Murder in the Philosophy Department

By Julia March

Who killed Niles Norman, the new head of the philosophy department?

When Norman is found murdered in his office, Liza Ryder, a professor of philosophy, offers the police her help. She's worried they won't take academic motives seriously. And she also investigates her colleagues herself.

Was the murderer the dotty old hippie? The vindictive former department head? The prodigiously incompetent administrative assistant?

Liza is horrified by how many motives she finds. Extortion. Deception. Secrets kept since grad school. Will anything be left of the philosophy department when the investigation is over?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julia March
• Release date: May 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986916946

Julia March

Julia taught philosophy for a period of time. Now she reads novels, writes novels, and has fun with her dogs.

Book preview

Murder in the Philosophy Department

An Academic Whodunit

Julia March

Copyright 2011 by Julia March

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is a coincidence.

Cover design by TERYvisions. www.teryvisions.com

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

MURDER IN THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT

An Academic Whodunit

Chapter 1

The day of the murder was the first day of a new school year. I felt more than just the customary anticipation. There was going to be a new head of the philosophy department, Niles Norman. He'd been hired away from a large, cheap, second-rate university. I wondered how he'd adapt to Beaufort, a much smaller and much more expensive tenth-rate undergraduate college.

We'd all met Niles Norman during the hiring process. We'd been watchful and he'd been cautiously affable. He arrived in Beaufort about a month ago. Someone had learned somehow he'd been recently divorced. At least that explained why he was willing to move to Beaufort at this point in his career.

I crossed a parking lot and headed for Timor Hall, where my office and the rest of the philosophy department were housed. I spotted my colleague Richard Tanner to my right, and I assumed he was bound for Timor Hall, too. When he caught sight of me, he called Liza! and stopped to wait for me to join him. Richard looked more like a praying mantis than I would have thought possible for a human before meeting him. Over six feet tall, he always seemed to be looming over people, possibly threatening them with his mandibles.

I evaded a rollerblader, a puddle of vomit, and an extensive gaggle of hair-flinging girls and joined him. We turned and headed across to Timor Hall. Productive summer? he asked.

Yes, I said. It really had been. I'd finished writing a book and started another, although Richard didn't need to know that. And you?

"I went to Provence. So perhaps not productive as such, but pleasant. So. He turned to me with a look of gleeful anticipation on his normally mild face. What do you think will be disclosed about Niles Norman as the term progresses?"

He sent me an e-mail and asked to meet with me one day last week, I offered. It seemed as though Richard, like me, wanted to collect information, not disseminate it. Maybe he'd still know some things I didn't.

He met with me, too, said Richard in an excited tone. I didn't think this was as newsworthy as he seemed to. What did he have to say?

He mostly wanted to talk about the sorts of students we get, whether they seemed happy, whether we should think about restructuring the program, that sort of thing. I watched a circle of hacky-sack players reach critical mass as a boy with blond dreadlocks joined them. He was welcomed with cries of Dude! and the group moved off the sidewalk and onto the lawn, where the boys began to pummel each other.

That's pretty much the sort of stuff he asked me. Richard was watching the hacky-sack players, too. I wondered if he'd been one when he was a student, forty or so years ago. No, I thought. Probably Richard had organized graduate student softball leagues. Probably with round robin playoffs and sponsored t-shirts.

These students, he said. They were born in 1990. I was already going bald in 1990.

It must have been the dreadlocks that got to him, then. It's a cruel profession, I said. Actually, I wouldn't be twenty again for anything on earth.

I knew Richard was sixty years old because he made a practice of telling people his age, even updating them on his birthdays. I suspected he'd been a precocious child. Once he'd told me for years he'd always been the youngest person in the room and I think he couldn't believe he wasn't still.

Returning to the previous subject, I said, Well-organized, though, isn't he, Niles Norman? During his meeting with me, he'd referred to a little list of issues he'd written down in advance.

Richard nodded. Have you noticed we call him Niles Norman, instead of Niles?

Or Norman, I said.

It's probably the alliteration. Once we get to know him...

I wondered if we'd find him easy to get to know. It's true I'd only met him twice, but he was the only person I'd ever felt inclined to describe as saturnine.

Richard looked longingly once more at the hirsute youths frolicking like puppies on the lawn. Big dangerous puppies, with opposable thumbs and fake IDs. He reached up and smoothed his bare skull. His sleeve rode up and his bony wrist stuck out of his jacket. He said, I know he wanted to change the first-year courses, but he said he was going to work on that with you. He talked with me quite a bit about the tenure process.

