A Little Class on Murder Read online

  EMERGENCY FACULTY MEETING

  Annie reluctantly edged inside the room. As expected, she read surprise and disdain on the faces of several faculty members. She would not—out of delicacy—have attended this meeting, except for Max’s importunings. And she devoutly wished Max were here right this minute to face these hostile glances.

  Even Burke looked blank as she stepped inside. The air crackled with tension.

  Burke closed the door, then walked to the lectern. His bristly eyebrows were drawn into a sharp V over his beaked nose, and his green eyes moved searchingly from face to face.

  There was no buildup, no marshaling of facts, just the implacable demand.

  “Which one of you did it?”

  Silence.

  Silence so absolute that the restless drumming of Crandall’s fingers thudded like the muffled drum roll accompanying a riderless horse until—abruptly—his hand stopped.

  Burke clawed savagely at his cheek and left reddened streaks against his leathery skin.

  “By God, I’m going to find out.” Those green eyes smoldered with fury. “Whoever you are, I’m going to find you. One way or another.”

  Bantam Books by Carolyn G. Hart

  Death on Demand Mysteries

  DEATH ON DEMAND

  DESIGN FOR MURDER

  SOMETHING WICKED

  HONEYMOON WITH MURDER

  A LITTLE CLASS ON MURDER

  DEADLY VALENTINE

  THE CHRISTIE CAPER

  SOUTHERN GHOST

  MINT JULEP MURDER

  Henrie O Mysteries

  DEAD MAN’S ISLAND

  SCANDAL IN FAIR HAVEN

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To Professor Mack R. Palmer, my old friend and former colleague, who teaches the kind of journalism I believe in

  1

  Open stacks. A boon to scholars and to those surreptitiously in search of esoteric knowledge.

  The reader in the shadowy, out-of-the-way carrel stifled a whoop of delight. Here it was in exquisite detail: how to put together a bomb, a nice little bomb timed to explode at precisely the right moment. In a manual on guerrilla warfare, courtesy United States Army. The coffee-spattered cover was a dull green. Such an innocuous-appearing pamphlet, but full of means to maim and destroy. Right here on the shelves of the Chastain College library.

  2

  Emily Everett was heavy. That’s how she put it to herself. Heavy. But she couldn’t help it. She didn’t eat that much more than other people. Why did everyone else have to be thin? Why should it make so much difference?

  She tugged on her bra and her enormous breasts quivered. Damn thing choked her. Something always hurt. Her back. Her feet. She sighed and reluctantly hoisted a thick stack of yellow folders. She stared at them with loathing, then slowly shuffled across the office. She hated filing, almost as much as she hated typing. She hated working while going to school.

  The main office door burst open and a slim redhead bounced up to the counter. “Hi, Emily. Is God back yet?”

  “Mr. Burke is out of the office this morning,” Emily replied stiffly. Who did Georgia Finney think she was? But Emily knew the answer. Georgia Finney was Sports Queen, chief photographer for The Chastain College Crier, president of her sorority. And gorgeous, with a brilliant shine like maples in the fall.

  Emily fastened malicious, resentful eyes on Georgia’s cheerful face, and said in an innocent tone, “Oh, Georgia, I saw the notice that Professor Crandall and his wife are having the Student Press Association over next week. Won’t that be fun?”

  And Emily felt a thrill of triumph, because the look in Georgia’s eyes—fleeting but so revealing—was a compound of fear, misery, and despair.

  3

  The hardest part was coming home to the down-at-heels apartment house with its faded green stucco exterior and hummocky grass. Charlotte Porter walked stiffly, her thin shoulders rigid. Shards of glass from a broken beer bottle glistened in the late fall sunlight on the cracked sidewalk.

  In her mind, she carried an image of a gracious house, an old and dignified house high on a bluff overlooking the river. Never a grand house, but so human and so filled with memories.

  But here, it was easier not to think of Jimmy.

  Spilled cola made the front steps sticky underfoot. Those loud Stemmons children. But what could be expected, no father, and a mother working two jobs. Not like Jimmy, who had been the center of her universe with every care she could give. The vestibule door was ajar. The Stemmons children again. Too young, too much in a hurry, too unruly to remember to close the door. Charlotte nudged it open wider with her elbow, her hands full with her purse and her briefcase.

