She wondered what Jeannie’s friends thought of the posters.
And Astrid, who always used this room.
Your people and your past.
Julia sat down hard on the bed she had just stripped.
History, Frank Carrington had said, repeating what Kellen had told him when he bought the cheval mirror. He said you would like it because you love history.
Was it possible—
Show tunes. Tonya had teased her, as Kellen used to, as everybody did, about her taste for Broadway show tunes. All her friends knew what she loved.
She turned to look at the poster of Lena Horne.
Jamaica, Kellen had told someone the night he died. He was going to Jamaica. Nobody had found a plane ticket or a reservation. Nobody knew what he meant. But now Julia did.
The famous title song of the musical Jamaica. Famous, at least, among those who knew the history of African Americans on Broadway. Lena Horne singing about the little island on the Hudson.
Lemaster, in the div school speech Kellen had mocked, calling Kepler “an island of transcendent clarity in a sea of secular confusion.”
Kepler Divinity Quadrangle, a little island…on Hudson Street.
That was Kellen’s message. A message for Julia’s ears alone. Maybe she was his Black Lady after all. The night he died, Kellen had visited the divinity school, and if he wanted nobody else to understand his message, that implied that he had hidden something there, somewhere, for Julia and Julia alone to—
“Mommy?”
Perfect Jeannie stood in the doorway.
“I was gonna help you clean up. Those other girls left such a mess down here.” Clucking her tongue, exactly like Granny Vee, who died twenty years before Jeannie was born. “Oh, you’re done.” Miming surprise. “I guess I’m too late. Oh well.”
She scampered off.
CHAPTER 26
PERSONA GRATA
(I)
BRUCE VALLELY WAS UNHAPPY. He was busily preparing next year’s preliminary budget for submission to the provost. The tricky part was that he had received, just last week, a memorandum informing him that his department was facing a budget cut of 2.5 percent, part of the university-wide effort to trim operating costs in the wake of declining investment income. Yet his instructions were explicit: he was to find the cuts without laying off any officers, postponing “vital” equipment acquisitions, or weakening “net campus security.” Maybe Penn and Teller could work this trick, but Bruce himself had no idea how to do it. Still, he was the boss and this was the job, so he sat in his drafty office with a yellow pad on his desk, testing various permutations of numbers, none of which added up.
He glanced out the window at the fleet of university buses in the lot, painted in the school colors. Several were caked in snow. Christmas was coming in a week and a half, and Grace would not be there to make it special.
First time ever.
He shook off the mood and bent to his yellow pad once more, playing with numbers on the calculator to figure out how to meet the provost’s impossible demands. He had an image, albeit dim and distant, of how state legislators and members of Congress must struggle to put together a budget in an era of limited resources. Never again, Bruce promised himself, would he assume that politicians had an easy job. The media, along with ordinary voters, gave them a terrible time, but the truth was, they were asked to achieve the impossible; and, occasionally, did.
His mind was not on his work. Not this part of his work.
His mind was on the case.
Earlier this week, enlisting a friend from Temple Baptist, where he and Grace used to worship and he occasionally still did, he had found the source of the jars from Kellen Zant’s guest room: makeup products manufactured by a small black-owned firm in Detroit, sold only by one beauty shop in the city, where, as it happened, Julia Carlyle was a regular.
All right, another black woman could have bought it and left it in the guest room. The trouble was, Kellen didn’t date black women. He dated white women.
Except for Julia.
Yet Bruce could not imagine Julia Carlyle sneaking in and out of Kellen’s house on Hobby Hill, and not just because she would almost certainly have been seen. More to the point, she just did not strike him as the type. Such behavior would seem, in her Clannishness, beneath her.
Another black woman? With a British accent?
Very strange, and getting stranger.
Bruce forced his attention back to the budget. He was still fiddling with figures when the receptionist buzzed to say that Rick Chrebet was on the phone.
“We better meet,” Rick said.
(II)
“IT’S NOT PERSONAL,” said Rick Chrebet.
