Chapter 15
Though Chris tried to put the possibility that Colin McCarty had a dark chapter in his life out of her mind for the remainder of the weekend, she wasn't very successful. By the time she parked in the ramp on Monday morning and headed toward the museum (a latte before anything else), she was focused on having a look at McCarty's curriculum vitae.
Had he been missing for a period and she was just unaware of it? A gap at the right time might be suggestive, though perhaps not conclusive. She thought about why she would do this. It wasn't just curiosity. If he was missing for a significant period at the right time, it could mean he was a convicted pedophile. Chris knew that all sorts of recent legislation existed that required notice to communities and registration of offenders. She needed to know or she might be liable for prosecution herself. There were times—and this was certainly one of them—when she didn't much like her job.
She arrived at the division office to find Charlie putting final grades into the computer. Chris asked him to dig out McCarty's file when he had a chance. She then went to her own office to fire up her computer and check her e-mail. It was close to eleven o'clock when Charlie dropped the thick folders that recorded McCarty's work life on her desk.
"How are the grades coming? Do you have everyone's?" she asked. The noon deadline was fast approaching.
Charlie shrugged. "All but Dr. Westphall's and the bunch that're finishing Bjornson's classes. They swear they'll have them in by eleven-thirty. Dr. Westphall is always the last one in. I think she waits in the hall until I start closing up for lunch."
Chris laughed and turned to the top folder. The first section of McCarty's personnel file would contain a current copy of his curriculum vitae. She spent five minutes and then sat back and closed her eyes.
During the academic year 1996-97 McCarty had been on sabbatical. According to his c.v. he spent the year as part of a repertory company in New York City and had starred in Back to Basics from mid-February through mid-April. A copy of a flattering review dated March 27th of that year was included in the file. The reported arrest had taken place on March 9th, according to the clipping. His vitae indicated he had taught a summer school course at Midstate University from early June through August of that same year. He'd been in continuous residence at Midstate ever since. It was obvious that he was indeed the Colin McCarty who had been accused of pedophilia and just as obvious that he did not go to jail for it. Apparently the only thing that resulted from his arrest was that it had drawn the attention of the reviewer for the New York Times who had made an effort to see the show.
Chris rose, put the file back together and returned it to Charlie's desk. He was engrossed in recording grades and didn't look up. She returned to her desk and took a deep, relieved breath. The incident referred to in the clipping, while unsettling, did not result in a conviction or even a trial. She turned her mind to developing a series of lectures about early Twentieth century architecture for her spring semester class.
She was in the slide library checking the inventory of architecture images when she heard Antonia Westphall open her office next door. Chris wandered out to the hall to say hello and was surprised to see Hjelmer Ryquist coming from the opposite direction.
"Morning, Doc," he said soberly. "Dr. Westphall here?"
"I just heard her come in, Hjelmer." They arrived at Antonia's open door at the same moment and looked in. Antonia was seated at her desk, facing the door and punching numbers on her phone.
"Oh!" she boomed. "I was just calling you, Chris. I want—" She stopped when she saw Ryquist.
"Got a minute Dr. Westphall? I've got a couple of questions."
"I'll leave you two," Chris interjected. "I'm in the slide library, Antonia, when you're finished if you want to talk to me. Did you give Charlie your grades, by the way?"
"Just now when I came in," Antonia replied, not taking her eyes off Ryquist.
Chris stepped around him as he stood aside to let her pass. When she was back in the library she tried to return to reviewing images but kept wondering what additional questions Ryquist had for poor Antonia.
She had successfully begun to concentrate on the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright and was searching for images of the Unitarian Church in Oak Park, Illinois when she heard Antonia Westphall say loudly in obvious frustration, "There isn't anything else to tell!"
Chris froze. She knew in that instant who she'd heard threatening Bjornson with a lawsuit for "messing with a person's career." Antonia Westphall's masculine voice, strained and furious, had mislead her. It wasn't a man. It was the diminutive art historian. "Oh god!" she whispered and dropped the pile of slides she had been laying out on the light table.
When she arrived at Antonia's office door, Ryquist was nowhere to be seen. She stepped in and sat without invitation in the visitor's chair. "How'd it go?"
"He keeps harping on that fight I had with Elizabeth over the catalog and it just isn't logical. It got fixed! You fixed it, Chris! Why would I want to kill her over that?" Antonia twitched nervously and tried to keep her hands still. She laced her fingers together so tightly the knuckles turned white.
Chris thought, If that's all Hjelmer's got and he's focusing on her, wait till he finds out she was the one yelling at Richard before he was killed. She said, "Did Richard pull one of his jokes on you, Antonia?" No sense being coy about it.
Antonia went white under her olive skin and stopped moving altogether. It was harder to see her in this state than to watch her multiple tics and twitches.
"Were you the person I heard yelling at Richard that afternoon in the studio?" Chris waited while fear and anger and frustration battled for control of Antonia's face.
"I didn't know anyone heard us," she said in the first true whisper that Chris had ever heard pass her lips.
"I was in the women's bathroom. I didn't hear a lot, but I did hear you say something about him messing with your career." Chris leaned forward in her chair. "Will you tell me what that was all about?"
