Chesapeake Crimes Read online

  I had always said this job would kill me. Being stoned to death wasn’t quite what I expected, but it was about to happen if I didn’t escape.

  I started for the door, but Rutty jerked me back. When I tried slipping between the tables, the Tenured Ones closed ranks. I was trapped.

  I realized they’d put the plastic sheet under me so my blood didn’t stain the carpet woven in gold and green, GHU’s colors. How carefully they had planned my death. For the first time ever, they set aside all their bickering and backbiting to act as one. Eliminating me had brought them unity, but I found cold comfort in this.

  So I turned to face them, preparing to meet my fate when I noticed a beautiful woman in a maid’s uniform going among them, filling their wine glasses. Phoebe! A trickle of hope opened inside me.

  “Before we attend to the business at hand, let’s toast to Adjunct Nora.” Rutty looked out at his/her colleagues. “We owe a debt of gratitude to Nora and other minions who want to teach at universities so badly they’re willing to do it for free. Well, almost free.” This evoked a smattering of chuckles. “Because of these lesser ones, we avoid the unsavory task of teaching in order to dedicate ourselves to intellectual pursuits.”

  “Here, here,” they said in unison. “To Nora and adjuncts everywhere!” They lifted their cups and drank.

  As I looked around at their shadowy forms in the candlelight, I realized they all had similar physiques. They were stubby, big-footed, and broad-shouldered from jumping on each others’ backs to get ahead. How mighty and powerful they appeared, this tribe of Tenured Ones.

  But like Rome, they fell. All around me, they began to fall—even the zombies. In fact they fell faster than the living. What a glorious sight! Tossing their tumblers, slumping onto the floor, or back into their chairs, cracking their heads on the tables, they went down. Rutty sank into a puddle near me, the stone s/he had been hiding sinking with him/her.

  In a flash Phoebe appeared beside me and took my hand. “We must make haste and leave this unholy place!”

  I followed in her wake as we wound our way around the tables and bodies.

  “My sleeping potion doesn’t last long on folks who imbibe spirits the way some of these do,” Phoebe said.

  Behind us, we already heard moaning. Rutty was coming around.

  Outside the dining hall’s glass doors, Phoebe uprooted the FACULTY ONLY sign. “Help me,” she said. We threaded the sign through the door’s handles.

  “Surely that’ll hold them,” I told her.

  She didn’t look convinced and urged me to run with her. The blanket of darkness covering campus didn’t slow us down. We knew this place by heart. We were halfway up the winding path to Ayn Rand Hall when we heard them breaking open the glass doors.

  From a burlap sack, Phoebe took two bottles of canola oil. “Pour,” she said, handing me one. Streams of oil flowed down the path, making it as slippery as Rutty’s promises.

  We were almost home free when Phoebe presented me with a pouch filled with hundred-dollar bills—Ben Franklin, my favorite patriot, smiled from their centers. “This ought to sustain you until you can find suitable employment for a young lady of your talent,” she said.

  “But where did you get…?” I looked up into the lobby of Ayn Rand Hall, where the life-size statue of George Henry stood beside an empty wall. The Econ Department’s solid gold plaque was gone.

  Phoebe was smiling her dimpled smile. “Avaritia est bona!” we said in unison.

  The Tenured Ones were getting closer. We could hear them chanting, “Nora! Nora!” They were carrying fiery torches and marching up the path toward us.

  “Never fear. George will stop them.” Phoebe went inside the lobby and grabbed George Henry’s statue. She was a strong ghost. I held the door for her.

  “Now get in your metal carriage and go.”

  We hugged. I wasn’t sorry to leave this place or this job, but I hated to leave her. “Me too,” she said without me having to say anything. She shoved me toward the parking lot.

  I ran to my van, started the engine, and took off for the exit.

  I was pulling out of campus when I took a last look in my rearview mirror. At the top of the hill, Phoebe had turned George Henry on his side and given him a good push. He was rolling down the path, bowling over those in the front of the mob. When their torches hit the canola oil, they burst into flames. Their screams filled the night. How ironic for a penniless adjunct to owe her life to George Henry, the patron saint of greed.

  I drank in the scene and realized that perhaps now I could write my lyrical gory story after all.

  Ellen Herbert’s short stories have been published in First for Women, the Sonora Review, and other magazines and have won more than ten awards, including a PEN Syndicate Fiction Prize and a Virginia Fiction Fellowship. One of her stories was read on NPR’s “The Sound of Writing.” Her short story collection, Falling Women and Other Stories, will be published by Shelfstealers Publishing in 2012. Ellen’s personal narratives have appeared in the Washington Post, the Rambler, and other magazines. Ellen teaches fiction at Marymount University and creative nonfiction at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

  AN EDUCATION IN MURDER, by Smita Harish Jain

  George Lewis wanted to be president of Hathaway College—feared, respected, idolized, maybe even lusted after. He would have made it, too; but only days before the Board of Trustees was to make the announcement, George Lewis turned up dead in his office, in the middle of his final act as chair of the Business Department: turning his own program from an academic success story to one that catered to the GED set.

