Down These Mean Streets . . .

 

The murder would have happened whether or not Ralph Pendergast had come into my office in Carey Hall on that Tuesday a little more than two weeks before. But that’s when I date my involvement in the business.

Ralph’s arrival was the second bad news of the day. The first was a rejection e-mail, which I opened on my office computer. If I counted correctly, S&S Publishing had just become the seventeenth publisher to reject Poison Ivy, my fifth Max Cutter private eye novel. The first four didn’t sell either. The most depressing part about the latest rejection is that S&S, a paperback house in Minneapolis, pretty much represents the bottom of the barrel in mystery publishing. Most of the writing they publish doesn’t exceed the quality of their rejection letter: “We are sorry, but your submission does not meet our editorial needs at this time.” Even I write better than that. Maybe I need an agent.

I was staring gloomily at the computer screen when Ralph walked in. All things considered, the form rejection via e-mail was more welcome.

As always, he looked like the keynote speaker at a convention of accountants (no offense to my accountant, or any others). You’d never catch him loosening his rep tie - not even in his own office, much less mine.

He gestured to me with a folded-up newspaper. “I need to talk to you, Cody.”

“Mi casa es su casa, Ralph.”

Ralph was uncharacteristically agitated, and Popcorn was flustered. She stuck her head through the doorway close on his heels.

“I tried to tell him you were busy, Jeff.”

Popcorn - called Aneliese Pokorny on her timesheet - doesn’t come close to cracking five feet tall and doesn’t look forty-nine. She also doesn’t like being called my administrative assistant, and justly so, because her official title doesn’t begin to describe her jack-of-all-trades job in our small department.

Ralph, on the other hand, is one of my half-dozen bosses at St. Benignus College in his capacity as provost. It isn’t so clear on the organizational charts, but he knows it and I know it. He can come into my cubbyhole office any time he gets the urge.

“It’s okay,” I said. At the same time I spread out my folded arms on the desk, surreptitiously clicking the button on our antiquated intercom system into the “on” position with my right elbow. Popcorn, catching on immediately, nodded her head of soft, suspiciously blond curls, and closed the door behind her on her way out.

“What’s the crisis of the day, Ralph?” I asked.

He slammed the newspaper on the old oak desk in front of me in a swatting motion. “If you don’t know, Cody, perhaps we should hire someone who would. It is your job as director of public relations to keep unfavorable publicity like this out of the newspapers.”

The plural “newspapers” was for the most part a gross exaggeration. There’s only one newspaper in Erin, Ohio, The Erin Observer & News-Ledger, although it is true that papers in Cincinnati and other Ohio cities sometimes pick up Associated Press stories about us - mostly when it’s bad news.

The rest of his statement was fair enough. I figure that about a third of my job is to try to generate positive buzz about St. Benignus through media relations and social media (tweeting, Facebook, the website), about a third is crisis communications when something negative happens, and about a third is whatever doesn’t fit into somebody else’s job description, like ghostwriting speeches and articles.

I’d already seen the paper - and cringed - at breakfast. But I picked up Ralph’s copy and unfolded it again now, stalling for time.

“There,” Ralph said, pointing. “That story.”

I knew it. He indicated a three-column story on the lower half of the front page - a light feature to balance out the latest war news from Afghanistan, a preview of local observances marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a spectacular top-of-the-page car crash in the next county that killed four teenagers drunk on beer, and a potential Republican presidential candidate’s swing through southern Ohio.

I began reading the feature out loud, starting with the 24-point, two-line head:

 

PROFESSOR PACKS PUNCH

IN GRAMMAR NEWSLETTER

 

By Maggie Barton

Staff Reporter

 

Dr. Sebastian McCabe is the head of the popular culture program as St. Benignus College. But he isn’t very popular with some of his colleagues these days.

His latest project is a blog called The Write Stuff, in which he pokes not-so-gentle fun at the grammatical lapses, flabby writing, and clichés found in the prose of administrators and faculty members of the Catholic college.

 

“Nice lead,” I commented. “But the third sentence is kind of long. Nice effort on the headline, but the alliteration is a little forced.” I skipped ahead. “You have to admit this list of clichés Mac called out is pretty good.” I just couldn’t stop myself from a loving recitation:

“At the end of the day.”

“Just doesn’t get it.”

“Cutting edge.”

“Defining moment.”

“Doesn’t have a clue.”

“Let’s not go there.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Going forward.”

“Shifting paradigms.”

“Think outside the box.”

“24/7”

“Root causes.”

