“But he still won a letter in basketball.”
She was standing by the window looking out into the back yard. She was watching her two boys play in the yard, he guessed. Already John Olson was fading when compared to the really important things in her life.
“It doesn’t add up, does it?” she said absently.
Tanner walked over to the desk. It was a plain desk, varnished a dark, almost black, color. A photograph on top caught his eye. It was a picture of Olson and Petey at a faculty picnic earlier in the spring. Petey was, as usual, a little too carefully dressed for a picnic. But at least she was smiling at the camera and with what seemed like a genuine smile.
Her brother wasn’t smiling. But then John Olson never had, as long as he could remember. A plump, serious face with strands of blond hair hanging limply over his high forehead. A suggestion of a slouch in his shoulders and he could even tell from the photo that Olson was pale and soft under his sport shirt. He guessed that John had been worried about getting sunburned and was getting ready to give Petey hell for having dragged him out there.
“Do you know much about him, Sue? Much about his background?”
She tore herself away from the window and walked over to the chair to sit down, the robe swaying against her flanks and her slippers making small slapping sounds against the rug.
“Give me a cigarette, Bill.” He gave her one and lighted it. “He came from a small town in South Dakota. Brockton, I think. His people were farmers. He lived there until he was eighteen when he went away to college.”
“That doesn’t tell me much about him.”
She spread her hands. “That’s all I know. He never talked much about himself.”
“He had a pretty cold personality. Any reason why?”
She closed her eyes and frowned, as if trying to remember were hard work and she wasn’t quite up to it. “Who knows? I think maybe somebody hurt him when he was young. I always got the impression that the only real emotion he felt for anybody was hatred for somebody back in his home town.”
“Did he ever talk much about it?”
“I told you he never talked about himself at all.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing moved him very much,” she said finally. “Other people’s problems didn’t interest him at all, probably because he was so wrapped up in his own. He was … cold … and he had no sense of humor. And I think he was frightened of something.”
“Any idea what of?”
“No, except it was some person. Maybe the same person in his home town that he hated. And I could be wrong on that score, too.”
He looked around the room again. Dusty little room. The bed, the bureau, and the bookcase, shelves jammed with textbooks. If you went away for a day and let the dust settle you wouldn’t think anybody had lived in it for years.
“Was he pretty much the intellectual?”
“Yes and no. He was interested in psychology, but then that was his field. I would say he was more interested in the offbeat side, though. Hypnotism, things like that.” She walked over to the window again and ran her fingers slowly down the curtains. “I’m sorry that he’s dead.”
It was the thing to say, Tanner realized. But he hoped when he died and somebody said it, that they would say it with more emotion.
The doorbell rang downstairs and Susan turned away from the window and started for the stairs.
“The detective—he was supposed to come back today.”
Lieutenant Crawford was middle-aged, with pale-blue eyes and a friendly face and hair that was beginning to silver around the temples and above the ears. He wore a slouch hat and a blue suit with a suggestion of a shine and a lived-in air and signs of strain where it was tight around the waist. He looked a lot like a harried, unsuccessful businessman.
Tanner introduced himself and Crawford grunted, found a place for his hat on the bureau, and lowered himself into the straight-backed chair by the desk like a man lowering himself into a tub of steaming hot water.
“Mrs. Van Zandt told me about you downstairs, Tanner. Nice woman isn’t she?”
“Real nice,” Tanner said shortly.
“Not a very good housekeeper but I guess she doesn’t have the background for it.” He teetered the chair back on its two rear legs and stared at the room, then looked back at Tanner. “You knew John Olson pretty well, didn’t you?”
“Not too well. His sister is my secretary. And John was on my committee. Outside of that, I didn’t know him very well at all.”
“Meaning you probably didn’t like him too well. I guess nobody else did, either.”
“I didn’t say that, Lieutenant.”
“You didn’t have to. You talk to as many people as I have and you get so you can tell attitudes. Olson was a nobody. Nobody liked him very well, nobody thought very much of him, and nobody’s too sad now that he’s dead.” He took a cigar from his coat pocket and neatly circumcised the end with a penknife. “We get them every day. Usually down in the city and usually in a rented sleeping room. The relatives live way off to hell and gone, they’ve got no friends, and the county has to foot the funeral bill.” He sounded bitter. “You’d be surprised how little people care about each other, Professor.”
He leaned forward in his chair. “Now this committee he was on. What was it all about?”
“Research for the Navy—confidential work but I can tell you a little about it. We were testing human beings to see how they would stand up under battle conditions. What the breaking point is. That sort of thing.”
