Watch Them Die

He took her by the arm again, then led her inside. She quickly pressed the button for the first floor. Paul’s shoulder rubbed against hers. The elevator door shut.

“They used real ravens and gulls in that scene, Hannah. Two stagehands in thick gloves spent hours and hours hurling birds at Tippi Hedren. It took three days to shoot that scene. The poor girl had a nervous collapse at the end of it.”

He slowly maneuvered his body so that he was standing between her and the elevator doors. “What do you think of that, Hannah?”

She shrugged uneasily. “Sounds pretty—harrowing.”

“But Tippi was Hitchcock’s discovery, don’t you see? She may have suffered, but it was for his artistic vision. How far would you go for the sake of realizing an artistic vision?”

“I don’t think I’d go that far,” she replied, shaking her head.

The elevator door opened. Hannah brushed past him and ducked out to the corridor. It was as if she hadn’t been able to breathe in there. She glanced up and down the hallway.

Except for a janitor wheeling a garbage pail and two students lingering by the main entrance, Hannah didn’t see anyone else in the area. She caught a couple of breaths, but she tensed up again when Paul came up to her side.

“That’s going to be the topic of discussion after the movie,” he said. “How much power should a director have over his leading lady? How much intimidation and control—for the sake of art?”

“Ought to make for a stimulating discussion,” Hannah said, with a weak smile.

She remembered Seth talking about how Otto Preminger badgered Jean Seberg during the filming of Bonjour Tristesse. He’d made the same point as Paul about a director’s right to unlimited power over his actors—especially a leading lady he’d “discovered.” She wondered if perhaps Seth had picked up that notion from one of Paul’s lectures. Or did they simply think alike? Maybe Ben was right, maybe Paul and Seth were working together, and she was their unwitting leading lady, their discovery.

“You seem tense,” Paul said, placing his hand on the back of her neck.

“No, I’m all right.”

“I give a terrific neck rub, you know. You’d love it.”

“I—I better take a rain check on that, too,” she said, edging away from him, toward the main doors.

“Well, at least let me give you a lift home,” he suggested.

“Actually, I have someone coming to pick me up. But thanks anyway.” She pushed the heavy door and stepped outside. The chilly October night air felt good.

Paul came up to her side once more.

“You don’t have to wait around,” she said. “I’m fine here. I’ll see you in class Thursday. By then, I’ll know when we can get together for our dinner date. I’m really looking forward to it, Paul.”

His eyes narrowed at her. “Who’s coming to pick you up? Is it that Ben Sturges character? I know you’ve been seeing him.”

“How would you know that?” Hannah asked.

“I just know,” he replied. “You disappoint me, Hannah.”

“Well, don’t be disappointed,” she said, staring him in the eye. “Because you’re wrong about Ben What’s- his-name. I barely know him. The person who’s picking me up is a friend of my son’s baby-sitter. His name is Lars, and he’s sixty-seven years old. Any more questions or objections?”

He laughed, then kissed her on the cheek. “You can’t fool me. I know you better than you think. Good night, Hannah.”

Hannah watched him walk toward the parking lot, then disappear around the corner.

She shuddered, and wiped his kiss from her cheek.

Hannah didn’t step back inside the school right away. She waited until Paul drove by in his Toyota. She gave him a little wave, and watched the car continue down the street.

Only then did she duck back inside the college. On her way to the stairwell, she didn’t see anyone in the main corridor. Hannah hurried up the stairs to the third floor. Stepping out to the hallway, she discovered someone had switched off most of the overheads. Only a few spotlights at the exits illuminated the way.

She headed down the dark corridor, past the lounge. The lights inside the vending machine cast strange shadows across the deserted study area. Everything seemed so still. But then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw some movement near the window. Hannah stopped.

It took her a moment to realize the phantom motion was merely headlights from passing cars below. Hannah told herself that she was alone here. If someone else was on this floor, she would hear footsteps. Every little sound seemed to reverberate in the empty hallway.

She continued on toward Paul’s office. She saw a line of light at the threshold under his door. Hannah tried the knob. Locked. “Ben?” she called softly. “Ben, it’s me.”

The door opened. “Are you okay?” Ben asked. “Did he make a pass?”

Hannah sighed. “Mostly, he just gave me the creeps.” She stepped inside, then quietly closed the door behind her. “I never figured he was capable of murder, but now I’m not so sure. Something he said has me wondering about Seth, too.”

Ben nodded. “I told you I didn’t trust him.”

He moved over to an old wooden file cabinet. The bottom drawer was open. “I’ve already been through the other drawers,” he said, searching the files. “Nothing so far. Ditto the coat closet. But I saw some videos on the shelf. He’s labeled each tape Such and Such a Lecture, and the date. We should take them back to your place tonight and have a look. I can return them here in the morning.”

Hannah walked around the desk.

“I tried there,” Ben said, looking up for a moment. “It’s locked.”

Hannah pulled the key from under the mini-Oscar paperweight, and unlocked the top right-hand drawer. Ben smiled at her. He finished with the file cabinet, then circled around to the desk.

They each took one side of the desk, and looked through the drawers. Hannah found paper clips, old receipts, and loose change in the top drawer. Just junk. The next drawer down held old lecture notes, clippings of his newspaper reviews, and a couple of spiral notebooks. Hannah paged through one of the notebooks. She read the start of an incomplete screenplay he’d written, called Love in Equinox. The opening scene was of a couple making love. All the while the man talked about how much he hated his dead father. It was pretty terrible.

“I found his old class lists,” Ben announced, shuffling through some papers. “Names, addresses, phone numbers. Here’s Rae. Huh, Angela Bramford is on this page. I wonder if anyone else listed here died from unnatural causes.” Grabbing a pen and legal pad from the desktop, Ben started copying down the list.

Hannah went back to flipping through Paul’s rough draft of Love in Equinox. He must have realized how god-awful it was, because there were only twenty-three pages. Hannah noticed that the young heroine stayed naked through most of it, and there was a scene with her masturbating. “You should read how sleazy this script is,” Hannah said. “He—”

Ben held up his hand, then shushed her.

Hannah fell silent, and she listened. Footsteps. Someone was coming down the corridor.

Ben hurried toward the door. He quietly turned the lock and switched off the light. He remained with his back to the wall. They listened to the footsteps becoming louder, closer. Hannah held her breath. She waited until the person outside passed the office. The footsteps grew fainter. Hannah let out a sigh. Ben flicked the lights back on, and he darted back to the desk. “We’d better hurry,” he muttered, sitting on the floor.

Hannah checked the next drawer down. She noticed a folder hidden beneath some more clippings of his reviews at the bottom of the drawer. She pulled it out and opened it up.

Several pieces of paper were clipped together. Hannah studied the first page: a montage of slightly grainy photos of a seminude Diane Keaton. The pictures had been taken off a TV set. It was the end scene of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The second page had the stabbing sequence.

“Oh, my God,” Hannah murmured.

Paper-clipped to the montage from Looking for Mr. Goodbar were three candid