I kept my voice low. “Do you think he cut his throat?”
Cord shrugged his big sloping shoulders. “He could have. The razor’s in the right place. At least it was. But usually people that take a hack at their own throat, they’re timid about it. This was a good try. He damn near slashed his head off — that is, if he did it. Now I got what the boys call an unhealthy interest in you. Want to talk right here?”
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
“You come in and give me a queer line of chatter and the next thing I know one of your friends is dead. I like to get all the loose ends pasted in or clipped off. Let’s you stop trying to kid me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I checked your schedule after you left and had a few words over the phone with your professor. I didn’t mention your name. He told me somebody was kidding me and that the department wouldn’t send a student out like that. So talk, Arlin.”
“Suppose I tell you that my reason was good but that it’s my business?”
“First let’s see how you check out last night. You had dinner here and left. Where did you go?”
“Right back to my place on the beach. I studied until about eleven, wrote a few letters and went to bed at about quarter to one.”
“No proof?”
“Not a shred.”
“Now this Toberly tells me that somebody was around asking him questions about how Gamma U turned him down. The guy said it was for a magazine article on fraternities. He didn’t give a name. Toberly gave me a description. It fits you pretty good, Arlin. Want to come on down to see if Toberly can make identification?”
“I give up. It was me.”
“Now don’t you think you better tell uncle?”
Two sophomores walked through into the dining room and stared at us curiously. “Someday I’ll get smarter,” I said. “Come on out and sit in my car for a little while.”
The sun was climbing higher. Cord’s face was drawn with fatigue. I told him my situation. He listened with a sour expression.
“What answer have you come to, Arlin?”
“I can’t give reasons. It’s just a very strong feeling. I say that four of them were murdered Carroll is the fourth. I don’t know about the automobile accident. We’ll skip that one.”
“And you think,” he said bitterly, “that three murders took place right under our noses. You think we’re that stupid!”
“It’s not that you’re stupid, Lieutenant. It’s that the guy behind it is one clever operator. Take the beach party. No trick to get Winniger out into the surf and drown him. No special trick to take advantage of the empty house on a Sunday, start a conversation with Sherman and trick him. And if a guy were disarming enough, he could talk the Flynn boy up onto a chair in the closet on some pretext.
“And now Brad. This last one is bolder than the others. This last one was permitted to even look a little like murder. Was it hard to find out where Brad and Laura had a habit of going? Would it be difficult to wait until Laura left to go back to her sorority house? There was a moon last night. What time did it happen?” I asked Lieutenant Cord.
“Around two, I guess. The way it was discovered so fast, this Toberly couldn’t sleep. He went for a walk around the place. He saw the light on and it bothered him. He took a quick look and phoned. We were there at quarter to three. Doesn’t that spoil the moon angle?”
“Not completely. Sneak in there and find the razor and let him have it. Then snap on the light on the way out to make it look more like a suicide.”
Cord studied me. “You talk a good game, Arlin. You almost get me believing it. Except for one thing. Why would anybody do all that? What the hell reason would he have?”
“Are you going to expose me, Lieutenant?”
He shrugged. “There’s no point in that. Keep playing your little game if you want to, as long as you’re getting paid for it. But stay out of my way. Don’t foul up any of my work.”
He got out of the car. He regarded me soberly. “And don’t leave town. I’m taking a chance on believing you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do some checking to make sure.”
I had no heart for the classes. I ate and went over to pick up Tilly. She came running out to the car. She climbed in beside me and her fingernails bit into my wrist. “Oh, Joe, I can’t take it any more! All this horror! I keep seeing him the way he was out at your place. Smiling and happy.”
“How did Laura take it?”
“They had to stop questioning her. She’s in the Sandson General Hospital. Shock and hysteria. They’re fools to bother her,” she said hotly. “Laura goes all green if somebody steps on a bug.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No, I couldn’t. And I couldn’t stand going to classes today, Joe. Start the car. Take me away from here. Drive fast, Joe.”
We didn’t get back until late afternoon. We bought a paper and read it together.
MYSTERY DEATH OF COLLEGE STUDENT.
That’s the way they covered it, speaking neither of suicide nor murder, but hinting at murder.
