“Of course. I’ve been thinking the same way. But you’ve organized it better.”
“That may be the reason I’m here. The use of orderly thought processes acquired through feature work now applied to murder. Do you think you would slip in public if you called me Joe?”
“No. I’m Tilly, of course. But let’s get on with it. Five died. Sherman, Winniger, Welly, Forrith and Ted. Suppose they were killed as a symbol. It had to come from someone inside the house, or an outsider. Each guess leads to a different set of symbols, Joe.”
“You are doing very nicely. Keep going.”
“If they were all killed by a fraternity brother, it had to be because of jealousy, spite, house politics... all that doesn’t satisfy me, Joe. Those reasons seem too trivial somehow. And if it came from outside the house, you have to agree that it was a male who was willing to take the chance of being seen inside the house. There the risk is greater, but the motives become stronger. The fraternity system is based on a false set of values. Kids can be seriously and permanently hurt by the sort of cruelty that’s permitted. A mind can become twisted. Real hate can be built up.
“When I was a freshman, one sorority gave my roommate a big rush. She wanted to join and so she turned down the teas and dances at the other houses. When the big day came she was all bright-eyed and eager. The stinkers never put a pledge pin on her. She offended somebody in the house and in the final voting she was blackballed. But she had no way to fight back.”
“What happened to her, Tilly?”
“She left school before the year was over. She wrote once. The letter was very gay, very forced. But even though it hurt me to see what happened to her, I was too much of a moral coward to turn down my own bid that night she cried herself to sleep.”
“Then,” I said, “if this is a case of a twisted mind trying to ‘get even’ with Gamma U, we have to find out who took an emotional beating from the brethren in the pledge department, eh?”
“Doesn’t it look that way to you? And you can find that out, you know. There are six thousand kids in the university. Two thousand belong to clubs and fraternities and sororities. Four thousand are what we so cutely call barbarians. Barbs. Outcasts. Spooks, creeps, dim ones. There, but for the grace of the Lord—”
“It can be narrowed down a little, Tilly,” I said. “The first two were killed last year just before the rushing season started. That means that if the assumption we’re making is correct, the jolt came the year before and the party brooded about it for almost an entire year before taking action. That would fit. He would be a junior.
“Assume, with the even split between male and female, there are seven hundred and fifty juniors. Five hundred of them are barbs. Out of that five hundred, probably fifty were on the Gamma U rush list two years ago. Out of that fifty, I would guess that fifteen to twenty were pledged. The rush list should be in the files. If we both work on it, we ought to be able to narrow it down pretty quickly.”
She looked at me and her eyes filled again. “Joe, I... some day I want to tell you how much it means that you’ve come here to...”
“Last one in is a dirty name,” I said.
She moved like I thought I was going to. As I reached the edge, she went flat out into a racing dive, cutting the water cleanly. She came up, shook her wet hair back out of her eyes and laughed at me.
We swam out, side by side. A hundred yards out we floated on the imperceptible swell. “Ted and I used to swim a lot,” she said in a small voice. And then she was gone from me, her strong legs churning the water in a burst of speed. I swam slowly after her. When I caught up with her, she was all right again.
“It’s clear today,” she said, going under in a surface dive. I went down too, and with my eyes squinted against the water I could see the dance of the sunlight on the sandy bottom. I turned and saw her angling toward me, her hair streaming out in the water, half smiling, unutterably lovely. I caught her arm and, as we drifted up toward the surface, I kissed her.
We emerged into the air and stared at each other gravely. “I think we’d better forget that, Joe,” she said.
“That might be easier said that done, Tilly.”
“Don’t say things you don’t mean, Joe. Ever.”
Only three to go. I parked in the shade and was glad of it when I found he hadn’t come back yet. It was a tourist court and trailer park. The layout had been pasted together with spit and optimism. Neither ingredient had worked very well. Dirty pastel walls, a litter of papers and orange peels, a glare of sun off the few aluminum trailers, some harsh red flowers struggling up a broken trellice. I watched his doorway. The sign on it said Manager. A half hour later a blonde unlocked the door and went in.
I walked over and knocked. She came to the door, barefoot. In another year the disintegration would have removed the last traces of what must have once been a very lush and astonishing beauty. That is a sad thing to happen to a woman under thirty.
“Maybe you can’t read where it says no vacancy,” she said.
“I want to see Bob Toberly,” I said.
“If it’s business, you can talk to me. I’m his wife.”
“It’s personal.”
She studied me for a few moments. “Okay, wait a sec. Then you can come in and wait. He’s late now.” Her voice had the thin fine edge that only a consistently evil disposition can create.
She disappeared. Soon she called, “Okay, come on in.”
Her dress was thrown on the unmade bed. She had changed to a blue linen two-piece play suit that was two sizes too small for her.
“I gotta climb into something comferrable the minute I get in the house,” she said defiantly. “This climate’ll kill you. It’s hell on a woman.” She motioned to a chair. I sat down. She glared at me. “Sure I can’t handle whatever it is you wanna see Bob about?”
“I’m positive.”
She padded over to the sink, took a half bottle of gin out of the cabinet and sloshed a good two inches into a water tumbler. “Wanna touch?”
“Not right now, thanks.”
She put an ice cube in it, swirled it a few times and then tilted it high. Her throat worked three times and it was gone. The room was full of a faint sour smell of sweat.
The room darkened as Bob Toberly cut off the sunlight. He came in, banging the screen door. He was half the size of a house, with hands like cinderblocks. He looked suspiciously at me and then at the bottle on the sink.
“Dammit, Clara, I told you to lay off that bottle.”
“Shaddup!” she snapped. “I drink what I please when I please with no instructions from you.”
He grabbed her arm and twisted it up behind her. He pushed her to the door, shoved her outside. “Wait out there until I tell you to come in.”
He turned to me, ignoring her as she screamed at him. “Now what do you want?”
“I’m making a survey of local students who were turned down by the local chapter of Gamma U. It’s for a magazine article condemning fraternities. I got my hands on the rush list for two years ago. Your name was on it.”
He rocked back and forth, his lips pursed, staring down at me. Suddenly he grinned. “What do you want to know?”
“What was your reaction when you weren’t pledged? How’d you take it?”
“I wanted to go bust those smart guys in the chops.”