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IV
The First Friday
Power is not… a certain strength. [Power is a]
set of actions upon other actions.
Michel Foucault
Jean Grahame, Don Grahame's wife, had done a Master's degree with Charlie. She'd then gone on to medical school and was now well established as Kingsford's best dermatologist. Charlie and Kate occasionally had dinner with Don and Jean, but more often he saw her over lunch. Her schedule meant that he might get a call at ten-thirty or eleven for lunch at noon, but he always made time for her. The call on Friday came much earlier. Charlie had just arrived at his office and it was only nine-fifteen.
"Okay; I put off a meeting; we're having lunch."
With that she hung up and Charlie got busy with his email and that stubborn paper. When he got to the club Jean was at a table for two and half-way through a glass of wine.
"Fill me in. Did you finally shoot Wilson?"
"Don't joke like that; the cops actually searched my car, my house, my office, and even my safe-deposit box for a gun. Since then, they've learned I wasn't the only one that didn't like Barrett. Anyway, I don't know much at all. I just learned yesterday that he was living alone in a big house after giving up his apartment and his partner - unless she gave him up."
"You're trying to figure it out, aren't you. You read so many mysteries there's no way you wouldn't be. What have you learned? Tell me or I won't buy lunch."
"You never do! Anyway, I've learned almost nothing. Barrett must have done something that got him killed, but all I have reason to suspect is that Barrett may have dabbled in drugs."
"If you can keep your mouth shut, I'll pass on a little tid-bit. I treated his partner, Janet Milford, for a rash a little over a year ago. It was all over her lower arms. I never did figure out what it was; she came to me late, when it'd become very itchy, and I just gave her some standard salve and didn't hear from her again. I didn't know who she was till she started going on about her partner, Barrett, being upset about the rash. I asked her if she meant Barrett Wilson and she nodded."
"Think Barrett did drugs?"
"No idea. I saw him occasionally at parties - he knew a friend of Don's - and he never looked even remotely high on anything."
"You never mentioned that before. What was he like socially?"
"Boring. I only spoke to him for a minute or so on occasion, and only when he was standing with Don. He seemed to be able to talk only about himself. Do you think it was a student? I can't see any of the department members knowing how to shoot a gun, never mind plugging someone."
"Student attitudes have changed a lot, but it's pushing it to think they're now ready to draw on a prof. Everybody's baffled. Barrett was a pain in the ass, but he was more a nuisance than a serious problem. All you had to do was avoid him. Of course, someone he was supervising couldn't avoid him and might well have been seriously pissed off."
"So, this was a bust. I thought you'd have a lot of good stuff. So you buy lunch. You're as bad as Don; he didn't know anything either, not even about the move. By the way, no one came around to search our house."
"I think initially Bolster and DeVries - the two detectives - were overly impressed by the fact that I was in the department both on Tuesday and on Wednesday, when they found the body, and that he and I didn't get on. Yesterday they must have realized that several people disliked Barrett, so I faded into the background."
"Unless they want you to think that."
"No, I really don't think so. I even think they think they might get something more from me, not about the actual shooting but about the background to it."
"I gotta go. Keep me informed. Bye."
Jean was always on a tight schedule, and once she'd gone Charlie carried his coffee over to the club table where several people were lingering. He was again asked about new developments but the conversation soon returned to what they'd been talking about, which was the president's comments published that morning. Charlie hadn't looked at the paper. Apparently the president had shuffled her vapid assurances yet again and told the Times-Standard she had every confidence in the Kingsford police and was sure it was an intruder and nothing to do with Meredith as an institution. One less than diplomatic remark was about how the university relied on its alumni for generous funding and how regrettable it was that "something like this" might upset them.
Back in his office, Charlie half-expected or half-hoped one or another student would come in about his course, but that didn't happen. He made a desultory attempt to work on his paper, but that came to nothing. He went for coffee about three-thirty and gave himself over to thinking about Barrett's death.
Clearly Barrett had done something to get himself killed. Barrett seemed to have been talking to someone in his office, apparently unsuspecting or at least underestimating that person's anger or resolve. What was odd was Barrett being in his office over the break. He had to have gone in to meet someone, and it probably was someone he didn't want at his house. That did make it look like it could have been a student, and since there was no way Barrett would meet with an undergraduate during the break; it had to be a grad if it was a student. Charlie got the lists out and went through them carefully. The next thing he did was something he should have done earlier, which was to check how many of the students listed were actually in residence. It was more or less the norm that people who finished their qualifying exams would leave campus and register part-time to save tuition.
Currently, Barrett had only two Ph.D supervisions and a solitary M.A. One of the Ph.Ds was nonresident and lived some eight-hundred miles away. As for students on whose committees Barrett served, there were four; all in residence. That was a total of six possibles, assuming the nonresident Ph.D hadn't been in Kingsford over the Christmas break.
Of the six possibles, Jennifer Pullen, the resident Ph.D, was the one Charlie had seen most often. Richard Dalton, the M.A. candidate, was older, having enrolled in the M.A. program after whatever he'd been doing since getting his B.A. Dalton had sat in on one of Charlie's courses on Foucault. He hadn't registered for the course, no doubt so Barrett wouldn't know he was taking it, but he'd made good contributions in the seminar and seemed to take the material seriously.
