by Lev Raphael
Feeling a surge of bravado, I said, “I’ll try it anyway, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll come up with something else. You know I can.”
Stefan nodded glumly.
I TOOK STEFAN’S car when we got back to the Campus Center, but as soon as I drove off campus, I felt my energy vanish like water into sand. I found the nearest cappuccino place—they’d been springing up all over town this year—parked, and dragged myself inside.
The caffeine in the air and the sweet aromas wafting from the gleaming ranks of sugary desserts in glass counters enveloped me. I took a double mocha and a white chocolate cheesecake brownie to a quiet corner as if I was about to do something illicit. Given the load of sugar and fat grams in that brownie, I suppose I was.
The cafe was filled with intense and nervous-looking students, some of whom I recognized from last year’s Gay Pride parade. They were what I thought of as theme-park queers: slim and shiny and up-to-date in their goatees, beads, oversized baggy thin sweaters, and high-top sneakers or Birkenstocks. A few of them nodded at me, and I tried to smile. I’m sure they were wondering where Stefan was.
He was the star, he was the one students looked up to, and I always heard “Is Stefan with you?” when I was out by myself.
But I was very glad now to be just that: by myself. The tangled talk at Le Village about Chloe’s murder and Priscilla’s death (which was probably a murder) had covered up what I was really feeling: a terrible, numbing fatigue that made my very bones ache.
All those months worrying about the conference, and now I was in the middle of two deaths. How had the conference come to this? How had it become the scene of some kind of visitation, a curse?
I knew that Stefan would have snorted at my attempt to understand the past few days’ events, to find some meaning in them. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the news media had been full of sententious references to the survivors making sense of the tragedy. Stefan had roared at the TV one night, “It doesn’t make any fucking sense! Why don’t they shut up?”
I was afraid he’d throw a book at the screen or even kick it in, but the outburst seemed to have untwisted something inside of him, at least momentarily, and he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t have to. I could fill in the rest.
At seventeen, Stefan had found out that he was Jewish, and that his parents and his uncle Sasha were Holocaust survivors. They had tried to escape and obliterate their past by raising him vaguely Catholic and ethnically Polish. He’d told me that for years after finding out he was really a Jew, he had felt like Frankenstein’s monster wheeled down from the lightning: grotesque, cobbled together, anxiously, crazily studied to see if he would scream or go berserk.
Instead, he’d withdrawn, favoring the cruelty of silence, until he eventually poured his pain into his writing. And that was an almost unforgivable act to them: revealing family secrets.
Did any of it make sense? To them, maybe. To Stefan, never.
Sitting hunched over my coffee, I thought, My dad looks like this when business isn’t going well. As he would say at such a time, I had le cafard. And you didn’t need to pronounce it perfectly to feel its effects. Vivianne’s pain and sadness had rekindled my own about last year, not that it was ever very far from the surface.
I looked out onto the ordinary Michiganapolis street and wished for one of those consuming summer rains where the sky is almost white and the lightning hits the ground like a stalking beast. A storm I could lose myself in. A storm that would remind me my life didn’t mean very much, that it was all a very small thing.
But I had to smile. Wouldn’t my cousin Sharon cock her beautiful head at me right now and say, “So one murder and one possible murder, that’s not enough of a storm for you? You want sound effects, too? And better lighting?”
My coffee was done, and though the brownie was terrific, it was so rich that another would have turned me as mindlessly chipper as Kathie Lee Gifford. It was time to get to work.
I DIDN’T HAVE much luck with the first two of Priscilla’s neighbors, those on either side of her house.
The first house looked like something out of a kid’s storybook: The Goblin’s Lair. Faced completely with undressed stone, it had a low brooding roofline, tiny casement windows like beady eyes, and a crooked paved path to a front door rounded like an arch. Overgrown arbor vitae trees ringed the entire house, and I wondered how anyone could live there without light penetrating through the trees. Michiganapolis was cloudy enough as it was, and its people heavily afflicted by Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Whoever lived in this house was a candidate for light therapy on an industrial scale.
