John D. MacDonald

College-Cut Kill

Chapter One

Brethern, Here’s to Death!

It was half past twelve on one of those early September days in Manhattan when the streets are Dutch ovens and a girl who can look crisp is a treasure indeed. I was completing the last draft of the current three-part blast, with Dolly sitting at my elbow noting the changes I wanted.

Miss Riven came in simultaneously with her crisp rap at the door, and said, “Mr. Engelborg wishes to see you immediately, Mr. Arlin.”

She did a Prussian drill-sergeant’s about-face and went back through the door, shutting it with a crisp clack that only Miss Riven can seem to get out of a door.

“Her!” Dolly said. “Her!” She made it sound like a dirty name.

“She thinks I work here,” I said. During the six weeks that I had been provided with office space and Dolly, she and I had become good friends. “Look, lovely. I can’t see anything more we need. Type it up with three carbons and get one over to the legal eagles for checking.”

I hesitated, decided against my coat, and went down through the offices full of common people to the shrine where Engelborg, the almighty, flings his weight around.

Miss Riven gave me a cool look, glanced at her watch and said, “You may go right in, Mr. Arlin.”

I pushed the door open. Engelborg, who looks like a giant blond panda, said, “This is Arlin. Joe, meet Mr. Flynn.”

Flynn merely nodded but he stared at me intently. He was a big, sagging man in his late fifties with an executive air about him. There was a bloodhound sadness about his eyes.

“Arlin,” said Engelborg, “is just finishing up a hot series on real estate swindles.”

“It’s all done,” I said. “Ought to be out of the typewriter tomorrow. That is, if the lawyers have no kick.”

“Good,” Engelborg grunted. “I want you to understand, Mr. Flynn, that Arlin isn’t a part of this organization. He works on a free-lance basis and this particular job was so hot we wanted him right here so we could coordinate more closely. What are your plans, Joe?”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I said, “I am going to wait until I get page proofs on the first installment and then I am going to go to Maine.”

“I understand,” Flynn said, “that you’re out of college two years. The University of Wisconsin. You were a Gamma U there?”

“That’s right.” I couldn’t smell which way this was going. Flynn looked at me as though he resented me in a tired way.

“He looks young enough, doesn’t he?” Engelborg said.

Flynn nodded.

That has been a sore point with me. When I was twenty I looked fifteen. Now, at twenty-eight, I look twenty. Professionally that has its limitations. Emotionally it’s all right. I play on their maternal instincts.

“So I look young,” I said. “Gee, thanks.”

“Take it easy, Joe,” Engelborg said. “Real easy. Don’t get upset. How’d you like to go to college?”

“Thanks, I’ve been.”

Flynn spoke heavily. “Let me talk, Arlin. My son is dead. He died last June at the age of nineteen. Everyone says he hung himself. I went down there. He was at West Coast University in Florida. I cannot believe he hung himself. He was a Gamma U. Other boys in that house died last year. In different ways. Automobiles. One drowned. Too many died. I cannot get help from the police. A private investigation firm would be too heavy-handed.

“Mr. Engelborg has been my good friend for many years. Last night I talked to him about this. He mentioned you. We discussed it. I want to pay you to go down and register for this fall term which starts very soon. I have certain influence and so does Engelborg. It can be arranged. We have a friend at the University of Wisconsin. The first three years of your credits will be transferred so you can enter as a senior. I know the secretary of the national chapter of Gamma U. There will be no trouble from that end.”

I sat down. I kept my voice as calm and logical as I could. “Mr. Flynn, I appreciate your problem. There are many inexplicable suicides among young people.”

“Teddy did not kill himself. I know that. I must have it proven. I have two other boys, younger boys. I don’t want this thing hanging over them.”

“Which would be better? Suicide or murder? If it isn’t one it’s the other.”

“Suicide is a sign of basic weakness. Teddy was not weak. I want you to go down there and live in that house and find out what happened.” He was as positive and undeniable as an avalanche.

I appealed to Mr. Engelborg. “Look, that isn’t my line. I find things out to write them up.”

Engelborg said, “You’ve done some very slick investigatory work, Joe. Those dock gangs, the Bermuda dope setup.”

“I’m my own man,” I said. “I do what I please.”

“That’s right, Joe,” Engelborg said.

“I don’t want to go to college. I want to go to Maine. Brother, it’s hot down there now. I’m tired. I want to go fishing.”

“You’ll wonder,” Flynn said, “all the rest of your life. You’ll wonder what kind of a thing you might have uncovered. What kind of a twisted, diseased thing it is that causes the deaths of fine young boys.”

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“You will be paid all expenses, plus a thousand a month plus a bonus of five thousand when it is all over, no matter what your conclusion is.”

“I hate Florida,” I said.

The blue gulf sparkled on my right as I drove south. The sun glinted off the chrome of the convertible, needling through the dark glasses. My luggage was stacked in the back end and I had not had to change to kollege kut klothes because the veterans pretty much took that aspect out of higher education. I had been one myself, the navy taking out a four-year chunk so that I got out when I had turned twenty-six.

The town of Sandson where the university was located turned out to be half on the mainland and half on a long island connected to the mainland by a half-mile public causeway. The university was inland from the mainland half of the town, perched on a hill a hundred, feet high — which made it a mountain in that locality.

The timing was good and I arrived on the last day of registration. I dumped cash and traveler’s checks into the Sand-son National Bank and drove east along the wide main drag. The university turnoff was to the right just beyond the city limits. A curving road led up to the haphazard collection of Moorish, Neo-Gothic, Spanish and Twentieth Century Lavatory construction. The bright young girls walked and cycled by in their thin dresses, brown legs flashing, eyes measuring me and the car for possible future reference.

I told myself this was a wild goose chase, a big mistake, a bunch of wasted time. I told myself again. Then I stopped telling myself. It was too much fun dropping back into the college frame of mind. But this time I was doing it the way I wished I had been able to do it at Wisconsin. At Wisconsin I had been knocking myself out, wondering how tough it would be to make a living later. Here I was getting paid for the deal.

Temporary cardboard signs were tacked up, pointing the way to Administration and Registration. I parked beside the indicated building, took the transcript of my three years out of the glove compartment and went in. There were tables with people working at them, filling out the desired schedules of classes. I took one of the catalogues and one of the blanks and went to work. I laid out six courses.

Literature IV (Creative Writing), Psychology VIII (Abnormal), Philosophy III (Ethics), Political Science VI (Ecology of nations) Modern History II (1914–1950). Lastly, I dipped for an elective into the Business School, Accounting I (Basic Methods), because I have never been able to see quite eye to eye with the Collector of Internal Revenue.

Then I joined the line leading to the window titled A to K. The young lady was very crisp. I gave the name we had agreed on — Rodney J. Arlin. It’s my name. The one my stuff has been published under is R. Joseph Arlin, and we thought the name might be just a shade too familiar to the reading public of one certain large magazine.

She checked her card file. “Arlin, Rodney J. We have you listed as a transfer. You have your transcript?” I handed it over. She checked it carefully.

“We can give you full credit for the hours shown here, and admit you as a senior. As a senior you are not restricted to living on the campus. Do you have a place to live yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Advise us immediately when you have an address. Your schedule is approved. Tuition will be three eighty-five for each semester. Yes, a check is acceptable. Take one of the getting acquainted bulletins as you leave. They’re on that far table. Class hours and rooms are posted on all bulletin boards. Compulsory meeting tomorrow morning at nine. As a senior you will attend the meeting in the Science Building auditorium. Next, please.”

I found the cafeteria, had a quick lunch and went off in search of the brethren. I found them in a rambling Miami-type house of cinderblock, with a big overhang to kill the heat of the sun, sprinklers turning lazily on the green lawn. There was a parking area to the left of the house with a dozen cars lined up in it, eight of them convertibles of recent vintage. I parked and went around to the front. The door was open. The interior looked dim and invitingly cool.

I punched the bell and stepped inside. Two of the brethren came into the hallway and stared at me curiously, warily. One, with heavy bone-structure, I immediately type-cast as a working guard or tackle. The other was the smooth-dan type that inhabits all major fraternities. Careful, casual, a shade haughty and a bit too handsome.

I picked him to slip the grip to. “Brother Arlin,” I announced. “Beta chapter at Wisconsin. Just transferred here as a senior.”

He looked slightly pained. “Nice to see you, Arlin. I’m Bradley Carroll and this is Brother Siminik.”

He was giving me the inch-by-inch survey — and I knew right then that it was a political house. By that I mean one with cliques, possibly two strong ones. Bradley was trying to decide whether I’d be any addition to his clique, or whether I might be permitted to join the other as dead weight. We were like a couple of dogs that circle each other, stiff-legged.

I sighed inwardly. The next move was too obvious. “I put my wagon in the parking area. Hope it’s all right there.” I took out a pack and offered him a cigarette. Siminik refused it. I lighted Bradley Carroll’s with a gold lighter, wide-ribbed, a thing I would never buy for myself, but something that a girl named Ann thought I ought to have.

“You drove down?” he asked politely. “Where from?” is what he was trying to say.

“From New York. Three days on the road.”

“Oh, you live in New York?”

“No, I just took a place there for the summer. Everybody says it’s a hell of a place to spend a summer. Not me.”

He was still wary, but warmer. “Say, we’re being pretty inhospitable, Arlin. Come on back to my room.”

It was an exceedingly pleasant room. The bottle on the coffee table was the very best bourbon. Siminik wasn’t drinking. Carroll mixed me a stiff one. He kept his good-looking slightly bovine eyes on me during our casual talk. I let him know without saying as much that I had no financial worries, that I was neither an athlete nor a bookworm, that I intended to sandwich a very good series of very good times in between the necessary study.

We went through the slightly oriental ceremonies until it was time to come to the point. “Would you recommend living in the house?” I asked.

He hadn’t expected the question that way. “It’s... very pleasant. The food is good.” He suddenly realized that he was on the defensive, an unthinkable position. “But of course,” he said quickly, “I can’t say whether there’d be room for you. I mean a private room, of course.”

“The house is too small?”

“Not that. Seniors are entitled to private rooms if they wish to live in the house. Juniors go two to a room and sophomores bunk in the dorm. There are only eight private rooms and all those are spoken for this semester.”

Siminik said, “Brad, the room that Flynn was going to—”

Brad Carroll said hastily, “Quent is taking that one, Al. I thought you knew.”

“Somebody drop out?” I asked very casually.

“No,” Siminik said, “he—”

“—won’t be here this year,” Carroll said.

I let it go. No point in pushing.

“You’ll have to see Arthur Marris anyway,” Brad Carroll said. “He’s house president and he handles the quarters problem. You might care to bunk with one of the juniors. That’s been done before and I think there’s one vacancy.”

I yawned. “I don’t know as I want to stay in the house anyway. I want to look around first. Maybe I can get some sort of a layout on the beach.”

“On the beach,” said Al Siminik, “it costs like there’s a river of oil under the land.”

Brad looked at him as though he had made a rude noise in public. He gave me an apologetic glance that said, “What else can you expect from knuckled-headed athletes?”

As I was leaving, promising to be back for dinner, I met two more of the brethren, one a shy, blond likeable sophomore named Ben Charity with a Georgia accent, the other a lean, hot-eyed, dark-haired, less-likeable junior named Bill Armand. I got over to the beach part of Sandson at about three-thirty. I found a small rental office inhabited by a vast, saggy female with an acid tongue.

“How much can you go for?” she said without hesitation. “If you want it through the winter it’ll come high. From now until Christmas I can find you something for peanuts.”

We went in my car to three places. I went back and took the second one, mostly because of its isolation. Bedroom, bath and kitchen made one side of an L and the living room made the other side. The L enclosed a small stone patio overlooking the gulf. It was sparkling new, completely furnished, and though the gulf front lot was small, a high thick hedge on either side kept the neighbors out. The car port was at the rear and it was ample protection against salt mist off the gulf. Two-eighty a month until the end of December. Four hundred after that.

I paid my two months in advance, unpacked, raided a package store for all the necessary, bought a typing table and still had time for a dip in the warm gulf before dressing to run back over to dine amid the brethren.

The house was noisy when I went in. In the lounge somebody had racked a bunch of very poor bop on the machine. There was laughing and shouting going on back in the bedroom wing. Suitcases were stacked in the hall. Through the doorway to the dining room I could see the waiters setting the big table in the middle, the smaller tables around the walls.

A little redheaded sophomore with the face of an angel collared me. “Are you Brother Arlin? Come on with me. Brother Carroll said to wait for you and take you back to his room.”

I told him I could find it and went back by myself. Brother Carroll was being the merry host. He smiled at me with what I guessed was his nearest approach to friendliness and steered me over to a tall boy. I found myself liking him immediately. He had gauntness and deep-set eyes and a firm-lipped wide sensitive mouth. He was older than the others.

“I’m Arthur Marris,” he said. “I’m glad to know you, Arlin. You do have a first name.”

I swallowed hard and said it. “Rodney. Rod, usually.”

Siminik was there, drinking gingerale, and another senior named Step Krindall, a bulging, pink, prematurely bald boy.

“Martini all right?” Brad asked. I nodded and took the cool cocktail glass he handed me.

“I think we’ll be able to make you comfortable if you’d like to move into the house, Rod,” Arthur Marris said.

“I can see you’re pretty crowded and I’m an outsider,” I said. “I’ve taken a place on the beach. Turn left at The Dunes. Right at the end of the road. I see no reason why it can’t be the Gamma U annex.”

Arthur Marris looked a little hurt. He glanced at his watch. “One more round and then we’d better go in,” he said.

