Murderer's Diary

The Perfect Murder 1 Monday Jan. 6, 1964 She exists! O, she exists! A fellow in the Existentialism class approached me and told me of her. As I sat unobtrusively, or so I believed, in the back row of the classroom, he had the gall to walk up to me and inquire of me what I was reading, I had no time to turn to a different part of the Kierkegaard book before he saw the title, “Diary of the Seducer.” He rolled his eyes and took a step back when he saw it. He cuts a ridiculous figure with his winks and his slouches and the raising and lowering of his eyebrows. The man flirts with all the girls in the class—all three of them—while I can see that none of them is worth a glance. He calls himself Larry—short for Lawrence, I suppose. I gave my name as Sven. “So what’s the ‘Diary of the Seducer’ about?” he asked me with a wink. When I told him it was a manual more or less on how to seduce an innocent young girl, he told me, “I know a girl like that.” I feigned indifference, but he went on. “I share an office with a girl like that.” The man had to be a teaching assistant, probably in the philosophy department. I could easily discover the location of his office. “You should see her face whenever the subject of s*x comes up. She blushes all over.” I rejoiced inwardly. She’s the One! I told myself. My Beautiful Unknown! I haven’t even seen her yet, but I know she is the One. *** Dana Schilling’s mother had told her time and time again that being married to a grad student in philosophy was her cross to bear. Bill was never willing to listen to her when she was feeling as emotional as she was this morning while she dressed for work. She was worried about the job interview he'd set up for next Thursday at a small college in Wyoming. What if he ended up teaching there, where there couldn’t possibly be any good job opportunities for her? She'd be stuck at home by herself all day. How could she handle that? She had listened to his travel plans in silence last night—he planned on flying to Wyoming on Wednesday evening and flying back to Minneapolis on Thursday after his interview. She didn’t want him to go! But how could she explain her feelings about this to him? He'd never understand. She decided to go to work early and call her friend Violet, who was a philosophy teaching assistant like Bill, every bit as introverted and withdrawn as he was, but nevertheless always willing to listen to her problems. When she dialed Violet's number from work, there was no answer. Funny. Violet always answered at eight-fifteen in the morning and invariably said, "I was just eating my toast. Have to leave in fifteen minutes." Where was she today? Why wasn't she available just when Dana most needed her? Dana waited a couple minutes, then dialed again. Still no answer. She would have to try again later. No point calling Violet at school because there was no privacy in the office where the teaching assistants' phone was located. Anybody might answer, even Larry Benjamin, for God’s sake, and she sure didn’t want to talk to him at a time like this! *** Larry was getting antsy waiting for Violet to show up at the office. Why did she have to oversleep or come down with the flu when he absolutely had to talk to her this morning? It was her fault he was in trouble with June Becker, and last night on the phone, Violet had agreed to his plan for getting out of it. Maybe she’d slept in on purpose because she was having second thoughts, though. There was no telling what Becker might do or say when Violet admitted to doing what she’d done. He pictured Violet walking into the classroom downstairs where she taught Intro to Logic and removing her red earmuffs and her fake fur coat, tossing them on the table at the front of the room, then standing at the lectern with her winter boots and knee socks keeping her feet warm while she shyly addressed the roomful of students. Larry remembered which classroom it was because he’d once slipped open the door and peeked in to find her writing on the blackboard. The students were whispering to each other, paying no attention as she wrote out some logic formulas. He’d tried to give her some pointers later about how to hold the attention of the class, but she’d tensed up and the light had gone out of her eyes. “Hey,” he’d said comfortingly, “I know you hate standing up in front of a class. But you’ll be doing it every day for the next thirty or forty years. You knew that, didn’t you, when you signed up for grad school?” She’d nodded and then looked at the floor. “Hey, come on, cheer up!” he’d said. “The hours aren’t long, and you’ll always get summers off and Christmas break and spring break. Why do you think I want to go into teaching? The pay isn’t great, but you can get away with twenty hours of work a week, forty weeks a year tops.” That got a smile out of her. Larry went to room 130 on the first floor and walked right in. It was ten after nine already but Violet wasn’t there, and he saw only a few students sitting around shooting the breeze. They looked up at him expectantly. He walked up to the front of the room and announced, “Miss Alexander can’t be here today. You are all excused.” All the students stood up and pulled on their winter coats and ski jackets, and most of them hurried out the door. Now if Violet came in, he would have her to himself until ten. Enough time to show her the paper he’d written last night on universals and go over what she needed to tell June Becker about it. All she had to say was, “I don’t know why I did it, but I typed a paper from Journal of Philosophy instead of the paper I was supposed to type for Larry in December. He didn’t plagiarize it—I did. Here’s the paper he actually gave me to type.” She didn’t have to mention she was mad at him because he’d asked her to write a paper. Becker never needed to know about that. Last night on the phone, he’d said, “You don’t have to lie, Violet. I’ll give you the paper on universals tomorrow—she doesn’t