by Lev Raphael
It was Angie Sandoval, looking as cheerful and relaxed as always. “I was visiting a friend in a dorm across the street,” she chirped. “Then I saw the Campus Police cars outside and I just knew I had to come over. Is it true there’s been a possible murder? Wow!”
Angie was a Criminal Justice major, and last year she had explained to me the role of the Campus Police, as well as putting me in touch with the county Medical Examiner when I had some questions about the death of my office mate.
“So can I help?”
“Help with what?”
“The investigation! God, you have such an exciting life!”
“Angie, I’m really tired tonight. Why don’t we talk about this some other time?”
“Cool! I’ll look for you tomorrow,” she said, bounding off.
When I got home, I was almost too tired to feel a sense of relief. The whole evening seemed like a nightmare fever that was creeping over me, blurring my thoughts, weighing down my arms and legs. Yet I was still able to take some dim pleasure from our tree-lined street and our lovely house.
Letting myself in, I found lights on everywhere. Stefan had fallen asleep on the blue and gold living room couch with the radio tuned to a local jazz station. Ella was singing “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” With her crystal-clear voice gently filling the room, it moved me that Stefan had waited up. Stefan has the craggy good looks of Ben Cross, the actor who played the Jewish runner in Chariots of Fire. I studied his face now, marveling at my fortune in having found not just a lover or partner twelve years ago, but a soul mate.
I sat on the edge of the couch and Stefan shifted a bit, muttering “Wha—”
I took his hand and then dropped it, remembering how I’d checked for Chloe DeVore’s pulse. Would I ever forget the feel of her wrist?
“Stefan.”
He opened his eyes and smiled as warmly as if I’d been gone a very long time.
“There’s been a death at the conference,” I said.
Stefan pulled himself up, alarmed. “Who?”
“Chloe DeVore.”
“Are you kidding? Nick, don’t joke about something like that.”
I shook my head. “It’s true. Detective Valley was there, with a bunch of campus cops, and he questioned me, and—”
“You’re serious. Are you okay?”
“This conference is a disaster.”
I recounted everything that had happened from the reception on wards, including all the odd reactions to Chloe’s entrance after her argument with Vivianne, and ending with the bizarre keynote speeches. It all seemed so sinister now, the prelude to ineluctable death.
“And I can’t believe I had to be around Valley. He’s so creepy. I don’t think I noticed it before, but he looks like an alien.”
Stefan frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s his eyes. I mean, his skin is milky white, even with the freckles, and that makes his eyes just look too dark, like they’re not really eyes but something dead or inhuman. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
“You have to stop watching The X-Files.”
“You think I’m being silly.”
“Nick, you’re beyond silly. There’s no word to describe what you are.”
I smiled. There was something oddly comforting in his assessment. But the smile didn’t last, because Stefan asked me to explain how I knew so much about what Valley asked Vivianne and everyone else.
“I sat in on the questioning.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
It suddenly struck me that he was right. “Valley said he wanted me there because I was co-chair of the conference. No, that wasn’t it—it was because of the bibliography, and my knowing all about Wharton scholarship.”
“Nick. Priscilla hasn’t written about Wharton. Neither has Serena, or the Gillians….”
“I’m a moron! He wanted to keep his eyes on me.” I moaned. “I bet he thinks I did it! Why didn’t I see that! Of course he suspects me!”
Stefan shook his head, either at my having been fooled or at my wild speculations. “I suppose you could ask him,” he suggested mildly. “Ask him what he was up to.” Then, almost to himself, he added, “Valley probably wouldn’t tell you.”
“I’m such a shmuck! I was like a little kid riding on a fire engine! I was flattered and excited that I got to watch him do his Perry Mason thing, but it was just a setup.”
“Maybe,” Stefan pointed out. “Maybe not.” He went off to the dining room to pour us both some Mandarin Napoleon, which we’d brought back from our last trip to Paris. Mixed with tonic water, the tangy orange-flavored liqueur perked us both up, and we sat side-by-side, considering Chloe’s death long into the night.
