SAFELY BURIED Chapter 25: The Professor

An angry, trembly voice said, “You lied to me. I thought I could trust you.” It was Paula.

“You can,” I said. “What’s the matter?”

“You told the cops where we live.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Liar. You put it in the paper. I read it. Our house was even on TV.”

“I didn’t tell them, Paula. They figured it out on their own. They found the clinic where you went to have your leg set.”

She seemed to think about that.

I said, “Are you home now?”

“You think we’re stupid?” she shot back. “We got out the back door the minute we saw a police car go by looking at the house.”

“Where are you?”

“None of your business. I don’t want that in the paper too.”

I took a deep breath. “Your real name came out in the paper because the detective in charge of the case released it to the press. I couldn’t keep it out of the paper after that.” I let it sink in, then added, “You ought to talk to the police, Paula. Stop running and hiding. You’re just making them more suspicious.”

“We saw Chuck Martin too,” she said. “We was at a neighbor’s house up the street, and he parked right out in front. He sat there all day watching our house. He never left the car. If he had to take a leak, I guess he used a beer can or something.”

“Are you sure it was Chuck Martin?”

“Yes, damn it, I’m sure!”

“When did you see him?”

“Right after it was in the Star.”

“The Indianapolis paper?”

“Yeah. Don’t you know what the Star is?”

“I didn’t know they were following this case.” I should have known though. I was slipping. Too much detective work, not enough newspaper.

“Mom’s real scared. She thinks we’re gonna get killed.” She sniffled. “It’s my fault. I got her into this mess. But she don’t blame me.”

“Where’s Edna Mae now?” I said.

“With me.”

“Are you here in Meridian County?”

“Never mind where I am. I just want you to know one thing. If Mom and me end up in a ditch on the side of the road some night, we had you to thank for it. Thanks a lot.”

She slammed the receiver down but missed the cradle. She slammed it even harder and hung up. Par for the course.

I got washed up and inspected myself in the mirror. The bruise on my cheek was nearly invisible, a light purplish splotch that my beard grew through. The lump on my head was gone. To celebrate, I made some coffee and put an English muffin in the toaster.

After breakfast I walked to work to get some exercise. The bells bonged, sending crystal circles through the air. Two old ladies on their way to church smiled at me as if I were one with them in faith.

I had the newsroom to myself. I got another cup of coffee and dug into the stories waiting for me on the computer. Shortly after noon Edward showed up in his go-to-meetin’ duds.

“You working Sunday morning again?” he blurted. “You must be bucking for a raise.”

“I wouldn’t turn it down,” I said.

He laughed as if both of us were joking. Then he came into my office and plopped on a chair. “Guess who I had a call from last night,” he said.

“Who?”

“I’ll give you a hint—the only one-term sheriff in the history of Meridian County.”

“Sounds like Chuck Martin.”

Edward’s cynical grin turned into a scowl as he said, “He had a complaint about you. He wants me to yank on your chain before you do anymore damage to his good name while you’re running all over town with your ‘wild stories’ about the Good Shepherd Home.” He squinted with one eye. “I detected the tacit threat of a lawsuit for libel.”

Was my chain about to be yanked? I sat back and waited.

Edward continued, “He also said I should fire you for withholding evidence from the police. He said you knew all along that Paula Henry’s real name is Paula Boofey, but you kept it quiet until the state police figured it out and you had to put it in the paper. He said, and I quote, ‘I can’t understand why the paper is protecting someone who may be involved in a double murder.’ He wants your head on a pole, Phil.”

“First of all,” I said, “I didn’t know her name was Boofey all along. Second, he doesn’t know what I knew and when I knew it. He’s just guessing. Third, I had a face-to-face with him yesterday—at two in the morning when he showed up at my apartment.”

“What? Two in the morning!”

I gave my boss a censored version of the encounter, omitting the fact that Martin had broken in. When I got to the part about the punch to the solar plexus that made him throw up, Edward laughed in disbelief. “No shit? You belted him? You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”

“He was drunk.”

“All the more reason not to get in a fight with him.”

“I was on automatic pilot,” I said. “I was half asleep. Then, about a half hour after I got rid of him, a rock came through the front window.”

