Three-Ways: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery

by Mike Markel

  We left her to her grief, real or otherwise.

  Chapter 4

  Down the black metal stairs, back to the cruiser. We’d just switched over to Dodge Chargers. This one, only a few weeks old, still had that new-car plastic smell. The sun reflected off the black hood, shining right in our eyes. I put down the visor and cracked the front windows a little to let some of the plastic fumes out.

  “Well?” I said to Ryan. “What do you make of May?”

  “That she is quite attractive?”

  I looked at him.

  “You asked me what I make of May.”

  “I have an idea, Ryan. Let’s play a game. Pretend we’re police detectives. We’re working a case together. We want to figure out who killed Big Dick. We just spent ten minutes with his main girlfriend, a willowy young lady named May. Your partner is a middle-age recovering drunk who’s desperately searching for any reason to keep going, and for now she’s trying out Just Doing Her Job. Do you think you could help her?”

  Ryan frowned, then nodded his head slowly as if he was giving the question some deep thought. “Well, if that’s the game you’d like to play, here’s what I would say.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “I look forward to your response.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure May is quite attractive.”

  I sighed. “Ah, shit.”

  “Give me a second, Karen. I’m being serious. The fact that May is quite attractive is about all I’m willing to say at this point.”

  “Why is that, Ryan?”

  “No, let me modify that. May is quite attractive, very self-centered, used to getting her own way and confident she always will, and she’s had many boyfriends.”

  “Yeah, well, that all goes with ‘quite attractive.’ I was hoping you might have some thoughts on—I don’t know—whether she strangled Austin Sulenka.”

  He shook his head and put on his I’d-like-to-help-you face. “I’m sorry. That’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

  “Explain.”

  “In general, I tend to believe the stuff a witness says before she knows the guy is dead more than what she says after. But with May I don’t really believe any of it. If she didn’t kill him—and didn’t know he’s dead—all the business about how disappointing he is because he wasn’t the wonderful fellow he said he is, all that might be true, although the part I really believe is that she learned a lot about her own limitations in that she didn’t realize he was just out to have sex with her. A girl that attractive, she’s been fending off guys since she was twelve, so obviously she thought she was good at it. Maybe she met her match with Austin, and that’s what made the biggest impression on her.”

  “And if she did kill Austin?”

  “If she did kill him, then everything she said is baloney. She knew we’d be by to interview her. She’s got the mascara brush in her hand, she’s rushing off to teach her class, she broke up with him a month ago, only runs into him around the office, but the news of his death is still shocking, mainly because she knew nothing about it since she’s moved on. Still, Austin’s death diminishes her even though she doesn’t have sex with him anymore because no man is an island.”

  “‘No man is an island’?”

  “John Donne. Seventeenth-century English poet,” Ryan said, nodding. “They were English majors.”

  “You had me worried there. I thought for a moment you were gonna concentrate on the case.”

  He gave me a big grin. “I was just having a little fun with you. I am concentrating on the case.”

  “Prove it,” I said. “What should we do next?”

  “All right. Next we should stop by the English Department and interview the chairman.”

  “Why?”

  “So he can tell us all about Austin and May and several other fun people we don’t know about yet.”­

  “And how do we find out if May is a liar?”

  “Well,” Ryan said, gazing up at the roof liner two inches above his head and theatrically rubbing his chin, “when we get back to headquarters, you start to head off to the ladies’ room, then you pause, turn back to me, and say, ‘Ryan, you mind getting the chief to sign off on pulling Austin’s phone records?’ and I say ‘Absolutely, Karen, great idea.’”

  “Did your big sisters beat the crap out of you a lot?”

  “Quite frequently.” Ryan frowned. “Never did figure out why.” Then he showed me his big grin.

  “But that idea I’m gonna have: checking his phones to see if he’s been in touch with May? You gotta admit that’s a great idea, no?”

  He wrinkled his nose like May did. “Good, not great. Kind of obvious, actually. I was being generous, what with you having so little in your life.”

  “Which way is the English Department?”

  “In the Humanities Building,” he said. “On University Drive.”

  The Humanities Building is a three-story brick-and-glass rectangle from the Sixties. The English Department was up on the third floor. I didn’t recognize the place, although all the departments that aren’t built around labs or art galleries or something special blend together in the few remaining fragments of my mind. The faculty offices ring the perimeter, with classrooms and meeting rooms in the windowless core of the building. We walked into the main department offices, where we were greeted by a chirpy forty-something woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the CMSU logo on it.

  Since Ryan looked up the English chair’s name when we were driving over, I let him introduce us and ask if he was in. The secretary scurried off to knock on the guy’s door and announce us. I heard the phrase “two police officers.”

  A man in tan chinos and a navy sport jacket came out of the inner office briskly, wearing a concerned expression. “I’m Jonathan Van Vleet.” He waved us in. He was a distinguished looking guy, about forty-five, with a long, slender face. His hair was mostly white, thinning on top, about halfway through the transition to bald. He was working on a goatee, also white, in preparation. He wore stylish eyeglasses, tortoise-shell plastic frames, round, arty-looking.

