The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  Pulling my department photocopy card from my wallet, I retrieved the folder with Freddie’s paper and carried it to the little copy room at the end of the first-floor hallway, flicking on each light switch I passed. Three copies of this plagiarized essay ought to do the trick: one for my records, one for the Department’s records, one for my report to the Dean. With a little persuasion and a chipped fingernail, the staple came loose from the pages. Then I slipped the essay into the multiple-pages slot of the multifunction photocopy machine and pressed the start button. The machine went through its various initial groanings, swallowed the first page of the essay as it was programmed to do, then, without warning, ground to a halt. The little display window read REMOVE JAMMED PAGES, FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS, BEGIN OVER. I groaned, more dramatically than the machine, and dutifully followed instructions. The machine jammed again. Shit! I removed the one page that the machine had gobbled, followed instructions, began over. The machine jammed. Double shit! After all my precautions, I was going to be late for class. I yanked open the front door of the machine for the third time, pressed down one green lever after another, probed all the photocopier’s secret inner compartments. Nothing. Began over. The machine jammed. It was now seven minutes of eight; I’d give it one more try. I pulled open the front door, pressed levers, opened compartments. Nothing. Wait! Was that infinitesimal scrap of white in the machine’s innermost bowels the corner of a sheet of paper? I yanked, and the offending sheet emerged. Good. Just enough time to copy Freddie’s masterpiece and get to class. As I crumpled up the retrieved sheet preliminary to tossing it in the wastebasket, a line of familiar handwriting caught my eye. Precise, print-like handwriting. Emmeline Foster’s handwriting. Suddenly alert, I laid the wrinkled page on the machine’s cover and carefully smoothed it out. My God! The last person to use this copy machine between the final day of class before Thanksgiving break and this very moment had photocopied Emmeline Foster’s purloined book of poems.

  12.

  I like these plants that you call weeds,—

  Sedge, hardhack, mullein, yarrow,—

  —LUCY LARCOM

  CLASS THAT MORNING WAS FAIRLY lackluster, overshadowed, I was certain, by the ominous awareness that violent death had hit the Enfield College community. Also, Mike Vitale hadn’t shown up, and that made a real difference in the class dynamics. I hadn’t realized until this—his first—absence how much I depended on Mike, always present, always responsive, always reliable. After class, I returned papers to my freshmen. “Freddie,” I said to the sole remaining student, when I’d finished handing the other essays back, “I have a few questions to ask you about your paper. Could you please come see me during office hours?”

  “What kind of questions?” Freddie’s plucked eyebrows furrowed, her pale blue eyes grew very still. Today she wore black jeans and a fitted jacket reminiscent of an English riding coat. “How can there be any questions? I worked hard on that paper.”

  “Please stop by this morning, Freddie. Sometime between ten and noon.”

  “But … but—”

  “I’ll see you later, Freddie. We’ll talk then.”

  As I pushed through the double doors into Dickinson Hall on my way back from class, Monica emerged from her lair. “Karen, there’s someone here to see you.” Her usual abrasive manner was overshadowed by a wary apprehensiveness. She seemed exhausted and stressed. She surveyed me evaluatively, with her head tilted. Oddly enough, it was the kind of look one woman gives another only under certain circumstances, the kind of look that has something to do with a man. “I put him in your office.”

  I found Lieutenant Piotrowski seated in the green chair, leafing through a copy of my recently published book on American writers and the constraints of social class. He must have taken it down from the bookcase where I hoard my complimentary copies.

  I plopped my heavy book bag on the desk, hung my black storm coat on the rack, checked my appearance—stupidly—in the nonreflective pebbled-glass panel of the door and blindly smoothed my hair. “Hard up for reading material, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  He glanced up from the book. “This isn’t bad, you know. Interesting, the way the American class system works. Ya live in it every day, but ya never think about it. And who woulda thought those really brilliant writers bought into class prejudice like that—Emerson and Miss Dickinson and them.” He chewed his upper lip thoughtfully. Then he nodded, as if he’d reached some conclusion. “Interesting stuff. And—I can actually understand what you’re saying.” He closed the book and placed it on the small table next to the chair.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Unlike many of my colleagues, I actually write to be understood. But I know you didn’t come here to talk about American literature.”