  Shifting the briefcase to one hip, she fumbled in her purse for her keys and poked the tiny one into the front of her mail slot. A massive wrought iron mailbox had weathered sixty years on the shady porch of Riverway.

  The usual mail. Sudden tears blurred her eyes as she glimpsed the ornate writing on one square white envelope. The annual University Women’s Thanksgiving tea. She’d not missed attending for more than a quarter of a century. A mistake that the invitation had come, obviously, because she’d dropped out of her clubs, all of them. She no longer went to the luncheons, every second Wednesday of the month, every third Thursday, with their high fluttering chatter of women, so like the evening chorus of birds settling in the treetops, and their familiar programs on quilts or silver, lace or church history.

  She’d told everyone, when she’d moved to the apartment house, that it was financial reverses, that dreadful stock market drop.

  No one knew how the money had gone, how desperate she’d been.

  She jammed the invitation, circulars, and bills into her purse, opened the second door, and started up the narrow wooden stairs, the treads covered with cracked linoleum.

  What a tacky, hateful place.

  But she could just barely manage the rent and continue to make restitution.

  At least, no one knew about that.

  She couldn’t bear it if anyone knew about that.

  4

  Could life be sweeter?

  “Agatha,” Annie announced to her cat as she stepped down from the ladder, “marriage is marvelous. I recommend it.”

  The sleek black feline atop the coffee bar paused in the fastidious cleansing of a pink-padded paw to regard Annie with unimpressed amber eyes.

  Annie wasn’t surprised at the lack of response. Salmon soufflé would garner Agatha’s respect, but not the irrelevant (to food) musings of her owner. And Agatha would assuredly take exception to that designation of possession. She had no sense of humor and a clear sense of her own preeminent position at Death on Demand.

  “The finest mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta,” Annie announced, picking up her adored feline and stroking her silky black fur.

  With the ease born of long practice, Agatha draped herself comfortably over Annie’s shoulder, yawned daintily, and focused her inscrutable gaze on the back wall.

  Following Agatha’s glance, the bookstore owner observed with pleasure the new watercolors she had just finished hangin
g over the mantel on the west wall. She could always count on drawing the island’s most omnivorous mystery readers (and upping sales for the day by at least thirty percent) on the first of every month. They hurried in for a glimpse of the mystery paintings. Competition was keen. The first person to correctly identify all five paintings by title and author received free coffee for a month and a free book. (New, of course. Some of her first edition collector’s items were pricey indeed, such as Michael Innes’s Christmas at Candleshoe, $75; J. D. Carr’s The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, $150, and Harvey J. O’Higgins’s The Adventures of Detective Barney, with a Goldstone bookplate, $160.)

  As Annie contemplated the paintings, she grinned. Was there anything more fun than the mystery combined with humor? Sometimes wry, sometimes dark, sometimes wacky, but always trenchant, the humor in the mystery limned society’s pomposities and posturings with wicked delight.

  And these watercolors illustrated some of the best in murderous humor, American-style.

  In the first, a young man in a white coat, cap, and apron loped down a brick sidewalk in the light of a street lamp. Running beside him was an elderly man, the image of Shakespeare. He carried a lion’s head and a black homburg and was impressively fleet of foot for a man of his age.

  In the second, three children hunkered close together in an obviously conspiratorial consultation as they peered out from behind a bush at a pink villa, guarded by a young policeman in uniform. The oldest member of the trio was a tall teenage girl with fluffy brown hair and enormous brown eyes. Listening attentively to her were a delicate blonde with smoky gray eyes and a small boy with a dirty face, unruly brown hair, and a hole in the sleeve of his jersey.

  In the third painting, the youngish man walking up the dark street had an air of diffidence and indecision. Everything about him was round—shoulders, stomach, forehead, and spectacles. Deep in thought, very deep in thought, he was totally oblivious to the black car cruising up the street, the gun poking from its window, and the splintered hole in the trash can he’d just passed.

  In the fourth painting, the skinny, angular, fairly athletic male with the deep tan, scruffy shorts, and bare feet struck a discordant note in the formality of the elegant panelled library. A darkly handsome man in a business suit sat behind the desk. He held up, for his visitor to see, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.

