The Dark Side Of Justice

Chapter 1-2

“Oh, but you’re gonna love this, Turn. Ready? From 2 p.m. to 5:40 p.m. the only person in here is the victim. His student-assistant comes in at 5:40 to see if he needs anything before she goes back to the dorm. That’s when she found him.”

“Well, before the professor arrives. Anyone check in but not check out?”

“Nope. The two security officers covering this area swear the students who came in before two were gone by the time the stiff arrives. When the professor comes swinging down the steps with his briefcase, something he did like clockwork every day, he was alone. No one was down here, except for security, during that time.”

There it was. A genuine, honest-to-God puzzle. Someone knows the professor’s habits and knows he comes down here to do work precisely at two. Either the killer is down here waiting for the professor, and somehow knows he is going to be in that given cubicle and no other, or he somehow has a way to bypass all the layers of security and enters unseen. Or there was, possibly, a third alternative.

“Yeah, don’t say it,” Frank grunted, frowning, and shaking his head no. “It could be one of the security officers. I thought of that too. No joy there, chum. My hunch is both are squeaky clean boy scouts and ex-marines. If it were one of them it’d have to be one hell of a reason. Except, I doubt that’s gonna pan out. So, my bucko, you have one hell of a case in front of you! Moreover, I am sooooo glad you have it, and I don’t.”

I smiled, sighed, and shrugged. Glancing at my watch I noticed it was almost seven pm. I had hopes of going down to where I kept my cars stored and working on the Road Runner for an hour or two tonight. That wasn’t going to happen. We still had the initial investigation to do. Hours of assembling the sometimes fabricated pieces of the puzzle and doing it by the numbers in a procedure every working cop knows inside and out. We’d be lucky if we rolled into our beds by midnight.

“No surveillance cameras?”

“Nope. To be installed next week.”

I nodded, wondering if this too was planned or if it was just a dumb stroke of luck for the killer.

“Who’s the student-assistant?”

Frank looked down at the small spiral notebook he used to jot down everything, flipped a couple of pages, and found the name.

“A graduate student by the name of Alicia Addams,” he said, looking up and grinning even more insidiously. “She’s upstairs in the professor’s office waiting to be interviewed. I thought you might want that one. You know … playing the brilliant young Shylock of a detective and interviewing the pretty young damsel in distress.”

I grinned and patted the hulking giant of a man on the shoulder as I stepped around him.

“That’s Sherlock, bub. Not Shylock. So, why don’t you go talk to the security guys again. See if they can give you more about our victim and about anyone who might want to see a physics professor dead.”

The computer lab in the basement was only half of the basement. Also down there were a series of chemistry, biology, and physics laboratories. The building we were in was called Ames Hall. It housed the departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Four floors up from the basement was the floor where most of the professors had their offices. Stepping off the elevator I found Dr. Holdridge’s office quickly enough. I followed the sounds of someone sobbing, and between her sobs, blowing her nose into a wad of tissues.

“Alicia Addams?”

“Yes … yes, I’m Alicia.”

Surprise. I had this impression female grad students in physics had to look like some Russian female mud wrestler. Foolish me. Alicia Addams was in her twenties, with long brown hair, green eyes, and long, finely chiseled gams. Her face was not pretty. Nevertheless, it wasn’t ugly. However, save for her legs, she was wearing a one-piece blue dress, her legs were crossed as she sat in a chair in front of the dead stiff’s desk. They were long and nice to look at. Very nice.

Her eyes were red, and her face was puffy from a long jag of crying. The wad of Kleenex in her hands looked like shredded mush. On the corner of the desk, and just out of reach, was a freshly opened box. Stepping into the closet-room sized office I reached for the box and handed it to her.

“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes, I know. The two officers in uniform told me you would want to talk to me.”

