The Edith Wharton Murders

by Lev Raphael

  A second, more substantial and upscale business area clustered around the state capitol to the west, along with a handful of small office towers. Malls and mini-malls sailed on seas of concrete to our east and south amid the suburbs that eventually gave way to rural towns and farmland.

  I strolled down The Mile a few blocks. Actually, I wasn’t as far away as I might have liked. The antique-looking lampposts down the main street are SUM crimson and gray, and the ornamental brickwork on every street corner spells out the school’s initials. Some days it strikes me as charming boosterism. Today wasn’t one of them.

  But at least the sun was making an effort to come out.

  The mile has a proliferating set of T-shirt and sweatshirt shops, all teeming with SUM-related articles in the school colors, but it has the only locally owned bookstore in town (in addition to the small-scale Border’s). And that’s where I was headed.

  Priscilla had told me once that Ferguson’s, which sold new and used books, had copies of all her mysteries because the owner was a fan; but that was balanced by her lament that Border’s almost never had more than one of her titles in stock.

  Ferguson’s was a showy, large, theatrical-looking store with thick carpeting and looming dark bookcases. The owner had gone for an antiquarian feel (though he didn’t do much business in rare or first editions), so there were miles of antique prints adorning the flocked wallpaper, and the store bristled with busts, bronzes, statuettes, decrepit musical instruments, old advertising posters. It was just this side of parody—like one of those train stations that’s been turned into a restaurant and the decorator corralled every moose head he could find.

  Ferguson’s was empty today except for Cal, who was reading Details behind the counter.

  “My mom says she hasn’t seen you at the gym lately,” Cal said.

  “Nobody has, hardly. I’ve been swamped. How’d you do last night? Make any money for the store?”

  Cal shook his head. “Not much. They sure liked to browse. How’s Stefan?”

  “Glad he didn’t go to the reception. They can be deadly.”

  From Cal’s expression, I could tell he was dismayed by my choice of words. Obviously, he hadn’t intended to mention Chloe’s death, and my gaffe didn’t seem to change his mind. He just smiled, gently letting me off the hook.

  I plunged into the depths of Ferguson’s. The mystery section there was reasonably large and well stocked, but badly lit, and in a far corner. I suppose that was intentional, to set a creepy mood.

  I found five of Priscilla’s books there right between Amanda Cross and Peter Dickinson, looking faded. Was that all of them? I hadn’t kept track of her writing, so I plucked the lot from their shelf, sat down on a stool, and scanned the “Also By” pages in each one. Yes, it seemed I had all of her mysteries there.

  What had Chloe said? Something about Priscilla plotting against her, and being unoriginal. Was that all? No, there was something more. Something about death.

  I looked at each title, and the last one hit me: Dancing with Death. Chloe had said something like “dabbling with death” last night, and I’d had no idea what she meant. Maybe it was a mistake for this title—unless it was a deliberate insult.

  But could it be that obvious? I skimmed the plot description on the back, and started to feel flushed. Shaken, I put the other books away.

  “Doing research?” a voice asked from behind me, and I jumped up, but held on to the paperback.

  It was Detective Valley.

  “Are you following me?” I said, knowing that if I were a stutterer, I’d be trapped in my own shuddering syllables right now. I kept the book down at my side, cover facing in so he couldn’t see Priscilla’s name on it.

  “Should I be following you? What are you up to?”

  I mumbled something about needing a break from the conference.

  “And you come here?” Valley shook his head, glancing around as if he’d found an alcoholic at a bar. “I guess you can’t escape books in your business.”

  “That’s true.” I headed for the counter near the door. Then I stopped and turned. “What are you doing here?”

  Valley smiled but didn’t respond, like a therapist making sure the focus stayed on his client. He followed me to the counter, and waited for me to make my purchase. I kept the book cover down on the counter, and luckily Cal had good eyes, because he didn’t bring it up to read the price tag stuck to the back. Valley would have seen the cover that way.

