Avery’s frown deepened. “Evidently none of your senior colleagues saw fit to inform me.”
I told him about Ned’s mysterious Native visitor and the effect she seemed to have had on him and how I had seen that very same woman slug, er, assault the putative Joe Lone Wolf in Rudolph’s bar almost three weeks earlier. “I think Ned had developed some kind of a fixation on Joe,” I concluded.
“Is that so?” He mused on the idea. “I wonder why?”
“My sense is that it may have been the idea of Joe even more than the man himself that fascinated Ned.” I shrugged. “Because he was Native.”
“You mean you think Ned had something like an idée fixe?” He let his voice rise in a parody of noble political discourse. “Joe Lone Wolf as a member of an exotic and endangered people whom it was Ned Hilton’s higher duty as an enlightened white man to nurture and protect?”
I laughed, but really it wasn’t funny. “I’m afraid Ned’s failure to ‘save’ Joe may be what’s now sending him around the bend. Something is.”
The fire was dying down. Avery took the iron poker and shifted the coals around. He seemed lost in thought.
With his back still toward me, he spoke. “I really shouldn’t say this, Karen.” This sigh was the deepest yet. “But I will. What if it’s the other way around? What if Ned somehow found out Joe was an ethnic fraud—before anyone else did—and he felt so betrayed that he killed him?”
I frowned. “But how would Ned have found out?” Clark McCutcheon? I bit my lip in silence. “But I’d swear on a stack of Leaves of Grass that when I took the news to Ned he knew nothing about it. He turned ghost pale and his eyes—well, I’ve never seen anything quite like his eyes at that moment—huge and defeated, like tar pits.”
“Tar pits, huh?”
“And now Ned has this…what?…this breakdown. I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, I do. Let me put on my administrator’s hat for a moment. Given certain…reports that have come to my attention over the past week or two, it seems clear to me that the English department has been seriously lacking adequate leadership since the beginning of the semester.”
“Yesssss!” I breathed it out in a sibilant rush. Adequate leadership: Who would have thought those two words combined could have aroused such passion in my breast?
“And then you tell me Hilton actually forbade you to inform college authorities of an egregious academic deception perpetuated upon the college—and upon its students—and just now I come across this troubling scene with Hilton, this, as you say, breakdown…It looks as if I’m going to have to take some immediate steps…” The sigh came from the depths of an administrator’s weary heart. Avery arose, empty glass in hand, and picked mine up from the side table. He poured bourbon, handed me my glass, and placed another log on the fire before he sat down again, crossed a long, well-tailored leg, ankle to knee, and sipped from his drink.
There followed a quiet few moments in which I basked in warmth, bourbon, silence, and the presence of Avery Mitchell.
“Tell me, Karen,” Avery said, abruptly, “how’s your tenure petition proceeding?”
“Tenure?” I’d almost finished the second drink. “Oh, yes, tenure. In all the chaos surrounding Joe Lone Wolf’s death, I’d almost forgotten.”
Avery snorted. I looked up at him, muzzy and startled. Avery snorted?
“Sorry, Karen. I don’t mean to be crude. But, for God’s sake, woman, you’d almost forgotten? You’re up for tenure, and you’d forgotten?” He titled his head again, with a quizzical expression on his handsome, worn face. He was expert in encouraging people to confide in him.
I rubbed my hand across my eyes. “This is what happened.” And I told him the whole story: the disappearance of my tenure file; the police confistication of my office computer; my mother’s untimely visit; Boylan’s harassment. I even told him about working unofficially with Sergeant Felicity Schultz to try to solve the homicide case and clear my name. I didn’t mention the two students who were also under suspicion; I wasn’t that looped. And there was something else I hadn’t told him, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
When I’d finished my woeful saga, Avery sat up in his chair, both shiny wingtip shoes flat on the floor, and said “Whew! And you’ve been trying to deal with all that by yourself?” He shook his head. Then he rose from the leather chair and said, “Let’s get out of here, Karen. How about some dinner? I think we both deserve a good meal.”
