The guiding dream of Ralph’s life seems to be a campus where nothing out of the mainstream is ever taught, nothing controversial ever happens, and the bottom line is always written in black ink. I bet his favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla. No surprise, then, that The Write Stuff, Mac’s blog nitpicking the grammatical foibles in faculty and staff writing on our campus - including Ralph’s administrative memos - sent Ralph’s blood pressure off the charts. Mac’s other eccentricities, such as his penchant for bagpipes and his success in writing mystery novels, only rubbed salt in the wound.
Ralph Pendergast, let me make clear, does not like Sebastian McCabe. He also does not like me because of my inability to keep Mac’s escapades out of the local press. And he absolutely hates surprises, which is why I was calling him with the bad news at this hour instead of letting him find out in the morning from the stories I was almost certain would appear in our local media.
He picked up the phone on the fifth ring, his voice groggy. Early to bed, early to rise.
“Sorry to wake you, Ralph,” I said. “This is Jeff Cody.”
“Cody? Oh, no.”
“Yes, sir. We’ve had a little incident you should know about.” I quickly outlined the situation.
“This is a disaster,” Ralph announced. “Simply a disaster.” I could imagine him pressing together his thin lips, running a hand through his slicked-back hair, maybe fumbling at his bedside for his wire-rimmed glasses. “I personally secured the corporate sponsors for this Chalmers Collection. Do you have any idea what this theft will do to our reputation in the business community?”
It wasn’t really a question.
I looked across the way. Mac was standing outside the exhibit room, next to the NO SMOKING sign, smoking a cigar.
“I should have known better than to let myself become involved in any McCabe project,” Ralph continued. “Sherlock Holmes, indeed!”
“You can hardly blame Mac this time,” I pointed out, grudgingly, out of my irrepressible sense of fairness. “As academic vice president, you’re in charge of the damned library. If your curator of special collections had taken some precautions-”
Why was I throwing Gene under the bus like that?
“Don’t let them play it cute,” Ralph interrupted.
“What?”
“The media. Don’t let them say it’s another case for Sherlock Holmes or something like that. They’ll put that on the front page. Get them to play it straight.”
“The media aren’t the enemy here, Ralph.” You are. “The best way to handle a public relations crisis is to be as open and accurate and responsive with the media as you can. If you’ve made a mistake, admit it and apologize. Have a bad day, if necessary, and get it behind you, move on.”
“We didn’t make a mistake. Don’t make this about the college. How the media choose to cover this is the issue.”
I took a deep breath. “Get real, Ralph. There’s no way I can tell the media how to play a story.”
“Then what good are you? And I was certainly under the impression that you had... connections, shall we say, at the Observer.”
“Don’t get personal, Ralph. Besides, that’s all over.”
“Emphasize the law enforcement angle,” Ralph went on, ignoring me as usual. “Campus Security is on the case, near a solution, that sort of thing.”
I barely heard him. On the other side of the escalator a stocky man in his mid-fifties, dressed in a dapper twill suit, was sidling up to my brother-in-law.
“Okay, Ralph,” I blurted into the phone, “I’ll take care of it. If you get any media calls, send them to me. But I have to go now. The press is already on the scene.”
Chapter Five - “Someone I Know”
Even at eleven o’clock at night, Bernard J. Silverstein was impeccably attired in a crisp white shirt and freshly pressed three-piece suit. He looked, as always, more like a professor than a news hawk. He also looked more like a professor than the professors.
“Hello, Jeff,” he said. “Interesting caper somebody pulled here.”
“I prefer to think of it as an incident, Ben. You pick it up on the police scanner?” Ben writes about police, courts, aviation and restaurants for the Erin Observer & News Ledger. In the summer he also writes a gardening column.
“Uh-huh.” Ben pulled a gnarled black pipe out of his coat pocket and stuck it between his thick lips without lighting it. “So what happened?”
Mac took the cigar out of his mouth, as if to speak.
“That’s what Campus Security is trying to determine now,” I interjected before my brother-in-law could talk.
“Don’t hand me that line of bovine excrement,” Jeff,” Ben said. He blinked his owlish eyes. “You know I need some information and I need it fast for the website. That’s the tail that wags the dog now.”
Nearly forty years in the journalistic backwaters had turned Ben Silverstein’s curly hair an iron gray. Two heart attacks had convinced him to modify his bull-terrier approach to getting a story, but he was still a real newsman - one of the best I’d ever known.
“Let me talk to Decker and find out what he’s learned,” I said.
“I’d rather talk to him myself.”
“No doubt.”
“The lieutenant ejected me rather unceremoniously from the crime scene,” Mac complained.
“Good,” I said. “Let me get back to you, Ben.”
Decker was drinking machine-brewed coffee out of a paper cup as he watched his men (one of whom was a woman) take photos and draw sketches of the scene.
“Your favorite press hound is yapping at my heels,” I told him. “What kind of bone can I throw the man?”
“It’s okay to give out the titles and descriptions of the stuff that was stolen,” Decker said. “The estimated value, such as it is, is useable. And you can say means of entry is unknown. But don’t make a big deal out of that. If by any chance McCabe is right, that could be an important clue and I don’t want to tip off the thief that we’re on to it. Oh, and the crime had to have taken place between five this afternoon and the time you folks came. I guess that’s it. Thanks for handling Silverstein, Jeff.”
Out in the corridor again, I gave Ben everything I had from Decker, plus some details from my own knowledge of how the theft was discovered.
“This heinous crime will not go long unsolved,” Mac vowed.
“I suppose not,” Ben said, looking up from his notebook, “what with all these - what do you call them? - these Sherlockians around here for the next couple of days.”
Ralph’s worst fear. I sighed. “I was really hoping you wouldn’t get carried away with that, Ben. I mean, I’m sure that Decker’s troops will find the thief in due course. This Sherlock Holmes angle is really kind of a sideshow, a distraction to the real news here.”
Ben snorted. “The Sherlock Holmes angle is the news, my lad. You wanted to be a reporter once, if I can remember back nearly twenty years when you were working on the campus paper. Tell me the truth: Would you soft pedal the Holmes stuff if you were writing this story?”
Instead of answering that, I said, “Well, you know I had to try.”
Ben’s mouth formed a grin around his unlit pipe. “Besides, my editor wouldn’t let me take a pass on the fun part. Aren’t you going to ask how she is?”
Lynda Teal, news editor of the Erin Observer & News Ledger, had been my girlfriend for four years. Had been, that is, until about a month back when she had declared her independence from what she considered my possessiveness and nagging. Nagging, she called it - just because I frequently provided her with helpful information about the dangers of cigarette smoking. I was only telling her for her own good, wasn’t I? Well, all right, maybe our relationship problems went a tad deeper than that. I still haven’t figured out why she called me a tall Woody Allen.