Read Online The Glendower Legacy by Thomas Gifford - Free Book Online

Square … and also within the spreading shadows of the violent death of young Bill Davis, the Harvard student brutally gunned down less than forty-eight hours ago on the lawn of his parents’ home in suburban Brookline. We’re speaking with Bill Davis’s adviser, Harvard’s well-known historian and author, Professor Colin Chandler—” She turned to meet his eyes, her face bright and serious, the earnest newshound whose good looks he’d admired so often on the evening news. Sharp features, soft brown eyes, a few flecks of gray artfully arranged in the thick chestnut hair swept back covering her ears. He almost smiled, then he heard the question. He wished her an evening with snakes in her boots.
    “Is it true, Professor Chandler, that you were the last person at Harvard to see Bill Davis alive?”
    “No, that is patently untrue, Miss Bishop, as I have just taken some pains to tell you. Bill came to my office on the afternoon of the day he was killed—I wasn’t there and he went away.”
    “Do you know why he wanted so desperately to see you? Why he left word with the secretary that you should call him as soon as you came in?”
    “The desperation is entirely yours, Miss Bishop. So far as I know there was nothing desperate about the message he left—he simply wanted me to call him. Many people leave messages for me and are not subsequently murdered … I surely would have called him had he been alive when I got the message.”
    A small crowd of students paused to watch, pointing, smirking. Chandler didn’t blame them. Two men stood uncomfortably beneath a bare-limbed tree, rain blowing against them. They looked curiously out of place and out of date, particularly the shorter one wearing a checked raincoat and matching porkpie hat.
    He barely heard what she was saying: his anger and frustration at her handling of the situation helped blot out her voice. The students lost interest, moved on. The two men stomped their feet, acted embarrassed at being so attentive to the television antics. Chandler’s eyes moved across the Yard, dreading the thought of any of his colleagues stumbling across this ridiculous charade. Two more men were standing on the stoop of Matthews Hall where Chandler had lived as a freshman. They weren’t watching him, fortunately; inexplicably they seemed to be watching the two men beneath the tree. An image registered in Chandler’s mind: a bald man, with a ruffle of gray hair over his ears, wiping his dome with a white handkerchief.
    “And so,” she was saying, her voice dramatic in the easy way of those who deal with a new horror each day, “the mystery of Bill Davis’s murder deepens and the question which lingers and which must eventually be answered is—what was so important about his seeing Professor Chandler? It’s not much to go on but right now it’s all any of us has got …” A weighty pause, Chandler heard his own teeth grinding. “Polly Bishop for Channel Three News in Harvard Yard.”
    The lights went off. She unhooked her arm from his. She handed the microphone back to the man who’d given it to her and patted away the rain on her face. She smiled at Chandler as if nothing had happened.
    “Miss Bishop, in the last two minutes you have made me see what a reasonable act murder can be …” He felt his jaw clenching involuntarily.
    “Well, that’s show business, Professor. Quick, strong, entertaining … not necessarily intelligent or thoughtful or valid. You should be very pleased with yourself and your little theory.” She picked up her Vuitton bag, slipped tight brown leather gloves over elegant, long-fingered hands devoid of rings, and looked him rather wickedly in the eye. “But the fact of my life is this—we’re the number one news station in Boston. We are reporters, not talking heads … we go out and find out what’s going on. And we don’t just report on murders in this town, or corruption, or scandal, or the mob—we try to do something about it. In