Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  “So it was suicide?” Stefan said. “You called her, she figured out somebody knew, and she jumped. Or it was some kind of accident, or….”

  “Oh, God, here we go again!”

  Those words floated around us, unreal, cold, disconnected from the smashed body lying on the other side of the river. It was like being in a nightmare where everything you think clearly comes out as babble. No, it was as if the last week hadn’t happened, as if we had just heard Perry Cross was dead, and Stefan and I were sitting in my office, trying out different possibilities.

  We had gotten nowhere, it had all been a terrible waste of time and emotion.

  “Well, you have an alibi, and so do I,” Stefan said, as we headed down the sloping path that led to Parker Hall.

  I didn’t say anything, silenced by shame. How could I have thought of Stefan as a murderer? It was a delusion, like some crazy story little kids tell each other with such excitement that they believe it’s true.

  “If she didn’t fall,” Stefan said, stopping me, turning me around to face him on that poorly lit and empty path, “if she didn’t fall, then someone pushed her. Someone who pushed Perry too.

  His grim silence said the next line: that someone who was still out there.

  “Serena,” I said firmly. “Who else? She hated Perry, she hated Rose. Perry got her job, Rose took away her department.” But the words disgusted me. Who was I to impute a crime or even motives to anyone? What arrogance. We would just tell everything to the police tomorrow and let them take care of the whole mess.

  “You’re right,” I said to Stefan. “It really is over. And you were right from the beginning. It’s none of my business. We’re out of it completely.”

  Stefan beamed at me as if I were an alcoholic finally confessing my addiction.

  “Let’s go somewhere to eat,” he said. “Pizza?”

  “Terrific” We headed down to Parker Hall as if each step were taking us out of a nightmare. I felt hungry, not just for pizza, but to plunge back into a normal life free of suspicion and planning and second-guessing. Somewhere off behind us, I heard someone whiz by on one of the bike paths.

  “Can we stop a minute?” Stefan asked. “I want to run upstairs to my office and get some essays.”

  “I’ll go up too, and see if there’re any notes from students.” Even though I told my students not to slip notes or papers under my door but put everything in my mailbox, they did so anyway. I suppose it was less intimidating for some of them than braving the department office.

  We climbed the worn-down sandstone stairs of Parker Hall and Stefan unlocked the scarred wooden door. The shabby main hall seemed cavernous, but there was some light filtering in from outside. He headed for the stairs without bothering to turn on any lights, since the stairwell had windows all down its length, and I stumbled after him. I called out, “Come get me when you’re done.”

  “Okay,” he shouted, taking the steps quickly as he headed to the second floor. I slowed down as I trudged up to the third floor, and when I got to the stairwell door, whose upper half was glass, I stopped, remembering my fearfulness a few nights before, when I’d thought someone was trying my office door.

  I blushed a little. I had done that to myself, made myself afraid. Thank God Stefan and I didn’t live in an old and isolated house with any kind of history! Then I’d never be able to sleep and I’d probably haunt the house myself, trying every door and window to make sure it was secure.

  Heading jauntily down the hall, I thought I heard something fall but decided it was only the echo of my own footsteps. When I turned the corner to head to my office, I saw the light was on, the door open. Having just thought about ghosts, I had to tell myself what I was seeing was real.

  “Shit!” I heard, and something was flung to the floor. I couldn’t see anyone, and wondered if I could make it back to the stairs quickly enough to shout for Stefan. But before I could get any further, Chuck Bayer was standing there, looking straight out the doorway.

  “What are you doing in my office?” I advanced on him, taking in the mess. Desk drawers gaped, and everything had been tumbled out of Perry’s boxes, the ones I had so carefully and self-satisfyingly filled.

  Now I was really shouting. “What are you doing in here?”

  Chuck backed away from the door as I crossed the threshold. “Don’t tell me you got confused in the dark, or you found the door open. I’m not buying any of that.”

