Read Power, The for Free Online Page B

know John very well.”
    “Nobody did.”
    “How did it happen? Do the police have any leads?”
    She turned away from the window. “Leads?”
    “Leads on who killed your brother,” he said, watching her face carefully.
    The look of granite crumbled at the edges. “Who said anything about John being killed?”
    He felt like he was in one of those conversations where you talk with somebody for ten minutes and then discover that each of you is talking about something else. But it shouldn’t have been like that this time, he thought. They should have been talking about the same thing.
    About who had murdered John Olson.
    “Tell me about it, Petey.”
    She wet her lips. “I don’t know too much about it. Susan Van Zandt found him—the body—at seven in the morning. He had set the alarm so he could go to Mass and it went off and rang and kept on ringing. When nobody turned it off, Susan went up and knocked on the door. There wasn’t any answer so she used her key and went on in.”
    While she was talking, Petey tightened her fingers around a crumpled wad of handkerchief, twisting the cloth until Tanner thought she would tear it. Her fingers looked thin and hard and scrawny.
    “John had been sitting at his desk, writing a letter. He never finished it. He was slumped in his chair, half lying on the desk. Later on, the police said he had been dead for four hours, that he had died at three in the morning.”
    “Stop it, Petey. I’m sorry I asked you.”
    “The detective said there had been no struggle,” she continued with a horrible, dry-eyed composure. “John hadn’t been shot or knifed or blackjacked or strangled, he had just …”
    “Petey, do you have any friends who might be home today?”
    The starched face nodded silently.
    “Then take the day off and go and see them. Come back whenever you feel up to it. Next week, maybe two weeks …”
    After she had left, he went to the window and stared out, trying to regain his sense of proportion. There was the green grass three stories below, the ivy that trailed up the broken brick to frame his one window, and the small, industrious spider that had cast its web in the upper left-hand corner. Two flies buzzed futilely just outside the pane: the first signs of summer. In a nearby tree, a squirrel chittered angrily at him and on the lawn below, a student stretched out to doze and forget the worlds of Chaucer and Shakespeare.
    There was nobody watching the building, nobody at all.
    He brewed himself a cup of scorching hot, black coffee, then went to class and lectured to a suddenly wide-awake audience that was far more interested in the death of John Olson than in anthropology. He bluntly parried questions about it, dismissed the class, and went to lunch.
    Early in the afternoon he dropped in on Susan Van Zandt.
     
     
    The house that John Olson had died in was an old-fashioned, white clapboard affair that had been built around the turn of the century. It was a landmark the university had acquired in a will and promptly turned into a faculty home. It was set far back on a huge corner lot. Two oak trees stood sentry duty near the front walk while a small row of shrubs ringed the sides of the house. The shrubs were a tired, speckled green, dusted with small flakes of white paint that had chalked and run off the clapboards during the rainy season.
    The interior of the house looked incomplete. A wall had been knocked out between the living and the dining rooms to make one room that was much too large for the furniture it contained. Worn oak flooring showed at the edges of a large, floral-patterned rug that hadn’t been quite big enough. It barely crept under the edges of a sagging sofa by the window and lapped just over the edge of the brick apron of a fireplace that had been painted white in an attempt to make it look modernistic. A black-oak tea table sprawled in front of the sofa, half hidden beneath dog-eared magazines and a square, glass ash tray that had been