Poisoned Pins

Once I’d regained my composure, I went to the portrait and managed to make out the words on the brass plaque beneath it: John W. Vanderson, Dean of the Guzman Center for Law, 1983-. I frowned at this, and then at his depiction, trying to convince myself that I was muddled, addled, mistaken, in the throes of a concussion, just plain crazy. But I wasn’t. His face was distinctive and easily recognizable, although in this case he was beaming genially at me from behind a broad, uncluttered walnut desk, with bookcases, framed diplomas, and an American flag in the backwound.

I made sure I was alone, then sat down on the opposite side of the hall and gazed up at John W. Vanderson, dean of the law school, husband of the Kappa Theta Eta house corps president (whatever that was), parlous pedestrian, and skilled prowler. Despite my efforts to the contrary, I could produce not one flicker of doubt that he was the man who’d stopped in front of the Kappa house to rub his jaw, the man who’d looked down at me from the third floor the next night, and the man who’d only a short time earlier knocked me into a tree and fled. He was the leading candidate for the anonymous caller

I rubbed my jaw much the way he had as I tried to make sense of this, but I might as well have been sharing my secret whistle with him. I understood why Winkie had recognized him from my description; she would have met him when he escorted Eleanor to alumnae functions at the sorority house, or at the Vandersons’ house. Her reticence was more difficult to understand, but for all I knew, it was based on a dictum from National or arose from an anagogic rite of sisterhood.

Clanks, clatters, and bits of conversation from the direction I’d come caught my attention. I stood up, and after a parting frown at Dean Vanderson, retraced my path to the main hail. Offices that had been dark were now lit, and within the nearest I saw a man emptying a wastebasket into a large plastic container, and a second wheeling a bucket into an i

The door of the dean’s office was ajar. If he could prowl, so could I, although I chose to do so with a great deal less impunity. I waited until the custodians were both out of sight, then darted into the office. I froze behind the door, and only when my heart stopped bouncing did I smugly conclude I had accomplished this minor intrusion u

The reception room contained a desk, a computer covered with a plastic hood, filing cabinets, and two straight-backed chairs on either side of a small table with journals and a bowl of mints. The door on the far side was closed, but not necessarily locked, I told myself cheerfully as I glanced at the still-deserted hallway and hurried across the room.

Seconds later I was inside Dean Vanderson’s private office, gripped by a sensation of déjà vu until I realized his portrait portrayed the room right down to the leather accessories on his desk and the diplomas on the wall. Beyond the windows was an expanse of lawn, and in the distance Farber Hall rose imposingly above the treetops.

I willed myself not to compare it to the tiny, crowded, dusty office at the back of the Book Depot, where I’d always wondered how the cockroaches fared in battle against the mice in the wee hours of the night. Beside the desk was a table, and on it sat a telephone. As long as I was in the midst of a crime spree, I decided there was no reason not to compound the felony and save myself a dime.

I dialed the number and leaned against the desk to brace myself for a barrage of outrage. “Hi, dear,” I began as soon as Caron picked up the receiver. “I’m going to be a little late, so why-”

“A Little Late? We are talking one hundred and fifty-seven minutes late, Mother. I told you we had to do our hair before we went to Rhonda’s. I called her earlier to tell her I wasn’t going to limbo if she paid me, and she said Louis and some other guys on the football team are coming by after they go to a movie. Do you want me to walk in there as if I’d arrived on a watermelon truck? It’s bad enough that…

She may have added quite a bit here, but I wasn’t listening; I was staring at a sliver of pink paper visible under the computer at the other end of the table. The color was familiar evoking unpleasant sensations not tin-like chilblain.

“Lock the store when you leave,” I said, hung up the receiver and cautiously edged toward the computer. I was not tampering with evidence, I told myself as I tried to coax out the insidious pink cat. Not one of the police officials, campus or local, believed my story that I’d seen John Vanderson on previous occasions. Therefore, there could be no evidence because there’d been no crime, even of the lex non seripta variety. Half an hour in Guzman Hall and I’d already prepared my first brief, I realized, increasingly irritated that I couldn’t get enough fingernail on its edge to pull it out.

I poked at it with a pencil borrowed from dear John’s leather cup, but it was pi

I did.

“Whaddaya think you’re doing, lady? If you want a computes go buy one at the store instead of stealing it from the college.”

I looked back at a middle-aged man who wore a gray uniform and brandished a mop. His expression was as unfriendly as his voice. “I was not stealing this,” I began, paused to clear my throat, and with more assurance than I felt, continued. “It does look odd, doesn’t it? I feel awfully silly being caught like this, but all I was trying to do was… well, what may appear to be..”

“You work on it while I call the campus cops,” he said, shaking the mop so hard that drops of water rained on the floor. “Every time one of you steals something from the law building, the cops come sniffing at me. I need this job, lady. I’ve got a family just like everybody else, and three kids to put through college.” He glowered at me as if I’d a

“I understand,” I said soothingly. “I have a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s demanding a car at the end of the summer. And the cost of four years of college is enough to-”

“Just stay there, okay?” He went into the front room and reached for the telephone.

I had all of ten seconds to lift the computer, grab the construction-paper cat, stuff it into my pocket, and rush into the front room before he hit the final button. “Wait!” I said as I grabbed his wrist. “Please don’t call the police. The computers still attached to everything; there’s no way I could have moved it more than an inch or so without undoing cables and unplugging it. I swear I wasn’t stealing it.”

He did not appear any more impressed by my logic than he had been by my previous attempt at parental camaraderie. “That’s what they all say, lady. What were you doing? Moving it so you could dust? I don’t remember hearing you’d been added to this building’s crew.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to concoct an explanation before I made my unauthorized entrance into the dean’s private office. Unlike glib characters in mystery novels, my mind went as blank as the top of John Vanderson’s head. “I’m not-no, well-it’s obvious that I’m not on the crew,” I managed to stammer.

“No shit, Sherlock.” He disengaged my hand and began to redial a number that would result in a veritable morass of complications for me.

He was on the sixth digit when I finally thought of something. I pushed down the button to disco