  I had been chief of the Boswell County Police Department for just over a year. Boswell was a one-horse town, and that horse was the college. The mayor had made it clear when he hired me that I was to make myself available to them 24-7. My biggest concern until today was making sure students didn’t park in faculty spots. Even a student protest was just a distant possibility on this unusually quiet rural campus. I came here for the quiet lifestyle, the spectacular scenery, the calm waters, the breathtaking mountains. I came here because it was the kind of place where I could settle down with someone, someone like Annette.

  When I got to Dillard Hall, George still sat in his red leather gentleman’s chair, his head resting on a matching walnut flat-top desk. Blood spatters covered the first-edition hardcover books that lined the wall next to the palladian window; bits of brain clung to the wicker chair by a shelf of academic journals. Fragments of his skull lay scattered under the lowboy behind his desk; and even his antique ceiling lamp had caught clumps of blood-matted hair. Whoever did this to George really meant business.

  “Steve, let us through!”

  “We have a right to be here.”

  “Out of our way!”

  I turned to find the entire faculty of the Business Department gathered outside George’s office. Eggheads, the whole lot of them. I didn’t know how Annette stood it. “We’re PhDs; that means we’re smart doctors, not rich ones,” they liked to say. Then they’d laugh, as if being poor made them seem smarter to anyone. They lined up behind the yellow police tape that separated George’s office from onlookers. Some had come to gawk; others just to make sure.

  “Murder. It’s definitely murder,” Professor Calibri proclaimed as I scraped what was probably a part of George’s temporal lobe off the ottoman in front of his button-tufted wing accent chair. Master of the obvious, that guy. Calibri was smart enough to have a PhD in something I couldn’t spell, but too stupid to realize that he was a prime suspect. They all were. What George had planned for them was enough to drive any one of them to murder.

  “The way I see it is this,” Calibri continued. “George had alienated many of his colleagues in the short time he was here. One of them must have exacted their revenge for his perfidiousness.”

  Thanks for that insight, whatever it means.

  The faculty crowded outside the door, each espousing his or her theory about what had hap
pened in George’s office. The fact that they had no training in criminal investigation seemed beside the point.

  “You know, Steve,” Sylvia Jones began as my team continued working the crime scene.

  “It’s Chief,” I wanted to say. I gritted my teeth. God help me if I ever called them anything but “Professor” or “Doctor.”

  “Yes, Dr. Jones,” I said, not turning to look at her, hoping that would tell her I wasn’t interested in hearing the rest.

  “I think that whoever did this really hated George. I mean, look at this mess!”

  More of the obvious.

  “He had it coming! Everyone knows what he was doing here,” Professor Mancini chimed in.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “The very idea!” came the chorus of responses from the other faculty.

  They were right about one thing. What George was doing was unheard of in academia. Many considered it sacrilege, a broken promise, a giant step backward for education. On the evening of his murder, George Lewis was putting the final touches on his plan to dissolve tenure in the Business Department and convert the entire curriculum into a high-volume, certificate-granting program.

  Gary Brewster couldn’t keep the disdain out of his voice as he described his future at Hathaway College. “Can you believe it? Asking us, PhDs, to teach non-degree-seeking students! Who cares how much revenue it would generate? Tourism and Retail Management aren’t even real majors!”

  “You don’t need college to do any of those jobs,” Doug Mancini complained.

  “That’s just the point; we weren’t going to be part of the real college anymore!” Herb Schwartz reminded him.

  “I didn’t go to school for nine extra years to teach future travel agents!” Marcia Paulson snorted and stormed away.

  “He was even going to have us teaching online. How do you teach students if they aren’t in front of you?” Thomas wondered.

  It went on, but I stopped noting who said what. As far as I was concerned, they were all saying the same thing: every one of them had a reason to want George gone.

  “Some of us would be going part-time! I haven’t done that since I was a visiting professor! What nerve!” someone else piped up.

  I shook my head and kept working.

  “It’s not like we’re paid that much; guaranteed lifetime employment is so little to give us in exchange for all that we do,” the same voice complained.

  There it was. “All that we do.” The Arts and Sciences faculty, long disgruntled at the significantly higher salaries that went to the Business faculty, always complained that they didn’t do enough to warrant those salaries. Their research and scholarship was sketchy at best and non-existent at worst. They called the Business folks unproductive, interlopers, not of the academy.

  Now they would call them murderers.

  I dropped what I was doing and turned to face the crowd. I looked around for Annette but didn’t see her. Surely she had heard the news by now.

  “Okay, let’s have everyone step into Room 410. Once we’re done here, I’ll be in to talk to each of you.” I motioned to one of my officers to escort the Business faculty and their opinions to another room.

  * * * *

  An hour later, we finished processing the murder scene, and I had George Lewis’s body transported to the morgue. I left one of my officers posted outside his office, in case any students showed up, and went to interview the first witness.