“What was the argument about?” Stefan asked, frowning. “Between Chloe and Vivianne?”
I reminded him that the brawl was in French, which I couldn’t follow at high speed or at high volume. This was a sore point for me, since I had grown up hearing French but had resisted speaking it. Stefan, with his perfect accent in French, consistently charmed my parents, and while the three of them made their elegant twists and turns on the conversational dance floor, I was the perpetual wallflower.
“But why would anyone want to kill Chloe?” I asked. “What’s she got to do with the rivalry between the two Wharton societies?”
“You think that’s what’s going on?”
“Stefan, they hate each other, they’re on the same campus together, and someone’s dead. Of course that has to be what’s going on.”
Stefan shook his head. “Academics are cowards, for the most part.”
“And cowards have never killed anyone?”
“If Chloe was murdered,” Stefan said firmly, “Vivianne did it. She must have been the one to decide they’d come to the conference. What other reason would there be? They don’t write about Wharton, you said so yourself.”
“So she brought Chloe to SUM to kill her, and then what?”
“She’s planning to blame Priscilla, because all that mess with Priscilla, Chloe, and Vivianne is bound to leak out.”
I disagreed. “That’s much too tortured an explanation. Vivianne’s no dummy. She could have figured out a way to kill Chloe in France, couldn’t she? And besides, I told you, it was almost like Vivianne was protecting Priscilla! I was there—I heard it.”
“Why would Vivianne be concerned about Priscilla? That doesn’t make any sense.”
He had a good point.
Stefan asked me who I suspected.
I didn’t like saying it, but this was Stefan I was talking to, so I didn’t hold back. “I think Priscilla probably did it. Look at how freaked out she was when the body was discovered. And you know how much she’s felt that Chloe’s this kind of curse she can’t shake. I can’t even count all the times that Priscilla’s complained about how famous Chloe was, and how she didn’t deserve it. I just wonder—”
“What?”
“Well, what am I going to do when Valley starts probing deeper into how Priscilla felt about Chloe, and why? What do I do if he really pushes me?”
“You’ll tell the truth,” Stefan warned.
I WOKE BEFORE the alarm, and before Stefan. I took my coffee out onto the sunroom, which is a very hopefully named room since Michiganapolis is the second cloudiest city in the country. It’s got something to do with where we’re situated in relation to Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, I think. But whatever the case, flying into the Michiganapolis airport, you invariably descend through thickening layers of clouds. This morning was typical, though it looked as if the sun might possibly burn through enough to make the day just partly cloudy.
Stretching along the back of the house, the large, long sunroom had become my favorite place at home. When we moved in, it was just a ratty screen porch, but with a beautiful floor of gray slate tiles. We had the porch enclosed, painted, and replaced the screens with large picture windows and two sliding doors, connecting the room to the heat and the central air-condi
tioning so we could use it comfortably year-round. Now it was hung with baskets of grape ivy and dotted with ferns on English-style plant stands. The couch, chairs, and glass-topped tables were solid and comfortable wicker, and the colors of the area rug, blinds, and cushions here were the same blue and gold as in the adjoining living room.
What I most enjoyed was the view of our large backyard with its lovely garden bisected by brick walks leading to and from the little gazebo, and the herb garden edged with miniature roses. I can’t take credit for the garden—that was planted and designed by the previous owners, and a wonderful bonus when we bought the house. It was too cool yet this morning to open the sliding doors and let in the spring air, but even with them closed, I could hear the peaceful cooing of the mourning doves.
The first time my parents had seen the house, they’d been impressed by its size, but found the whole prized faculty neighborhood north of campus too quiet. “So many trees,” my mother had whispered to my father, clearly longing to be back in New York, where trees apparently knew their place and kept themselves more inconspicuous.
