“What is it?” Peter asked.
“During the time when your ex-wife was pursuing Godfrey,” I said, “did you ever meet him?”
“Yes, a few times at parties,” Peter said. “Though I must say I quite often tried to avoid the man, finding him hideously conceited, with only one subject of conversation—himself.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Seven years ago,” Peter said. “Why do you ask?”
“When Godfrey spoke to you through the door at the hotel, did you recognize his voice?”
“What a peculiar question,” Peter said, clearly taken aback. “One simply assumed that one was talking to him because it was his room.” He paused. “I cannot be absolutely certain that it was indeed Godfrey I conversed with, given the circumstances. There is the additional fact that the man claimed to be ill, and I did detect what I thought was a note of strain in his voice.”
“But you can’t swear that it was actually Godfrey on the other side of the door?”
Justin hadn’t said anything about Godfrey’s feeling ill, and surely he would have noticed. It wouldn’t have been easy for Godfrey to conceal a stomach bug of some kind from his son if he had to rush off to the bathroom periodically.
“No, I cannot,” Peter said. “But if it was not Godfrey with whom I spoke, then who was it?”
“It might have been the murderer,” I said.
Peter turned so white I thought he was going to faint. I started to get up to attend to him, but he rallied enough to say, “No, thank you, I’m all right. Just a bit of a shock, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “It’s a shock to me, too. But the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to believe that Godfrey was already dead when you went to the hotel.” I kept my eye on him. If he was the murderer, he was putting on quite an act to convince me otherwise. I couldn’t see him as a killer unless he were talking someone to death.
The problem was, I couldn’t see anyone—at the moment—as a killer, but someone had murdered Godfrey.
“I must say, that is quite an unsettling notion.” Peter was slowly regaining some color—not that he had much to begin with, poor man. “To have been that close to the perpetrator of such a vicious act—well, the mind frankly boggles, as I am certain you can understand.”
“I can,” I said. “Now you have to tell the deputy about what you did. She’ll probably draw the same conclusion.” Or at least, she should, I amended silently. Kanesha might be a pain in the neck sometimes, but she was bright.
“Yes, I will,” Peter said.
“Good. I’ll leave you then,” I said, and once again I made it to the door. But the memory of why I had come down to see Peter surfaced, and I turned back.
“I forgot something,” I said as I walked back toward the desk. “We need to get the locks on the archive office and the storeroom changed right away.”
“What?” Peter looked alarmed. “What has happened?”
I explained tersely. Peter shook his head. “I shall certainly speak to Rick Tackett immediately,” he said. “This is a serious breach of our security. I wonder whether I should discuss this with the head of the campus police.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary just yet,” I said. “Getting the locks changed today, if at all possible, is the most important thing.”
“I shall see to it.” Peter sighed. “So many phone calls to make.” He brightened. “I shall have Melba make the necessary contact with Rick, however.”
“That’s probably not a bad idea,” I said. I knew Melba could probably get results from Rick faster than Peter could. “Good luck with Deputy Berry.” I thought a reminder couldn’t hurt.
Peter was picking up the phone as I left.
In the outer office Diesel was stretched out on the credenza behind Melba’s desk while Melba worked at her computer. She looked up when I shut Peter’s door behind me.
“You sure were in there a long time,” she said. “It couldn’t have taken that long, even with Peter, to talk about what happened.”
“It didn’t,” I said. “There was something else Peter wanted to discuss.” I threw up a hand. “And before you ask me, I can’t tell you. If Peter chooses to tell you, fine, but don’t ask me, please.”
Melba pouted for a moment, but she never could stay annoyed or angry with anyone for long. “All right, Charlie. Spoilsport.” She grinned at me. “I’ll get it out of Peter somehow.”
I smiled at her, not doubting for a moment that she could. “Come on, Diesel. Let’s go.”
Diesel sat up and yawned. Then he stretched for a moment before jumping down. He came up to me and rubbed against my legs.
“We’ll see you later.” I waved at Melba as I followed my cat out of the office and toward the stairs.
I had plenty to think about when Diesel and I were once again installed in our accustomed places in the archive office. While the cat settled down for a nap, I stared at the computer screen. I should have been checking e-mail, but instead I kept running a list of suspects through my mind:
Julia Wardlaw
Justin Wardlaw
Jordan Thompson
Peter Vanderkeller
Any or all of them could be lying.
For example, Julia could have seen Jordan Thompson leaving as she herself arrived, rather than the other way around. Peter could be lying about speaking to someone through the door, or it could have been any one of the others in the room when Peter came to speak to Godfrey. Justin could have killed Godfrey, run out of the room terrified by what he had done, and then sat on the bench in the square until I found him.
Then there was the unknown factor: Mr. X or Ms. X.
Godfrey seemed to have angered enough people in his life that there were probably others in Athena who might have wanted to kill him.
But how to find out who they were, that was the question.
I glanced at the inventory of Godfrey’s papers lying on my desk. I knew one place to start.
Sighing, I picked up the inventory and began jotting down the box numbers that contained correspondence. It was going to be a long day.
TWENTY-TWO
I worked my way steadily through Godfrey’s correspondence, stopping only for lunch and the occasional insistent demand for attention from Diesel. At some point Rick Tackett appeared to change the locks on the office door and the storeroom, but until he came to offer me the new keys and take the old ones away, I hardly noticed him.
He stood in front of my desk for a moment, surveying the boxes. “Lotta stuff here. What are you gonna do with it?”
“Keep it in storage until I have a chance to go through it all and catalog it. But that’s going to be a while. I have a lot of other things to see to first.”
“Seems like a lotta work for just a bunch of paper,” he said.
I shrugged. “Someone may be interested in them at some point, want to do a dissertation perhaps. You never know what kinds of interesting stuff you’ll find in a collection like this.”
“Is it valuable?”
“Possibly,” I said. “Like anything, it depends on how much someone would be willing to pay for it. I doubt the college would want to sell the collection, though.”
Rick nodded and turned away. I watched him go, somewhat surprised by the conversation. This was the first time I had heard him express any curiosity about anything archival in nature. In the past when he’d delivered packages to the office he had never asked even one question.
It was probably because of Godfrey’s murder, I reasoned. I went back to my work.
Godfrey had accumulated several boxes full of fan mail, not to mention other kinds of correspondence. I scanned each letter as quickly as I could, looking for evidence of some kind of threat to—or ill feeling toward—Godfrey. There were indeed some of the latter but none of the former. If he ever received a threatening letter, Godfrey hadn’t kept it, apparently. I also skimmed any notations that Godfrey made on the letters, but I gleaned nothing worthwhile.