Murder Is Academic Read online

  “I know.” Maggie’s eyes, too, were too bright.

  Sue frowned at her fiercely. “So that’s my story. Yours too?”

  Maggie took a deep breath. “Near enough,” she said. “Twice burned.”

  “Oh,” said Sue.

  “So I’ve had enough. From now on old Maggie toughs it alone.”

  “You don’t envy Jackie?”

  “Sure. Physically I do. Frank’s damn good in bed. But it wasn’t staying casual. So if they hit it off, hurray for both of them. I mean, Frank is a decent guy. And statistically her chances are pretty good. I’ve heard of several happy endings.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “Nothing. That was the problem. I can’t stand being vulnerable again. Even for someone decent.”

  “Not in control,” said Mary Beth unexpectedly. She had been listening intently.

  “Right.” Maggie’s attention switched to Mary Beth. “Maybe that’s what we’re all doing here. Getting back in control.”

  “But men are in control. You just said so.”

  “Not of everything. How can you say that?” demanded Sue, adding unfairly: “You started all this by dropping Tip. Does he control you?”

  “Jeez, no! I never want to see him again.” He had said, How could you do this to me?

  “This, mind you,” Sue said to Maggie, “is only a few months after as torrid an affair as you’re likely to see in this uncensored century.” Mary Beth covered her face. “Seriously, Swede, how can you say you’re not in control? What the hell did Tip do to you?”

  “Hey, easy,” said Maggie, breaking in. “There are lots of ways to get hurt, Sue. When we’re ready to give details we’ll let you know.”

  “Closemouthed as the CIA,” grumbled Sue, but, belatedly, she seemed to realize it was time to stop. She said, “Hey, is anyone else hungry?”

  “Sure am,” said Maggie. They all went to plunder the refrigerator. Mary Beth, as usual, had no appetite, but she managed to drink a cup of coffee.

  The theatre tickets were for the first Wednesday in April. Late Tuesday night Mary Beth knocked on Maggie’s bedroom door to announce that Ixil coffee was available, if she wanted, and found her sprawled on the floor reading Shakespeare. The closeted books had been unpacked, filling an empty shelf and even displacing a few math books.

  “I just realized, I’ve never read Titus Andronicus,” said Maggie, faintly surprised. “Horrible play.”

  “I’ve managed to miss it too,” smiled Mary Beth. “Along with several others.”

  “Well, I don’t recommend it. It takes a strong stomach. Like your coffee. But I accept anyway.” She stood up and followed Mary Beth into the hall. Mary Beth wanted to ask, Was he in theatre? But she had learned her lesson and held her tongue.

  The production of The Three Sisters was mediocre. The young actress playing Masha was promising, but the others varied from satisfactory to clumsy. Still, the playwright’s vision came through from time to time, and as usual Mary Beth found herself gratefully lost in it for the evening. It was one of her few joys, to immerse herself in another world, to suffer sorrows other than her own, to be taken out of herself, her dull and worthless self.

  Afterward they stopped for a drink at the Steamboat. They sat in a booth under gingerbread woodwork, having an enjoyable debate about whether Chekhov really understood women. There was something a little odd in Maggie’s mood, and Mary Beth finally identified it as relief. She too was pleased that her friend had exorcised whatever ghost had been troubling her. It was a good evening. Mary Beth felt almost back to normal. She had forced herself to relax.

  Aqbal, that day of evil, had come and gone four times without hurting her. Things were getting better.

  She met Maggie briefly in the hall that night on her way to the bathroom. “Hey, you okay?” she asked hopefully.

  “A hundred percent,” Maggie said. “Well, ninety-eight percent. Thanks, Mary Beth. For the push.”

  “I really didn’t mean to,” apologized Mary Beth.

  “Maybe not. But it helped.” Maggie flashed her wide grin and clapped Mary Beth lightly on the shoulder as she started on down the hall. “Hey, don’t worry. I’m a swimmer too!”

