No One You Know

by Michelle Richmond

  “But how? I thought they’d kept it a secret from everyone.”

  “Almost everyone. I saw them together once, in the office of the Stanford Journal of Mathematics. I walked in and they were—” He scratched his neck, looked away.

  “They were what?”

  “Involved.” He took a sip of his coffee.

  “How involved?”

  “Very.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “Not there.”

  “It was shocking to me, too,” he said. “She’d always been so shy. I figured it must have something to do with McConnell’s charisma. He had a lot of it, you know. Good-looking, charming. For some reason, girls fall for that sort of thing.”

  Was it just my imagination, or was there an edge of jealousy in Strachman’s voice?

  “I walked away. Never mentioned it to anyone.” He paused, looking at me as though something was just dawning on him. “You’re still trying to figure it out, aren’t you? After all these years.” He hesitated for a second, as if he was making a quick calculation, extrapolation, trying to figure out whether he would’ve been doing the same thing if the roles had been reversed. “All right,” he said, “I can respect that.

  “Anyway, what I was getting at was that there was an awful lot of talent in that math department. Your sister’s was the most obvious, but there were others. At twenty-six, I was already losing my edge. I suspected the Hilbert was as far as I would go, and I only got that far because of Lila’s—” He paused, looked away. “Her misfortune,” he said finally. “It didn’t help that I wasn’t much liked in the department. Back then, I had a rather overbearing personality. The prize didn’t bring me any joy. I felt ashamed. I was certain everyone hated me for taking what was rightfully hers. If I’d continued, maybe I could have been good, but I knew I’d never be great.” He shrugged. “So I quit. I’ve never regretted it.”

  “Did you read Andrew Thorpe’s book?” I asked.

  “I skimmed it.” He paused. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was only interested in whether or not I made an appearance. I’m telling you, I was pretty insufferable back then.”

  “Why would you have?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Made an appearance. Say you’d been in the book—”

  “Which I wasn’t.”

  “No, but if you had been—”

  “No reason,” Strachman said. “Except, I guess, I was there. For a few weeks, pretty much everyone in the department was under a cloud of suspicion. The police questioned all of us. Not very well, in my opinion, but they did question us. It was what everyone was talking about in the hallways, the cafeteria, even in the study sessions. I remember thinking at the time that I was caught up in a real-life game of Clue. Was it Mr. Boddy in the ballroom with a rope? Professor Plum in the conservatory with a candlestick?”

  I grimaced.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to make a joke. But you’ve got to understand, we were all living mathematics night and day. It was very stressful, highly competitive, a petri dish of obsessive personalities. And then this terrible and, I must admit, fascinating thing happened. We were horrified and riveted at the same time. And the women—there weren’t many of them, you know—were afraid. We all knew that Lila didn’t have much of a life outside of the department, which seemed to raise the probability that the killer might have been one of us.”

  “And what do you think?” I asked. I was watching his face for something—a flinch or nervous tic that might incriminate him, an obvious sign like sweating or looking away. But he looked me in the eyes and said, “I have no idea.”

  “What about McConnell?”

  Strachman shook his head. “Honestly, I think he was just an easy target. The obvious choice, perhaps, but I don’t believe he did it.”

  “Why?”

  “It just seems out of character. Granted, we weren’t best buddies or anything, but we did have a few classes together, and I had worked on a project with him during my first year. I didn’t like him much, but then I didn’t like anyone very much in those days. I envied his confidence, his ease with women. They loved him, you know. He was tall, good-looking, funny, and when he walked down the hall you could just tell he had an effect on people. Women would stop in mid-sentence to look at him. I was this average-looking guy, clammed up whenever I tried to say so much as hello to a girl, and for him it all just came naturally.”

  It had never occurred to me before to ask this, but hearing McConnell described in this way, I couldn’t help but wonder. “Were there other women?” I asked. “Besides my sister?”

