Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  Like so many other things, it wasn’t just the revelation but the way it came.

  “Nick, I was seventeen. Why’d they wait so long! The only reason Dad stopped hiding it was he thought he might be dying. He felt sorry for himself, he felt guilty.” Stefan helplessly held up his hands in a gesture that was just like his father’s—but I would never say that.

  Stefan wasn’t quite as angry at his mother or his uncle about being lied to all his life, which made me wonder if he hadn’t dumped it all on his father in an act of emotional economy. Demonizing one parent was easier, somewhat less destructive, perhaps. But he was distant from all of them, a distance I didn’t challenge, but didn’t actively support, either. I hoped he’d eventually be reconciled with his family.

  Stefan and I unpacked as soon as we got to the cottage, and I turned up the heat we kept at low while we were away. It was 50 to 60 during the day at this point in the fall, but could go down into the 20’s or 30’s at night, and the west wind off the lake could be fierce.

  I had brought up the shabbat candles and a challah so we could make shabbat there. Lighting the candles, blessing the wine, the bread, and saying the short version of the after-meal blessings (Birkat ha-mazon) were rituals that Stefan had at first felt awkward about, then grudgingly observed, and now participated in without resistance. He had come a long way in our ten years together, but sometimes he had the air of a badly injured man whose accident still beclouds his successful physical rehabilitation. He can walk, but he remembers a time when it was impossible. Stefan could join me in the blessings, and a mild bit of Jewish observance, but he was still haunted by all those years his parents and uncle pretended they weren’t Jewish, worse, pretended they were Catholic, but ambivalently so.

  We always left the freezer and cupboards in the cabin well stocked, so dinner that Friday night was easy. I started putting together my favorite chili: meatless and fast, which we ate with a red pepper and cucumber salad. We killed a whole bottle of Médoc before Stefan said, “So what did you find in Perry’s stuff that scared the shit out of you?”

  I set down my glass, trying hard to glare, to be stern, but I giggled instead, as much drunk as feeling ridiculously exposed.

  “It was that obvious?”

  “You come home half an hour after you left, looking like Medea, make me eat an enormous lunch, tell me we should pack up and go to the cabin for ‘a change.’ ” He shrugged. “You’d never make a good spy.”

  I took his hand across the table. “How could you wait all this time to ask me?” I knew the answer, though: he was patient, he was kind. He knew I wanted to escape, so he let me. But now I suppose we had to face whatever I was running from.

  I reached into my pants pocket and brought out the note, unfolded it, passed it over.

  “STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING OR I’LL KILL YOU,” Stefan read, without inflection. The air around us, fragrant with cumin and coriander, oregano and garlic, was like a shroud, muffling the ugliness of those words.

  Stefan held the note and gazed down at it with puzzled regret as if it were a mirror and he were a faded actor wondering where his youthful face had disappeared to.

  “This is a joke,” I said. “I can’t believe any of this is happening.

  “Stop what,” Stefan said slowly. “And who’s this for?”

  “It must be for Perry. I found it in his desk. I was right that people hated him. Maybe he’s dead because he didn’t stop—”

  “Stop what?”

  I shook my head. “God, I don’t know. But I don’t think it was just an accident him winding up in the river like that—even if he was drunk. What if somebody got him drunk?”

  “And then killed him? Who? A mystery figure from his past?”

  “Somebody from the present. I’m not the only one around here who hated him. Look at Serena Fisch—she’s ecstatic now that he’s out of the picture. She’s got the courses she wanted, and I’m sure she’ll get his position officially.”

  Stefan looked disgusted. “So she killed him for that?”

  “What’s so unbelievable about it? We don’t know anything about her.”

  “Okay, then what about Priscilla Davidoff? You said she was really hostile about Perry. And she writes mysteries, doesn’t she?”

  “They’re awful—”

  “But somebody always dies in her books, right? So she thinks about murder, she imagines it—why couldn’t she do it?”