  VII

  13 Qanil (April 4, 1968)

  She almost escaped, screaming and running back toward the ramp, but he caught her before anyone stopped, and walked her back down slowly, powerful in his anger. Important for things to look normal from the highway. But she was so frantic it was hard. Bitch. Trying to control him. Mum’s hand gripping his ten-year-old arm, her ginny breath hissing, “Behave or I’ll cut off your finger, I’ll cut off your ... ” No. No more. Under the pilings, out of sight, he thought he had her. Her struggles fed his anger and his smothering hand quieted her. But then he lost it, and even though he tried a long time he couldn’t get it back. Clumsy bitch. A lot of them were clumsy like that. As he stood up finally, she squirmed away, and he had to stab twice, once in the back, and once, sloppily, on the neck. Bitch.

  But the triangle on the cheek was very precise and neat.

  The only problem was that the kitten had come to and disappeared. Well, no matter, it would be hit by a car or something.

  On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In a hundred cities across the U.S., riots boiled up—blind outpourings of violence in response to inexplicable violence. The symbol of peaceful racial change was dead, and so, it seemed, was peaceful change. Laconia was lucky. The south side, heavily black, poured into the streets in fury and was joined by swarms of university students, heavily white, and furious too. The downtown parks were trampled and many speeches were made, but only a few windows were broken in the frustrated grief and rage of the day.

  Jane, standing on the edge of the crowd next to Roger, felt the helpless anger and sorrow as they listened to a black minister praying. She pulled her shawl tighter about her.

  “God, Roger,” she said in a low voice, “what can we do?”

  “Nothing, hon. Sometimes there’s just nothing we can do.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Sometimes things are just out of control.”

  “I am so damn mad at the world.”

  “Yeah.”

  She listened a moment more, then said, “Let’s go home and get drunk.”

  “We’re talking about the Ving Tsun system,” said Ed Hamlin. “It was developed by a woman, and does not depend on physical strength alone. Quickness, yes. Lots of hard practice, yes. Skill doesn’t come overnight. Today, I’ll talk about staying out of trouble in the first place. Then we’ll move on to the basic principles of Ving Tsun.”

  Ed was a dignified, cold-eyed young man. WAR had hired him for two demonstrations. Now he looked around the group in the large seminar room and said, “Okay, stand up, please. You and you.”

  He was indicating Jane and Sue Snyder. They both rose uncertainly.

  “Two women, same height,” said Ed. “Professor Freeman and ... ?”

  “Sue Snyder,” said Sue.

  “Okay. Sue, you’re in much better shape to cope with an attack than Professor Freeman.”

  “Ha! Don’t mess with me!” said Sue smugly.

  “What’s my problem?” asked Jane.

  “Okay. Start at the top. Professor Freeman is wearing a chain around her neck.” True; it held the little gold watch Roger had given her. “Bad choice. I know you’re interested in rape especially, but robbery should be avoided too. In fact, sometimes it turns into rape. Jewelry like that is easily snatched, if the chain is weak; if it isn’t, it could be used to strangle you.”

  “Okay,” said Jane.

  “Number two. Sue is wearing jeans. Not ideal, but pretty good for mobility. Professor Freeman is in a skirt. Luckily skirts are pretty short now, but you can see how even the dress Professor Freeman is wearing can constrict movement in a fight. One of our basic moves is a front kick, and you’d have trouble.”

  “I have trouble even in jeans,” said Sue, demo
nstrating.

  “We’ll fix that.” Ed Hamlin moved on to the next topic, demonstrating basic stances and how to deflect blows and kicks. He was good, though Jane wondered despairingly if she’d ever learn to be quick enough. Constant work on a tenure dossier left little time for exercise, and she felt slow and clumsy next to Maggie or Terry.

