“Enough of a sonofabitch for one of his ex-students to want to kill him?” he asked Callie.
“Albert Jasper was awful,” she said. “Cynical, condescending, ruthless, uptight, paternalistic in the worst sense of the term…” John thought she had run out of words, but she was only pausing for breath. “Arrogant, inauthentic, self-centered…all in all, a horrible person. You don’t have to take my word for it either; the others will tell you exactly the same thing.”
So they had, so far. “And yet you put on a big party for him when he retired.”
“Nellie put it on. He did the organizing, and I think most of us came to please him, not Jasper. And, well, to tell the truth, in my case I was flattered to be invited. I wasn’t a very big fish at the time. And I was excited about the idea of a forensic anthropology conference. But the whole retirement-party bit was Nellie’s concoction; no one else’s.”
“And yet you all came.”
Callie laughed shortly. “A big mistake.”
Especially for Jasper, John thought.
Callie drew herself up. “Are we done? There’s a session I’d like to attend.”
“Just one more thing,” John said. “I’d like you to take a look at this.” He removed a sheet of paper from the folder at his elbow and passed it to her. On it was a copy of Albert Jasper’s telephone bill for June 1981-more of Julian Minor’s work, obtained by Telefax a couple of hours earlier.
“Look at the circled number, the call to Nevada.” She looked. “Yes?”
“Do you know that number?”
“Well, it’s the university’s prefix-”
“I know that, but the extension isn’t in use anymore, and so far no one’s been able to tell us what it was. You don’t recognize it?”
“No. Wait, yes. It’s the old anthropology department extension. We haven’t used it since 1989.”
“So it would have been a call to the department switchboard?”
“The department secretary. There were only six or seven faculty offices back then, and a secretary could handle it.”
“The call was made just two weeks before the meeting-two weeks before Jasper was killed. You wouldn’t happen to know what he was calling about?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t calling you?”
She laughed. “Jasper wouldn’t call me.”
“All right, who would he call?”
“Well, Harlow, probably. I mean, I don’t think he knew any of the others. They were all cultural, or linguistics, or archaeology. But I’m just guessing.”
“What would he be calling Harlow about?”
“I have no idea. They weren’t exactly in close contact, so it’s a bit of a surprise, actually.”
John looked up as a head poked through the open doorway of the lounge.
“Manager said you wanted to see me.” It was one of the lodge staff, a sleepy-looking teenager with a bad complexion and long, stringy blond hair under a turned-around baseball cap. He took an unwilling step into the room.
“Thanks, be with you in a second.”
“I can come back later.”
“No, I’m just leaving,” Callie called to him. She ground out her cigarette and stood up. “I really think I would have heard about that phone call if it were anything significant,” she said to John. “I can’t imagine it was anything important.”
Maybe not, John thought, but it was the only call listed on Jasper’s bill to any of the people John was now concerned with. And they had talked for thirty-nine minutes. That was a long time for a long-distance call. Especially for people who weren’t exactly in close contact.
John pulled out his small notebook as the kid eased warily into Callie’s chair. “What’s your name?”
“Vinnie.”
John looked up.
“Stoller.”
John wrote it down. “And you’re the one who changed the sheets and towels Wednesday?”
“Not all of ‘em. I did Cottage 18.”
Harlow’s cottage. “Do you remember what time that was?”
“About 4:57.”
John put down the pad. “About 4:57?”
“I remember because it was the last one in the row, and I was like back for my dinner break at 5:00.”
John wrote down 4:57p. “Tell me exactly what you saw at the cottage, exactly what you did.”
The boy shrugged. “I didn’t do nothing. There was a do-not-disturb sign on the door, so I left everything on the wood box, under the eaves.” His hands were circling one another. They were already the hands of a man; square, work-scarred, thick-jointed.
“You didn’t have a passkey?”
“Sure I did, but we’re not supposed to go in if there’s a sign. So I left it, that’s all.”
“You didn’t knock?”
“Well, yeah, I think I did.”
“And?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
“You didn’t look through the window?”
“There wasn’t no point. I’m telling you, you couldn’t see nothing. Can I go now? I gotta get back to work.”
“Sure. Thanks for your help, Vinnie.”
Vinnie ran his tongue over his lips as he got up. “Was the, uh, guy already, like, dead when I was there?” “Looks like it,” John said.
And that was about the only concrete thing he’d learned in over four hours of interviews: The do-not-disturb sign had been put out by 4:57 P.M. Wednesday. Assuming that the killer had hung it there to put off the discovery of the murder, that had to mean Harlow was already dead by then. And with 4:00 being the earliest possible time of death-Tilton was awfully damn sure of that-the murder had to have happened after 4:00 and before 5:00.
He picked up a molded-glass paperweight that sat on the table as a decoration. Inside was a miniature desert scene with cactuses, a tiny bleached steer skull, and a rail fence. He shook it, and instead of the usual snowstorm effect, there was a swirl of brown particles; a sandstorm. Very Western.
He held the weight in his palm and watched the particles settle. One thing he had no shortage of was motives for wanting to see Jasper dead. Callie wasn’t the only one. As Gideon had told him, they all had similar stories. Jasper had told Les Zenkovich flat out-after three years of graduate work-that he didn’t have the brains to make it as an anthropologist and he’d do better looking for a field that made less stringent intellectual demands on its practitioners. Like Callie, Les had transferred too, and wound up getting his Ph. D. at Indiana with little difficulty.
Miranda Glass had been told much the same thing, also after three or four years under his thumb, but she had lost heart and thrown in the towel on her doctorate. She’d become a big name in museum work, but in this crowd, with only an M.A. to her credit, she was one of the undereducated.
Leland Roach had a different kind of grievance. Although he’d suffered the usual hard time under Jasper, he’d stuck it out and managed to get his degree without having to go elsewhere, and to do it relatively quickly. All the same, he had been unable to get a satisfactory academic appointment for five years. Then he had learned that it was because Jasper had been blackballing him behind his back, smilingly agreeing to serve as a reference whenever Leland had asked, then denouncing his competence, his resourcefulness, his personality, and, at least in one case, his sense of humor. When Leland had dropped Jasper from his list of references, he had quickly landed an assistant professorship at San Diego State, then moved on to the prestigious Colorado Institute of Technology.
All these accounts, Gideon had reminded John, had to be taken with a grain of salt. The sources, after all, were the aggrieved parties themselves, and the tales had been told during various late-night rounds of war stories at one conference or another through the years. But whether accurate in their specifics or not, they left no doubt that there hadn’t been much love lost on Albert Evan Jasper in this group.