Murder Misread Page 2

  “Ha! I told you it’d never replace the horse,” declared a cheerful new voice.

  Trust Tal to be around when anyone new appeared. Charlie turned. “Tal! Hi!”

  Tal Chandler was bald, a wiry, twinkling old gnome with knobby nose, knobby chin, knobby red cheeks, as though his face had been constructed of little hard apples. He reminded Charlie of a Walt Disney dwarf. He wore shapeless gray trousers, a heather-gray tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and sagging pockets, and a wide grin. He nodded toward Maggie, who was studying the video controls. “And who is the lovely learned lady?”

  “Dr. Ryan. Our statistical consultant, just arrived from New York,” said Charlie. “Maggie, this is Tal Chandler. The Meredith Professor of Educational Psychology. Emeritus.”

  “Talbott Chandler! Of course!” Maggie turned from the video. The screen was behaving itself now, showing a clear page of text with white spots hopscotching across it. She extended her hand enthusiastically, and Tal dropped his bookbag to shake it. “You did that famous stuff on how kids learn French!”

  “A linguist as well as a statistician! Delightful!” Tal beamed. “Tell me, are you related to the small children I saw a few minutes ago in the preschool playground? The younger announced that I was ‘Da.’ The elder told him, I believe, ‘Fiche-moi la paix.’”

  “Oh, God.” Maggie clapped a hand to her forehead in mock dismay. “I’d hoped that if I did my swearing in French they wouldn’t pick up nasty words to shock innocent bystanders. Not a good strategy around a university, I see.”

  Tal’s smile widened, his little round cheeks bunching even tighter. “Fear not, I shan’t translate,” he assured Maggie.

  “Hey, c’mon,” protested Charlie.

  Tal rolled his eyes at Maggie, beckoned Charlie closer, and whispered in his ear, “It means ‘shut the hell up.’”

  “Mm. A truly useful phrase,” Charlie admitted.

  Tal turned back to Maggie. “And where is the lucky father of these phenomenal infants? Will we have the pleasure of his company?”

  “He’s still in New York, but he’ll join us a little later this summer. He’ll be acting near here, at the Farm Theatre again.”

  “Ah, the Farm Theatre. Good outfit, that. Saw a splendid Cyrano there a few years back,” Tal reminisced.

  “That was Nick!” exclaimed Maggie. “He did Cyrano!”

  “He did? Send him my congratulations!” Tal snatched up Charlie’s borrowed ruler left-handed and waved it on high. “What moments, eh? ‘Let death come! I wait, standing proud, with sword in hand!’ Debout, et l’épée à la main!” He hopped onto a chair, commenting aside, “My wife can do this all in French, you know. She makes a far better Cyrano than I. You must meet her. Let’s see… something about old enemies… ah—”

  Maggie’s blue eyes were dancing. “‘Despite you all, old enemies that round me loom…’” she prompted.

  “Ah yes!” Right hand cocked behind him in a fencer’s pose, he thrust the ruler at the air. “‘Despite you all, old enemies that round me loom, I bear aloft unstained, unyielding—my white plume!’”

  He swished an imaginary hat and bowed extravagantly. Maggie applauded, laughing. “Quel geste!”

  Charlie said, “Tal, you’re bouncy today!”

  “Yes. The delightful company, of course. And I’m celebrating!” He twinkled down at them. It had been months since Charlie had seen him so ebullient.

  “Celebrating what?”

  Tal shook his head vigorously. “That’s a secret! Tell me, Dr. Ryan, will you be free for lunch today?”

  “I’ll probably have to meet the kids.”

  “Tomorrow, then! And you must meet my wife. She can’t come today either.” He jumped down from the chair, stumbling a little but catching himself by grabbing at the jacket on the rack. “But Charlie, you must join today’s celebration! Not the cafeteria. Someplace on College Avenue, with proper champagne. Plato’s, all right? At noon?”

  “It’s a deal,” agreed Charlie.