I nodded and glanced at the office. It looked like what you might expect a Physics professor’s office should look like. Books everywhere. The wall immediately behind the desk was nothing but books from ceiling to carpeted floor and a small computer desk with a very large CRT screen. The interior wall was bare except for a set of photos of a living Dr. Holdridge standing either besides, or shaking hands with, a number of distinguished-looking men. The exterior wall had a long and narrow slit of a window which looked down on the campus commons below. The last wall was more photos.

I was impressed with the man’s desk. It had the look of precision to it. Mostly bare, with the few papers on it stacked in a neat stack, yet what caught my eye were the three pens placed with unerring accuracy directly onto the middle of the desk’s surface. They were precisely aligned. Looking at them, the word ‘perfectionist’ crossed my mind.

“You were the professor’s student-assistant?”

“Yes. For two years now. I’m working on my master’s degree in physics and chemistry.”

“When did you see the professor last? That is, before you found him in the lab below.”

“Oh, let me see …” she sighed, sniffling, and staring up at the ceiling for a moment or two to think. “This morning around ten, I think. He was here in the office working, and I just popped in to ask if he needed anything.”

“Okay, how did he look and sound?”

“He was upset. Really angry. He told me he didn’t want to be bothered until later this afternoon when he went down to work on the computer. Really, I’d have to say, it was just another normal day.”

“Normal? An upset professor is normal?”

A whiff of a smile momentarily played on the girl’s lips before disappearing. Tears welled up and she hurriedly pulled out of the Kleenex box a dozen or more and buried her face in them for a short jag of crying. It ended with her blowing her nose loudly before she looked up at me.

“That was Dr. Holdridge, Detective. He was always mad at someone. He was a great teacher and a brilliant mind. I have never heard anyone explain Quantum Mechanics so clearly like he could. Except, he was … he was … hard to get along with. He was tough. Tough and abrasive. He made a lot of demands on his students and on his peers. He often said he could not tolerate fools and he thought humanity in general were fools of the first order.”

Ah. A perfectionist and egotist.

“So, who had angered him this time?”

“Oh, that’s simple. The head of the department, Dr. Murphy. Lots of his peers angered the professor. Although, Dr. Murphy was special. He would usually become livid if he got into a row with her.”

“Dr. Holdridge was not the department head?”

“Oh, no. No way. He wanted to be. He campaigned for it. Plus, he made no effort to conceal his ire at being superseded by a woman as chair. Furthermore, there was no way Dr. Holdridge would ever become the Physics department head. He was just too … too severe. He could make the most brilliant of his students feel like a stuttering i***t when he dressed them down. He could have the entire faculty on the verge of mutiny with some of his biting commentary. To be a department head, especially the department head in physics, you must be something of a skilled diplomat and politician. You must schmooze with the alumni and with big-time business leaders. To be a top-drawer department you need lots of people and lots of corporations donating huge sums of money. You have to be a colleague with your peers. I am afraid Dr. Holdridge was not that kind of personality.”

The personality of the late Doctor Walter Holdridge sounded like that of a Rottweiler with rabies. That kind of personality guaranteed the creation of a lot of enemies. The question was, was the killer on the campus? Or were there more out there we hadn’t heard about?

“So, who else on the faculty could yank the professor’s chain?”

Again, that whiff of a smile played across the plain, yet attractive, face of the student. For a brief moment a small flicker of humor lit her green eyes, making her even more attractive. I wondered if this smiling girl, this feminine geek, might also have a motive for murder.

“Oh, goodness. Everyone, at one time or the other, yanked the professor’s chain, Detective. Just get a campus directory and go down the list. That would include the janitors for this building and the gardeners, the electricians, the plumbers. Everyone.”

I sighed and sat down in one of the small chairs beside the desk and directly opposite the child. Funny, here she was in her twenties, and not bad looking, and I was a single male barely in my forties. Nevertheless, somehow, I was thinking of her as if she was a child. A kid. Someone barely out of puberty. I was looking at her more like a father might look at his daughter.

