Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  Except for me, the sole audience member remaining dry-eyed and seated was Ayesha Ahmed, in a blue robe and white hijab. She gazed at me, her expression sober. And she didn’t read a poem.

  Chapter 18

  Monday 10/19

  As the plump Latina server at the Blue Dolphin diner slapped our platters of eggs, sausage, and home fries on the table early Monday morning, I decided I liked eating with Felicity Schultz. In a town of no-carb, no-fat, no-sugar, no-caffeine dieters, she was a down-to-earth, no-nonsense eater. If I’d been with Earlene, we’d have had oatmeal. Both of us.

  “Who gets the pancakes?” the waitress asked.

  “That’s me,” Felicity said, hefting her fork. Then she gave me a sideways look. “Hey, I’m breastfeeding the baby Hulk. Okay?”

  “Did I say anything?” Overeating in company is always more fun than overeating alone. “Pass the ketchup.”

  The next few minutes were spent in near-silence, with only the sounds of forks clicking on plates and cups clicking on saucers. This early on a Monday morning the diner was frequented by UPS drivers, mailmen, local police officers, and medical personnel from Enfield Regional Hospital a mile down the road. It was too early for students, and professors would have their French Roast fix at Starbucks.

  ***

  After the poetry slam Saturday night, when I‘d gone to pick Mom up from the Schultz-Lombardi apartment, Felicity, bless her heart, had suggested a temporary solution to my eldercare dilemma. “Lombardi and me, we’ve been talking. Your mom’s so good with Buster—we think it would be real helpful if she stayed at our place daytimes this week to play with the kid. Lombardi’s gotta be here anyhow. That’d give you a break, keep Adele safe, give Lombardi some relief from all the ga-ga goo-goo, and make the baby happy. And maybe you and I can do something to get Neil Boylan off our backs.”

  “But taking my mother, that’s too much to ask—” I’d been calling Connie’s house once a day, in case she’d gotten home without letting me know. I had no idea how long Mom would be with me, so Felicity’s offer was a godsend. But I still had no idea whether or not I should be planning a long-term solution.

  “Hey, you’re not asking—I’m offering. And listen, it’ll get me outta the house and save my sanity. This kid is something else. I had no idea what I was getting myself into—fourteen hours a day of servitude.” She jerked her head toward her tall, panther-like husband, who was on his knees by the playpen spinning a musical top for the baby. “Might as well make use of Daddycakes while I can.” She grinned at me.

  Daddycakes?

  So I told her what I’d decided that morning, that the most effective way to get Boylan off my back would be to investigate the murder myself, and she declared herself my unofficial partner “strictly on the q.t., of course.” Thus was greatness born—the new investigative team of Schultz and Pelletier—an investigative collaboration that might actually work.

  ***

  “So,” Felicity said, having downed the last triangle of pancake, “What have we got to go on?”

  I told her that on Saturday I’d overheard Boylan talking about going after Ayesha; that Ayesha wasn’t worried because she had “family resources.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  I could just see all sorts of racist stereotypes bombarding her imagination: tall young men in skull caps and flowing robes, brandishing hand grenades or scimitars. I knew exactly what she was imagining, because the media had done a similar job on my own unconscious.

  “Come off it, Schultz! She just means…” I didn’t know what she meant, so I told my new partner about the hate mail Ayesha had been receiving. “I’m worried about her—I think she knows who’s sending it and is trying to deal with him herself.”

  Then I told Felicity about the clutter I’d found in Joe Lone Wolf’s office and about Clark McCutcheon’s interest in the collection of Native arts and artifacts.

  “Hmm,” Felicity said.

  The final thing I told her was about the affection students had revealed for Joe at the poetry slam. “For a man who was so distant and unpleasant with his colleagues, he certainly seems to have been adored by his students. Listening to them, I began to see new depths in the man.”

  Felicity was writing down bits and pieces of what I said in a little notebook. I’d regretted immediately having told her about Ayesha’s “family resources,” so I didn’t say anything at all about the girl’s dry-eyed demeanor at the poetry slam. Enough was enough.

