Free Murder is an Art by Bill Crider

record wasn’t as sterling as he led people to believe. At any rate, he’d taken a job at Hughes and never left.
    Jack wasn’t especially fond of either Beauchamp or Winston, but he went over to the table.
    â€œHey, Jack,” Beauchamp said. “Have a seat.”
    Winston wasn’t as enthusiastic, but he didn’t object, so Jack sat down.
    â€œGin and tonic,” Beauchamp said, raising his glass. “Keeps down the incidence of malaria. What are you having?”
    â€œGin and tonic sounds good.”
    A young blond waitress walked over and took his order. Jack knew that to be politically correct he should think of her as a server, but his mind just didn’t work that way. He was trying to change, however.
    â€œHeard about Val Hurley?” Troy asked when the waitress was gone.
    â€œNo, what about him?”
    â€œBig trouble,” Winston said, shaking his head.
    Samuel Winston was a pedantic sort. No one ever called him Sam. Most afternoons, he could be found at the Seahorse, moistening his sorrows. He never even came close to drowning them.
    The waitress came back and put Jack’s drink down on a little white napkin.
    â€œPut it on my tab,” Troy said.
    Jack knew this meant that Troy would be assessing him when it was time to leave. Troy always volunteered to run a tab, and Jack, who wasn’t very good at math, had an uncomfortable suspicion that Troy generally made a slight profit from his friends.
    The waitress smiled and asked if Troy and Samuel wanted their drinks freshened. They didn’t.
    Jack took a sip of the gin and tonic and said, “So what kind of trouble is Val Hurley in?”
    â€œAside from the Satanism?” Troy asked.
    Jack took another sip, a much bigger one this time. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said. “And tell me all about it.”

11
    The next morning at quarter after nine, Sally was in her office speaking to Dean Naylor on the telephone, explaining to him that she hadn’t been able to reach the Thompsons.
    â€œI left a message yesterday afternoon,” she said. “And I called again last night from home. The machine picked up again, so I left another message. But they haven’t returned my calls.”
    â€œCall them again, right now,” Naylor said. “Dr. Fieldstone wants us to meet with them as soon as possible. In fact, he was hoping that we’d have a meeting set up for this morning.”
    â€œI’ll see what I can do,” Sally told him. “But if they won’t answer the phone or respond to my messages, I don’t know what we can do about it.”
    â€œWe’d better do something, ” Naylor said. “This is a very serious situation, and Dr. Fieldstone wants it resolved at once.”
    Sally hung up and sat for a moment, quietly fuming. She sensed that Naylor was somehow blaming her for the Thompsons’ failure to get back to her, and she didn’t like it. But it probably wasn’t Naylor’s fault. He was under pressure from Fieldstone.
    She picked up the phone and had started to dial the Thompsons’ number when a student appeared at her office door. He stood there looking at her expectantly, so she hung up the phone and asked if she could help him.
    â€œI guess so. You’re Dr. Good, right?”
    He was a skinny young man, about twenty, with a vacant look and a baseball cap that he wore backward, a custom that Sally couldn’t quite figure out. Did having the bill pointed in the wrong direction somehow help water drain off the cap better in the not infrequent rainstorms that visited the area? she wondered.
    â€œYes, I’m Dr. Good,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
    â€œWell, I’m in Mr. Hurley’s nine o’clock class, and he hasn’t shown up. Some of us thought maybe he was sick, but no one has come to let us know. I figured that since you were the division chair, you’d