The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

“I was a good friend of Laura’s for a year or so before the murder. We shared an apartment for a while, until she moved in with her boyfriend. Although she came from the Midwest, Laura was free-spirited, extremely cultured, and had an allure that made her attractive not only to boys but also to girls. She made lots of friends right off the bat, was invited to every party, and was remarked upon by her professors. She was the most popular student in our class.”

  “What was her relationship with Wieder, exactly?” I asked. “Do you know anything about that? Some people told me they had an affair, and that’s what Richard Flynn hinted at in his manuscript. But she claims there was never anything romantic between them.”

  Sarah thought for a few seconds, biting her lower lip.

  “I’m thinking now how to put it clearly . . . I don’t believe there was anything physical between them, but they meant a lot to each other. The professor didn’t seem like the kind who was into younger women. He just had an energy about him. We all admired him and cared about him. His courses were awesome, he had a great sense of humor, he gave you the feeling that he knew what he was talking about and really wanted you to learn something, rather than just doing the job he was paid for. Let me give you an example. Once, at some fall fireworks—there were all kinds of stupid rituals back then, and some of them probably still exist—almost the whole of our class had gone together with a couple of professors to the field in front of the art museum, waiting for it to get dark and for the artillery to begin. Within half an hour, almost every student was standing in a group around Wieder, who wasn’t even saying anything.”

  “Some of his former colleagues claim he was a womanizer,” I suggested, “and that he drank too much.”

  “I don’t think so, and Laura never mentioned anything like that to me. I’m inclined to believe that it was just gossip. In any event, Laura had a boyfriend at the time—”

  “Timothy Sanders?”

  “Yes, I think that was his name. I’ve never had a good memory for names, but I think you’re right. Laura seemed to really care about him, if she was capable of caring deeply about anyone. But apart from her relationships with that guy or with Wieder, Laura had started to show me a different face, one that gradually frightened me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was extremely, extremely . . . fierce. Fiercely determined, that’s the word, but at the same time very calculating. At that age, almost none of us—students, I mean—took life very seriously. Flirting with a boyfriend was more important to me than my future career, for example. I wasted a lot of time on unimportant things, buying trifles or going to the movies, and I stayed up so many nights talking nonsense with friends. But Laura was different. Once, she told me that she’d given up athletics at the age of eighteen, realizing that the prizes she’d won until then weren’t enough to guarantee her a place in the L.A. Olympics, and four years later she’d have been too old to stand any chance of being chosen for the team. I asked her what one thing had to do with the other, and she was amazed at my question. She said, ‘What is the point of working hard if you don’t have an opportunity to prove you’re the best?’ Do you understand what I’m saying? For her, sport was only a means to an end, which was public recognition. That’s what she wanted above all, or maybe it’s the only thing she’s ever wanted: for other people to acknowledge that she was the best. From what I could gather, ever since early childhood, her sense of competition was overdeveloped, and in time it turned into an obsession. No matter what she did, she had to be the best. No matter what she wanted, she had to achieve it as quickly as possible.

  “And she didn’t even realize it. She saw herself as an open, generous person, ready to sacrifice herself for others. But whoever stood in her way was an obstacle to be gotten rid of.

  “I think that’s why her relationship with Wieder was important to her. She was flattered that she’d been noticed by the most charismatic professor, a genius admired by everybody. His attention made her feel special—she was the chosen one, she was unique among that gaggle of girls who all looked at Wieder as a god. Timothy was just a boy who followed her around like a puppy and who she slept with every now and then.”

  It seemed as if the effort of talking was exhausting for Sarah, and two red blotches had appeared on her cheeks. She kept clearing her throat, as if it were dry. She’d emptied her cup of coffee, so I asked her if she wanted another, but she said she was fine.

  “I think that’s why she befriended me in the beginning. Although I’d been born and raised in the city, I was naïve and bowled over by her, which confirmed to her that there was no point in her having any complexes about being a hick who’d made it to the East Coast. She took me under her wing, in a way. Like Sancho Panza, I followed her no matter what, mounted on my donkey, as she blazed her way to fame and glory. But she wouldn’t tolerate the slightest gesture of independence. Once, I bought a pair of shoes without asking her advice. She managed to convince me that they were the ugliest shoes in the world and that only somebody completely devoid of taste would wear such things. I gave them away.”

  “Okay, she was a cold and calculating bitch, but so are a lot of other people. Do you think it’s possible that she was involved in Wieder’s death? What motive might she have had?”

  “The book that Wieder had written,” she said. “That damn book.”

  Sarah told me that Laura had helped the professor with a book, and he’d drawn on her knowledge of math to create models to evaluate behavioral changes brought about by traumatic events.

  Sarah’s impression was that Laura came to overestimate her contribution. She was convinced that if she hadn’t helped him, Wieder would never have managed to finish the project. So she asked him to give her credit as coauthor, and the professor—as she delightedly told Sarah—had agreed to it. At the time, Timothy had gone to Europe to do some research at a university there, and Laura had moved into the house she shared with Richard Flynn, after staying for a short while in the one-bedroom apartment Sarah had rented. She later told Sarah that Flynn, the guy she was sharing the house with, was a deluded daydreamer, and that he was madly in love with her, a situation Laura found amusing.