  Tal’s cheeks bunched in another grin. “A celebration! I’ll see who else can come. Of course I asked Cindy, but she had another appointment. I told her I’d save her some champagne. But now perhaps you should tend to your tapes.” He gestured theatrically at the TV screen, where little white flashes continued to bounce silently across the displayed text. “Do you know how we used to do eye-movement research, Dr. Ryan?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “One brave fellow, Professor Ahrens, actually stuck a tiny cup on his eyeball with a thin marker attached, so as he read, the pattern of eye movements was traced onto a smoked drum in front of him.”

  “God! That’s hideous!” Maggie shuddered. “How could he read normally?”

  “Yes, indeed, that’s what the rest of us all said! You see, we didn’t want to have to do experiments like that ourselves. We scientists like to think that we can endure anything in the search for truth, but really we hate to sacrifice our little comforts and little vices. But luckily, in this case someone eventually thought of bouncing light off the eye and photographing it, and bright young folks like Charlie here are refining the methods all the time. Though I don’t know about Charlie.” He shook his head in mock sorrow. “This young sprat thinks we make up hypotheses as we read, whereas anyone sensible knows we look at the words.”

  “This old geezer says we struggle along word by word without any coherent ideas about what they mean,” Charlie returned.

  “You see what I mean?” Tal appealed to Maggie. “He twists simple statements of fact. Why, according to him there’s no need to look at the page at all, just open the book and start hypothesizing. Daydreaming.”

  Charlie laughed “Tal, who’s twisting now?”

  “Well, wait’ll you hear my paper at the MPA convention!” Tal glanced at his watch. “But right now, I’d best return these books to the library. Now that I’ve finished daydreaming my way through them.” He hoisted his bookbag and whisked out as quickly as he’d come.

  “Famous scholars never look the way I think they will,” said Maggie, amused. “His publications are very sober.”

  Charlie nodded. “He was a little giddy today, though he’s always cheerful. He’s been retired four years now, and still bustles around. Publishes a lot even now. We have great discussions about the control of eye movements. And he’s curious about everything. You notice the grilling he gave you already!”

  “Yeah. A man after my own heart. Now, what do we want to find out from those little flashing lights on the screen?”

  They returned to their chore.

  2

  Sunlight sifted through the trees. The creek giggled below. A little child galloped down the path, paused to pick up a pebble from the mud, ran back to her smiling mother. They moved on past, until their happy chatter merged into the rustling of the leaves.

  A sweet day for a murder.

  In the end, Maggie decided to join Tal’s celebration lunch. The athletic babysitter was getting along well with the children, Maggie reported back to Charlie. “Liz is even willing to take them to McDonald’s. A place I avoid whenever I can,” she explained with a disdainful wrinkling of her nose. “And Will needs his nap afterward, so she can take them back to my apartment. Meanwhile, if it’s okay, I’ll tag along with you grown-ups instead.”

  “Great! Let’s go, then. It’s about time.” He locked his office and led the way down the stairs to the parking lot. “Tal will be glad you can come. Though you won’t get out of meeting his wife tomorrow too. He seemed bent on that. Did you work out a schedule with your sitter for tomorrow?”

  “For the next week, until Liz’s classes start, there’s no problem. And when Nick gets here he’ll have some time too.” She smiled at him as he locked the office door behind them. “It’s refreshing to be working in a place where people provide for children. Most of my clients assume that parents’ plans can be adjusted at the drop of a hat.”

  “Well, in this department so many people are
working with children it’s hard to forget. Frankly, I’m glad my own work is with college students at this point. It’s a hell of a lot easier to schedule.”

  “And they’re easier subjects, statistically. They know the test-taking game, how to play by the rules, much better than the little ones do. So you don’t get too many squirrelly answers to skew your data.”

  They had walked past the end of the parking lot. A deep wooded ravine cut raggedly along this edge of the campus, separating it from the congestion of the town. Long-legged Maggie, swinging easily along the uneven ground, unhesitatingly chose the right path from among the several that meandered down into the woods. “I see you still know your way around,” Charlie observed.

  “Yeah, it comes back. It was only seven years ago that I left.”

  “Did you ever work in this department?”