  When I’d called Piotrowski on Saturday, he’d listened in silence to my speculations about the break-in at my office. “So,” he’d said when I’d finished, “you’re telling me you handled all the evidence?”

  “Evidence? For God’s sake, Lieutenant, I wasn’t thinking of my office as a crime scene.”

  “Well, no. I’m just thinking, ya understand—if the evidence has all been tampered with already, I don’t need to come running up there tonight.”

  “I didn’t tamper!” The man was infuriating.

  “—and any connection to the Corbin homicide is really … ah … tenuous. Look, Doctor, when are you free on Monday?”

  So here he was, at 9:07 Monday morning, in my office, sitting back in the comfortable chair, looking for all the world like an exceedingly amiable Great Dane. The large chair accepted his bulk as if it were delighted to have a fitting occupant. As I sat in the black captain’s chair opposite Piotrowski and centered the pleats of my olive-green wool pants over my knees, Monica walked by in the hallway, craning her neck for a glimpse of the lieutenant.

  He watched her pass, his eyes like slits. “Can we close that door, Doctor?”

  I jumped up and pushed the door. It closed with an emphatic snick.

  “Thanks. This definitely should not be overheard. Now, listen, I really don’t think there’s anything to be learned here by investigating this break-in—” At my protest, he held up a hand. “I know, I know. Look, maybe it’s linked to the homicide, I dunno. Could be. Have the security people look around. Maybe they’ll find something, but … Dr. Pelletier, I’ll be frank with you. Here’s the real reason I came by. As you can imagine”—he gestured wryly at himself, the unmistakably official police-officer bulk—“I’m at a serious disadvantage asking questions around this campus. In my line of work, the people I’m used to dealing with are not exactly rocket scientists, if you get my drift. Them I know how to handle. Pull a little here, nudge a little there: Presto, they spill the beans. And I know how to listen when they talk. But here … here there’s a whole kind of different …” He paused—at a loss for words. Translation: I was the expert in language. I should help him out.

  “You mean culture? An academic culture?” Then I wanted to bite my tongue. I knew how the lieutenant worked. For some reason, today, he was intent on buttering me up.

  “Yeah, that’s it. An academic culture.” His brown eyes widened, expressing admiration for a superior intellect; he all but slapped his knee. Give me a break, I thought. He continued, “People think different here than they do in the kinds of places where I know how to lean on—ah, converse with—people. You know, bars, motels, public housing.…”

  I sat forward in the captain’s chair, and looked him straight in his innocent brown eyes. “Lieutenant Piotrowski, what is it you want?”

  “You know what I want, Doctor.” He was suddenly absolutely serious. “I want—I need—some help. You been real useful to me in the past, and you could be real useful now. You know this place. You know these people. You could nose around at Enfield without arousing suspicion. People will tell you things they’d never dream of letting slip if I’m around. And listen, those books that were taken? Right? If they’ve got anything to do with Professor Corbin’s death, you’d
be the one to make the connection. Right? What the hell do I know about lit-er-ah-choor?” He grinned at me. We both knew he liked to play the rube. “You help me out, and I’ll share info with you. Maybe that way you’d have a better chance of getting those old books back. I know I’d catch hell for talking about an open investigation, but sometimes I gotta follow my gut. And my gut tells me you could be … real useful.” He nodded his head judiciously. There was no resisting his level gaze; at some point in his police training he’d had those brown eyes magnetized.

  I gazed back at him, long and hard. Any decision I made, I wanted him to realize, was my own conscious choice; he hadn’t manipulated me into it. But, really, what harm would there be in asking a few questions? I was good at asking questions; that was the way I taught. The right question asked at the right moment carried more pedagogical weight than a ton of arcane information given in a lecture. “Just tell me what you want me to do, Lieutenant.”