“That’s a relief.”
“Seriously, Bruce. It has nothing to do with you.”
The thaw was memory. The weather had turned wintry again. Bruce Vallely shoved his famous hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat, wishing for his parka. The two men were descending the towpath that bordered the fetid Harbor Canal. Reeds four feet high separated the frozen mud from the water. On their right, up the slope from the path, ran Deepwater Street, where, ten or twelve feet above their heads, cars scuttled past, seeking a shortcut to avoid rush-hour traffic. In theory, the land abutting the canal was a park. In theory.
In practice, it was simply raw, and deserted.
The department wits used to say that God put together Rick Chrebet with the little that was left after he made Bruce, for Rick was—everyone in the squad room could recite the litany—shorter, thinner, slower, cooler, and paler than his partner. Back when the two were rookies together, twenty-odd years ago, one might also have said that Rick Chrebet was blonder, but the decades had sprinkled both heads equally with a salty gray. Now Bruce had retired and Rick, just passed over for captain, was on the verge of doing the same, except that he enjoyed the work.
For a few minutes, there was no sound but the tread of feet over snow: one pair heavy, one pair light, one pair heavy, one pair light, the rhythm as steady and predictable as an old friendship.
Finally, Bruce said, “If it’s not personal, what’s going on? There’s no investigation of anything but a robbery. Everything else has stopped.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“It’s robbery? That’s the final verdict?”
Rick had been carrying a long stick. Now he tossed it into the reeds, disturbing whatever lived there, because there were ugly flurries in every direction. “I told you this was coming.”
Bruce raised his face to the battered afternoon sky. A bright smudge suggested that the sun still lived out there somewhere. “Nobody will talk to me all of a sudden.”
“I’m talking to you.” It occurred to Bruce that his former partner was very angry. “Never mind. I know exactly what you mean.”
“So—what’s going on?”
His partner eyed him. “Why are you so interested in this? You’re retired.”
Bruce knew better than to trot out the “loose ends” explanation this time. “I’m under some pressure here, Rick. My employers want to make sure every ‘t’ is crossed, every ‘i’ is dotted, so on. You know how it is.”
But Rick Chrebet was not saying whether he knew how it was or not. “Look, Bruce. This is very hush-hush. And people aren’t very happy about it.” A pause. “I hear Ben Church threatened to resign. And Janey Wei threw a hissy fit.”
Bruce tried to picture little Janey losing her temper, couldn’t.
“What were they so mad about? What happened?”
“Look. We follow orders, okay? From higher authority. Let’s put it that way. Now, a couple of days after the murder, the cops out in the Landing were running in circles, but Ben and Janey had a couple of leads. They were making a nice case. They—well, never mind the details. The point is, they were making progress, right?”
Their walk had carried them to the muddy edge of the water meadow. Tall grasses seemed weedy and offending.
“S
o—another day goes by, and Janey and Ben develop a little more information, and they have an interview they want to do. Not a suspect or anything, but a lead. Somebody who might point them in the right direction. They want to interview this individual, but it turns out to be a little bit sensitive, for…well, reasons. They have to get certain permissions. They see the people they have to ask for permission—this is where your higher authority comes back in, right?—and then they wait and wait, and maybe two days later, three, an order comes down. No interview. No speculation, not to anybody. Then, a couple of weeks later, no investigation either. No more work. Call it an armed robbery, close the case, and turn over all the notes, all the files, sealed and signed. Want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“So do we. Janey and Ben especially. All we know is, the state’s attorney herself made the call. One rumor said it was the feds. Another said she was worried about next year’s election with this case hanging over her head. Anyway, higher authority tells everybody on the force to stand down. From now on, we only look for people who might have wanted to steal his wallet and his keys. And that’s the end of that.”
“And Ben and Janey…”
“Hey, Janey’s got little kids now, so does Ben, even if he never sees them since the divorce. Mortgages. Retirement to save for. I mean, Bruce, look. Okay, it’s a little high-handed, but robbery does make sense. Maybe it even was a robbery. People will accept that verdict. They’ll skin us alive for not finding the perpetrator, but they’ll believe the motive.”