  “No. I worked on a neurology project out at Carroll Lab once, but mostly I hung around the math building and the psych building at the other end of the campus.”

  “Yeah. Education is a little world of its own.” Charlie pushed aside a branch that overhung the path. Norway maples had taken over the steep hillside here; except for a few malnourished vines, other species found it difficult to cope with the shallow, greedy maple roots and the dense shade of the broad leaves. The rough earth, still dark from yesterday’s rain, sported only a skimpy undergrowth of baby maples. But the sun, sloping through the shifting leaves, dappled the warming earth, and he felt an irrational stirring of cheerfulness. Deanna would come back, he was sure. She had her moods, but who didn’t? And what they shared was so special. Maybe after work today, he would—

  “Which way do you prefer here?” Maggie paused at a fork in the trail, where one path led to a green-painted metal pedestrian bridge, and another wound lower and under the bridge along the edge of the little creek that had patiently carved out this gorge.

  “The lower one’s prettier if you don’t mind steps. But it may be soggy still from the thunderstorm yesterday. I generally use this upper path.”

  “Fine, let’s be prudent.” That warm Diane Keaton smile again as she turned toward the bridge. “I love this walk, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m a hiker. You must miss the woods, living in New York.”

  “Not as much as I expected. We’re only a block from Prospect Park, so we’ve got plenty of woods and meadows and ravines to explore.”

  “Aren’t those big city parks dangerous?” He had to stretch to keep up with her athletic strides.

  “Well, I don’t wander through them alone at night.” She hesitated, glancing at Charlie with an ambiguous smile. “Somebody did try to rape me once. But it wasn’t in Prospect Park. It was only a few miles from this very spot, when I was a student here.”

  “God!” What could he say? What a horrible experience, to have someone forcing himself…. He mumbled inadequately, “That must have been terrible!”

  “Yeah. Well, help arrived fast and we sent him up for ninety-nine years. Happy ending.” She didn’t sound happy, her shoulders hunching under the sky-blue cotton. “Anyway, I’ve learned to stay alert. Did you notice the guy under the bridge just now?”

  Charlie looked back, frowning, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. The ravine was a visual crazy-quilt patched from dark earth, green leaves, splashes of sunlight. The original camouflage design, quivering as the breeze riffled the leaves. Below, the little creek gurgled and glinted through the shadows; trunks and branches traced irregular dark lines through the trembling foliage. Near them, the artificial pea-green of the bridge shafted straight-edged across the little chasm. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “See where the trail widens? That muddy patch? Maybe thirty yards up the trail?”

  “Yes. Oh!” He saw him then: standing nearly hidden by a clump of bushy young maples, only a bit of gray sleeve and a dark shoe visible from here. “Wonder what he’s up to?”

  “In Prospect Park he’d probably be a bird-watcher,” Maggie said lightly, turning back up the path toward College Avenue. “Either that or one of the homeless mental cases the state has so kindly liberated from institutions so they can find their own New York apartments. A task that drives the sanest of us batty.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie glanced back uneasily. He could no longer see the shadowed figure. “You’ve got sharp eyes.”

  “Yeah. Half Irish, half eagle, that’s me.” She flapped her arms in the loose shirt clownishly.

  They emerged from the woods into the abrupt tar and concrete world of College Avenue. Temporarily depopulated until summer school began, it seemed spacious today in the sunlight. Only a few blue-jeaned students drifted along the sidewalks. Maggie pulled an envelope from her briefcase. “Is the branch post office still up the street there?”

  “Yes, next to the shoe store. We could—”

  “Be right back!” Without waiting for him, she sprinted across the street toward the storefront post office. Charlie scuffed slowly along, enjoying the sun after the shadows of the ravine. The street was lined with nineteenth-century commercial buildings of brick or stone, two or three stories high, their carved cornices still bulking proudly against the sky but their upper windows peeling and decked with the tacky detritus of cheap student apartments: a row of Genesee cans on one sill, a T-shirt drying on another, an Indian cotton curtain knotted in the center to let in some light in a third. Below the second story the Victorian facades had disappeared completely behind layers applied in more recent decades—storefronts of glass and fake brick, or turquoise panels, or neo-colonial white plastic columns supporting white pediments. Up to a level of eight feet or so most nonglass surfaces had been sprayed with graffiti.

