by Lev Raphael
Couldn’t ignore, because Stefan read aloud from these books before he was finished, and then left them in my study after he was done. With Post-it notes attached, explaining what was so good about each!
While Serena and Stefan did their literary Point Counterpoint, I enjoyed the fish stew and mused about Priscilla. Maybe I’d assumed too quickly that she was guilty. And maybe life was more like art than I’d been willing to imagine—that is, like her mystery, I mean, with a lot of suspects. Wasn’t that true here? Look at what had happened at the reception the previous evening. Weren’t all those people as suspicious as Priscilla? I glanced around for her, wishing she were there to buttress my growing belief in her innocence.
After all, what was Devon Davenport so angry about at the reception and even afterwards? And wasn’t it possible that Grace-Dawn Vaughan hated Chloe more than anyone else did? Chloe had satirized her pretty devastatingly. And when Vaughan admitted that she had never gotten over it, that could just have been a canny way of diverting Valley’s attention.
Davenport and Vaughan had been whispering about Chloe at lunch today, but stopped when I tried to catch what they were saying—so didn’t that mean they both had something to hide? And why did Gustaf Carmichael and Crane Taylor hate Chloe, too? What were their links to her?
I noticed Devon Davenport get up from his table and go over to Vivianne’s to say something to her. She airily waved her hand, dismissing him. What was that all about, I wondered.
Then, for a moment, I felt overwhelmed by my own suspiciousness. Hell, maybe everyone in the room had a reason to kill Chloe. Like Murder on the Orient Express, where they’d all done it. All except me and Stefan, of course.
I came out of my fog when I heard Chloe’s name.
One woman at the table, whose conference tag said “Billie Sefaris/Cornell,” asked if anyone had heard more about the investigation. In her late sixties, Billie had a shivery-sounding voice and very large eyes, and looked trim, like an avid golfer.
There were various comments from others, all of which added up to zilch. Stefan and Serena kept out of it, forking up their mocha cake, which was surprisingly tasty.
“It’s so sad,” this Sefaris woman went on, “when an artist dies young. All those unwritten books.”
‘Thank God there won’t be any more,” Crane Taylor said, nodding vigorously as if agreeing with some unseen commentator. “She was a lousy writer, not any better than that Cunnilingus guy you were talking about.”
“Cunningham,” Serena corrected modestly.
“Ham, sham, who cares. Chloe was a shitty writer and a real bitch from day one.”
The silence at our table rippled outward.
“How did you know her?” I asked.
Taylor seemed to snap out of his reverie. He fixed me with his beady, contemptuous eyes and said bitterly, “None of your fucking business.” He shoved his chair back and exited.
I got lots of sympathetic looks and apologies, though why people apologize for someone else’s crudity, I don’t know. How can it make a difference?
Stefan tapped my foot under the table, and I made a mental note to ask Angie Sandoval if she could find out anything about Taylor’s connection to Chloe. Or Gustaf Carmichael’s. And I had to try getting in touch with the Medical Examiner again to see if she’d tell me anything specific about the way Chloe died.
I stood up and announced that we had another half hour after dinner before our screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence in the auditorium, and invited the conferees to enjoy more coffee or take a short walk south of the Campus Center to the Michigan River, which curves through SUM. There was a lovely bridge down the road, with benches, and there were also benches on either bank under enormous weeping willows. The ducks would be idling in the current and it would be very restful.
Serena rose wearily. “I think I’ll go find my drug connection,” she drawled, and sauntered off.
I didn’t feel like going far at all, so Stefan and I took cups of coffee out into the hall and then wandered down near the entrance to the parking structure, where there was a lounge far enough away for us to have privacy. It wasn’t entirely private, of course, more like a place where the architect had decided for some reason that the hallway should be double in width, so he’d done that and created a visual divider with several ugly, wide pillars.
Windows looked out onto a barren courtyard that you couldn’t see at night. The designers had stuffed the lounge with boxy armchairs that were comfortable enough for university furniture, though they were a strange shade of blue that somehow looked curdled or boiled.
