Dean Anthony Rice was the sort of man who could not tolerate the flaw of human stupidity. Red-faced and constantly out of breath, he was forty-seven pounds overweight and looked more like a numbers man at a small-town accounting firm than a professor of dead languages.
On Friday afternoon, as the former students of Unraveling a Literary Mystery were sequestered in an upstairs room of the Fisk mansion, he paced his office on the second floor of the Tower. He had taken his heart pill, his blood pressure pill, his antidepressants. There was a half-peeled banana going brown on the walnut desk. Lamplight streamed over the surface, illuminating a copy of Paul Fallows’s novel The Golden Silence. The book’s back was broken, and Rice had littered the text with a hundred pink Post-its that held incomprehensible notes. On the floor was a pillow and blanket where he had slept the night before.
Rice could feel it. The sudden rage of his predicament.
The problem was bringing in Shipley from Harvard. It had been Detective Bradley Black’s idea. She might have been a cult hero at the college fifteen years ago, but not all cult heroes were to be celebrated. Some—he thought of old Richard Aldiss in particular—were only remembered by their mistakes. And Shipley had made so many mistakes during the night class. Yes, she had exonerated Aldiss—but to Rice that meant nothing. It was not the victory those who seemed to worship Shipley made it out to be. He had met Aldiss once, and there was something about the man. Something almost inhuman. Maybe it was his frozen smile, or maybe the way his black eyes held you, judged you, drew you down. Rice shivered at the memory.
He thought of the professor now. Not surprisingly, the incompetent Shipley had been able to get nothing out of him. What if someone else spoke to him, someone with nothing to gain but the truth? Aldiss would appreciate his honesty; Aldiss would see him as a man with equal, perhaps even greater, intelligence. No more slutty young professors with the motive of making their name at Harvard, no more petty games. He would go to Aldiss and ask him about the murders of Michael Tanner and Lewis Prine, and they would speak to each other like two learned men who were after nothing less than truth.
Yes, that was it exactly. No more digging in a forgotten novel, no more of this nonsense. He would pay a visit to Aldiss that afternoon and end this thing once and for all.