“I know what you’re upset about,” I told Ralph. “Some of these clichés are a bit passé. I’m sure that professors and administrators actually used them, though, because that’s where Mac gets his material. I just can’t figure how ‘vast majority’ didn’t make the list. That’s one of my favorites. Did you ever notice that majorities are always vast, Ralph?”

He pressed his thin lips together, making them even thinner. I take it back: Ralph doesn’t always look like an accountant. With his receding black hair, his sharp nose and his rimless glasses, he sometimes looks like Mr. Mitchell, the long-suffering father in the Dennis the Menace comic strip.

“Your brother-in-law is a - a -”

“Menace?” I suggested.

He tried again. “He’s a thoroughly unwholesome element on this campus. This blog of his holds up the entire faculty and staff to derision by the students.”

“Not all of them,” I pointed out, “only the ones who write badly. I suppose he might argue that he’s making constructive criticisms. You realize, of course, that Mac started this blog back last spring. You complained then.”

“Yes, and that was bad enough.” He bent over my desk and picked up the newspaper. “Now this scandal sheet has spread the damage to the entire community. We’ll be the laughing stock of southern Ohio!”

Ralph nostrils quivered. His voice was operating on an octave that could have shattered glass. But calling The Observe & News-Ledger a scandal sheet really proved he was losing his grip. The Observer hasn’t done anything remotely scandalous since it backed General Eisenhower against Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in 1952. (That cost the paper advertisers it has never regained.)

I grabbed the newspaper back from him.

“Let’s get real here, Ralph. Why don’t you admit that you’re just PO’d because Mac called your memo on affirmative action . . . what did he call it?” I scanned the story looking for the right phrase. “Here is it: ‘grammatically incoherent.’ He went easy on you. Confusing ‘fortunate’ and ‘fortuitous’ was bad enough, but anybody who writes ‘hopefully this won’t happen again’ should be hopefully drawn and quartered.”

Ralph went indignant, his best emotion. “I resent your implication that my distress at this matter is purely a display of personal pique. I am hardly the only one held up to ridicule in this article. McCabe also insulted the president of this college!”

I looked at the article again. “Oh, I don’t know, Ralph. “‘Pretentious gibberish’ isn’t so rough. After all, it is true. Did Father Joe complain?” Knowing Father Joe, he’d be more likely to chuckle.

The thin line of Ralph’s lips turned up and his gray eyes burned bright beneath his glasses. If Machiavelli ever smiled, that’s how he did it. This wasn’t a good sign. And I knew he wasn’t going to answer my semi-rhetorical question.

“When McCabe flew a kite on the campus quadrangle and trampled over a student who happened to be the son of the Swiss ambassador, it was an embarrassment,” he said. “When he played bagpipes at commencement exercises, it was an outrage. But this time he has gone too far. The public ridicule he has visited upon St. Benignus College, its faculty, and its staff shall not go un-redressed!”

Ralph Pendergast never makes idle threats. If anything, he understates. So whatever he had in mind, it wouldn’t be pleasant for me or for Sebastian McCabe.

Mac wears bow ties, lets hair grow all over his face, stuffs his overweight body with every unhealthful food imaginable, and smokes cigars only Winston Churchill could love. He’s a seriously flawed personality, as proved by the kind of mysteries he writes. But he is my best friend. I defended his latest escapade - as I had all the others - the best I could.

“You’re not looking at this the right way, Ralph,” I said. “This article is really a positive for St. Benignus. It has conflict. That makes it interesting. Morrie Kindle will pick it up for the AP and it’ll be in newspapers all over the country, getting our name out there.”

“That’s your idea of a positive, Cody?” The skepticism in his voice was thicker than peanut butter, the crunchy kind. “A negative story like this spread nationwide?”

Not only did the Pendergast voice begin to tremble, but the Pendergast legs looked weak. I would have offered him a seat on the oak chair or the worn couch, but it’s against my principles, the ones that say to never let Ralph get comfortable in my office.

“You just don’t understand public relations,” I told him. “We need students. They pay the bills around here. It’s hard to attract students when they’ve never heard of you. One of the six hundred things I’m paid for around here is to make sure they hear about us.”

“But not like this!”

“Ah, but Ralph, look at it this way: The fact that a faculty member can criticize without fear of retribution shows we have academic freedom here at St. Benignus. That’s a good thing, right?”

A certain look crept into Ralph’s eyes and I knew he thought he had me. “Does this tortured attempt to build a mitigating rationale indicate you are responsible for publication of this article?”

