Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  A third car, headlights off, edged out of tree shadows on the street. It was a fairly new compact, maybe dark green, and I didn’t recognize it. But as I sat there in the dark, I watched it follow closely behind Joe Lone Wolf’s bus as it turned left, heading for home.

  What the hell was that all about? Was someone shadowing Joe? Should I call him and make sure he’d gotten home okay?

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday 10/13

  A windstorm over the weekend had blown down all but the oak leaves, and by Tuesday afternoon when I came on campus after the Monday holiday, autumn had transformed itself from terminal summer to nascent winter. Old brick buildings had taken on chillier facades—straight, stark, Puritan lines without the redemption of nature’s green. Groundsmen had run their leaf-blowers over the sidewalks, but the Common itself was buried in fallen leaves. Hank Brody was scuffing across the hidden grass. Other students had donned jeans and wool jackets, but Hank still wore his cargo shorts and sweatshirt. Wasn’t he cold?

  “Hey, Hank,” I said. He was coming toward me from the direction of Dickinson Hall, and I wondered if he’d been looking for me.

  Hearing my voice he glanced up, startled. He was pale, his matted corn-husk dreads flopping over the high forehead. “Oh, Professor, do you know where Professor Lone Wolf is?”

  “Professor Lone Wolf? No.”

  “I had an appointment with him for two o’clock—about my paper. I waited a half hour, and he’s still not in his office. He didn’t make either of his classes this morning, either.”

  “Did you try the office? Maybe he told Professor Hilton or Monica, the secretary, where he was going.”

  “Ha!” Hank exclaimed. “That secretary said Professor Hilton was in no fit state to see anyone, and what did I think she was anyhow, a babysitter for the faculty? I’m not going back in there—phew! That lady’s scary.”

  “Monica’s bark is worse than her…bark,” I said, lamely. When Monica was in a bad mood, the entire department tip-toed around as if they were walking in a field of activated hand grenades. Once we were back in the English department, I let him into my office. “You don’t have to talk to her again, but let me see what I can find out.”

  Monica was at her computer, scowling over a game of Mahjong Titans. She didn’t shut it down when I walked in, didn’t even raise her eyes from the screen. Hank was right—she was scary. Then all at once I realized that maybe I’d be better off in the long run if I didn’t ask Monica about Joe Lone Wolf; Joe might well be a sore spot for her. For a while he and Monica had been tight. Joe had spent a good deal of time in the office leaning over her desk, laughing and chatting. Monica was the only person I’d ever seen him chummy with. Three or four years ago, I’d even come across them smoking weed late one long summer evening when I was taking a walk on the back campus. Monica had glared at me, but who was I to condemn anyone? I remember thinking what an odd couple they were. Around then, Joe stopped coming into the office, and his friendship with Monica seemed to end.

  Discretion being the better part of earning tenure, I turned quietly on my heel and left the office.

  Seated behind my desk, I lied to Hank. “Sorry, kid. Monica doesn’t have a clue as to Professor Lone Wolf’s whereabouts.”

  “Oh.” The lanky boy slumped in the chair. “I really need to talk to him.”

  “Did you call his home number?”

  “He’s not answering—home or cell.” Hank unfolded his tall body from the armchair and stood there, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he mumbled and turned toward the door.

  “Hold on.” I stood up and followed him into the hall and out onto the Quad. “Is something wrong? Can I help in any way?”

  He stood still, looking down at the leaf-strewn grass. Stress had tightened the muscles of his face so that his lips were thin and his cheekbones protruded.

  “Hank?” I prodded. “If you’ve got a problem, I might be able to get some help for you.” He was shivering now, in his summer-weight clothes. Didn’t he have anything warmer? I tapped him lightly on the back of his hand. “You’re not alone on this campus. There are all sorts of resources for students. Why, Dean Johnson—”

  “No. Please, not the Dean. My scholarship…” He turned and began kicking dry leaves as he walked away. I thought I heard him say, “I just have to talk to Joe Lone Wolf,” as he headed in the direction of downtown Enfield.

