The Edith Wharton Murders

by Lev Raphael

  I studied the tables and understood Serena’s assessment: there was some tentative mixing of the two Wharton groups, as if last night’s face-off at the reception hadn’t happened, as if Chloe’s death was a reason to build bridges.

  Going over to the buffet table to help myself to some fragrant waffles, I wondered if the buoyant mood in the room wasn’t simply due to people realizing how lucky they were to be alive. But as more and more conferees entered for breakfast, the energy built. They were like a tour group in Hawaii unexpectedly getting to see an active volcano from a safe distance—and at no extra charge. Serena was right. The murder was spicing up their weekend.

  “These waffles are terrific,” I said, amazed at how hungry I was.

  Serena nodded graciously as if she’d made them herself. “Buckwheat,” she said. Then I remembered that she had tried all the food in advance and assured me it would be more than acceptable.

  I devoured the waffles and went back for more. While I worked on my second stack, Serena showed me the SUM student newspaper. Someone in that coven of funky illiterates had managed to throw together a short article on Chloe’s death, spelling both her names wrong. But I was appalled to read that our president, Webb Littleterry, had issued a statement condemning “the climate of violence at SUM.”

  I started to choke and Serena slapped my back.

  “This is ridiculous! Why the hell is he blaming gays and lesbians for Chloe’s death? You know that’s what he’s trying to do, connect this to the protest at the Board of Trustees meeting. This sucks! It’s Joanne Gillian’s work, because she was doing the same damn thing when she talked to Valley.”

  “Of course,” Serena said calmly. “Littleterry doesn’t have a brain in his head. He has no idea how to run a school. But what can you expect? Look at his lousy playbook when he was coach. We were just lucky Ohio State and Michigan were weak that year, with all those players sidelined by injuries. Otherwise we’d never have gone to the Rose Bowl—not that we won.” Serena went on to rave about Littleterry’s weaknesses as a coach.

  This was a side of Serena I’d never seen: the football fanatic. I’m sure she had season tickets, wore the school colors to each game, and screamed abuse as much as encouragement at our team. SUM had devoted—and, some say, demented—fans. They kept coming back for punishment year after year, since SUM’s football team was notorious for starting a season well and then losing it on the road, or at a crucial home game. I knew enough about our team to know why people groaned whenever SUM’s Tribunes got inside the ten-yard line: they always blew it. And you could almost always expect the Tribunes not to convert an interception into points—not even a field goal.

  I tuned out, but ignoring Serena, I picked up on what was passing between Grace-Dawn Vaughan and Devon Davenport, who had sat down at the table right behind me.

  They were whispering about Chloe. Vaughan was saying, “She was just stringing you along, Dee-dee.”

  Dee-dee! What a bizarrely cute nickname for that dragon.

  Curious, I moved my chair back a little, but they must have caught me trying to eavesdrop, because Vaughan abruptly changed the subject.

  Serena wound up her football jeremiad with a shake of her head and I nodded vigorously in support. Go, team, go.

  “At least that bitch isn’t here,” Serena said, looking around. “Joanne Gillian,” she added, reading my confusion.

  Serena was right. Neither Joanne nor Bob Gillian was there today.

  “Maybe they’re superstitious,” I said. And in a hushed movie preview voice, I went on, “Maybe they think that Death is stalking the conference.”

  “That would be lovely,” Serena said.

  I looked around some more. Verity Gallup at her table, and Van Deegan Jones at his, both seemed strangely subdued, even though their table mates were engaged in animated discussion. I couldn’t help cynically wondering if they each thought that Chloe’s death was taking attention away from their societies and their agendas. But maybe there was something more going on?

  Why had they both been so angry about Chloe’s presence at the conference? I wondered if their argument about Grace-Dawn Vaughn wasn’t an attempt to divert Valley’s attention, and even mine.

  I was almost done with my third cup of coffee when silence spread across the room and I had that eerie sense that people were staring at someone—maybe me. I turned and saw Detective Valley heading right for my table, quiet, implacable. I felt like a swimmer in Jaws.

