The Door to December

deal with him?'
     'Oh, well, he was a nut, and his interest in the occult was as peculiar as it was exasperating, but he was brilliant. I'll give him that. With a more stable personality, his intellect would've taken him all the way. He'd have been famous in his field and maybe even to the general public.'
     'Did he get Pentagon funding?'
     'Yes.'
     'What would he have been working on for the Pentagon?'
     'Can't say. For one thing, I don't know. I could check the files, but even if I knew, I couldn't say. You don't have security clearance.'
     'Fair enough. What can you tell me about Wilhelm Hoffritz?'
     'He was slime.'
     Dan laughed. 'Doctor... Marge, you certainly don't mince words.'
     'It's only the truth. Hoffritz was an elitist son of a bitch. He wanted in the worst way to be chairman of this department. Never had a chance. Everyone knew what he'd be like if he had power over us. Vicious. Abusive. He'd have run the entire department right into the ground.'
     'He was doing Defense research too?'
     'Almost exclusively. Can't tell you about that, either.'
     'Rumor has it that he was forced out of the university.'
     'That was a banner day for UCLA.'
     'Why was he gotten rid of?'
     'There was this young girl, a student—'
     'Ah.'
     'Much worse than you think,' Marge said. 'It wasn't just moral turpitude. He wasn't the first professor to sleep with a student. Half the men on the faculty would be dismissed, and maybe as much as a fifth of the women, if that rule was well enforced. He was having sex with her, yes, but he also beat her up and put her in hospital. Their relationship was ... Kinky, is a kind word for it. One night, it got out of hand.'
     'Are you talking about bondage games or something?' Dan asked.
     'Yes. Hoffritz was a sadist.'
     'And the girl cooperated? She was a masochist?'
     'Yes. But she got more than she bargained for. One night Hoffritz lost control, broke her nose, three fingers, her left arm. I went to hospital, saw her. Both eyes blackened, split lip, badly bruised.'
    * * *
    Laura and Earl stood at the window, watching Flash and the tall man move down the walk in the deepening twilight. The telephone-company van was only a lumpish shape, all details obscured, as the oncoming night knitted together with the shadows under the curbside jacarandas.
     She said, 'FBI, huh? They won't go away?'
     'No.'
     'Even though I'm aware of them now.'
     'Well, they're not convinced you were conspiring with your husband. In fact, that would be one of the less likely possibilities in their eyes. They still figure someone — whoever was financing Dylan's research — will come after Melanie, and they want to be here when it happens.'
     'But I still need you,' she said. 'In case the FBI itself takes my daughter.'
     'Yes. If that's what comes down, you'll need a witness in order to go after them in the courts.'
     She went to the couch and sat on the edge, shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms propped on her thighs. 'I feel as if I'm losing my mind.'
     'Everything'll work out if—'
     He was interrupted by Melanie's scream.
    * * *
    Dan winced at Marge's description of the battered student. 'But Hoffritz has no arrest record.'
     'The girl wouldn't press charges.'
     'He did that to her, and she let him get away with it? Why?'
     Marge got up, went to the window, and stared down at the campus. The orange light of sunset had given way to the grays and blues of twilight. A few clouds had sailed in from the sea. At last, the psychologist said, 'When we put Willy Hoffritz on suspension and started looking into his previous relationships with students, we found this girl wasn't the first. There were at least four others over the years, four that we know of all undergraduates, sexually involved with Hoffritz, all playing masochist to his sadist, although none of them had been seriously injured. Until this girl, it was always more of a nasty game than anything. Those first four were willing to talk about it when we insisted, and because of our interviews with them, we uncovered some interesting, appalling ... and frightening information.'
     Dan didn't press her to continue. He suspected that it was painful and humiliating for her to admit that a colleague —