A slim thirtyish man with a doge’s profile stalked out of 321 a moment later, scowling. His lips were almost as pale as the eyes bulging out at McCall from behind steel-rimmed glasses. “I’m Snyder,” he snapped. “What do you want?” He was dressed in rather sporty fashion, a man who evidently took pains at his mirror in the morning. His manner and tone were so disagreeable that McCall pegged him as vulnerable.
“I’ll keep you just as short a time as I can, professor,” McCall said. “I suppose you’ve heard that I’m here for Governor Holland on the Laura Thornton case. You know about her?”
“Certainly I know about her. Everybody at ’Squanto does. Why do you come to me?”
McCall smiled wanly at him. “I don’t really know. I’m pretty much at loose ends, and I’m following up every lead I can get. You see, I’m here about Dean Gunther, too.”
“Gunther?” The pale eyes were set in concrete. “Are you intimating—?”
“My dear professor, I’m not intimating a darned thing. My only reason for questioning you is that I hear you had a fight with Dennis Sullivan, a student here who knows Laura Thornton. I haven’t the foggiest notion if it has anything to do with my investigations. I’m simply asking. Could you tell me what happened, and why?”
Snyder flashed startling gray teeth. His breath was pungent.
“That’s taken care of. All over with.”
“I’d still like to hear about it.”
“There was some trouble, but it had absolutely nothing to do with... Sullivan’s not doing well in a course he’s taking under me. He became irritated when I spoke sharply to him, and he lost his head.”
“What did he do, Mr. Snyder?”
“He knocked me down.”
“After class?”
“During class. He just stepped, up to me and lashed out with his fist. He has an extremely short fuse, that young man.” Snyder’s tone was murderous.
“What did you do?”
“I reported him to Dean Gunther at once. When I got back here Sullivan was waiting for me in the hall.” He licked his gray lips. “He was waiting to apologize. He was almost groveling. Seemed genuinely sorry for what he’d done. That’s the whole bit. May I return to my class now, Mr. McCall?”
“Sorry to have bothered you, professor.”
Snyder stalked back into his classroom, and McCall headed for the elevator. The only light Snyder’s story shed on anything was what it revealed about Dennis Sullivan. A short-tempered, possibly unstable kid who was torn between his shallow hostilities and his desire to remain at Tisquanto State. There was no other explanation for his abject apology, if Professor Snyder was to be believed.
At a phone booth in the lobby McCall checked with the hospital. He was told that Laura Thornton was still in coma, between life and death.
So he phoned Sam Holland and brought the governor up to date.
“I was afraid Brett Thornton would be like that,” the governor said. “Don’t let him get you down, Mike. There’s a lot of bluff in his bark. For the rest, we can only hope and pray that the girl pulls through. So you think Gunther’s murder and the attack on Laura are related?”
“Yes.”
“I hear there was another student outbreak this morning.”
McCall told him about the strange riot. “It’s not good, governor. As far as I can make out it’s a small segment of the student body that’s causing the trouble. But they suck the others in, and soon everybody gets sticky under the collar. Frankly, I can understand some of the kids’ attitudes after talking to President Wade and some others here. Whatever the students get they’ll certainly have to fight for. How is Mrs. Thornton?”
“Not good. Well, Mike, do what you can. I want that killing cleared up fast, and some decent resolution to the Laura Thornton affair. As for the campus situation, I’ll step in if I have to. But I’m hoping it won’t come to that.”
“I wish you’d give me an easy assignment once in a while!”
Holland sighed and hung up. McCall had a taunt, urgent feeling that would not go away, he knew, until he came up with some right answers.
He consulted his memorandum and drove over to the Sigma Alpha Phi house again. He asked for Veronica Gale, the girl who was reportedly sharing Damon Wilde’s bed. But she was out, he was told, and was not expected back for several hours. Using the sorority phone, he rang up Patricia Reed’s rooming house. A woman who identified herself as the landlady answered. “Patricia isn’t here. Is this Dennis?”
“No,” McCall said. “Could you tell me when Miss Reed will be back?”
“I have no idea,” the woman yipped. “And if this is Dennis, you’ve got your nerve! Keeping Patricia up till all hours like you do. I don’t like it, mister. It gives my house a bad name!” She slammed the receiver.
Back at the Red Harbor Inn McCall shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, stretched out on the bed, and went into conference with himself. He found himself arguing in circles. It was like trying to handle smoke.
Again and again he found himself coming back to Graham Starret, the black student who had discovered Laura’s unconscious body on the riverbank, and wondered why. There was certainly no reason to suspect Starret of having had anything to do with the beating of the girl beyond the fact that he had reported finding her body — a fact that, in McCall’s view, gave him an appearance of innocence. Yet he kept picking away at Starret. The thought struck McCall that he might be motivated by the same racist psychology as Lieutenant Long. It was an appalling thought, and McCall spent an uncomfortable few minutes wrestling with it. Was he looking for primitive — easy — solutions, too? The scapegoat psychology that moved Long?
On impulse he reached for the phone and asked the desk clerk who answered to connect him with police headquarters and Lieutenant Long.
“This is McCall, lieutenant. What’s doing?”
“Nothing,” Long said. He would have sounded nasty asking for a drink of water. “How’s the genius from upstate making out?”
“About as well as you. How’s your case coming against the Starret boy?”
“We had to let him go. A mouthpiece showed up from the NAACP or something.”
“Then you had no evidence,” McCall said cheerfully. “Did you check out his story with the date he had that night? The girl in the car with him?”
“That piece of white trash?” the lieutenant growled. “She backed up his story, all right. What would you expect?”
“Thanks, lieutenant.”
“For what?”
McCall went back to his reflections.
Who had typed the letters? Girl and man? Who had lured Dean Gunther to the big oak behind the Bell Tower and made a pincushion out of him? If, in fact, they were the same.
And who had beaten Laura Thornton almost to death?
Suppose the two crimes were connected.
Suppose the two crimes weren’t connected.
Veronica Gale...
Damon Wilde, student rebel leader, riot enthusiast (he could still see Wilde waving his arms in exhortation to his troops that morning in the assault on McNiel Hall), pursuer of Laura Thornton — so hot in pursuit that he had managed an invitation to the Thornton home and a vague state of “engagement” — all the time sleeping with Veronica Gale. What kind of arrangement was that, Katie Cohan’s lecture on the modern sexual mores of college students notwithstanding?
Had Laura found out? Maybe she had. Maybe she wasn’t as free and easy in her attitude toward freedom of the sexes as her boyfriend. Maybe she called him on it and got beaten to within an inch of her life for being such a square.
Was Wilde capable of such a thing? He was quick-tempered, certainly; he had resented McCall, answered a few questions, rushed away. He had been nervous. He had also been cryptic, on the one hand admitting having been with Laura in the Greenview Motel on a number of occasions under the false names of Mr. and Mrs. Jospeh Addison, and on the other confessing with every appearance of sincerity that he didn’t really care much for Laura. And, finally, voicing a threat. Watch out, fuzz...