to find Steve Millman. I didn't know he had decided to call you. I'm sorry if I've bothered you.”

“Just a surprise to hear that name twice in one afternoon. I didn't mean to upset you, Miss Bennett. I'll tell you what I told Marty. Steve and I were roommates, but we were never friends. I didn't really like the guy. It was because of the room lottery that we ended up together. I had a high number, he had a low one, and we were talking one night the year before and decided to give rooming together a try. It was a mistake, but we survived it.”

“Do you have a moment to talk about him?”

“Sure. What can I tell you?”

“Was he friendly with Heinz Gruner?”

“I'm not sure Millman was friends with anyone. He was an annoying creature, at least to me. He got on my nerves; probably got on lots of people's nerves.”

“What did he major in?” I asked.

“History, I think.”

“So did Heinz. So they probably knew each other from classes as well as from the dorm.”

“A reasonable conclusion,” Arthur Howell said. “It was a small school. We all knew each other.”

“I understand he came from Phoenix.”

“Right. He talked about it a lot. He loved it. He said it had the best weather in the world.”

“You know that Heinz died in a hiking accident between Phoenix and Tucson.”

“I heard later that summer. Can you tell me specifically what it is you're looking for?”

“I'm trying to find out who went hiking with Heinz Gruner.”

“How do you know anyone did?”

I went through it again, the missing suitcases and backpack, the small backpack that disappeared and reappeared, the bits of evidence I had put together.

“Heinz was kind of a quiet guy,” Arthur Howell said. “I remember hearing him talk about wanting to go to Arizona in the spring, wanting to walk in the mountains. The feeling I got was that he went alone.”

“Were you still in the dorm when he left?”

“I was the last man out of there. I had a lot of finals to take and one huge paper that I thought I'd never finish.” He laughed. “They started to threaten me that they would lock up the dorm with me in it if I didn't clear out.”

“I hope you did well,” I said.

“I did, but it was a struggle. Probably the best paper I ever wrote.”

“When did your roommate leave?”

“Let's see.”

I knew it was a terrible question so many years later. I could not have answered it myself.

“He left before me, that's for sure. I'd say I was alone on that corridor for two days, worrying that they'd shut off the water and electricity.” He laughed again. “I can't give you a date because I don't know what the dates of that last week were. It was May, that's all I know. I was sitting at my desk, trying to put together that paper, and Steve said he
was leaving. I said good-bye hardly even looking up. It was such a relief to have that room to myself, even with all the trash he left.”

“Do you have any recollection if he left around the same time as Heinz?”

“None. I'm sorry.”

“When did you find out he wasn't returning to Rimson in the fall?”

“When I got to campus. We didn't keep in touch over the summer. I just realized one day I hadn't seen him and I asked someone, and was told he'd dropped out. Are you trying to tie that in with Heinz's accident?”

“I'm just trying to see if there's a connection.”

“Well, I have to say I didn't like Millman, but I don't think he had anything to do with Heinz's death.”

“Any idea how I can find him?”

“I gave Marty McHugh some phone numbers, but they may be dead ends. I haven't seen or heard from the guy since that morning at Rimson.”

I asked him about K, and he came up blank. I wrote down the names he said he had given Marty McHugh. One of them was a girl whom Steve Millman had gone out with, a freshman that year. Arthur Howell had run into her at a convention he'd attended a couple of years back. She was married and working on Wall Street. I thought I might wait a few days to give Marty a head start. Now that I knew he was working on my behalf, I was sure I'd hear back from him.

“You ever room with anyone again?” I asked when our conversation was winding down.

“Not till I met my wife. She's a great roommate. I hope to keep her happy for the rest of our lives.”

I smiled, wondering if he shared the compliment with his wife.

“So how was lunch?” my husband asked as he came inside the house. He has a knack of getting to what's important in life.

“It was much more than I expected, in every way. And my host, Martin McHugh, is a character. I have a feeling he may dig up the missing Mr. Millman.”

“Well, I checked him out today,” Jack said, giving his son a hug and then commenting on the fingers that still showed signs of blue and red paint despite the cleanup. “If he ever broke a law, law enforcement doesn't know about it. I couldn't even locate a driver's license for him.”

“Then he's changed his identity.”

“Looks like it. He could be dead, you know.”

That gave me a chill. “I don't think so. Herb Fallon talked to his mother. She said she didn't know if she could locate him. She didn't say he'd died.”

“I found some Millmans around the country,” Jack said, pulling a sheet of paper out of his briefcase. “There's a Stephen with a P-H, but no one spelled like yours. He certainly doesn't drive a car in Arizona. Or own one.”

I set the table as we were talking. I wasn't eating anything that night except a piece of melon. I felt as though I had just finished that huge lunch, even though it was hours
before. I could still taste the fluffy texture of the whipped cream that came with the berries.

We talked about it again after Eddie had gone to bed. I looked at Jack's list of Millmans, not sure I wanted to call people around the country. His mother had to know where he was, and by this time she had probably talked to him and told him Herb Fallon was looking for him. Maybe I should have called, I thought. Herb came across as intimidating. Mrs. Millman might have decided not to pass along the message.

Two men on Dean Hershey's list had not yet been contacted. One lived in California and the other in Chicago, but I was too tired to make any more calls. It would have to wait till the next day.

Herb Fallon called in the morning, anxious to hear about my lunch with Marty McHugh. When I started describing the food, he interrupted. “Not the lunch, Chris. The lunch. What did Marty say?”

I switched to substance, embarrassed that I had thought he wanted to hear about the fare. I told him about my call to Arthur Howell, who had already heard from McHugh.

“So he's really on the ball,” Herb said. “Sounds promising.”

I told him that Jack hadn't found any trace of Millman.

“Maybe you should call the mother. You know, womanto-woman. Maybe you can soften her up.”

“I'll think about it. Right now I'd really like to see if I can patch things up with Mrs. Gruner.”

“You may be able to make nice, but I bet she still won't tell you anything about Kafka. It sounds as though that's a real stumbling block.”

“It is. I wish I could think of a way to approach her.”

“You'll work something out. Who's left on that corridor that we haven't talked to?”

I gave him the names.

“Jereth and Eric. Yeah. I think Eric went into linguistics, teaches at the University of Chicago. Jereth I'm not so sure.”

“Well, I'll try to reach them today. And I'll think about how to approach Mrs. Gruner. I don't think anyone else can tell me about Mr. Kafka.”

“He may not be relevant, you know. By the by, I did some digging yesterday. Looked up all the visiting speakers, musicians, dancers, you name it from that year. There are a few K's in there, a guitarist named Tom Klapp, a speaker named Keith Gordon. He had a bookout on Japan as a leader of industry at the time he spoke. I'm pretty sure I went to his lecture. It put me to sleep. I looked over the speakers carefully. Considering who the Gruners were, they were more likely to pal around with intellectuals than guitarists.”

“Anything interesting about this Keith Gordon?”