The owner was in the foul mood that I would have expected.
When she yanked open the front door, she glowered at me. Behind her, I saw two little boys bouncing around in a playpen in the chaotic living room, which looked as if a tidal wave of toys and kiddie stuff had broken across it and receded unevenly. The kids were fairly quiet, but the room’s disorder screamed at you. And the room stank.
But she didn’t. She was drenched in some floral perfume as harsh as Lysol (maybe it was Lysol). Fortyish, she surveyed me contemptuously, holding her left hand in her right, and squeezing her ring finger, which was bare.
Divorced, I figured.
The name on the mailbox was Jorgenson, so I said, “Hello, Mrs. Jorgenson.”
“What the hell do you want? You can’t be selling anything, you’re not dressed well enough for that.”
Mrs. Jorgenson was wearing unattractive purple sweats, and she made me think of a skunk because her roots needed retouching badly: there was a band two inches wide along the top of her blond head at the part. Maybe she was letting her hair stay like that as a protest.
“You know about Priscilla Davidoff, your neighbor?” I motioned to Priscilla’s house.
“That she’s a dead dyke. Yeah, I know about that. So what? You can’t be a reporter, you don’t look that smart.”
“Actually, I teach at SUM—”
“Figures! So does that moron, my ex-husband. Well, he says he teaches there. Mostly he’s trolling for babes. That’s probably what he’s doing right now. If he isn’t actually screwing one in his office. That’s how I found out—”
I tried to stem the tide a little. “Priscilla was a friend of mine.” I smiled, hoping to ingratiate myself a little.
“It must be nice,” she snapped.
“Excuse me?”
“It must be nice to have friends. I don’t have any. Not now. They all dumped me just like Gary did.”
Gamely, I forged ahead. “You see, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Priscilla, and one of the things I’m looking into is whether she had a late-night visitor this week, and if you noticed.”
“You’re not some kind of militia nut, are you? This isn’t about one-world government or anything, is it?”
“No!”
“Then why are you poking around like you’re the police? Listen, I’ve got two little kids, and I don’t have time to pay attention to other people’s business. If you were doing your job and earning the money us tax payers paid you, you wouldn’t have the time to be so nosy!”
She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t have to. I gave up and wished her a nice day.
The next neighbor was a shy and befuddled elderly man with poor eyesight who seemed almost frightened of me, and wouldn’t talk at all. I walked away from his front door thinking, I hope I never get like that, but knowing I probably would. Didn’t everyone?
My luck changed, though, when I tried the house directly across the street from Priscilla’s. The woman answering the door, Mrs. Lorraine, in her Seventies, had a great wide smile that was so bright it practically threw the rest of her face into shadow.
I introduced myself, told her that I was a friend of Priscilla’s and that I was distraught about her death. Mrs. Lorraine seemed quite willing to chat, and she instantly invited me into her pleasant little ranch house, which was so filled with pink it could
have been a set for Funny Face. Mrs. Lorraine was quite pink herself, round, friendly, and she wore the current American uniform of the elderly: a thin track suit. Pink, of course.
Two white bichon frises came snuffling up to me when I sat on the well-padded sofa. The dogs were apparently prepared to be quite sociable in a calm sort of way, and while Mrs. Lorraine made some coffee and chatted from the kitchen, I admired their cute gorilla-like faces and talked baby talk to them.
Stefan was not convinced we could live with a dog, so whenever I was around dogs, I felt like I was auditioning—them, and myself.
“They look like those fuzzy little warriors in the third Star Wars movie, don’t they?” Mrs. Lorraine asked, bringing in a tray with coffee and homemade shortbread.
As she poured and served the shortbread, we chatted. That is, Mrs. Lorraine talked about herself. She was a retired high school English teacher, had lived her whole life in Michiganapolis, and right now, she was working on a book.