The names and faces were slightly blurred at dinner. I knew I’d get a chance to straighten them out later. The cliques began to straighten out in my mind. Brad Carroll, with Siminik as a stooge, ran the opposition to Arthur Marris. The controlling group in the fraternity during the past years had been composed of veterans. Marris was one of the last of them in school. Bald-headed Step Krindall and Marris were the only two left in the house.

Brad Carroll was the leader of the group trying to get the reins of authority back into the hands of the younger nonveteran group. His biggest following was among the sophomores. Better than half the seniors and almost half the juniors seemed allied with Marris. With enough voting strength, Brad Carroll could effectively grab the power from Marris this year, even though Marris would retain the title as president of the house.

I found that there were thirty-three members. Ten seniors, nine juniors and fourteen sophomores. They hoped to take in fifteen freshmen who would not be permitted to live in a house until their sophomore year. Of the active members living in the house, eight were seniors, seven were juniors and ten were sophomores. My presence brought the number of seniors up to eleven.

After dinner, much to Brad’s poorly concealed concern, Arthur Marris took me off to his room. Daylight was fading. He lit his pipe, the match flare flickering on his strong features.

“How do you like the chapter?” he asked.

“Fine. Fine! Of course, I’m not acquainted yet, but everything seems—”

“You’re not a kid, Rod. You don’t handle yourself like a kid. You spoke of the navy at dinner. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” I said, chopping off a couple of years.

“I’m twenty-five. I can talk to you as man to man. That sounds corny, doesn’t it? I want to ask you if you’ve noticed the tension. I can feel it. It’s all underneath, you know. I brought you in here to talk to you about it. Part of my job is to protect the reputation of the chapter. You’ll make friends outside the house. They’ll gossip. I prefer that you hear the bad things from me, not from outsiders.”

I shrugged. “So the boys get a little rough sometimes. Is that serious?”

“This is something else. This is a jinxed house, Rod. I want to tell you a little about last year. I was a junior. The house president was a senior named Harv Lorr. In October, just as the rushing season was about to begin, two sophomores on their way back from Tampa rolled a car. Both of them were killed.”

I whistled softly. “A tough break.”

“That’s what we all thought. Just before Christmas vacation one of my best friends went on a beach party. His body was washed up two days later.”

“Accidents in a row like that aren’t too unusual.”

His voice was grim. “In March a boy, a senior, named Tod Sherman, was alone in his room. The guess is that he was cleaning his gun, an army .45. It was against the rules to have it in the house. His door wasn’t locked. It went off and killed him.”

“Maybe they come in threes.”

“In June, during the last week of school, one of the most popular kids in the house hung himself. A boy named Teddy Flynn. He was a senior, a very bright boy. Ha was graduating a week before his twentieth birthday. He hung himself in this room. I took it for this term because no one else wanted it. He used heavy copper wire and fastened it to a pipe that runs across the ceiling of that clothes closet.”

It bothered me to think that it had happened in this room. It made the whole situation less of an academic problem. It made me realize that I had taken a smart-alec attitude from the beginning. Now that was gone. There was a tangible feeling of evil. I could taste it in the back of my throat.

“Let me get this straight, Arthur. Why are you telling me this?”

“One, two or three deaths might be written off as accident and coincidence. I think five can too, in this case. But outsiders don’t see it that way. They think it’s fishy.”

“Do the police?”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean that responsible people consider it fishy. The kids in the other houses do. By next year, it will all be forgotten. The transient population will take care of that. But this year is going to be rough. It’ll affect our pledge total. There’ll be a lot of whispering. For those inside the group it’ll mean a stronger unifying force, I suppose. I thought you, as a senior transfer, should know all this.”

“Why did the Flynn boy kill himself?”

“We’ll never really know, I guess. His gal was really broken up. She was a junior last year.”

“Did she come back?”

“I saw her at registration. Her name is Mathilda Owen. Tilly. You’ll probably run into her sooner or later. This is a big school, but she’ll travel in our group, I imagine.”

“The five boys that died, Arthur. Outside of their being members of the fraternity, is there anything else to tie the five of them together?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Teddy Flynn hung, Tod Sherman shot, two sophomores killed in a car and one unnamed guy drowned.”

“That’s it. The boy who drowned was Rex Winniger. The sophomores were Harry Welly and Ban Forrith. It was... a pretty bad year here.”

“I can imagine.”

He leaned over and put on the desk lamp. Evil was thrust back into the far shadows. He smiled without humor and said, “There had better not be any accidents this term.”

I made myself laugh. “Hell, all the accidents for the next ten years are used up now. We’re over the quota.”

Chapter Two

Axes to Grind

The creative writing deal met once a week for a two-hour session, Friday from ten to twelve. It was taught by a dry but pompous little man who, the year before, had hit one of the book clubs with a novel that had little to recommend it but the incredible size of the heroine from the waist up and the frenzy with which she met all emotional experiences.

Tilly Owen was in the class. I located her at the first session, a tallish dark-haired girl, almost plain. Her face showed nothing and I was disappointed in her. She took notes meekly, her dark head bent over the notebook. But when she walked out, I did a quick revision. The tall body had an independent life of its own. Her face showed a clear and unspectacular intelligence, an aloofness — but the body was devious and complicated and intensely feminine, continually betraying the level eyes. She went off with a few other girls before I could make an intercept.

During the week leading to the next session when I saw her again, I enlarged my circle of friends inside the fraternity. Brad Carroll thawed a great deal, particularly after I had a few of them out to the beach house for cocktails. I began to learn more about the insides of the brethren.

Step Krindall, with the baby blue eyes and the pink head, was as uncomplicated and amiable as a dancing bear. Arthur Marris had too deep a streak of seriousness in him, verging on self-importance. His touch was thus a shade too heavy. The better house president knows when to use a light touch. Every house has its types. Bill Armand, the dark, vital junior was the house skeptic, the cynic, the scoffer. Ben Charity, the shy blond Georgia boy was the gullible one, the butt of most practical jokes. The angel-faced redheaded sophomore named Jay Bruce was the house clown. There was the usual sullen, heavy-drinking kid on his way off the rails — one Ralph Schumann, a senior.

The rest of them seemed to merge into one composite type, a bunch of well-washed young men in a stage in their development when clothes, women, snap courses and hard-boiled books had a bit too much importance. They talked easily and well, made perhaps a shade too confident by their acceptance into one of the most socially acceptable groups on the campus. And, in many ways, they were exceedingly silly, as the young of any species is likely to be.

Their silliness pointed up the vast gulf that my two years out of college had opened up. I could see that in their group mind I was becoming rated as one hell of a fellow, a quick guy with a buck, a citizen who could handle his liquor, keep his mouth shut.

I found that I had not lost the study habit. Necessary research during the two intervening years had kept me from losing the knack. The courses were amazingly stimulating. I had expected boredom, but found intellectual excitement.

On Friday came the second writing class. As per instructions, the entire class had done a short-short apiece and dropped it off on the previous Wednesday at the instructor’s office.

He gave us a long beady stare and we became silent. “I should like to read one effort handed in,” he said. He began to read. I flushed as I recognized my own masterwork. I had banged one out with an attempt to give him the amateur stuff he expected.

He finished it and put it carefully aside. “I shall not tell you who wrote that. I read it because you should all find it interesting. I do not care to be laughed at. That story had complete professional competence. No doubt of that. And it is a devilishly clever parody of the other stories that were turned in. It is a tongue-in-cheek attempt to cover the entire scope of the errors that beginners make.

“Yet the perpetrator of this — this fraud, could not conceal his ability, his very deft turn of phrase and control of emotion. I am mystified as to why he or she should be taking my course. I suggest to this unnamed person that he or she give me credit, next time, for a bit more intelligence.”

I shot a wary look to either side. No one was watching me. I forced myself to relax. Another dumb stunt like that and I would destroy my purpose, if I hadn’t done so already...

At noon I elbowed my way through the mob and went down the steps behind Tilly Owen. I fell into step beside her and said, “My name is Rod Arlin, Miss Owen.” I gave her the very best smile. “I offer lunch, an afternoon on the beach, early dinner in Tampa, and a few wagers on the canines at Derby Lane.”

She quickened her pace. “Please, no.”

“I come well-recommended. Arthur Marris will vouch for me.”

“I have a date.”

I caught her arm above the elbow and turned her around. Anger flashed clear in her gray eyes.

“And a Mr. Flynn in New York considers me to be a bright kid, if that means anything.”

The anger faded abruptly and her eyes narrowed. “If this is some sort of a—”

“Come on. My car’s parked over in the lot behind Administration.” I gestured.

She sat demurely beside me in the car. I parked in front of her sorority house. She dropped off her books, changed to a pale green nylon dress beautifully fitted at the waist and across the lyre-shaped flare of her hips, and came back out to the car with swim suit and beach case in an astonishing twenty minutes. She even smiled at me as I held the door for her.

At lunch she said, “Now don’t you think you ought to tell me why...”

“Not yet. Let’s just get acquainted for now.”

She smiled again, and I wondered how I had managed to think of her as plain. I got her talking about herself. She was twenty-two, orphaned when she was eighteen. A trust fund administered by an uncle was paying for the education. During the summer she had gone north to work at a resort hotel. She adored steaks, detested sea food, kept a diary, lived on a budget, hated the movies, adored walking, wore size eight quad A shoes and thought the fraternity and sorority system to be feudal and foul.

She gave me a surprised look. “I don’t talk like this to strangers! Really, I’m usually very quiet. You have quite a knack, Rod. You’re a listener. I never would have thought so to look at you.”

“What do I look like?”

She cocked her head to the side and put one finger on the cleft in her chin. “Hmmm! Pretty self-satisfied. Someone who’d talk about himself rather than listen. And you’re older than I thought. I never noticed until just now those little wrinkles at the corners of your eyes. Quite cold eyes, really. Surprisingly cold.”

“Warm heart.”

“Silly, that goes with hands not eyes.”

We drove out to the beach. She was neither awed by nor indifferent to my layout. “You should be very comfortable here,” she said.

The sun bounced off the white sand with a hard glare. I spread the blanket, fiddled with the portable radio until I found an afternoon jazz concert. The gulf was glassy. It looked as if it had been quieted with a thick coat of blue oil. Porpoise played lazily against the horizon and two cruisers trolled down the shore line. Down by the public beach the water was dotted with heads.

She came across the little terrace and down across the sand wearing a yellow print two-piece suit. Her body was halfway between the color of honey and toast, fair, smooth and unblemished. I rolled onto my elbows and stared at her. It put a little confusion into her walk, a very pleasing shyness — with the mind saying don’t and the body saying look. That kind of a girl. That very precious kind of a girl.

“Well!” I said. She made a face at me.

She sat on the blanket, poured oil into the palm of her hand and coated herself. We lay back, the radio between us, our eyes shut, letting the frank Florida sun blast and stun and smother us with a glare that burned through closed lids with the redness of a steel mill at night.

“Now,” she said sleepily. “Now tell me.”

I reached over and closed the lid of the radio. “Have you made any guesses?”

“Just one. That was your story he read today, wasn’t it?”

It startled me. “A very good guess indeed. Mind telling me how you made it?”

“Too simple, really. Somebody in the class had to be there on... false pretenses. I’m a senior here, you know. So I happened to know everybody else in the class except you.”

I told her why I had come.

She didn’t answer. When I glanced over I saw that she was sitting up, her forehead against her raised knees. She was weeping.

I patted her shoulder. It was a very ineffectual gesture. The oil she had used was sticky.

She talked without looking at me. “I didn’t want to come back here. I wanted to go to some other school. Every day I see places where... we were together.”

“Do you feel the way Mr. Flynn does?”

“That Ted didn’t kill himself? Of course. We were going to be married. Almost everybody knew that. And now they look at me and I can see in their eyes that they are full of nasty pity. The girls won’t talk to me about dates or marriage. I thought I’d die this summer. I worked every day until I was too exhausted to think about anything, just go to sleep.”

“If he didn’t kill himself, somebody else did.”

“That’s the horrible part.” She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were red. “That’s the awful part, having to accept that. And that’s why I came back. I thought I would try to find out. The first thing is to find out why anyone should kill Ted, why anyone should want him dead.”

I took her in on my reasoning thus far. “If you assume that he was killed, you have two choices. The other deaths in the house were either accidents or they were caused too. If they were accidents, somebody was after Ted as an individual. If they were not accidents, then you have two further choices. Were they linked, or were they separate crimes? If they were linked, there is no use looking in Ted’s history for an enemy. If they were linked, he and the others were killed as symbols, not as individuals. Do you follow me?”

“Of course. I’ve been thinking the same way. But you’ve organized it better.”

“That may be the reason I’m here. The use of orderly thought processes acquired through feature work now applied to murder. Do you think you would slip in public if you called me Joe?”

“No. I’m Tilly, of course. But let’s get on with it. Five died. Sherman, Winniger, Welly, Forrith and Ted. Suppose they were killed as a symbol. It had to come from someone inside the house, or an outsider. Each guess leads to a different set of symbols, Joe.”

“You are doing very nicely. Keep going.”

“If they were all killed by a fraternity brother, it had to be because of jealousy, spite, house politics... all that doesn’t satisfy me, Joe. Those reasons seem too trivial somehow. And if it came from outside the house, you have to agree that it was a male who was willing to take the chance of being seen inside the house. There the risk is greater, but the motives become stronger. The fraternity system is based on a false set of values. Kids can be seriously and permanently hurt by the sort of cruelty that’s permitted. A mind can become twisted. Real hate can be built up.