  Chuck nodded. “Okay,” he said. “It’s pretty simple. Perry had something of mine, and I want it back.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  He licked his lips, eyes down, cringing like a disobedient puppy. Well, a tall, skinny, badly dressed puppy.

  “What did Perry have of yours?”

  Chuck wouldn’t look at me.

  “How did you get in?” I turned to check the lock, and that’s when Chuck sprang at me, knocking me into one of the file cabinets. I felt the jolt from my shoulders down to my legs, and when my head snapped back, he was grabbing at my throat. I kicked at him but his arms were so long I couldn’t connect. I couldn’t believe how much strength there was in that gangly physique.

  He killed them, he’s the one, I thought, as Chuck punched me in the chest and I staggered. His eyes were terrifying—there was no anger there, no emotion at all, just calculation, as if I were a problem in logic he was solving. He hit me again and I fell backwards onto my desk. I heard some kind of crack and suddenly couldn’t see anything. My lungs felt empty of air. I was whirling in darkness and agony. He’s going to kill me too, I thought, starting to cry as his hands found my neck and he began to squeeze.

  There was a roar, the hands were ripped from my throat, and I heard an enormous crash. Through my pain I could make out Stefan slamming Chuck against the wall between the windows, blood spattered on Chuck’s forehead and shirt.

  Coughing, I tried to tell Stefan to stop, but when Chuck slid to the floor, Stefan backed off, staring down at him red-faced, panting, as if he wanted to kick him.

  I gasped out, “No. Leave him alone.”

  Stefan turned, still so caught in his rage that I was almost afraid for myself. He didn’t move toward me. “You okay?”

  “And I thought department meetings were bad….”

  Stefan grinned wildly, shaking his head as he came to peel me from the desk. “He’s woozy. Let me check you out.”

  “Am I bleeding?” I pointed to the back of my head.

  Stefan leaned over, parting my hair gently, feeling for an injury. “No. Does anything feel broken or fractured?”

  I cautiously stretched my arms and legs. Though I was dizzy, and would probably be covered with bruises in the morning, I was still more stunned than in pain.

  Stefan held me gently, stroking my hair. Then he said, “Give me your belt,” and I slipped it off without even asking what he needed it for. He dragged a chair over to Chuck, yanked him up onto it, his head lolling, pulled his arms around and behind, and wove the belt through the slats, fastening it so Chuck couldn’t break free. Then he took off his own belt and tied Chuck’s legs together.

  “Stay clear of his legs,” Stefan warned. “He could kick.”

  “Don’t worry. If I was in one of those monster movies where someone always walks closer to the monster to see if it’s really dead, I’d be the guy out booking a long cruise.”

  “How can you make jokes? He could have killed you.”

  I nodded. “And probably figured out how to make it look like you did it.”

  Stefan grimaced. “A lovers’ quarrel?” He sat on the edge of Perry’s desk, well back of Chuck, who seemed to be coming around. “What happened?”

  “I came up here and he was tearing through Perry’s stuff, and mine too. He said he wanted something back, something of his that Perry had. But he didn’t tell me what it was, and when I was looking over at the door to see if he’d broken in, he jumped me.”

  The words sounded flat and empty t
o me.

  Stefan reached over for the phone, dialed 911 to report an assault, gave the address and our names. When he hung up, Chuck said:

  “It’s attempted murder, really.”

  We stared at him.

  “Could I have some water?”

  Stefan motioned for me to stay put. He grabbed a mug, went out to the fountain and brought it back, carefully standing to the side of Chuck’s chair, so Chuck couldn’t use his feet. He held the cup up and Chuck drank from it very calmly, as if he weren’t tied to a chair, as if we were all having a civil and even friendly little meeting.

  “Is she dead?” Chuck asked when Stefan moved back to his perch on Perry’s desk.

  “Rose? Yes,” I said. She must have been, there had been no doctor or nurse hovering over Rose, trying to revive her.