The students on whose committees Barrett served were Peter Burton, Jane Casagrande, Matt Richards, and John Wesley. Casagrande had not yet paid her Fall term fees, so it was possible she had dropped out of the program. That would make things a little simpler. Charlie turned to his laptop again and looked up Jane Casagrande. He learned that she had "N. W." after each of the three courses she'd registered for the previous term, which meant she'd not written the exams or submitted term papers. That, together with the outstanding fees made it look as if there were only five possibles. A call to Phoebe confirmed that no one had heard from Casagrande for weeks before the break and certainly she'd not been in the department since the beginning of the Winter term. On the other hand, if she'd dropped the program because of a serious falling out with Barrett, she might have come to see him at the break.
But was his killer a student? One point in favor of it being a student was that all the grads had keys to the building, which would have been locked during the break. Of course, the point applied equally to colleagues. However, if whoever Barrett had met didn't have a key, Barrett would have had to wait at the building's main or side door because neither was visible from his office window.
One thing that seemed clear was that the murder wasn't the result of sudden rage. If Barrett had been beaten to a pulp, maybe, but whoever killed him had brought a gun to their meeting. Even in the most unlikely event that Barrett kept a gun in his office, the killer getting at it would have left traces of a struggle.
When Charlie got home he was met with a declaration.
"I want to go out tonight."
"It's Friday; all our favorite places will be jammed."
"They always have a table for us at Sandoval's"
"We were just the
re!"
"And your point is…?"
"Okay, okay, but let's go early. We can go in a half-hour."
"That's when they open; I don't want to be there when they unlock the door. Call Derek and say we'll be there at six. I'm going to take a shower."
Charlie sat down and let stuff run through his mind. He often did that when he was working on something, and in a way this wasn't all that different. He was pretty sure Bolster and DeVries expected something from him. Bolster asking about drugs was probably as much a prompt as a question. He was likely expected to find out which of Barrett's students might have shared his interest in drugs - if he had one.
The trouble was that the more Charlie thought about Barrett and drugs, the more out of line it seemed with what he knew of Barrett. Then Charlie remembered a reception Barrett had organized for a visiting speaker. The university didn't allow liquor to be served on campus except with a special license, though no one bothered about a couple of bottles of wine at a small reception. Barrett, though, had served wine and martinis and plenty of them. Charlie recalled feeling a little put off by that, but Barrett had been positively jovial that night. Okay, maybe there was another side to Barrett when he was among friends, so the drug thing was a possibility.
Sandoval's was already busy when they got there at six. Probably people wanting an early dinner before a show or party. Derek had saved their table and whisked off the "Reserved" sign as they sat down. Charlie ordered a bottle of a New Zealand sauvignon blanc he liked and Kate thought too pricey. He then gave the menu his usual attention despite the fact that he knew it by heart. As usual, Derek had a special that was more interesting than the dishes listed and both ordered it.
"You look, I don't know, kind of worked up. What's going on?"
"I've been thinking about Barrett's murder."
"Spare me; don't tell me you're really going to get into this."
"Not really; it's just that I got a list of the students working with Barrett. I think it'd be worth looking closely at those students. There are only six; well, five, really, since one seems to have taken off."
"Can you really picture a student shooting Barrett?"
"It seems unlikely, but it's not absurd. Another thing is that I thought of a time when Barrett clearly put a good time ahead of propriety."
"Charlie, might you be letting your dislike of Barrett determine your thinking on this?"
"I'm trying not to. Do you think it's possible he was in his office for some reason and wasn't expecting anyone and somebody just walked in?"
"I assumed the door to Barrett's office was locked when they found the body."
"I don't know…Oh…"
"Right; no one could have just walked in unless he unlocked the door when he went in or left it open or ajar."
The department doors could be opened by turning the key to the right or to the left. If the key was turned to the right, the door opened but stayed locked and locked automatically when it was closed. If the key was turned to the left, the door opened and was unlocked and could be shut and reopened without a key. The new locks had been an attempt to cut down on the theft when the university's insurance began to soar due to the number of computers that went missing. Most department members opened their doors by turning the key to the right, so they could go to the washroom or main office and lock their doors just by shutting them. Barrett almost certainly did the same and he always closed his door when in his office. Whoever had killed Barrett most likely couldn't have just walked in.
"So, either Barrett was expecting someone and left the door open, or he had to go down to let the killer in."
"Let's forget about Barrett for a while. I want to know if you've thought about what you want to do about the house."
"The Barrett thing has been a tremendous distraction, but you're right. There are things more important to us. Trouble is, I just can't make up my mind."
"I've been thinking hard about the money side. You know, we've always indulged ourselves; we've never saved in any serious way. The income from my copy-editing helps but it's sometimes sporadic. We really can't afford a condo in our neighborhood. There're only two things we can do without seriously changing our lifestyle. We could sell the house and buy a condo in another neighborhood, away from the lake, or sell the house and put the money in some kind of trust to pay the rent on a nice apartment in our own neighborhood."
Charlie began to feel hassled and was relieved when Derek turned up with their main courses. Derek poured more wine then left, but it'd been enough to break the tension. Kate seemed to understand and they talked about other things. They finished and Charlie offered dessert. Kate opted for a Spanish coffee and he finished the wine. Perhaps to draw things out both decided to have an espresso and by the time they left the restaurant Charlie was feeling better and had no reservations about driving.
Later, as he was waiting for sleep, Charlie gave some thought to whether he might be putting himself in danger by talking to the students whose names he'd collected. The thing was, he didn't believe any one of them had shot Barrett. Dalton; he'd start with Dalton.