  Serena patted my hand as if she expected I was about to face some ordeal. She was right. Valley asked me to step outside.

  I rose and followed him, smiling benignly at each table I passed. Some conferees looked away as if embarrassed; others appeared to be eagerly awaiting my arrest. Obviously there were hard feelings after last night’s offensive keynoters.

  Out in the hallway, Valley drew a small Penguin paperback from his jacket pocket. It looked like a brand-new copy of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth.

  “We found this at the crime scene.” Then he corrected himself. “Murder scene. Next to the body.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Valley looked away, clearly unwilling to tell me any more than he wanted to.

  “But I didn’t see that book there.”

  Valley glared at me as if I were Johnnie Cochran and he was Mark Fuhrman.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t suggesting that you—”

  Valley cut me off. “Whatever.”

  I reached for the book, then stopped. “Is it okay for me to touch this?”

  If he had been a student, he would have said “Duh.” But since he was a detective, he explained with some annoyance that of course the book had already been checked for fingerprints, and yes, I could touch it. I looked it over.

  “What did you find?” He didn’t answer, so I asked, “Was this Chloe’s?”

  “We don’t know. Her name’s not in it.”

  “If it wasn’t hers, then—”

  Now he shrugged. “It could have been the murderer’s, or someone else’s. Maybe Mrs. Gillian. She did find the body. Maybe she dropped it.”

  “Oh, I don’t think Joanne Gillian reads Wharton. Hell, I don’t think she reads anything much—remember, her husband said she’s dyslexic. Even if that’s not true, this isn’t her kind of book.” I turned the shiny paperback over and over in my hands as if it were the key to some door.

  “It could have been planted,” Valley said, eyeing me carefully for my response.

  “Planted? Like some kind of deliberate clue? Jesus, that’s what serial killers do to taunt the police!”

  He shushed me and drew me further from the dining room door. People passing in the wide hallway glanced at us curiously.

  “That could be what’s going on here.”

  How could Detective Valley talk so calmly about the possibility of a maniac at the conference? I lowered my voice but couldn’t keep the panic out of it. “You mean there’s some kind of Edith Wharton Zodiac Killer loose at this conference? That’s crazy. There’s only one person dead.”

  “So far,” he said ominously. “Yesterday was only the first day of the conference.”

  I made my way to a nearby seating area and sank into a high-backed deep chair, sorry that I had ever read a single Patricia Cornwell novel. Valley sat down opposite me, leaning forward, drilling me with his eyes as if commanding me not to freak out. I think I was very close to it.

  “Can you explain how this book might be significant?”

  I buried my face in my hands. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  Well, that got through, since I prided myself on having read more about Wharton than anyone in the galaxy. I put my hands down, sat up straighter, crossed my legs, breathed in deeply a few times. “Okay. The House of Mirth, it’s set in turn-of-the-century New York, and it’s about a society woman who’s really beautiful, but even though she doesn’t have any money of her own and she’s growing older and needs
to get married to be financially secure, she keeps screwing up her chances to nab eligible men.” I took a breath.

  “She probably loves somebody who’s poor like she is, huh?”

  I laughed. “How’d you figure that out?”

  Valley shrugged. “Sounds like the kind of book my wife reads—those Silhouette things. She’s always telling me the plots, and they all sound the same.”

  “This one doesn’t have a happy ending.”

  “No?”

  “Not at all. Lily Bart—that’s the woman—keeps moving down the social ladder, falling, really, until—”

  “Until she’s a hooker?”

  “Jesus, no! This was published in 1905. She commits suicide.”

  Valley frowned. “Suicide? Chloe DeVore didn’t commit suicide.”

  “Right.”

  “How’s she do it in the book?”

  “Chloral. It’s something people used to mix with water to help themselves sleep. She takes an overdose—and actually, it might be accidental.”

  “Chloral,” Valley repeated. “Chloral.”