  “It’s true,” Chuck said, not looking at either one of us. “Murder’s a trap. You can’t end with one, it leads to another. You have to keep covering your tracks.”

  “What were you looking for?” I asked again.

  Chuck cleared his throat. “A letter from a professor of mine back in grad school.”

  Stefan and I exchanged incredulous looks. Both of us seemed to be wondering if he was delusional.

  “Everybody is curious why I never got anywhere after I found the Wharton letter and published that article. That’s because I didn’t find the letter, and the article wasn’t really mine.”

  Plagiarism is a crime that for academics is a combination of slander, rape, and drug smuggling. I was wide awake, thrilled, oblivious to any pain or the fact that I was listening to someone who had been strangling me a few minutes ago.

  Chuck was smiling a little. “You know the story. The letter was in a Wharton book that Walter Berry owned, and like most of his library, it ended up scattered in Paris. I was there when it was found, but I didn’t find it.”

  “Then who did?”

  Chuck was clearly enjoying himself. He looked cocky. “My graduate adviser, Marilyn Fellowes.”

  Stefan whistled. Somehow I had forgotten that Chuck worked at Yale with the famous feminist author of three major books on women novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, books that were scholarly but accessible, and brought her a great deal of money, critical acclaim, and popular notice. She had died some years back, I recalled.

  “We were in Paris, on vacation. She wanted my first time there to be terrific, so we stayed at the Meurice.”

  Stefan gave me a warm smile. The Hotel Meurice was opposite the Tuileries and we had often walked past it on our long strolls through Paris.

  It felt indelicate, but I asked, “You were lovers?”

  Chuck sneered at me. “Of course!”

  He went on. “When we got back to New York, she asked me if I’d proofread the article she was doing, and she’d put my name on it as second author. She wanted me to get a good start when it came to job hunting. Just when the proofs came, her cousin in Atlanta called her and she had to go down there because of an illness.” He shrugged, and I finished the story for him.

  “You made sure you were listed as the first author.” I understood how tricky that was. He couldn’t have taken Marilyn Fellowes’s name off the article since the editors had already seen it there when the article was submitted. But he could reverse the names, and then everyone would assume (as I had) that her name was on the article just for prestige, just to give the article an extra push.

  Chuck smiled. “I did something even better. I sold the Wharton letter to a private collector in New York for twenty thousand dollars.”

  “It wasn’t yours to sell,” Stefan said a little primly, then shook his head as if wondering why he was lecturing a killer about professional ethics.

  “What did Fellowes do?”

  Chuck looked uneasy for the first time since he’d been talking. “She wrote me a letter from Atlanta—don’t ask me how she heard about it so fast. I shouldn’t have kept it. Perry found out about it. It was when we were both grad students at Yale. I ran into him in town one night, we were both pretty bombed, and—” Then he frowned, as if not quite sure how something so valuable had slipped out.

  “Perry was good at worming out people’s secrets,” I said.

  “I was wasted, and he came right out and asked me if I had really found the Wharton letter. And then I was bragging about what happened. He said he didn’t believe me, and there we were at my dorm room and I was showing him the letter from Marilyn as proof. Next thing I know, I wake up hours later on my bed, can’t find the letter.”

  I thought Chuck was lucky Perry hadn’t raped him while he was unconscious, or at least stolen his wallet.

  “Perry was the only person alive who knew about the letter, so you had to kill him, and Rose must’ve seen you do it,” I said.

  “You could say that.” He looked right at me, as if daring me to say it mattered. He shrugged, as much as he could tied up.

  “I met Perry by the river, on the terrace that night. It was his idea. A joke. But he wasn’t joking when he said he needed more money. He’d been blackmailing me for years. He reminded me that I was a complete fraud and that if it ever came out about the letter, not only wouldn’t I get tenure here, but I’d never teach anywhere in the country. And he was right. He was also drunk. And when we walked back across the bridge, he stopped to throw up. He was leaning way over the rail, pretty unsteady. He lost his balance—”

  “And you pushed him.”