***
I made a call to Felicity, and she offered to keep Mom overnight. This couldn’t go on, I knew. I’d soon have to make professional arrangements for my mother. But, oh, I couldn’t, simply couldn’t, pass up a chance for an evening with Avery Mitchell.
We went out of town, to a French restaurant in an old farmhouse, a place I’d never heard of, but where he seemed to be a regular, and he ordered coq au vin for both of us. We ate and drank, talked and laughed. It was all so easy—the best time I’d had since Charlie left for training camp.
Charlie.
After dinner, in the restaurant parking lot, Avery opened the BMW’s passenger door for me. Before I could enter, he took me gently by the shoulders and turned me toward him. His slender hand stroked my hair once. I felt as if I were melting into a dark, sweet puddle. Then I put both hands on his shoulders and eased him away, too breathless to speak.
Avery gazed down at me, thoughtfully, his eyes soft, and after a beat or two in time, he said, “We can’t do this, can we?”
My brain was spinning. Charlie. Oh, Charlie. “No, we can’t,” I said, my throat ragged.
“After all,” he continued, “you’re up for tenure.”
Tenure? Oh, yes, tenure.
“And it would be seen as an abuse of power.” Ever the administrator. Already he was doing risk management assessment.
“And then there’s Charlie,” I said.
I got in the car and he went around to the driver’s side. He turned the key in the ignition, and the BMW’s tires whooshed in near silence over the leaf-strewn roads.
Chapter 23
Saturday 10/24
Even through the haze of strobe-lighted cigarette smoke, I knew her the moment I saw her: bronzed skin, high cheekbones, dark eyes, silky black hair in two braids falling past her shoulders.
“That’s her,” I whispered to Felicity, who accompanied me. My cop friend was almost unrecognizable in undercover mode, lipsticked and mascaraed, her hair gelled and spiked, wearing what she called her “lucky outfit,” black velvet pants and a red satin shirt unbuttoned to display her considerable cleavage. “That’s Graciella Talltrees—at that table.” I nodded toward the felt-covered semi-circular blackjack table presided over by the beautiful Native woman.
When we had pulled up to the Mohegan Sky casino just a short while ago, it had been an ordinary late-fall midafternoon. Then we’d walked into the giant domed wigwam supported by tree trunks of mythic strength, tall enough to hold up the sky, and, suddenly, it was mystical night lit by flaming braziers, neon sunset glowing around the edges of the painted ceiling. Was this how my Mi’kmaq ancestors had lived? I didn’t think so.
“Blackjack, huh? You play?” Her gaze darted here and there. She was casing the joint.
“God, no.” It was hard to make myself heard over the pounding beat of “Born in the USA.” I raised my voice. “All I know about gambling is how to slip quarters into slots. I just want to talk to the woman.”
“Sure thing. I’ll set it up. Let me sit in on a hand or two with her, and I’ll…you know…establish a rapport. Find out when she’s taking a break. I know how to do this stuff.” She edged over to Graciella’s table, sat down, leaned forward confidently, slapped her money down, stacked her chips, and she was a player—no different from the others.
***
I’d considered passing Ned’s information about Graciella Talltrees on to Lieutenant Boylan, as I probably should have. But he’d been so nasty when I’d told him about Joe’s Frankie V. ide
ntity, I didn’t want to muddy the waters any further—at least until I could find out more about this Carlo Mangeri persona from Ms. Talltrees. So I recruited Felicity, and we set out together to learn what we could from—and about—Joe’s Native friend.
Driving east on the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Connecticut, Felicity and I had summed up what we knew about Graciella Talltrees. It wasn’t much. One: I had seen Graciella slug Joe Lone Wolf in Rudolph’s bar; she had a good, solid right. Two: She worked as a blackjack dealer at Mohegan Sky. Three: She had come to the chairman’s office to talk to Ned about Lone Wolf, whom she knew as Carlo Mangeri, a professional gambler. The second two facts I had pieced together from Ned’s mutterings. That, and whatever else Graciella had told him, was clearly enough to freak my chairman out.
