Chapter Nine
“God By Committee”
10:17 pm
November 14
Pascal Chem Building
It was going to be a long night.
Shelby Moore sat in Lab 132, grading freshman papers while keeping an eye on the gases condensing in the test tubes on the lab table at which she sat. She had arrived nearly eight hours before to find a note taped to her lab drawer:
Will be gone for a few days.
Grade sects 102, 103, 104.
Grad Assists should handle classes if not back mon.
—jb
ps. set point of hydrochlor still not derived.
Shelby supposed that she should be glad he only required her to grade his freshman papers. Shelby supposed she should be glad that he did not require her to have sex with him. As far as she knew, though, he did not require anyone—not even his grad students, who were getting paid, for God's sake—to have sex with him. As far as she knew the only person having sex with Jack (as she secretly called him) was Professor Morowitz. Their relationship confused Shelby. It confused her because they both seemed so utterly dissatisfied with each other. Shelby supposed that she could have gotten joy from the knowledge that her asshole of an advisor was having a miserable affair, but she genuinely liked Prof. Morowitz. Thus Shelby was unable to find anything joyous in the entire situation.
One of the test tubes bubbled.
Shelby looked up.
Dr. Morowitz walked into Lab 132.
"I got a note. He said he'd gone to Alaska."
"I got a note. He said to grade his freshman papers."
Both women burst into giggles.
"Shit," said Prof. Morowitz. "He took my only grad student."
"Shit," replied Shelby. "I'm not even a grad student."
"Neither am I. Maybe that's the common denominator."
Another round of giggles. This one approached genuine laughter.
"Have you had dinner yet?"
"No."
"Good. Fuck him and his papers. There's no food at my place but we could order pizza..."
"That would be great. Let me turn off these burners." Shelby got brave enough to look Lisa Morowitz straight in the eyes. They were very pretty eyes. Much prettier than Jack's. And they were the reason that, two hours later, Shelby was not in her dorm to witness the murder that took place three doors away.
•
10:17 pm
A small, decrepit house in Herschberg, MN
Evelyn sat in the corner of a semi-dark room, getting stoned out of her mind. She had arrived approximately two hours earlier. The room belonged to a house that belonged to some friends of hers— mostly drop-outs, mostly leftists, dealers all. She'd knocked on the door and said "I need to chill for a while" to whomever opened it. She didn't remember who that person was. Nor did she care. Someone else had handed her a baggie of dope and she had sequestered herself in a second-floor room that apparently no one ever used. Everyone else had left her alone. She did not care why this was. It suited her just fine.
(In fact, the person who had admitted Evelyn was named Claude. The person who had handed her the dope was Claude's sometime-lover, Susan. The room in which she was obliterating her brain belonged to Claude's other sometime-lover, Jim. The reason everyone had left the house was because shortly after Evelyn's arrival, Jim had told Susan that he had seen a wolf outside the house, and no he wasn't on anything, and should they tell Claude? And Claude, upon being informed of this, had said that whoa, wolves were even worse vibes than, say, monogamous relationships, and since he didn't want any of the former in his house, he didn't want to be around any of the latter either, so why didn't they all go drop in the Arb?)
Evelyn would not have cared if she had known any of that, either. The only thing she cared about was that Steph was really upset because Mark had this thing for Janis STILL, which might or might not have had anything to do with Janis' roommate getting murdered, for Chrissake. And since Evelyn couldn't decide whether or not she had a real reason to beat the shit out of Mark, because after all it was another matter if he was upset for Janis over Jill, rather than being just a jerk hung up on his ex, and because Steph's crying was driving her up a wall, and because she didn't know just how much longer she could live in a place that had hosted a murder ("worse vibes than wolves and shit," in Claude's words), she had decided to stay as stoned as possible for as long as possible.
Which was why, even if she had been there, she would have been in no shape to witness the murder that took place two hours later.
•
12:15 am
O’Henry Dormitory
Albert Feinstein sat at the desk of the Senior Study that had been temporarily assigned to him not six hours before, thinking that the cops and the administrators and the detectives were real s.o.b.'s to tell him first that he could stay in his room and then to decide that they had to bumble around through it some more, searching for evidence which the whole lot of 'em were obviously too incompetent ever to find.
Actually, that's not what Albert was thinking. That is what the Albert of ten seconds before had been thinking when the current Albert noticed that he had used incorrect parallel structure and a split infinitive in the previous thought tirade. The current Albert noticed this because the current Albert was trying to concentrate on the English essay that his bitch of a teacher had graciously extended to Saturday (what kind of a bimbo expects things on Saturdays?!), in light of the trauma she was sure he had undergone. The only trauma Albert had undergone, he thought to himself, was having to write this damned essay on a school-supplied typewriter in a school-supplied cell, devoid of music and proper lighting, because the incompetent s.o.b.'s had confiscated everything else but the clothes on his back and a pair of pajamas. The pajamas, Albert assumed, were for the hours of sleep he was not going to get because of the stupid English essay....
Albert's intense concentration was the reason he did not hear the door open behind him.
The silencer on the gun was the reason he did not hear the two shots fired directly into his back.
The speed and accuracy of the bullets (one directly through the aorta, the other directly through the left ventricle) were the reasons no one heard Albert call for help.
Albert's head hit the college-supplied IBM Selectric. A little trickle of blood stained the essay, which would now, unfortunately, be late.
The fact that Albert was dead was the reason that he never saw what the killer dropped on the bed of the temporary room.
It was a stuffed bunny-rabbit. Brown with pink ears and big glass eyes that stared directly at Albert's corpse.
On the gift tag around its neck, in curly handwriting with a heart dotting the eyes were the words:
Love always,
Jill.
•