Free Something the Cat Dragged In by Charlotte MacLeod

superior’s gnomic utterances. “You mean you know for a definite fact Ungley kept things in that filing cabinet of his. How?”
    “Saw ’em.”
    Svenson took a few more giant steps, then condescended to utter. “Happened along the day Ungley was moving out of those old flats. Last one to leave, naturally. Demolition people standing around waiting. Movers bringing stuff out. Couldn’t manage that filing cabinet. Bunch of panty-waists. Took out the drawers and carried ’em one by one. Ungley having fits because it was raining a few drops and his blasted archives were getting wet. I went in and got the cabinet, shoved the drawers back in, and carried the damn thing down to Mrs. Lomax’s over my shoulder.”
    “The very model of a modern college president,” Shandy murmured. “All four of the drawers were more or less filled, would you say?”
    “Ungh.”
    “Old papers and stuff, I suppose?”
    “Don’t know. Didn’t notice. Wasn’t interested. Too damn glad to get rid of the old bastard. Pest. Bore. Expensive.”
    “Expensive?” That surprised Shandy. Svenson wasn’t one to toss words around lightly, if at all. Nor was he a skinflint about paying decent wages to his faculty members, much less coughing up a respectable pension for a superannuated professor. “What do you mean, expensive?”
    “Highest-paid man on the staff, God knows why. Wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. Squawked like hell at the size of his pension, too. Told him to take it or leave it. He took it. Too damn much as it was, damn it. What did Ungley need with all that money? No family, no house to keep up, not even a blasted goldfish to feed. No travel, no hobbies, no goddamn anything. Wouldn’t even buy his own books. Pinched ’em from the library till Porble got after him.”
    “M’yes, so Helen told us. Surely Ungley hadn’t really held a grudge against Porble all these years?”
    “Why not? Held everything else he could get his grabby mitts on. Still be holding on to his job if I hadn’t kicked him out. Did you know not one single student had enrolled in his course for three solid years before I retired him?”
    “Er—no, I didn’t. Ungley was out before I ever got here, you know.”
    “Show you in the records.”
    “I’ll take your word for it. Yet you say Ungley was the highest-paid teacher on the faculty. That doesn’t make any sense, President.”
    “No. Damn it. Engberg was no fool.”
    Dr. Engberg had been Thorkjeld Svenson’s predecessor, though not for long. He’d been killed in an accident of some sort only a short time after he’d taken office. Shandy wasn’t sure of the details, since that, too, had occurred before he’d come to Balaclava. So it must have been the president before Engberg, old Dr. Trunk, who’d hired Ungley in the first place.
    “Was it Engberg or Trunk who gave Ungley so much money?” he asked.
    “Trunk. Signed a crazy yearly increment contract. Couldn’t be broken. Engberg tried. No go. Hodger.”
    “Do you mean Henry Hodger couldn’t break the contract, or that he drew it up?”
    “Drew. Tighter’n a bull’s crupper in fly time.”
    “That’s interesting. Hodger’s also a member of the Balaclavian Society, which appears to have been the only— er —meaningful relationship Ungley ever formed around these parts. So it’s dollars to doughnuts Hodger also drew up Ungley’s will, if he ever got around to making one. I think we’d better go and call on him, President.”
    “Now?”
    Svenson began veering leftward, toward the tomblike edifice of red brick and gray Quincy granite in which Hodger had maintained both his office and his living quarters since the beginning of recorded time. Shandy managed to head him off.
    “Not yet. There’s Melchett’s car pulling into Goulson’s driveway. No doubt he’s in a swivet to get back to his giblets and gallstones, so let’s not keep him waiting. Besides, I’m curious to see how he weasels out of his original willingness to