Ned was not a natural risk-taker, but by supporting Joe for tenure against me he’d gambled big-time. I assumed that with all good intentions he’d made a commitment to himself to see that the first Native American ever was installed in a tenured position at Enfield College. If he couldn’t do anything about the long sorry past of American history, at least he could redeem his own sorry whiteness by giving an Indian a job. Then Joe’s duplicity had knocked the foundations right out from under him; the man he’d gone out of his way to promote turned out not to be a dedicated Native scholar of American Indian literature, but an imposter and an opportunist. No wonder Ned had lost it; all his good intentions toward Joe had been based on an affirmative-action identity scam. Would the betrayed idealist ever recover from the shock?
And to cap it off, he’d learned from Graciella Talltrees that Joe had a third identity—as a professional gambler.
“Well,” Felicity said, stripping the peel from a bruised banana as we zoomed past the Worcester exits, “are you thinking of Ms. Talltrees as an informant or a suspect?”
I tried not to gag at the scent of the over-ripe fruit. “I guess I was thinking of her simply as a source of information.”
“Why not as a suspect?” she mumbled around a bite of banana.
“Why not? This is America. Innocent until proven guilty, right?”
She took another bite. “Okay, I’ll buy that. For now. So, what do you think she was to Lone Wolf, a girlfriend or a tout?”
“A tout?”
“You know, someone who promotes something illicit—illegal gambling, for instance. Who knows what else the vic was into.”
I shrugged. “Girlfriend or tout? I guess that means love or money, huh?” I took myself in memory back to that night at the bar, the steely anger in Graciella’s eyes, the icy control of her expression, the power behind her punch. “The way she hauled off and hit him, I’d say it was love, at least on her part. Nobody slugs anyone that hard and that fast for money.”
“Ya think so, huh?” Felicity looked dubious. “Well, in either case, I’d say she’s a suspect. Add her to the list.”
“What list?”
“The list that starts with your name.”
“Oh, that list. Right.”
***
Graciella Talltrees blew cigarette smoke over her shoulder and away from me. “Yeah, that creepy professor I talked to at your college told me Carlo was dead. I got off that campus as fast as I could.” Seated at the bar in one of the many Native theme cocktail lounges at the casino, she was needle-thin and as jittery as if she were strung together with wire. “That jerk Mangeri caused me enough grief—I don’t need to get messed up in a murder.”
I sat on one side of the blackjack dealer, with a mounted wolf head snarling down at me from beside the huge beveled mirror. Felicity, sipping from her sweating glass of ginger ale, was on the other side. I was drinking a whisky sour with our new friend while she stuck with Diet Coke and bar pretzels. Once Graciella got over her shock at being asked about Joe/Frankie/Carlo—He of Many Names—by two, as she thought, English professors, she wasn’t reluctant to talk to us. As a matter of fact she seemed relieved at the opportunity to get the story off her chest and maybe get some help recovering money he had stolen from her.
The man Graciella knew as Carlo Mangeri had been a regular at the casino for the past few years, she said, spending every weekend at the blackjack tables. He won a lot, lost a lot, was a compulsive gambler. “We’d been on again, off again for a couple of years,” she said. “He could be a lot of fun. He’d show up Friday nights and spend the weekends at my place.” She held up the empty pretzel bowl, and the waitress refilled it. “He never said where he was the rest of the time.”
Then she told us how she had connected Carlo Mangeri and Joe Lone Wolf. On one of her credit cards, she got billed for a cash advance of $10,000 paid into the account of one Joseph Lone Wolf. Furious, she traced Lone Wolf on the Internet and found him at Enfield College, not so far away. The Friday evening I’d seen her at Rudolph’s, she’d driven into town and asked for Professor Joseph Lone Wolf around campus. Someone told her they’d just seen him at Rudolph’s bar. Her plan was to stroll into the bar, try to identify this unknown Lone Wolf character from among the drinkers, and then decide what steps to take to get her money back. But when she entered the room, cool, calm, and collected, lo and behold, who does she see strutting his stuff at the bar, but the guy she knows as Carlo Mangeri. She made the connection instantly. “It was like when the slots pay off, boom, boom, boom. Things just slid into place. He’d stolen one of my credit cards!” She lost her cool, and whamoo! Joe/Carlo was down for the count.