  “Well,” he said, sitting back and smiling again. “That was easy.” He had a beautiful smile—full lips, a wide flash of straight white teeth. Damn that Earlene; she’d got me thinking about this perfectly efficient police officer as a man. A man with lips. “So, when would you have some time for a good long chat?”

  “How about right now?” I didn’t have another class until two-thirty, when my Dickinson seminar met.

  “Now’s good for me. Got coffee anywhere around here?”

  I checked my two office mugs, one a burnt red with a crazed glazing, the other a spherical white ceramic with a schmaltzy rendering of a bluebird. I had no idea where these ugly cups had come from; even in my most poverty-stricken days, I wouldn’t have allowed either of them in my home. Maybe I’d inherited them with the office. At the moment, each mug was half-filled with cold, black, scummy coffee, necessitating a trip to the bathroom for a sanitary scrub. Monica gave me a slant-eyed look when I entered the department office with the two clean cups. None of your business, Monica, I thought, as I decanted coffee from the department machine. It was good coffee, I’d say that for Monica, and she kept it fresh all day.

  Piotrowski was again reading The Constraints of Class when I returned with our coffee.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, as I set the bluebird mug next to him—it was the less disgusting cup of the two—“I’m curious. You told me Monica Cassale found Elliot’s … er … body when she was delivering him some dinner? Tell me, why on earth would Monica take food to Elliot Corbin?”

  Piotrowski finished the paragraph he was reading before he closed the book and took up his mug. Obviously he was buying himself time to think about how he would answer my question.

  When he spoke, the regulation disclaimer emerged mechanically from his lips. “Now, Doctor, you know I can’t divulge—”

  Exasperated, I plopped back down into my chair. “Well, Lieutenant, it was my understanding that any exchange of information was going to be reciprocal, but now I’m beginning to wonder. How’s this divulgence thing going to work, huh? I divulge, you keep silence? How am I supposed to know what kinds of questions to ask? And whom to ask them of? Forget it, Piotrowski! Nothing doing! Deal’s off.” I wiped my palms together, cleansing them of our agreement.

  Halfway into my tirade the big cop began to grin, and as I ranted on, the grin got wider and wider. When I slammed to a halt, he raised a hand. “Okay. Okay. But you gotta understand, Doctor, everything I tell you here is in the deepest—and I do mean deepest—confidence.” Since the investigation the previous summer, the lieutenant had taken to wearing roundish brown-rimmed glasses, and now he lowered his chin, raised his eyebrows, and looked at me owlishly over the lenses.

  “Of course.”

  “There’s more to Ms. Cassale than meets the eye.”

  Monica? “Really?”

  “For one thing, she and the victim had a long-term … er … relationship—”

  “Monica and Elliot?”

  “Yeah. For a number of years she was Professor Corbin’s housekeeper—at least it started out that way. He’s got a huge house, ya know. Lotta stuff in it.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “That’s right; you have.” He paused. His brown eyes suddenly became introspective—as if he’d just been struck by a possibility. “So—Ms. Cassale kept house for the professor starting … oh, maybe ten, eleven years ago. But it looks like she took on other … er, duties … in addition to the cleaning and cooking.”

  When he paused, as if that was all he intended to tell me, I prompted him. “Sexual duties?”

  “Seems that way.”

  “I’m interested in the way you phrased that, Lieutenant: duties. It seems we’re not talking about a love affair here.”

  “No. Not at all.” The direction this conversation was taking seemed to make Piotrowski uncomfortable. “Strictly a business arrangement, as I understand it.”

  My God! And right here in staid little Enfield. We sat in silence for ten seconds or so. “So—that’s why she was taking Thanksgiving dinner to him. She still cooked for him.”

  “So she says.”

  “But nothing … more?”

  The shrug of the muscular shoulders was eloquent. “I think he was the one got her the job here.”

  “Re-e-e-ally!” Then, after a pause, “So that means …”

  “What?”

  “That means Monica’s not out of the picture as a suspect in Elliot’s death?”

  “Nobody’s out of the picture.”

  “Except me?”