  The cleaning woman who had found George was waiting for me in Dillard 415. One of the smaller classrooms used by the Business Department, it also doubled as the department’s conference room. A collection of wooden desks pushed together into the center of the room passed for a conference table. Lecture notes from the accounting class the day before filled the blackboard: debits near the window, credits near the door. In the front of the room, an electronic whiteboard occupied the place of honor, the last vestige of a once not-so-bad program. In the two years George had served as chair of the Business Department, he took it from number five in the state to dead last. Just where he wanted it. The easiest way to dismantle a program was to show it wasn’t successful.

  Sitting in a metal folding chair under the only window in the room was a petite, dark-skinned woman. Her eyes were closed, her face cupped in both hands.

  “Miss,” I started and searched her uniform for a name tag. “Rosa. I’m Chief Summers.”

  She opened her eyes slowly and looked around the room, as if to remind herself where she was. She took in a long, deep breath that filled her whole chest and held it there for several seconds. When she finally exhaled, tears started down her cheeks. She sobbed quietly for a few minutes, then crossed herself and told me what had happened that morning.

  She found George’s body at six a.m., her usual time to clean his office on Saturdays. She unlocked his door and, after looking inside, ran screaming from the room. She never entered the office or touched anything besides the doorknob. She called the police, and we came right away. She had been waiting in Room 415 for two hours, because that’s what “the boy with the uniform” told her to do. I assumed she meant one of my younger officers and didn’t question her about it further. Coupled with the medical examiner’s preliminary estimate that George had died about twelve hours before he was found, I could place his death at approximately six p.m. on Friday evening—a dead time in any academic building. No pun intended.

  I sent her home with the assurance that she would not be asked to clean George’s office, that that job belonged to trained crime-scene clean-up crews, and made my way across the hall to Room 410. The professors should have the case solved for me by now. I sighed.

  “Steve! There you are. Do you have any idea how long you’ve left us in here?” one of them chided.

  “Yes, we have other things to do,” another one said.

  “Is this going to take long?” the complaining continued.

  Yes, George’s death must be such an inconvenience for you.

  I turned without responding and asked my deputy to escort the professors one by one to Room 400, where I would question each one.

  Dillard 400 was a large classroom with lecture-hall seating. Many of the chairs were either broken or missing. Students had declared their love or immortalized the words to their favorite songs on the tops of the fixed tables. Some of the whiteboards could no longer be erased. Over the past two years, it, like most of the bigger classrooms in the building, had fallen into disrepair, through lack of regular use and maintenance. With the number of Business majors at an all-time low, class sizes had never been smaller.

  The first faculty member in was Marcia Paulson. She took the chair at the front of the classroom, no doubt used to being the focus of the room.

  “Dr. Paulson, can you tell me your whereabouts yesterday evening, around six p.m.?” I began.

  Paulson huffed. She ran both hands through her gray-streaked hair and shook her head several times to make it all fall back into place. Then, with squared shoulders and a firm glare, she said, “I don’t understand why you’re questioning any of us. We’re PhDs, not murderers.”

  I replied with the obvious. “Every one of you hated George Lewis’s plans for the Business Department. Wouldn’t some of you want to get even?”

  She thought for a moment before replying. “You’re right; but murder is beneath us. Besides, we were all at the meeting.”

  “What meeting?” I asked.

  “The meeting to develop a plan to stop the destruction of the Business Department.”

  “Really? What’s the plan?”

  “We were still working on it, but murder was not on the agenda, I can assure you.” She smiled. “It doesn’t matter now; someone has already solved our problem.”

  She raised her eyebrows and waited. When I didn’t take the bait, she went on anyway.

  “You’re not going to want to hear this, but the person you should be talking to is Annette.”


  “Annette?” I acted sufficiently surprised.

  “She was the last one here with George last night. Just ask Doug Mancini.”

  It was no secret how I felt about George’s secretary, Annette. What I didn’t know was how much everyone else’s knowing would impact my investigation. Rather than react to Paulson’s insinuation, I told her she could leave and asked my deputy to bring Doug Mancini to me.

  Mancini stormed in all fire and brimstone. “If you think you’re going to pin this on me, you’re nuts! Yes, I hated him. Who didn’t? But when I left here last night, George was still alive; and I was at the SOD meeting until one a.m.”

  “SOD?”

  “Save Our Department.”

  Mancini loomed over me waiting for my response.

  I swallowed a smart remark about academics and their ridiculous acronyms and said, instead, “But you saw George Lewis last night, before the meeting?”

  His bravado waned as he stammered out his response. “Yes, well, I wasn’t here long, and, we just had some business to go over, and, you know—he was alive when I left!”

  “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened yesterday evening, Professor Mancini.”

  He released a long sigh and found his way to one of the student chairs.

  “Look, Annette’s going to tell you that I threatened George, but she’s the one with the bigger motive here. We all knew she was sleeping with him, and he was planning on leaving her behind when he moved into the president’s office. She had to feel used, betrayed, furious.”

  I knew all this. Annette had told me so herself. I hated George for what he had been doing to Annette.

  “Did you threaten George Lewis, Professor Mancini?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a threat, exactly.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “It was more of an observation. I just told him changing our department from a degree program into a certificate program would be a poor choice for him to make.”

  Yes, I’m sure that’s just how you phrased it.

  “Did you see Annette here last night?”