  Without warning, Agatha turned and, smoothly as a ballerina, sprang back to the coffee bar. Art, her attitude clearly indicated, was not a matter which deserved a feline’s undivided attention. Muscles bunching beneath her sleek black coat, she flew from the coffee bar to a nearby table and disappeared behind a stack of Sue Grafton’s latest, all autographed by the author.

  In the fifth painting, the woman police officer was young, tall, and slender, and wore her dark hair in a neat bun. She stared thoughtfully at the door of a pink concrete-block building, decorated with metal signs, including one with the establishment’s name, Ruby Bee’s. Her face reflected curiosity, suspicion, and uneasiness.

  Which was the funniest? Well, it depended upon a reader’s mood. The fifth book was a raunchy romp, a guaranteed rib-cracker. The first provided wonderful glimpses of the home front during World War II along with a clever mystery. Each was different and hilarious.

  The front door bell jangled. “Anybody here? This place open? Where’s Annie Laurance Darling?” The staccato male tenor, hurried, demanding, yet not unpleasant, reverberated down the center aisle.

  “Here I am,” Annie called, turning to face the front of the shop.

  Abruptly, the atmosphere was charged with tension. A lean, beak-nosed man in his fifties strode down the center aisle, exuding energy, determination, and impatience. His face was leathery and his forehead looked to be permanently wrinkled in a frown. Questing green eyes of an unusual brightness darted from Annie to the paintings to the collection of mugs behind the coffee bar. His white shirt was tucked haphazardly into tan cotton slacks and his lank brown knit tie was askew.

  The newcomer jabbed a nicotine-stained finger at the mugs. “You sell pottery, too? Thought this was a mystery bookstore.” His voice had the sharp, nervous quality of a collie’s bark.

  “Not for sale,” she retorted crisply. “We serve coffee, too, and each mug carries a different title.”

  “Clever.” He surged past her, stalking behind the coffee bar. Agatha poked her head from behind the stack of books, narrowed her amber eyes, and headed for the rattan furniture area near the classic mystery section. Wiry brown fingers snatched up a mug. “The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder by Edgar Wallace. Why him? Man was a hack.”

  “Not fair,” she objected. “He did write a lot, but—”

  “How many?”

  Annie looked at her inquisitor in surprise. One of the problems in serving the G.P. (as Ingrid, her good friend and helpful clerk, described the General Public) was the ever-present danger of confronting a nut. This man didn’t look like a nut, but what was the point of his barrage of questions? “Wallace wrote eighty-eight mysteries, six nonmystery novels, sixty-two books of short stories, four collections of verse, twenty-eight plays, and ten screenplays. Once he wrote a book over a weekend. The Coat of Arms.”

  An approving smile fleetingly creased the tanned, bony face. The parrot-bright eyes moved back to the display. He reshelved the Wallace mug and grabbed another. “The Glass-Sided Ant’s Nest by Peter Dickinson. What’s this about?”

  “Murder in a London attic where members of a primitive New Guinea tribe live. Dickinson’s one of the most original crime writers alive.”

  He slapped the mug back in place with a thump that made Annie wince. “Who wrote, ‘But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid’?”

  “Raymond Chandler, of course.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Who’s Selwyn Jepson’s clever female series character?”

  “Eve Gill. Man Running, The Golden Dart, The Hungry Spider, The Black Italian, The Laughing Fish, and Fear in the Wind.”

  His green eyes shone. Annie had a feeling that she’d passed some kind of test. He stuck out his hand. “I’m R.T. Burke, new chair of the journalism department at CC.” A pause. “Chastain College,” he amplified.

  She took his hand. “Annie Laurance Darling,” she offered. His handshake was firm, quick, and hurried.

  Chastain was a lovely small town snuggled in a pleasant harbor on the mainland, about 13 miles from the ferry dock that served the island of Broward’s Rock and, of course, Death on Demand. Settled in 1730, Chastain had prospered in the heyday of cotton, missed destruction when Sherman passed by, and flowered in recent years as a mecca for tourists appreciative of antebellum homes. Annie vaguely recalled a live oak-rimmed campus and buildings of uniformly Georgian architecture. She had a little trouble picturing R.T. Burke in this milieu.