Crawford chewed it over for a moment, then looked at him shrewdly. “You want to know how he died, don’t you? That why you waited?”
Tanner tried to keep the tenseness out of his voice. “That’s right. I want to know how he died.”
“His sister probably told you all we know. No external wounds, no shots or stabs. No blood at all. No signs of a struggle, no marks on the throat, no needle punctures on the arms. The missus says he didn’t have any visitors and the windows weren’t forced at any time.”
“Have you got any theories?”
“Theories? That’s the nice thing about my work, the woods are always full of them. Myself, I think he took the short way out. We won’t know until we get the results of the autopsy but it looks like poison.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at the chewed end thoughtfully. “Did you ever see the expression on the face of a man who took poison? You wouldn’t forget it, once you did. They die relatively slowly and feel every second of it. It all shows in the face.” He shrugged. “The only thing wrong with that theory is that we can’t find the bottle or the tin or whatever he carried it in.”
“I don’t think he would have taken poison,” Tanner said.
“Why not? He wasn’t well liked, he didn’t have any friends or love life, and so far as I can tell, he didn’t particularly enjoy living. We run into this type of thing all the time.” He squinted at Tanner. “You must have your own ideas—people usually do.”
“I think he was murdered,” Tanner said slowly.
Crawford looked interested. “What’s the motive? Money? Passion? Revenge? People usually have to have a reason for killing somebody.”
There were plenty of reasons,
Tanner thought.
Shall I tell you what it’s all about, Lieutenant
?
“I still think he was murdered.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion, Professor. But I wouldn’t want to be too sure of it. The only person who could be sure that Olson was murdered at this stage of the game would be the murderer himself.”
“Anybody could think it was murder, Lieutenant. That’s the popular thing to think nowadays.”
“Yeah, I guess it is at that.” Crawford took out his wallet and thumbed methodically through the bills and the cards. He moistened a thumb and pulled out a small, white card. “I found this taped down to the desk top and pulled it off and took it along. I didn’t know what to make of it.”
He handed the card over. It was in Olson’s handwriting and read:
“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal … .”
It was signed:
Adam Hart
.
Tanner read it and handed it back. “I don’t understand. It’s a quotation from Nietzsche.”
Crawford smiled slightly. “That’s what the girl at the library said. This Adam Hart—ever hear of him, Professor?”
“No, I never heard of him before in my life.”
“That so.” Crawford gazed thoughtfully out the window and Tanner realized with a shock that the man didn’t believe him. “That kind of surprises me, Professor, it really does.” He leafed through his wallet again. “You know, I was rather glad I met you here. I was going to have to look you up later in the day, anyway. On business. You see, Olson was writing a letter when he died—he died right in the middle of it.” He paused. “It was addressed to you, Professor.”
He handed over a sheet of folded, blue writing paper and Tanner opened it. The bottom right-hand corner was crumpled, as if a hand had suddenly clutched at it. On the paper itself there was just the date and his name and one line of writing that broke off abruptly.
PROFESSOR TANNER:
I want to tell you about Adam Hart——
HE
went home late that afternoon and discovered his apartment had been thoroughly ransacked. The janitor remembered nothing, though nobody could have gotten in without his help. And he hadn’t been bribed to forget, Tanner thought. The man honestly couldn’t remember.
The next three nights were bad. He stored most of his possessions and lived out of a suitcase, shifting hotels every night and telling nobody where he was staying. There was nobody he could trust.
He locked the doors and stuffed clay into the keyholes and jammed the spring locks so they couldn’t be forced open. Then he pulled the shades and sat in the dark and watched the streets or the courtyards through the crack between shade and window, waiting for the Enemy to show up. He cradled his service pistol in his lap, hoping for the opportunity to use it.
David and Goliath,
he thought grimly,
but I don’t have a chance.
He would watch for an hour, then take a sleeping pill and collapse on the bed, not even bothering to turn down the sheet. Before he drifted off to sleep he usually spent an agonizing few minutes wondering what the Enemy’s next move would be. He didn’t have long to wait.
His world started to go smash Thursday morning.
He had been sitting at his desk going over his lectures for the day when Lieutenant Crawford walked in and settled in Petey’s swivel chair. He looked worn; his shirt stuck to him in huge patches where the sweat had soaked through and little tears of perspiration oozed over the ridges in his neck.
“You could have knocked.”
“Sorry, Professor—the door was open.” Crawford turned in the chair to look out the window at the students crossing the quadrangle below. “Semester’s just about over, isn’t it?”
“Next week is finals. After that they’re on their own.”
