“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why don’t you mess around with the wife of a man like Lemaster Carlyle? Why is that such a crazy thing to do?”
Art Lewin’s facial expression said that perhaps Bruce was the crazy one. “Come on,” he said, and, with difficulty, laughed. “He wouldn’t take it very well, would he?”
“I suppose not,” said Bruce, certain he was missing something. They were standing at the heavy wooden door to the building. The old iron lock no longer functioned. Art was holding his electronic key to the entryway. Bruce had a master that opened every door on campus.
The economist looked up at the sky, and Bruce steeled himself for a disquisition on the causes of weather. Instead, the young man grew wistful. “You know what? It wasn’t just Kellen who hated Lemaster Carlyle. I don’t think Lemaster liked Kellen too much either.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know, they had that disagreement in the papers. But even before that. I saw them together this one time, at the faculty senate, when Lemaster was still a law professor, before he went to Washington and all that. I was just out of grad school. Anyway, the senate was debating this committee proposal to amend the university’s code of ethics, to forbid sexual relationships between professors and students in all circumstances. Lemaster was a big backer. Kellen was one of the leaders of the opposition, because, well, he said grown-ups can make their choices, but let’s just say there might have been some spark of self-interest. Anyway, at the break, they ran into each other in the hallway, and Kellen asked Lemaster why he was fighting so hard when it was obvious to everybody that the proposal was going to be tabled without a vote. And Lemaster looked at him, gave him that steely-eyed glance of his, you know, like everybody’s disdainful father? And he said, ‘You’re against the rule. That’s enough reason for me to be for it.’ Kellen said, ‘Don’t make this personal’—or something like that. Lemaster was still looking at him like he was an interesting species of rodent. He said, ‘It’s not personal. It’s official. I just think you’re a dangerous man.’ Words to that effect.”
“Did anybody else hear this exchange?”
“I don’t really know. Could be. The hallway was pretty crowded. I mean, they weren’t shouting or anything, they were both pretty civil, but I don’t think they cared about being overheard.”
Bruce weighed the tale. Too thin, he decided. Even combined with what else Art had told him about the night of the murder, it was just too thin. “I see,” was his only comment.
A hiatus, each playing a bit of poker with the other.
“If you don’t need me any more, I’d like to get my bag and head home—” Art began.
“Wait.”
“I’m tired, Bruce.” The sullen child was back.
“Just one thing more.”
He sighed and looked around as if expecting help. In the course of their walk, a gray twilight had crept over the campus. The frigid wind promised worse to come. The professor thrust his soft hands into his pockets, looking balefully at the director of campus safety, and it occurred to Bruce that Art Lewin was a dreadfully unhappy man.
“Sure, Bruce, sure. One thing more.”
“When we were in your office, you said that you’d want to kill Kellen Zant.”
The youthful eyes widened. “Well, I didn’t mean it seriously. It was kind of…I was just trying to make a point.”
“Do you think you could elaborate?”
“It’s not a secret, Bruce. I went over this with the investigators. If you want to find a motive, just track down the husbands of all those wives he seduced. One of them is bound to be angry enough.” A pause. “Or hurt enough.”
Bruce saw it. Remembered the photograph on his desk: two children, no mother. He glanced down at Arthur’s left hand. No wedding band, but an indentation where one used to be.
“You’re divorced.”
“That’s right.”
“Did Kellen Zant have something to do with it?”
Art Lewin glanced away again, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he coped with whatever was stirring in him. His baby face was flushed and wounded. “You could say that.”
“Kellen…slept with your wife?”
“Stole my wife.”
“What?”
“A little miscalculation on his part.” A shrill laugh, half sane. “Carol left me, babies and all, to chase after him. It wasn’t part of his calculation.”
“Your wife left you for Kellen Zant? When was this?”
“Oh, nine, ten months. More. Almost a year now, come to think of it.”
