Speaking of Death: A Carmel Allen Mystery

By D. K. Quillan

Introducing the sardonic, quick-witted Carmel Allen, a divorced mother with two teenage kids, who barely makes ends meet with her two part-time jobs teaching public speaking at the State College in town and also at the Community College in another town. Raising her kids and juggling the teaching and the commute between the two schools, Carmel gets by on her resilience, wry sense of humor, and an ability to survive with a sarcastic sensibility. When the obnoxious Speech Professor Morris Zeller, who is equally disliked by the students and the other faculty members, is found dead, it looks like an open-and-shut case of suicide. Yet Carmel holds a piece of information that suggests murder but she is hesitant to go to the police because Sheriff "Butch" Rutkowski has declared the case closed. Luckily Carmel meets up with the part-time police officer Wynne Fox who finds several aspects of the death suspicious. The two women unofficially investigate the crime and there is no shortage of suspects because Zeller had so many enemies. Moving in and out of the action are some pompous academics, eccentric professors, scatterbrained staff members, Carmel's no-nonsense friend Eugenia, and the theatre instructor Grant Poston whom Carmel has romantic feelings for even though she's not sure whether or not he is gay. Speaking of Death is a fast-moving, delightful romp filled with vibrant characters headed by the sparkling Carmel Allen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098337476

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Author

Part I: Your Introduction

One

Your introduction is in many ways the most important part of your speech. It is essential that you grab the audience’s attention from the start. This can be done by posing an intriguing question to your listeners.

Harris & Hadley, Public Speaking Essentials, Chapter 2

Have you ever noticed that a fat man dressed up in a quality suit looks like a successful professional but a fat women in an equally expensive outfit looks like a professional wannabe? I notice it all the time. I see it everyday and it annoys me. Dr. Chumley, chair of the department, is huge but he must have a good tailor. He always looks like a chairperson. If he adds five pounds over the weekend, they must rush him a new set of duds from New York or somewhere because his clothes always fit perfectly. Dr. Zeller wears cheap blazers, has gravy stains on his lapels, and bits of Jello from lunch can be easily spotted on his sleeves; yet he can still pass for a professor even on his worst days. On the other hand, dear Dr. Lucille Rowley, a butterball of a darling who makes me feel practically anorexic, buys all her clothes from some classy catalogue company in Montreal (I know because I’ve asked her) and she still looks like a fourth-year Assistant Professor sweating out a tenure decision. And why? Because she’s fat. I’m no feminist but I don’t think it’s fair.

Of course I don’t have that problem. I look like a struggling Adjunct Lecturer because, well, I am an Adjunct Lecturer. I can’t blame the weight thing. In fact, I lost eight pounds between my last two doctor’s visits. She told me, Congratulations, Mrs. Allen. You are no longer obese. You have edged into the category of just overweight. I took that as good news. Some days you have to grab at any piece of good news you can get and this was one of those days. Just overweight sounded great to me. But it still doesn’t satisfy me about this male-female discrepancy about weight and the professional world.

If I were an Assistant Administrative Something-or-other sitting in an office all day, it would be one thing. But to have to stand up in front of a class of young and (mostly) skinny college students does make you feel a bit obvious. Teachers are always on display. There’s no getting around that fact. And because I teach public speaking, I get more opportunities to observe these kids when they are on display. I can’t help but notice the way they dress, their hair, their posture, not to mention their tattoos and piercings. And I have come to the sobering conclusion that most of them are young and thin, two things I am not. If you put them in some pricey business-like clothes, which is hard to imagine with most of them, they’d look just like rising young executives, the kind who wouldn’t be bothered to do lunch with the likes of me. I frequently am too busy for a real lunch so I can live with that. But I’ll wager that if all these students were as pleasantly plump as yours truly, the well-dressed guys would look prosperous but those girls, even in their finest garb, would look as unprofessional as myself. That’s what bothers me.

Two

It is not enough to just get your audience’s attention in your introduction. You must also make it clear to your listeners what your speech is going to be about.