They were near the end of the towpath. A rusty bicycle barred the way, the brackish water dark and unwelcoming where, when Bruce was a boy, he and his older brother used to launch their canoe. Even the floating ice looked polluted.
Bruce said, “Theresa Pappas—the state’s attorney—she’s a good friend of the Carlyles, isn’t she?”
Rick shrugged. “One thing I learned in this investigation is, except for Kellen Zant, just about everybody is Lemaster Carlyle’s pal. Oh, some people are a little bit intimidated by him, because he knows pretty much all the movers and shakers. But, either way, nobody wants to say a word against—” He stopped, and clapped his old partner on the back. His face was pinched. “Bruce, look. That’s not why I wanted to talk. Whether we’re ordered to call Zant’s murder a robbery or something else isn’t your problem.”
“Then why?”
“Because—just between you and me and the wall?—you’re not exactly what we’d call persona grata these days, if that’s the phrase.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve had some problems. Evidence vanishing from custody. Even Zant’s cell phone, believe it or not. So Mrs. Pappas has put a hard lid on. The order isn’t just that nobody’s supposed to talk. It’s very specific.” Rick’s buggy eyes were pained but determined. “One person we are specifically not allowed to talk to is a certain Bruce Vallely, director of campus safety.”
Sheets of ice floated on the old canal. On the other side, in the section of town known as Outer Elm, patient developers had dredged the area nearest the shore and built condos, shopping malls, playgrounds, a boardwalk. All white, by happy coincidence, an ethnically cleansed paradise in the middle of the city, and quite reasonably priced: mostly third-generation immigrant families.
“Seriously?”
“Actually, Bruce, it’s worse than that.”
“Worse how?”
Rick Chrebet still had his hands deep in his pockets. His breath described pale arcs in the frigid air. “They know you’ve been running some kind of private investigation, Bruce. They know you were in Zant’s house. I’m not in Mrs. Pappas’s confidence—not on something like this—but the word is, they’re considering a case against you for obstruction.”
CHAPTER 27
AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR
(I)
JULIA BEGAN HER TASK methodically but also impulsively, the same combination that had carried her to so much success in life, and so much failure. Mary Mallard and Tony Tice both seemed to think that Kellen had turned something over to her. The surplus he intended to capture. The inventory he did not want to hold. Aside from his cryptic messages and the occasional unwanted gift of fudge, Julia could only think of one object Kellen had recently arranged to have delivered to her.
The mirror.
The silver-and-tortoiseshell hand mirror by William Comyns of London that Granny Vee had given her not long before she died, and that Kellen had evidently kept next to his desk for twenty years.
So, late Tuesday night, as the house slumbered, Julia took the mirror from its place atop her small desk in a corner of the bedroom and carried it down to the kitchen, a long, grand room with trendy and pricey black granite counters that looked gorgeous in the showroom but, when darkness fell, seemed to suck all the light out of the air. Kellen, at a party Lemaster gave for black faculty five years ago—one of his few visits to Hunter’s Heights—had remarked that the counters reminded him of the Clan, tough and dark and sturdy, proudly and determinedly preserving all that was useless in African America.
Julia had told him to leave her alone.
Now she laid the mirror under the reading lamp next to the computer that sat on the kitchen desk. She had cleaned and polished it, but not with the effort it needed. She should take it to a professional, she decided, turning it over and over. Come on, Kellen, she said in her mind. If I’m your Black Lady, then talk to me. Why did you give me the mirror? What does the mirror mean? The mirror, the surplus, the inventory risk. And Jamaica. Why did you go to the div school that night? She could find no pattern, make no sense. She ran her fingers over the delicate filigree on the back, the clusters of leaves along the edges, the emblem of the sun in the middle, the royal decorations surrounding it. She felt her annoyance rise hotly, not only because she could not fathom its significance, if any, but also because Kellen had taken such poor care of the mirror, allowing the tarnished surface to get so scratched up that she could hardly make out the famous W•C hallmark any more, because of all the—
The hallmark?