  “I’m Detective Karen Seagate, my partner Detective Ryan Miner.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, but he didn’t look at all pleased. He pointed to the two chairs set up in front of his wide wooden desk. He had two monitors on his desk, one showing a letter, another a spreadsheet. When we were settled in, he said, “I’m afraid to ask.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Dr. Van Vleet, but we’ve got some bad news about one of your students.”

  His shoulders seemed to relax a little bit, as if he was relieved it wasn’t his family. “Go ahead.”

  “This information hasn’t been made public yet, but we wanted to tell you and ask for your help. One of your grad students, Austin Sulenka, was found dead this morning.”

  He was silent for a while. His eyes closed slowly and his cheeks seemed to droop. “What happened?”

  “We’re not exactly sure, sir. The autopsy hasn’t been conducted yet. We don’t know if it was some kind of accident or murder.”

  “Is that all you’re permitted to tell me?”

  “He apparently died of asphyxia, but we’re not sure how it happened.”

  He nodded his head. “What would you like to know?”

  “Could you start with the basics? He was a graduate student, right?”

  “Give me a second while I pull up his records.” He hit a few keys, waited a bit, hit a few more. “Okay. Austin was a graduate student, in his fourth semester with us. He was a teaching assistant.”

  “Translate that for us, would you? What kind of degree was he getting? How close to finishing was he?”

  Van Vleet looked at the screen a moment. “He was getting a Master of Arts in literature. A teaching assistant teaches two sections of first-year writing each semester and takes three graduate seminars. In exchange, he gets free tuition and fees and a little over ten thousand dollars a year.”

  “So he would have graduated this month?�
�

  He put up his palms in a slow-down gesture. “It’s a little more complicated than that. He would have completed his courses, but to graduate he would have to successfully defend his thesis.”

  “I’ve heard that phrase. Not sure what it means.”

  “Each MA candidate proposes a thesis—which is a research project of about a hundred pages—to a committee of three graduate faculty members. When it’s complete, they read it, then the four of them sit down for the defense. That’s a meeting where they ask the student questions about the thesis. If the committee votes yes, the student is awarded the degree. If the committee votes no—well, actually, they rarely vote no. Most of the time, they vote ‘not yet.’ They send the student back to revise it and schedule another defense, maybe the next semester.”

  “Do your records tell you whether he had done the defense yet?”

  “No, I don’t have that information.”

  “Who’s the committee?”

  “You’ll want to speak to his adviser, Suzannah Montgomery. The adviser is the chair of the committee.”

  I glanced at Ryan to be sure he was taking notes.

  “What do your students do after they get an MA in literature? Do you know what Austin’s plans were?”

  “No, I don’t know. Some of them, less than ten percent, go on to get a PhD at another university. We don’t have one here. They want to be professors, and that’s the admission ticket. Almost half stay on here as adjunct faculty or go someplace else to do that—”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “An adjunct faculty member works semester-to-semester, course-by-course. At most universities, including here, they teach first-year writing, maybe an intro to lit. But the pay is insulting—twenty-four hundred per section, no benefits. And no security. If the section doesn’t make, they don’t get paid.”

  “So they’re second-class citizens.”

  “I’d call them fourth-class citizens because they’re so much lower than the regular faculty, but since there aren’t any other groups in between, officially I guess they’re second-class.” He shifted in his chair, like he’d just said something witty. Apparently, he’d gotten over the dead grad student. “The idea was they were meant to fill in the holes when we didn’t have tenure-track faculty to teach a particular course, or when a regular faculty member was sick or on leave or sabbatical. But since adjuncts are so cheap, their role has expanded exponentially, especially in the last decade. They now teach ninety-five percent of the first-year writing and most of the intro courses. Yes, we have a two-track system. The adjuncts do the bulk of the teaching; the regular faculty do some teaching but almost all the research.”

  “But you don’t know what Austin was planning to do?”

  “You’ll have to ask Suzannah.”

  “Do you have access to any performance evaluations? I assume you have his grades?” I pointed to his computer screens.

  He nodded, moused around for a moment, then turned back to me. “On the basis of his grades, Austin Sulenka was a mediocre student. His GPA was 3.14, with a couple of C’s that he repeated, a lot of B’s, and a couple of A’s.”

  “That’s mediocre?” I would have thrown myself a party if I’d ever gotten those grades when I was in college. I saw Ryan turn toward me and give me a look.

  Van Vleet nodded. “An excellent grad student is 3.8 or better. A very good one is 3.5, 3.7. You’re supposed to be disappointed if you didn’t earn an A in a grad course.”

  “Aside from grades, what can you tell us about what kind of student he was?

  “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” he said.

  I just looked at him.

  Ryan spoke. “No one should speak ill of the dead."

  I looked at Van Vleet. “Is that what you just said?”

  “Darn tootin’,” he said, granting Ryan a small smile for having passed the audition.

  I wasn’t smiling. “The way I’d look at it, Professor, you want us to catch whoever did this, right?”

  “Of course, Detective.” He sat up straighter in his chair. The pussy. “I just want to be sure I’m speaking in confidence. I really don’t want anything bad about Austin to end up in the media.”