“When I was a freshman, one sorority gave my roommate a big rush. She wanted to join and so she turned down the teas and dances at the other houses. When the big day came she was all bright-eyed and eager. The stinkers never put a pledge pin on her. She offended somebody in the house and in the final voting she was blackballed. But she had no way to fight back.”

“What happened to her, Tilly?”

“She left school before the year was over. She wrote once. The letter was very gay, very forced. But even though it hurt me to see what happened to her, I was too much of a moral coward to turn down my own bid that night she cried herself to sleep.”

“Then,” I said, “if this is a case of a twisted mind trying to ‘get even’ with Gamma U, we have to find out who took an emotional beating from the brethren in the pledge department, eh?”

“Doesn’t it look that way to you? And you can find that out, you know. There are six thousand kids in the university. Two thousand belong to clubs and fraternities and sororities. Four thousand are what we so cutely call barbarians. Barbs. Outcasts. Spooks, creeps, dim ones. There, but for the grace of the Lord—”

“It can be narrowed down a little, Tilly,” I said. “The first two were killed last year just before the rushing season started. That means that if the assumption we’re making is correct, the jolt came the year before and the party brooded about it for almost an entire year before taking action. That would fit. He would be a junior.

“Assume, with the even split between male and female, there are seven hundred and fifty juniors. Five hundred of them are barbs. Out of that five hundred, probably fifty were on the Gamma U rush list two years ago. Out of that fifty, I would guess that fifteen to twenty were pledged. The rush list should be in the files. If we both work on it, we ought to be able to narrow it down pretty quickly.”

She looked at me and her eyes filled again. “Joe, I... some day I want to tell you how much it means that you’ve come here to...”

“Last one in is a dirty name,” I said.

She moved like I thought I was going to. As I reached the edge, she went flat out into a racing dive, cutting the water cleanly. She came up, shook her wet hair back out of her eyes and laughed at me.

We swam out, side by side. A hundred yards out we floated on the imperceptible swell. “Ted and I used to swim a lot,” she said in a small voice. And then she was gone from me, her strong legs churning the water in a burst of speed. I swam slowly after her. When I caught up with her, she was all right again.

“It’s clear today,” she said, going under in a surface dive. I went down too, and with my eyes squinted against the water I could see the dance of the sunlight on the sandy bottom. I turned and saw her angling toward me, her hair streaming out in the water, half smiling, unutterably lovely. I caught her arm and, as we drifted up toward the surface, I kissed her.

We emerged into the air and stared at each other gravely. “I think we’d better forget that, Joe,” she said.

“That might be easier said that done, Tilly.”

“Don’t say things you don’t mean, Joe. Ever.”

Only three to go. I parked in the shade and was glad of it when I found he hadn’t come back yet. It was a tourist court and trailer park. The layout had been pasted together with spit and optimism. Neither ingredient had worked very well. Dirty pastel walls, a litter of papers and orange peels, a glare of sun off the few aluminum trailers, some harsh red flowers struggling up a broken trellice. I watched his doorway. The sign on it said Manager. A half hour later a blonde unlocked the door and went in.

I walked over and knocked. She came to the door, barefoot. In another year the disintegration would have removed the last traces of what must have once been a very lush and astonishing beauty. That is a sad thing to happen to a woman under thirty.

“Maybe you can’t read where it says no vacancy,” she said.

“I want to see Bob Toberly,” I said.

“If it’s business, you can talk to me. I’m his wife.”

“It’s personal.”

She studied me for a few moments. “Okay, wait a sec. Then you can come in and wait. He’s late now.” Her voice had the thin fine edge that only a consistently evil disposition can create.

She disappeared. Soon she called, “Okay, come on in.”

Her dress was thrown on the unmade bed. She had changed to a blue linen two-piece play suit that was two sizes too small for her.

“I gotta climb into something comferrable the minute I get in the house,” she said defiantly. “This climate’ll kill you. It’s hell on a woman.” She motioned to a chair. I sat down. She glared at me. “Sure I can’t handle whatever it is you wanna see Bob about?”

“I’m positive.”

She padded over to the sink, took a half bottle of gin out of the cabinet and sloshed a good two inches into a water tumbler. “Wanna touch?”

“Not right now, thanks.”

She put an ice cube in it, swirled it a few times and then tilted it high. Her throat worked three times and it was gone. The room was full of a faint sour smell of sweat.

The room darkened as Bob Toberly cut off the sunlight. He came in, banging the screen door. He was half the size of a house, with hands like cinderblocks. He looked suspiciously at me and then at the bottle on the sink.

“Dammit, Clara, I told you to lay off that bottle.”

“Shaddup!” she snapped. “I drink what I please when I please with no instructions from you.”

He grabbed her arm and twisted it up behind her. He pushed her to the door, shoved her outside. “Wait out there until I tell you to come in.”

He turned to me, ignoring her as she screamed at him. “Now what do you want?”

“I’m making a survey of local students who were turned down by the local chapter of Gamma U. It’s for a magazine article condemning fraternities. I got my hands on the rush list for two years ago. Your name was on it.”

He rocked back and forth, his lips pursed, staring down at me. Suddenly he grinned. “What do you want to know?”

“What was your reaction when you weren’t pledged? How’d you take it?”

“I wanted to go bust those smart guys in the chops.”

“Did you know why they turned you down?”

“Sure. They were rushing me because they figured me for eventual All-American here. But the timing was bad. In early practise I got a bad shoulder separation. It happened during rush week. They got the spy system operating and found out I was out for the year, probably out for good. From then on I was just another guy with muscles.”

“Has it made any change in your life?”

He frowned. “I got stubborn. I decided I wanted to stay in school. But they dropped me off the athletic scholarship list. I married Clara, tier daddy had just died and left her this place. It brings in enough to swing the school bills.” He turned and stared at the door. Clara stood outside looking in through the screen. “I didn’t know at the time that she was no good.”

Clara screamed more curses at him. He went over casually and spit through the screen at her. A charming little family scene. I got out as quickly and quietly as I could. As I drove out onto the road I could still hear her.

Chapter Three

No Suicides Today

The next to the last was a washout, the same as Toberly. The last was a kid named Harley Reyont. I found him at his room in the dormitory and I took him down the street to a beer joint. I knew he had seen me around the campus so I had to use a different approach with him.

I said, “I’m a transfer and I’ve been thinking of whether or not to hook up with the local chapter of my fraternity. But I don’t like some of the things I’ve seen around there. I thought the smart thing to do would be to find somebody they gave the dirty end of the stick to.”

I saw his hand shake as he reached for his stein. He was a pale, thin, pleasant-looking boy. “What makes you think I got the dirty end of any stick, Arlin?”

“I saw the rush list. They didn’t pledge you and neither did any other group.”

“They did me a favor, that bunch.”

“Just how do you mean that?”

His mouth curled bitterly. “I was just as wide-eyed and eager as any of the rest of them. Hell, I thought I’d die when I wasn’t tapped on pledge night. I thought something was wrong with me, that maybe I was a second-class citizen. I’ve smartened up since that night, believe me. My clothes weren’t right during rush week and my conversation wasn’t smooth enough to suit those snobs. They could see I wasn’t going to be an athlete. So I got passed over in the rush.”

“Was that good?”

“Take a good look at them, Arlin. A good look. Then come back and tell me what you think of their set of values. It’s a damn superficial life, fraternity life. If they’d take me in I’d be like the rest of them now. Cut out of the same pattern.”

“But you resented them at the time. Maybe you still do.”

He frowned down at his stein. “No, I don’t think I still resent them. I feel a little bit sorry for them.”

“Didn’t you want to get even?”

He looked up quickly. “I see what you mean. I suppose so. I sublimated it. I hated them and I had to show them. I turned in straight A’s for the freshman and sophomore years. I’ll do it again this year. But not because I still resent them — because in the process of acquiring the high grades, I learned that I’m actually pretty bright. I enjoy the work.” Again the bitter smile.

“You could say the brothers helped me find myself.” He sighed. “Hell, Arlin, I guess I still resent it. I’ll resent it all my life. Sour grapes, I suppose. Only I went for a walk along fraternity row during one of the big weekends. I could see them through the windows, dancing with their tall cool women, all wearing that same satisfied smirk. I wanted to bust the windows with rocks. I wanted to be inside there, one of them.

“I wanted to be Brother Reyont, the Big Man on the Campus. I walked back to the dorm and read Kant. He always puts me to sleep in short order. It took twenty pages that night. But I don’t blame Gamma U. Any other house would have done the same thing. I was a pretty dim little freshman, that I can assure you.”

“Thanks for being so frank with me.”

“You’re buying the beer, aren’t you?...”

When I drove in I saw that my lights were on, and I knew that Tilly had used the key I had given her. I parked quietly and stopped and looked through the window. She was in the big chair wearing that green dress I liked. Her legs were tucked up under her and she was reading a news magazine. The lamplight brought out the very fine line of her cheek and throat.

She looked good to me. Having her waiting there for me made me play too many mental games. It wasn’t healthy. On a crap table the wise man plays the field. Anybody who bets all night on the same number loses his shirt.

I went in and she came up eagerly out of the chair.

“Aha!” I said. “So you are here about the mortgage! Heh, heh, heh.”

“Please, sire! The night is cold. You will not throw me and my piteous child out into yon snow.”

“Mind your tongue, girl, or I shall feed you both to the wolves.”

We laughed together. Silly people. She stopped suddenly and said, “Oh, Joe, it seems so long since I could laugh like this.”

“Easy, easy,” I said warningly. “Go weepy on me and I’ll turn you over to the dean of women. They’ll hang you for — damn! I’m sorry, Till. Foot in the mouth disease.”

“That’s okay. How did you do?”

“Reyont is off the list. And he’s the last one, that is if you covered your boy. Did you?”

“That’s why I came, Joe. I saw him. He... he’s very odd. He frightens me a little. His name is Luther Keyes.”

“Do you think he’s capable of — what happened?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. You’d better talk to him tomorrow. He’s in my nine o’clock class, room fourteen in the Arts Building. I’ll arrange to walk out with him. We’ll come out the west door.”

“Done. What did you tell him? What sort of a story did you give him?”

“I played the gossip. I asked him if he thought one of the Gamma U men had been killing his fraternity brothers. You know, dumb innocent questions. Baby stare. I won’t tell you how he reacted. You be the judge of that.” She looked at her watch. “Gosh, it’s late.”

“And a bright moon and a warm breeze. It just so happens that I picked up a suit the other day that ought to fit you.”

She stared hard at me. “No nonsense, Joe?”

“Promise.”

I waited for her in the living room. She went out first. I turned off the lights. There was a trace of phosphorescence in the waves as they broke against the shore.

We went out too far. The fear came without warning. She was surging along, ten feet ahead of me. All knowledge of the shore line was gone. We were in the middle of an ocean.

“Tilly!” I called. “Till!” She didn’t stop. I put on a burst of speed that I knew would wind me completely if I had to continue it for long. As I made a long stroke, my fingertips brushed her foot. I reached and caught her by the ankle.

“No, Joe,” she gasped. “Let me go! Oh, please let me go! Don’t stop me!”

She fought to get free but I wouldn’t let her go. “What good would it do? You’re trying to run away from something.”

Suddenly she was passive. “All right, Joe. I’m all right now.”

“Come on, we’ll get you in.” That was easy to say. In the struggle we had become turned around. I could get no clue as to the direction of the swells. I could see no lights on shore. I knew then that we were out so far that the lights were too close to the horizon for us to see them from our angle of vision.

“Which way, Joe?” she asked, her voice tautening with panic.

Oh, fine, I thought. This was your idea and now you don’t care for it much.

Then, like a letter from home, I saw the pink on the sky, the reflected city lights of Sandson.

“That way,” I said. “Come on. Take it easy.”

After a long time I was able to correct our course by the lights of a familiar hotel. It seemed that we would never, never make it — and then my knee thumped sand. She stood up, swayed and fell forward. I tried to get her up. She was out cold. I got her over my shoulder and weaved up to the house. I dumped her, dripping wet, on the couch. I turned on the hooded desk light, got big towels.

Her lips were blue. Her eyes opened and her teeth were chattering so badly she couldn’t speak. It was a warm night. I poured a shot and held her head up while she drank it. She gagged but she kept it down. I got blankets, covered her. She cried for a long time, softly, as a tired child will cry. I sat beside her and rubbed her forehead with my fingertips until she went to sleep.

After she was asleep, I sat for a long, long time in the dark and I knew, without her telling me, just how it had happened. She had grieved for Ted. But not enough. She had been strongly attracted to me, as I was to her. With a person of her intense capacity for loyalty, it seemed an unthinkable deceit. It made a strong conflict within her. What she had done had seemed to her at the time to be the only solution.

I knew that when she awakened, her reaction would tell me whether or not I had guessed right about her feelings.

I sat there until the eastern sky was gray shot through with a pink threat of tomorrow’s sun. She stirred in her sleep, opened her eyes and looked at me with no alarm or surprise. She held her arms up and I kissed her. It was as natural and expected and unsurprising and sweet as anything I’ll ever know.

“I had a nightmare,” she whispered.

“A long, long bad dream, darling. It’s all over now. For good.”

“Don’t ever say anything to me that you don’t mean, Joe. Ever.”

“Promise.”

“And Joe...”

“Yes, darling.”

“Please. Go away from me for a little while. Way over there. I feel like a hussy. I don’t want to be one.” She grinned. “Not quite yet.”

“We ought to get you back.”

“Isn’t today Saturday?”

“Don’t ask me like that. I always look at my watch when anybody asks me too quickly what day it is. Yes, it’s Saturday.”

“No classes, Joe. I can cook. How do you like your eggs?”

“After a swim at dawn, of course.”

