“What have we got to say about anything? Nothing! It’s going to change. You better believe it. Why the hell are we militant? Because nothing else works. The New Left is one way, but it has to be backed up with imagination. Maybe what happened last night would have helped.”
“You mean burning Gunther in effigy?”
“That’s right. We wanted to get under his skin, make him react. Maybe if he felt a hurt he’d show some sympathy with our problems, take some positive action. The last thing in the world we wanted was for somebody to murder him. All that means is that we have to start in all over again on somebody else in authority.”
“You’re a hard case, Damon.”
“Golly, man, the words you come on with. I’m awed. Look! I don’t swing out all the way. I mean, it’s not my bag. But you ought to get with it a little bit. Who condones murder, for Chrissake? You’re barking up the wrong oak tree. It’s just that we’ve got to have a voice. Can’t you dig that? It’s like being inside a cage yelling your head off, pounding on the bars, and nothing happens, nobody lifts a finger, just stands around in silence. Wolfe Wade sits there behind his desk combing the worms out of his hair. He’s in a wet dream of yesterday. This is today, man! Don’t you get it?”
McCall nodded. “Of course I do.”
“Just a voice is all. We have ideas, some good ones. It’s time people got over the stupid notion that youth doesn’t know. I’m not a Yippie, or even a hippie, I’m just a student. But I want them to listen to me, and their ears are stuffed with wax.”
“Let’s get back to the issue, Damon.”
“Laura.”
“Yes.”
“And the dean. You think I did that to Laura?”
“I’ll find out if you did.”
Wilde smacked the bed with his fist. It was a formidable one, and McCall watched it. “Oh, baby. You sound like my father. Bugger it! You want to know something? I didn’t like Laura that much. She thinks she’s so great. Come to think of it, I don’t like her at all.” He glanced at his watch and turned away.
McCall knew he had struck a chord somewhere. The boy figured he had said too much and had tuned out.
“I have to go now,” Damon Wilde said.
“I may want to see you again.”
Wilde said suddenly, “I don’t know what you or the fuzz are going to do about Laura, but we don’t like that sort of thing. Dig? What happened to Laura will... well... take care of itself.”
“Somebody forming a vigilante group?” McCall asked, smiling.
“Don’t partronize me,” Wilde barked. “Look, why don’t you go bug Denny Sullivan or Perry Eastman? They’ve been sucking around Laura, too.”
“I intend to do that,” McCall said.
“Fine,” Wilde said. “And the hell with you.” And he rushed out, cursing.
McCall glanced around. There was no point in searching Wilde’s room; the police had undoubtedly done so, and besides Laura’s boyfriend did not strike him as dull. An eye-hurting psychedelic poster hung over a cluttered desk. Above the bed glowered blowups of Humphrey Bogart and Malcolm X.
He heard the front door open and bang shut.
He started down the hall. The young pumpkin with the handlebar mustache was waiting for him with a solemn expression.
“He’s something of a challenge, isn’t he, Mr. McCall?” the young man said. “I mean Damon. Ballsy. Look, I’m James Tuttle the Third. They call me the Trinity around here. I know about you. Everybody does. We’ve been waiting for you to come around and run Damon through the computer. Look, Damon’s sore because Laura was seen with another guy Friday noon. If you think he acted kind of funny, that’s the reason.”
McCall did not even blink.
“Who was the other fellow, James?”
“Dennis Sullivan.”
“As long as you’re being so informative,” McCall said, “just how close were Sullivan and Laura? Damon mentioned something about his ‘making out.’ Was Sullivan, too?”
“You’d better ask him.” Tuttle waved a delicate forefinger. “In fact, Mr. McCall, you’ll have to find out anything else all by your V.I.P. lonesome. I’m no fink, and you better believe it.”
“Then I take it,” McCall said, smiling, “you don’t care for Mr. Sullivan.”
“You can take it,” James Tuttle the Third smiled back, “and, sir, you can stuff it. The egress is this way.”
McCall stepped outside.
Immediately he reopened the door and stepped back inside. Young Tuttle had disappeared. McCall went into the big common room. Nobody was there. He made for the phone he had spotted near the door.
He got Kathryn Cohan without difficulty and she supplied him with Dennis Sullivan’s address. “How about getting together soon?” McCall asked.
Kathryn said, “Oh, but you’re too busy, Mr. McCall,” and he heard her laugh as she hung up.
Dennis Sullivan lived in a rooming house a few blocks off campus.
Driving along, McCall chewed his cud. The beating of Laura Thornton and Dean Gunther’s murder were connected. He did not know why he was sure of this, but he had always been a hunch player... he wondered if he should not have questioned Wilde about the notes and decided that he had been wise not to. If the student had knowledge of them, he would hardly admit it; the only result would have been to alert him that McCall — and probably the police — knew about them.
Had Dean Gunther really been playing around with one of these attractive college kids? Gunther was the right age for that sort of thing; he dimly glimpsed that Rose Gunther was a washout. And one never knew what another man was capable of.
He had to assume, in view of the notes, that Gunther was guilty of indiscretions if not downright flagrancy. What could have happened last night? Gunther had sneaked out to meet a coed whom he had been having an affair with. He had met death instead.
McCall stopped at a curbside phone booth to call the hospital.
Laura Thornton’s condition was unchanged.
11
The house was an old mansion gone to seed. It smelled of bitter coffee. Sullivan’s room was on the third floor.
McCall found it off an alcove and knocked on the door, freshly painted black.
He knocked again.
“All right,” a voice said.
The door opened, and McCall was a little startled. The young man who stood there had long brown hair sweeping to the neck and curled low across the forehead. He wore a heavy gold earring in his left ear and, like Damon Wilde, he was naked to the waist. He was also barefoot. He wore black, very tight jeans that almost embarrassed McCall. Long sideburns framed his cheeks like parentheses.
“Dennis Sullivan?”
The young man stared; he had bright, fixed blue eyes. “You’re McCall.”
“That’s right. May I come in?”
Sullivan shrugged and stepped back.
McCall entered a small arty room walled with paintings and photographs. The rest was litter and dirt.
“Excuse me,” the young man said. “I was just dressing.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
Sullivan went into the bathroom. He shut the door.
“I suppose you’re here to question me about Laura Thornton,” he called.
“Yes,” McCall said.
Silence.
McCall prowled the room looking at the photographs and the paintings, the beat-up furniture, the textbooks on the shelf above a desk. Most of the pictures on the wall were photographs, blowups of the campus, crowds, a number showing violent action, principally by white-helmeted police wielding their clubs on students (taken apparently during the riot). McCall noticed a good deal of photographic equipment lying about; either it was Sullivan’s hobby or photography was part of whatever curriculum he was taking. A few unframed canvases leaned against the desk. McCall went through them. They were all violent abstracts. One was a study in yellows; another was in blues, black, and purples. One that especially drew his eye was in various shades of red; it made him think of flames scorching the walls and roof of a cave. The artist’s name was scrawled in the righthand lower corner of the painting, but he could not make it out.