  ***

  I glanced up from the screenful of accumulated e-mails on my computer. Cat Andrews, standing in my office doorway. I stifled a groan. I’d thought I might be able to catch up on some work without interruption. “Hi, Cat. Can I help you?”

  She gave me a complicated look, pity and compassion. “You’re not really too old to be on Facebook, no matter what you think. You want to be up on the latest with your students, don’t you? Joining is really easy. Look, I can set it up for you in just five minutes. And then you can connect to so many friends. People from high school. People from college. And people can poke you and write on your wall and send you gifts.” She was leaning over my shoulder now, staring at the screen.

  Not only was Cat interrupting my work; she was also castigating me for being an electronic Neanderthal. I bit back a sharp retort. These days I supposed Facebook was as unavoidable as death, taxes, and the Internet. I might as well get it over with. Closing my e-mail, I pushed my chair back and stood up. “Your fingers are just itching to get on these keys, aren’t they, Cat? Okay, I can spare five minutes. Go ahead and set it up.”

  “Five minutes for my part of it, I mean. And then you’ll fill out your profile information, choose who to friend—”

  “Whom. Whom to friend. And is friend a verb now?” My grammatical training had been taking a thumping lately, what with all the neologisms brought about by the digital revolution.

  “Sure is. Oh, yeah.”

  While Cat was pecking away at the keys, I strolled over to the window. The afternoon was cold and spitting rain. Behind the denuded trees on the Quad, Enfield’s old buildings, foursquare and solid, seemed to have emerged directly from the blunt New England earth, a concrete expression of the foursquare morality of the Calvinist founders. A gardener was on his knees on the Common digging holes to plant what looked like daffodil bulbs.

  “All done,” Cat said. “All you’ve got to do now is fill in your profile, download your photo, and choose your friends and you’re in business.”

  “Thanks.” And no thanks.

  “And, look, I’ll be your first friend.” She did something with the keyboard and her…page?…popped up on the screen. “See, it says you’re now my friend. Goody. I can’t wait to get back to the dorm and give you a poke. Bye.”

  She skipped out of the office, leaving her page up on the screen. I sat in the desk chair and stared at it, bemused. Okay. There was Cat’s photo with green hair. And lots of vapid messages from friends. Marcy was eating Pop Tarts—Yum! Fred was cramming for a Poly Sci exam—Bummer. Wendy was dying to go home for some real food.

  Did I need to know any of this? I closed Facebook down without waiting to be poked. I needed coffee and an hour or so away from campus.

  If I had my little green house in town, I’d go home and take a bath.

  Instead, I’d call Greg and ask him to meet me at Starbucks. He was on the President’s Council this year; he’d know what was going on with the overall tenure situation.

  ***

  “And how are you doing, Karen?” Greg asked. He gave my hand a friendly squeeze. “You any less strung out this week? Let’s see—tenure materials are due…Friday. Right?”

  “Everything’s ready. I’m all set to submit them this afternoon. Just have to print out one more essay.” It was odd, but I couldn’t feel any sense of jubilation or relief—just a numb, passive anxiety, something like a latent, lurking toothache.

  Cat Andrews bounced into the coffee shop. At that distance she could have been anyone, but I recognized the bedhead. When she spotted me, sh
e turned in my direction with a big smile. Oh, no. Not Cat again. At the last minute, however, she stopped, made a sudden pivot on her heel and swerved away—maybe because Greg had become visible behind a pillar.

  It was a funky Starbucks—olive-green walls, huge cast-iron Corinthian pillars, black-painted overhead metal air vents, and mismatched, distressed-wood tables—some corporate honcho’s idea of what would make professors and students feel like they weren’t being manipulated by some corporate honcho. Greg and I sat in an alcove by the bathroom door and spoke in low tones. The rain had turned into a cold deluge. My umbrella, hanging from a coat hook, accompanied us with a monotonous drip, drip, drip.

  “So Irina and I will throw a party.”

  “Ha! Better wait to see what happens first.” I took the top off the coffee cup and spooned out latte froth. “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

  Elbows on the table, he leaned toward me, dead earnest. “Karen, you’re a shoo-in.”