  But one day, Laura, who visited the professor’s house quite often, found a copy of the proposal he’d sent to a publisher. Her name was nowhere to be found on the document, so she realized that the professor had been lying to her and didn’t have the slightest intention of making her a coauthor.

  That’s when, Sarah said, her friend started showing her ugliest side. She didn’t have fits of hysteria, she didn’t break stuff, she didn’t scream—it would have been better if she had. Instead, Laura had asked Sarah if she could stay at her place overnight, and she’d sat for an hour or two staring into space, saying nothing. Then she’d started to figure out a battle plan, like a strong-willed general resolved to completely annihilating the enemy. She was determined to have her revenge on Wieder.

  Laura knew that disagreements had arisen between the professor and the people he was working with on a secret project, so she began to confuse his mind, making him think he was being followed and that people were searching his house when he was out. In fact, it was Laura herself who was doing it—she’d move things around and leave other subtle signs of intrusion, in a kind of sadistic game.

  Secondly, Laura led the professor to think that she was in love with Richard Flynn, who she’d introduced him to, in an attempt to make him jealous. She was trying to get Wieder to delay his submission of the manuscript and, in the meantime, persuade him to go back to their former understanding.

  The professor, Sarah said, probably realized that what Laura was demanding was ludicrous. She hadn’t even finished her master’s degree, but her name would have been on the cover of a major academic work—and he’d have gotten plenty of flak for it, with his career being seriously damaged as a result.

  I remembered what Flynn had written in his manuscript about his first meeting with Wieder. If Sarah Harper was telling the truth
, he’d have been just a patsy. His only role had been to make the professor jealous, a simple sock puppet in Laura’s show.

  “On the night of the professor’s murder, Laura came to my apartment,” Sarah went on. “It was around three a.m. I’d gone to bed early, because the next day I was going home for the holidays, and a friend had offered to give me a ride to New York.

  “Laura seemed scared. She told me that she’d had an argument with Richard Flynn, who’d taken her flirting seriously and had become obsessed with her. She’d collected all her stuff from the house, and it was now in the trunk of her car, outside. In any event, Timothy had come back a couple of days previously, and they were going to move in with each other again.”

  I said, “Richard claimed that Laura had told him she intended to spend that day with you and to stay at your apartment overnight.”

  “As I said, she arrived early in the morning. I’ve got no idea where she’d been up until then. But she asked me to say we’d been together the whole evening, if anybody asked. I promised I would, thinking she meant if Richard Flynn asked.”

  “Where did you live at the time, Sarah?”

  “In Rocky Hill, about five miles from campus.”

  “How long do you think it’d have taken Laura to get there from the house she was sharing with Flynn?”

  “Not long, even if it was late at night and the weather was very bad. They lived somewhere on Bayard. About twenty minutes or so.”

  “And it would have taken her about half an hour to get from the professor’s in West Windsor back to Flynn’s house, given the weather. Plus another hour to pack her stuff, so that means two hours. If my information is correct and she did go back to Wieder’s house that night, that means she left there at around one a.m., and not at nine p.m., as Flynn told the police. In other words, after Wieder was attacked . . .”

  “I knew even then that something wasn’t right and that Laura was lying. Usually, she was very self-confident, but that night she was frightened—that’s the word. I’d just been woken up and I could hardly wait to get back into bed, so I didn’t want to hear all the details of her story. We’d grown apart by then and, to be honest, I no longer wanted her friendship. I made up a bed for her on the couch and went back to sleep, after letting her know that I’d be leaving early the next day. But when I woke up at seven a.m., she’d already left. I found a note saying she’d gone to see Timothy.

  “I left at around eight a.m., and found out about what had happened while listening to the radio in my friend’s car. I asked him to pull off the highway—we were on the Jersey Turnpike—and I remember that I got out and threw up. I immediately wondered whether Laura had somehow been involved in the professor’s death. My friend wanted to take me to the hospital. I tried to calm down, and after I got back home, I spent the holidays in bed. The police called me between Christmas and New Year’s, and I got back to New Jersey and made a statement. I told them that Laura had been with me that day, from lunchtime until the next morning. Why did I lie for her, knowing she might be involved in something so serious? I don’t know. I think that she dominated me and I wasn’t really capable of refusing her anything.”

  “Did you talk to her after that?”

  “Right after I’d been interviewed by the police, we had coffee together. She kept thanking me and assuring me that she had had nothing to do with the murder. She told me that she’d asked me to testify so that she wouldn’t be harassed by cops and reporters. More than that, she told me that the professor had finally agreed to acknowledge her contribution to the book, promising to list her name as a coauthor, which sounded a bit strange to me. Why would he suddenly have changed his mind, just before being murdered?”

  “So you didn’t believe her?”

