The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

it.
    I wondered how soon I could interview this first-on-the-scene person without being thought too insensitive. I waded in.
    “You must have been very upset, Woody. I’m sorry for Dr. Appleton and I’m sorry you had to see him that way.”
    “I hear things, you know, and I know a lot of people thought Dr. Appleton was mean or stuck up or just ornery. But he was always nice to me, always said thank you when he saw me taking out his trash.”
    What a surprise. “I’m glad to hear that.”
    Woody opened his denim shirt a bit and showed me a familiar Henley College logo T-shirt in blue and gold, the school colors. “He give me this for my birthday.”
    What? I who prided myself on knowing birthdays did not know our janitor’s, and Keith Appleton not only knew it but gave him a present? I could hardly stand it.
    “How nice of him,” I said. “When is your birthday, Woody?”
    “May twentieth.”
    “Like Cher,” I said.
    “What’s that, Dr. Knowles?”
    “Never mind.”
    Woody took my comment as liberty for him to go on about the great Keith Appleton. “Well, there was also that time I was off a couple of weeks with pneumonia, he give me a little something to help out. Not that I asked, but he slips me a check one day and says how I probably could use a bit to tide me over while I got back on my feet.”
    Stunned, would have been putting it mildly. Keith the Good Samaritan? Keith the champion of the worker?
    “He was kind-hearted,” I said, astonishing myself.
    “No matter what anyone thinks, he was a man, you know, and no man deserves that.” Woody pointed over my shoulder into Keith’s office, where that had happened.
    “You’re absolutely right, Woody,” I said, and meant it.
     
     
    When Woody left, surprisingly not asking what I was doing in the deceased’s office, I shook myself into focus. Information, clues, I told myself. You’re here to work.
    I went back to the desk and opened the second of the file drawers. This one had folders with names of students I recognized as Keith’s chemistry majors. I flipped through and saw term paper after term paper. Again, I was overwhelmed with the desire to hide in a corner of the office and read every scrap of what the drawers contained. Now that I knew Woody was around, I felt more comfortable, as if an old man past retirement was all the protection I’d need against a murderer. I was glad neither Woody nor I would be here after sunset.
    More noise in the hallway. Woody was back in the doorway, this time with a dolly piled high with empty cardboard boxes.
    “This should be enough to start with, Dr. Knowles. Dean Underwood didn’t tell me who she was sending over to clean out Dr. Appleton’s office but I guess you’re it.”
    No wonder Woody hadn’t questioned my appearance at the crime scene. “Uh—” I stammered.
    “Except I should tell you that I said to her, that’d be Dean Underwood, that, much as I like my job, there’s just so much I’m willing to do. And goin’ through the belongings of a person who’d just passed in that awful way”—Woody paused and bowed his head, his skinny old hands resting on the handle of the dolly—“well, that wasn’t one of them. So she said she’d send someone over to pack everything up, and then she wanted the boxes taken over there to her office.”
    I cleared my throat and forced an informed expression on my face. “Yes, well—”
    “You sure got here fast, by the way.”
    “I was close by.”
    Woody gestured to the boxes behind him. “I brought these up from the cellar. Let me know if you need any more.”
    Could I pull this off? At least temporarily, why not? “That’s super, Woody. I’ll get started right away.” Before my jig is up.
    The old man dragged the empty boxes off the dolly, one or two at a time, and planted them in the doorway of Keith’s office. I wondered if he’d ever go any farther. Given the small amount of time he had left to his career, probably not.
    Woody pointed to the new addition to Keith’s award wall.
    “I come up here special to hang that new frame yesterday morning. Dr. Appleton wasn’t in yet, but I wanted him to be surprised at how quick I did it. Now I don’t know if he even saw it more than a minute. I didn’t spot his car out there until close to about noon, and I don’t know when he”—Woody gulped, sending his Adam’s apple on a trip along his throat—“you know . . . passed.”
    Noon. The same bracket Virgil had mentioned for the