Stefan and I had driven my parents around Michiganapolis, pointing out the gold-domed capitol and anything else that could pass for a landmark, unsuccessfully trying to get them to appreciate our unpretentious but beautiful little college town with its attractive homes on clean and pleasant streets.
I didn’t win any points either by trying to demonstrate that Michiganapolis was in its own way as easy to figure out as Manhattan’s grid. Michigan Avenue ran east from the capitol into the suburbs, with the university spreading south of it and faculty, professionals, and students living north. West, north, and south of the capitol and what passed for downtown were factories, middle- and working-class neighborhoods, with strip malls lining the major north-south roads and the gigantic Capital City Mall sitting athwart Michiganapolis’s western border like a brooding medieval fortress. The Michigan River ran roughly south of Michigan Avenue, parallel to it, and from the air, it all seemed well laid out.
My parents kept saying yes and nodding at our tour guide comments, but it was as if we were speaking a language they didn’t know and they were merely being agreeable. Their distance was even greater when we drove them across SUM’s verdant huge campus. We hit them with what I thought were impressive statistics: the campus’s nearly six thousand acres were traversed by fifty miles of road and 150 miles of walkway.
But they just listened to that. From the turreted sandstone buildings dating back to the 1850s to the enormous fields of experimental crops stretching from the campus’s southern edge back into SUM’s entirely agricultural past, none of it registered with my parents. Their polite murmurs seemed almost a way of keeping themselves from saying, “Surely there’s more?”
My parents clearly considered my life and my home in Michiganapolis pretty but dull, just as they thought my teaching career wasn’t very stimulating to even think about. When I told my mother years ago that I wanted to teach composition, she crinkled her nose. “Why teach the masses to write better? What will they write after college? Shopping lists? Birthday cards?”
Becoming a bibliographer hadn’t added any luster to my image for them. They clearly considered doing a bibliography as little more than intellectual accounting. I know both of them would have preferred me to have branched into something flashier. How on earth was a bibliographer going to ignite any sparks, or be amusing?
I did have in my favor the fact that Edith Wharton had lived in France and had three homes there, and so was a suitably sophisticated writer to work on, but that was counterbalanced by the bibliography itself. I’ll never forget the way my mother leafed through its earnest dull pages bristling with numbers and cross-references, thoughtfully stroking the brown library binding. “No photographs,” she observed.
“It’s not a biography,” I said.
She nodded. “No, of course not.”
My mother had helped me with the French accents and some difficult translations, but she didn’t seem at all pleased when I pointed out her name on the acknowledgments page. She held the book out as if she were a diva wanly fingering a lover’s bouquet that had faded before she’d had a chance to enjoy it.
My father was the director and part-owner of a very old, very fine, small New York publishing house and so I suppose my mother took for granted the gorgeously designed and produced art books that graced his catalogue. In comparison, my bibliography looked like some improving text printed by missionaries. I don’t even think that hearing that their boring son was hosting a conference which had started with a suspicious death would make much of a difference in how they thought of me. When I’d recounted the chaos I’d been involved in on campus the previous year, my father had said a bit disdainfully, “It sounds like that idiotic TV program, Rescue Seven-eleven.”
“That’s ‘Rescue Nine-one-one,’” my mother corrected, amused.
“Why are you smiling?” Stefan asked now from the doorway.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“A minute or two.”
I smiled even more broadly, enjoying the warmth in his eyes. I often found him looking at me, drinking me in. Stefan’s gaze had a touch of rueful surprise, as if he couldn’t believe he had risked ruining our relationship. It was gratifying to feel admired and wanted again, but sometimes his appreciation had the opposite effect, reminding me of how much he had hurt me. Luckily that wasn’t the case this morning.
Stefan was wearing the black silk robe I’d bought him for his birthday, and he looked very tousled and sexy. I told him I’d made some coffee, and he nodded. “I’ll get some after I shower.”
He came to sit by me.