H.P. Bradley, Public Speaking Today, Chapter 4

I was thinking of this whole weight dilemma again recently because I was reminded of my first encounter with murder. I’d like to call it a murder case but it was nothing so official as all that. First encounter is the appropriate phrase, I think, because before that time my only experience with murder was in books and on television. I was an armchair sleuth. I was never very good at guessing who did it in mystery novels because I was just lazy, I suppose. After all, it was just pretend and it was somebody else’s job to do the sleuthing. Just like many others, I thought of murder as a harmless diversion. I would get more upset over something on Animal Planet than a grisly murder on Law & Order. More of my brain cells were used up with Wheel of Fortune than over an Agatha Christie paperback. It was not until I ran up against a real murder that I found I had a slight but genuine talent for sleuthing. Purely amateur status at first, but enough to get me started.

And it was all a matter of weight. Not my own but the whole idea of how much a person weighs and what that means in one’s life. I am convinced that weight is the trait that not only literally shapes us but dictates our ideas about a lot of things besides food, clothes, and the size of movie theatre seats. Obviously self esteem, confidence, and all those other tricky characteristics are influenced by our weight. But have you ever thought how weight determines our idea of happiness, success, failure, and even sleep? I have. And because of that I was able to solve my first murder.

Three

Your introduction should not be too long. Lengthy introductions can offset the balance of your speech. There must be something substantial in your introduction to justify taking up the listener’s time and patience.

Windermeyer & Funk, Speaking in Public, Chapter 1

I mentioned Dr. Zeller before, the pudgy slob of a professor, not only because he comes to mind when I think of this weight dilemma but also because he was the one responsible for getting me into this sleuthing avocation.

No one liked Morris Zeller, neither the students nor his colleagues. He tormented the students in his classes, made unreasonable demands, and enjoyed the power he had over them. One of the reasons I got my job in the Department of Speech Communications was because Zeller was such a dreadful public speaking instructor. He told all the girls not to dress like sluts and he suggested to all the African American students that they needed speech therapy. Since Zeller was tenured, they couldn’t get rid of him but the department took away all his SPH 100 classes before enrollment nose-dived. Instead he was foisted on the speech rhetoric majors and I was hired to teach public speaking.

The other faculty members loathed Zeller but, since he had no power over them except to be annoying at department and committee meetings, he was more of a joke than a threat. He responded in kind, bad-mouthing all the faculty in his department to whomever would listen. No one would listen except the Adjuncts like myself. What choice did we have?

Come in my office, he told me one Wednesday about a month into the spring semester. You’ve got to see this!

Morris Zeller tended to breathe heavily because of his weight and the air would pass through his crooked teeth and make a whistling sound as he huffed and puffed up the stairs to his office. I started to explain that I had to be on my way to get to my class at another school thirty miles away (a typical Adjunct situation) but he ignored me and plowed on. For someone with a PhD in speech and rhetoric, he was not a good listener. I was not curious about what he had to show me. I knew it would be just another student essay with unintentionally funny mistakes that he loved to share. All teachers do this, even the nice ones. I think it’s a kind of release of tension or something. I recall a time I couldn’t wait to show my colleagues the test answer in which the student wrote, The purpose of an introduction is to completely arouse the audience. Yet Zeller’s gleeful and malicious enjoyment of his students’ supposed stupidity did not relieve tension. It created an uneasy feeling in me and I dreaded these little confidences.

When we got to his office he shut the door then went over to his desk. Zeller was in his usual dark blazer decorated with food stains. His white shirt was off-white with age and his tie, which was once a shiny blue, was now a dull grey. As he leaned over his desk, I swear I saw gravy stains on the back of his jacket. Maybe it was just the way the light was hitting the dust on his shoulder. Zeller found what he was looking for and turned to me doing some kind of pixie pirouette.

See this? he asked me eagerly. Not a word to anyone. Not yet. Read it!

It was not the work of a student but a typed letter with a very fancy letterhead. To this day I have tormented my brain to try and remember more details about that letter. It was from the Society of Something or Other having to do with rhetoric, it was from Great Britain because the word check was spelled cheque, and it was addressed to Dr. Morris Zeller at Brighton State College. I barely got past we are pleased to inform you before Zeller grabbed the letter from my hand and read part of it aloud.