“Then go on out and swim, dear. You’re dressed for it. I’ll call you when it’s ready. How’s the larder?”

“Full of ambrosia.”

“Come here, Joe. Now go swimming. Quickly, Joe. Quickly.”

I swam. She cooked. She called me. I ate. We kissed. We made silly talk. Words are no good. Ever.

That Ted had himself a girl, he did. I was glad he was dead. To be glad for a thing like that gave me a superstitious feeling of eternal damnation. Bad luck. It gave me a shiver. She saw it. We held hands. No more shivers. No more bad luck, I hoped.

During that week, after I rubbed Keyes off our list, we plotted. I could speak more freely because now I could talk about Ted without it rocking her as badly at it had in the beginning.

I said, “We tried one way. I have a hunch that guy you mistrust is just another zany. Now we go at it from the other direction. We forget motive and try opportunity. We back-track on the beach party, the return trip from Tampa, the gun-cleaning episode, Ted’s apparent suicide. Now from the motive viewpoint you brought out that the case is stronger for an outsider.

“From the opportunity point of view, the case is stronger against one of the brethren. Two of the incidents happened inside the house. At the beach party most of the members were present. The car accident is the hard one to figure out. I suggest that we drop it for the time being. Maybe it was a legitimate accident. Maybe it just served to give the murderer his idea. Were you on the beach party? Yes, I know you were, because I know Ted was there. And it was all couples.”

“You want me to tell you about it.”

We were in deck chairs side by side on the little terrace, our heads in shade, our legs outstretched in the sun. She took a cigarette. I held the lighter for her.

She leaned back. “The beach party was just before Christmas vacation started. It was a fraternity affair, but there were a few outsiders, guests. Rex Winniger, the boy who drowned, was with a casual date, a snakey little blonde that I disliked on sight. Rex had broken off with Bets, a girl in my house. It seemed too bad. He was very popular and a good athlete, but not much of a swimmer. He came from Kansas, I think.”

“Where was the party?”

“On a long sand spit called Bonita Island. We used a big launch belonging to Harry Fellow’s father. Harry graduated last year. We moored it on the mainland side of the island and we had to wade ashore. We got there in mid-afternoon. Everybody swam and toasted in the sun. The drinking started a little later. Nearly everybody drank too much. The party got a little wild.

“The party broke up a little after midnight because some of the boys had passed out and their dates were yammering to be taken home. Somebody thought of counting noses. Rex and the little blonde were missing. Some of the group thought it would be a big gag to leave them marooned there. Then they went looking with flashlights. They found the little blonde asleep on the sand. They got her awake and she said she hadn’t seen Rex in she couldn’t remember when. You could feel people getting a little worried and a little soberer then.

“The boys made a line across Bonita holding hands — it’s only about seventy feet wide. They went right from one end to the other. Quite a few of the other boys could have swum to the mainland as a joke. But Rex really couldn’t swim that well. Then we all hoped that maybe he’d tried it and made it all right. But on the way back people were laughing in that funny nervous way that worried people do. Ted whispered to me that he didn’t like the look of it at all. We girls were taken home.

“In the morning Ted met me and he looked haggard. He said that Rex hadn’t showed up. They reported it early that same morning. Hundreds of people looked for the body. The papers made a big story of it and the blonde got her picture on the front page, looking tearful. Well, you know the rest. The beach party was on a Thursday night. They found his body on the beach on the mainland on Saturday afternoon, about three miles below Bonita Island.”

“Did you notice if he got drunk at the party?”

“Everybody was drinking. Some of them got pretty sloppy. But I don’t remember that Rex was sloppy. We talked about that later. We compared notes. After dark everybody was in the water at one time or another, because the surf was coming in beautifully.”

“Was there any incident, any trouble that caught your eye?”

She thought for a few moments. “No... I guess not. Nothing really unusual. When people drink they say things they normally wouldn’t say. There were quarrels and poor jokes and some spiteful talk. Harv Lorr was president of the house. He saw that things weren’t going too well. He tried to keep all the boys in line. Arthur Marris helped him, even though Arthur was only a junior then. Ted could have helped but he didn’t want to leave me alone for as long as it would take.”

“All in all, a bust party, eh?”

“Not a nice party, Joe. Full of undercurrents.”

Chapter Four

Sweating Bullets

At that moment a car drove in. I heard it stop. Till gave me a quick look. I got up out of the chair. Bill Armand, the faintly vulpine junior, and Brad Carroll came around the side of the house, carrying suits and towels. One of Armand’s dark eyebrows went high in surprise as he saw Tilly.

“Why, hello, Tilly!” Brad Carroll said in his careful voice. “Hi, Rod. I didn’t know you two were acquainted. Rod, we decided this was the day to take you up on your standing invite.”

“Hello, Brad,” Tilly said, “And Bill. I met Rod in our writing class. The guy is persuasive.”

“We’ve noticed that,” Bill said. “Tilly, you’re looking wonderful.”

“Thank you,” she said gravely.

There was a moment of awkwardness. I said, “The bar is the kitchen shelf, mates. Select your venom and some for us. Till’s is rum and coke and I’m on bourbon and water if you feel industrious. You can change in the bedroom.”

They went inside. Tilly reached over and touched my arm. “Joe, darling. This is going to give them a very choice bit of gossip.”

“Do you really care?”

“Uh uh.”

“That’s my girl.”

They came back out bearing drinks. Bill clowned it his towel over his arm like a waiter’s napkin. He bowed low as he handed Tilly her drink, murmuring, “Madame.” In trunks he was deeply tanned, whip-lean, with long smooth muscles. Brad was whiter, softer, thickening a bit in the waist, with a small roll of fat over the top of his yellow trunks.

Bill sat on the edge of the terrace turned toward us, with one eyebrow still high enough to give him a knowing look. Brad said, “We didn’t do this right. We should have come armed with charming blondes and a couple of jugs to salve our conscience. We thought you hadn’t had time yet to live dangerously, Rod.”

“I keep telling you that we’re underestimating the guy,” Bill said.

“Where’s Al Siminik, Brad?” I asked. It seemed odd to see Brad without his shadow.

“By the time we see him again, we’ll have forgotten what he looks like. He’s earning his keep, throwing his muscles around,” Bill answered.

I eyed Bill. “What’s your sport, Armand?”

He laughed. “Molly.”

Tilly bristled. “That isn’t a nice thing to say, Bill?”

“Protecting your sisters?” he jeered.

I was amazed at how cold Tilly’s gray eyes could get. “The only thing I have against Molly is that she’s stupid enough to find you attractive, Bill Armand.”

He held up his hands in mock defense and ducked his head. “Hey! Take it easy.”

Talk became more casual. After a while Bill drove to the main road and phoned Molly. He came back and said that Brad’s girl, Laura, was coming out and bringing Molly with her. Shortly after that, Bill and Tilly went in for a swim. Brad moved over into the chair where Tilly had been.

His smile was very engaging. “Rod, you strike me as being a pretty canny guy.”

“Oh, thank you, sir.”

“No gag, Rod. I mean it. You’re smart enough to see how things stand at the chapter. Arthur is one of the best friends I’ve got.” He was working the knife out of the sheath very slowly and I knew why he’d decided to come out. Carroll, the tireless politician.

“But...” I said.

He gave me a quick look. “Oh, you see it too?”

“Better tell me what you see, Brad.”

“I’ll be frank. I wouldn’t want this to go any further. I see a sweet guy who completely lacks the executive touch. He’s too heavy-handed. Now take Harv Lorr. There was a great president. We used to have a penny-ante poker game going on weekends in his room. Will Arthur go for that? Not for a minute. It says in the book no gambling in the house. The boys resent that rule-book attitude, Rod. But a lot of the fellows figure it this way. They say that Arthur was elected and he’ll graduate in June, so why not play along with him.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that this is a whole year out of our lives. Why let Arthur make it a poor fraternity year? Every member has a vote. Right now, because of some people’s sense of duty, Arthur swings the majority. But if the rest of us who don’t quite agree with some of his measures could consolidate our vote, we could do just about any thing we pleased.”

“In other words, let Arthur have the title and let you have the real push.”

“I didn’t say that!” he said in a hurt tone.

“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?” I asked disarmingly.

He pretended to think it over. “Well, it would be one way to put it, Rod.”

“Let’s get it out in the open. You want me to vote with you.”

“Only if you sincerely believe that it’s the thing to do.”

“Let’s take the gloves off, Brad,” I said. “I’m a transfer. I’m a senior. I’m not living in the house. As I see it, there’s no reason for me to get messed up in local chapter politics. With either you or Arthur running things, the food is going to be good, the lounge is going to be comfortable, the dances are going to be fun. I don’t care about anything else.”

“That,” he said firmly, “is what I consider an irresponsible and selfish attitude.”

“Consider it anything you want to.”

“Then I may take it that you’ll vote with Arthur?”

I saw I had hurt his feelings. Or at least he had decided that should be his attitude. “You may take it this way. I’m not for you or again you. When I attend chapter meetings I’ll refrain from voting. Then you won’t have to worry about a counterbalancing vote.”

His smile was full of satisfaction. “I’m glad to hear you say that. Frankly, a lot of the younger boys would be willing to follow; your lead in preference to mine, even. You’ve made quite an impression, Arlin. Quite an impression.”

“Do you want some advice?”

“What do you mean?”

“Take it or leave it. You’re creating tempests in teapots, Carroll. You’re misdirecting a very strong itch for power. Find some new direction for it.”

He dropped all expression. “Am I to judge from that that you consider the fraternity to be unimportant?”

“Take it any way you please.”

“You damn veterans are all alike. Everything is a big joke. Arthur is the only one I ever saw who takes things seriously. Just because you fought a war, you’ve got this superior attitude. Frankly, Arlin, it makes me sick to my stomach.”

“Vote for Carroll!” I said. “Vote for a square deal!”

“Go to hell!”

“Now you’re being stupid. Offend me too much and I’ll get interested enough to bust a few spokes out of your big wheel.”

He chewed that around in his mind for a while. I was rewarded with his most charming smile, an outstretched hand. “Sorry, Rod. I get too worked up.”

“Forget it,” I said, yawning.

He stood up. “I’m glad to see Tilly dating, Rod. Poor girl. She needs a few good times.”

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

He flushed. “You’re damn difficult to talk to sometimes.”

At that point a car stopped behind the house. We heard a girl’s voice over the sound of the surf. They came around the side of the house. Bill and Tilly came out of the water to meet them. Molly had a trim little figure, chestnut hair, a set of large trusting eyes and a vulnerable mouth. Her eyes glowed as she watched Bill Armand walk toward her. Laura was as dark as Tilly, but taller, a shade leaner, with a face so patrician that it looked inbred. Her speech was a finishing-school drawl.

Molly was a giggler. Bill treated Molly with affectionate amusement. Brad treated Laura as a girl who had earned the right to share in his reflected glow as a large wheel around the university. Both girls tried without success to conceal an intense curiosity about Tilly and me and our current status.

Tilly turned feline on me, and in the process she was as cute as a bug. I saw her wondering how to handle the problem. Finally she gave me a meaningful stare and said, “Rod and I are so glad you could come out here. What are you drinking? Rod, fix them up, like a dear, will you?”

Laura gave Molly a meaningful look.

It was a complete essay, that look.

We swam, we loafed in the sun — three couples on a late Saturday afternoon. To any onlooker we were young and carefree and casual. Uncomplicated. I lay with Till sprinkling sand on the back of my arm and thought about us.

One vulnerable little girl heading for heartbreak, one icy maiden as ambitious as her grasping boy-friend, one young cynic complicated by a streak of ruthlessness, one lovely girl who had been persuaded the night before that this was not the time to die — and one pretender, a young man who had thought it possible to come to this place and solve a pretty problem without becoming emotionally involved, and who was slowly finding it impossible.

The police station of Sandson and the fire department shared the same building. It looked vaguely like a Moorish castle.

The man they steered me to was a Lieutenant Cord. He was an unlikely six foot six with a stoop that brought him to six three. He had a corded throat, heavy wrists, and a slack liver-spotted face.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Arlin?”

“I’m at the university, Lieutenant. I’ve been doing some work in psychology. One of the case histories assigned to me is the case of Tod Sherman, who was killed during March this year.”

I made it pretty breezy. He leaned back in his chair and for the first time I noticed a very alert intelligence hiding behind his sleepy gray-green eyes.

“Let me get you straight. I remember Sherman. How does it hook up with psychology when a lad had a bad accident like that?”

I took a deep breath. I had to make it better than I thought. “You know, of course, about accident-prone people and how they contribute the lion’s share of motor vehicle accidents and accidents in the home. The study of such people is a legitimate part of modern psychology. I have reason to believe that Sherman was an accident-prone. Actually it is the death wish operating on a subconscious level, or else the result of a childish desire for attention.”

“What do you want from me?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a summary of what happened. I’ve talked to the other members of the fraternity who were there at the time. Their reports are confusing.”

He looked at the wall clock. “I guess it won’t take too much time. We got the call on a Sunday afternoon. They don’t operate the dining room at that house on Sunday’s and nearly everybody was out. A boy named Flynn, the one who hung himself three months later, was the one who heard the shot and traced it to Sherman’s room. Flynn was in the lounge at the time, and it took him, he said, maybe ten minutes to find out who and what it was.

“One other lad, a sophomore named Armand, was in the house at the time. He was asleep and the shot didn’t awaken him. Flynn was smart. He phoned the campus infirmary and then us. He didn’t touch the body. He checked the time. We got there as the ambulance did. The doctor pronounced him dead. We were both there a little less than twenty minutes after the shot according to Flynn’s watch. Sherman had been sitting at his desk by the window. There was an oily rag and a bottle of gun oil on top of the desk. The gun was a .45 Army Colt.