“My daughter’s an agent in New York. She’s promised me that if it’s halfway decent, she’ll be able to find me a publisher. It’ll be marketable largely because of my age,” she laughed. “But that’s okay with me. My daughter says I might be like the author of …And Ladies of the Club, or that Stones for Ibarra woman. You know. An isn’t-it-amazing-this-old-lady-wrote-a-book kind of deal.”
I was glad Stefan wasn’t there, since he’d dread being asked to read the manuscript. Because he’d been profiled several times in the Michiganapolis Tribune, people recognized him, and were often stopping him at malls, in the post office, even the gym, to ask if he’d read their books and help get them sold.
Sitting there with Mrs. Lorraine and her adorable dogs was so much nicer than being sniped at by Priscilla’s other neighbor that I just relaxed into the couch. And even though I was full, I savored the shortbread.
Mrs. Lorraine talked about how nice Priscilla had been to her, helping her in with groceries sometimes, and even mowing the lawn for her when Mrs. Lorraine was out of town. She even helped Mrs. Lorraine with some remodeling, “because she was so good with her hands.”
“You might be interested to know, young man, that the police asked me a good many questions, but they didn’t get at the most interesting point, to my mind.”
“What was that?” Her coffee was a little weak, but the shortbread was superb, and I helped myself to more.
“Well, I’ll tell you. The same night every week, Priscilla had a car in her driveway. There was one a few days ago, the night that Chloe DeVore woman was killed on campus. This went on for months.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“They didn’t ask. More coffee?”
I passed.
“I should say that they asked if I’d seen anything or anyone unusual, and this looked to be the same person who’d been arriving after mid night and leaving around three or four a.m. for months, so it wasn’t re ally unusual. But whoever it was probably knows something important about Priscilla. And I’ve been working the details into my own book. Guess what I’m writing.”
“A mystery?”
“Heavens, no! Who reads that junk? I’m writing a memoir.” She said the word with an amused shiver. “That’s because my daughter told me that memoirs are very popular these days.”
Wasn’t that the truth! I couldn’t believe how many unknown writers were getting enormous advances for memoirs—some of them not even thirty years old! What could they have to remember?
“Of course,” Mrs. Lorraine was saying, “I know it helps to be schizophrenic, or deformed, or a criminal, or a politician—but I’ve led an interesting life all the same.”
“Do you know who Priscilla’s visitor was? Could you recognize them?”
“You mean him or her, not them. Them is plural, young man.” She waited for my acquiescence and when I nodded and dutifully repeated, “Him or her,” she continued. “All I can tell you is that it was someone of average height, and the car was definitely a BMW. The driver was wearing a hat and a raincoat with the collar up. It might have been a man, but it might have been a woman trying to look like a man. It was definitely somebody who didn’t want to be seen. This person turned off the headlights before pulling into the driveway, which was always dark, and didn’t put the headlights on until way down the street. Being quite careful. I never made out the license plate, because the car lights were off and the street was pretty dark. Also, my eyes—” She smiled ruefully.
A BMW, I thought, wasn’t unusual enough a car in our college town. It could be anyone. Was the weekly visitor a lover or just a friend Priscilla counseled in some way? And was there any connection to Chloe’s and Priscilla’s deaths, or was this new piece of information just tangential?
I thanked Mrs. Lorraine for the coffee and shortbread, feeling full but pretty frustrated.
We headed for the door, the bichon frises following at a respectful distance.
“May I say something personal?” she asked.
Hesitating, I said, “Sure.”
“You’re not a very good liar, young man. I could see right off you weren’t that old a friend of Priscilla’s.”
Blushing, I asked her how she could tell.
“You didn’t seem truly shaken by her being dead. I’ve lost a lot of folks over the years, so I know. And it wasn’t as if you were trying to be brave or anything. You were just curious. No offense! Also, when I said Priscilla was good with her hands and she mowed my lawn, you didn’t object. That girl was a total klutz! She paid to have her own yard mowed. Besides, weren’t you involved in a murder at SUM last year? I’m sure I can remember reading about it and seeing your photograph in the Tribune. “
“That was me.”
