The Tannehill Case

Howard Tannehill was eighty-two years old and had been a judge for thirty of them, and he had the particular habit of the very old, which is to greet strangers as though they owe him nothing. On the first of March, at a quarter to seven in the morning, he was walking the path along the Olentangy the way he walked it every day, and a young man in a dark coat came the other way.

What happened next took eleven seconds and was seen, in whole or in part, by four people, of whom the police ever found one. A boy of twelve on a bicycle saw all of it and told it the same way the next three times he was asked, and his account is the only record of that morning that exists anywhere. The jogger with the headphones was never identified. The woman in the parked car had driven on before anybody thought to look for her. The man on the riding mower, a hundred yards off, had been facing the other way.

The young man stopped. He said something. The judge said something back. The young man then took the judge's walking stick out of his hand — the stick being a heavy thing of lacquered ash with the institute's small silver plate set in the handle — and beat him with it, standing over him, on the path, in the open, with the light coming up over the trees, for as long as it took, and then a little longer. He stopped when the stick broke. Then he walked off the way he had been going, unhurried, south toward the university, and left the two halves of the stick in the grass on either side of the body, which, in the judgment of every officer who came after, is the detail that made the case impossible for eleven days.

The plate was engraved with the name of the man who had given it.

By the end of that week the two names had been printed in the same sentence in four hundred places. The engraving on the stick had taken the reporters one morning to the man who had given it. The arrest record — ten years old, assault at a shelter downtown, dropped before it was charged — had taken them a second morning to the girl on Fourth Street. What did not come off either name was the phrase the columnists settled on in the third week: the philanthropist who would not comment.

The police never found Rusk. They searched the loading bay on Fourth Street and found it clean, in the way that a room is clean when someone has had six hours and knows what a warrant looks like. They searched the house in Clintonville, which was not clean in that way at all: Voss had been in it, apparently for weeks, apparently alone, and had received them in the front room with his hands folded and answered every question fully and helpfully, and had wept once, briefly, when the photograph of the path was put in front of him, and had asked to be left in peace to grieve.

Amos read the report three weeks later in his office at ten at night, and stopped at that paragraph for a while, because he had known the man for twenty-two years and had never once seen him cry.

On the twenty-fourth of March the receptionist put a call through to Amos and said there was a man in the lobby with a list of questions about the institute, and Amos said to send him up.

He was tall, he was under forty, and he came in with his coat still on. His name was Cory Lindstrom and he was a partner at a firm in Chicago, retained by a group that had been trying since October to buy the institute and had been told no in writing four times by a man who was now refusing to leave his laboratory.

"I'm not asking about the foundation," Lindstrom said. "I'm asking about the estate file. Adrian Voss's personal instrument, the one your name is on."

"You're not the client," Amos said.

"No." Lindstrom looked at the bookshelves for a moment with the particular patience of a man who has been told no by lawyers before and has budgeted for it. "Then I'll come back with something that makes you the client."

He came back on the twenty-seventh with a subpoena, and this time he did not take his coat off either.