Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  Boylan stood ramrod straight, as if he had never heard of bendable joints, but when I gestured to the green armchair, he sat—stiffly. It was a discomfiting situation for both of us; he sure didn’t want to be here at my bidding, and I couldn’t wait to get rid of the man.

  I told the lieutenant what Stuart had told me about the dead man’s true identity. “And so he was never really Joseph Lone Wolf. He was Frank Vitagliano the entire time.” I made my story simple, honest, and short, but Boylan sat there, silent, for a full minute before he spoke. “Convenient timing, Professor,” he said, finally. Skepticism and suspicion played across his angular features. Running his fingers through his damp ginger curls, he said, “You sure you didn’t brief this, er, old friend, Professor Horowitz, on what might make a good diversion from any…er…speculations about your possible culpability?”

  I lost my hard-won cool. “Any ‘speculations’ you might have about me, Lieutenant Boylan, I fear are baseless. One thing I learned in graduate school was that speculation is merely a preliminary part of the process of reasoning and investigation. One begins with speculation, but one must have irrefutable evidence in order to come to a valid conclusion.” Anger always brings out the Latinate in my language. I rose as if I assumed I had the right to dismiss him and handed him a sheet of yellow lined paper. “You’ll find Stuart Horowitz’s full name here, Lieutenant, along with his academic affiliation, phone numbers, e-mail address. He says he’d be more than happy to talk to you and to provide the names of several of his former fellow graduate students who would also be able to identify Joe Lone Wolf as Frank Vitagliano.”

  “I’ll bet he would.” Boylan was the master of the bad-cop evil eye—not even a cat’s grin today. “I’ll just bet he will. You sure do have a lot of male friends, Professor Pelletier, now don’t you?”

  Chapter 20

  After Neil Boylan left, dragging his malice behind him, I went to the door and twisted the knob to make sure it was locked. Then I threw the bolt. In the cold, rain-blurred light of the departing afternoon, I shivered and pulled my thick sweater tighter around me. Then I opened the top desk drawer. Finally, I had a moment to look through Joe’s grade book.

  It was the usual thick-cardboard-covered class record and roll book, the kind I bought every few years at OfficeMax. This one had dark green covers, its light green pages featuring wide vertical columns for student names, narrow columns to mark attendance, and boxy columns at the end of each row to record mid-term and final grades. Oddly enough, throughout the book, the only columns filled in by Joe were the wide ones on the left for names and the boxy ones on the right side for final grades. In between, there was a huge swath of emptiness; Joe hadn’t recorded attendance, quiz grades, essay grades, class participation, or any of the multitude of small cues that allow a teacher to remember whether or not her students are conscious in the classroom. Also, over the years of teaching at Enfield, he hadn’t given actual letter grades; he’d chosen Pass/Fail grading, a not uncontroversial option. I leafed through the book. From Joe Lone Wolf’s first Enfield course to his most recent completed course in the Spring semester, grades were marked in a bold black script. And without exception they read P—a solid column all the way down of P, P, P, P, P.

  Then I reached his current class, and in an otherwise blank final-grades column, Hank Brody’s semester grade was already listed—a bold black, indelible-ink F.

  I gasped. An F for a scholarship student? That meant death. Well, not literally, of course, but it meant a severe blow to his financial aid. And Hank was an exceptional student; his essay for me had picked up on the discussion about magic in the Native tales. It had been both insightful and eloquent. This grade had to be a mistake. And why had Hank praised Joe so highly at the poetry competition? You would have thought he’d want to kill the man who had threatened his academic future.

  Wait—bad choice of words, but I did have to talk to this kid as soon as possible. I checked my cellphone for the time: 5:35. Too late to see him today.

  Then a worrisome thought plagued me; a failing grade could be seen as a motive. Someone who didn’t know Hank might suspect him of the murder. I had to keep Lieutenant Neil Boylan from getting his hands on this grade book. Especially since Hank, as the student who’d found Joe’s body, had been under suspicion at the start. This time Boylan would think he had his perp for sure.

  I stood in the middle of the office and looked around. Should I keep the grade book in my desk? Should I hide it among my own books?