We reached Timor Hall. Rather, we reached the mean alley that led to its main entrance. Timor Hall, like most of the campus buildings, was designed in the nineteen-seventies, and boasted nothing so old-fashioned as a front door. Instead, its entrance lay hidden in a poured concrete canyon, and it was easy to miss. The alley leading to the unmarked door was just slightly too narrow for a snowplow to clear in winter. The custodial staff was supposed to wield shovels. They preferred not to do so. The college president worried constantly about the prospect of lawsuits from the students or their parents. He regularly threatened the support staff's union. But in vain. No one who could avoid it went to Timor Hall between January and March. Most faculty members soon learned to keep sand or shovels in their offices. Last year I'd brought in pet-friendly ice melter from home.

When we entered the building, I noticed the foyer had now been named the Certifigo Assurance Foyer. Over the past few years, mysterious companies had begun annexing trivial bits of real estate. Foyers, lecture halls, corridors... I supposed they were trying to establish name-recognition among the students. It seemed a long shot to me—most of our students probably wouldn't remember even their majors after a few years away from here—but what did I know about marketing?

Stairs or elevator? I asked Richard. There was no obvious right answer. The philosophy department was on the ninth floor. The elevator was slow to come. Oddly slow, since it was as fast and bouncy as an amusement park ride once it arrived.

Elevator, said Richard firmly. Don't you remember that e-mail about the rats?

I shuddered. Now I remembered. Despite the college's best efforts, drunken students had recently found their way into the stairwell. Apparently they'd deposited something that had attracted rats, probably food or vomit. Some people suggested they'd brought the rats directly. But I thought if our students could organize and plan in advance that well, they'd have used those abilities to get themselves into a better college than this one.

Richard punched the button to summon the elevator. The indicator light had been burned out since I came to Beaufort.

What about the tenure process? I asked Richard. Richard had evidently lost the thread of the conversation, and looked confused. That you said Niles Norman asked you, I said.

Right. He wanted to know who'd gotten tenure when, whether anyone had been turned down, whether the department's perception was that the Dean's office was, as it were, friend or foe in these cases. Richard waved his hands in a manner meant to indicate and so on. The empty elevator arrived, opened its doors and gave a jaunty bounce. We stepped in.

I always wonder if an elevator ought to be quite so exuberant, I said, dropping the subjects of Niles Norman and tenure. So, Richard, did you have some nice meals in Provence?

When the elevator arrived at the ninth floor, it opened into another foyer. This one wasn't named yet. It had textured concrete walls and an orange carpet. There also used to be a purple metal fire door leading from the foyer to the offices of the department. That had been replaced sometime in the late nineties with glass doors. These were fitted with a key-card lock for nights and weekends.

The department's administrative assistant Kandi had tried to establish a policy of having the glass doors curtained, and keeping them locked all the time, but she hadn't succeeded. Curtains would have been an unwelcome expense for the department to undertake. And even at Beaufort, people admitted students sometimes had to find professors in their offices, and occasionally even attend seminars. Kandi had filed an appeal with the union about the curtains, but it hadn't been heard yet. There was a backlog of union appeals. The figure I'd most often heard cited was fifteen years, but no one really knew for sure.

So the door remained uncurtained. It also remained unlocked when Kandi was in the office. That is to say, between nine-forty-ish every morning and her quitting time on the stroke of three forty-five. Minus her lunch hour—say eleven forty-five to one-thirty. And her breaks. There was usually a group of surly students waiting at the doors.

Richard veered off in the direction of his office, and I headed for the wide spot in the hall optimistically called the lounge. I'd spotted Caroline Babcock sitting neatly on a purple seating unit. This was Caroline's year for tenure. She was one of only two other women in the philosophy department. Since the other one was a dotty old hippie, I hoped Caroline would be able to remain here. Since she'd come to Beaufort I'd enjoyed having someone to eat lunch with and sit with at meetings and papers. I wouldn't call her a friend, exactly, but she was a welcome colleague. I wanted to help her however I could.

She was a small tidy person about ten years younger than I was. A hair was never out of place in her smooth blonde bob. Worse: it never seemed to need a trim, and her roots never showed. A blemish never appeared on her smooth golden skin. She wore a sort of uniform popular with academic women, who'd modeled it after the uniform of academic men—jeans and suit jacket, with a plain shirt or sweater. Caroline's jacket today was brown plaid linen; the shirt was black cotton. She generally made me feel like someone from a rougher-coated and more unkempt species.