  “What’s her motive?”

  Stefan shrugged. “We don’t know anything about her, either. Maybe she just hates male academics.”

  “Great. Now you sound like Rush Limbaugh complaining about feminazis.” But I thought that writing about murder did seem a possible path to committing it. “And there’s also Bill Malatesta,” I said quietly. “He could’ve done it because he panicked after he told Perry that Broadshaw came on to him. If it got out, Bill would probably never get his degree.”

  “And what about Chad—your student who said he found the body? Why wouldn’t he talk to the Campus Police? What’s he got to hide?”

  “You really think he could have done it? Perry was so much bigger.” I answered my own question: “But Chad’s a wrestler, and Perry was drunk.” When I looked up, Stefan was smirking. “You’ve been making fun of me,” I said.

  “Once you start looking for suspects, everybody looks guilty. And what if Perry wrote the note?”

  “You mean he was going to give it to someone?”

  Stefan nodded thoughtfully.

  “But if that’s true,” I said, “that’s just as much reason for murder. If he threatened someone with murder, then—”

  Stefan shook himself. “I hate this. Let’s wash up and take a walk.”

  I was glad for the break, for the release into habitual activity, and enjoyed washing and stacking the dishes as much as if I were in someone else’s kitchen helping out after a party.

  “Now why is it that other people’s mess isn’t so offensive?” I asked Stefan, when the last plate was done. “Maybe that’s because you know you’re not trapped there.”

  He said, “Any more questions you want to ask and then answer yourself?”

  I grinned. “What if we just crawl into bed now? We’ve already missed the sunset. We can take a walk tomorrow.”

  “Getting horizontal sounds great.”

  “I hope we can get vertical too.”

  Stefan followed me to the bedroom.

  We slept very late, took a long bath before breakfast, which was really lunch, cooked and ate far too much food: creamy scrambled eggs, peppered bacon, French toast and buckwheat pancakes doused with real maple syrup. It was as if we were in training for some ordeal. We ate greedily, enjoying every bite, making quite a mess of our faces and hands.

  We finally heaved ourselves up to get the dishes to the sink. We washed up without talking, moving around each other with the easy grace of ten years together. Once we had started sharing a house in Massachusetts, I discovered something I had never known: the simple joy of quiet and undramatic moments together. It’s hard to talk about it without sounding like a Hallmark card, but I still sometimes marvel at how much fun it can be to do work around the house with Stefan, set a table, watch TV. And to touch each other casually, as a sort of low-key emotional punctuation. Sharing a life is what I mean—since most of life is not dramatic, is even routine, but the routine can be beautiful. I’m not trying to glorify domesticity, just give it a little dignity, I guess.

  With the dishwasher churning away, we headed out to the lake. I always enjoyed walking along the curving wild beach, especially where the sand turned rocky, and beyond to the low cliffs with tangled slabs and steps of gray shale at their feet. The shale looked black and shiny when the waves broke over it, and there was something monumental and sad about it—like the remains of some ancient palace. I usually felt like a little boy on the beach, wanted a shovel and pail, and could almost always get Stefan to join me in stomping and jumping in any puddle we found. Today
, though, he seemed much less inclined to be silly.

  We ended up sitting side by side on shale ledges well back from the waterline for a long time, staring out at the enormity of Lake Michigan, making inane comments now and then about the colors, the size, the smell. It heartened me that even a writer could be overwhelmed, deprived of originality in the face of something so beautiful. We were both used to the roaring salty Atlantic besieged by sunbathers, ships, gulls; but here was what felt like our own private ocean, no matter how many sailboats or swimmers we ever came across. Today the lake was very quiet, almost absurdly picturesque.

  Often when I feel very close to him, I also am amazed that Stefan and I had grown up not that many miles apart in Manhattan—him in Washington Heights, me on the Upper West Side—but had never met until we were in graduate school.