“I’ve got a boy,” Crawford mused. “He’ll be coming home then. Leech off the old man or be a beach boy for the summer. Kids nowadays—they don’t like to work any more. I guess we bring them up all wrong, we give them too much.” He mopped at his face with a khaki handkerchief that was too small for the job. “What are you going to do this summer, Professor?”
Crawford had something to say but he was going to take his own sweet time in saying it, Tanner thought.
“I was thinking of taking a short leave from the Project and going out to Colorado on a research grant. Excavation of an old Indian village.” With everything that had happened in the last few days, he knew he wasn’t going to go. But Crawford would find that out in due time.
“You know, I rather figured that you would be doing something like that. I really did. But I guess we were both wrong.”
Tanner studied Crawford for a moment. The man was a little too casual, he was waiting for some kind of reaction. “I don’t get you.”
“Being curious is my job so I checked up on it. No particular reason and if you want to get sore about my snooping, I guess you’ve got a right to be. Anyway, I checked and they told me in the front office that they had taken your name off the list. Just the other day, too. They’re bringing in a professor from another university to handle it. They’d been considering him and at the last minute I guess he got it.” He located a toothpick in his pocket and absently dug at a rear tooth. “I’m surprised you didn’t know about it.”
“I’ve got a contract,” Tanner said tightly.
Crawford looked sympathetic. “I know people who have had contracts before, Professor. And guess what? They were no good—no good at all. I suppose you could sue but I wouldn’t want to give you odds on winning.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“I don’t kid people about things like this, Professor.”
He had been going to withdraw anyway, Tanner thought. But he couldn’t understand why his name should have been taken off the list arbitrarily.
“About John Olson,” Crawford said, changing the subject. “The other day when I was talking to you, you said you thought he’d been murdered. Anything to go on besides your own opinion? This is official—and I wouldn’t advise withholding information.”
Tanner chose his words carefully. “Let’s just say it was a hare-brained idea of mine. There was nothing solid to it.”
“Then you weren’t convinced to the point where you’d try playing detective?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll put it this way. Sometimes a fellow dies and his friends or relatives think he was done in. And when it turns out that he wasn’t and the police close the case, they get upset and start doing some investigation of their own. Usually they don’t accomplish much but they make a lot of trouble for themselves and for the police. You understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
Crawford looked pained. “I think maybe they read too many books. The ones in which the police are always stupid and overlook clues that any half-wit can find. Or maybe the police just don’t want to solve it. Things aren’t like that in real life, Professor. Ninety per cent of the time, when the police close the case it’s because there’s nothing more that can be done, or needs to be done.”
Tanner felt tired. “Let’s not beat around the bush, Lieutenant. What’re you driving at?”
Crawford patted his face with his handkerchief again. “There’s nothing more that needs to be done with the Olson case. We’re closing it.”
“I thought you had the idea that he was poisoned.”
“So I was wrong. The results of the autopsy came in yesterday. There wasn’t any poison, Professor. Not a trace of it.” He smoothed out the dampened handkerchief and tucked it carefully away in a pocket. “I’ll admit that the look on his face was almost a sure tip-off for poison, though it doesn’t explain why he should’ve sat down to write you a letter rather than one to his sister, for example.”
“Or who Adam Hart is.”
Crawford snipped the end of a fresh cigar. “Adam Hart. I’ll admit I’m curious about him, Professor. But then I’m curious about a lot of things and life’s too short to investigate them all.” He changed the subject. “Olson himself. Was he fairly healthy? Or was there something wrong that you know about? Something that might not show up in a routine physical?”
“So far as I know he was healthy. He never missed a class and he never seemed to suffer from chronic headaches or colds. Why?”
Crawford stood up, toying with his hat. “Well, I guess that’s the way it goes then. I’ve seen it happen before to a young fellow so I shouldn’t be too surprised.”
Tanner could feel his skin start to crawl. “Surprised at what?”
“Olson wasn’t killed and he didn’t commit suicide, Professor. I hate to disappoint you but he came home at midnight Saturday night, read a while, and at three o’clock Sunday morning he sat down at his desk and died.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. No pain or strain. He just died.”
Just like that, he thought, after Crawford had gone. A young, relatively healthy man had sat down at his desk and died. With no cause.
He shivered. It would be so damned easy to get the shakes and end up in a blue funk, just knowing what was after him. Not
who
. Not a person, not somebody he could fight, not somebody he could flush out into the open.
Not
who,
but
what.