Antonia hesitated only a moment. "I got a letter from someone claiming to be a lawyer. He threatened me with a lawsuit for using copyrighted material without attribution." Antonia stopped and struggled to get possession of herself. "I spent every waking moment for a week in the library and on the web trying to find the article he said I used."
"What did he accuse you of doing with it?"
"The Mannerist catalog—he said I'd lifted big blocks on the work of Pontormo and Bronzino. Chris, I didn't! I know I didn't, but I searched anyway because there was a chance I'd repeated someone else's research. Finally by Sunday I was sure there was no such article and no such author, at least not one who's an expert in the Sixteenth century. I mean, there probably is a person with the name, but he's never published anything on any topic that I could find. I finally decided it was Richard and one of his nasty little pranks, so I confronted him. He denied it at first and then he started to laugh. He thought it was hilarious! I could just see my tenure blowing up. I told him I'd sue him and I left. I was going to call a lawyer the next morning and then he was found dead and I've been waiting for the police ever since. Are you going to tell them, Chris? Do you have to? I didn't kill him, I swear!" Antonia twisted her hands in her lap. Chris saw that they were trembling violently.
"I think you should tell Detective Ryquist yourself, Antonia. As soon as possible. Right now, in fact, if we can catch him. Don't wait for him to come to you."
"I hate him!" suddenly burst from Antonia's lips at a decibel level that caused Chris to jump. "Well, I do," she said more quietly. "Richard's dead and I hate him. Isn't that sick? I wish he were alive, the little weasel, so I could let him know how much I detest him and his stupid, hurtful—" She reached for a tissue. Chris noted there was quite a pile of them in the wastebasket. Antonia was having a very bad day.
"I'll come with you to find Ryquist. Let's get it over with."
Antonia sniffed and gulped. "Okay," she said at last with a bit more of her normal volume
.
The detective sat back and stared at Antonia across the conference room table. He'd been chatting with Charlie when the two women arrived in the office. "So he engineered a letter to you that accuses you of borrowing someone else's material. That right?"
"It wasn't just borrowing, it was plagiarism," Antonia lowered her voice to what was a normal tone for anyone else. "It could have ruined my chance of getting tenure next year." She sniffed into a tissue miserably.
"We talked about tenure before, Hjelmer," Chris interjected. "Remember?"
"Yeah, I remember." His gaze shifted back to Antonia. "Thanks, Doc. I'll call you if I need you. Okay, Dr. Westphall, let's go over it again."
Chris would rather not have been dismissed, but she nodded and left the conference room, closing the door behind her. Poor Antonia would have to cope unaided.
"Dr. Westphall have some kind of fight with Bjornson?" Charlie asked after the door was closed.
"Seems so," Chris sighed. "He pulled one of his pranks on her."
"What did he do?" Charlie asked with frank interest.
"Got someone to send her a letter accusing her of plagiarizing material for her article in the Mannerist catalog."
"Jesus, he had a nose for it, didn't he?" Charlie shook his head.
"He was just mean," Chris agreed. "He always went for the weak spot."
"I hate to speak ill of the dead," Charlie said. "But he was a predator."
"A very good description," Chris said and stepped into her office.
When Antonia Westphall emerged from the conference room half an hour later, she looked just as miserable as when she'd gone in, Chris observed, but she wasn't in shackles so maybe there was hope. The little art historian left without a word. Ryquist stepped out of the room moments later and Chris was struck with a sudden need to confess that she too had something to tell him. Ryquist looked at her blandly and waved her into the conference room.
They sat across from each other at the conference table. "Okay, Doc. Shoot," the policeman said evenly.
"I learned last week that Elizabeth was planning to try to get the museum moved." There. It's out. Chris could take her conscience to bed without fear.
"Move it somewhere?" Ryquist seemed puzzled. "Don't imagine the administration would be too pleased, what with the new building and all."
"Oh, she wasn't plotting to move the museum physically, just get it out of the Division of Fine Arts administratively."
"Interesting." He continued to watch Chris closely. "This place is just a gold mine of information today. I knew it would be good to come here. Better tell me more about it."
Chris took a deep breath. "I learned that she was trying to do it by some pretty underhanded means."
"We heard she wasn't happy with the present arrangement. I've been following up on that since she died, and I gotta tell you, I still don't get it. This some kind of big deal, whether the museum is in the Division of Fine Arts?" He stared at Chris with guileless gray eyes. There was that worm vs. robin sensation again.
"I'm not sure what you mean, Hjelmer," she replied, buying a little time to think before she spoke.
"What's it matter in the scheme of things?"
"I'm not sure it does matter actually. I can't imagine it would matter to anyone outside the campus. The museum was put into the division when I was hired five years ago. Elizabeth had been in the habit of overrunning her budget and she wouldn't tell anyone what she was up to. When they hired her they gave her free rein with the exhibition schedule, not realizing what the fiscal consequences would be. When they tried to get the place under control she fought by enlisting a board of directors from the elite of Camford. They were well intentioned, but it made life really hard for the administration. They were all so sick of it, I've been told, that when someone suggested the museum be placed in the Division of Fine Arts when I was hired, they jumped at it. It was a rough couple of years. I told you she was tough to work with. I think she hated reporting to a woman. Actually she probably would have hated reporting to anyone."
