LITMIR.BIZ

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a little remote, more inclined to observe than to get involved.”

      “You mean politically?”

      “No sir. I mean just life. Jack was a spectator.” To say this, here, now, to this man, made Stall feel strange. Did he, Stall, resemble Jack Leaf? Stall had told no one, not even Maureen, about his theory of himself. Tom Stall, observer of life.

      “So, Professor Leaf wasn’t involved in politics?”

      “Not that I knew,” Stall said. Far from it. Jack considered politics the wasteland of scoundrels.

      “We have to be careful about politics, Tom. Especially now.” Connor put his hand flat on the Tallahassee Democrat. On the grainy picture of Charley Johns’s redneck face. Connor looked at Stall for a long moment out of narrowed eyes. Eyes that said, You understand me, don’t you?

      The mystery had commenced, but Stall was certain of three things: Harding and Connor had talked, this meeting was the beginning of Stall’s vetting for the chairmanship, and there was something in Connor’s mind about Jack Leaf, something he was not telling Tom Stall.

      Florida was America’s Vacation Land, and her beautiful beaches, the ring of white sand that enclosed her like a necklace of pearls, were cosmopolitan places where North and South mingled and even the races occasionally came within shouting distance of each other. But, oh God, go inland a few miles and Florida was Alabama and Mississippi with a vengeance. She was a land of lynching, convict labor, peonage, and the bare-knuckles politics that had not changed since Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had served as the first grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan.

      People of breeding knew that you talked about politics and religion in polite company at your peril. Stall had no idea what he was free to say to his president about either one in a state where politics and religion went hand in hand if the religion was Protestant. God help you if you were Jewish or Catholic. In the eyes of Charley Johns and his wilderness tribe, disciples of the Church of Rome were only slightly better than Jews.

      Stall decided to play it safe. “Sir, I don’t involve myself in politics much, except to vote when November comes around. I’ve got all I can handle with a wife and daughter, and these courses you pay me to teach.”

      Connor nodded abstractly as though Stall had just delivered a paean to motherhood and apple pie. In a way, Stall supposed he had.

      Connor said, “Tom, have you heard anything about the Committee?”

      “The Committee, sir?”

      Stall had heard about a lot of committees. He had sat on more of them than he liked. The tenure and promotion committee had been the worst, the august body that decided who kept a job and who had to slink off looking for work with the mark of Cain on his forehead. It was a duty that guaranteed enemies. When this committee’s decisions were announced, wives snubbed one another in supermarkets. One of Stall’s colleagues had pounded on the door of another man’s office late one afternoon, screaming, “Come out, Dawson, you gutless, brainless son of a bitch! Come out and fight! I know you voted me down, and the least I can do is knock you on your goddamned fat ass before I leave this godforsaken sump of mediocrity!”

      Stall had sat in his office through this rant waiting to hear if Dawson’s door opened, in which case, he would have to go out and try to restore order. But who knew? Grimes, the screamer, might have a weapon. And by the sound of him, Grimes was desperate. Desperate men did desperate things. Stall had waited until he heard Grimes stomp away. Dawson, it was later reported, had made his escape by climbing out his window and scrambling down the ivy that grew up the redbrick wall.

      President Connor was waiting.

      Stall said, “No sir. I have not heard about the Committee.” Stall tried to introduce some levity. “I sure serve on a few of them!”

      Connor’s eyes brooded. He bit the inside of his cheek and sucked his teeth. “You’ve heard no rumors. Nobody talking in the faculty mail room?”

      Stall shook his head, wanted to look at his watch, but knew that would be a gaffe. Where was this going?

      Connor sighed, the long breath that preceded climax. “The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee is Charley Johns’s brainchild, though I doubt he has one. A brain, I mean. I don’t know what Dan McCarty was thinking when he let Charley get this thing up and running. The Committee has police powers, subpoena powers, a team of lawyers and investigators, and they’re all hell-bent to root out Communists, homosexuals, and other undesirables in our schools. I’ve been working against this behind the scenes, talking with friends up in Tallahassee, trying it keep these people out of our business down here in Gainesville, but now that Dan’s gone and Charley’s sitting in his chair, well, it could be, Loose the dogs of war.”

      Stall smiled. The president knew his Shakespeare. “With respect, sir,” he said, “what does all of this have to do with Jack Leaf?” And with me?

      “A man came to my office yesterday. I was out. He wanted to talk to me about Professor Leaf.” Connor opened the desk drawer into which he had stared hard when he’d first invited Stall into this office. “He told Mrs. Braithwaite he represents the Committee. He left this with her.” Connor lifted a manila envelope from the drawer and pushed it across the desk.

      Stall looked at the president for permission to open it.

      Connor nodded.

      The first picture showed a man walking into a bus station men’s room. The second showed another man, well-dressed, dark-skinned, slender, with black hair, entering the same men’s room. The third shot, taken inside the men’s room through the open door of a stall, showed the slender, dark-skinned man standing with his trousers halfway down his thighs and his arm raised to the wall for support. The arm obscured half of the man’s face. Another man kneeled in front of the slender man doing what Stall knew some men did. He thanked God he’d never seen it.

      Stall knew why there was no fourth photo, one that might have identified the standing man. There was no fourth photo because after the flashbulb had revealed the lurid pose of number three, all hell had broken loose. Stall closed his eyes and imagined the two men running from the bathroom, stampeding right over the photographer who had caught them in the act. He opened his eyes, looked up at President James Connor, and could not stop himself from muttering, “Holy Christ.”

      “Far from it.” Connor’s tone was grim. “That’s Jack Leaf.”

      With these words, Stall knew, he and Connor ceased to be master and man.

      They became confederates. Comrades in what project, what venture, Stall was not sure, but he knew they were linked now and forever. He tried this: “You can’t tell that’s Jack Leaf, not really.”

      “Come on, Tom.”

      “It could be someone—”

      “You liked the man. From what I hear, a lot of people did, but we’ve got to face facts. And we’ve got to stop this before it goes any further if we can.”

      Stall told the president about the student with the slide rule who had seen two men leaving Murphree Hall only minutes before Jack Leaf had taken his walk in the air. And he told about seeing two men in front of the College Inn.

      “Yeah,” Connor said, “Margaret described the guy who delivered those photos. Apparently, he played football for Miami. She thinks he’s good-looking.” The president shook his head at the strange discriminations of women. “A linebacker, I’m told. Also an ex-cop and a sometime preacher of the gospel, a real versatile type. Carries a badge now under the aegis of the Committee. I’m coming to the conclusion that the two men went to Leaf’s classroom, talked to him, or . . . did something to him, and then he jumped.”

      Stall, who felt now a little more at ease with Connor, said, “So . . . ?”

      “Tom, I want you to look into this as discreetly as possible. Find out what you can about Jack Leaf and about anybody else in the department who might be . . .”

      Stall

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