  “Did you ever think you’d end up in Michigan?” I asked. “We’d end up in Michigan?”

  “I never even thought of Michigan. I always figured I’d live in New York. Have a terrific apartment on Riverside Drive.” He closed his eyes as if picturing himself unlocking his fantasy front door.

  “In the low Seventies?” That was not too far from where I’d grown up, though on the less impressive West End Avenue. Stefan nodded, smiling at his old dream.

  “Well I wanted Park Avenue—”

  “And somebody playing Cole Porter at your parties?”

  “Yes! And me as slinky and smart as Myrna Loy.” Suddenly I pictured her and William Powell in The Thin Man. Stefan seemed to catch the change in my mood.

  “You think someone killed Perry for sure,” he said, not looking at me. “That he was doing something worth being killed for.”

  “Yes, I do. I mean, there are a lot of loony people around at the university, but I can’t imagine someone writing a threatening note like that who was just kidding. It doesn’t feel like a joke.”

  “What are you going to do?” Stefan asked me, face blank.

  Did I have to do anything? So what if I’d found the note in Perry’s desk? It wasn’t as if anyone had asked me to report on his things. What if the note was from a crazy student, or something personal that had nothing to do with his death, and nothing to do with me and Stefan? How could we even tell that the note had been written here in Michigan? Maybe it was some bizarre kind of souvenir or talisman. Some people kept old photographs; Perry liked to keep his favorite threatening notes….

  I was really clutching at straws, desperate to believe the note wasn’t important, when of course it was.

  “God, I’m hungry,” I said. And we headed back to broil some two-inch-thick steaks, which we ate with French-fried yams and a bottle of Cahors. We played the radio very loud during dinner and our conversation was episodic and strained, as if we were soldiers back from the front unwilling to talk about the horrors they had survived, but too clouded and distracted to pretend everything was fine.

  We eventually staggered to bed, as surly and uncommunicative as if being together in this cabin were an accident, not a plan.

  11

  STEFAN DROVE US HOME VERY EARLY on Monday morning because he had two afternoon classes back to back. There wasn’t much traffic until,we got closer to Michiganapolis. I slept most of the way, waking up sweaty and uncomfortable now and then, asking where we were, peering woozily out the window, with the receding towns like pages torn from a calendar in a movie to economically show the passage of time. We were home sooner than I expected, and I brought in the mail and started the wash while Stefan showered again. On his way to his office hours before class, he pawed through the mail, but didn’t have time to open much.

  “You’ll sort everything, right?”

  “Of course.”

  I always did; he always asked. I suppose most couples have these ritual little interactions that are the equivalent of chimps grooming each other—a sign of closeness that might seem strange to outsiders.

  After he was gone, I wandered through the house a little. Usually I feel released and happy to be back no matter where we’ve been—up north, San Francisco, Paris. But today I couldn’t relish being home because of the note I’d found in Perry’s desk.

  I checked the campus directory, made a quick phone call, and drove over to my office in Parker.

  Detective Valley showed up five minutes later, wearing the same suit as before. It must have been a Columbo raincoat touch, I thought, something to make people more relaxed and more voluble.

  “Thanks for meeting me here,” I said, nodding for him to take my students’ chair. He closed the door behind him and sat down. I passed him the note.

  He read it without a change of expression, put it down on the desk, and just looked at me.

  “That was in Perry Cross’s desk.”

  Nonchalantly, he asked, “How’d you find it?”

  “Lynn—the chair—asked me to pack up Perry’s things in boxes.” I turned and waved to the mess on Perry’s desk.

  Valley’s eyes seemed to flicker with doubt.

  “Well, actually, it was his secretary who asked me for him. Claire. She said he wanted me to do it. You can check with her. She’s in charge of all this.”

  “I’ll ask her,” Valley said quietly. “When did you find the note?”

  “Friday. I was—”

  “Friday? Today’s Monday,” he said sharply. “Why did you wait three days to call me?”