But far from being upset, Mrs. Lorraine was delighted at her own cleverness. “I have to warn you. If you’re going to investigate things, you should have worked a little harder at being believable.”
I held up my hands. “You win.”
“So,” she said a little breathlessly. “You don’t think Priscilla Davidoff’s death was a suicide?”
“Not really. She didn’t seem depressed enough, and—Well, I’m just not convinced, and I understand that some evidence at the crime scene is ambiguous.”
“How exciting! Perhaps I should write a mystery instead of a memoir!” She frowned, puzzling it out: “A retired old lady sees lots of mysterious doings in her town. No, isn’t that a bit too much like that Jessica Fletcher show? I wonder what the market is for mysteries. I’ll have to ask my daughter.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“I suppose you must be right about Priscilla not being depressed, if you worked with her at SUM. That part is true, isn’t it? Good. I only knew her well enough to have an extra key and take UPS deliveries for her—”
“You have a key to Priscilla’s house? Do the police know?”
“Don’t raise your voice—it upsets the dogs.”
I looked at their friendly white faces; they seemed unperturbed.
“The answer’s no, since they didn’t ask. Can you use the key?”
I wanted to hug her. Of course I could use the key. There might be something I could find that the police had missed, some clue that would reveal who was visiting Priscilla regularly, and if that had any connection with her death.
Mrs. Lorraine took my hands in hers. “Yes. You can borrow the key. As long as you bring it right back. Only you have to tell me everything you dig up over there so I can decide if I want to get any of it into my book.”
Mrs. Lorraine’s dogs eyed me steadily, and I imagined they were thinking, Sucker.
I agreed, reluctantly, to give Mrs. Lorraine what she wanted.
ANXIOUS AND GRATEFUL, I slipped across the street to Priscilla’s house with the spare key.
Like many others in that neighborhood, Priscilla’s house was a fifties-era ranch house with white siding, mildly decorative shutters, and ordinary foundation plants. A generic house except for the beautiful roof of cla
y tiles, which added an incongruous touch of the Southwest, I thought.
I let myself into a tiny hallway quickly, unsure how I would explain my presence if I was discovered trespassing. But was it trespassing, exactly, if I had a key? And I hadn’t stolen the key; I’d borrowed it from someone who had the right to have one. But did Mrs. Lorraine have the right to lend the key? And was talking about rights foolish anyway in this context?
That roof didn’t seem so incongruous when I looked around inside. The cheerful house was decorated in the bright Southwest colors and geometries that can sometimes seem oppressive and even bizarre in the Midwest. Here, though, it was all done with a light touch, not making the white walls seem too stark, and thankfully, there was not one Georgia O’Keefe poster, so I didn’t feel that I was stepping into the page of a catalogue or a cliché.
I stood in the little hall, orienting myself. Straight ahead was the kitchen, the living room-dining room (a “great room” in real estate parlance) lay to my left, and two small rooms were to my right. I assumed one was Priscilla’s bedroom, the other her study.
I’d expected to feel a little creeped out in the house of someone recently dead, maybe murdered, but I didn’t. There wasn’t anything immediately weird or mysterious about Priscilla’s comfortable home, and of course it hadn’t been abandoned long enough for there to be any signs of neglect or decay.
There were no plants that I could see from where I stood, but lots of books. The hallway was lined with books on gleaming, lacquered white shelves, and from the titles I guessed they were mostly mysteries, hardcover and paperback. I moved into the living room, with its oranges, blues, and greens, glancing around for—well, for what? I didn’t really know what I was looking for, what I expected to find, or what I hoped would leap out at me, shouting “Clue! Clue!”
Stefan, of course, would be horrified that I was doing this at all. He’d probably call it breaking and entering. Or, at the very least, ill-advised.
Orange and green countertop tiles brightened the kitchen. Here, too, there wasn’t anything that drew me closer. No heavily marked calendar or revealing memo pad by the phone. No hastily abandoned meal or broken dishes. All I was learning was that Priscilla had been very neat.