  When I left, Valley nodded good-bye, and once outside, I saw him lean on the counter and talk to Cal. Was he asking about me?

  Lunchtime traffic—cars and pedestrians—was pretty bad, so I had plenty of time to think about what had brought Valley to Ferguson’s as I made my way back to the Campus Center.

  Crossing evergreen-lined Michigan Avenue, I decided that Valley must be checking on who had bought copies of Wharton’s The House of Mirth at the reception. Maybe that’s all it would take to discover the murderer—that, and fingerprints. Maybe they’d catch the murderer today, even this afternoon, and the rest of the conference could go on without trouble.

  But what if the murderer was Priscilla? The idea made me sick. It’s not that I cared for her deeply; we were only beginning to be friends. But she seemed too normal. Surely she was just a frustrated author, not a killer.

  Then I remembered Stefan in one of his darkest moods this winter during the envy months suddenly launching into a quiet tirade one night in front of the fire. We’d been listening to Shura Cherkassky play Chopin polonaises. I was reading a hypnotically plangent novel of Anita Brookner’s; Stefan was just brooding.

  “Why,” he said, “why is it always postal workers who go crazy and shoot a crowd of people? What’s so bad about their lives? What do they have to complain about? I keep waiting for a writer to go berserk. I can see him barging into a publishing house, one that hasn’t published Salman Rushdie so the security isn’t very good, nobody stops him, and he blasts his editor right through the wall, machine-guns the entire publicity department, firebombs marketing, and then takes out the publisher himself. Like a movie with drug lords or terrorists seizing a building. And they drop hostages out a window, one-by-one….”

  Stefan had a rapt look on his face that scared me. He could have been a channel into the collective unconscious of all abused writers. He went on.

  “Remember that Stephen King movie, Misery? King got it all wrong. No fan’s going to kidnap a writer and break his legs. It should have been a writer kidnapping an editor, or a reviewer. Now that’s a movie to love. That’s a movie to own.”

  All that from a writer who was fairly successful compared to Priscilla.

  Back at the Campus Center, I shuddered thinking about how hatred could lurk in the most unexpected places. And I wondered where I could hide out to go through Priscilla’s book. I didn’t see any conferees loitering in the hallway outside the dining room, so I ducked into the nearest men’s room, and chose a stall at the end when I saw there was no one around.

  Damn. The light wasn’t very good in there. It was much brighter over by the sinks, but I couldn’t examine her mystery out in the open. Before I could even sit down on the closed toilet seat, I heard laughter and familiar voices, and something about Edith Wharton.

  I recognized both voices. It was Gustaf Carmichael and Crane Taylor, which was proof that the two Wharton groups were mixing, since they were such completely different people. Carmichael pretentiously pseudohip, Taylor arrogant and old-fashioned.

  They were at the sinks washing their hands, from the sound of it. I was hoping to hear some praise or approval of the conference arrangements, and dreading even mild criticism.

  What I did hear shocked me.

  Gustaf Carmichael joked, “Most conferences don’t include murder as entertainment.”

  He was disgusting.

  But Crane was worse. He said, “I’m glad Chloe DeVore’s dead.” Gustaf Carmichael chuckled. “You, too?” They both laughed heartily, as
if at a private joke, and I heard the door close.

  How the hell did they know Chloe DeVore—and why had they disliked her enough to enjoy her death? What had she ever done to them?

  7

  I SAT THERE in the toilet stall for a moment or two. It was as if Crane Taylor’s and Gustaf Carmichael’s mocking voices were echoing around me. I’d been wrong to think they were so different, since they both hated Chloe DeVore. But why?

  Startled and confused, I slid Priscilla’s unread book into my jacket pocket, but I almost felt as if my hand were moving on its own. What the hell was going on at this conference?

  I checked my watch and hurriedly unbolted the stall door, yanked it open, and stepped outside. The door hit the partition wall and swung back into place with a thunk. The cool, clean rest room was empty except for the sounds drifting in from the hallway and the whisper of water shifting in tanks and pipes. Remodeling had added recessed lighting, marble tiles near the sinks, and the kind of improbable, annoying chartreuse and violet color scheme you find in doctors’ offices.