We were alone, and we sat in chairs side-by-side and talked about the murder. Even though people walked by—mostly students, and none of them associated with the conference—it felt as if we had achieved real isolation.
“You know,” Stefan said, “I think you’re right about Priscilla.”
“Do you?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I just feel depressed. I like her. What about Crane Taylor freaking out just now at dinner? Maybe he did it—though God knows why.”
“He kills her,” Stefan said carefully, “and then bitches her out in public.”
“I know it’s not sensible. But murder isn’t sensible either.”
“Nick, it’s what you told me about Priscilla’s book that convinced me. She wrote out the fantasy, and then she lived it. I’m not saying she planned everything exactly, but having to be around Chloe at the conference made her snap. I can see it happening.”
“Good for you.” I didn’t know why I felt so sullen.
“Nick, you have to tell Detective Valley.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I can’t believe you’d keep it to yourself. That could be a crime.”
“But he’ll find out by himself,” I argued. “Somebody must have heard Chloe mentioning Priscilla’s book at the reception, even if she got the title wrong, and they’re going to put it all together without me.”
“Are you stalling so that Priscilla can get away?”
I glared at him, ready to call him an asshole, but the anger instantly drained out of me. He was right, dead right. I realized that unconsciously, that’s exactly what I’d hoped to do. I’d keep quiet about Priscilla and not tip off Valley to what was in her book, and maybe she’d get herself away, somewhere, I don’t know where.
Jeez, I wasn’t any better than President Littleterry; I wanted the whole thing to just disappear.
Stefan was angry, his voice low, eyes dark. “Nick, you have to tell Detective Valley everything you know or suspect.”
“Tell me what?” Valley asked, stepping out from behind one of the nearby pillars.
He looked so damned pleased with himself that I leapt to my feet and started shouting, “Quit spying on me!”
Stefan tried to grab my arm and drag me back into my seat, but I fended him off.
“You turn up everywhere I go, and don’t tell me it’s an accident!”
Now, I should explain about loud voices on campus, and in town. As a rule, Michiganders do not freely burst into raving abuse the way New Yorkers do, except at football games, where they can be as vicious as any old-time Big Apple cabbie. So my outrage had brought a few passersby to a complete standstill. They stared at me, at Valley, and at Stefan, trying to figure out this peculiar and noisy tableau.
Valley turned to them and said, “Police business,” and they moved off without a word. He turned back, unfazed, and asked with the same intonation, “Tell me what?”
Defeated, hopeless, I sank into my chair. Valley didn’t sit in a facing chair but on one of its wide arms. I guess that was so he could look down at me, which he couldn’t do if we were face-to-face. Valley didn’t have to drag out any confession. I told him all about Priscilla’s novel and the way Chloe had mocked it at the reception. I felt Stefan’s quiet approval and relief as I spoke.
Standing up, Valley said, “If Priscilla is the murderer and she’s fled
town, you could be charged as an accessory.”
I was too miserable to care at this point. Valley nodded a warning at me, and walked off, I assume to locate Priscilla. After a few depressed moments in which neither one of us spoke, Stefan and I headed to the other side of the Campus Center for the screening.
The auditorium was full of animated discussion and even laughter. This was what I’d hoped for. I saw Priscilla looking quite haggard, sit ting in the center of a row, far from the aisle, so I couldn’t conveniently reach her to talk. Well, at least she hadn’t left town, so there wasn’t any way I’d be charged with helping her escape.
Where was Angie Sandoval? I wondered. I hadn’t seen her at dinner either. I guessed that she must have gotten bored playing sleuth. Who could blame her?
My introduction was quick. All I had to do was praise Laurie Scherby, the Wharton scholar who’d studied Wharton on film. With my brain on autopilot, I made some general comments about her contributions to the field and fled back to my seat.
Scherby, from San Diego State University, was a warm, unpretentious woman full of Hollywood and Wharton anecdotes. She was very entertaining for her fifteen minutes, at least if the audience’s laughter and applause were any indication. Stefan kept asking me if I was all right, and I’d just nod or say, “I’m tired.”