Do you think Niles Norman will feel threatened by Ted and try to thwart him because he was the first choice for department head? Ted, I mean? she began.

That sounds like a soap opera. Then I thought for a moment and amended, If soap operas are still the same as they were twenty years ago.

Before Niles Norman was hired, a man named Don Borkent had headed the department for twenty years. Twenty years! I'd often wondered how Don had managed those twenty years in power. I assumed no one else had wanted to do it, and Don passionately had. Still wanted it, in fact. But the Dean had insisted Don be replaced at last. Don had suggested Ted Sobczynski as his successor. Ted had been voted in by the department—if not unanimously, close enough. I'd voted for him myself. Anything to get rid of Don. But the Dean hadn't accepted the department's recommendation. That was extremely unusual, unusual enough to need an explanation. No explanation had been forthcoming, though. The Dean had insisted on a search for a new candidate. And the search resulted in Niles Norman's appointment.

I can't imagine why Ted would have wanted to be department head anyway, I said, sidestepping her question about Niles Norman's intentions, which I had no idea how to answer. Does anybody ever really want that?

The extra money. The teaching relief, she suggested. Caroline hated teaching. From undergraduate gossip I'd heard, she was inexplicably bad at it, too.

I guess, I said. Why didn't it wind up being Ted, anyway, I wonder?

Caroline shrugged.

Do you think Niles Norman will be better or worse for you than Ted would have been? I meant, would he be better or worse at steering her tenure case through.

I think they'll be about the same, Caroline said confidently. I met with him this morning, and— She broke off as Ted himself swaggered towards us.

He was a large glossy man in his late fifties. Even though he was barrel-shaped now, he must have been exceedingly good-looking twenty-five years ago. He had a broad face and beautiful posture. His thick wavy hair was still mostly brown. Caroline, you look as lovely as ever. How do you keep so cool in this heat? I wondered what he was talking about. Caroline was wearing her usual jeans, shirt, jacket and boots. Plus it was an unseasonably cool September day. "And Liza. Tenure for you this year, Caroline, isn't it?" he continued.

I hope so. Caroline actually simpered.

You can't be worried. You're the clearest case we've had in years.

Caroline looked down modestly. Thank you.

Again, what was he talking about? The last person to get tenure had been a bombastic protégé of Don's. He was on leave this year, as people always were in the year following a successful tenure battle. He'd had a very large number of publications. Not good publications in everyone's eyes, but they were publications, and they did add up to a very large number. The last person to win tenure before that had been Ian Asper, and weird as he was, he was undoubtedly good.

I was on the tenure and hiring committee for years, Ted said. Doubtless I will be again this year, too, once we get the committees straightened out.

Niles Norman will value your experience, Caroline murmured.

I can certainly give whatever practical help you ask. Bring your submission to me beforehand, and I'll help you strengthen it. He beamed hopefully at her.

Thank you, she said again. It's so important to have a mentor who can supply the benefits of his experience. Good one, I thought. Both Ted and Don were fans of what they called mentoring, the word they used for helping their friends get on.

As Ted huffed his way down the hall in the direction of his office, Caroline asked idly, Why do you think he's got so much juice?

I don't know. I've always wondered. I guess because he's been here forever, and he's been on so many committees... And the students are said to like him... I'd never met a student who thought he was a good teacher. He taught the same courses year after year. Sometimes he used out-of-print textbooks. He'd had only two lifetime publications. Two! I'd never heard him mention an article or a book he'd read. I'd continued an increasingly vigorous search for any kind of proof he could read. I'd never found any.

There was no harm in him, as people said. He was affable, a great organizer of lunches and a regular attendee at department meetings and symposia. I supposed he was likeable enough. I did suspect, though, that there might be some harm in him. At least, in our department's having a professor who was intellectually even lazier than our students. Still, I was happy to see he seemed willing to do everything he could to help Caroline get tenure.

Traffic was picking up in the hallway. Doors opened and closed. Janet Hubbard dithered past. She peered at Caroline and me benevolently through her bifocals and appeared to recognize us. She dropped down onto a seating unit to join us, spilling her crocheting and a book out of her open briefcase. She stuffed it all back in and beamed at us. Isn't this nice. The three women in the department. We must make a point of having a supportive little get-together regularly this term. She wore Birkenstocks over woolly socks. Socks that matched each other, even. She must have made a special effort for the first day of term.