  I had to get to the dining room for lunch, and there wasn’t time to waste. Serena had warned me over and over that the worst part of a conference was the inevitable creeping lateness that would start in the morning and then gradually overwhelm each day, slopping over to the next, causing crankiness and fatigue. She made it sound fairly dire, and did not smile when I’d quipped, “So that’s why the Roman Empire collapsed! Tardiness. I should have known.”

  As official conference chair, I had to set a good example by being as prompt as possible. She had impressed upon me the image of myself as a dike holding back the sea of chaos. It was not an image (or a word!) I found very appropriate. And maybe it was too late for order to be restored at this conference. I didn’t see how we were going to end up with harmony, peace, and merriment like at the end of a Shakespearean comedy.

  Outside the men’s room, in the now-crowded hallway, I was flagged down by Angie Sandoval.

  “Professor Hoffman. Wait!”

  There was something so refreshingly normal about Angie, I found myself beaming hello and giving her my full attention. I didn’t care now if I was late. It wasn’t just her youth, it was the kind of youth she represented: eager, enthusiastic, helpful. She wasn’t sullen or cynical, and I could talk to her easily, unlike lots of her peers at SUM, because her face wasn’t marred by ugly and painful-looking piercings in her tongue, her eyebrows, her lips. With those students, I kept forcing myself not to stare or squirm—or ask why they didn’t go whole hog and put plates in their lips like that African tribe I’d seen on the Discovery channel.

  So I welcomed Angie’s interruption as a dose of normality at that moment.

  “Guess what? I’ve registered for the conference!”

  That’s when I noticed she was wearing a plastic Wharton badge. “What? Why?”

  She lowered her voice and moved a step closer while the crowd eddied around us.

  “I’m going to observe everyone. And take notes! I got my Criminal Justice professors to let me out of my classes for the day so I can do real-life crime work after I told them I was assisting you in the investigation.

  Great—I hoped Valley wouldn’t hear about this.

  “Isn’t that cool?”

  I smiled and said that yes, it was cool. And then I lowered my voice. “Are you serious about snooping around?”

  Angie cocked her head as if she was about to do a dumb blond imitation complete with “Fer sure,” but she just said, “Totally.”

  “Okay. Then can you keep an eye on Priscilla Davidoff? She’s tall, dark hair—”

  “The one who looks like Geena Davis?”

  “Yes, that’s her. If I do it, it’ll be too obvious.”

  “Right! I can be inconspicuous, I’m just a student. Hey, is she a suspect?”

  I mumbled something vague about Priscilla being “possibly involved.”

  I felt awful about setting someone to spy on Priscilla, especially since Valley had told me to stay out of the investigation. But he hadn’t said anything about encouraging anyone else, had he?

  “Wow! This is like an independent study!”

  I warned Angie to be careful. “Listen, we’re dealing with a real murder. It’s not a game show.”

  “Oh, totally,” Angie agreed. And she set off for the dining room, as intrepid as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rolled into one.

  I followed at a discreet distance, suddenly reminded of all the high school students who toured the campus in the spring on their college visits, led around by snappy, hectoring guides who made fun of the University of Michigan down in Ann Arbor at every opportunity. Those kids on tour not only looked painfully shy and overwhelmed, since many of them came from Michigan towns smaller than SUM, they also looked amazingly fresh and unspoiled. That was because you’d see them standing next to their often haggard-looking parents, and you’d know how ruined and fallen those unlined faces and vigorous bodies would be a mere two decades later.

  Inside the crowded dining room, I saw Vivianne heading for a table, and I hurried up to her.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  She turned and spoke as graciously as a medieval lady granting her suitor a boon. “Of course. Shall we find seats?”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Ah, bon.” She nodded, and stepped out of the way of some conferees, guiding me over to a window that looked out on a very wooded part of campus. It seemed a lovely spot for a tête-à-tête, but I had only one thing I wanted to know.