  My friend was beginning to annoy me. “But what if Joe…”

  Greg had captured both my hands now. “You’re super-stressed, aren’t you? Maybe Earlene is right; maybe you should see a therapist.”

  I pulled my hands away. “What could a therapist tell me that I don’t already know? Academic life has been my escape route from ignorance and poverty, right? Becoming a tenured professor is the holy grail of that life, right? And I’m not going to get tenure because of that god-damned Joe Lone Wolf.” I pounded out his name.

  Greg sat up straight and put a finger to his lips. “Keep it quiet. People are listening. Now you don’t have to believe me if you think it will jinx the process, Ms. Doom and Gloom, but you are a shoo-in. As for me, I’m ready to party.”

  “Party all you want to,” I snapped. Yes, he was definitely annoying; the last thing I needed was a little Miss Sunshine in my life. I pushed back my chair, which screeched against the concrete floor. “I’ve got to get back to campus and print out my essay.” I snatched my umbrella from the hook. Greg stepped aside to let me pass. The coffee shop had filled up, and I nodded at Garrett Reynolds and Stephanie Hart, who had taken seats near us and were speaking quietly together. Damn! Had they been in a position to overhear me fulminating about Joe? I sure as hell hoped not.

  We made our way between the jammed-together tables and the damp, woolly-smelling students, and, once on the sidewalk, turned toward campus. For no good reason, I’d just snapped at my faithful friend. I felt as if I were headed directly to the funny farm.

  Chapter 9

  Tuesday 10/13

  When the phone rang an hour or so later, I had Hank on my mind. I wondered if maybe this call was from him. Had he changed his mind about asking for help?

  But, no. The caller, a man with a cigarette voice, was on a cell phone; I could hear the connection crackling and cars whizzing past in the near distance. “This Karen Pelletier?”

  “Yes. Who’s calling?”

  “Neil Boylan. Remember me?”

  “Lieutenant Neil Boylan?” Charlie’s colleague at the Massachusetts State Police B.C.I. What the heck?

  “Yeah. Got something I need to talk to you about.”

  My first, icy, thought was that he was calling to deliver some horrible news about Charlie: He’d been blown up by a female suicide bomber in a market square in Basra. He’d been shot in fighting between Shiite and Sunni militants. He’d been killed in a firefight with some obscure militia connected to the Taliban. He’d been…I’d seen it in the movies: sober men in uniforms, stepping out of cars in some anonymous American suburb, proceeding gravely up a narrow cement walk between rows of scraggly marigolds, knocking resolutely at the door…But, surely, if this were about Charlie, it would be the National Guard at my door, not the state police on a telephone. I remembered to breathe.

  I’d met Neil Boylan several times at cop parties. He seemed like a real hard-ass. His crisp ginger curls and pinkish skin were deceptively childlike, but his manner, while often ingratiating, could quickly turn crude. Charlie neither liked him nor trusted him—and Boylan knew it. “Okay, Lieutenant, I’m listening. What’s up?”

  A moment of crackling and whizzing and a man’s shout in the background. The phone went silent, as if muffled by a hand over the speaker. Then he was back. “I want to talk to you about the death of your colleague, Professor Joseph Lone Wolf.”

  ***

  I should have gone directly to college authorities with Boylan’s news. Why didn’t I? Instead, I snatched up a heavy sweater and sped off campus as fast as I could go without actually running. I was stunned. The death of Joseph Lone Wolf. The death of Joseph Lone Wolf.

  Why did Lieutenant Neil Boylan want to talk to me? Shit! Someone had blabbed to him about…about what? Nothing! I was simply being paranoid. Wasn’t I?

  I should have gotten on the phone with President Avery Mitchell immediately. But I didn’t. Maybe I’d forgotten who Boylan was. Yeah, he was a state police homicide investigator, and yeah, I owed him, as such, all the assistance I could provide. But I also knew he was a nasty piece of work. His news must have shocked me into unquestioning obedience; I should have been more wary. When I’d asked Boylan why he needed me, he said I’d find out when I got there. “Make it snappy. And I want to keep a low profile on this, so don’t call anyone—and I mean anyone. I’ll inform the proper parties when we know what we’re dealing with here.”