She put the mirror down again, focused the bright light. The Comyns hallmark was a “W” followed by a “C,” with a small circle between them, raised about three-quarters of the height of the letters. It was hidden in the design, but any expert would know where to look. But this hallmark was not just scratched. It was obliterated.
This was not wear and tear. It was purposeful.
She turned the mirror upside down, and saw it at once. The letters had been…altered. Altered in a way that only someone who knew the hallmark was there would even notice; and nobody but Julia was likely to know.
The “C” was turned around the wrong way, the long curve bisected neatly by a horizontal slash. As for the “W,” the left-hand slope was worn away, and the middle part of the letter, which pointed upward, had been turned on its side, to point to the right.
It made no sense.
Oh, yes, it did.
It was a mirror.
Julia smiled. She already knew what Kellen had done, but carried the mirror into the powder room to be sure. She held it up to the mirror, and, sure enough, viewed closely, but only through a mirror, the hallmark had been changed. No longer did it read W•C. Now it read E•K.
Her smile faded. What, or who, on earth was E•K? Eddie Krueger? No, his name was Freddy. Edward Kennedy? Ernst Kaltenbrunner? Elegant Kellen? Perhaps she had misunderstood. Maybe she had read the new hallmark wrong, or maybe she was working too hard, reading heavy symbols into normal wear and tear because she wanted them to be there. Nevertheless, because she was organized, she took several shots of the mirror with her digital camera, both in the mirror and lying on the counter, several of them close-ups of the hallmark, and downloaded them to her laptop, then sent them along the Internet to Kodak, where she stored digital images.
Patience was not natural to her, but if the mirror was a message, Julia knew she would, given time, figure it out.
(II)
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EARLIER IN THE DAY, she had asked Latisha call Joe Poynting, who hurried over, worried, no doubt, that the dean had discovered a rule making him ineligible for the grants he was seeking to support his research in Bologna. Instead, Julia turned facedown the memo pad on which she was still working out permutations of “Shari Larid,” then shut the door, a rarity, and swore the young man to secrecy. Then she asked her question.
“You work late in the library every night. You’re there till closing, sometimes later. What I need to know is if you ever saw Professor Zant.”
“In the Kepler Library?”
“Yes.”
Joe nodded. “Sure, I saw him. Sometimes at night, sometimes in the late afternoon.”
“What was he doing?”
“Research, I guess. I didn’t ask.”
“I meant, what did you see?”
The student sat with his knees together and his hands in his lap. Julia sensed he had not much liked Kellen. “He was usually going in or out of the archives.”
Confirming Vanessa’s tale. Except—
“How often did you see him in the archives?”
“I’d say at least once a week.”
Of course. Kellen came over to the div school after Julia left for the day, meaning that he was not dropping by just to annoy her. Nor was he just looking for Vanessa, who had visited the archives perhaps five times in the past year. No. Kellen Zant had been at Kepler because he was working on a project of his own.
In the archives.
(III)
LEMASTER WOKE when his wife crept back into the master suite and, when she slipped into bed beside him, reached for her. Julia was willing to be reached for. She was jangly, worried, confused, a little frightened, and ready for physical reassurance of the reality of their shared life. Lemmie made love the same way he did everything else: thoughtfully, dutifully, and fully master of himself and all around him. He was male enough to take pride in her pleasure, but far too self-aware to imagine there might be virtue in occasionally surrendering his control. Sometimes, at a tender moment, she would catch his gaze, the somber brown eyes watchful and patient, Lemaster thinking only of her needs, when a bit of male selfishness might have turned pleasant to thrilling. Now and then she caught herself wondering what if anything truly lit her husband up; for she had never, in all their years together, seen him truly lose control.
Stephen L. Carter Page 27