“The slug had caught him under the chin and gone up through the roof of his mouth, exploding out of the top of his head to lodge in the ceiling. He had fallen to his left between the chair and the window. The gun was under his desk. The ejected cartridge case was on the window sill. A full clip was on the desk blotter beside the oil bottle. It was the standard mistake. Ejecting the case and forgetting the one in the chamber.

“As I see it, he was holding it pointing up toward him, and he pulled the slide down so he could look through the barrel. His hand was oily and the slide got away from him. When it snapped up, it fired the shell in the chamber.”

“Were you complety satisfied with the verdict of accidental death, Lieutenant?”

He smiled humorlessly. “Now what kind of a fool question is that, Arlin? If it wasn’t accident it would screw up this psychology report, wouldn’t it?”

I tried again. “Did you investigate to see if anyone said he was depressed?”

“Sure. Lots of guys are cagey enough to do a hell of a good job of faking an accident when they want to knock themselves off. But in that case there is an insurance angle, usually, and the guy himself is older. No, this Sherman was apparently a pretty popular guy in the house. He wasn’t depressed. He’d busted up with his girl, but he had a new one pretty well lined up. He had enough dough, a good job after graduation, and his health.”

“You’ve been very kind, Lieutenant.” I stood up.

“Any time,” he said.

I went to the door. As I turned the knob he said, “Just a minute.” I looked back at him. He smiled. “Do me a favor, Arlin. Come around some time and tell me what the hell it was you really wanted.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“See you around, Arlin.”

I went out and sat in the car. There was a coldness at the nape of my neck. Up until the talk with Cord, I had been willing to go along with the theory of a chain of accidents. I had tried to be thorough for the sake of the pay I was getting. Mr. Flynn had just been a man pathetically anxious to prove his son was not a suicide. Tilly had been a girl who had not been able to understand how Ted Flynn’s mind may have been unstable, along with his undeniable brilliance.

But now everything had a new flavor. It was something that Cord had said, and yet, going over his words again and again, I could not pick it out.

I knew, sitting there in the sun, as well as I knew my own name that the odds were in favor of someone else’s finger pulling that trigger. I was sweating and yet I felt cold.

For the first time I realized that my operations were a bit transparent. If someone had killed Sherman — and I didn’t know why I was so sure they had — then that someone might still be in the house. If so, he was watching me. It would be natural for him to watch me. I was a stranger. I was an unknown factor.

I sensed a quiet and devious intelligence at work. A mind that could plan carefully and then move boldly.

I drove away. My hands were too tight on the wheel and my foot was shaky on the gas pedal.

Chapter Five

Accidentally — On Purpose

I cut the History class. Tilly cut her class at the same hour and we drove down Route 19 through Clearwater to Largo and then turned left to Indian Rocks Beach. I found a place where we could park in the shade and watch the placid gulf. On the way I had told her of the talk with Cord.

She look my hand, looked into my eyes and said, “For the first time it’s real to you, isn’t it, Joe?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“It’s been real to me all along. You know how when people go with each other, they talk about everything under the sun. Once Ted and Step were arguing about suicide. It was after Sherman had died. Step couldn’t see that it was wrong — but Ted told us that the only time he could see the remotest justification was when a person was painfully and incurably ill — that the world is too wide and wonderful a place to leave before the time you have is up. He wasn’t just talking, Joe.”

“I think I would have liked him, Till.”

“You would have. I know it. When they told me he’d hung himself, I found out later that I’d screamed that he didn’t do it, that someone had done it to him. I’m still just as certain of that as I was during the first moments. He was incapable of it. They were holding the last meeting of the year, the election of officers for the next year it was. They waited and waited and then they went looking for him.

“Brad cried like a baby. They cut him down and then he was shipped north for the funeral. I couldn’t go to that. I couldn’t even go to the memorial service for him in the chapel at school. I was too sick. They had me in the infirmary. When I got out I went north and took that job.”

“Up until now,” I said, “I’ve been playing an intellectual game. Mental musical chairs. Now it isn’t a game any more.”

“For me it never has been.” She bit her lip. “Joe, you’d better not let anything happen to you. You’d just better not.”

I kissed her then, there in the cool shade with the warm wind touching our faces, and she came alive in my arms in a way I’ve never before experienced. Holding her was holding flame and purpose and a clean, wanting strength. It shook me, and shook her too. We sat apart from each other.

We said very little on the drive back. I left her off at the sorority house. I went to a bar and had a few. I arrived at Gamma U in time for dinner. I talked and I listened politely and the table conversation went over the surface of my mind while below the surface a tallish, faintly awkward girl walked, and her eyes were more than promise...

I woke with a start at dawn. The bedroom had an outside door. I had left it open and latched the screen. A tall figure was silhouetted there.

“Rod,” he said. “Rod, let me in.”

I went to the door. “Oh, Arthur! Man, it’s a little after six. I didn’t know you boys were going to drop in at this time of day.”

I unlatched the door. He brushed by me, walked to the bed and sat down, staring at his big hands. His faintly Lincolnesque appearance was more pronounced. The eyes had sunk deeper into his head. His cheeks were more hollow. I suddenly knew that this was no time for patter and laughter.

“I can’t depend on anybody else,” he said. “You’ve got to help me.”

I sat beside him and reached over and took my cigarettes from the bedside table. I lit both cigarettes with my lighter. “What is it?”

“The most awful mess yet, Rod. The worst. Everybody’s running around like headless chickens. I came out here to talk to somebody with sense. This time it has rattled me.”

“Get to it, Arthur. What happened?”

“The police phoned the house at three this morning. It happened at the Onyx Court.” I barely concealed my start of surprise. That was the court and trailer outfit owned by the Toberlys.

“They said that they had a body tentatively identified as Bradford Carroll. I dressed and went over along with Bill Armand. The place was swarming with police. Brad’s throat had been cut. I told them that it was Brad all right. I still feel sick. There was blood all over...”

“Take it easy, Arthur.”

“They were still questioning Bob Toberly. He’s a student too. We rushed him a couple of years ago and passed him over. He runs the place along with his wife. It’s sort of a crummy place. Toberly said that Brad and his wife, a tall dark girl that he recognized as a student, had registered in at about ten for the night. He said they’d done it many times before. He said that they were secretely married.

“Well, Bill, standing beside me, said ‘Laura!’ They turned on Bill and made him admit that he thought it sounded like Laura Trainor. They got the name of the sorority house and two cops went to pick her up. They’re holding her now. I’ve done all I could. I wired Brad’s parents, and the sorority sisters phoned Laura’s father. I heard he’s on his way down. Rod, it would be bad enough without all that trouble last year, but this is absolutely the worst. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

I left him sitting there and made him a stiff drink. Laura was one of Tilly’s sorority sisters, along with Molly. So Tilly would know already. I made a second stiff one for myself. He took his glass numbly and drank it as though it were water.

“The razor was right there,” he said. “I saw it. A straight razor. He used them. I guess it was an affectation. I guess he had a kit with him so he could get cleaned up and go directly from the Onyx Court to class.”

“Do you think Laura did it?”

He shuddered. “How do I know what to think? I don’t think she’s capable of a thing like that. But they could have quarreled.”

“What will happen?”

“It was too late for the morning papers but the afternoon papers will give it a big play. They’ll bring up all that stuff from last year. There were reporters there. Toberly’s wife put on her best dress. To her it was like a party. They’re giving Toberly a bad time. Brad voted against Toberly, of course, two years ago. Most of us did. They’ll twist and turn until they make a motive out of it.”

“How can I help?”

He gave me a tired smile. “You’ve helped by listening. I have to go back now. I have to get everybody together and tell them to keep their damn mouths shut. Then I have to pack Brad’s things. A policeman is going to help me. He’ll be looking for evidence. He’s in the house now, sitting on a chair outside Brad’s room. He was there when I left anyway.”

“What about Brad’s people?”

“They’ll be down, I suppose. I ought to make a reservation for them at the hotel. Look, would you do that for me?”

“Sure thing.”

He stood up and put the glass on the bedside table. “Thanks, Rod. That drink helped a lot.”

“Let me dress. I’ll go in with you.”

“No, I’ll go along. I’ll be at the house. See you there.”

Some of the brothers were having an early breakfast when I went in. The single waiter acted jittery. Lieutenant Cord was sitting in the lounge. He came over to me and said, “Is this another one of those accident-prone guys?”

I kept my voice low. “Do you think he cut his throat?”

Cord shrugged his big sloping shoulders. “He could have. The razor’s in the right place. At least it was. But usually people that take a hack at their own throat, they’re timid about it. This was a good try. He damn near slashed his head off — that is, if he did it. Now I got what the boys call an unhealthy interest in you. Want to talk right here?”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“You come in and give me a queer line of chatter and the next thing I know one of your friends is dead. I like to get all the loose ends pasted in or clipped off. Let’s you stop trying to kid me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I checked your schedule after you left and had a few words over the phone with your professor. I didn’t mention your name. He told me somebody was kidding me and that the department wouldn’t send a student out like that. So talk, Arlin.”

“Suppose I tell you that my reason was good but that it’s my business?”

“First let’s see how you check out last night. You had dinner here and left. Where did you go?”

“Right back to my place on the beach. I studied until about eleven, wrote a few letters and went to bed at about quarter to one.”

“No proof?”

“Not a shred.”

“Now this Toberly tells me that somebody was around asking him questions about how Gamma U turned him down. The guy said it was for a magazine article on fraternities. He didn’t give a name. Toberly gave me a description. It fits you pretty good, Arlin. Want to come on down to see if Toberly can make identification?”

“I give up. It was me.”

“Now don’t you think you better tell uncle?”

Two sophomores walked through into the dining room and stared at us curiously. “Someday I’ll get smarter,” I said. “Come on out and sit in my car for a little while.”

The sun was climbing higher. Cord’s face was drawn with fatigue. I told him my situation. He listened with a sour expression.

“What answer have you come to, Arlin?”

“I can’t give reasons. It’s just a very strong feeling. I say that four of them were murdered Carroll is the fourth. I don’t know about the automobile accident. We’ll skip that one.”

“And you think,” he said bitterly, “that three murders took place right under our noses. You think we’re that stupid!”

“It’s not that you’re stupid, Lieutenant. It’s that the guy behind it is one clever operator. Take the beach party. No trick to get Winniger out into the surf and drown him. No special trick to take advantage of the empty house on a Sunday, start a conversation with Sherman and trick him. And if a guy were disarming enough, he could talk the Flynn boy up onto a chair in the closet on some pretext.

“And now Brad. This last one is bolder than the others. This last one was permitted to even look a little like murder. Was it hard to find out where Brad and Laura had a habit of going? Would it be difficult to wait until Laura left to go back to her sorority house? There was a moon last night. What time did it happen?” I asked Lieutenant Cord.

“Around two, I guess. The way it was discovered so fast, this Toberly couldn’t sleep. He went for a walk around the place. He saw the light on and it bothered him. He took a quick look and phoned. We were there at quarter to three. Doesn’t that spoil the moon angle?”

“Not completely. Sneak in there and find the razor and let him have it. Then snap on the light on the way out to make it look more like a suicide.”

Cord studied me. “You talk a good game, Arlin. You almost get me believing it. Except for one thing. Why would anybody do all that? What the hell reason would he have?”

“Are you going to expose me, Lieutenant?”

He shrugged. “There’s no point in that. Keep playing your little game if you want to, as long as you’re getting paid for it. But stay out of my way. Don’t foul up any of my work.”

He got out of the car. He regarded me soberly. “And don’t leave town. I’m taking a chance on believing you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do some checking to make sure.”

I had no heart for the classes. I ate and went over to pick up Tilly. She came running out to the car. She climbed in beside me and her fingernails bit into my wrist. “Oh, Joe, I can’t take it any more! All this horror! I keep seeing him the way he was out at your place. Smiling and happy.”

“How did Laura take it?”

“They had to stop questioning her. She’s in the Sandson General Hospital. Shock and hysteria. They’re fools to bother her,” she said hotly. “Laura goes all green if somebody steps on a bug.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, I couldn’t. And I couldn’t stand going to classes today, Joe. Start the car. Take me away from here. Drive fast, Joe.”

We didn’t get back until late afternoon. We bought a paper and read it together.

MYSTERY DEATH OF COLLEGE STUDENT.

That’s the way they covered it, speaking neither of suicide nor murder, but hinting at murder.

Bradford Carroll, accompanied by a coed to whom he was secretly married, registered in at a local tourist court at ten o’clock last night. He was discovered shortly before three this morning by the proprietor of the court — who was attracted by the light which was left on. His throat had been cut with a straight razor which was found near his right hand.

Police took the coed into custody. She had returned to her sorority house some time before the body was discovered. Police report that before his wife collapsed, she testified that Carroll had been alive when she left, at approximately ten minutes of two.

Carrol, a senior at West Coast University, was a member of Gamma U, that same hard-luck fraternity which lost through suicide and accidental death, five members during the previous school year.

From there on the article went into his history and the school groups of which he was a member.

“It’s a ghastly thing,” Tilly said. “The police,” I said, “promise an early solution of Carroll’s mysterious death.”

A friend of Tilly’s came over to the car. Tilly introduced us. The girl said, “How do you like the new ruling, kids?”

“Haven’t seen it yet.”

“No? It’s on all the bulletin boards. Curfew for all students living on the campus in either houses or dorms. All special senior privileges rescinded. Now we stand a bed check just like the lower classes. All absences from living quarters after eleven are to be reported to the office of the dean until further notice. How do you like that?”

