Murder is an Art Read Free Page A

pulled back into a little ponytail. With the ponytail and the bulging suit, he looked a little like a B-movie drug dealer. The tassels on his shoes only added to the picture. If he’d been carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster, he would have been perfect.
    â€œIf it’s not any of the usual stuff, what could it be?” Sally asked.
    â€œI guess we’ll just have to wait and let Fieldstone tell us that,” Jorge said.

3
    Fieldstone’s office was in the Administration Building, so Sally and Jorge had to go outside, not always a pleasant prospect when you live near the Texas Gulf Coast. In the summer, the weather was generally intolerably hot and muggy, and in the fall and spring, it was lukewarm and muggy. There wasn’t much of a winter to speak of, but it was muggy, too.
    However, now and then a cool front would push through, the sky would clear, the sun would shine, and the air would be pleasantly dry. It was that way as Sally and Jorge crossed the quadrangle to the Ad Building.
    â€œIt’s a great day to be outside, isn’t it?” Sally said.
    Jorge said, “Any day is a great day to be outside.”
    Sally immediately felt guilty. She was just making conversation; she hadn’t meant to remind Jorge of his prison experience. However long it had lasted, and the rumors about that varied, it couldn’t have been pleasant.
    But Jorge hadn’t spent his time in solitary confinement or whatever they called it now—administrative segregation, maybe. Sally wasn’t always up to date on prison terminology. At any rate, Jorge hadn’t been inside a building all the time; surely he had been allowed an occasional walk outside in the yard.
    She thought about asking him, but she didn’t know how to go about it. Neither did anyone else, for while everyone was curious about Jorge’s prison experience, they found him too intimidating to ask about such a personal thing.
    He wasn’t deliberately intimidating, but his size put people off. He wasn’t just muscular; he was tall. Sally was five-seven, but her head barely reached the top of Jorge’s shoulders.
    And it wasn’t as if he’d been in the slammer because he’d been caught driving ten miles over the speed limit on the Interstate; he had served time for murder. He might have seemed more approachable if he had been imprisoned for some drug-related offense, or possibly even something more serious—armed robbery, say. But murder was a little tricky to work into the conversation.
    Like the stories about the length of time Jorge had spent behind bars, the stories about the exact nature of his crime varied. Oh, there was no doubt about the murder. That was well established. But no one seemed to know for sure just exactly what the circumstances had been.
    One story had it that Jorge had killed his wife’s lover. Troy Beauchamp favored that one, and Sally had heard him tell it more than once in the faculty lounge.
    â€œThe way I heard it is that he came home early from work one day,” Troy had said. “And he caught his wife in bed with another man.”
    â€œWhat kind of work did he do?” asked Vera Vaughn.
    Vera was a tall, stout blonde who taught sociology and dressed in leather a lot—leather skirts, leather pants, leather jackets. Sally’s opinion was that if the college ever did a stage production of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Vera would be a shoo-in for the title role.
    Vera also had strong feminist leanings and occasionally expressed convictions that Sally thought were based more on emotion and speculation than on facts and research. For instance, Vera believed that the top women marathoners consistently finished behind the top men only because of social and cultural conditioning.
    â€œWho cares what kind of work Jorge did?” Troy asked.
    â€œIt could be important,” Vera answered. “A man’s self-image is often related to his job. Jorge could