College-Cut Kill

“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.