Frankly, I didn’t like the thought. Although women and I was like mixing nitroglycerin and gasoline together, and any relationship with a woman, including my brief marriage, usually fell apart with a sudden finality to it, nevertheless I still liked to gaze upon a good-looking woman. I thought there might be a chance I might find a girlfriend. One who actually found me both attractive and interesting. One I could actually tolerate and appreciate.

Hell, it was a thought. A hope. Everyone must have a measure of hope in their souls.

“Who else on the faculty could repeatedly anger the professor?”

“Hmmm, let me see,” she began, furrowing her eyebrows and thinking for a moment before answering. “There’s Dr. Armand Peltier. He’s head of the Chemistry department. His office is next door. Dr. Peltier is very good at agitating the professor.”

“And then there’s Dr. Hodgeskins. He’s one of the professors in the Archeology department. There’s no love lost between there. Between those three, Dr. Murphy, Dr. Peltier, and Dr. Hodgeskins, that would be the list.”

I nodded.

“Tell me about this afternoon. Was it usual for the professor to be in the basement at that time of the day?”

“Yes. Every day. You could use the professor to set your watch. Every day exactly at the same time.”

“You usually checked in to see how he was doing?”

“Every day,” she smiled weakly, more tears flowing down her ruby cheeks, her lower lip beginning to tremble. “Clockwork.”

“It was you who found the body?”

For an answer she broke into a fit of hysterical crying. More Kleenex left the box in one rapid sweep of the hand. I waited in silence for the moment to pass. You learn to be patient as a cop. Especially when you’re investigating a murder.

“Yes, I came in precisely at 4:15. That’s when the professor wanted me to interrupt him. That’s when I … found him like that.”

“What did you do?”

“I … I screamed. Screamed like a silly little girl. It was then I went running to find Ralph.”

“Who’s Ralph?”

“He’s the campus security officer on duty at the south entrance. I say hello to him every day at that time. I found him and we both ran back to see if the professor might still be alive. However, he wasn’t. Ralph told me to follow him. We called the police from the phone down in the basement.”

So. There it was. A dead professor with a piano wire around his neck and an entire university as primary suspects. Swell. I smiled with an appreciation, again, of Frank’s uncanny ability at sniffing out tough cases with the least amount of knowledge and handing it to me with a smirk on his face.

Well, that’s okay. That’s why I’m paid by the city. I’m a cop. Besides, truthfully, I like what I do.

“Thank you, Miss Addams.” I said, coming to my feet and stepping toward the entrance. “We might need to contact you again with more questions later on. Please stay in town until the investigation is done. Here is my card. If you think of anything else don’t hesitate in giving me a call. Okay?”

She reached out and took the card I held in my hand. Her face came up and there was this certain look, a look I was all too familiar with, clearly painted on her face. s**t. Here it comes again.

“Detective, somehow you look familiar. You look like an old movie star. Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean old. Just, your face, seems so familiar to me. Although, I can’t seem to remember the actor’s name.”

Clark Gable. Yes, I know. You must think I am an arrogant sonofabitch with an ego problem of my own if I think I look like Clark Gable. However, that’s a mistake. It’s not an ego problem. It’s genetics. One look at my mug and you can’t help but have the impression a bigger, taller, Clark Gable is standing in front of you. Besides, I don’t like it. It’s a curse.

I’m not Clark Gable. I don’t think I look like the dead actor. Although, others do. The women, for some reason, latch onto it right from the get-go. Maybe you think that’s good. Women being attracted to me. Nevertheless remember; my wife tried to poison me. Twice. At the time we were only married for three months. That should tell you something about my success with women.

I smiled and half turned as I stepped out into the carpeted hall.

“Where might I find this Dr. Murphy?”

“I think she’s downstairs in one of the labs.”

“Thanks,” I said, nodding, and turning away.

No. I’m not Clark Gable. I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Nothing more and nothing less. Deal with it.