  Felicity slipped the notebook into her jacket pocket. “Okay, you’ve got your connections, and I’ve got my connections. Together we should be able to fill out the big picture on this guy, Lone Wolf,” she said. “Now, here’s something for you. I got a call last night from a confidential source.”

  “Yeah?” I motioned for more coffee.

  “Boylan’s been trying to locate Lone Wolf’s next-of-kin.”

  “Yeah?” Someone had put quarters in one of the miniature juke boxes, and Willie Nelson was on the road again.

  “In the college personnel records he listed a Margaret Lone Wolf in Erewhon, Montana as his mother.”

  “Yeah?” I contemplated the remaining home fries on my plate, and then pushed it away.

  She gave me a straight look. “Not only is there no Margaret Lone Wolf in Erewhon, but there’s also no Erewhon in Montana. What do you make of that?”

  “It’s strange—that’s for sure. Are you saying ‘Arrow-won’?”

  “No. It’s Erewhon. Not sure I’m pronouncing it right.”

  “Spell it.” I had the glimmer of a clue.

  “E.R.E.W.H.O.N.”

  As she said each letter I wrote it out on my paper placemat, but, before I was halfway through, I knew what we were dealing with. “Nowhere!” I said. “Why that mendacious little twerp.”

  “No! It’s Erewhon,” Felicity protested. The waitress poured coffee and removed our empty grease-slicked platters.

  “Write it backwards.” I sipped fresh coffee.

  She did. “For Christ’s sake. It is ‘Nowhere, but it’s not spelled right.”

  “Just an English major having a little fun,” I said, “and deceiving the college about his origins in the process.” I told her about Erewhon, the nineteenth-century novel by Samuel Butler, which featured the fictional country of Erewhon—or Nowhere, slightly misspelled.

  “Well, hell.” She slapped both stubby hands on the tabletop. “And how am I gonna get this info to Boylan without compromising my source?”

  “Why not just have your Deep Throat ‘suddenly recall’ an old college class. She (I was thinking Trooper Dunbar)—or he—could look it up in his or her college English lit textbook”

  “If she—or he—ever took a course in English lit.” She grimaced. “Which is unlikely. You’d have to supply the textbook.”

  “No problem. We get free textbooks from academic publishers all the time.” It’s one of the perks of the profession. Medical doctors get free drugs and holiday junkets—we get a truckload of almost identical textbooks.

  “Great—that’s an excellent idea, Karen. You know, you could have been a good criminal investigator. You’re wasted in higher ed.”

  “I coulda been a contender!” I sighed melodramatically, secretly pleased by her praise. “But right now I’ve got to go teach a class in American literature.”

  We descended the diner’s concrete steps into a cold misty rain. Felicity fished for car keys in the pocket of her hooded jacket.

  “I told you about that strange car, didn’t I?” I suddenly asked, remembering.

  “Which one?”

  “The one that followed Joe from the college lot at midnight, not this past Saturday, but a week ago Saturday.”

  “A week ago Saturday?” Felicity became very still. “That’s two days before…Maybe you did, but tell me again.”

  “Well…” I began.

  She put a hand on my arm. “Wait a sec.” She scanned the lot again and the busy street that ran past i
t. “We’ll talk in my car. You never know who’ll be driving by here and see us together. We can’t let this get back to Boylan.”

  Felicity’s car was an old Toyota Camry with a child safety seat in the back. The front passenger seat was littered with take-out coffee cups, fast-food wrappers, and at least a half-dozen pacifiers. She brushed the garbage to the floor, but the pacifiers she dropped into an empty McDonalds’ coffee cup. She set it carefully in the cup-holder, close to hand for when Buster demanded one.

  I told her the whole thing: Joe arriving in Sally’s car, getting in his VW bus, the dark sedan following him with no lights.

  “I’ll be damned. Chenille? And then an unknown driver? But you say that was Saturday night? So that means the driver of that car isn’t necessarily the perp. The ME says Lone Wolf died early on Monday. And he was definitely around on Sunday night. He had some kind of party—”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? We heard about it from the neighbors—a lot of noise. Drumming and chanting.”