Bruce frowned. He had heard nothing of this from any of his sources, not a whisper. He said, “Now, Art, let me understand this. Your wife left you for the man, and you still played chess with him? Every Friday afternoon?”
“It was only the man I hated. I didn’t love his mind any less.”
This was too much for Bruce to process, so he put it aside for later consideration. “So…your wife…Carol…what did Kellen do when she said she was leaving you?”
“Kellen? What do you think he did? I told you, he was commitment-shy. He sent her back. Said that wasn’t the deal.”
“He sent her back…to you?”
Art nodded. “She came banging on the door, the middle of the night, the day after she walked out. Crying, miserable, telling me she made a big mistake. I thought it was funny. I laughed my head off. I let her in, but the next day I told her I was moving out.”
Bruce’s head was whirling. Somehow he could not picture the laughter. Then, looking at the young man’s sad, greedy face, he could.
“You let her in but you moved out?”
“No. I just told her I was. I wasn’t going to, not really.”
“I see,” said Bruce, but he didn’t. “Maybe I should talk to Carol. Where is she now?”
“Home.”
“Home? Like, her parents’?”
“No, Bruce. Not home like at her parents’. Home like at our house. That’s why I have to go. Carol will have dinner waiting.”
“But I thought you were…uh…”
“Divorced. Right.”
“Then how on earth—”
“We’re just divorced, Bruce. That doesn’t mean we can’t live together. Doing it this way is a sensible exercise in rationally managing risk. There are no legal impediments if either of us wants to make a change, and, in the meanwhile, Carol and I have all the benefits of marital life. Sometimes she’ll want to stay out all night with somebody else. Or I will. Or we both will.” His winter pallor brightened in blush. “Then, you know, my mother-in-law takes care of the kids. Well, no, she’s not my mother-in-law any more, is she? I don’t think there’s a word for it. My estranged mother-in-law? I don’t know. Anyway, the point is, Carol and I are both free to see other people. If we want to do it, we do it. In that sense, what happened with Kellen has been good for us. I think you could say it has had a liberating effect on our rational faculties. We’re no longer bound by any artificial barriers. We can make choices with better information. We’ve become more efficient in the pursuit of happiness.” Art Lewin’s head was bobbing, his adolescent face was smiling, his voice had grown louder, and he seemed scarcely aware that Bruce at his side was trembling with a baffled fury. “You know, lots of people who aren’t married live together. It’s the coming thing. I’m not even sure there is a rational case to be made for traditional marriage any more. Without external pressure, religious or social, to compel marriage, no rational, welfare-maximizing individual would enter into one. As a matter of fact, at the rate the numbers are increasing, we can expect—”
Art Lewin was still deep in his own maunderings as Bruce, unable to bear any more, slipped away into the shadows. He had decided: campus life was not for him.
The young economist had said there was no rational case to be made for traditional marriage, and a part of Bruce Vallely hated him for that. Bruce could have offered a perfectly rational case, a
lthough he suspected that a scholar trained in the modern way would never understand. For Bruce, the case in behalf of marriage consisted of a single beautiful word:
Grace.
CHAPTER 19
A DISTURBING COMPLAINT
(I)
BACK IN HIS OFFICE for a few precious minutes before hurrying home to beat the storm, Bruce put in a call to Rick Chrebet. There were only so many remaining favors he could call in, but what he needed, he needed. For a change, Rick was at his desk, and, yes, they had interviewed Art Lewin at length before everything stopped, and, yes, they had picked up on the remark about Jamaica. Yes, they had checked it out: they had not, said Rick, quite lost all of their competence since Bruce left. And, no, he was not in anybody’s computer for anything that weekend or anytime soon: no Jamaica, no Caribbean, no air travel, no hotel, no car rental, no cruise ticket, nothing. Zant was just back from a trip to Dallas and Atlanta to make presentations for his consulting clients. On the way home he had stopped in Arkadelphia to see his uncle. The week after the murder, the economist was supposed to have gone to Los Angeles to visit another client, but had not yet made his reservations: the client’s corporate travel department had been waiting to hear from him. “First class,” said Rick, awestruck. Zant had also booked tickets, buying early to save his hosts the fare, for an April conference at the University of Chicago, where he was supposed to deliver a paper on the optimal level of adultery.