  By the time the Ving Tsun session was over, Jane was even further off schedule. Yesterday the computer had accepted her cards in a calm and competent whir, thought a moment, and then printed out, politely, the not very surprising news that there was an error somewhere. Now she wedged her door open and sat at her desk, the big manual before her. She began to compare the control cards with the instructions, letter by letter. But there were no mistakes. After the third careful check, Jane slammed the manual shut. “Goddamn imbecile machine!”

  “Did I hear you mention a computer?”

  Jane turned to the door. “Maggie! You work with that beast! Can you tell me what the hell it wants me to do?”

  “I can try.” Maggie set down her bookbag, looked at the printout message, and then compared Jane’s control cards to the manual. “There,” she said, pointing at the eleventh card.

  “But that’s correct!”

  “You punched in comma-space instead of just comma.”

  “Oh God, you’re right. That’s the way humans always type it. How can you see things like that?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I’m afflicted with a mind like a goddamn imbecile machine. I notice details—and gaps.”

  “Wish I had that affliction,” grumbled Jane.

  “Is this the analysis of your prelinguistic phonetic study?”

  “Yes. Word gets around, doesn’t it?”

  Maggie picked up her bookbag. “My roommate’s in your seminar. Jackie Edwards. She says your research is very exciting.”

  “Well, thanks. And thanks for explaining the damn computer.”

  “Sure.” Maggie swung off down the hall. An interesting and competent young woman. Jane, gathering up her cards, thought that she’d like to get to know her better. After the tenure push was over, of course.

  The computer terminals were housed in the basement, not far from the equipment room and labs, in a big fluorescent-lit room with small, high-set windows. There was a tinge of ozone in the air there, glaring white walls and tweedy gray commercial carpet, pale gray plastic tables. A hygienic modern design, marred only by the wastebaskets overflowing with discarded printouts, by the cardboard boxes clumsily arranged to hold more waste. The designer of the room had not counted on so much error. Clearly, he had never used a computer.

  She had to wait her turn at a keypunch, but got the card right on the second try. She slipped it into the correct place in her pack and read it into the machine.

  Almost immediately, the computer went down.

  “What’s happening?” she asked the attendant as he hung up the phone.

  “I don’t know. All the action is out at the CS lab.”

  “Did they say when it would be working again?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “Will I have to read in my cards again?”

  “Nope. Not unless it’s worse than they think.”

  “Okay. Guess I’ll come back later, then.”

  As she climbed the stairs, she wondered how much time she had actually saved. With her desk calculator, she could have worked the statistical analysis in an hour or two. The computer did it in seconds, of course. But those seconds were surrounded by time at the keypunch, more time figuring out where the mistakes were, still more waiting for the machine to decide to function.

  But of course if she did it herself she wouldn’t produce all those reams of impressive wastepaper.

  Her seminar topic today was the sound system of English. Jane, showing slides of the spectrograms of syllables like pa and ba, marveled as she always did at the subtleties humans could discern. Even very small humans, as young as Linc’s son. As young as little Greg? Well, the computer would tell her soon. She hoped.

  After class, she checked her mailbox to find a note from the chairman. He announced proudly that he had been appointed to a national policy review task force by someone in the Johnson administration. He would therefore be away frequently during the next six weeks. While the department was honored by the appointment, et cetera, et cetera, it meant that certain important departmental decisions, including tenure recommendations, would have to be delayed. Early June, he promised. Damn. Damn, damn, damn! Would this tension ever be over?

  Already despondent, she went back down to the computer room. Her printout was waiting in a big stack of completed jobs. She pulled it out and unfolded it. Thank God, it had run this time. But as she read on down the pages, her heart sank. There were the means, the numbers neatly arrayed in exactly the order she had predicted. A beautiful confirmation of her hypothesis.

  Except that the statistics showed that it was not significant. It didn’t count. There was so much random variation among those individualistic babies that the differences she was looking for might have been accidental. The fast habituators and the slow habituators had canceled out the effects of the change of syllables, made them look unimportant.

  So. That was it. Scratch the last four months’ work. Scratch tenure too? Perhaps.

