Free A Rare Murder In Princeton by Ann Waldron Page A

George and see about Chester, but Dodo sounded odd. “Sure, come on over,” she said.
    Dodo said she’d be there in minutes. McLeod tidied up her desk—she thought she had better do this since she couldn’t close a door to hide the clutter—and decided she’d lock all the student papers in the file cabinet with the mysterious objects from the carton of dresses. The world seemed to have gone mad.

Eleven

    DODO WESTCOTT ARRIVED, looking somewhat worn, her cherry-colored suit rumpled and her face tired and lined.
    McLeod met her downstairs and suggested they sit in the glassed-in sunporch since her office was so spartan and so open. It was close to five o’clock and the staff was leaving Joseph Henry House as McLeod and Dodo settled on a sofa. Frieda, the dark-haired, dark-eyed secretary, poked her head in the sun parlor door to explain that the doors were on automatic locks. “Just make sure the door you use is closed tight when you leave, McLeod.” She paused and declaimed dramatically: “ ‘O, it’s broken the lock and splintered the door . . . Their boots are heavy on the floor.’ ” In a more normal voice, she said, “That’s from Auden. Of course, we hope no one will break the locks, but at least we can lock the doors, can’t we?”
    McLeod promised to close the door tightly, and turned her full attention to Dodo.
    “This is nice of you to stay and talk to me. I’m terribly upset by what happened today . . .”
    McLeod agreed that murder was unsettling.
    “You see, I thought the world of Philip Sheridan,” said Dodo. “He was such a gentleman. There’s no other word for it. And he was so generous to the Friends . . .”
    McLeod noted that just a little while ago Dodo had not thought Philip Sheridan was so terribly generous, when he turned down her request for champagne for the Friends’ dinner, but she had apparently decided not to speak ill of the dead again.
    Dodo continued, “I don’t know what we’ll do without him. I can’t imagine who would want to kill him, can you?”
    “No, I can’t, but then I don’t know anything about him, really. I presume he did get along with everybody at the library.”
    “Of course he did. He was a towering figure. Everybody adored him. That’s what I tried to tell all those policemen. We all looked up to him.” Dodo paused and looked at her scarlet fingernails a long time. McLeod looked at them, too, and wished she could manage to find time to get regular manicures and keep her nails long and red. How did other women do it? She had never been able to accomplish this simple feat. “Well, nearly everybody adored him, that is. There was one exception, of course.”
    McLeod wondered where all this was going. “Who was the exception?” she asked.
    “Chester.”
    “Really?”
    “Chester and Philip had some terrible quarrels.”
    “That’s amazing,” said McLeod. “I’d say that if anybody adored Philip Sheridan, it was Chester Holmes.”
    “Of course, in a way, he adored him. But don’t they always say it’s the spouse who does the murder. Well, Chester wasn’t his spouse, but you know what I mean. People like that—those relationships—are always charged with such tension. Those people are always so sort of unbalanced—”
    “Philip Sheridan, unbalanced?” said McLeod. “Dodo, be sensible. Think about it. Were they emotionally involved ? I got the impression that Chester was a faithful apprentice figure.”
    “He must have been more than that,” said Dodo.
    “He was good at the work he did at the library, wasn’t he?” said McLeod. “And it must have been a great help to Philip Sheridan at his age to have a young person living at the house. They weren’t inseparable.”
    “I know, but don’t you think Chester maybe wanted them to be inseparable? If Philip had found somebody else, wouldn’t Chester have gone berserk?”
    “Did Philip find somebody else?”
    “He must have. What else would make Chester kill him?”
    McLeod shook