“Seriously,” said Rick.
One more thing, he added, voice dropping. Zant had recently used his E-ZPass, his digital toll card, on expressways in Massachusetts. But no hotels or motels had hosted him, and none of his Upper New England friends had seen him.
A puzzle, said Rick.
Bruce agreed. “Now, Kellen Zant did a lot of consulting work.”
“True,” said Rick.
“Do you know what he was working on when he died?” A long pause, two old colleagues sniffing each other out. “Is it a state secret, what he was doing?”
To Bruce’s surprise, his sally brought forth no answering laugh, even the mirthless one that would tell him he wasn’t being funny. Instead, the silence continued, as though Rick Chrebet was weighing sad options his old partner could not imagine. When Rick spoke, his usually dry voice dripped reluctance. “It was a robbery, Bruce. You know that, right?”
“I read the papers, but—”
“We’re not looking into his consulting work, or his private life, or anything else.” Words slow and painfully clear. “We’re looking for an armed robber who shoots his victims in the head. Period. An official statement will be out soon.”
“Suppose it wasn’t a robbery. Suppose—”
“Other avenues have been considered. They’re closed now.”
“Does that mean—”
Rick was implacable, even if amiable. “We’ve known each other a long time, Bruce. I know how your suspicious little mind works. I know you must be thinking, double-tap, back of the head, it looks like a professional hit. And you must be thinking, whatever Zant was working on, he must have scared somebody important. But you’re wrong, Bruce. Those possibilities have all been ruled out.”
Bruce considered. They had been partners forever, friends nearly as long, and knew how to send messages without ever letting on. Rick had used the passive voice. He did not say he or his people had chosen not to try the other avenues. He said they were closed—implying that someone else had done the closing. So Bruce answered, every bit as carefully, “Bear with me for a moment. Okay, it was a robbery. I accept that. I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends.”
Rick laughed, humorlessly, and it occurred to Bruce that his old partner, usually tumbling with mirth, was genuinely perplexed, even miserable. “You’re not a cop any more, Bruce. Loose ends aren’t really your department.”
“These loose ends are. It’s a university matter. I’m not…working the case.”
Again the answer was a long while coming, and Bruce wondered what invisible line he had crossed. He must have scared somebody important. In the outer office, somebody was shouting about a basketball game, a big upset. Rick said, “Sorry, Bruce. His work is a dead end. That’s our conclusion.”
“Who concluded it?”
Still the slowness, words dragged upward like heavy treasure buried in a tomb. “I really can’t get into those details, Bruce.”
“This really goes that high up? Is that what you’re saying?”
Another hush on the telephone. The predicted snow was spattering the window, except that it was mostly rain. What flakes there were melted before they could stick: sort of like the official investigation. Bruce wondered why his partner had been so forthcoming at first, but slowed the flow of information once they reached the topic of Kellen’s work.
“I’m sorry,” said Rick at last, and Bruce knew better than to press. He had already asked for, and been denied, access to the Audi and to Zant’s house. If he asked too many favors, even Rick would reach a point when the word no might become too easy to say.
“Okay. Just one more thing.”
“Sure, Bruce,” said his golfing buddy, but the arid voice carried a note of warning.
“They say Kellen Zant was a bit of a ladies’ man. They say he particularly liked married women.”
“That’s not a question.” Impatient now, the favors plainly at an end.
“You must have interviewed some of the, ah, husbands involved.”
“And wives. What’s your point?”
“Were any of them…Did you ever focus on one of them as a suspect?”
A hiatus on the other end. Paper rustling. Voices in the background. Had Rick put the telephone down? No. He had unplugged his headset and was whispering directly into the mouthpiece. “That’s over the line, Bruce. I can’t discuss that.”