  “Is it a revenge killing? Was the murderer saying that Chloe was responsible for someone’s suicide? That’s too weird.”

  Valley scratched an ear.

  “Wait!” I said. “I know this is bizarre, but listen: Chloe—chloral. It sort of sounds the same. Maybe it’s some kind of pun.”

  Swayed by my eagerness, Valley stared at me as if waiting for the solution to the puzzle, but I admitted I didn’t have one. If the killer had been making a sick pun, its deeper significance was too subtle for me to get.

  After a moment, Valley said he needed a registration list from me so that the Campus Police could start fingerprinting all the conferees to compare them.

  Then there were fingerprints on the book, I thought, keeping that to myself.

  I had a copy of the final registration list in my jacket pocket and handed it over. Just then, Priscilla Davidoff arrived for the morning session of panels, looking dazed. Valley slipped off and I waved to Priscilla to join me.

  “Let me get some coffee first,” she said glumly, and in a few minutes she was back, slumped over where Valley had been sitting. She was a wreck.

  “Nick, Nick, I swear to you that I did not kill Chloe DeVore.”

  I studied her face. I didn’t know Priscilla well enough to be able to tell if she was lying or not. All I could see was the probable ravages of a sleepless night. Even under her makeup, it was clear that she was pale, and that her eyes were red and bleary.

  “But I do feel guilty.” She hung her head. “Incredibly guilty.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see what’s happened here? It’s all my hatred for Chloe! It’s crystallized. I spent years hating her, and it’s backfired on me.”

  She looked so woeful and distressed that I was torn between trying to ease her out of her guilt, and suspicion that she was attempting to snow me.

  “You have no idea what I’ve done,” she said. “It’s terrible. There are times I’ve been in bookstores and when I saw her books face out, I turned them so that only the spine was visible. And that’s not all. I’ve slipped her books behind others on a shelf so no one could see them unless they were looking for them.”

  “That’s not so bad,” I said, unsure if I believed what I was saying.

  “Once,” she said, breathing in as if to fuel the fire of confession, “once, right after Chloe got a rave review in the New York Times Book Review, I bought a copy of her book, tore the title page out, ripped it up, and flushed it down the toilet. I was trying to curse her, and her book.”

  Just then, Vivianne Fresnel sauntered past into the dining room, dressed in a stylish black pants suit. She nodded good morning to me, but she didn’t see Priscilla, who was hidden by the high-backed chair.

  Priscilla saw Vivianne. “She’s the one who did it!” Priscilla moaned. “But it’s still my fault.”

  “Listen,” I said. “Vivianne covered for you last night when she was being questioned. I don’t know why—or what she suspects, but she wasn’t out to get you.”

  Priscilla finished her coffee without looking at me.

  “And why would she kill Chloe? They were back together. Their book’s a best-seller. Why now?”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense to you. And I’m sure you misinterpreted what was going on. She’s French, remember? It’s easy to misread people if you don’t know their culture.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “She was saving your ass.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Priscilla set her mug on the floor.

  “Okay, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I did misunderstand what she was saying, though it’s unlikely since my parents are Belgian. But why didn’t Vivianne say anything about you? About your letting her know where to find Chloe after they broke up? About staging a public brawl, practically, because you knew Vivianne and Chloe had argued about that stupid Byzantine Empire book and if they were in the same room it would happen again in stereo.”

  Priscilla flinched and I was sure I’d gotten that piece right. Bringing them together at my party hadn’t been a scientific exercise in mixing in compatible elements to see how they interacted. No, she must have had inside information through her network of Chloe DeVore spies that the two women had argued about plagiarism.

  I pushed. “Explain that to me, okay? Why would she keep it all to herself?”

  In a faint voice, Priscilla said, “Because she’s going to torpedo me when she can get the most out of it. She’s biding her time, Nick. She’s French, she’s a Latin—she’ll get revenge, but only when she’s ready.”

  Priscilla seemed on the point of tears.

  Suddenly I remembered something that Chloe had said to Priscilla at the reception, something that had stunned her.