Yes, I was dead tired. I’m not ashamed to say it.
But once The Age of Innocence began, for two hours I was blissfully free of my fatigue and any thoughts about Chloe DeVore, Priscilla, murder, and my own jeopardy. That lavish, stupid film was as comforting as a fat summer read that makes you feel like a hippo blissfully wallowing in a swollen river at high noon.
When it was over, and Scherby returned to the stage to lead the discussion, I saw I’d been right to pick this film. It had done exactly what I’d hoped for: brought the conference closer together, with almost every one united in contempt and superiority.
There weren’t questions, except those fake academic conference questions that are thinly disguised speeches, and everyone who stood up to talk had the same spirited distaste for Scorcese’s work. There was little or no dispute about any point as the criticism rose and crested.
Van Deegan Jones derided Scorcese. “He’s been seduced by surfaces. He’s gotten the book all wrong and made a showy, vulgar movie out of a witty and subtle novel.”
Lusty applause. Even I joined in, since Jones was right.
The casting was the next target, for being so out of synch with the book. Slight and mousy Winona Ryder wasn’t remotely like the statuesque blond May Welland, whom Wharton describes as an athletic Diana. And Michelle Pfeiffer wasn’t remotely lustrous, dark, or exotic enough to play Ellen Olenska.
“And don’t forget boobs!” Verity Gallup bellowed. She reminded us that Ellen Olenska’s low-cut dress is a scandal at the opening of the novel, but this couldn’t happen in the movie with Michelle Pfeiffer since she’s flat-chested. Everyone laughed, but would they have booed if a man had made the same remark? Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Verity at dinner, had I?
Stefan said to me, “I haven’t read the book, so I can’t compare them. I just thought the movie was slow.”
The academic slash and burn drew itself out for another ten minutes, and then I stood up and thanked Scherby “for leading the massacre—I mean, discussion.”
More laughter, and people started stretching and wandering into the aisles.
So many conferees came down the aisle to congratulate my choice of entertainment for the evening I felt overwhelmed. But academics enjoy nothing so much as a golden opportunity to feel superior, and in this case, impecunious and bedraggled professors could sail off having felt that they had bested wealth, beauty, stardom, and Hollywood it self.
Just when I was feeling relaxed and about to suggest to Stefan we go out for a drink, Valley strode down the aisle looking very stem, but it wasn’t me he headed for, it was Priscilla, who froze when she saw him and looked around as if she were planning an escape. The only other way out would be up across the stage and through a fire exit, but she still wouldn’t make it far.
Valley spoke to her in the thinning crowd, rounded her up, and led her down to where I was chatting with Stefan.
“I want both of you to wait until everyone’s out of here.”
He eyed Stefan, who got the message and said to me, “I’ll be outside.”
When it was just the three of us, Valley sat us down in the center of the front row. He stood leaning back against the lip of the stage, not ten feet away, as if he were a principal reprimanding two students for cutting up during assembly.
“I want you to tell me everything about your relationship with Chloe DeVore, and what happened at this guy’s party”—here he pointed at me—”in February.”
I couldn’t look at Priscilla, since I’d given him a general idea of the confrontation between Vivianne and Chloe, and that Priscilla helped set it up. Priscilla didn’t know I’d squealed on her, but I still felt low.
“I didn’t have a relationship with Chloe DeVore,” she said weakly.
“Bullshit. You hated her. You said it. How can you hate a stranger?”
Priscilla shrugged helplessly, clearly so strung out she could barely marshal the resources to defend herself. “Am I going to be arrested?”
Valley shook his head. “Not yet.”
I asked him, “Are her fingerprints on the Wharton paperback you found by Chloe’s body?”
“Are you her lawyer?”