  “Why were you so reticent about Priscilla when the detective questioned you yesterday?”

  Vivianne shrugged as if the answer was obvious. “Why make more trouble?” And her broad, gentle smile seemed to ask if I was done.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “Priscilla is a very troubled woman. Her life displeases her.” Vivianne shrugged again. “Does she need another burden?”

  “So you think she—?”

  Vivianne reached over to put two fingers against my lips. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She slipped off to find a seat.

  I saw Angie Sandoval taking a seat at a table where Priscilla sat with her arms crossed, looking very glum. Serena waved me over, pointing dramatically at the empty seat next to her as if she were waving a semaphore flag. Joining Serena, I was even more convinced now that Vivianne could not have killed Chloe. Wouldn’t a real killer want to cast suspicion on someone else?

  I nodded and smiled at everyone seated at my table. Another sign of progress at the conference: the table was equally divided between the Wharton Association and the Wharton Collective. There were three “suits” and three pseudopunks, the pinstripes balanced by the earrings (on men). Gustaf Carmichael and Crane Taylor were unfortunately not among them. I would have liked studying those two to see what they betrayed about Chloe when other people were around.

  As I said hello and exchanged a few words of greeting with each scholar, I mentally recalled their varied contributions to the field. That was easy, since everyone wore a conference name tag and Serena had insisted that we make the print on them very large. “I hate people breathing all over my breasts while they try to read the damned things.”

  This was a fairly undistinguished group whose work was derivative—the kind of people who like to talk about Wharton’s social satire (that was the suits), or dress up banal observations about her fiction in modish critical jargon (the punks).

  I’ll never forget reading a vaporous, baffling essay by one of the guys at the table, Pete Levinsky, about The House of Mirth and midpoint practically howling, “I got it! He’s saying Wharton’s heroines are in conflict with their male-dominated society! Amazing!”

  That was the kind of outburst Stefan had to put up with for five years as I worked on the Wharton bibliography, wading through file cards and fits. The explosion would usually be followed by an overly detailed explanation of what I was reading, then a philippic of one form or another.
No wonder he was sick of everything Wharton.

  Sitting there at lunch, I sensed what I often did when I was with a group of Wharton scholars. They were recalling the brief paragraphs in my bibliography in which I’d described their articles or books, and iI’d been sparing and overly judicious, they probably wondered what I really thought. Or they were pissed off that I hadn’t—as when I judged work to be truly significant—used any adjectives like “major,” “unique,” “important,” since each of them thought they’d written the definitive work about Wharton.

  Right now, everyone rushed to praise the conference, and I tried to seem grateful. The awkwardness passed as real conversations broke out and people started on the salads that had been waiting for us. They were small but attractive, with what tasted like a lime vinaigrette.

  Serena whispered, “They weren’t bullshitting you. Everything’s going very well. I’ve been catching pieces of what people say, and it’s all positive.”

  I nodded, unable to feel happy.

  While one waiter took away our salad plates, another set down our cream of broccoli soup, which was peppery and delicious. I ate it with surprising gusto while around me the discussion whirled from one paper topic that morning to another. There was some delicate sparring, but it didn’t seem any more serious than the early stages of conflict at a family reunion.

  As the lunchtime din rose around me, sealing me off, all I could think of was Chloe’s murder. With so many people milling around last night, but apparently not one witness, how could the killer be found? And what if Valley had been right, and Joanne Gillian was the intended target? Wouldn’t the killer try again?

  I glanced around me, wondering who would want to kill Joanne. I saw her glowering a few tables off at something her husband was saying. Jeez—why not Bob Gillian? Why couldn’t he have wanted to kill Joanne? She was certainly hateful enough in public—maybe she was even more of a monster at home. Maybe when he married her, she hadn’t been a narrow-minded harridan, and he was actually appalled at the woman she’d become. Perhaps he’d seized his one chance to break free.