“Do you mean you think whoever hit her over the head did it by mistake while trying to kill Dr. Blanco?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Why not?”
“They don’t look that much alike,” I said. “Different genders, to start with.”
“I don’t mean to imply that the killer couldn’t tell them apart.” He frowned as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “But what if the killer rushed in, hoping to get the drop on Blanco, and realized, too late, that he was about to slay the wrong person? He might just go ahead with it. What else could he do if she’d already seen him about to kill her?”
“I can think of plenty of things short of murder!”
“Such as?” My grandfather crossed his arms and lowered his brows, as if he’d just issued an impossible challenge.
“He could have shouted, ‘Look out! It’s right behind you! Have you ever seen a rat that big?’ Or stopped, and laughed, and said, ‘Haha! Fooled you!’ Or if he was a drama student, like ninety percent of the suspects, he could always stop in his tracks, look stern, and say, ‘No, no. That won’t work for this scene. What’s my motivation?’ Or—”
“Yes, you can think of a lot of other things the killer could have done, but none of them sounds as logical as my theory,” Grandfather said. He began trying to take off his coat. “He knew if he let Dr. Wright live she’d cast suspicion on him when he eventually succeeded in killing Blanco, so he said to himself, ‘What the hell—in for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”
“All of which would be worth considering if Dr. Wright were such a pleasant, likable person that no one could imagine anyone wanting to kill her. But unfortunately for your theory, most of the people around here hate her a lot more than Blanco.”
“How can that be?” he said. “Damn—help me off with this thing.”
Apparently venting was doing the trick.
“Most of them haven’t the faintest idea who Blanco is,” I said as I held the coat for him.
“That could be, I suppose,” he said. “But still—if my theory is right, Blanco’s next. Should we warn him?”
“If you truly think he was the intended victim, maybe you should.”
“You don’t think it might be more interesting to give the killer a sporting chance?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think killers deserve any kind of a chance. What do you have against Dr. Blanco, anyway?”
My grandfather frowned, and at first I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he harrumphed.
“Blasted busybody’s the one standing between me and my building,” he said finally.
“Your building?”
“Been trying to donate a new building to the biology department,” he said.
“They probably don’t want a new building,” I said.
“Their facilities are completely antiquated, not to mention way too small for them. Why wouldn’t they want a new building?”
“Because this is Virginia, remember?” I said. “Who wants convenience when they can have history? The biology building is the third oldest on campus and was used as a military hospital during the Civil War. Plus it’s barely large enough for all the tenured professors to have tiny, cramped offices, which means all the rest of the faculty have to be farmed out to even more cramped offices in other, less convenient buildings, thus making everyone’s rank in the hierarchy blatantly apparent. I could think of a few more reasons, but those should be enough.”
“Hmph,” my grandfather said. “Maybe that blasted Blanco is trying to lead me on, then.”
“Lead you on how?”
“Well, according to him, the biology department would love to have a new building but there’s some kind of complicated financial arrangement he wants me to go through to get it done, and it just doesn’t make sense. Instead of just handing them a check, he wants me to put the money in some kind of trust fund that will disburse the money to the college in a different tax year. Sounds overly complicated. Makes me wonder if he’s up to something.”
I pondered this for a few moments.
“Have you tried talking to an accountant about it?” I said. “Or a tax attorney? The college has a whole lot of foundations and funds and things designed to make sure that they and their donors get maximum advantage from every dollar donated.”
“My foundation’s got a small army of accountants and tax lawyers,” he said. “And they don’t like it either. The way they read the documents, I’d have no guarantee of how the money is used—they could use it for general operating expenses or to fund some project that’s an environmental menace. Hell, until we get some kind of proof that this Caerphilly Philanthropic Foundation really is affiliated with the college, we’d have no proof Blanco wasn’t using it to fund a trip to the Caymans. So if you asked Blanco, he’d probably say it’s my people holding up the transaction. Which is nonsense. No one’s going to give the college that kind of money without appropriate due diligence. He’s the roadblock.”