“You don’t need a shower—you smell fine,” I said. And he did. His natural odor was fresh and vernal, like grass cuttings. He crossed his bare legs at the ankle, his high-arched feet as beautiful as an angel’s in a Renaissance fresco.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Stefan asked sympathetically.
“I can’t remember anything specific from my dreams, but they were epic. Crammed with people and full of disaster. Kind of a mix of War and Peace and Towering Inferno.”
Stefan smiled gently.
“No symbols to analyze,” I said. “It was all right there in front of me.”
Stefan nodded. “Remember what your cousin Sharon said once? That the things you dread never happen—it’s always something different, and most of the time, it’s something worse.”
“I wish she were here.” Sharon’s practically my sister, and always supportive in a crisis. I couldn’t even call her now, since she was traveling up the Yangtze River on a two-week holiday. “She’s so sensible.”
“And I’m not?”
I met Stefan’s eyes, and he looked away, embarrassed at the unspoken reference to his crazy behavior last year. For years I’d thought of him as stable and calm, and so when I suddenly learned that he was attracted to an ex-lover, and had helped that ex get a job at SUM, I was betrayed not just by him but by my own faith in his steadiness. After it was all over, I’d shouted, “It doesn’t matter how old you and Perry were. You were just like some fucking paunchy fifty-year-old straight guy chasing after a bimbo because he’s getting old. Well, you can lust after anyone you want to, but you’re still gonna die.”
And then I got really nasty.
I broke the silence now. “This is unbelievable. I was worried about the conference turning into the Montagues and the Capulets, and what happens? Someone ends up dead without any pitched battles—”
“Nick, Chloe was murdered,” Stefan said quietly. “I heard on the radio a few minutes ago that they’re saying it was definitely murder.” He brought that out tentatively, and then added, “Chloe DeVore,” as if somehow I could have forgotten who had died last night. “They said something about blunt force and head wounds.”
From the moment I’d seen her body and the bloody granite tile nearby, I’d been sure that it was no accident. Despite myself, I had imagined someone b
ringing the granite tile down on her head. Once, twice. It wasn’t a very heavy tile, but it was stone, and deadly.
THAT FRIDAY MORNING, I returned to the Campus Center feeling as apprehensive as a substitute high school teacher facing a class full of malcontents, bullies, and thugs.
What the hell was I supposed to do? Was I supposed to cancel the conference? I couldn’t do that by myself, could I? I’d have to talk to Serena, and more importantly, to Coral Greathouse. What were you supposed to do when a conferee was murdered? I felt dizzy at the blizzard of complications that would engulf me and Serena if the conference was canceled: the Campus Center hotel reservations, trying to change flights, arranging for registration refunds.
And there would be a storm front of complaints moving in.
I wasn’t up to all that, and I wondered if even Serena had the skills to handle such a profound mess.
When I got to the private paneled dining room reserved for all our conference meals, I was surprised by the pleasant buzz of conversation that carried out into the hallway.
It was actually more than pleasant. I could see that when I stepped inside. There was a strangely festive air at the ten round tables draped with generic-looking white tablecloths. Young, pimply student waiters and waitresses weaved among the tables with standard white coffee carafes, murmuring, “Decaf or regular?” About half of the conferees were here, and everyone seemed to be reading the Michiganapolis Tribune with its vile headline, LESBIAN KILLED AT SUM.
Serena saw me and waved me over as familiarly as if we were old friends breakfasting on her terrace. She was alone, swathed in purple.
“It’s amazing,” she whispered as I sat down, nodding in all directions to be polite. “Look at them!”
I did. Instead of casting a pall on the conference, Chloe’s death had jazzed everyone up.
“They love the bad news,” Serena said.
A waiter set orange juice in front of me and pointed out the break fast buffet table at one end of the room.
“But what should we do?” I asked. “How can we keep the conference going now?”
“You mean should we pull the plug? Not a chance! Not unless Coral or someone higher up says so. We soldier on. This is going to be a real success. Can’t you feel it? I do.”
