MERVYN GRAY: I’ve got a strong suspicion.
PROFESSOR BURTON: We must face the crisis. It’s no use to pretend that it doesn’t exist. This wretched publicity is the poorest sort of thing for the department.
MERVYN GRAY: I realize this, Professor Burton. Unfortunately I can’t do anything about it.
PROFESSOR BURTON: Then — unfortunately, as you put it — I must. Blameless as you well may be, we simply can’t tolerate this sort of thing in connection with the university.
MERVYN GRAY: You mean that I’m fired?
PROFESSOR BURTON: I mean that you will not be rehired for the fall semester. For your own good I suggest that you resign. After this affair has been forgotten, there is no reason why you should not seek a similar post at another institution. If you choose to do this, you can look to me for references.
MERVYN GRAY: And if not?
PROFESSOR BURTON (rising): That aspect need not be considered. Surely you’ve thought the matter over.
MERVYN GRAY (desperately): Naturally, Dr. Burton. But my whole career is at stake. I’ve even been hoping for an assistant professorship—
PROFESSOR BURTON (like steel): That, I fear, is no longer remotely possible. The regents would be outraged at the mere suggestion, and rightly. These are the facts, Mr. Gray. May I have your resignation?
So much was academically inevitable. But that could be by far the least of it. For what if the police refused to believe that he had no knowledge of how Mary’s body had come to be found by him in the Chevy trunk? That could be a matter not of his academic career but of his life... He forced himself to think coolly.
Mary Hazelwood had been murdered. And someone had stolen his car and stuffed her body into the trunk. This someone was almost certainly an acquaintance, because he knew all about the trick ignition switch. A sickening thought... Well, now was the time to fish or cut bait...
Going to the police was out.
Once he had made the decision, his next step was clear. And this was too exposed a spot to do it. Mervyn started the car and drove off.
He turned at Ardly Avenue and then took Perkins Road to the Freeway, heading north.
After a few miles he drove off into a side road, and presently left-turned into another.
He stopped the car between a vineyard and a field barren except for a few sheds and farmhouses in the distance. The hot breeze sighed through the grapevines; grasshoppers sang.
Mervyn got out. He was alone on the road.
Steeling himself, he flung open the trunk. She was still there, in sky blue, stiff and curled. Poor Mary, thought Mervyn, poor innocent friendly Mary.
He stooped. Her suitcase lay half under her body. Her right temple showed a great dent that had pushed her features askew. Apparently she had been killed by a blow from a heavy object. The area of contusion showed a pattern of secondary marks, grouped in a semicircle, where the skin had been broken. Mary’s bones were delicate; the blow might not have done such damage to a heavier skull.
The muscles of his arm quivering, he reached behind the body and pulled out the suitcase. The body bumped to the floor of the trunk. The blazing sun, the vineyard smelling of hot leaves and sulphur, the dust-colored road, the car: in such a context the corpse seemed absurd as well as pitiful.
Mervyn lugged the small suitcase around to the front seat and opened it. He was poking around when a faint clatter brought his head up and around sharply. Behind him at the crossroads a toy truck was growing larger. He hurried around to the rear of the car and slammed down the trunk lid, breathing hard. The toy became a noisy, dilapidated pickup. Three pairs of expressionless adult eyes swiveled to stare at him from the front seat as the pickup passed. In the rear crouched four bedraggled children with dirt-colored hair and fox faces; they too stared at Mervyn until the pickup dwindled to nothing behind a cloud of dust.
Mervyn went back to the front seat and finished exploring the suitcase; it contained only the usual feminine clutter. He took it back to the trunk, unlocked the trunk again, stowed the suitcase away... He frowned. Wasn’t something missing? Her purse! Suitcase but no purse... He lifted the body, looked underneath. No purse.
Mervyn shut the trunk. His hands tingled. He went to the side of the road, scooped up another handful of the hot, dry sand from between a pair of small tumbleweeds. He rubbed his palms with it nervously. Then he climbed into the car and turned it around and drove back to the crossroads and presently onto the Freeway.
The sun was dropping low over the flatlands. Through the haze in the west the golden hills of the Coast Range loomed serenely above it all. Mervyn strove to capture some of their aloofness. He could not afford to handle his problems, he kept telling himself, on an emotional level... Automatically checking his gas gauge, he was reminded that when he had reclaimed the car at the Madera garage the gauge had stood at the quarter mark. Significant fact? One that deserved thinking about? The week before, John Boce had borrowed the convertible and made much of the fact that he had returned it with a full tank. Mervyn had not used the car since. Three-quarters of sixteen gallons — the capacity of the tank — was twelve. At highway speeds the old convertible usually made about fifteen miles to the gallon. Approximately 180 miles, then 190 perhaps, for the gauge was a bit below the one-quarter mark. Madera was something over 150 miles from Berkeley. Which left thirty-five, maybe forty miles to be accounted for.
All this was very strange. And he still had to decide what to do with Mary...
He looked to the left, toward the mountains. After a few miles the farms thinned out as the barren foothills began. He knew places where no one came, not even to graze cattle.
Mervyn grimaced. He’d have to make sure there were no witnesses... Wheels within wheels. A single certainty: someone wanted him tagged for the murder of Mary.
He reverted to Mary’s handbag. Why was it missing? Accident? Or design? The possibilities were alarming.
He began to drive faster. Sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five. The rush of the wind recalled him to his senses, and he decelerated; thereafter he drove cautiously, well below the speed limit. It would not do to be arrested. Or, even worse, to become involved in an accident and have the trunk fly open.
At Merced he gassed up. He discovered that he was famished; he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He considered. The time was now six o’clock. If he drove straight through he would arrive in Berkeley about eight, or half past. For a reason which he could not identify, this seemed too early. So he turned into a drive-in.
But now he found that, hungry or not, he could not eat with Mary Hazelwood curled up dead in the trunk. It seemed monstrously unfitting. Committed, he ordered a milk shake, drank it without tasting it. Then he called for black coffee and sat brooding... If only he could dump the entire business — anonymously — into the hands of the police! Why should he be in this miserable position? To have to choose between disposing of a murder victim and destroying his career! Or even having to take the rap for the whole thing...
Suddenly nervous, Mervyn paid up and started north once more. And again that niggling disinclination to get back too early. He chewed at it and finally identified the cause. Night was what he was after. He did not want to be seen. He was feeling guilty!
The thought enraged him; he drove faster. But then he slowed again. After all, he did have something to slink about — he was carrying a corpse in the trunk of his car, and he was planning to dispose of it where it would never be found. He thought of the police and again, in frustration, rejected the idea. It was simply too damn suicidal... If only he knew the identity of that someone, if he could manage to tuck poor Mary’s corpse into that someone’s bed, for instance... that would be poetic justice... He spent the rest of the trip — through Modesto, Manteca, Tracy, north to Walnut Creek and over the hills to Berkeley — in a series of fantasies, all darkly disastrous to the someone who had planted the corpse in his car.