And just what was wanted of him? To drop off the committee? Or had he already gone past the point of no return, did he already know too much? And if so, why hadn’t there been another attempt to kill him? It wouldn’t be difficult. Sunday morning he had almost walked off the end of the pier. Perhaps some day he would step out in front of an automobile or lean too far out of an open window. And everybody would say that Professor Tanner had been careless. Or that the world had been too much for him.
And why me? Why me rather than anybody else on the committee? What do I know that’s so special? Or is it that he just hasn’t gotten around to the others yet?
He started sifting through the pile of mail on his desk. It was the same stack of mail that had been there Wednesday morning. The same stack that had been there Tuesday and Monday. Nobody had sent him anything since Monday. No firm in the city had dropped him a circular, nobody had sent any bills.
He flicked through the sheaf of letters waiting to be filed and stopped at one. A colored circular from Colorado advertising the natural wonders of that state.
Only he wasn’t going there. And one of the minor reasons why was that Crawford had said the school had dropped him. Why, he didn’t know. Professor Scott wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. He had had run-ins with Scott, but the old man had always backed him up outside of the department. His trouble must have started with the dean of the school, Harry Connell.
He looked at his watch. Harry would be in now. And maybe Harry would have an explanation.
Connell’s secretary didn’t want to let him by.
“I’m sorry, Bill. Mr. Connell’s very busy right now. Why don’t you stop back later?”
“Do you think he would be in later?”
She bit her lip. “Honest, Bill, I don’t know what to say. He said you might drop by to see him and to tell you that he was busy.”
“And that he was going to be busy the rest of the week, that it?”
She shrugged. “Of course, if you didn’t pay any attention to me and walked right in … I can always say I tried.”
He brushed past her. “Thanks.”
The man in the office was on the phone, talking. He hung up when Tanner barged in, an angry look on his fleshy face.
“I thought I told my secretary to tell you I was busy?”
“She did but I guess I’m getting a pretty thick skin.” He lowered his voice. “What’s going on, Harry? Why didn’t you let me know if something was up?”
Connell’s face reddened. “I ought to call the police. I ought to have you thrown out of here but I’m trying to keep it quiet. The publicity wouldn’t do the school any good and I kept thinking that we could ease you out and still keep it under cover. We were going to tease you along to the end of the semester and then we were going to lower the boom. But you want it lowered now.”
“What on God’s green earth are you talking about?”
Connell stood up and leaned his knuckles on the desk. “We pulled you from the Colorado field trip, Tanner, because it’s our policy not to send out research groups of students unless they’re under competent instructors.”
“And I’m not?”
“Where did you get your degree?”
“Wisconsin.”
“Can you prove it?”
Tanner sank down in a chair, enormously tired. “What’s the story, Harry?”
Connell’s mouth was so tight with anger it was almost invisible. “The name is
Mr.
Connell, Tanner. And the reason why I don’t call you ‘Professor’ is because you’re not one.” He ran a shaking hand through his thinning hair. “It was a routine check—I don’t know what made me do it. You had applied for the Colorado position and we wrote to Wisconsin asking for any experience you might have had on field trips before.” He paused. “They never even heard of you. They don’t have a single record of you. I’ve read about impersonations before but I never thought …”
Tanner was desperate. “You couldn’t have checked everything!”
“We even went through the annual … .”
“I never had my picture taken for it.”
“That’s a little unusual, isn’t it? And you didn’t go out for any school activities, either, did you? We checked all of them.”
“I was never much of a rah-rah boy. But you could’ve checked with Professor Palmer in the Anthropology Department. He could have told you.”
Connell picked up a letter from his desk top and waved it at him. “He told us he never heard of you. Read it yourself.”
“My thesis is on file here,” Tanner said slowly. “You must have checked that.”
“We checked it—that is, we tried to. There wasn’t a thing. Not a thing.”
“I filed it when I applied here, it should have been there!”
“Then why don’t you go and look? And when you find it, bring it back here and I’ll apologize.” He picked up a narrow slip of paper from his desk and handed it to Tanner. “Here’s a check—you’re paid up to date. We’re breaking your contract right now. You’re through, both here and on the Project. You’re lucky the board doesn’t prosecute but it would make the university look foolish for having hired you in the first place.”
Tanner took the check and stared blankly as the little man turkey-walked back to his desk. All his records had been checked at one time, he thought, confused. They never would have hired him without doing that. Connell must realize that. Or maybe it was just that … that …
That Connell didn’t remember.
His thesis wasn’t listed in the card catalogue and when he checked in the stacks, he couldn’t find it there, either. There was the row of neatly typed and bound theses, thick with dust, but there was no gap where one had been taken out. So far as he could determine, it had never been on file.