  “Really?” Huh? Drumming and chanting?

  It was cold and damp in the car. Felicity turned the key in the ignition and the heat dial to MAX. The CD player came blasting on, Michael Bolton singing about heartbreak.

  I held my hands over the heater vent. “Should I call Boylan and tell him about that car?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t think so, Karen. He’s just gonna say, ‘very convenient timing, Ms. Pelletier, very convenient timing.’”

  ***

  All the way through teaching my morning class, I’d been thinking about what Felicity had said: “You’ve got your connections and I’ve got mine.” She’d been referring to my Enfield College connections, of course, but I had a much wider network than that: the entire academic brain trust of American literature scholars. This whole social networking phenomenon of Facebook had made me recall my professional online network, the various e-groups I belonged to for professional discussion and information. I was beginning to think about ways in which I could use my e-groups to learn more about Joe Lone Wolf and his past.

  Monica had somehow requisitioned a computer for my office, and I accessed its search engine. I seemed to recall that Joe had done his graduate work at Montana University, so I called up the Montana U alumni website. Joe Lone Wolf’s name didn’t come up. Bummer! Then I slapped my forehead: of course it didn’t! Joe had never completed the Ph.D. He’d never graduated, so he wasn’t listed as an alum. Duh!

  I checked the time readout on my desk phone: 11:11. I was brain-dead. Time for emergency rations. At Java Zone, I purchased black coffee and a Snickers bar. If I could have, I would have ingested them intravenously. Then I went directly back to my office and posted a query on the largest American literature discussion group: “Anyone know anything about an Amlit scholar named Joseph Lone Wolf?” Okay, that would go out to thousands of people. It was the best I could do at the moment. Time to prep my afternoon freshmen class. We were reading Invisible Man.

  ***

  Before I left campus later that afternoon, I checked e-mail. No responses to my query re: Joe Lone Wolf, but I now had sixty-seven Facebook friend requests. Hmm—that gave me an idea. I’d just picked up actual mail from my department box and had found a memorial card with Joe’s portrait, the one in full tribal regalia. Ned was saturating campus with these little cards. What if I scanned Joe’s picture into my computer and sent it out to scholar-friends on Facebook? An electronic “wanted” poster. Anyone know this man? So I worked my privacy settings and sent the portrait out to thirty-eight people in the academic field of American Literature. Somebody had to know this man.

  Then I went home to cook for company. In this chilly weather, beef stew sounded like manna from heaven.

  Monday evening

  Outside the kitchen window, slender black branches crisscrossed the cloud-mottled gray of the darkening sky. I stood at the sink peeling potatoes, looking out the window, and wishing Charlie were here with me, drinking this rough Spanish roja while we shared the happenings of our day. Without him, dusk was an empty hour, and my solitary glass of wine a worrisome indulgence. What was it they said about people who drank alone?

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  The beef, onions, and garlic had been stewing all day in the crockpot. Now I cut potatoes, carrots, turnip and parsnip into chunks and lifted the lid of the pot. Fragrant steam wafted into the air, clouding the eyeglasses I wasn’t too vain to wear at home.

  I was expecting Felicity and Lombardi for a brainstorming session on the murder investigation. Felicity’s husband did have a first name. I knew what it was but never used it, and Felicity referred to him only by his surname. I simply couldn’t imagine that no-nonsense tomboy cop whispering sweet nothings in the ear of a hunk named Egidio.

  They’d bring my mom home with them, of course. This morning she’d been anxious when I took her to that “strange place” again, but she’d perked up when she saw the baby. And the baby—they’d bring that pudgy little Goliath. It had been so long since I’d spent time around an infant, I hardly knew how to behave with this serious small person who looked me directly in the eye, frowning, as if I failed to meet his exacting standards for an acceptable human being.

  The vegetables plopped into the stewpot, turnips first, then the carrots, potatoes, parsnips. Each made a little splash in the beefy broth. The peas I would put in at the end, so they wouldn’t mush up into soggy, flavorless nothings.

