Too Many Murders(4)
“Aw, gee, he was such a weed!”
“You don’t look like a judgmental type, Tom.”
“I’m not, and I could deal with a weed, Captain, if he was an ordinary weed. But Evan wasn’t. He was so—full of himself! I mean, he weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet and had a face like Miss Prissy out of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. But he didn’t believe he looked weird! To hear him talk, you’d get the impression that guys who weigh ninety pounds soaking wet and have faces like Miss Prissy are just what the doctor ordered. He had a hide so thick a naval shell couldn’t dent it!”
“That’s thick,” said Carmine solemnly. “What was he like in class? Did he get good grades?”
“A-pluses in everything,” said Tom despondently. “He headed the class, even drew better than the rest of us. We got sick of seeing his drawing of a dogfish’s cranial nerves or an ox’s eyeball being held up as examples of what anatomical drawing ought to be like! Man, he was a pain! It would have been okay, except that he rubbed it in, especially to guys like me on scholarship. I mean, I’ll probably have to go into the army or navy to get out from under debt, which gouges a hole in the years I’ll have left to practice for myself.”
“Did he socialize with his classmates?”
“Hell, no! Evan did weird things, like go to New York City to see an opera or some highbrow play. He never missed an avant-garde movie at the Chubb Film Society, bought tickets to charity banquets or those speech nights at country clubs when some kiss-ass politician was the speaker—weird! Then he’d bend our ears afterward as though the rest of us were peasants. I guess if anything surprises me, it’s that no one here at Paracelsus has ever beat the shit out of him.”
“Did he keep regular hours? Snore? Have unpleasant—er—personal habits of any kind?”
Tom Wilkinson looked blank. “No, but yes to the regular hours. Unless you call his conceit and bragging unpleasant.”
“What time did you discover him?”
“About six. I have a car because it means I can get back to college for lunch and dinner. Cafeteria meals on Science Hill are expensive, and my sister gave me her old clunker when she bought a better car. Gas is dirt cheap, and my meals here are part of my room and board. The food’s good too. I finished a physiology class in the Burke Biology Tower at five thirty, then drove home.”
“Are most of your classes on Science Hill?”
“Sure, especially for a genuine pre-med. We have a couple of—um—dilettantes in our sophomore year who take art history and crap like that, but they go elsewhere for classes as well. The closest thing to a classroom Paracelsus has is a lecture theater that the Dean saves for sermons on untidiness and vandalism.”
“Vandalism?”
“Oh, that’s just the Dean. The freshmen get a bit restive and do things like chuck dirty old house bricks into Piero Conducci’s pebble gardens; they have to use a cherry picker to get them out. I wouldn’t call putting whore’s underwear on a nude lady’s statue vandalism, sir. Would you?”
“Probably not,” said Carmine, straight-faced. “I take it that all the students in your wing are sophomores, Tom?”
“Yes, sir. Four wings, one for each year. Evan and I have an upstairs room, but down below us are more sophomores.”
“So, given that the emphasis is on pre-med, that means the wing is deserted between lunch and around six in the evening?”
“Yeah, it is. If someone’s too sick to go to classes, he’s supposed to be in sick bay, where there’s a nurse. Sometimes a guy cuts classes to catch up on an important assignment, but there’s nothing like that on our schedule at the moment, sir.”
“What about mornings?”
“The same, only shorter. I think the Dean tries to get the tradesmen in during the morning, so he can keep a better eye on them.”
Carmine rose. “Thanks, Tom. I wish all my witnesses were half as candid. Go and have some dinner, even if you don’t feel like eating.”
From there it was off downstairs to see Dean Robert Highman. As Carmine descended the graceful but open staircase (he loathed stairs he could see through, like these), he stopped to take in the nucleus of Paracelsus College’s broad, squat X. Each wing was devoted to student accommodation, but the center contained the offices and apartments of the college’s senior faculty. The Dean and Bursar lived in commodious quarters here; though the four year Fellows each lived in a kitchenless apartment at the far end of the four wings, the four similar units adjacent to the nucleus were occupied by postdoctoral Fellows who had nothing to do with the college’s administration.