Death at the Alma Mater by G. M. Malliet

Author:G. M. Malliet
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Murder, cozy, soft-boiled, amateur sleuth, Fiction, mystery novels, murder mystery
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2009-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

UNQUIET AMERICAN

Augie was their third American of the night, but he was of a much different cut from the Dunnings of New York. Slow of speech, relaxed in attitude, he sprawled in the armchair vacated by Karl Dunning, but unlike Dunning with his rather precise, buttoned-down, yet helpful manner, Augie filled the room with his large body and his booming drawl. He spoke at such a leisurely pace Sergeant Fear had no trouble keeping up with him in his notebook, although a few words gave him trouble. He’d have to look them up later, back at the station. What, for example, was a pawdnuh?

Now Augie Cramb was saying something about calling his gopher back home.

“I’ll ask him to email y’all a few photos from that time. You’ll see. Lexy could make a dead man walk, if she felt like it. Trouble was, she didn’t much feel like it, mostly. Wouldn’t put out for no one, excepting, I reckon, that husband of her’n.”

“I see,” said St. Just. “Now, w—”

“Cold as charity, our Lexy,” Augie warmed to his theme. “Cold as a nun’s—say, you boys ain’t Catholic, are you?”

St. Just shook his head. “C of E.”

Augie Cramb looked puzzled. Was this one of those wacky cults? Plenty of those where he came from, but what would these two policemen be doing as members?

“Go on, Sir. You’re saying Lexy lacked … a passionate nature?”

“Oh, she was passionate in that arty-farty way she had. Everything was ‘too, too’ and ‘simply mah-velous, don’t you know.’ But there was no beef in that taco, no siree. No huevos in that ranchero. For that, a man needed to look elsewhere. Damn waste, it was. A cry and shame, as my daddy would have said.”

“Are you trying to say she was frigid, Sir?” asked St. Just.

“Ain’t that what I been a-tellin’ you?”

No, you sidewinder. Sergeant Fear, exasperated by trying to translate the man’s accent and vocabulary, was beginning to show the strain. The page of his notebook reserved for Augie Cramb was smeared and blotted with crossings-out and corrections. Here and there he’d added a few stars by the man’s statements—Sergeant Fear’s own system for ranking the truthfulness of a witness. St. Just call it his Torquemada Michelin Guide. One star meant truthful; five meant the sergeant believed the witness was almost certainly lying.

“Are you speaking from personal experience, Sir, or are these your impressions? Perhaps you’re repeating a rumor you heard elsewhere?”

“Well …” and there came over Cramb’s features a worldly-wise, man-to-man smirk: James Bond letting his hair down. “Normally, I would defend a lady’s honor to the death, but since this is her death we’re talking about—yes, we took it for a test drive once, after a spectacularly drunken night in the college bar. It was not a success, and the experiment was never repeated.”

St. Just, wondering if the failure might not have been more on his side than hers after a night’s drinking, asked mildly, “And that was the end of it?”

“Tell you the truth, Inspector, she gave me a wide berth after that.

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