“Heaven forbid! I don’t send out press releases or tip the media every time a professor irks half the faculty and all of the administrators. For one thing, it happens too often. I’m just saying this isn’t the public relations disaster you seem to think it is.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. And whether you acknowledge it or not, you bear a certain responsibility for the story. It happened on your watch.”

“I didn’t know about this” - I pointed at the paper - “before this morning. Maggie didn’t call me for a comment before publication. But, by the way, she did get comments and ‘no comment’ from several people - including you, Ralph. And none of you thought of telling me the story was in the works, which I’m sure you know violates our college communications policy.”

I was getting up a head of steam now, and I made the mistake of chugging along instead of stopping right there to dwell a while on Ralph’s faux pas. “But even if you had referred the reporter to me, it’s not like I could have stopped the story.”

“And why not? Your lady friend is the editor.”

“News editor.” And whether she was my lady friend was dubious, but I wasn’t going to get into that with Ralph. “Leave her out of this.” I was halfway out of my chair before I realized it. I sat back down. “To answer your question, we have freedom of the press in this country and it’s a freedom that journalists take a great deal of pride in exercising - that’s why not.

“Listen, Ralph, if this discussion is supposed to be about my competency as a public relations professional, I will remind you that nobody ever questioned that professionalism in the twelve and a half years I held this job before you arrived. And there’s not much you can do about Mac, either.” I smiled. “He has tenure.”

Tenure is the academic equivalent of life eternal. A teacher who had it was almost impossible to fire - and Mac had it.

“You don’t,” Ralph said.

The simple declarative sentence chilled me more than a lot of blustering and posturing would have. I love my job, and finding another one in the same or a related field in this weak economy would be a very dicey proposition indeed.

“And as for Professor McCabe,” Ralph went on, “his position is not as solid as you seem to imagine. Many alumni and corporate supporters of the college were appalled at the theft of the Woollcott Chalmers Collection and the homicide that followed it. None of that would have happened if McCabe hadn’t brought that dratted collection of so-called Sherlockiana to campus to begin with.”

The murder of a prominent participant in my brother-in-law’s ill-fated “Introducing Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes” colloquium on campus had happened half a year ago.1 I wasn’t surprised to find that for Ralph the memory was fresh.

“The crimes were hardly Mac’s fault,” I objected. “Besides, he solved them in short order, which kept the journalistic feeding frenzy at minimum. It didn’t even extend beyond spring break, which kept the students out of it. And furthermore, neither the victim nor the murderer was part of the St. Benignus community.”

I thought that was a pretty comprehensive defense. But Ralph was having none of it, of course.

“True, but irrelevant,” he snapped. “The media attention to events surrounding the so-called popular culture program only swelled the ranks of those concerned that we have such a program in the first place. Courses on rock and roll, comic books, and Star Wars - lectures on Sesame Street and Columbo - you won’t find academic cotton candy of this sort at other Transfigurationist colleges. They may not survive at this one much longer. And if they go, McCabe goes.”

“Neat trick.”

“No trick at all, Cody. I’m talking about the normal process of academic review, which was followed even in the extremely undisciplined atmosphere that presided on this campus before I arrived a year ago. You must know how that works.”

I was seeing the whole picture now, and it was ugly.

“Every program gets reviewed every three years,” I recited. “A faculty committee looks at the number of students it attracts, what happens to those students when they graduate, how many faculty members it takes to run the program, and how much it costs. The committee makes a recommendation to the vice president for academic affairs. The whole process can be bucked up to the president or even the board of trustees, but in practice the academic vice president almost always has his way - even if he goes against the committee recommendation.”

“Precisely,” Ralph said, his mouth turning up again.

He’s the vice president for academic affairs, as well as provost.

“The popular culture program is in the review process right now,” he said. “As a consequence, Professor McCabe’s blog may be a short-term problem. Your performance, however, remains a matter of concern to me, Cody. I believe it should be a matter of concern to you as well.”

Ralph seemed to have outgrown the notion, which he once expressed to me, that I was basically well meaning and possibly even salvageable if I could be pried away from the negative influence of my brother-in-law.

There was nothing threatening about his tone. There didn’t need to be. Now that he’d reminded himself that he had the upper hand, Ralph was back to normal: objective, academically dry, passionless. If he cut himself shaving, would he bleed?

With a nod of dismissal and a “Good day, Cody,” he made for the door. When he was halfway through it I called out after him, “Have a great day, Ralph!” Oh, and was it good for you, too?

1 See No Police Like Holmes (MX Publishing, 2011).