have to know I didn’t give it to you to type in December.” Then he noticed that one girl hadn’t left the classroom. She approached him with a helpless-female look and said, “We’ve got a test next week and I’m having trouble with truth tables. Can you help me?” She had a wool scarf wrapped around her neck several times. On most mornings, he loved nothing better than to help a girl with logic, leaning over a book with her and writing out a formula or drawing a diagram, but right now he had to find Violet. “Sorry, I can’t right now. But you could come up to my office this afternoon,” Larry said. “How’s four p.m.? Room 350. Same office as Miss Alexander.” “I know where your office is,” she said, drawing out her words in an attractive, feminine manner. “I was just there the other day.” The girl was on the chubby side, and had scraggly hair and glasses, but her nose was cute. He could imagine gently lifting her glasses from her face and exclaiming, “Miss Gunderson, you’re beautiful!” He’d used that line with several girls, always with success. Their responses were delightfully unpredictable, though. One of the girls had removed his glasses in turn, saying, “Mr. Benjamin, you’re handsome!” “See you at four then,” he said. That would give him something to look forward to. His appointment with Becker was at three and couldn’t possibly take an hour, even with Violet there. He needed to remind Violet that she was Becker’s favorite student. He could say, “She likes you, Violet. She’s not about to throw you out of school over this. She’ll probably think I was asking for it, and I guess I was. Just say you were mad at me and leave it at that. Give a reason, she’ll just argue with it.” Larry returned to the third floor and stopped in the department office. Violet hadn’t called in, and when the secretary dialed her number, she got no answer. “Damn,” Larry said, wondering where the hell she could be. There was nothing else to do but go out in the cold to look for her. He simply had to talk to her before he talked to Becker. Without Violet’s help, he would be up s**t creek. Maybe she was on her way to school and he’d run into her on campus. He knew the route she took from her apartment because he’d walked home with her once or twice. Violet lived above the Scholar coffeehouse, where Bob Dylan had begun his career just a few years earlier. She was sure lucky, Larry thought, getting that place when that friend of Bill’s moved out. He put on an overcoat, gloves, and a hat with earflaps, and picked up a spiral-bound notebook, the one with his Existentialism notes, and stuffed his hastily written paper on universals into it. On his way, he recalled how Violet had sounded relieved when he told her he got a B for the Metaphysics class. She must have realized that Becker hadn’t discovered the plagiarism. That explained why she’d agreed to write a paper on Kierkegaard for him—she’d felt guilty about plagiarizing the universals paper. Now that he’d been accused of plagiarism, he could maybe get Violet to write a paper on Heidegger too. God, what was he thinking? He promised himself that he’d never cheat on his schoolwork again. Get me out of this one, God, if you exist, and I’ll never do that again. Carrying the notebook, he walked across campus to the Dinkytown neighborhood, where Violet’s apartment was located. As he waited for the traffic light to change at the corner of Fourth and Fourteenth, he noticed that the windows of Gray’s drugstore had valentines plastered all over them. Something else he had to do. Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day and he still hadn’t sent any valentines. How many girls did he need to buy one for this year? Nancy for sure, maybe Kathy, maybe even Violet. He figured if he got them in the mail by noon, they’d be sure to arrive in one day. Then he remembered his mother. He’d need to stop in the post office for an airmail stamp for her valentine. He crossed the street before the light changed and walked down the block to the door to Violet’s stairway on Fourteenth Street between the Scholar and the Dirty Grocery. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and banged several times on Violet’s door, but heard no response. He tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. She had to be home, no doubt hiding from him because she was getting cold feet about the meeting with Becker. “Violet, I know you’re in there!” he yelled. “I gotta talk to you! Stop being a scaredy cat.” There was no response from inside, not a peep. He had to know if she was sitting in there waiting for him to give up and leave. And if something had happened to Violet, he had to know that too. God forbid if she was incapacitated. Then what could he do? He’d need all day to figure that one out. It was time to try his trusty Dayton’s Department Store card, he decided. “Violet! I’m coming in there whether you like it or not!” he yelled. He reached in his pocket for his wallet and extracted the plastic charge card. Larry worked the card into the space directly below the lock. Then he slid it up behind the lock and pulled it forward. Ta-da! The lock slid aside. With his left hand, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door open before the mechanism could slide back into place again. He froze when he saw Violet lying on the mattress that she used as a living-room couch. She was wearing only a short-sleeved white blouse with some of the buttons undone. The rest of her clothes were lying in a neat pile next to her. Holy s**t! As he stepped closer, he looked at her face. Her features were distorted and discolored, her eyes bugging out, her tongue protruding. His stomach churned and he felt bile rush up his throat to his mouth. Bending over, he let go of his notebook and his gloves, and crossed his arms over his midriff. He swallowed hard so he wouldn’t throw up. An ugly cough pushed open his mouth, but nothing came out. Good thing he’d skipped breakfast this morning.