Are you teaching today? I asked.

Yes, she said. Yes, I think so. Maybe not. I must just check with Kandi. But I do think so.

Caroline cleared her throat.

How do you know what to prepare, if you don't know which class it is? I asked.

Prepare, said Janet, as though the notion was foreign to her. Oh, I never prepare. We aren't all like you, Liza. I think if you let the class flow, you know, just flow forth, you'd be surprised what the students learn. I bet you'd be surprised.

Not waiting for a response, Janet stood, stabbing Caroline in the leg with a knitting needle that escaped from her briefcase, and dropping two books into my lap. I handed them back to her. The Ethical Primate and Love's Fierce Majesty. I knew she regularly taught The Ethical Primate in one of her ethics classes. Possibly she was analyzing Love's Fierce Majesty in her feminist philosophy course. Or possibly it was Janet's elevator novel. The cover pictured a chesty girl in a nightgown, with a shirtless man glowering behind her. I didn't even know you could still get books like that. I thought romances now were all chick lit, featuring girls in glamorous careers, instead of the governess-y jobs the romance heroines used to have. Romance wasn't my preferred genre, though. Maybe this kind, with the girls running away from cranky-looking heroes, was making a comeback.

We watched Janet wander down the hall, colliding rather viciously with Richard, who'd just come out of his office. He set her upright before heading for the seminar room. I noticed a plaque near the door now identified it as the Klecan Fittings and Rings Seminar Room.

I guess I should get going, too. I have to photocopy some stuff before my class, I said. The class was several hours away, but photocopying was unpredictable. If Kandi decided to help—indistinguishable from hindering, as far as I could see, except it was less efficiently done—it could expand to fill those several hours.

Chapter 2

I entered the department office. Kandi was on the phone. She glanced up, looking annoyed. She fluttered a pudgy coral-tipped hand at me in a gesture somewhere between Hello and Don't bug me.

Friends at other institutions claimed their department secretaries sometimes did photocopying. At Beaufort, professors did their own. And paid for it, too, until a payment waiver was submitted. I didn't photocopy much. I preferred to post handouts on my class web site for the students to print out or not as they chose. Most chose not. But when I'd tried to post today's handouts, I'd found my web site had been removed from Beaufort's server. This happened fairly regularly, though always without warning. I wasn't worried. Such things were usually corrected within a few days. As long as the request came from a secretary. Requests from professors were routinely ignored.

With that in mind, I deferentially approached Kandi's desk. It sat guarding—or you could say blocking—the door to Niles Norman's office. I could see Niles Norman through the open office door, sitting at his desk. He looked up and smiled, and I waved at him. Across from Kandi's desk lay the corridor leading to the photocopy room and the mailboxes. I told him I could not possibly find the time for something like that, Kandi was saying into the phone, biting her words off like little sour candies. No... no... there really are only eight hours in a day, but do you think these people consider that? I assumed I was one of these people. I also judged the call was a personal one, and unlikely to end soon. I headed off to the photocopy room.

I found my colleague Augustine Cole there. He was wielding an ornate and wickedly sharp letter opener, battling a recalcitrant envelope. He was a slender elegant man, dressed impeccably, as always.

Augustine! You're looking good. In fact, he was listing slightly. The sun was probably long over the yardarm in his time-scheme.

My last autumn, he said wistfully.

That's right; you're retiring at the end of this year. I'll miss you, I said. Augustine taught medieval philosophy and philosophy of religion. Perhaps as a result, he could be relied upon to respond enthusiastically to any invitation for a drink. His vices were so old-fashioned they appeared wholesome—mostly drinking and smoking, though he also had a weakness for handsome men.

He'd come to Beaufort years ago, after leaving the priesthood. I don't know why he left. Maybe because he drank. Or maybe because he'd lost his faith, or because he disapproved of the Church's stand on homosexuality. Certainly all those things were true of Augustine, but I don't know whether one in particular sent him into secular teaching. Or whether one got him into trouble and forced him into it.

Even so, he could have gone to teach at a Catholic college. He'd have had students there who had a little bit of background in his material. Maybe even a little bit of interest. But whether he jumped or whether he was pushed, I did know that his animosity toward the Church was so great at the time he left that he wanted nothing to do with