  Strachman thought for a moment. “There was one,” he said, “a girl in the philosophy department. Petite, willowy, brunette—very pretty. I used to see them eating lunch together all the time, she was obviously smitten. He put an end to it soon after it started—maybe a couple of months—but it was an ugly breakup. Sometimes she’d show up at his office late at night, demanding to see him alone. There would be shouting, and he’d have to practically push her out the door. She threatened to tell his wife, but I don’t know if she ever did. The other guy who was working with us on the project used to get very annoyed, but to be honest, I wished McConnell would teach me how he did it. I couldn’t imagine any woman would ever feel that strongly about me.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “Melissa? Melanie?” He shook his head. “I never knew her last name. I don’t know what McConnell did to finally get rid of her, but by the time your sister showed up she wasn’t coming around anymore.”

  “I’m very curious,” I said. “Why did you keep McConnell’s secret? Why didn’t you tell the police what you knew about him and Lila?”

  He looked at his watch. “I have a meeting in fifteen minutes.” And then, as if to prove to me that he wasn’t just making the meeting up to get out of there, he elaborated. “We’re bidding on the tunnel to Montara. If you want to make a good investment, buy property on the coast now, before the tunnel goes in. People still think it’s too far from the city, they’re turned off by Devil’s Slide. But once the tunnel opens, property’s going to skyrocket, mark my word.”

  He stood to leave. “I assume you’ve talked to Carroll.”

  “Carroll?” I repeated, trying to remember where I’d heard the name.

  “Don Carroll, McConnell’s mentor at Stanford. Carroll knew McConnell better than anyone. I’m sure he’s still teaching.”

  DRIVING TO WORK AFTER MY CONVERSATION WITH Strachman, I tried to banish from my mind the image of Lila and Peter McConnell, naked in the offices of the Stanford Journal of Mathematics. When I talked to McConnell in Diriomo, he had somehow managed to make his affair with Lila appear almost inevitable, inspired, driven by a deep intellectual and emotional connection that was more powerful than his will, or hers. From his telling, it looked more like a tragic love story than a sordid affair. But the image of them in the office together late at night—his wife would have probably been waiting for him at home, the child tucked into bed—made me confront something about Lila that I didn’t want to think about, something I’d never wanted to think about. She’d knowingly had an affair with a married man, a father. Their relationship had not been based purely upon intellectual attraction, but also upon something earthly and common, something I had succumbed to more times than I cared to admit: lust.

  All these years I’d thought of her more as a girl than as a woman. Even though she was three years older, I’d always been the more worldly one. This perception had to do with her naiveté in social matters, her lack of romantic and sexual experience. I’d never once gone to her for advice on men, and had assumed that, when the time came, she would come to me. But the fact was that she had been twenty-two years old when she died, old enough to know what she was doing, old enough to understand what an affair might do to a marriage. I tried to chase the thoughts away. To even contemplate that Lila might have been at fault in any way felt wrong. In my story, she had always been blam
eless.

  Thirty

  ON FRIDAY EVENING, I WENT TO SEE BEN Fong-Torres.

  “Red or white?” he asked, when he greeted me at the elevator door.

  “Red.”

  “Perfect. We have a Syrah I’ve been wanting to try.”

  We took our glasses outside, where a steep wooden staircase led down to a shady garden of fern trees, luxuriously blooming rose bushes, and banana palms. I could imagine sitting in the garden in the morning, sipping my coffee and reading a book. I asked Ben if he and his wife, Dianne, ever did that.

  “Oh, we’re not coffee people,” he said. “We drink tea.”

  While I could enjoy a good cup of tea every now and then, I had a hard time relating to people who didn’t drink coffee at all. Granted, they were probably calmer, kinder, and less prone to anxiety—but I couldn’t imagine going a day, much less a month or year, without coffee.