  “Last night you looked miserable when Chloe attacked you. What did she mean when she said your ‘plan’ wasn’t original, that it was right out of one of your books?”

  With a pained smile, Priscilla said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She got up and strode off to the women’s room down the hall.

  Why didn’t I believe her?

  BEFORE THE MORNING sessions got under way, two Campus Policemen armed with copies of the registration list arrived at the dining room to announce that they were there to take fingerprints. Some conferees objected, but others were delighted and practically waved their hands like eager-beaver students hoping to get called with the right answer on their lips.

  After that was accomplished, I sat in for part of each session and all three that morning went very well. The comments and questions were surprisingly polite and uncontentious, given that the audience was heterogeneous. I mean, in each room there were members of the Wharton Association and the Wharton Collective, though Serena and I had segregated the panels themselves as best we could to avoid conflict. It was as if everyone was trying to be on their best behavior after the murder. But then I knew from my own department that academics were skilled at being nice to someone, and shafting him without hesitation when they got the chance.

  One session was called “Is Wharton Dead?” and the aim there was to deconstruct Wharton criticism itself. At least that’s what I think was the aim, because surely we all knew that Wharton was indeed dead.

  I wanted to smile when I listened to the paper given by Gustaf Carmichael. He ignored Wharton entirely to discuss an unknown Swiss woman novelist, Greta Inderbitzen, who was Wharton’s contemporary and might even have met her in Paris. Around the small room I could sense how baffled and jealous the audience was. Carmichael was doing the ultimate act of academic one-upmanship by championing a writer no one had heard of or read.

  He could make whatever claims for Inderbitzen’s novels (all thirty-eight of them!) he wanted and no one could challenge him. It wasn’t any more sophisticated, really, than a little kid sticking his tongue out and mocking his peers with a singsong “Nanny, nanny poo-poo!”

  He
was such a weasel in his leather pants and Vatican City T-shirt.

  But I suppose his paper could have been much worse. After all, that well-known and unreadable academic writer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had practically said that one of Henry James’s novels was really about fisting, so ever since I’d read that nonsense, I’d been expecting someone to claim that The Age of Innocence was about piercing. Or tattoos.

  I found myself idly wishing that Joanne Gillian were attending this morning. I would have delighted in her frustration, because I was sure that she wouldn’t understand a word of the critical jargon being slung around, especially in the more recondite papers, while she would assume it was probably pornography—or Satanism.

  I slipped off at one point to get myself another cup of coffee, hearing Stefan’s voice in my head as I poured, telling me I’d had enough that morning. I drank it anyway, enjoying every sip. And it brought me some clarity. I headed down the hall to the small bank of phone booths and slipped into one to call the county Medical Examiner, Dr. Margaret Case.

  I couldn’t get past her brisk, cheerful secretary, so I left a message, and the secretary’s very careful repetition of my name convinced me I wouldn’t get a return call soon. After reading about Chloe and the conference in today’s Tribune, where my name was mentioned as conference coordinator, I bet Dr. Case had warned her secretary to put me off if I called.

  I checked my watch. It wasn’t quite 11:15, and lunch started at noon after half an hour of free time for the conferees. It’d be okay for me to skip out, and I decided to see if I could find out which one of Priscilla’s mystery novels Chloe had been making fun of last night, and why.

  But it was more than just mockery, I thought: something in one of Priscilla’s books was connected to her involvement with Vivianne and Chloe. Otherwise, why would Priscilla have looked so upset when Chloe brought it up, and then, when I asked, pretended that she didn’t follow what I was saying?

  It was a relief to get outside the Campus Center, to get away from SUM even though I only crossed Michigan Avenue. I was hitting “The Mile,” as students called it. Nothing magnificent like the one in Chicago, just a stretch of mostly student-oriented stores and restaurants running for almost twenty blocks across the northern edge of SUM’s mammoth campus. It was a commercial wall behind which the faculty and student residential area swelled northward.