  “But I had to. It was one thing when he was on the east coast, but when he was here, in the department! Then I waited.”

  I shuddered. I knew Chuck meant that he waited to see if Perry was really dead.

  “I was fine until I read the article in today’s paper about a witness, and I put that together with Rose. She works nights and her office is right there with a view, so she must’ve seen me. That’s why she acted so strangely when I ran into her yesterday in town. When I called her, she asked me to come to her office tonight because she didn’t want to talk on the phone. She promised me she wouldn’t tell anyone, but how could I trust her? And why should she keep it quiet?”

  Stefan and I looked at each other. We knew. Perry must have been blackmailing her too about her Nazi past. Rose really would have kept silent; killing her was unnecessary.

  We heard a siren approaching, and Stefan said, “I’ll go down and open the door, otherwise they’ll have to break in. Be careful.” Down the hall, he turned on the lights.

  “You got a lot of mileage out of that Wharton letter,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. A fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship. But everyone was waiting for what I’d do next. There wasn’t anything I could do! I’d never equal a find like that, and have anything to say as good as Marilyn had.”

  “Why didn’t Marilyn Fellowes expose you? She could have.”

  Chuck shook his head. “She was married, she had a family. Too much to lose. And besides, don’t you remember what Ben Franklin said about choosing old women for lovers—they’re so grateful.”

  Disgusted, I turned away, to see Stefan and two campus policemen heading toward us. Valley was right behind them. The office seemed unbearably crowded now.

  “I explained what happened,” Stefan said, “but we’ll have to come along to the station anyway.”

  “Busy night,” I said, recognizing one of the cops from across the river. I nodded at Valley, too. “You were right,” I told him.

  Valley looked puzzled.

  I said, “Professors around here do some pretty stupid things.”

  Valley smiled. “Do you need a doctor?” he asked.

  “No, I’m okay.” His whole manner toward me had changed, and I took that to mean he believed Stefan and I were innocent.

  “I’m okay,” I repeated. “But I’m really disappointed. It’s not like this in the movies.”

  The cops, Valley, Stefan, and even Chuck stared at me.

  “In the movies, the criminal traps you and makes you listen to his lo
ng and detailed confession first, then he tries to kill you.”

  17

  THE PHONES WERE UNPLUGGED because even though it was the weekend, we were getting so many messages our tapes were filling up faster than we could return the calls, or decide not to. Stefan and I had separately and together done eight interviews already, and that was just for mid-western TV stations and newspapers. Stefan had arranged for the cremation of Perry Cross’s remains, and we had stayed away, fearful of it turning into a freak show. Unable to reach us by phone, Sharon had wired us two dozen roses and sent a first edition of Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death in which she’d simply written “Bravo!”

  With the phones off, the quiet was blissful. Stefan had made a fire and we’d established ourselves in front of it with bed trays and an ample supply of treats. Stefan had bought two bottles of Veuve Clicquot rosé champagne, and I had driven down to a bakery in Southfield just to bring back my favorite dessert in the world: an ambrosial seven-layer chocolate cake. Usually we just bought a small section since the cake was so rich, but this time I bought an entire two-foot log, and I decorated the length with white rosebuds, laid it out on a silver platter. I did not tell Stefan that the tiny old woman behind the counter had recognized me. “You’re that crime fighter, right?” I had wanted to say, “Yes, I’m Batman,” but couldn’t, because she seemed so pleased I thought she was going to scoot around the counter and pinch both my cheeks in delight.

  Tonight I was wearing the black silk lounging pants and velvet smoking jacket Stefan had given me last Hanukkah, and I had convinced him to put on the black and white Henley step-ins I’d ordered for him from an International Male catalogue. I hoped all the black made me look slimmer. Stefan looked tousled and sexy.

  “What about Perry’s money?” I asked, breaking one of the long companionable silences.