  “No, I didn’t. But I was down, both physically and mentally, and all I wanted was to go back home and forget about everything. I decided to take a sabbatical, and I didn’t start classes again until the fall of 1988, so Laura wasn’t there anymore when I returned. She called me a few times at home in that period, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I lied to my parents, saying that I’d had a bad breakup, and I went to therapy. The next year, when I returned to Princeton, the whole story about Wieder’s murder was yesterday’s news and almost nobody talked about it. No one asked me anything about the case after that.”

  “Did you ever see or talk to her again after that?”

  “No. But last year, by chance, I found this.”

  Sarah unzipped her bag and took out a hardcover book, which she pushed across the table to me. It was by Laura Westlake, PhD. There was a black-and-white photo of the author on the back of the dust jacket, above a brief bio. I immediately saw that she hadn’t changed much over the past two decades: the same common features, tied together only by an expression of determination that made her already look very mature.

  “I found this book in the library of the rehab center where I stayed. It was published in 1992. I recognized the photo on the back and realized that she’d changed her name. It was her first book. As I later found out, it had been received with unanimous praise, and her entire subsequent career has been built on it. I have no doubt that it’s the book Wieder was going to publish.”

  “I wondered why that book was never published,” I said. “It seemed that the manuscript vanished after the murder.”

  “I’m not sure whether or not it played any part in the professor’s murder, but I presumed she’d stolen the manuscript she’d been talking about before the killing. Maybe she manipulated that guy Flynn into committing the murder, and she stole the book. So I did something else . . .”

  She took a napkin from the holder on the table, wiped her lips, leaving a trace of lipstick, and then cleared her throat.

  “I found out Flynn’s address. It wasn’t easy, as he lived in the city and there are a lot of Flynns in this town, but I knew that he’d majored in English at Princeton and graduated in 1988, so in the end I tracked him down. I put a copy of the book in an envelope and sent it to him, without any cover letter.”

  “He probably didn’t know that Laura had stolen Wieder’s manuscript,” I surmised, “and still thought that it was a love triangle that had turned out badly for everybody.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, and then I found out that Flynn had died. I didn’t know whether my sending him the book led him to put the whole story on paper, but maybe it was his way of getting revenge on Laura for lying to him.”

  “So, Laura got off scot-free, thanks to you and Richard, who covered for her.”

  I realized that this sounded harsh, but it was true.

  “She was the kind of person who always knew how to take advantage of the feelings of the people who cared about her. Anyway, do what you like with the information I’ve given you, but I’m not prepared to make any official statement.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” I said. “As long as the rest of Flynn’s manuscript is missing, the whole thing is just a bubble.”

  “I think it’s better this way,” she said. “It’s an old story that’s no longer of any interest to anybody. To be honest, not even to me. I have my own stories that I’m going to think about in the years to come.”

  I parted with Sarah Harper and realized how ironic it was that perhaps I’d managed to untangle the threads of the whole affair just after it had ceased to have any importance to me.

  I wasn’t interested in making sure justice prevailed. I’ve never been a fanatic in the service of the so-called truth, and I was smart enough to know that truth and justice don’t always mean the same thing. At least in one respect, I agreed with Sam: most people preferred simple and nice stories to complicated and unuseful truths.

  Joseph Wieder had died nearly thirty years previously, and Richard Flynn was six feet under, too. Probably Laura Baines had built her career on lies, and maybe on a murder. But people have always worshiped those cut from that very same cloth, and have called them heroes—glancing through a history textbook wou
ld be enough to prove that.

  On the way home, I pictured Laura Baines ransacking the house in search of the manuscript, while Wieder was lying in his own blood on the floor. What was Richard Flynn, who had perhaps wielded the baseball bat, doing in the meantime? Was he still there or had he left? Was he trying to get rid of the murder weapon? But if he did it for Laura, why did she dump him? And, in that case, why did he continue to cover for her?

  Or maybe that train of events existed only in the mind of Sarah Harper, a woman who’d been going down step by step, while her former friend had been building a spectacular career for herself. How many of us are really able to be happy for others’ success and don’t secretly dream of making them pay sooner or later for what they’ve got? Take a look at the news, guys.

  But my questions were no longer important, along with all the other details. Maybe I just liked to believe that Laura Baines, that cold, calculating woman, had performed one of those pool tricks where you hit one ball, which in turn hits another and another. Richard Flynn, Timothy Sanders, and Joseph Wieder had been nothing but pool balls to her, striking up against each other until she achieved her goal.

  And the most ironic thing of all would have been that a man like Wieder, a man who, after all, enjoyed so much rummaging through people’s minds, had ended up being put in a mortal checkmate by one of his students. In this case, Laura Baines would genuinely have deserved her later success, since she’d have proven to be a more skilled vivisectionist of the human mind than her mentor.

  The next day I met up with Peter at Abraço Espresso, in the East Village.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. “You look tired, man. Has something happened?”

  I told him I’d finished the job I’d been hired to do and handed him a written summary. He just put the envelope in his silly briefcase without paying much attention to it. I gave him the copy of Laura Baines’s book, too.

  He didn’t ask me anything else, looking as if his mind was on other things. So I started talking, telling him about a possible version of what had happened in the fall and winter of 1987. He listened to me absently, fidgeting with a sachet of sugar and taking a sip of tea from time to time.