  “You have my word on that, Professor. What do we need to know?”

  “What you need to know is that Austin was … an asshole.”

  “‘Asshole’ is such a broad term. Can you give us an example?”

  “Okay, how about sleeping with one of his students?”

  “That violates policy?”

  “The policy is a lot less clear than I would like. On the one hand, Austin is officially a student. Students sleep with other students all the time, of course. But he’s also the instructor of record for the two courses he teaches. If he were a faculty member sleeping with one of his students, he would face dismissal. All TA’s are given paperwork that explains the university’s policy: that it’s inappropriate. But there are no officially stated penalties. He received a reprimand and was told that if it happens again he’s out.”

  “How far did the student take the complaint? Did she go beyond the department here?”

  “She took it to the dean of students. They have their own disciplinary procedure.”

  “Is that Mary Dawson?” Ryan asked. He remembered her name from a case a few months ago. I remembered a face, sort of.

  “That’s right,” Jonathan Van Vleet said. “She can fill you in on that.”

  “Is that the kind of thing makes you call him an asshole?”

  “That’s just the most obvious example. I mean, if you’re a teacher and you don’t see two or three good reasons you shouldn’t be screwing an eighteen-year old in your class, you’re either too stupid to work in a university or you’re an asshole.”

  “Give me another example.”

  He nodded. “He was in one of my seminars. An undistinguished student—no doubt about that. Didn’t prepare for the classes, wrote lazy papers, et cetera. What he was really there for was the girls.”

  “The other grad students?”

  “They couldn’t take their eyes off him. He’d sit there, a bemused look on his face when anyone actually talked about literature. I’m not a prude. I don’t have any problem with the grad students hooking up. Hell, my wife and I met in grad school. But when you’re in class, when you’re studying—we’d like you to take it seriously. Or at least pretend to. It makes us feel we have a purpose in life, you know? Ten o’clock at night, go meet up with the other students at a bar downtown, do whatever you want … but my faculty take their jobs seriously, and I do, too. It’s insulting to all of us when we get a student who thinks this is a Club Med for people who like books.”

  I nodded. “Okay, he was an asshole. Can you help us with anyone who’d want to hurt him?”

  Van Vleet shook his head. “I just don’t know him well enough. He might’ve been an asshole in other ways. And since I imagine he cycled through the grad students, he could’ve pissed off one or two of them—or maybe their boyfriends. But I really don’t know.”

  “All right, Professor. Sorry we had to bring you this news. But we appreciate you giving us all this information. You’ve been very helpful.” I handed him my card. “You call me if you think of anything else that could help us with what happened?”

  Ryan and I made it back to the Charger. “Austin Sulenka seems to have been an asshole,” I said, turning over the big engine.

  “Yeah, I got that.” Ryan winced as he twisted to fasten his seat belt.

  “So is Van Vleet,” I said.

  “What? Just because he drops a Latin phrase about how you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, then calls his dead grad student an asshole?”

  Chapter 5

  We crawled along the congested roads on campus. I honked at a kid, his face in his phone, wandering in front of the Charger. It would take us as long to cover a half mile on campus as five miles on city streets.

  “That appears to be the consensus,” Ryan said. “Austin was
an asshole. If two interviews are enough to form a consensus.”

  “You’re not buying it?”

  Ryan paused a moment. “Not quite yet,” he said. “Take May Eberlein. She said Austin wasn’t what he appeared to be. But why should we believe he misrepresented himself? Maybe he was straight with her that he wasn’t into monogamy. She’d broken a lot of normal guys, so she saw it as a challenge to domesticate him. Then, she would drop him. Game over. But she failed. Rather than admit that to us—”

  “Or to herself.”

  “That’s right, rather than admit that to us or to herself, she feeds us this story about how the whole experience was so educational. To her, admitting to being naïve is less humiliating than admitting that she wasn’t sufficiently bewitching to break him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Possible. How about sleeping with one of his students? Let’s hear you spin that one.”

  “Well, that one’s a little more challenging—”

  “No shit, as in, whatever the girl’s motives were, whatever her actions were, unless she somehow managed to yank his dick out of his pants against his will …”

  “Agreed.” He nodded. “No matter what she said or did, it was his responsibility, as the adult, not to pursue her. Even if she stopped by his office, closed the door behind her, and took off her clothes, it’s officially his fault. And if he instigated it by exploiting the power differential, then he’s really at fault.” Ryan shifted in his seat. I could see his injury was still bothering him.

  “So we agree he was an asshole.”

  “If it’s true he had an affair with a freshman in his class, then yes.”

  “All right,” I said. “Good. When we get back, let’s get his phone records and see if he was drilling any of his freshmen.”

  “And catch up with his adviser.” Ryan pulled his notebook from his inside jacket pocket and opened it up. “Suzannah Montgomery.”

  “Yeah, let’s see if he was drilling all the women in Rawlings.”

  I pulled into a spot behind headquarters, and we made our way to the detectives’ bullpen.

  “Ryan, you ask for permission to get his phones, will you, and I’ll see what I can get from the dean of students about him screwing his student.”