  Joe’s apartment was three or four blocks from campus, at the bottom of a long hill that sloped past the college gymnasium and playing fields, then past nineteenth-century frame houses with miniscule front yards, and then a row of small apartment buildings the college rented out to faculty and staff. The raucous shouts of girls playing soccer created a strange dissonance with the words echoing in my head: The death of…

  From a block away I could see the pulsing emergency lights on a half-dozen state police cars. Night was beginning to fall, and the walls of the small dark-brown brick apartment building flashed in a psychedelic frenzy. So much for keeping a low profile. On the street, cars were slowing down to catch a glimpse of the excitement. A small group of onlookers huddled outside near the police cars, their faces likewise psychedelic: blinking white and blue. These must be Joe’s neighbors, like him benefitting from the subsidized campus housing.

  Neil Boylan was Homicide, like Charlie, but at this point, I assured myself, that didn’t necessarily mean murder. In the case of any unattended death, an investigator would be present to assess the situation. So, as I put one foot in front of the other, I consoled myself: not another Enfield College murder. Joe was dead—a vigorous man in his thirties. But it could have been a stress-induced heart attack, couldn’t it? A fall in the shower? Suicide? Maybe he’d choked on a chunk of buffalo jerky.

  “But why call me?” I asked myself, again. Me? I hardly knew Joe. Or Boylan, either, for that matter.

  When the lieutenant saw me coming he straightened up and trotted over. Lieutenant Neil Boylan, a man of medium height, was whippet-thin with a receding hairline and an expression often bordering on sardonic. A snappy dresser, he wore ironed jeans and a well-cut brown wool jacket over a black polo open at the neck.

  “You know this guy, Lone Wolf?” No preamble. No thanks for coming. Just, “you know this guy?” Boylan’s expression was neither hostile nor friendly, just the guarded neutrality these guys learn in cop school.

  “Yes, of course I know him—we’re in the same department. What happened to him?”

  “English Department, huh? How well did you know him?” He had a cat’s grin.

  “Just about as well as I know anyone I’ve sat through ten thousand department meetings with—meaning, not well at all. What happened to Joe?”

  Before Boylan could answer my question, a tall uniformed officer with a beak of a nose beckoned to him. “Don’t go anywhere,” the lieutenant cautioned me, with a pointed index finger. He strode over to talk to Trooper Lombardi, who gave me a discreet nod. I knew Lombardi. He was Sergeant Felicity Schultz’s hu
sband, and Felicity was Charlie’s partner. Currently she was on maternity leave, caring for Buster Schultz-Lombardi, the biggest, most rambunctious six-month-old I’d ever known. I smiled at the trooper—at least I think it was a smile. It might have been more of a nauseous grimace.

  Cold and shaky, I sat down on the cement steps that led to the apartment building’s courtyard. I fastened the leather toggles of my hand-knitted sweater and turned the collar up against the chill breeze. It was beginning to hit me—Joe Lone Wolf dead, Lieutenant Hard Ass getting on my case. What would Charlie tell me to do? I knew—he’d tell me to shut up and watch my back.

  Boylan stalked up again, running a hand over his short-clipped hair. “To answer your question, Professor, Joseph Lone Wolf was found dead in his apartment this afternoon. Cause undetermined.”

  “Jee-zus!” Joe Lone Wolf. I may have resented Joe’s claim on what I saw as my tenured position, but I’d never wished him any ill. And now he was…no longer an obstacle. I felt terrible for ever badmouthing him.

  I thought it would be prudent not to mention any of that to Boylan.

  He pointed in the direction of a police car Lombardi seemed to be guarding, a statie blue-and-gray. Its rear window was rolled up again, the occupant invisible through the tinted glass. “There’s someone over here I need to talk to you about.” He took my arm to lead me the ten yards or so to the car, but I shook myself free. “He’s the reason you’re here.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Someone who says he knows you.” He grabbed the back-door handle of the police sedan but didn’t open it immediately. “Fat chance of that.”

  I could see only a shadow through the glass. Who could it possibly be? Had they caught the killer already? Was it someone I knew?

  With a flourish, Boylan whipped the door open. I half expected him to say, “Ta! Da!”