College-Cut Kill

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?”