The committee was very impressed with your proposal and are pleased to award you a grant of 20,000 U.S. dollars for the project!

I had never seen the old windbag so overjoyed.

That’ll show those morons!

The morons were his disapproving colleagues. He never referred to them as anything else.

That’s wonderful news, Morris! I was actually a little happy for the sweating, whistling creature. What is this project that they –?

The adverse influence of regional dialect on rhetoric –! Oh, what does it matter! It’s mine! $20,000! And it was the same proposal the college’s half-witted grants committee turned down just last fall! Wait until the morons hear about this!

I knew there would be no living with Zeller after this. He’ll rub it in every time he encounters one of the morons. I almost felt sorry for them.

Have you told Dr. Chumley yet?

Not until tomorrow’s department meeting. I’ll tell them all at once and watch their stupid faces. That’s worth even more than the $20,000!

He was really quite ugly when he was so happy. I’d never noticed it before.

Not a word to anyone before tomorrow. Understand?

Sure. Not a soul.

Even if I wanted to spread such cheerless news around the department, I wouldn’t have the opportunity. I had to be on the road within five minutes if I wanted to get to CCCC in time for my two o’clock class. I wouldn’t be back on this campus again until Friday, the day after the department meeting.

Having had the opportunity of sharing his triumphant little secret with someone, Zeller lost interest in me and I was able to sneak away. I was glad Adjuncts were not required at department meetings because it was going to be the kind of unpleasant experience I could do without.

I thought little of Morris Zeller during my drive to the community college and by the time I got through my class there I had pretty much forgotten all about him and his big fat grant. On Thursday afternoon I had to have two new tires put on the Honda and I thought of how $20,000 would certainly come in handy. When I was correcting papers that night I must have momentarily wondered how the meeting went but knew I would hear all about it the next day when I went back on the Brighton campus to teach my two morning classes.

Friday morning I bought a local newspaper when I stopped to get gas and couldn’t help noticing Morris Zeller’s photo on the front page. I supposed a $20,000 grant warranted a front page story in our little daily (except Sunday) paper, the Brighton Beagle. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It seemed that Morris Zeller, Professor of Speech and Rhetoric at Brighton State College, had committed suicide on Wednesday night.

I was, as you can imagine, completely aroused.

Part II: The Body of Your Speech

One

If you are using any terms that may not be familiar to your audience, it is best to define them at the beginning of the body of your speech. It is very frustrating for a listener if a word or term is used repeatedly and one is not sure what it means.

Alden, Smith, Crouch & Smith, Public Speaking, Chapter 6

As I said, I am an Adjunct. My friend Eugenia, who is also an Adjunct, says it means the college adds junk to its faculty, meaning cheap labor. (She’s African American and it’s funnier when she says it.) Not that Eugenia and I consider ourselves junk, but sometimes we feel like the college thinks we are. Adjuncts are the economic backbone of the American Higher Education system. About two-thirds of the faculty for many colleges and universities is made up of us Adjuncts. We are part-time instructors with low pay, no tenure, few benefits, and precious little security. An Adjunct teaching three courses will make about one third of the salary of a full-time faculty member who teaches the same number of classes. You can see why the budget office loves us. When money is tight – and I can’t recall a time when it wasn’t – Adjuncts are crucial. A full professor retires and instead of replacing him or her, the college hires three Adjuncts for the same amount of money. If the retiree is an expensive old male from the healthy days of yore, they can hire five Adjuncts. When times get really bad, the college can fire any or all Adjuncts because they have no continuing contract and no union can stop them. But the administration rarely does that. We are such a good bargain that they can’t get along without us.

To be fair, Adjuncts usually do not have the same responsibilities as full-timers. We usually don’t have advisees, are not required to attend department meetings, are not allowed to serve on most committees, and – thank goodness! – are not expected to publish. Having been to a few department meetings, I can say that being excluded is a definite perk. But if I were paid three times as much I would be willing to put up with them.