College-Cut Kill

“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.”