  “I went up north—Stefan and I went up north to our cottage. I needed to get away.” As soon as those last words were out, I felt like an idiot. Valley just waited for me to go on.

  “I guess I could have called you on Friday. I just wasn’t thinking straight.”

  Valley glanced over at Perry’s things. “Why didn’t you finish clearing up?”

  “I found the note and had to leave.”

  “Just like that.” Valley didn’t sound convinced, but why should he be?

  “Listen, the note really freaked me out, and all this has been really hard for me,” I said.

  “But you didn’t especially like Perry Cross.”

  “I’m not a monster! He was my office mate and he was killed. It would shake anybody up.”

  “That’s it, huh?” He nodded, cool eyes on me.

  I didn’t look away.

  “Killed?” he asked. “You said killed—but the Medical Examiner’s report says it was an accident. Why do you think he was killed?”

  “Look at the note.”

  “It could be just a threat—it could mean anything. A practical joke.” He shrugged. “We’ll examine it. Not that it’ll tell us much since you’ve been carting it around the state.”

  “Hey!”

  “Who else saw you find the note? Nobody?” He nodded grimly.

  Oh great, I thought. I was digging myself in deeper.

  “Has anyone else seen the note?”

  “Stefan,” I said sullenly.

  Valley pressed on. “And he didn’t bring it to my attention either.”

  “We were up north!”

  “Without a phone?”

  I didn’t answer that one.

  “Why are you so sure Professor Cross was killed?”

  I went on the offensive. “The physical evidence doesn’t rule out that somebody pushed him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  Valley shook his head. “Are you telling me that Perry Cross had real enemies at this university? You said he wasn’t popular. Did people hate him enough to kill him?”

  I shook my head, feeling sweaty and dizzy.

  “Did you hate him? Did you kill him and then fake this note to make it look like someone else did it? And you’re the hero who cracks the case?”

  I wanted to get the hell out of there and keep going, but I forced myself not to bolt.

  “Did you hate Perry Cross enough to kill him? Did you?”

  I closed my eyes. “Yes, I hated him.” It was out—now I could meet his stare. “But not enough to kill him, and if I did, why would I show
you this note after they rule his death is an accident? That’s not very swift, is it?”

  “I’ve been here fifteen years and professors do lots of stupid things.”

  Despite myself, I wanted to ask him what he meant by that.

  “What did you have against Perry Cross?” Valley brought out.

  I stammered, “Nothing.”

  “But you just said you hated him. Why? What did he do to you?

  “Not a thing—I hated the kind of person he was.” It sounded so lame I wasn’t surprised when Valley chuckled.

  “I get it,” he said. “Generic hatred.”

  “What’s it matter anyway?” I asked. “Since you’re convinced it was an accident, who cares why I hated Perry Cross?”

  Valley let the question hang in the air, his silence answering me. I felt exposed, hung out to dry—and it was my own fault. I was the one who called him.

  He stood up and smiled, obviously pleased he’d gotten me to blurt out what I really felt about Perry. And I thought he enjoyed my general discomfort—it probably amused him to torment faculty members, or maybe he just saved that for queers.

  “We’ll get back to you about the note,” he said. “If we need to.” At the door he turned and added softly, “Now, is there anything else you’re not telling me, any other surprises?”

  “Nothing!” I snapped, feeling my face turn red, thinking about when Chad had told me he was the one who had found Perry’s body.

  Valley nodded, eyeing me suspiciously, opened the door, and slipped out of my office, as cool and controlled as when he’d come in.

  Dragging myself home, I wished I had just destroyed the damned note and saved myself the inquisition.

  Dispiritedly, I moved the wash along to the drier and started another load. While the washer chugged away in the laundry room off the kitchen, I made a pot of coffee. When I poured myself a cup, I sat down to go through the mail. It had to be done, and I figured it might calm me.