Now it was my turn to meet his comment with silence. Reluctantly, Valley said no. “The prints don’t match hers, or anyone else’s at the conference, except the clerk who sold her the book, and he has an alibi. He was picked up by the store manager right after the reception and they went back to tally receipts, replace some stock, and package returns. They weren’t finished until after the body was found.” He was clearly disappointed.
“What paperback?” Priscilla said, and I explained that a copy of The House of Mirth had been found by Chloe’s body.
“But I checked the credit card receipts at Fergusons,” Valley continued, stopping right there.
“And?” I asked.
Valley smiled and turned to Priscilla. “Why did you buy a brand new copy of The House of Mirth last night? And where is it?”
Priscilla frowned. “Why shouldn’t I buy any book I want to? My only copy was torn, so I wanted a new one. What’s wrong with that?” She reached into the side pocket of her enormous brown canvas shoulder bag, then started scrabbling around in the other pockets, and then the center, tossing aside keys, tissues, sunglasses.
Valley watched her intently, and my heart sank when she looked up, pale. “It’s not there.”
Valley nodded. “There were only two copies of The House of Mirth sold at the bookstore table during the reception. One was paid for with cash, and the clerk can’t remember who bought it. The other was a credit card purchase. Yours, Professor Davidoff.”
Priscilla hung her head briefly, then sat up straighter, suddenly looking much less beaten down. “Vivianne must have seen me buy it,” she said defiantly. “And she stole it from me to leave by the body!”
I asked, “But what about the other person who bought the same book?”
Valley ignored me and told Priscilla not to leave Michiganapolis.
She protested, “I didn’t do anything—why would I leave?” But after a policeman has warned you like that, how can anything you say not sound like a lie?
Priscilla sank her head and started to cry. Valley walked off, and I wondered why he’d wanted me there. To watch how I reacted, like the night before? What did he hope to find?
As soon as Valley was gone, Stefan hurried down to the front row. We both tried comforting Priscilla, but even Stefan’s reassuring, warm voice and manner didn’t have any effect. Sobbing now, hands over her face, she just begged us to leave her alone.
We did, and I felt horrible for suspecting her, for telling Valley about her myste
ry, and for having let myself be bullied into the whole damned conference to begin with. Stefan had said I was too accommodating, but cowardly was more accurate. I had never been good at standing up to authority figures, even when I was right. Behind them always loomed the slim, slight, but powerful figures of my parents, whose approval I’d never quite been able to snag (showing them my bibliography wasn’t any different from bringing a poster paint scrawl back from kindergarten).
We walked out, and I started replaying for Stefan what Valley had asked Priscilla, when Angie Sandoval cornered me outside the auditorium.
“I know it’s late and you must be zonked, Professor Hoffman, but I have to talk to you about our case. It’s urgent.” She was brimming over with excitement that left me cold.
“Unless you know without a doubt who killed Chloe DeVore, it has to wait,” I said, brushing her off.
I walked away, and Stefan followed, whispering at me, “How can you be so rude to a student? You like her.”
I didn’t answer for a while, but when we got to the car, I exploded. “I’m sick of this whole business. I wish I’d never come to SUM. I wish I’d never heard of Chloe DeVore! It’s not enough that I was trapped into doing the conference, and yes, I know I helped set that up because I was too much of a wuss to say no! But it’s been spoiled, ruined. And Littleterry’s on my back,” I moaned. “And Joanne Gillian thinks I’m Satan, and Coral Greathouse is going to be next because this conference is a fiasco.”
Driving away into the cool crisp night, Stefan said very calmly, “It’s not a fiasco. You said everything’s going well. Littleterry’s a pompous idiot, and Joanne Gillian’s a religious thug. If they try to stop you from getting tenure, we’ll threaten an ACLU suit, and you know they’ll probably back down to avoid the bad publicity.”
“That’s true,” I muttered, not quite ready to be talked down from my ledge.
“And whatever Chloe’s faults, Nick, she didn’t deserve to die. That’s the real tragedy, not what happens to your conference. Or even your job.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound like her death is just an inconvenience. I guess it’s easier to bitch and groan about every thing else, because it hides what’s really going on.”