  In the end, I decided to take it home with me. I’d call Hank first thing tomorrow morning and set up a talk with him.

  Wednesday 10/21

  “Do you believe in magic, Professor?”

  “Me?” Hank’s question took me aback. “Hell, no. I’m much too rational a thinker for that—maybe too rational for my own good. Why do you ask?”

  “Because you gave me an A on that essay I wrote about magical transformation in the Trickster tales.” The sun through the window next to our table in the Java Zone fell on his shaggy dreadlocks, and their straw turned to gold.

  “I didn’t give you anything. You earned it. You made a passionate and intelligent argument for the cultural importance of magic in the tales.”

  He sipped from his extra-large mocha latte with whipped cream. This early in the morning—not yet eight o’clock—the mere sight of the super-size concoction nauseated me. “It was just that Garrett Reynolds was so damn contemptuous about the magical elements in the American Indian stories that he pissed me off.”

  “Better lower your voice, Hank.” Classes were about to begin, and Java Zone was more of a grab-it-and-go zone than a sit-and-eavesdrop zone, so we hadn’t been particularly quiet. “Garrett’s at that table, over by the doors.”

  Hank turned his head and stared. “That jerk! He—” He abruptly clamped his teeth over his words. “Never mind. I promised…Well, anyhow, I don’t really believe in magic, either, but don’t you think it’s truly arrogant to say that something’s impossible just because we don’t understand how it works?”

  I laughed. “Imagine someone turning on a light bulb in Puritan New England. She would have been burned as a witch.”

  “Yeah, and the light bulb, too.”

  I peeled the top off my cardboard cup of black coffee and took a cautious sip. “So…” I said, “that’s why I asked to meet you here. After reading that terrific paper of yours, I was surprised to see the “F” Joe Lone Wolf was planning to give you in his course.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders sagged. He pushed the latte away, half-finished, and slid me a glance I could only think of as cagey. “How do you know about that?”

  I told him.

  “Shit! I was hoping you wouldn’t find out. Sorry for the language, but if I fail that course, I’ll lose my scholarship. If I lose my scholarship, I’ll have to leave Enfield.” He dropped his head to his hands. “Oh, God—I’ll end up just like my father.”

  A sigh expelled itself from somewhere deep in my torso. Life is in constant conspiracy to turn English professors into therapists. “Like your father?”

  “Yeah, I come from coal mining country. Last summer Pop had a heart attack and died.” Hank’s head was still hanging and his hands were clenched into fists somewhere in the center of his chest. “He was only forty-three. I don’t know whether it was the coal that killed him—or the alcohol.”

  I regarded him sadly. “And, really…” I sighed again. “Really, the coal and the alcohol were the same thing, weren’t they? Hopelessness.”

  His head jerked up. “You understand?”

  “Oh, yes. I understand. More than you can imagine.” Garret Reynolds was directly in my line of vision, so I couldn’t help but notice how agitated he seemed, tapping his fingers on the table, swiveling his head toward the door whenever anyone entered.

  “This is what happened with Lone Wolf—I mean Professor Lone Wolf—I just couldn’t write what he wanted me to. He assigned us offensive…creepy…topics, li
ke ‘In Defense of Killing Indians,’ for example, or ‘In Defense of Auschwitz.’ We were supposed to write an essay endorsing that position. He said if we could develop the skills to argue the inarguable, then we could use those skills to persuade readers of anything.”

  “‘In Defense of Auchwitz,’” I mused. What a hell of a topic to inflict on students.

  “Yeah. Professor Lone Wolf said we should become provocateurs, intellectual firebrands. Whatever the common wisdom was, we were to argue against it, and do it well enough to outrage and infuriate readers. It seemed perverse to me, but…what do I know? I got the topic ‘In Defense of Poverty,’ and in the end I simply couldn’t write it. What is there to endorse about poverty? Hunger? Ignorance? Fear? Disease? Listen, I’ve been living in poverty all my life—there is no defense. So I ended up writing a satiric essay, you know, like Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’ But when he read it Professor Lone Wolf said we weren’t allowed to be satirical. We had to present a straightforward persuasive argument. So that’s why I got a failing grade.”

