“Is it against the house rules to buck the pres?”
He sighed. “I didn’t want to say this. But you force me. You may have noticed that there is a certain coolness toward you among the membership.”
I nodded. I had noticed it.
“The membership feels that you are stirring up needless conflict among the more susceptible boys. We had a small closed meeting of the seniors the other day. It was resolved that I speak to you and tell you to cease and desist. If you had any chance of being successful, I wouldn’t speak to you this way. But you have no chance. You just do not have enough influence as a transfer.”
“If I don’t?”
“Then I can swing enough votes to deny the privileges of the house to you.”
“That takes a three-fourths majority.”
“I have more than that.”
I knew that he did. It was no bluff. I made my tone very casual. “Well, you’ve taken care of me a lot easier than some of the others.”
He took his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t think I quite understand that, Rod.”
“Then we’ll drop it right there.” I stood up.
He put his hand out. “No hard feelings?”
I ignored his hand. “Isn’t that a little trite?”
He was good. He actually looked as though he wanted to weep. “That isn’t the Gamma U spirit, Arlin.”
“You take your job pretty seriously, Marris.”
“I do the best I know how.”
“What man could do more!” I said breathlessly. I turned and walked out.
Chapter Seven
Setting Up the Kill
Tilly had stayed up until three, she said, finishing a story for our mutual Friday class. She wanted me to read it. She had brought her carbon with her, in her purse.
“Right here?”
“No. The atmosphere has to be better than this, Joe. Wine, soft music.”
“At my place I can provide the wine and the soft music. Would you okay the background?”
“Look, I’m blushing about the story. I thought it was something I’d never try to put on paper. Maybe I don’t want you to read it.”
It was Friday afternoon. We went out to my place. I put on dark glasses and took the carbon out on the beach.
Tilly said, “One thing I’m not going to do is sit and watch you read it, Joe.” She walked down the beach away from me. I watched her walk away from me. No other girl had such a perfect line of back, concavity of slim waist, with the straightest of lines dropping from the armpits down to the in-curve of waist, then flaring, descending in a slanted curve to the pinched-in place of the knee, then sleekly curving again down the calf to the delicacy of ankle bone and the princess-narrow foot.
She turned and looked back and read my mind. “Hey, read the story,” she said.
I read it. She’d showed me other work and I’d been ruthless about too many adjectives, about stiltedness. This one was simple. A boy and a girl. The awkward poetry of a first love. The boy dies. Something in the girl dies. Forever, she thinks. She wants it to be forever. She never wants to feel again. But as she comes slowly back to life, she fights against it. In vain.
And one day she has flowered again into another love and she cannot fight any more — and then she knows that the bruised heart is the one that can feel the most pain and also the most joy. There was a sting at the corners of my eyes as I finished it.
“Come here,” I called. My voice was hoarse.
She came running. I held her by her sun-warm shoulders and kissed her. We both wept and it was a silly and precious thing.
“I do the writing in this family.” I said. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know. Now I don’t think so.”
“In this family? That is a phrase I leap upon, darling. That is a bone I take in my teeth and run with.”
“Trapped,” I said.
“I release you. I open the trap.”
“Hell no! I insist on being trapped. I want to be trapped. I am a guy who believed in a multiplicity of women. I still do. You’re all of them. You’ll keep well. You’ll last. How will you look at sixty?”
“At you.”
“I’ll be six years older. I’ll sit in the corner and crack my knuckles.”
“With me on your lap it’ll be tough.”
“We’ll manage.”
“Is it good enough to hand in, my story?”
“Too good. We won’t hand it in. We’ll whip up something else for the class. This one we keep. Maybe someday we’ll sell it.” Something stirred at the back of my mind. She saw then the change in my expression.
“What is it, Joe? What are you thinking about?”
“Let me get organized.” I got up and paced around. She watched me. I came back and sat beside her. “Look. I can’t power Arthur into trying anything. It won’t work. I can’t become dangerous. But there’s another way.”
“How?”
I tapped her story with one finger. “This way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I write it up. Other names, other places, but the same method of death in each case. I’ll twist it a little. I’ll make it a small business concern. The similarity will be like a slap in the face.”
“You’ll have to write an ending to it. How does it end, Joe?”
“I won’t end it. I’ll take it right up to a certain spot.”
“Then what are you going to do with it?”
“Easy, my love. I’m going to leave it in Arthur’s room and wait and see what happens. I am going to have it look like an accident. I am going to do it in such a way that he’s going to have to give some thought to eliminating one Joe Arlin.”
“No, Joe. Please, no!”
“I’ve got to finish it off. One way or another.”
She looked at me for a long time. “I suppose you do,” she said quietly.
“Be a good girl. Play in the sand. Build castles. I want to bang this out while it’s hot.”
Dust clouded the page in the type-writer and I put the desk lamp on. Tilly sat across the room reading a magazine. I could feel her eyes on the back of my head from time to time.
I had brought my bad guy up to the Sherman death.
“...stood for a moment and took the risk of looking to see that nothing had been forgotten. The gun had slid under the desk. The body was utterly still. He sew the full clip on the desk beside the bottle of gun oil and...”
“Hey!” I said.
“What, darling?”
“I’ve got a slow leak in my head. So has Lieutenant Cord. So had the murderer.”
She came up behind me and put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “How do you mean?” I pointed at the sentence I had partially finished. “I don’t see anything.”
“Angel,” I said, “Lieutenant Cord spoke of a full clip. I do not think he meant seven or six. I think he meant eight. A clip will not hold nine. There was one shell in the chamber. So how did it get there? To load a .45 with nine you put in a full clip, jack one into the chamber, remove clip, add one more to the clip and slap it back into the grip. A guy loading with nine is not likely to forget he has done so. Let us go calling...”
Lieutenant Cord was about to leave. He frowned at me, looked appreciatively at Tilly. I put the question to him.
“Yes, the clip was full, but what does that prove? Maybe that one had been in the chamber for months. It even makes the case stronger my way. The guy takes out the clip, counts eight through the holes, and forgets the nine load.”
“Or somebody else palms another shell out of the box he had and puts it in the chamber.”
“What kind of tea do you drink, Arlin?”
“Be frank with me, Lieutenant. Doesn’t this make the whole thing just a little more dubious to you?”