  He pulled out his notebook. “Seems I’ve decided that,” he said, noncommittally. “So, enough about Ms. Cassale. Let’s get on with business. The other day we talked about Professor Corbin. Right now, why don’t you tell me more about these missing diaries, and …” He glanced down at his notebook. “… this Emmeline Foster. She was a poet, you said, but I didn’t see any mention of her in the index of your book here.”

  “In that book I was just looking at the … er … famous writers.”

  “So, this Foster woman, you’re saying she’s not famous. That’s what I thought. So what does that mean about the value of those lost diaries?”

  “The journals weren’t lost, Lieutenant—they were stolen. And it means their ‘value’ is solely scholarly, not monetary, which is what I assume you’re getting at.”

  “So you don’t think they were … stolen … so someone could hawk them and make a bundle, like with that Northbury novel?”

  “I don’t see how—”

  “What about reputation? Would it advance someone’s career to come up with this old stuff?”

  “Jeez, Piotrowski, I can’t imagine why. Emmeline Foster’s only claim to the ‘big time’ was her relationship with Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Poe, huh? Now that’s the big time. Even I know that. So—anything of Poe’s would sell for big bucks, huh?”

  “Probably.”

  “Tell me about him and Miss Foster.”

  “There’s not a lot to tell. Poe had this thing about women poets. He sort of collected them as admirers and semi-sweethearts, even carrying on public flirtations with them in the newspapers.” I told the lieutenant about the poet Fanny Osgood and the teasing poems she and Poe wrote back and forth to each other in the pages of the Broadway Journal when he was editor—and when both of them were married to other people. “And, if I’m not mistaken, there were one or two poems in the Journal from Emmeline Foster, as well. I could check on that the next time I go to the American Antiquarian Society.”

  “I suppose I don’t need to ask if you saw anything of Edgar Poe’s in this here box of her stuff?”

  “If I had, Lieutenant, believe me, I’d have told you—and I would have taken it someplace safer than my office. Probably to the Special Collections section of the college library. But, really, I haven’t had time to go through the box carefully. And, Piotrowski, other than the Poe connection, I can’t conceive of any monetary value Foster’s manuscript poems or journals would possess. Only a very specializ
ed library—or collector—would want them. Oh—” I jumped up from my chair. “I almost forgot. This morning …” I began digging hastily through my bulging briefcase, and tugged out the crumpled photocopy I’d rescued from the copier. “… I found this in the copy machine.” I glanced down at the sheet with Emmeline Foster’s handwriting on it. It was a copy of the verse I’d read when I’d looked through the little blue book. I held it out to Piotrowski.

  The lieutenant took the poem, scrutinized it, looked up at me. “That’s … pretty,” he said, with the guarded response of the poetry-impaired.

  “It’s a page from the little notebook Emmeline Foster wrote her poems in—not her drafts, I imagine, but the finished poems. Don’t you see? After somebody ripped off the book from my office the day I opened the box, he or she made copies—not right away, but sometime after the close of school on Wednesday. The machine was jammed when I tried to use it first thing this morning, and I’m certain Monica would never have left it that way Wednesday afternoon. Anyone who tried to copy something after the … the thief … jammed the machine would have had to clear the jam.”

  “Which confirms what? That your thief is someone who has access to this building—”

  “And a copy card. The photocopier won’t work without a department card.”

  “So, we’re talking about someone associated with the English Department.”

  “Obviously—”

  A tentative knock on my office door startled me. I glanced at my watch: ten-thirty. Shit; this unenlightening little chat with Piotrowski had slopped over into my office hours. I opened the door—and found Freddie Whitby waiting for me with a put-upon expression on her clever little face. Freddie stepped into the room with the confident tread of the entitled, but faltered, then stopped dead when she noted the enormous man occupying my big green chair. She stared at Piotrowski and her expression altered slowly. I made an attempt to see the lieutenant through Freddie’s eyes; there was no way this man was anything but a cop. Freddie made a little noise, a squeak, an eeek that came from somewhere at the very back of her throat. Then, edging her way sideways out of the office with her eyes fixed on the lieutenant, she pivoted and took off at a trot down the hall.