“Helen called me often.”
“Last night, Gordon, or do you want me to get a warrant for the phone records?”
Ruth thought she saw Gordon flinch, and then he stared down into his glass again and swished the scotch around, watching it film the sides of the glass.
“All right, so she called me. I didn’t tell you in front of Chappy. He would have laughed his head off while promising to visit me in jail. He’d also volunteer to stick me with a lethal injection.”
“Helen’s call, Gordon.”
He suddenly looked old, and somehow smaller. He sighed so deeply it made him cough. “It was only a short phone call, Dix, nothing more. God in Heaven, I can’t believe she’s gone. There’s some maniac out there, some crazy man who hates me, who hates Stanislaus, who wants to destroy everything.”
Ruth said, “How very odd, Dr. Holcombe. You believe it’s all about you, and no one else. Don’t you think that’s a rather narrow view? After all, you’re sitting here drinking your fine single malt scotch, quite alive, while Erin Bushnell, Walt McGuffey, and Helen Rafferty are dead.”
Dr. Holcombe looked confused for a moment, then said, “Of course I care, dammit. I didn’t mean—Are you sure you don’t want something to drink?”
Savich said, “No, thank you, Dr. Holcombe. Why don’t we all go over to that booth?”
There were half a dozen ancient booths lining two sides of the room. The vinyl was slippery and cold, the cracks so large one could easily lose a wallet. Ruth allowed Dr. Holcombe to scoot in first, then essentially locked him in by sitting next to him on the outside. He didn’t appear to notice.
“It’s going to start snowing soon,” he said into his glass. “I’m wondering when I leave here with all this scotch in me whether I’ll be able to get back to Stanislaus. You know the media are there, Dix. Soon our donors will be on the line, asking to talk to me. What am I going to tell them? That their director is a murder suspect? I can’t even imagine Helen being gone, much less dead.” He raised pain-glazed eyes to Dix’s face. “She’s always been there for me, my guardian angel. After I left Tara, I was going to my office, but I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Helen wasn’t there, you see. You’ve got to believe me, I didn’t kill her.” He lowered his forehead to the table.
Savich went to the bar and asked for four coffees and a cup of tea.
“If that’s true, Gordon, you’d best start convincing me you didn’t. Tell us about Helen’s phone call.”
“I want another drink first.”
When Savich came back to the booth, he heard Dix say, “No more, Gordon. You need to stop with that stuff. Here’s Agent Savich with some coffee.”
Savich handed him a cup. Gordon stared at it, gave a little shudder. He picked up his scotch glass, tipped it, but it was empty.
“Talk to me, Gordon. Don’t even consider lying, or I’ll give Chappy a free pass to have a field day.”
“All right. Helen was whispering on the phone—it was absurd, really, her whispering like that. She told me she was worried for me, that I had to be careful. She told me you and Agent Warnecki and the other two FBI agents were snooping around, asking her about our affair.”
No one spoke: They simply waited. Gordon sipped at his coffee, unaware of what he was doing. Ruth finally said, “This is a nice quiet place, Dr. Holcombe. I can see how you could view it as a sort of sanctuary, a place where you can be by yourself, away from students and colleagues. Do you always come here alone?”
“Sure, always alone, Agent Warnecki.”
Dix asked him, “What else did Helen tell you, other than to be careful and that we’re snooping around?”
“She said you told her that you knew about my relationship with Erin and some of the other students, that she’d already given you some names but you wanted all of them. She said she didn’t have a choice but to help you. She started crying, begging for my forgiveness.”
There was only the soft sound of Dr. Holcombe’s palms rubbing the sides of his scotch glass.
“That’s a pretty sturdy motive, Gordon,” Dix told him. “Your ex-lover spilled the beans, starting a scandal that might get you fired from your prestigious job, and giving parents an excellent reason to yank their kids out of Stanislaus. I could arrest you right this minute.”