“Come on, Rick. This is me.”
“Yeah, Bruce, it’s you. Are you gonna punch me in the face if I don’t talk?”
“I never did anything like that and you know it.”
“Some of the guys you dragged in here sure thought you might.” A heavy sigh. “Matter of fact, I seem to remember that a couple of them filed civil-rights complaints.”
“What? That never happened!”
“I think it did.”
“What is this, some kind of joke?”
Although Rick was no longer on the headset, his voice was as distant and dry as before. “A couple of the complaints are in process now. Maybe they were filed after you left the force.”
“There’s rules. The department would have to give me notice.”
“Must have fallen through the cracks.”
Bruce ran a hand through his short, brushy hair, trying to get his mind around what could only be a threat. “What are you telling me, Rick? Am I under investigation?”
A beat. The voice came back, not so harsh. “I’d watch myself if I were you, that’s all I’m saying.”
(II)
BRUCE BADE GOOD NIGHT to the second-shift staff, just filtering in, a dispatcher and a sergeant in the building, a pair of patrol cars on the move, three officers and one administrator for a campus of several hundred acres: the agony of the balanced budget. Six more cruisers and a trio of vans were behind a wired gate, awaiting the day shift, and the day of more money. He pushed through the double glass doors and out into the parking lot. He never left the Mustang in the space reserved for him, because backing up and turning around were too difficult. With his wife passed on and his children grown, worrying about scratches in the smooth red bodywork was one way to fill the need to fret. He opened the door and smiled grimly, remembering all the years of opening the passenger side first for Grace, who declared herself utterly liberated except on the issue of…well, who gets to go first.
And thinking about Grace put an itch in his mind, something to do with Kellen Zant and his car—
He stopped. He felt watched.
Swift eyes that had known jungle darkness and desert glare ranged across the shadows t
hat lay beyond the far end of the lot, where the university property ended. The border was marked by a sprinkling of small houses, a couple of disused factories, and, farther on, a slowly rising hill at the crest of which developers hoped to create a luxury subdivision. Sight is drawn to movement in the inkiest of nights, but Bruce, gaze impeded by the yellow gleam of the lamps that illuminated and, in theory, protected the parking lot, saw nothing.
Something.
A wisp of movement in the woods near one of the houses, a fold in the darkness like a brief thickening of the very air.
Gone.
An animal. A gust of wind. Imagination, born of stress: he knew that malady, too.
Yet Bruce Vallely was a man who would rather trust his instincts than interrogate them. If he felt watched, somebody was watching. But no amount of patient waiting was able to conjure afresh that strange twisting image in the woods.
Bruce shook his head, then stood still again, looking at his hand. He was still holding on to the wide-open door of the car. The itch in his mind was back. He thought about handing Grace in, as her people used to call it, securing her door before opening his own.
Of course.
He realized what had bothered him during his interview with Nathaniel Knowland. What had the div student told him about the night he saw Kellen Zant?
There had been a woman with him, a skinny phantom, a black woman with a British accent, wearing what might or might not have been a white rain slicker. They had climbed into Zant’s gold Audi TT on Town Street, across from the stadium.
The woman drove, Bruce remembered. And Kellen Zant got in first on the passenger side.
Bruce had pressed the young man, and he had not backed off this particular detail.
Kellen Zant, the great ladies’ man, not only allowed the stranger to drive his car, but did not hold her door before seeing to his own.
Slipping behind the wheel of the Mustang and starting the engine, Bruce felt twin theses forming. One possibility was that Kellen was too distracted, or too angry, to be polite. This struck him as unlikely. Politesse was not choice but training. Either the habit of opening doors first for the ladies was so ingrained that it survived one’s moments of passion, or it was not. Very well, in the generation that had spawned Nathaniel Knowland, or the generation looming just a few years beyond it, such pleasantries meant nothing, or might even be taken as insults. But Professor Kellen Zant was of a different time.
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