  “In essence you got a failing grade because you were sincerely satiric—or should that be satirically sincere.”

  “That’s what he said—I was too earnest. Then I tried to drop the course, but he wouldn’t sign off on it. He told me that if I rewrote the assignment to his specifications, he’d grade it again.” Hank sat with his fingers twined together, twisting them over his stress-whitened knuckles. “I’m hoping you’ll let me write about something different, something I can believe in.” This unsophisticated kid had little practice in appearing blasé; his eyes pleaded like those of a Bassett hound.

  “Oh.” I really didn’t have to think too hard about this. I understood that Hank’s scholarship meant everything to him; what would his life become if he had to drop out of school? “You know what, Hank? No sense in you writing another essay. Just give me the satiric one. If I think it’s worthy, I’ll grade you on the effectiveness of the satire. If not, you can write about something else. Okay?”

  He jumped up from his chair, and for a moment I was afraid he would throw his arms around me, right there in the Java Zone.

  My coffee was cold now. And I still needed ten minutes or so to review my notes for class. But I simply couldn’t run off without asking him: “Um, Hank? There’s something I don’t understand.”

  “What’s that?” Hank folded his gangly limbs into the chair again

  “I was at that poetry slam the other night—where you read the eagle poem. After such a bad experience with Professor Lone Wolf, what upsets you so much about his death? It just doesn’t seem to compute.”

  Hank looked me right in the eye. “Damn right, I’m upset. He…he was terrific.”

  “Really? Even though he threatened to fail you?”

  He sighed. “Did you know Joe Lone Wolf well?

  “No. Not at all, to tell the truth.”

  “Were you ever in his office?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s where I found the grade book. He’s got…interesting things.”

  “Yeah, he does. First day of class he let us handle those beautiful baskets, those kachina dolls—do you know some of them are sacred? Then he told us that Western culture had it all wrong about the arts, separating them from ordinary life the way we do—confining them to books and museums and academic study. That drains the spirit from them, he said—stories and pictures and exquisite objects should be part of daily life in order to be alive. They should be beautiful and also be of use, like those pots and baskets. They should always be at hand and in hand. Then he picked up a plain little stone-headed tomahawk from a shelf by the door—an authentic throwing axe, he called it. The only truly ancient thing he’d been able to collect, he said. That old tomahawk, he told us, was just as infused with spirit as any Shakespeare sonnet.”

  “Really? A tomahawk?”

  “Yes. And he showed us how to use it. Like this…” He raised his arm high and back , then whipped his wrist forward. The motion appeared so effective I half expected the window on the far side of the room to splinter into shards. “Throwing the tomahawk, Professor Lone Wolf said, was as beautiful a motion as any ballet step in ‘Swan Lake.’”

  “Really?” I repeated. I raised my own arm high and replicated his motion. Then I looked around sheepishly. Garrett Reynolds was gaping at me. Damn. But the motion of my arm and wrist had felt good, almost like a move in a dance.

  “That turned my world around. I’ll never be the same again. Somehow,” Hank said, “I just can’t find it in my heart to hate him.”

  Behind him, out of his range of vision, Ayesha Amhed entered the coffee shop in a cool yellow flowing robe and green head cloth. I couldn’t find it in my heart to tell Hank that at a signal from Garrett Reynolds, she’d sat right down with him and begun an earnest conversation.

  “Oh, by the way, Hank,” I said, hoping I could distract his attention as I led him past their table. “The day you found Joe dead, you told me Joe’s apartment door was always open. How did you know that?”

  “What? Oh, he told the whole class. Just drop by any time you want to, he said. The door’s always open.”

  Chapter 21

  A breathless message from Stuart on my voice mail after my p.m. class requested that I call him at home. A woman answered the phone. “Yes, hang on, he just got back. Stu, honey,” she called.

  He was still breathless when he got to the phone. “Boy, Karen, do I need to talk to you.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, “but can I first ask you about—”

  “Clark McCutcheon?”