Gordon nearly knocked over his glass. He grabbed it, righted it. His breath was coming hard and fast. “I didn’t do it, Dix, I swear to you. I couldn’t kill Helen. I loved her, in my way.”
“What is your way, sir?” Ruth asked.
“She was my anchor. She knew people, understood them in ways I couldn’t begin to; she gave me comfort and advice. I’ll never forget how I was interested in this viola student, and Helen told me she wasn’t stable, that she’d cause scenes and probably hurt me, so I stayed away from her. A couple of months later, she accused a boy from town of rape.”
“I remember that,” Dix said. “Kenny Pollard, but he had a rock-solid alibi. Seems clear to me now, Gordon, that Helen actually helped you seduce your own students.”
He shook his head back and forth, obviously shaken.
“When you realized she had told us about you, you killed Helen for revenge, didn’t you? That, and you couldn’t stand the world knowing you’re a philandering old fool.” Savich’s voice was so hard, so brutal that Gordon froze like a deer in headlights. Savich sat forward, grabbed Gordon’s wrist and squeezed. “
You will tell me the truth, you perverted old man. Why did you kill Erin Bushnell? Did she of all the music students see through you? Did she threaten to tell the world what you are, want to see you humiliated and run off campus, stripped of your power and prestige?”
Suddenly, the man who’d hunched over his drink, desperate and pleading, was gone. In his place was Dr. Gordon Holcombe, director of Stanislaus, back in all his dignity, his patrician face set in arrogant lines again. He looked at each of them in turn with disdain and a superior’s patience. “I will tell you the truth about Erin. I first became involved with her on Halloween when she showed up at my house to trick-or-treat, dressed like Titania from Midsummer Night’s Dream. She called me her Oberon later that night.”
The expression on Ruth’s face never changed, although Dix fancied he saw her shudder.
“Erin was the most talented violinist I’ve heard in a very long time. Gloria Stanford was convinced she’d be known the world over someday. She had glorious technique, could make you weep listening to her play. The three violin sonatas composed for Joseph Joachim by Brahms—she was transcendent. I was blessed by her company, I reveled in it. But I did not kill her, there was no reason. I didn’t kill Helen Rafferty, either. I loved both of them, in different ways.
“Whatever you may believe about my personal ethics and behavior, none of it concerns you unless I did something criminal, which I did not. Dix, you are the sheriff of Maestro. Everyone says we are lucky to have you. Well, prove it. Find out for all of us who killed two citizens of our town in under a week.”
“You forgot Walt McGuffey, that kind old man who never harmed a soul in his life.”
“I heard about him. You want to lay the old man’s death at my door, too? Fact is, I didn’t know him well, he meant nothing to me. Why would I kill him?”
“His house is on the way to Lone Tree Hill and the other entrance to Winkel’s Cave. Ruth’s car was hidden in his shed. That’s why someone murdered him.”
“I don’t know anything about her car! I haven’t seen Walt in months.”
Dix said, “When did you last see Erin alive?”
“On Thursday afternoon, at Stanislaus. She was working hard rehearsing for the upcoming concert, and we had no plans to see each other over the weekend.”
“But you did see her on Friday, didn’t you, Gordon? You took her to Winkel’s Cave, to murder her.”
Gordon looked like he might faint. He paled, and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. Ruth stuck her coffee cup under his nose. “Drink.”
Gordon was babbling now, waving his hands at them like a drunk conductor. “I didn’t, really, there’s no way I could do anything like that. I didn’t—”
Dix splayed his hands on his seat cushion and leaned toward his uncle. “Let me tell you what you’re going to do for us, Gordon. You’re going to give us written permission to search your home, your office, and your studio. If you cooperate, we’ll do it discreetly as part of the investigation. If not, we’ll get search warrants and post flyers on every tree on campus about the women you slept with, then subpoena each of them to come back to Stanislaus and talk to us—and the board of directors.
“You know now that you can’t expect to keep your affair with Erin under wraps for long, but they might let you keep your job, or help you get another one somewhere, if you tell them yourself. Think about it.