Ryquist persisted. "What would be better from her point of view if she was on her own?"
"Not having to report to me, certainly," Chris acknowledged. "Possibly she thought she'd get her budget back into her exclusive control."
Ryquist nodded. "Money is always a good motivator. Go on."
"She might have thought her board of directors would be easier to manipulate. At the present time they're largely ceremonial and advisory." Chris shrugged. "I really don't know. I thought she'd given it up years ago until Colin McCarty brought it up."
"What's he got to do with it?"
"He's on the committee she was trying to push into approving the change. He came by last Wednesday to ask me if the proposal was dead. I mean… well, you know what I mean… if the proposal should be pulled now that Elizabeth is gone."
"I'm trying to figure out if anything about it would make a good enough motive for murder," Ryquist said. "Would she take a big chunk of your division's budget if she left?"
Chris shook her head. "She'd take the museum's part of our budget. It would be a wash fiscally. I mean, the other departments didn't get anything by being in the same division, or lose anything, for that matter."
"But she was out to stab you in the back."
"Hjelmer, she was a pain to work with. She was snappish and egotistical and frequently very rude. My life would have been a lot easier with her in someone else's administrative control. But it was best for the museum and the university if she stayed, so I would have fought to prevent any such action by the senate. That is not a motive for murder in my mind, but you may feel differently."
"Well, there's motives for murder and there's motives for murder," Ryquist mumbled.
Chris shrugged. "It's just hard to see how anything about it could make someone mad enough to commit murder. I always thought murder was intensely personal. That was just administrative maneuvering."
"She'd need more than one person to get that done, wouldn't she?"
"Realistically, she would have needed a lot more," Chris replied. "You surely don't think more than one person was involved, do you, Hjelmer?"
"No, this was probably a one-person operation. Was there one person more than anyone else who would be inconvenienced if she pulled out of the division?"
"The upper administration would be inconvenienced if she started blowing her budget the way she used to, but on a personal level I can't imagine that it would matter to anyone." Then a thought struck Chris. "Of course, maybe I'm the villain of that piece. She tries to remove the museum from my trembling grasp and I black out in a fury and zing her."
"You'd be up on the list if it weren't for your neighbor."
"Honestly, he's the dirtiest old man I've ever met, but if he keeps me out of trouble I'll have to be grateful."
"He's eighty-three and quite a character. I wouldn't go over there alone to express my gratitude if I were you, but you might bake him some cookies or something. Without him we might have decided you had the best motive to do the lady in. Everyone we've talked to describes how she treated you from the day you arrived. They all think you're some kind of saint for taking it without losing your temper." Ryquist was smiling. "Course, I know you're not a saint, Doc, but I promise not to tell."
Chris laughed thinly at Hjelmer Ryquist's joke and plowed ahead. "When I saw Elizabeth and Colin McCarty arguing I couldn't imagine what it was about because I didn't know they even knew each other except by sight."
"Arguing?" Ryquist leaned forward. "When? Where?"
"I don't remember exactly. Sometime last fall. They were in the theater and I overheard them exchanging words. I guess the fight must have been about the political maneuvering she was doing. Maybe he didn't like her tactics or something."
"He stand to lose if she pulls out of the Division of Fine Arts?"
"No, I can't imagine why it would matter to him. Not professionally and certainly not personally."
"Why not pe
rsonally? He's a man. She's a woman. Sometimes personal just happens."
Chris nodded. "True. It may happen—or it may have happened, that is, for Elizabeth. I've heard talk over the years, but honestly I don't think it happens for Colin. He's a real loner." She stopped short of saying that he was also gay and perhaps had a taste for younger men. "That's why I was so startled to find them arguing. It's just so out of character for him."
"What's the most surprising thing about it to you, Doc? Just think out loud."
"That they knew each other well enough to argue."
"And?"
"That Colin never said anything about her maneuvering to me. Or that I didn't hear about it through the grapevine. Usually you can't keep a secret like that on this campus for long." Chris paused. "Of course, he assumed I knew because Elizabeth had told him I was copied on all the paperwork he had, so he probably thought he didn't needed to bring it up." She didn't think that was all of it, but said nothing more.
Ryquist nodded and was silent for a time. "Okay," he said at last, coming to his feet. "Thanks for filling me in, Doc. One more piece for the puzzle." He started for the conference room door.
Chris stood and trailed after him. "You aren't seriously thinking Antonia had anything to do with this, are you?"
Ryquist stopped and turned back. "Why do you ask?"
"She just doesn't have it in her. She'd be so squirrelly and nervous if she did anything like that she'd fall apart in a day."
"She's a twitchy one, all right. I'm keeping all the options open until we solve this, Doc. That's the right way to go about it. I'll try not to scare her too badly, though. Okay?"
"Thanks, Hjelmer, but I think it's already too late on the that score."