  Either he was very perceptive or he had a keen self-awareness. “Believe it or not, I went to school there. Bright Georgia cracker back from Europe. CC was started in forty-four. Flooded with GI’s after the war.” He squinted speculatively at her. “World War Two.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” she said dryly. Why did everyone over forty assume her generation was illiterate?

  “You’re damn young.” He cleared his throat. “You free on Tuesday and Thursday mornings?”

  Before she could answer, he barreled ahead. “Damn short notice, I know. Classes start next week, but everybody says you’re a whiz. Have you ever taught anything?”

  “Taught?” She felt as disoriented as a first-time reader of a Craig Rice mystery. “Mr. Burke, I don’t—”

  “Call me R.T. Don’t go with titles and all that crap. I’m a newsman, pure and simple. Never thought I’d be teaching anything. Worked for AP for twenty-five years. Bureau chief the last ten. Had a triple bypass. Doctor ordered me to take it easy.”

  “And, of course, that’s what you’re doing,” she said mildly.

  He gave her a piercing look, those brilliantly green eyes sp
arking, then laughed. It resembled a hyena’s bark. “Damn sharp, young miss. Right. Right. I spew. Sometimes I explode. Simmer the rest of the time. Just as soon go out with a bang as a whimper. Having a hell of a time, actually. Like to stir things up—and believe me, this department needs some fresh blood. Bunch of damn three-toed sloths with tunnel vision. Giving ’em hell. Furious at me, the governing board, and the president. You know Charles August Markham?”

  Annie recognized the name of the college president. She’d glimpsed him once at a beach replenishment meeting here on the island. Broward’s Rock had taken the lead in working toward improvement of the beach replenishment bill recently passed by the legislature.

  “I know him by sight.”

  “I was in his platoon. Been pals ever since. Asked me to take on the department, see if I could get it up to snuff. Told him I’d be glad to.” His bushy black eyebrows bunched. “Thought it’d be easy. The more fool me. But I’ll get there. One way or another. Damn academics. Know more ways to obfuscate and delay than a politician in a filibuster.”

  Annie was beginning to enjoy this truncated conversation. She leaned comfortably against the coffee bar and realized that, for once in her life, she was dealing with someone a good deal more uptight than she. It gave her a sense of cool well-being. Why, she could be as laid back as Max, her new and always relaxed spouse. What a pleasant feeling! She smiled at her visitor. “Do you know what Robert B. Parker said about academics?”

  A hyena bark in anticipation.

  Encouraged, Annie quoted from John C. Carr’s The Craft of Crime: Conversations with Crime Writers: “ ‘Somebody once said that one of the reasons academic infighting is so vicious is that the stakes are so small. There’s so little at stake and they are so nasty about it. More than any other group I’ve ever seen, academics don’t seem to know how to act, and there is a way to act.’ ”

  R.T. Burke slammed a fist on top of the coffee counter. “Damn right. God, I’d like to set him—or Spenser—loose in my department.” There was no glint of humor in those vivid green eyes. “Goddam, wouldn’t I like that! There is a way to act. First class, that’s what we need. First-class teachers. First-class writers. First-class reporters. I won’t stand for cheaters and liars.” He leaned across the wooden bar. “You know why I went into newspapering? Truth, that’s why. Men like Zenger and Pulitzer and White. Decent men trying to tell the truth. And the muckrakers, who went out there and found out how people worked like slaveys. Those writers told the world and got some laws to keep kids from grinding out twelve-hour days in the mills. That’s journalism. Not this poking into people’s bedrooms that passes for investigative reporting today. Cheap trash.” He was breathing heavily. “By God, there is a way to act.” He glared at her. Slowly, his breathing eased. “Bet you think I’m going to have a heart attack on the spot, huh? Not me. Tougher than a sob sister at a hanging. And I don’t put up with fools.” The red ebbed from his face, and there was what sounded like a snort of either laughter or embarrassment. “Puts me up a creek sometimes. Like now. Just fired the sorry jerk who was going to teach feature writing. Found out he’d been let go for making a story up. Making a story up, can you believe that?” The flush rose again from his neck to his hairline. “Thank God, you can fire adjunct faculty. Anyway, I’ve got a damn big hole in the schedule. Classes start next week for the winter quarter. Heard you put together a mystery program for the annual house-and-garden tours last spring. Occurred to me maybe we could use a course on the mystery.”