“I don’t,” Tilly said. “But what else can they do? Anxious parents will be giving the school a very bad time. They’ve got to have some sort of an answer.”

I dropped Tilly with a promise to pick her up later, and went to the house. Step Krindall looked as glum as his round pink face permitted.

“Special meeting tonight,” he said.

Bill Armand was standing in the lounge, staring out the windows toward the palms that bordered the drive. He gave me a crooked smile.

“Come to college for a liberal education,” he said. “Where have you been all day?”

“Comforting the shaken.”

“Tilly? When you need a stand-in, let me know.”

I was surprised at the sudden feeling of jealousy. “Sure, Bill,” I said easily. “What’s the voting around here? Murder or suicide?”

“The dopes, which I might say covers about ninety percent of our membership, favor suicide. They overlook the very real argument that Brad was too selfish to kill himself. He wouldn’t think of depriving the world of his presence for the next forty years.”

“I thought he was your friend!”

“Is friendship blind, like love?”

“Armand, the adolescent cynic. Who stepped on you, Bill? And how hard?”

His lips tightened and his face turned chalk white. He turned on his heel and walked away.

I ate with placid Step Krindall, Arthur, Al Siminik and a quiet senior named Laybourne at a table for four. It was a very subdued meal. Once I went to a slaughterhouse. I saw the look in the eyes of the steer after that first brutal smack between the eyes. Siminik wore that look. Arthur ate doggedly, as though from a sense of duty.

After coffee, Arthur looked up at the dining-room clock. He rapped on his glass with a knife. “We’ll go up to the meeting room in five minutes. You Step — you other latecomers — hurry it up.”

We filed up to the meeting room. It was a meeting without ritual, the lights on full. Arthur took the chair. “We’ll dispense with the minutes of the previous meeting and with the treasurer’s report. This is a special meeting called for a special purpose. What happened last night was a severe shock to all of us. Brad was... our brother and our friend.”

Siminik startled the group by sobbing once aloud. He knuckled his eyes like a small boy.

Arthur went on. “I have talked with the police, just before dinner. It begins to appear that the verdict of the coroner’s jury will be death by his own hand.”

“Nuts!” Bill Armand said loudly.

Arthur rapped for order. “That’s enough, Armand. If you can’t control yourself, I’ll order you out of the meeting. Lieutenant Cord has made it clear to me that he anticipates that some of you will find a verdict of suicide hard to believe and will make some foolish, amateurish attempt to uncover evidence turning it into a crime. Murder. I have called this meeting to tell you that the police intend to deal with any such quixotic impulse very harshly. I will deal with it very harshly from this end. What happened is police business and will be handled by the police. I hope I’ve made myself clear.

“Now for my second point. The students will ask us Gamma U’s innumerable questions. Was Brad depressed? Did we know about his marriage? It will be the duty of each and every one of you as a Gamma U to politely but firmly evade all such questions. It is our duty as Brad’s friends to keep our mouths shut. By that I do not mean to go about with mysterious and knowing looks. Brad is dead. Nothing can alter that. The policy of this house will be to say that Brad had been troubled lately and that we did not know the cause. Any comment?”

“Yeah, what was he troubled about?” Armand asked.

“I consider that question impertinent, Armand. Any other comments?” He stared around the room. “All right, then. This meeting is adjourned. Wait. One more point. This is for you boys that live in the house. The bed check and curfew will be adhered to rigidly.”

Chairs were shoved back. Arthur walked out first. I went down the stairs and out the door. Tilly was sitting in my car.

“I walked over,” she said. “I didn’t want to be stood up.”

“How did you know I was going to?”

I turned on the lights and motor. She moved over close to me. “We’re going to your place and talk, Joe. I can think more clearly now.”

Chapter Six

Shooting at Windmills

She went in ahead of me and put the lights on, as I put the top of the car up against the dew. The gulf was rough, the waves thundering hard against the beach. We dragged chairs out onto the terrace. I held her tightly against me for a moment. “Hey,” she said, “I want to keep on thinking clearly for a while. Leggo!”

“Chilly woman.”

“Hush!” She sat down and after three tries we got our cigarettes going. “This,” she said, “is probably silly. You’ll have to let me know. Remember when we talked about what the dead boys had in common except the fraternity?”

“I remember.”

“Brad’s death makes the pattern more clear, Joe. Can you guess what they had in common?”

I thought for a time. “No. Give.”

“Rex Winniger, Tod Sherman, Ted and Brad were all very positive people. Strong personalities. They had influence in the fraternity. Every house has a certain quota of nonenities. But there was nothing wishy-washy about any one of that four. They had power in the house and on the campus. Is that going to help?”

I felt the excitement. “That is going to help. You are a lovely and intelligent gal. I was so close to it I didn’t even see it. Wait a minute now. Let me think. It doesn’t make motive any stronger from a sane person’s point of view, but it does make it clearer. Jealousy. Lust for power. If the pattern is anything other than accidental, it means we have to look among the membership for our boy. And we said a long time ago that insiders would have the edge by far on opportunity.”

I guess we got it both at the same time. She reached over and held my hand. Her hand was like ice. “It couldn’t be, Joe. It just couldn’t be.”

“Come on inside. I want to read you something.”

We went in and shut the terrace doors against the wind. I found my lecture notes from the abnormal psychology class. They were fragmentary, but I could piece them together.

“Listen, Tilly. One of the types of insanity least vulnerable to any known treatment is the true psychopath. It’s as though the person were born with some essential part missing. Conscience. The psychopath has no understanding of right and wrong. To him, the only thing is not to get caught. Has reasonable-sounding motives for all his actions.

“This type of person, if displeased with service, will set fire to a hotel and think nothing of the consequences as long as he is not apprehended. Entirely blind to the other person’s point of view. Many murderers caught and convicted and sentenced are true psychopaths. Motive for crime often absurdly minor. True psychopath shows high incidence of endowment of brains and charm of manner. Is often outstanding. Often basically arrogant.

“Delights in outwitting others. Capable of carrying on long-range planning. Constantly acts in the presence of others. Often a liar as well, with amazingly intricate and well-conceived fabric of untruth. Society has no good answer as yet to the true psychopath.”

I put the notebook away. She frowned at me. “But Joe! He’s such a sweet guy! Gentle, understanding. He was so nice to me after Ted... died.”

“High endowment of charm of manner. Constantly acts in the presence of others. Delights in outwitting others.”

“But with all he’s got on the ball, he’d be almost as big without... going to such crazy lengths.”

“Motive for crime often absurdly minor.”

“But to kill... just for the sake of fraternity house politics. Joe, it’s crazy!”

“A true psychopath is an insane person. He hides among us normal jokers because he looks and acts and talks just like one of us... up to a point.”

“Will the police listen to you?” she finally asked.

“They’d laugh in my face. What proof have I got? We’ve got to show that each murder helped him, even though it helped him in a minor way.”

She crossed the room. “Hold me tight, darling. I’m scared. I don’t want to think about him. I wish it were Bill, or Step, or little Jay Bruce, or even Al Siminik. Anybody except Arthur Marris.”

“We’ve got to get hold of Harv Lorr, the fellow who was president last year. He can help us straighten out the timing on those other deaths. He’s probably in North Dakota or some equally handy place.”

“He’s a Tampa boy. He’s working in the family cigar business. With luck, Joe, we can be talking to him in an hour or so.”

Harv Lorr came across from the door to our booth. “There he is,”. Tilly said. I looked up and saw a tall man approaching. He was prematurely gray and there were deep lines bracketing his mouth. He wore a light sport coat and an open-collared shirt.

“It’s nice to see you again, Tilly,” he said. His smile was a white ash in his sun-darkened face.

I had slid out of the booth. “Meet Joe Arlin, Harv,” she said. We shook hands and murmured the usual things. We all sat down.

Harv ordered beer. He sat beside Tilly. He turned so he could look at her. “You sounded a little ragged over the phone. What’s up?”

“It’s about Brad,” she said.

Harv frowned. “I read it this evening. Terrible thing. How do I fit?”

Tilly looked appealingly at me. I took over. “Mr. Lorr, I want to ask you some pretty pointless-sounding questions. If you stop me to ask me why I’m asking them, it will just take that much longer. Believe me, there’s a definite pattern in the questions. First. The two sophomores who were killed in that automobile accident. Were they of any particular importance in fraternity politics? Were they active?”

Harv looked puzzled. “They were two votes. At the election of officers the previous June they’d voted for me as house president for the next year, rather than Ted Flynn.”

“We’ll move on to the next question. We weren’t particularly interested in those two sophomores anyway. The next guy we care about is Rex Winniger. Was he active?”

“He was the outstanding man in the junior class. If he’d lived, I don’t think there was any doubt of his becoming house president during his last year. It was a blow to all of us.”

“He died in December. Then in March of this year it was Tod Sherman. He was a classmate of yours, as Flynn was. Was he active in house politics?”

“Everybody is to a certain extent, Arlin. When I won out over Ted, Ted gave up having any pronounced opinions. There is usually a couple of strong groups in the house. Tod Sherman was my opposition. We fought each other tooth and nail, but it was good-natured. At the time he died, we were pretty well lined up for the June elections. I wanted Arthur Marris for president and it was understood that Tod Sherman was pushing Brad Carroll.

“In a house that size the cronies of the pres get the gravy. You know that. Tilly said over the phone you were in the fraternity up at Wisconsin. You know then how a president on the way out through the graduation route tries to get one of his boys in for the following year.”

“And so after Sherman died, Ted Flynn took over the opposition.”

“If you knew all that, why ask me?”

“I didn’t. I just guessed.”

“I don’t see how you could guess a thing like that. Ted was quite a boy. He went to work on the membership. It began to look as though Brad was going to give Arthur a very close race or squeak in himself in Arthur’s place. But, of course, it was all shot to hell when Ted killed himself. In fact, we had to vote by mail during July, after school was out. I handled it.

“Arthur made it by a good ten votes. If Ted had lived to give his little talk in favor of Brad, it might have been a different story. Probably would have been, as Arthur sometimes makes a pretty poor impression in spite of his ability.”

I leaned toward him. “And what would you say if I told you that Brad had organized a pretty effective resistance to Arthur and was hamstringing him very neatly by having acquired a majority of the voting strength?”

Harv gave me a quizzical look. “Now wait a minute, Arlin, let’s not go off—”

“Can’t you see the picture? First Winniger, then Sherman, then Ted, and now Brad. Which did each death help. Which man? Arthur. Every time.”

He gave me a long scornful look. “Now hold it up, Arlin. That’s kid stuff and you know it. Sure, the boys play politics. It’s a game. It’s good training. But nobody — nobody ever took it that seriously! Man, are you trying to tell me that old Arthur goes around killing people so he can get to be house president and then so he can keep his authority.” He turned to Tilly. “You ought to know better than that!”

Tilly counted if for him on her fingers. “Winniger, Sherman, Flynn, Carroll. All in the way, Harv. All dead, Harv. You know the law of averages. If you don’t care for our answer, give us your answer.”

I could see it shake him a little. But he kept trying. “People, you don’t kill guys for that sort of thing. Look! It’s a college fraternity.”

Then Tilly carefully explained to him about psychopaths. I was surprised at how much she remembered. She told it well. When she was through, Harv Lorr knew what a psychopath was.

“It seems so incredible!” he complained. But I saw from his eyes that we had him.

“If it was credible,” I said, “somebody would have found out a long time ago. If there’d been a million bucks at stake or something like that — some motive that everybody would be willing to accept, the whole thing would have looked fishy and friend Arthur would have been stopped in his tracks. But this way, for a goal that seems unimportant to the common man, he can hack away almost without interference.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked humbly. He had given up. He believed us.

“Just sit tight,” I said. “Be ready to give over the facts when they’re called for.”

“What do you two plan to do?” he asked.

I looked at Tilly. I kept my eyes on hers. “We’ve got to give the guy a new reason,” I said, “and then jump him when he jumps.”

Her lips formed a soundless, “No!”

“There’s no other way,” I said. And there wasn’t. I wanted her to talk me out of it. I was ready to be talked out of it. I wanted no part of it. But she saw the logic of it, the same as I did.

“Keep your guard up,” Harv said.

“I’ll make him be careful,” Tilly said.

I looked at my watch. “If we can make fifty miles in fifty minutes, you stand a chance of not being expelled, Miss Owen.”

We left. I got her back in time. I went out to my place on the beach and wished I was in Montreal. I wished I was in Maine looking at the girls in their swim suits. I wore myself out swimming in the dark, parallel and close to the shore. I had a shot. I tried to go to sleep. I had another shot. I went to sleep. I dreamed of Arthur Marris. He had his thumbs in my jugular...

I waited for the coroner’s jury. I told myself it was the smart thing to do. They might force the issue. Then they returned a suicide verdict and sad-eyed people shipped Brad to his home state in a box. Laura went abroad...

Call it a ten-day wonder. A small town might have yacked about it until the second generation. A college has a more transient sort of vitality. Life goes on. Classes change. New assignments. Next Saturday’s date. Call it the low attention factor of the young. A week turns any college crisis into ancient history.

Tilly and I talked. We talked ourselves limp. The conversations were all alike.

“We’ve got to get him to make the first move, Tilly.”

“But to do that, Joe, you’ve got to be a threat to his setup. You’ve got to take Brad’s place.”

“You don’t think I can engineer a strong opposition move?”

“I know you can. That’s the trouble.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“You fool! I don’t want you being a target.”

“The other boys didn’t have their guard up. Not one of them knew until the very last moment. It must have been a horrid surprise. He won’t be able to surprise me.”

