Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005
- Автор: Dean David, Dempsey Timothy F.
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN 1054-8122
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005». Краткое содержание книги:
“Beat him up! Who?”
“That’s the problem. Harrison says he doesn’t know who did it. He was out as usual walking his dog on the hiking trail behind our — his house last evening, just after dark, when it happened.”
“Did you call the police?”
“I wanted to, but Harrison said no, I don’t know why.”
“And you want me to do... what?”
“Will you come out to the house and talk to Harrison? He’s in too much pain to drive to campus.”
“Does he want to talk with me?”
Her voice subdued, telling tales out of school, Naomi said, “He doesn’t know I’ve come to see you.”
She wheeled the Navigator in at the campus parking-lot entrance, stopped, and turned to me, her eyes moist. “Please, Peter, we need help. Something’s wrong and I’m worried.”
I dropped down from the Navigator with a promise of action, retrieved my Volvo from the lot, and cell-phoned my office to tell them I would be late returning from lunch. I followed Naomi then back up Main and across town to Mariposa Estates, a development of modest one-story mission-style homes where many faculty lived. Naomi pulled up a driveway and into a garage, its door sliding down behind the Navigator. I parked at the curb and she met me at the door, elfin, beautiful, worried. “He’s out on the patio,” she said, leading me through a book-lined living room and out a pair of French doors onto a shaded pad of tile, into air scented with jasmine. A redwood recliner bore Harrison Buckman, a wiry, athletic man in his mid forties suddenly fattened by swaths of gauze and tape across his chest, over one shoulder, and around his right arm and hand. He turned his head towards us in obvious pain. His face was red and bruised, one eye nearly swollen shut. “What the hell, Naomi!” he muttered. He sighed and struggled up to a seated position and shook my hand with his left hand. “Hey, Peter. Sorry to bother you with this.”
“Wow, Harrison,” I said. “How fast was it going when it hit you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Naomi tell you what happened?”
“She says you don’t know who did it. Were you robbed? Don’t you think you ought to make a police report?”
Instead of answering, Buckman glanced over my shoulder at Naomi and said, “Hey, Naomi, I’m dying of thirst. Could you get me and Peter something? A beer, maybe? You, Peter?”
“Maybe a Coke.”
Naomi disappeared and Buckman leaned toward me. “Sit down, Peter,” he whispered. “I wasn’t robbed. And I don’t want to upset Naomi, but I think the guy who did this to me was Joe Hayden.”
“In Fine Arts? The painter who used to play NFL football?”
“Yes. Played defensive end a couple of seasons for the Raiders back in the ’eighties, before he got hurt. I guess he discovered painting in therapy, began to sell well up in Bay Area galleries, and got picked up by the GSU Art Department.”
“Can you identify him to the cops?”
Harrison shook his head gingerly, eyes closed. “No. I really didn’t see who it was. Just a dark shadow out of the corner of my eye and whap! Dropped a bag over my head filled with something. Ether, maybe? Whatever it was, I tried to pull the bag off, took one breath, and I was out for fifteen, twenty minutes. Came to all beat to hell, with Lolly — that’s my dog — licking my arm.” He shifted on the recliner to find a more comfortable position. “Bruised some ribs and damn near broke my right arm, and my right hand looks like he stamped on it. Broke two fingers.”
“So what makes you think it’s Hayden?”
“Hayden is Naomi’s ex. They got married about a year after she came here, but it didn’t work out and she left him.”
“And you think that’s why he popped you? Because you and Naomi...?”
“It’s a good bet. She says he’s never really gotten over their divorce. Still telephones once in a while and sends her cards on anniversaries. I don’t think she’s afraid of him, but he worries her. She says he’s gentle, a lot more artist than footballer, but maybe a little nuts.”
“All the more reason to call the cops,” I said.
“No way, Peter. I’ve got to handle this my own way. First of all, if Naomi knew Joe did this, she’d be really upset. And if word got out about it, can you imagine the stories in the Greenfield Gazette? Hell, in the San Francisco Chronicle? ‘GSU Professor Beaten in Love Triangle.’ That’s all it would take to shut off the National Science Foundation and every other granting agency. I might just as well kiss the Nanotech Lab goodbye. I mean, you don’t have to be a saint to do good science, but the big foundations like Hewlett and Keck and Carnegie, they won’t let you play in their sandbox if your reputation’s smudged with any kind of sex thing.”
I nodded. “I can see that. But why would he do something like this? Was he trying to get rid of you permanently?”
“No. I don’t think so. He could have done it easily enough with me completely out like that.”
I was puzzled. “I don’t know Hayden very well. We talked once at one of those faculty teas the Swensons throw; you know, where the only ‘t’ consumed is preceeded by ‘mar’ and followed by ‘ni.’ How sure are you he’s the guy?”
“Well, the bag he used. It’s over there by the railing. Take a look.”
I crossed the patio and spotted the bag, crumpled brown canvas, the kind of sack you might carry fifty pounds of potatoes in. Or four or five footballs. It still gave off a faint medicinal smell. On one side was a stencil in white of a pirate wearing an eye patch, the logo of the Oakland Raiders.
“See?” said Buckman. “And what his motive was, I’m not sure, but he went to a lot of trouble to disable my right arm and hand. I’m not one of those theoretical guys who do all their research with a blackboard and a computer. I’m hands-on, and in nanotechnology, a good hand is pretty important. I mean, you’re manipulating stuff under the scope that’s only a few atoms wide. Maybe he thought he could put me out of business.” Buckman paused, squirming to relieve some pain. “Anyway, I don’t give a damn why he did it, but first chance I get, I’m going to lay for him with a baseball bat. See how he likes to paint with his arm in a sling.”
I drank my Coke, made nice, and drove back to campus and walked across the Quad, aswarm with the three-o’clock class change, to the Admin Building and the president’s office. H. Evinrude Swenson had an anteroom full of people waiting for an audience, but Mrs. Abrams, his secretary and sweetly smiling guard dog, squeezed me in.
Swenson’s small inner sanctum was utilitarian, without the usual collections of plaques, awards, and certificates you find in the offices of important people, mostly because Ev didn’t consider himself very important. “I’m just a kind of greenhouse,” he told me when I first went to work for him. “Try to let the sun in and keep the cold out so all the exotic plants around here can grow and flower.” And there was only a little irony in his voice.
This time, he greeted me in his Minnesota singsong. “What tale of horror do you have for me today, Peter?”
“You know Naomi Cordier? In Dance?”
“Ah. You bet.” His voice bore the soft reverence we all reserve for things that are the best in their class.
And so I told him of Naomi and Buckman and Hayden and what had happened the night before.
Ev leaned back in his old wooden desk chair, his craggy Swedish face creased in thought. “Buckman’s right to be worried about reputation,” he said. “It’s not that granting agencies and foundations are prudish, but any kind of sex-based crime is going to scatter them like a covey of quail on the Fourth of July.”