Edward sprang out of his chair and paced swiftly back and forth as if bouncing off the walls. “That guy belongs in jail. You reported it to the police, didn’t you?”

“I thought about it,” I said.

“What the hell are you waiting for?”

I flipped my hands. “It was pathetic. He acted like a child. And I can’t prove he threw the rock.”

“Report it! Let the police investigate. It’s their job to prove it, not yours. Hell, it shouldn’t be hard to prove he was there. His DNA must be everywhere if he barfed all over your living room.”

“It’s not there now. I cleaned it up.”

“You should have called the police right away.”

“I didn’t want to smell it.”

Deep in thought, he strutted back and forth with his hands in his pockets. His suit coat draped behind him like a cape. Then suddenly he veered out of the office and disappeared. A minute later he returned with a .45 automatic in his hand and laid it on my desk.

“This is for you,” he said. “It’s loaded, and the safety’s on.”

“You want me to shoot Chuck Martin?”

“I want you to protect yourself, damn it.”

“I don’t have a license to carry a gun.”

“Then get one. Or keep it at home—you don’t need a license for that.”

I stared at the pistol lying next to my coffee mug. “Okay, Ed. Thanks.”

He picked up the gun again and explained how to use it. Then he pointed a long finger at me and said, “Be careful. Don’t get yourself killed. I don’t want to have to go looking for a new editor. And if you have any sense, you’ll report what happened to the police. That moron should be off the streets.”

After he left for lunch, I hefted the gun and made sure the safety was on. I didn’t want to shoot anybody, but it wasn’t a bad idea to have some protection besides my baseball bat.

I put the gun in my desk and got back to work. Around one o’clock, a couple of my reporters came in. While I was in the newsroom talking to them, the front door opened and Gary Fromm walked in. “You open?” he said. “Can I come in?” At first he didn’t seem to recognize me, probably because of my beard. Then he said, “Are you Mr. Larrison?”

“Yes. Hello, Gary,” I said. “What can I do for you?” I went to the front counter.

He acted nervous and uncomfortable. He looked less scruffy than the day we had met. His hair was combed, his beard was trimmed, and he had a black T-shirt on. “You got a minute?” he asked me.

“Sure, come on in. We can talk in my office.”

As he followed me through the newsroom, he said, “I wasn’t sure you was open today.”

“We’re open. We have to get tomorrow’s paper out.”

“Oh yeah?”

He sat on the chair that Edward had pulled up to my desk, but instead of looking at me, he stared outside at the courthouse.

I sat down and said, “It’s good to see you again, Gary. How’s your wife? Did the baby come yet?”

“No. We’re still waitin’. They wanna do a C-section. The little fart’s pretty heavy.”

“I bet it’s a boy,” I said.

“Yeah it is.”

“Well, I hope everything goes well. I’m sure it will. They do a lot of C-sections.”

“Yeah, but she’s still scared. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want ’em cuttin’ on me if I was her.” He forced himself to look at me. “It’s on account of her I’m here. She wanted me to come and see you.” He rubbed the bumpy ends of his collarbones with a thumb and index finger.

“What’s on your mind, Gary?” I hoped he wasn’t about to ask me to publish an appeal for donations to help them pay their hospital bills.

“Remember what you said to me last week?”

“I remember.”

“Yeah. Well, I been havin’ trouble sleepin’ at night ever since. One night my wife woke me up because I was havin’ a nightmare. She said I was cryin’ in my sleep. I was shakin’ all over. My teeth was even chatterin’.” His voice began to crack, and he coughed to hide it. “This ain’t fucken easy,” he said.

“I know it.”

“My wife—her name’s Stephanie—she wanted to know what I was dreamin’ about. I didn’t want to say, but my teeth wouldn’t stop chatterin’. I couldn’t stop ’em. I was scared. I don’t scare easy, but I was then. I told her what they done to me—how they took my manhood away. I bawled like a baby when I was tellin’ her about it.” He began to choke up again and cussed at himself.

I got up and shut the door. “I’m glad you came, Gary. You’ve done the hardest thing already by talking about it.”