“How can you be sure?”

“By never being off guard.”

“People have to sleep, don’t they?”

“Now you’re handing me quite a sales talk, Till.”

We talked. At the drive-ins, between races at the dog tracks, on my small private beach, riding in the car, walking from class.

I didn’t tell her, but I was already starting the program. I took over Brad’s sales talk. I buttonholed the brethren and breathed sharp little words into their ears.

I racked up a big zero.

It was funny. When I had no axe to grind, I was Rod Arlin, a nice guy, a transfer, a credit to the house. As soon as I started to electioneer I became that Arlin guy, and what the hell does he know about this chapter, and why doesn’t he go back to Wisconsin...

Arthur tapped me on the shoulder after dinner. “Talk for a while, Rod?”

“Why, sure.”

We went to his room. He closed the door. I glanced toward the closet. I sat down and the little men were using banjo pics on my nerves. But I worked up a casual smile. “What’s on your mind, Arthur?”

I didn’t like him any more. That warm face was a mask. The deep-set eyes looked out, play-acting, pretending, despising the ignorance of ordinary mortals.

He stood by his desk and tamped the tobacco into his pipe with his thumb. He sucked the match flame down into the packed tobacco with a small sound that went paaa, paaa, paaa. He shook the match out.

“It pleased me that you transfered here, Rod. I liked you when I first met you. I considered you to be a well-adjusted person with a pretty fair perspective.”

“Thanks.”

“Lately you’ve been disappointing me.”

“Indeed!” I made it chilly.

“This job I have is fairly thankless. I try to do my best. I could understand Brad Carroll when he tried to block me in my job. Brad was a professional malcontent. Not mean — just eager. You know what I mean?” He was bold. He half sat on the edge of his desk.

“I know what you mean.”

“When you try to operate in the same way, I fail to understand you, Rod. What have you got to gain? You’re only spending one year in this school. I want this chapter to run smoothly. The least thing we can have is unity among the members.”

“And you’re the great white father who’s going to give it to us.”

“Sarcasm always depresses me a little, Arlin.”

“Maybe you depress me a little. Maybe I think that if you can’t run the house right, a voting coalition should take the lead away from you.”

“Look, Arlin. You have your own place on the beach. You have a very pleasant girl to run around with. You have a full schedule of classes. If you still have too much energy left over, why don’t you try taking on a competitive sport?”

“Is it against the house rules to buck the pres?”

He sighed. “I didn’t want to say this. But you force me. You may have noticed that there is a certain coolness toward you among the membership.”

I nodded. I had noticed it.

“The membership feels that you are stirring up needless conflict among the more susceptible boys. We had a small closed meeting of the seniors the other day. It was resolved that I speak to you and tell you to cease and desist. If you had any chance of being successful, I wouldn’t speak to you this way. But you have no chance. You just do not have enough influence as a transfer.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then I can swing enough votes to deny the privileges of the house to you.”

“That takes a three-fourths majority.”

“I have more than that.”

I knew that he did. It was no bluff. I made my tone very casual. “Well, you’ve taken care of me a lot easier than some of the others.”

He took his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t think I quite understand that, Rod.”

“Then we’ll drop it right there.” I stood up.

He put his hand out. “No hard feelings?”

I ignored his hand. “Isn’t that a little trite?”

He was good. He actually looked as though he wanted to weep. “That isn’t the Gamma U spirit, Arlin.”

“You take your job pretty seriously, Marris.”

“I do the best I know how.”

“What man could do more!” I said breathlessly. I turned and walked out.

Chapter Seven

Setting Up the Kill

Tilly had stayed up until three, she said, finishing a story for our mutual Friday class. She wanted me to read it. She had brought her carbon with her, in her purse.

“Right here?”

“No. The atmosphere has to be better than this, Joe. Wine, soft music.”

“At my place I can provide the wine and the soft music. Would you okay the background?”

“Look, I’m blushing about the story. I thought it was something I’d never try to put on paper. Maybe I don’t want you to read it.”

It was Friday afternoon. We went out to my place. I put on dark glasses and took the carbon out on the beach.

Tilly said, “One thing I’m not going to do is sit and watch you read it, Joe.” She walked down the beach away from me. I watched her walk away from me. No other girl had such a perfect line of back, concavity of slim waist, with the straightest of lines dropping from the armpits down to the in-curve of waist, then flaring, descending in a slanted curve to the pinched-in place of the knee, then sleekly curving again down the calf to the delicacy of ankle bone and the princess-narrow foot.

She turned and looked back and read my mind. “Hey, read the story,” she said.

I read it. She’d showed me other work and I’d been ruthless about too many adjectives, about stiltedness. This one was simple. A boy and a girl. The awkward poetry of a first love. The boy dies. Something in the girl dies. Forever, she thinks. She wants it to be forever. She never wants to feel again. But as she comes slowly back to life, she fights against it. In vain.

And one day she has flowered again into another love and she cannot fight any more — and then she knows that the bruised heart is the one that can feel the most pain and also the most joy. There was a sting at the corners of my eyes as I finished it.

“Come here,” I called. My voice was hoarse.

She came running. I held her by her sun-warm shoulders and kissed her. We both wept and it was a silly and precious thing.

“I do the writing in this family.” I said. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know. Now I don’t think so.”

“In this family? That is a phrase I leap upon, darling. That is a bone I take in my teeth and run with.”

“Trapped,” I said.

“I release you. I open the trap.”

“Hell no! I insist on being trapped. I want to be trapped. I am a guy who believed in a multiplicity of women. I still do. You’re all of them. You’ll keep well. You’ll last. How will you look at sixty?”

“At you.”

“I’ll be six years older. I’ll sit in the corner and crack my knuckles.”

“With me on your lap it’ll be tough.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Is it good enough to hand in, my story?”

“Too good. We won’t hand it in. We’ll whip up something else for the class. This one we keep. Maybe someday we’ll sell it.” Something stirred at the back of my mind. She saw then the change in my expression.

“What is it, Joe? What are you thinking about?”

“Let me get organized.” I got up and paced around. She watched me. I came back and sat beside her. “Look. I can’t power Arthur into trying anything. It won’t work. I can’t become dangerous. But there’s another way.”

“How?”

I tapped her story with one finger. “This way.”

“How do you mean?”

“I write it up. Other names, other places, but the same method of death in each case. I’ll twist it a little. I’ll make it a small business concern. The similarity will be like a slap in the face.”

“You’ll have to write an ending to it. How does it end, Joe?”

“I won’t end it. I’ll take it right up to a certain spot.”

“Then what are you going to do with it?”

“Easy, my love. I’m going to leave it in Arthur’s room and wait and see what happens. I am going to have it look like an accident. I am going to do it in such a way that he’s going to have to give some thought to eliminating one Joe Arlin.”

“No, Joe. Please, no!”

“I’ve got to finish it off. One way or another.”

She looked at me for a long time. “I suppose you do,” she said quietly.

“Be a good girl. Play in the sand. Build castles. I want to bang this out while it’s hot.”

Dust clouded the page in the type-writer and I put the desk lamp on. Tilly sat across the room reading a magazine. I could feel her eyes on the back of my head from time to time.

I had brought my bad guy up to the Sherman death.

“...stood for a moment and took the risk of looking to see that nothing had been forgotten. The gun had slid under the desk. The body was utterly still. He sew the full clip on the desk beside the bottle of gun oil and...”

“Hey!” I said.

“What, darling?”

“I’ve got a slow leak in my head. So has Lieutenant Cord. So had the murderer.”

She came up behind me and put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “How do you mean?” I pointed at the sentence I had partially finished. “I don’t see anything.”

“Angel,” I said, “Lieutenant Cord spoke of a full clip. I do not think he meant seven or six. I think he meant eight. A clip will not hold nine. There was one shell in the chamber. So how did it get there? To load a .45 with nine you put in a full clip, jack one into the chamber, remove clip, add one more to the clip and slap it back into the grip. A guy loading with nine is not likely to forget he has done so. Let us go calling...”

Lieutenant Cord was about to leave. He frowned at me, looked appreciatively at Tilly. I put the question to him.

“Yes, the clip was full, but what does that prove? Maybe that one had been in the chamber for months. It even makes the case stronger my way. The guy takes out the clip, counts eight through the holes, and forgets the nine load.”

“Or somebody else palms another shell out of the box he had and puts it in the chamber.”

“What kind of tea do you drink, Arlin?”

“Be frank with me, Lieutenant. Doesn’t this make the whole thing just a little more dubious to you?”

“No,” he said flatly.

“You,” I said, “look at life through a peashooter. You can focus on one incident at a time. Don’t you ever try to relate each incident to a whole series?”

“Not this time.”

“Miss Owen and I know who did it, Lieutenant.”

“She drinks tea too, eh?”

“You don’t want to know?”

“Not interested. Go play games. Go play cop. Maybe it’s a part of your education.”

We left. “For a time there he seemed brighter than that,” I said.

We got into the car. “Joe,” she said. “Joe, why don’t you go back to New York? Why don’t you tell Mr. Flynn that in your opinion Arthur Marris did it? Why don’t you let him take over? He could build a fire under the lieutenant. Why don’t you go to New York and take me with you?”

“Shameless!”

“Determined. You’re not getting out of my sight again, Joe.”

“I propose and what do I get? A bloodhound yet.”

“Take us home, Joe.”

“Home! Haven’t you ever heard the old adage about street cars?”

“Yes, but you have a season ticket. Home, Joe.”

What can you do?...

I finished the unfinished yarn, folded one copy carelessly and shoved it into my pocket. I finished it Saturday. Tilly, who’d driven down early, was singing in the small kitchen, banging the dishes around.

“I go to leave the epic,” I said.

“Hurry back. And, Joe, bring two of the biggest steaks you can find. The biggest. I’ve never been so hungry.”

I felt like a commuter going to work. Kissed in the living room. Kissed at the door. Waved to. Told to be careful, dear.

Although the brethren with Saturday morning classes were at them, the others were in bed, most of them, with a few others looking squinty-eyed at black coffee in the dining room. I had some coffee with Step Krindall. This morning his baby blue eyes were bleary.

He moaned at forty-second intervals, wiping his pink head. He said, “That wrist watch of yours, Rod. Could you wrap it in your handkerchief and put it in your pocket? The tick is killing me.”

“A large evening?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t counted my money yet. I missed the curfew and the bed check and the last bus out here.”

“Seen Arthur around this morning?”

“He was coming out of the communal shower as I went in. A ghastly memory. He smiled at me. He slammed the door.”

I finished my coffee.

“You slurp a little, don’t you?” he said weakly.

I gave him a hearty slap on the back and went back to the row of senior rooms. I tapped on Arthur’s door.

“Come in!” He looked up from the desk. He was studying. He frowned and then forced a smile.

“I came in to tell you I was a little off the beam the other day, Arthur. I’m sorry. Must be the heat.”

“You don’t know how glad I am to hear that, Rod. Frankly, you had me puzzled. I was going to suggest a checkup at the infirmary. Sometimes the boys get working too hard. A lot of times you can catch them before they crack.”

I looked at him blandly. “Too bad you didn’t catch Ted Flynn in time.”

He nodded. “I’ve felt bad about that ever since. Of course, it was Harv Lorr’s responsibility then. But all upperclassmen should look out for all the other brothers, don’t you think?”

“I certainly think so.” I pushed myself up out of the chair, said good-by and left quickly before he could call my attention to the folded second-sheets I’d left tucked visibly between the cushion and the arm. I had written it up without my name so that anyone would naturally read it to find out whose it was. And I was depending on the narrative hook I’d inserted in the first sentence to keep the reader on the line until it broke off on page nine.

I went and bought two steaks as thick as my fist, frozen shrimp, cocktail sauce, an orchid with funny gray petals edged with green, a bandanna with a pattern of dice all adding up to seven or eleven, gin and vermouth, both imported, and a vast silly shoulder bag of woven green straw. I wanted to buy her the main street, two miles of waterfront beach and the Hope diamond, plus a brace of gray convertibles that would match her level eyes. But I had to save something to buy later.

When I got back, she was gone. I stowed the perishables in the freezing compartment and jittered around, cracking my knuckles, humming, pacing and mumbling until she came back at quarter to one.

“Just where do you think you’ve been?” I demanded.

“Hey, be domineering some more. I love it.”

“Where did you go?”

“I took a bus to school and found Molly and talked her out of this.” She took it out of her purse and handed it to me. It was ridiculously small. On the palm of her hand, it looked as vicious and unprincipled as a coral snake.

“Her father gave it to her,” Tilly said.

I took it and broke it and looked at the six full chambers. I put out one load and snapped the cylinder shut and made certain the hammer was on the empty chamber.

“I thought we ought to have one,” she said in a small voice.

“You’re cute,” I said. “You’re lovable. Come here.” I opened the bottom bureau drawer and took out the .357 Magnum. If the one she brought was a coral snake, this is a hooded cobra. “Now we’ve got an arsenal.”

“How was I to know, Joe?”

“Look at me! Am I a bare-handed type hero? Am I a comic-book buccaneer? Uh uh, honey. At moments of danger you will find Arlin huddled behind the artillery. You should have seen me in the war. Safety-first Arlin, they called me. The only man in the navy who could crawl all the way into a battle helmet.”

Suddenly she was in my arms and shivering. I laid the weapons on the corner of the bureau and paid attention. “I’m scared, scared, scared,” she said.