  “Did you know that, in Turkey in the fifteenth century, there was a law allowing women to divorce their husbands if they didn’t provide them with adequate amounts of coffee? But a century later in the Ottoman Empire, anyone caught operating a coffeehouse could be officially beaten as punishment. On the second offense, they were sewed into a leather sack and tossed into the Bosphorus River.”

  Ben nodded politely. It was always my first instinct when there was a hole in a conversation—talk about coffee. I worried that I was like a dentist who regales strangers with stories of molar extractions, or a realtor who can’t stop talking about fluctuations in the thirty-year rate.

  “Thanks for finding the tape,” I said.

  “No problem. After we talked about it, I became a little obsessed.”

  “Where did it turn up?”

  “I’d loaned it to a friend years ago. I had to make several phone calls. Turned out my friend let his cousin borrow it, who let her son borrow it, who listed it on eBay last year. But no one bought it. Imagine the kid’s surprise when I e-mailed him through his eBay account and told him I wanted my tape back.”

  In the TV room, we sat side by side on the plush sofa. The recording was low quality, the sound scratchy. You could tell it had been recorded in somebody’s basement. The first song was good but not great, a slow, Dylanesque ballad about mornings on Haight Street, before the bars had opened. The second was an acoustic number, the kind of guitar work that made you feel both lonely and inspired. I could almost feel Boudreaux in the room with us, sipping whiskey and weeping over the strings. Before the third song came on, Ben paused the cassette player and said, “Pretty amazing, huh?”

  “It is.”

  “This next one caught me off guard. It’s the first time I ever heard Boudreaux on keyboard, but that’s not the half of it. I almost didn’t call you. Didn’t know if I wanted to open up that can of worms. But then I talked to Dianne, and she said you really ought to hear it.”

  I swallowed. “All right.”

  He pressed play. I leaned forward and listened. The first couple of minutes were just Boudreaux on keyboard. The notes were less certain than when he was on bass, but there was still something about the music that surpassed the brain and went straight to the heart, like Boudreaux was feeling every note of it. There was something very private about it, too, as if Boudreaux didn’t expect another living soul to hear this music. It felt like I was listening in on someone’s dreams. And then he began to sing. His voice faltered through the first few lines, then grew stronger, but it never did become entirely confident. Later, listening to the song again, dozens of times, alone in my apartment, I realized that it was this uncertainty in the voice, the emotional rawness, that made it beautiful. His voice reminded me a little of Townes Van Zandt, and I thought of a night more than thirty years before, when my parents had taken me and Lila to see Van Zandt perform at the Fillmore. We waited in line out in front of the building on Geary on a cold night in February. Next door to the Fillmore was the imposing three-story building that served as headquarters for the People’s Temple. Mingled in with the people waiting for the Van Zandt concert were Temple members, and indigents waiting to be fed in the church dining hall. At one point a man with dyed black hair stepped out of a limousine, and he was instantly surrounded by people who seemed to want to touch his hair and his clothes. He smiled and hugged everyone, kissing several women, and even a few girls who didn’t look much older than Lila, on the mouth.

  “Is that Townes Van Zandt?” I asked.

  My mother pulled me and Lila close. “No,” she said. “That’s Jim Jones.”

  Not long after, the man with the dyed black hair would be dead, along with hundreds of his disciples in Guyana. A few days later, Dan White would assassinate Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, and eventually be found not guilty because he was under the supposedly mind-altering influence of Twinkies. Growing up, I didn’t know that San Francisco was any different from any other place. Only when I was older would I realize how strange my city seemed to people from other parts of the country. To me, it was simply home, a place where you might wake up one morning to find that someone you knew had followed a cult to Guyana, or that someone else you knew had died of AIDS, or that your mayor had been murdered. Strange things happened here all the time: some were beautiful, some were horrible, all were part of life in the city by the bay.