He made a derisive snort. “I feel like a freaken baby. And I’m about to have a kid of my own.”

“It’s good to get it out in the open. You don’t want to keep it bottled up inside.”

“Yeah. Steph said the same thing.”

“She’s right,” I said. “And it’s understandable that you’re upset. What you went through was traumatic—it hurt you emotionally. You’re coping with it now. You’re healing yourself.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like a piece a shit.”

“That’s because it’s hard to talk about it. It takes courage.”

He hung his head and folded his arms on his chest. His mouth hung open, and he breathed hard through his broken front teeth.

“Would you like something to drink?” I said. “Coffee? A Coke? A glass of water?”

“I’ll take a Coke,” he said softly.

By the time I got back with the soda for him and a cup of coffee for me, he had pulled himself together somewhat. He took a long gulp from the can and belched softly. Then, looking outside or at the floor, he said, “A cop would take me to this guy who had a log cabin in the woods. It was more like a house than a cabin. It was real nice, all fixed up inside. Everything looked perfect. Nothin’ was out of place. I never seen so many books before. They covered most of the walls. I guess he was a teacher or somethin’ because the cop called him the Professor.”

He took another gulp and went on: “The first thing I had to do when I got there was take a bath. He’d watch me get naked and then he’d watch me while I was in the tub to make sure I scrubbed everything. When I got done, he dried me off himself. He was real slow about it. It took forever. He’d touch me with the towel all over. The guy was sick. He liked to hold my balls in his hand.” He broke off suddenly and said, “How much of this do you want to hear?”

“Whatever you want to tell me.”

Gary’s voice acquired a robotic monotone as he described what the Professor had done to him. “Sometimes we went swimmin’ in a little pond in front of the cabin, and sometimes we would hike in the woods if it wasn’t hot, because the guy didn’t like to get sweaty. Mostly we watched movies on TV. First we’d watch a regular movie, like The Magnificent Seven, and then somethin’ perverted, like men havin’ sex with little kids. I never seen stuff like that before. I never knew people done stuff like that. Then he made me do what the kids were doin’ in the movie.”

“What an animal,” I said.

“Thinkin’ back on what he done to me makes me wanta go find him and beat his fucken brains out.”

“Do you think you could find his cabin?” I said.

“I wish I could. It was pretty far. It took a while to get there.”

“More than an hour?”

“Seems like it, but I can’t say for sure. It was a long time ago.”

“What did this guy look like?”

After a moment’s thought, he said, “He wasn’t real tall. He was about a foot shorter than the cop that brung me there—I don’t know, maybe five-foot-two, somethin’ like that. And I remember he talked real fast, like he couldn’t wait to get the next word out. He didn’t look like no professor to me. He had a flattop, and he smelled like perfume—I guess it was cologne.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Blond, real light blond, almost white.”

“How old was he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe forty or fifty. He had a little flab on him, but he wasn’t real fat.”

“That’s a good description,” I said. “Maybe the police can use it to find him.”

“I’ll never forget what he looked like an’ how he smelled.”

“What about the cop who brought you there? Was it always the same one?”

“Yeah, a guy named Chuck Martin. He got elected sheriff later on. What a joke.”

My heart jumped. “Did he know what the Professor did to you?”

“I think he did, but we never talked about it. I never told him. I didn’t want to talk about it.” He stood up. “I guess I’d better go. I don’t like leavin’ my wife by herself right now.”

I felt bad for thinking she had sent him to ask for charity. I had forgotten what she had said to me last week. “You’ve got a good wife, Gary, I told him. “She really cares about you.”

“Yeah. I know it.”

I watched him rush through the newsroom and out to his truck, a clean but dented pickup. Then I sat down and began making notes of what he had told me while it was fresh in my mind. An edgy thrill ran through me. I finally had someone who backed up Paula’s story. I let the ecstasy build, and by the time I finished my notes, I was so euphoric that I couldn’t work anymore. Euphoria was dangerous—there was always a letdown—but I let myself enjoy it while it lasted. I walked home to get something to eat.

When I opened the front door, it banged into the school bell and I nearly had a heart attack. But the manic euphoria went on.