  I replaced the top on the pot, sat down at the scrubbed-pine table, and pulled my wine glass toward me. It was empty. Damn. I got up, retrieved the bottle from the counter, refilled the glass and took a sip.

  Had it only been two weeks earlier that my primary concern was the compilation and submission of my tenure file? That seemed as far in the past as the Garden of Eden. Since then murder had intervened—and not only murder, but police suspicion of me and of my two best students, Ayesha and Hank. I’d tried again to call Charlie, the only person in the world who could help me make sense of all this, but the base operator said his unit was still out of contact. Worry about him ate away at my gut like an unmentionable disease.

  And then, on top of all that, came the care of my mother and her increasing senility. And, of course, the theft of my box of tenure materials.

  But right now tenure was the least of my worries. I was a damn good English professor, fuck it! If Enfield College wanted to consider me for tenure, they could just wait until I’d finished dealing with other matters, matters of life and death. I took another slug of the red stuff.

  By the time the headlights of Felicity’s Toyota swept the dark kitchen window, the wineglass was empty again. Two car doors opened and then clunked shut. Only two? I had the house door open before they knocked. Felicity stood there bareheaded, her shaggy hair askew and her jaw pugnacious. Mom was right behind her, puffy coat buttoned to the chin. I peered around them at the car. The delayed-action interior light revealed no further passengers.

  Felicity noted my curiosity. “Don’t ask,” she snapped. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

  ***

  Mom had finished her meal and was watching Nick at Nite in the living room when Felicity and I settled ourselves on the shabby kitchen couch with our coffee. I’d had another glass of wine with my stew and she’d had two. Now I watched as she splashed scotch into her coffee—things did not seem to be good with Felicity Schultz tonight. When she handed the whiskey bottle back to me, I screwed the top back on tight and set it to one side. No more for either of us. The way it looked, I might end up having to serve as this Massachusetts state trooper’s designated driver.

  She took a sip of the coffee. “He said to make his apologies to you.” She blurted it out. “Otherwise he’s not talking to me. I had the kid in his snowsuit and the diaper bag packed, then Lombardi announces he’s not coming. ‘Oh, yeah,’ I says. ‘Then have a happy boy’s night in with the little squirt.’ I snatched up the car keys and got out of there. If
I’d stayed, Lombardi would have gone out drinking somewhere—that was the mood he was in. And I just couldn’t take being alone again with that demanding little twerp.”

  I winced, and she noticed. “Oh, I love the termite to pieces, but, God, being cooped up with him at all hours, night and day, for weeks on end, months and months—sometimes I think I’m half-dead.” She covered her face with her hands. “Oh, God, I’m such a terrible mother. I can’t wait to get back to work. What’s the matter with me?” Her shoulders heaved. Sergeant Felicity Schultz was crying?

  Yes, stalwart Sergeant Felicity Schultz was crying, great gasping, unladylike sobs and sloppy, nose-running tears. Poor thing. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed, in a state of family crisis. I put my arm around her shoulder and grabbed up a box of tissues with the other hand. “There, there,” I said, soothingly, like a kindergarten teacher, “it’ll be all right. Just wait. You’ll see.”

  I wasn’t certain which one of us I was trying to comfort.

  Until now, I hadn’t stopped to think about the stress placed on the Schultz/Lombardi marriage by Lombardi’s suspension. And, really, wasn’t that my fault, since Felicity had been acting in my interests by allowing her husband to keep her up-to-date on developments in the Lone-Wolf homicide investigation? He must resent the hell out of that. And, of course, on top of everything, she was suffering post-partum depression. I remembered again—in both body and soul—how merciless the baby blues could be.

  While I comforted my friend, I indulged in my latest “grounding” exercise, picturing myself and Charlie in that little green house currently for sale on Elm Street. If I got tenured I would put a down payment on it immediately. I grabbed another tissue and wiped my own eyes. In that little green house, no one would ever cry.

  ***