  Depressed, she took the sheets and went to see Josh. The loading door that led from the equipment room to the parking lot was open, and in a moment Josh appeared. He was humming tunelessly, happily. His radio was playing, but he was humming something else.

  “Hi, Josh.”

  “Oh, hi, Jane. Got a printout?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just let me get this tachistoscope out of the way.” He went up the stepladder and stowed the equipment carefully on a shelf.

  “It washed out,” said Jane as he came down.

  “Oh, really?” He smiled broadly.

  “Josh, are you stoned?”

  “Just a nice little buzz. I’m okay. Let’s see it.”

  She spread out the relevant pages. “It’s the variation among the subjects that killed it.”

  He looked at it, still humming, and finally said, “Yeah. Tough.”

  “So, we start over, I guess.”

  “Yeah. But look at those fantastic means!”

  She wondered if he were seeing them in Technicolor. She said, “Right. But they’re not statistically significant.”

  “Yeah, but look. All we have to do is get a few more of those kids to habituate, right? Let’s make the preliminary habituation tape a loop.”

  “A loop. So instead of having a fixed time for habituation, we have a fixed level of habituation.”

  “Right! We can keep the loop going for thirty minutes if we have to. Then when the kid has settled down we switch to the stimulus tape. 1 can rig that easily. I’ll get you a second tape recorder. That one right there.” He pointed to a shiny metal machine on the shelves above.

  “Okay. Good idea. Josh. I’ll go figure out what to use for the habituation criterion.” The twenty-four babies she had just tested in vain would at least be useful for deciding on that.

  “Okay, great.”

  Jane sighed. “I just hate to be starting all over.”

  “Hey, but listen, it’ll work this time! Just look at those means!”

  She said, “Okay. Thanks, Josh. You get the recorder down. I’ll go start collecting babies. Week after next okay?”

  “Yeah. Great!”

  As she plodded down the hall she heard him return to his tuneless tune. Maybe he had the right idea. She slipped into the women’s room and took a Valium. But she still didn’t feel like singing. Maybe she ought to ask Josh what he was on. The means, when she looked at them again, remained depressingly black and white.

  An hour later she had finished redesigning the experiment, had chosen the most appropriate criterion level for habituation, and was turning to her file of birth records. Jane’s secretary was amused that her job required clipping birth announcements from t
he paper every day. “You ought to send them all congratulations,” she had said once, as she handed Jane the week’s collection of announcements.

  “Yeah, like the draft, you mean. Aunt Jane wants you!”

  “Right!”

  Now Jane sifted through the clippings, pulling out the birth announcements of babies who would be three months old week after next. She noted down the parents’ names and addresses and turned to the telephone directory.

  There was a knock on her open door. She looked up. “Hi, Linc. What can I do for you?”

  Linc, looking haggard, stepped in. “Nothing, I guess. Hold my hand.”

  “Chairman’s note? No decisions till June? Damn frustrating.”

  “More than that. My heredity paper just came back. Viciously unfair reviewer.”

  “You can send it to another journal.”

  “Yeah. I’ll try. But nobody’ll accept it soon enough.”

  “I know. Boy, do I know.”

  He sat down heavily, huge in the little straight chair, and frowned a little. “You mean you’re having trouble too?”

  She waved a hand at the offending printout. “Washout. Thirty tedious babies, six thrown out for various reasons, the usable ones too variable. All thirty down the drain.”

  “God, I’m sorry, Jane.”

  “Well, it happens. We’ll both recover.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Hal was just asked to do a book chapter.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. It’s a hell of a time for us to get hit with this.”

  “Right. Psychologically bad, as we experts say.”

  He grinned at her suddenly. “Yeah.”

  “Will you have to change your paper much for the next journal?”

  “Not really. I thought I could change the introductory paragraph a little, maybe. Put in a couple of references to articles in that journal.”

  “Good PR.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes were dark and grateful. “How about you, Jane? Is it really a total loss?”