College-Cut Kill

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.