  “What? McCutcheon? No, I want to know if you can tell me where exactly in Brooklyn Joe…er…Frankie came from.” If I found out about Frankie’s early life in Brooklyn—Brooklyn!—Felicity could work her cop connections for murder motives stemming from…from what?…childhood stoopball games?

  But Stuart wasn’t listening to me. “No. No! Clark McCutcheon—he’s the one we have to talk about.”

  “What’s Clark got to do with it?”

  “So, you do know him?”

  “Well, yeah. Of course I do. He’s in my department.”

  “Whew!” I could hear the air whistling through Stuart’s teeth. “Then I simply don’t understand.”

  I was mystified myself, but more by Stuart’s interest in McCutcheon than by McCutcheon himself. “Understand what?”

  “How Frankie could get away with it. Here’s the story. You got me really curious, so I went on the Enfield College website, just to see what I could find out about his Joe Lone Wolf persona. What courses he taught, and so on. Then I saw that McCutcheon was on your faculty, too. That was a huge shock. How long’s he been there?”

  “Just this semester, so far. Why?”

  “It’s really weird. McCutcheon and Frankie go way back, all the way to Montana University. McCutcheon was Frankie’s dissertation director.”

  “He was?” I couldn’t get my mind around it. “Then why—”

  “Yeah, right. Then why wouldn’t McCutcheon have recognized his former student when he got to Enfield, and why didn’t he expose him as a fraud?”

  “Exactly! Stuart, I’m going to look into this right now.”

  “Be careful, Karen. I remember McCutcheon as a guy who always has hidden agendas.”

  ***

  “Karen, I knew you’d show up here one of these days.” Clark McCutcheon leapt up from the desk chair in his meticulously neat office and clapped his hand on my shoulder. It was a large, tanned hand, warm and gentle, and, as always, it smelled of high skies and the wide open plains.

  I couldn’t smell any agendas—other than the usual, that is.

  Smiling broadly, he guided me to a comfortable armchair upholstered in faded blue chintz, took a wooden side chair from his conference table, swung it around backwards and straddled it, arms resting on the tall slatted back, grinning the whole time. “You know that…drink I promised you? You ready for it now?”

  Today Clark wore a We
stern suit with broad, top-stitched lapels. It was a light cord fabric, the color of desert sand, and with it he sported a black bolo tie with a turquoise-and-silver slide in the shape of a Navajo thunderbird. His blond-white hair was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck with a leather thong. His shoulders were broad, his movements cheetah-like. He radiated physical strength and prowess. The man was masculinity distilled down to its pheromonal essence.

  I sat as far back in the chair as I could. “A little early for a drink, Clark,” I said, “at least for me. I’m here because I have a question for you. I know Ned met with the senior faculty yesterday to—”

  His blue eyes widened, incredulous. “—To tell us about Lone Wolf’s false identity. Isn’t that something? What a fraud!” He upped the wattage on his smile and did the finger/gun thing. Behind him on the desk, piles of index cards were stacked as meticulously as if they were hundred-dollar bills. “And I understand that you’re the girl detective who unmasked him.”

  I smiled. “I’m hardly a detective, but I just wanted to know…what you thought about the situation.” I’d come directly from Stu’s phone call meaning to ask Clark right up front why, when he must have known of Joe’s deception, he hadn’t turned him in to the college authorities. But, sitting here, face to face with Clark, I decided a more oblique approach might be prudent. It was something about his eyes. What had he said to me once? Nothing escapes me: that’s what it was. When he looked at me, it was as if nothing escaped his gaze. “Especially since I remembered that you used to teach at Montana—where Joe, well, really Frankie Vitagliano, had come from. Did you know him at MU?”

  Clark regarded me for a long moment. I thought those eyes were going to swallow me up; I’d end up drowning in a sea of blue. “Well, yes, I did,” he drawled. Then he grinned at me as if we shared delicious secret knowledge. “Karen, you are one smart lady. No one else made the connection.” He jumped up and grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve got a story to tell you, and there are better places to tell it, preferably someplace where we can get a drink.”