“Hold on for twelve hours,” I said. “To yourself — not to me. Junior will move fast. He has to. The chips are on the table. The mask has slipped. The hour is on the wing and the bird in the bush has become a rolling stone.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“What do you expect? Get out from under my chin. Stand over there. Okay. This is the order of battle. Arthur will show. He has to. He will show in one of two ways, but first night must fall. He will either come in here playing house president looking for an opening, or he will sneak.

“We will have the daylight hours in which to be gay. Then, come night, we must be boy scouts. We must guard against the sneak play. The surf makes considerable racket. A sneak will come from the beach.

“Thus, the answer is to be invisible from the beach and to be brightly lighted. The south corner of the living room answers that purpose very neatly. We will move the couch there and sit pleasantly side by side with weapons available and wait. In that way we shall be facing the door at which he will knock, should he decide to come openly. Should he knock — you, in great silence, will dart into the living room closet.

“Either way, we shall have two witnesses, you and me. Should he come openly, you must rely on my reflexes and my glib tongue, darling.”

“I love your reflexes.”

“On the ice you will find two mastodon steaks, shrimp that need no cleaning and one wild flower. The wild flower is for you.

“If the steaks turn out poorly, due to the cooking thereof, I shall take away the flower.”

Oh, we were glib and gay throughout that long afternoon. We swam, drank, ate, told jokes, sang, held hands. Nothing did very much good. Our laughter was too brittle and high, and our jokes were leaden.

There were ghosts lurking behind our eyes.

Violence belongs in damp city alleys and shabby tenements and sordid little bars. It doesn’t fit into an environment of white sand and the blue-green gulf water, and the absurd and frantic running of the sand pipers, and the coquinas digging into the wash of wet sand. Murder doesn’t go with the tilt of white gull-wings against the incredibly blue sky, or the honeyed shoulders of the girl you love.

From time to time during that afternoon I would almost forget, and then it would come back — the evil that hid behind the sun and under the sand, and under the water and around the corner of the house.

Chapter Eight

Booby-Trap

The sun sank golden toward the gulf and then turned a bank of clouds to a bloody fire that was five thousand miles long. Dusk was an odd stormy yellow, and then a pink-blue and then a deep dusty blue. A cool wind came from the north west, and we shivered and went in and changed. We were as subdued as children who have been promised punishment.

It was possible that he might listen. As night gathered its dark strength and the sea turned alien, we sat in the brightness in the corner and read silently together from the same book, but even that was not powerful enough to keep us from starting with each small night noise. The wind grew steadily. The Magnum was a hard lump by my leg. She had clowned possession of the .32, stuffing it under the bright woven belt she wore, but it did not look particularly humorous.

When the knock came, firm and steady, we looked at each other for a moment frozen forever in memory. Her face was sun-bronzed, but the healthy color ran out of it so that around her mouth there was a tiny greenish tint. I squeezed her hand hard and pointed to the closet. I waited until the door was closed so that a thin dark line showed.

“Come on in!” I called. I let my hand rest casually beside me so that in one quick movement I could slap my hand onto the grip inches away.

Arthur Marris came in. The wind caught the door and almost tore it out of his hand. He shut it. The wind had rumpled his hair so that strands fell across his forehead. It gave him a more secretive look.

He smiled. “The night’s getting wild.”

I made myself put the book aside very casually. “Sit down, Arthur. I wrenched my ankle in the surf. If you want a drink, you’ll have to go out into the kitchen and make it yourself. I want to stay off the foot.”

I admired his tailor-made concern. “Oh! Too bad. Can I fix you one too?”

“Sure thing. Bourbon and water. Plain water.”

I sat tensely while he worked in the kitchen. He brought me a drink and I was relieved to see that he had a drink in each hand. I took my drink with my left hand and as I did so I braced myself and moved my fingers closer to the weapon. He turned away and went back to the chair nine feet away. He sat down as though he were very weary.

I lifted the drink to my lips and pretended to sip at it. I set it on the floor by my feet, but I did not take my eyes off him as I set it down. It made me think that this must be the way a trainer acts when he enters the cage for the first time with a new animal. Every motion planned, every muscle ready to respond, so much adrenalin in the blood that the pulse thuds and it is hard to keep breathing slow and steady.

“I’m troubled, Rod,” he said.

“Yes?” Casual and polite.

“This is something I don’t know how to handle.”

“Then it must be pretty important.”

He took the folder copy out of his pocket. “Did you leave this in my room by accident?”

“So that’s what happened to it. No, don’t bother bringing it over. Toss it on the desk. I can see from here that it’s mine.”

“I read it, Rod.”

“Like it?”

“What do you intend to do with it?”

In the game of chess there is move and countermove, gambit and response. The most successful attacks are those, as in war, where power is brought to bear on one point to mask a more devastating attack in another quarter. But before actual attack, the opponents must study each other’s responses to feints and counter-feints.

“It’s an assignment for my Friday class. Due next week.”

“I suppose you realize, Rod, that you’ve patterned your story, as far as it’s gone, on the series of misfortunes we’ve had in the house. You’ve twisted it a bit, but not enough. The method of death and the chronology are the same.”

“I still can’t see how you’re troubled.”

He frowned. “Is that hard? I had two other people in the house read it this afternoon to see if their slant was the same as mine. You can’t hand that in the way it is. Your instructor would really have to be a fool not to tie it up with what has happened, particularly because Brad Carroll’s death is still fresh in everyone’s mind.”

“What if he does?”

“You’ve made an amazingly strong case, Arlin, whether you know it or not. Until I read your story, I thought it was absurd to think of what has happened as anything except a series of tragic accidents and coincidences. No one can read your story, Rod, without getting, as I have, a strong suspicion that there is some human agency behind this whole affair. Absurd as the motives may seem, I have been wondering if...” He frowned down at the floor.

“What have you been wondering?”

“I took a long walk this afternoon. I tried to think clearly and without any prejudice. I want to ask you to hold up sending in that assignment for a time. Is the original copy here?”

“In that desk.”

“Are there any other carbons?”

“No. You’ve seen the only one.”

“I’d like to have you come back to the house with me, Rod. Right now. We might be able to clear this up.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Not with this ankle.”

He stood up and came two steps toward me. “I’ll help you, Rod. You see I want you to come back there with me, because even though your reasoning might be right in that story, the conclusion is...”

Marris stopped short and stared at the leveled weapon. He licked his lips. “What’s that for?”

“What do you think it’s for? How do you like the end of the road.”

He smiled crookedly. “Look, Arlin. You can’t possibly believe that I...”

The room was gone as abruptly as though the house had exploded. Too late, I remembered the fuse box on the outside of the house, in typical Florida fashion. We were alone in the sighing darkness, in a night that was utterly black. The outside door banged open and the sea mist blew in, curling through the room, tasting of salt.

I moved to one side, toward the closet, as fast and as quietly as I could go. I took three steps when somebody ran into me hard. A heavy shoulder caught my chest and I slammed back against the closet door, banging it shut. The impact tore the gun out of my hand and I heard it skitter across onto the bare floor beyond the rug. I touched an arm, slid my hand down to the wrist and punched hard where the head should be.

I hit the empty air and the wrist twisted out of my grip. Something hard hit me above the ear and I stumbled, dazed and off balance. I fell and had sense enough to keep rolling until I ran up against a piece of furniture. I had gotten twisted in the darkness. I felt of it and found it was the desk. Tilly screamed at that moment and the scream was far away because of the closed closet door.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I patted the floor ahead of me, looking for the gun. Somebody rolled into me and there was a thick coughing sound. I slid away. There was a thumping noise. The shots came, fast and brittle against the sound of the sea. There was an angry tug at my wrist and then a liquid warmth across my hand.

The terrace doors we had locked splintered open and the white glare of flashlights caught me full in the face as I sat back on my heels.

Two figures tramped toward me and around me. I turned and saw that they had gone toward a moving mass in the center of the room. One of the figures who had come in towered over the other. I got to my feet and reached the closet door and opened the closet. At that moment the electricity came back on.

Tilly stared up at me and said, “I thought you were... I thought you were...” She leaned against the wall of the closet, closed her eyes and sank slowly toward the floor.

I turned and saw Lieutenant Cord pulling a man off Arthur Marris. Arthur lay on his back. His face was dark and the breath was whistling in his throat. His eyes were closed.

“Back up against that wall,” Cord said quietly to the other man who had risen to his feet.

Step Krindall blinked his baby-blue eyes. Droplets of sweat stood on his pink bald head. He stared incredulously at Arthur. He said, “I thought I had my hands on Arlin! My heaven, I thought it was Arlin! I was strangling Arthur.” He worked the fingers of his fat pink hands convulsively.

“You were trying to kill Arlin like you killed Carroll?” Cord asked, very casually.

“Sure,” Krindall said. “And the other ones. My heaven, I have to take care of Arthur. He’s not smart you know. He’d let them push him around, Arthur would. I’ve been watching out for Arthur now for a long time.” He looked appealingly at Lieutenant Cord.

“He knew what you’ve been doing?”

“Oh, no! He wouldn’t like it even though it helped him a lot. I never told him. He won’t die, will he?”

Arthur stirred. He opened his eyes. He gagged and rubbed his throat as he sat up.

Krindall took a step forward, ignoring Cord. “Arthur, you’re not sore at me, are you? I knew you wouldn’t be sore. I was helping you. And then when you showed me that story today, I just thought Arlin would make trouble for both of us and it would be better if he was dead.”

He reached down as though to touch Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur pulled himself away, violently, hunching along the floor.

Step looked at Arthur for one incredulous moment and then began to blubber, his eyes streaming, his hands making helpless appealing flapping motions.

“Who was shooting?” Cord demanded.

That reminded me forcibly of Tilly. I turned back to her.

She was sitting on the closet floor staring at me. She wore a curious expression. “I felt myself fainting. I sort of expected to wake up on the couch. Only — I didn’t.”

Cord saw the punctured door, thin plywood splinters protruding. “You were shooting from inside the closet?” he asked incredulously.

“I was locked in,” Tilly said with dignity as I helped her to her feet. “I thought Mr. Arlin was being killed. I wanted to create a diversion.”

“Great diversion,” Cord said dryly, staring at my hand. The blood was dripping from the tips of my index and middle fingers. Tilly looked down. This time I was ready. I caught her and put her on the couch.

Arthur stood up shakily. He said, “Rod, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You built such a strong case you got me thinking about Krindall. Little things that I had half forgotten. I still couldn’t believe it.”

Krindall stood, weeping silently. But there was a gleam in his tear-damp blue eyes. I said, “Look at him! Great emotion. Great acting. He’s standing there trying to figure an angle. All this doesn’t actually mean anything to him. This great devotion to Arthur is just a sham.”

The tears stopped as abruptly as though they had been turned off with a pipe wrench. He looked like an evil, besotted child. “I could have got you, Arlin,” he said. “I could have got you good. I rode Rex under the water and towed him out to where it was deep. I got Tod into an argument about guns and slipped a round into the chamber. The argument was whether you could see any glint of light down the barrel.

“I fixed the noose for Ted and got him on the chair to tell me if it was water pipes in the top of the closet. He didn’t see the noose until I slipped it over his head and yanked the chair away. Then I had to keep pulling his hands off the pipe for a little while. I knew about Brad and his wife. When she left, I went in. It didn’t take long. All of them were stupid. All of them. I’ve been smarter than any of you.”

“Yeah, you’re real bright,” Cord said speculatively. “Real bright. We got some mind-doctors who can check on you.”

“Doctors! You think I’m crazy!”

He made a dive to one side. Even as he moved, I saw the butt of the Magnum peeping out around the edge of the chair leg. I needn’t have worried. Cord took one step and swung a fist that was like a bag of rocks on the end of a rope. The fist contacted Step Krindall in mid-flight. It made a sound like somebody dropping an over-ripe cantaloupe. Cord sucked his big knuckles and stared down at Krindall.

“Real bright,” he murmured. He looked over at me. “You worried me, Arlin. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm keeping an eye on this place.”

Tilly revived and Krindall came to enough to be walked out. As I held my punctured epidermis under the cold water faucet, I apologized to a glum Marris.

We were alone again and the night wind still blew, but it was not alien. The sea sighed, but it was a domesticated beast.

Then we had a solemn nightcap together. Tilly said that she thought I ought to drive her back to the campus and I said why of course. We put the top up and I took her back as though we were returning from a very average date.

Ten days later I hit rain as I crossed into Georgia. I took the coast road and the rain stayed with me. The wipers clicked back and forth and the blacktop was the color of oiled sin.

I thought of facing one Mr. Flynn and telling him what had happened, what I had found out. He would have some of the details from the papers. There were others he should know, and others I would spare him. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it was something that had to be done. Krindall would be institutionalized.

Tilly stirred and yawned and stretched like a sleepy cat and smiled at me. Depression went away as though the sun had come out.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Mmm. Famished. Let’s find a place to eat and then go find a nice court to stay in. We’ll stay there until a sunny day comes along, huh?”

“What’ll thinkle peep, honey? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Who cares what they think, huh? Show ’em the license.”

“Hunting, driving or marriage?”

“Hunting, of course. No, I’ll tell ’em we had to get married.”

“Then they’ll ask why.”

“Then I’ll say because you got me expelled from junior high.”

“You don’t look old enough to have been in junior high.”

She curled against me. “Just old enough to know better, hey?”

It was raining like crazy in Georgia and the sun was shining bright.

Content

John D. MacDonald
College-Cut Kill

Chapter One Brethern, Here’s to Death!

Chapter Two Axes to Grind

Chapter Three No Suicides Today

Chapter Four Sweating Bullets

Chapter Five Accidentally — On Purpose

Chapter Six Shooting at Windmills

Chapter Seven Setting Up the Kill

Chapter Eight Booby-Trap