  After a few minutes Maggie rejoined him. She was reading the walls too. “The messages change, don’t they?” she observed. “When I was here it was all anti-Vietnam, down-with-Nixon stuff.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Jimmy Carter just doesn’t inspire the same emotion in our graffiti artists.”

  “Yeah. Who cares about human rights? They’ve reverted to more eternal concerns.”

  She jerked a thumb at one elaborate message and Charlie smiled. The wall proclaimed, “Whiskey makes you frisky, brandy makes you randy, rum makes you cum.” He said, “There must have been a few slogans like that, even then. There certainly were on my campus.”

  “Yeah, I have to admit. But we extolled drugs besides alcohol. We would’ve said ‘pot makes you hot’ or something, right?” She pushed open the door of one of the fake-brick fronts and Charlie followed her into Plato’s.

  A wide mahogany bar ran halfway back into the restaurant. Wooden booths lined the walls under a trellis decked with bunches of plastic grapes. Only a few people sat in the booths or at the tables clustered in the rear. Plato’s did not attract the rowdier undergraduates; the plump, dark-mustached owner purposely priced his beer high and never featured all-you-can-eat specials as did the other College Avenue eateries. “Sure I lose a little money,” he had once explained to Charlie. “But I don’t have to replace the chairs those animals break, or mop up where they’ve thrown up all over the rest rooms. If Sal wants to do all that, let him make the profit. Besides, I get the nice people.”

  “I don’t see Professor Chandler,” said Maggie. “But we’re early.”

  “Yes.” Charlie squinted at his watch, which was hard to see in the dimness. Looked like ten of. He’d allowed more time for the walk than necessary, given Maggie’s long-limbed energy. “Why don’t we just sit in a front booth, so he’ll see us when he arrives?”

  “Great. I’m famished! How about some dolmas to start now, and we’ll have something else when the others arrive?”

  Her eager appetite reminded Charlie of Deanna, how she studied the menu with a tense little smile of ravenous anticipation, her long lashes blinking dark on her cheek as she puzzled over the choices. He tried to brush the image away and looked up at the too-plump blonde student waitress to tell her he’d wait for their friends to arrive. She nodded pertly and went to
fetch Maggie’s order. Bouzouki music strummed through speakers high in the corners, attempting to cover the pops and clatters from the kitchen. Maggie leaned back into the corner of the booth, one rangy leg stretched across the seat, and studied Charlie. The sky-colored shirt made the darker blue of her eyes seem electric.

  “How long will it take you to finish coding your videotapes?” she asked.

  “A couple of weeks. I’m a little behind because one of the grads who was supposed to help code them had to leave right after spring classes ended. Family problems. But the other two coders are slogging away. Already have a couple of the experiments ready for you to look at.”

  “Good.” One bony finger poked idly at the salt shaker. “So tell me, how did you get interested in studying reading?”

  “I wanted to help kids learn to read. I know my stuff seems pretty far from that, working with adults in this project, but we have to know how skilled readers do it before we can help kids learn the skill.”

  “Makes sense. But, I mean, why not help kids learn math? Or become an optometrist or a statistician or some other useful thing?”

  “Well, reading is so important! Absolutely basic to life today. If you can’t –well, I’ve known people—” He broke off, gulped some of his ice water.

  Her blue eyes were intent on him. “People who had trouble learning?”

  He shrugged. “My Aunt Babs. She pretty much raised me after my mother left. She was so embarrassed about not being able to read. Always pretended she could… you know, claimed she’d forgotten her glasses or something. She’d bring home papers she had to sign and ask me to read them. I was only eight or nine then. Had to share what was treated as a filthy family secret. A couple of times I tried to teach her but she gave up right away. And I thought, if only I knew how to teach. She said she was stupid and that was that.” There was a blur on his glasses, and he took them off and rubbed them with a paper napkin. “She, uh, committed suicide. I came home from hockey practice and found her.”