Felicity cleared her throat. “I was right,” she said to me, sotto voce, “it was money, not love.”
I curled my lip at her.
“You never asked…er, Carlo…where he was during the week?” Felicity queried. She munched peanuts.
“I figured that was his business.” Graciella shrugged. “If he was into something he didn’t want to talk about, then I didn’t want to know about it. Listen, it wasn’t like either of us was in the relationship for the long term. I’ve got a kid to support, and I don’t want my son exposed to the kind of life I lead.” She waved an eagle-tattooed arm in an expansive gesture that took in the whole pseudo-glamorous world of dealers, gamblers, false hopes and phony promises. “He’s in a private boarding school in New Hampshire—costs me everything I’ve got. I can’t be thinking about marriage or anything like that.”
I was moved by the personal disclosure, but Felicity ignored it. “So, what did you think Mangeri was into?” She was starting to sound just a little too much like a cop. I made a slight “down girl” motion with my fingers: ease up.
Graciella crunched on a pretzel. “Oh, like another regular gambling venue, maybe, somewhere else.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What a fascinating story! It’s just like a novel—he had another life!”
“Yeah. Another life. Isn’t it funny—it turns out I was right about that.” She laughed, harshly. “But being an English professor was the last thing I would have expected from Carlo Mangeri.”
“His having a second life wouldn’t have bothered you?” Felicity asked.
“Hey, no. Take as much as you can get, I say. Whatever floats your boat.” A uniformed security guard checked us out. Graciella gave him a thumbs-up. “Things were pretty good between us for a while, and then something happened that he wouldn’t talk about. He must’ve gotten in over his head…must have borrowed where he shouldn’t have.” She looked deep into her glass. “In these places, ya know, they try to keep the wise guys out, but…That’s the first thing I thought when your Professor Hilton said Carlo—Joe, or whatever he called him—had been murdered. I thought the mob must have gotten to him.”
Felicity and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. The mob! Nobody, but nobody, in Enfield had thought of the mob.
“That’s why, when I heard he was dead, I backed right out. No way. Uh, uh. Nothing doin’. I’m not getting involved in anything like that.” She was sucking air at the bottom of her second Diet Coke—must have been mainlining caffeine. I lifted a finger to the Latina bartender, who set a fresh drink
in front of her.
“How was he killed?” she asked, transferring her straw to the new glass. “Was it a professional hit?”
I turned to Felicity. She shrugged. I looked back to Graciella. “I heard it was a drug overdose. Peyote buttons.”
Her whole body jerked upright. “Peyote? What the hell! I didn’t know you could get that stuff around here. I mean, I’m Hopi, from Arizona. I know magic mushrooms—they’re all over the rez down in the Southwest, but here, in New England? So that makes it a different story—the mob doesn’t do mescaline. They couldn’t have had anything to do with this.”
Graciella brooded over her Coke. “So, after I found him in Enfield, I thought I’d never see him here again, and I was trying to figure out how I could get my money back without going to the cops.”
“Why not inform the authorities?” Felicity’s eyes were slitted. Cop’s eyes.
I glared at her. Tone it down.
“Yeah, like the heat is going to listen to someone like me. And, besides…” She let it trail off. What was there in Graciella Talltrees’ past that made her so reluctant to deal with the police? Her expression hardened. “Then, what does that S.O.B. do but show up at the casino the next weekend with some showy over-the-hill orange-haired slut.”
Sally Chenille! I thought, and things began to slot into place for me, too.
“He just wanted to flaunt her at me. Bastard! I got so pissed that when they left, I took off work early and followed them. The slut dropped him off in a parking lot at Enfield College, and he got right into that ugly bus of his and led me directly to his apartment house.”
That dark sedan following Joe’s VW van from the lot! Graciella Talltrees!
Felicity shifted uneasily on the seat next to our new best friend.
Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure Page 19