  Thirty-one

  THE THIRD SONG ON THE TAPE WAS ENTITLED “The Forest.” When Boudreaux sang the simple refrain, his voice was choked with emotion:

  Deep in the trees I’m on my knees

  Looking at you and not believing

  What have I done, my beautiful one

  What have I done

  The song gave me chills. I tried to be objective about it. One thing my mother had taught me during her years as an attorney is that, if you’re looking for something hard enough, you can almost always find it. If we believe a thing to be true, we look for clues that will lead us to our foregone conclusion, filtering out anything that might contradict our beliefs. She’d seen it happen with juries. She’d even seen it happen with my father.

  One night, about a year after Lila died, wanting to borrow a belt, I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door. “Come in,” my mother said, in a falsely cheerful voice.

  My father was out that night, and when I entered the room I saw my mother sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping her eyes.

  I sat down beside her. “What’s wrong?”

  She smiled and put an arm around my shoulders. “Just something your father and I need to work out.”

  “Tell me.”

  She plucked a Kleenex from the bedside table, blew her nose, and said, “He’s got this crazy idea that I’m cheating on him.”

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “He says I’ve been distant lately. Maybe I have. If so, it’s got nothing to do with your father. I’m just—” She paused, as if looking for the right word. “Sad,” she finished. “I’ve been sad for a while now. And your father is accustomed to a certain level of—” Here she paused again, then looked me square in the face. “Attention, if you know what I mean.”

  “Mom!” I said. “How gross.”

  “Well, you asked. Anyway, somehow he got this idea, and now he can’t let go of it. Every time I have to stay late at work, he gets suspicious. Yesterday, I told him I couldn’t have lunch with him because I had a meeting at noon that I expected to run for a few hours. Which I did, but at the last minute, it got moved to one-thirty. By then it was too late to call your dad and have him drive all the way across town, so I grabbed lunch across the street with Liam instead.”

  Liam was one of the younger associates at her firm. I’d met him a couple of times at the office. He was great-looking and had once come this close to making the U.S. Olympic skiing team, but when I tried to engage him in a conversation, I’d discovered that he was painfully boring.

  “And?”

  “And your dad, for some crazy reason, had been waiting outside the building, and he watched me go into the restaurant with Liam. We�
��re sitting there eating our pasta, talking about the case, and your dad storms in and says he needs to talk to me.”

  “Dad did that?”

  “I excused myself,” my mother said, “and we went to Dad’s car to talk. He said he knew something was up, and seeing me at lunch with Liam when I was supposed to be with him was proof. So now he thinks I’m having an affair with Liam! Can you believe it?” She was laughing and crying at the same time.

  After leaving Ben’s house, I went home and listened to the song over and over again, for hours on end. I had to consider that I might be making myself crazy like my father had done all those years before, looking for something where there was nothing. After all, the lyrics were vague enough that they could have been written by anyone, and could have myriad meanings. But the song appeared to be laced with guilt—“what have I done”—and the reference to the trees unnerved me. The lyrics, taken alone, would have been perfectly innocent. And yet I had to consider the context: Boudreaux’s car at Armstrong Woods.

  During our first meeting, I’d asked Ben if he knew of any reason why Boudreaux might be there. I asked if he was into hiking, or if perhaps he had family at the Russian River. Ben didn’t know about the latter, but as for hiking, he told me he got the feeling that Boudreaux wasn’t much of a naturalist. “He was more comfortable inside a bar or a recording studio,” Ben had said. “The first time I met him, he looked like he hadn’t been out in the sun in months. Which is why I was so surprised years later when he told me he was working at the dairy farm. It just didn’t seem to fit his personality.”

  Through my bedroom window I could see the muted lights of the city. A slender moon—the kind that Lila had dubbed a “fingernail moon” as a child—hung high in the sky, and a swath of fog seemed to be hanging from its tip like a giant white overcoat. For perhaps the thirtieth time that night, I pressed the rewind button on my portable stereo, waited for the whir and click of the tape, and listened to “The Forest.”