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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Murder Mystery X: Penultimate Installment
Mann’s lack of concern threw Kicker into a black mood. Mann told him that the other business, as he called it, was of no account. Kicker should concentrate on the themes, the language, not the biography. But Mann had always in his lectures, even in his books, asserted that a critic’s job was to get to the heart of the matter, to find out what the writer was thinking when he wrote. If the writer was thinking about screwing other men, then what? Is that what Mann wanted him to write about?
Mann laughed. He paused for a moment, looked down at the boy, and laughed until he sputtered.
Then, fatally, Mann smiled, his small teeth yellow and close to Kicker’s face. For a terrified moment Kicker thought Mann was going to kiss him. And Kicker grabbed Mann’s tie and shoved his fist so in a way that nearly pushed Mann’s Adam’s apple into this throat before he realizing the professor had stopped breathing, the tie already cutting into the ample flesh of his neck.
Kicker let himself out of Satis Library with Mann’s key. He left Mann, sitting upright in his office chair with an angry expression on his red face sometime after midnight.
Perhaps nothing else would have happened — perhaps Mann’s laugh and smile would not have been fatal after all — had not a colleague of Mann’s decided to go to his office in the middle of the night, driven by general angst, a desire to get out of his house, and a furious need to find out whether he’d left his silver cigarette case in his office because he certainly couldn’t t find it at home. It was mildly dangerous to leave valuables in one’s office since none of the doors actually locked. As he walked past Mann’s office to get to his own, he saw a sliver of light coming from underneath the door. Mann was known for his refusal to waste anything from electricity to scrap paper, so his colleague assumed Mann was in still in his office. When he knocked and there was no answer he let himself in.
What he saw made him smile.
Mann was nearly dead and would have looked dead to someone less astute than the killer. He looked around the room and saw that Mann had scribbled the words “mad, mad, mad, mad” on a pad of paper recording his day’s appointments, including one with Mann’s favorite student. It was, Prescott was it? How extraordinary. Wouldn’t have thought the boy had it in him. Was Prescott angry about a grade? Did Mann catch him plagiarizing? Not that Mann usually cared about such things but he had thought so well of young Prescott that he might have nourished hopes that were proven ill-founded. The note was folded carefully by Mann’s colleague and placed in a gray coat pocket for safekeeping.
It was only as he was about to telephone the police that his own anger at Mann — who had for years bullied him, tormented him — rose to the surface. He had lived through his first few years in fear of Mann’s sarcasm. He was humble when he should have been defiant, he bowed to Mann’s wishes when he should have made his own heard. He was a better scholar than Mann, a better teacher than Mann, and he had, for thirty years, listened to the boasts of a boor for whom he the utmost contempt. Students adored Mann because he was a bully and a fool; even they could feel superior to his obvious narrow-mindedness. The most ignorant of them were no more ignorant than he. Mann’s work on Melville had once been considered fresh but that was soon after the book was published one year after Mann graduated from Cornell in ’68. But he had produced nothing of note since then, nothing. Books were printed but not reviewed; Mann was no longer even in a footnote to recent scholars. But he still received more attention than anyone in the department. Well, he was about to get some more attention. Might as well make it as remarkable as possible.
Winkie, you see, had published conscientiously researched and well-documented articles for thirty years without receiving very much notice from anyone at all.
Winkie found the body at four and quite a messy few hours followed, but Winkie, hunter and cook that he was, had solutions hidden in his workshop underneath the cold November earth. His thoughts were full of what he remembered of Melville, thinking about all those long passages concerning the body of the whale.
Kicker went back to frat row and slept heavily and without dreams. There was considerably more activity that night in the corridors under Satis Library than there was on frat row.
Posted at 01:41:13 PM on May 16, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
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Previous: Murder Mystery IX: Telltale Hearts
Next: Murder Mystery XI: The Thrilling Conclusion
This is fine and all but I’m looking forward to when Gina returns to writing her usual commentary. I miss her.
— Funofit · May 18, 10:12 PM · #
What I like:
I think it’s good to have someone as ignorant and stubborn as Kicker in the same room as Mann. With Mann as the only evil character, he seems a bit cartoonish, but with another character of the same sort in the story, that evil seems more grounded in reality.
I like that Winkie is the one to cut out his heart as well, only he should not get caught.
What I didn’t like:
Kicker kills Man and then leaves his office. What is going through his head between these two events?
“Mann was nearly dead and would have looked dead to someone less astute than the killer.” This is coming from Winkie’s perspective, but Winkie is not the killer. Or am I just confused?
Winkie is mad at Mann for things he should actually be mad at himself for. He never spoke up or stood up to Mann. Is that Mann’s fault, or his?
— Harry Lime · May 19, 10:44 AM · #
I want more spookiness.
— Hannah · May 20, 01:36 PM · #
MORE!
— sherlock · May 21, 10:04 PM · #