Stork Raving Mad: A Meg Langslow Mystery (A Meg Lanslow Mystery)

use—a weapon now harmless with no hand to wield it.
    A weapon someone else could use for good, perhaps? I’d leave that to Art, Abe, and Michael, who presumably knew Dr. Blanco better than I did.
    I was about to shuffle out of the hall when an impulse struck me. I reached into my pocket for my key ring. I didn’t know if it was an old-fashioned custom or an eccentricity of the previousowner, but most of the doors in our house had keyed locks, even the closets—and all with different keys. The coat closet was supposed to be for Michael’s and my stuff, which was why the entire hall was crammed with borrowed coatracks. We hadn’t been locking it, but whether Dr. Blanco had really been using it as a phone booth or whether he’d been snooping, I could keep him from doing it again. I sorted through my keys till I found the right one and locked the door.
    If Dr. Blanco wanted privacy for his phone calls, he could go out in the yard as the students did.
    As I turned away from the door, I ran into Ramon and Bronwyn coming back from the kitchen.
    “Rehearsal over?” I asked.
    “About to begin,” Ramon said. “Would you like to come and watch?”
    “No thanks,” I said. “Farther than I want to walk right now and I’ve seen a couple of rehearsals already.”
    “I don’t suppose you could keep Dr. Blanco here in the house with you, then,” Bronwyn said. “We don’t want him interrupting the rehearsals telling us how obscene and offensive the play is.”
    It had puzzled me before when Blanco said that. I’d have called the play merely bawdy. I planned to discourage Mother from seeing it. But I wouldn’t have called it obscene. Clearly Blanco’s literary taste matched his rather prim and priggish exterior.
    “He’s entitled to his opinion,” Ramon said.
    “But he’s not entitled to force his opinion down everyone else’s throat,” Bronwyn said. “That’s censorship.”
    “He probably likes censorship,” Ramon said. “And anyway, he’s been pretty quiet since Dr. Wright died.”
    Perhaps Blanco was making a few token protests to prove he wasn’t a pawn.
    “He’s obnoxious,” Bronwyn said, turning to me. “When Ramon or any of the other students speak Spanish to him, he ignores them. Pretends he doesn’t understand.”
    “Maybe he’s not pretending,” Ramon said. “Not everyone with Latino heritage actually speaks Spanish.”
    “Then it’s dishonest of him to take advantage of an accident of birth if he doesn’t honor his heritage enough to speak the language or learn about the culture,” Bronwyn said. “Have you looked at his CV?”
    “His what?” Ramon echoed.
    “CV—curriculum vitae,” I put in. “It’s what they use in academia instead of resumé.”
    “Never use an English word when a Latin one will do,” Bronwyn said with a sniff.
    “Actually, resumé is French, but I know what you mean,” I said. “Where’d you see his CV, and what’s so interesting about it?”
    “It’s posted on the college Web site,” she said. “It lists a lot of awards and honors. First Latino professor on the staff of this college, certificate of thanks from some Hispanic cultural association. I mean, it looked encouraging. We knew Dr. Wright was going to be hard to deal with, but when we heard that the other professor assigned to deal with Ramon’s case was a Latino, we were relieved. We thought he’d be sympathetic.”
    I frowned suspiciously. Ramon had managed to give the impression that the prunes’ arrival was a horrible surprise. But how could that be if he and Bronwyn had known Blanco was assigned to the case—or even that there was a case to begin with? Maybe the prunes were right and Ramon had been deliberately avoiding them.
    Clearly Ramon had done well in his acting classes. Or maybe it was Bronwyn who had been busy gathering intelligence about the enemy.
    “But instead of being helpful, he’s as bad as she was,” Bronwyn said. “He’s nothing but a Tío Taco.”
    “Stop calling him that,” Ramon snapped.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s a term for someone who’s sold out his Latino heritage,” Bronwyn said. “Like Uncle Tom or Oreo for blacks.”
    “It’s a nasty insult and I wish you’d stop saying it,” Ramon said. I got the feeling I was seeing the latest round of an old argument.
    “Even if the guy deserves it? Look at him—turns up his nose on every aspect of Spanish culture—”
    “How do you know he deserves it?” Ramon snapped back.