At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait Read Free Book Online

here.”
    He grinned again. “Who knows? Strange things can happen in the halls of academe. You take care now.”
    Grinning still, he put his hand out. I took it. He mauled my fist again, but this time I gave him a little something in return. In the right circumstance, I can be as dopey as the next guy.
    The grin only widened. He released his grip, looked me up and down appreciatively, and said, “You’re in pretty good shape. You work out? Martial arts?”
    â€œA little origami on the weekends.”
    He laughed. “Listen, keep in touch, okay? Maybe I’ll think of something. Maybe I can help.”
    I nodded. “Sure,” I said.
    I stopped at the Alumni Office in the Administrations Building and picked up Alice Wright’s address. The woman at the desk wouldn’t give me Wright’s home phone number—against regulations—so I had to use shrewd detective work, and the El Paso phone book, to discover it. I dialed it from the pay phone in the foyer.
    â€œHello?” A woman’s voice, just a hint of drawl in it. It sounded too young to be the voice of Lessing’s daughter.
    â€œHello,” I said. “Is Alice Wright there?”
    â€œShe can’t come to the phone at the moment. May I ask who’s calling?”
    She didn’t sound like a bureaucrat, and Alice Wright wasn’t a skip and she wasn’t a suspect in anything that I knew about. “My name’s Croft. I’m a private investigator and I’m trying to learn something about her father, Dennis Lessing.”
    â€œHer father?” Curious, interested. “Why?”
    â€œIt’s a fairly long story. Do you know when I can reach her?”
    â€œYou could call again around four-thirty.”
    I looked at my watch. Two-thirty. “All right. Thanks.”
    â€œWhat was the name again?”
    â€œJoshua Croft. I’ll call back.”
    The library looked, from the outside, exactly like a Bhutanese temple with a lot of windows, one that happened to be half a block long and six stories tall. Inside, at the information desk, I was told that I could find the yearbooks on the fourth floor. I took the elevator up.
    Opposite the elevator doors, behind a glass wall, was a small reading room. Bookshelves, tables and chairs, a young girl in charge behind a metal desk. I told her what I wanted and she disappeared off into the stacks for a few minutes, then came back with two thick hardcover books, the bound yearbooks from 1921 to 1930. The yearbook was called “The Flow Sheet.” Somewhere there’s a guy whose job is to think up clever names for college yearbooks. He may be the same guy who invents the names for hair salons.
    I sat down at a table and started leafing through the first of the volumes. The paper was frail and smelled of dust and of time long past.
    In 1921, there were only three buildings on the campus of the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy. A photograph showed them atop the barren unlandscaped rock, Bhutanese temples of learning somehow plunked down in an expanse of rubble.
    Among the photographs of the teaching staff, I found one of Dennis Lessing, professor of oil geology. He was an imposing man in his forties with a thick swept-back mane of black hair and an elaborate black handlebar mustache. Dark deep-set eyes, high strong cheekbones, a wide sensual mouth. He wasn’t smiling, but then none of the others were either. Maybe 1921 wasn’t an amusing year. Or maybe, back then, geniality wasn’t a selling point in college professors.
    I looked for a photograph of Emmett Lowery’s father. Didn’t find one.
    The 1923 yearbook held a photograph of Lessing and five of his students, just returned from the first of the oil geology field trips, August of ’22. They stood in front of a Model T Ford, their bodies stiff and awkward, their smiles strained, as though none of them were really quite comfortable with this photography