The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  Before I left campus late that afternoon, I arranged for the box of Emmeline Foster’s books to be temporarily stored in the Special Collections section of the library. Aside from the one letter I’d just read, a few poem drafts, and the daguerreotype in the brass case, books were about all that remained of Foster’s possessions. Increasingly anxious about their safety, I’d accompanied the custodian with the handcart to the library and had waited for the box to be locked securely away. Then I headed for my car. As usual in the November twilight, the crows that make their winter home in the roosts of Enfield’s rooftops were swooping and cawing before their nighttime slumber. I stood on the top step of the Enfield College library transfixed by the eerie beauty of the birds in motion—the discordant music of their calls—awkah, awkah, awkah—the gleam of the glossy black wings against the deep striated rose of the horizon. Then, as I strolled past Dickinson Hall on my way to the parking lot, a young boy fell in step with me. “Lady,” Joey Cassale queried solemnly, “did you know that crows are carnivores?”

  15.

  Nor would I be a Poet——

  It’s finer——own the Ear——

  Enamored——impotent——content——

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  THURSDAY MORNING FOUND ME PULLING into Elliot Corbin’s unpaved driveway. The previous evening I’d gotten another unexpected call from Lieutenant Piotrowski. Somehow the lieutenant had come up with the notion that it would be useful to his investigation if I did a sustained search through Elliot’s books and papers for, as he phrased it, “any little literary clue” that might possibly lead to the identity of my colleague’s killer. “I put in a request for approval to hire an expert consultant,” Piotrowski told me, “and the suits approved it right away. This is a visible case, and they want it resolved. So, I got you the same fee as last time—five hundred a day. That okay?”

  “Lieutenant,” I’d replied, “I don’t have time. I’m still teaching, and the semester’s at its craziest. I can’t afford to take whole days away from my work.” Wednesday’s FroshHum class had clearly suffered from inadequate preparation on my part. We’d finished up our Poe unit, but nobody took much interest in the discussion of “The City in the Sea.” Once again, Mike Vitale hadn’t shown up for class, and I thought I could understand why: We would be discussing a poem about death, and Mike was a little too close to an actual death in his own family. I wondered just who it was who’d died. Must have been someone a little closer than the customary November grandmother. Freddie Whitby hadn’t been in class either, so I didn’t have to deal with her; when would I have time to locate the source of her pilfered essay?

  “Yeah, Doctor. But you’re in the classroom, what?—eight, ten hours a week?”

  “Six. I’m teaching two courses. But you forget about class preparation, thesis supervision, office hours, advisee counseling, paper grading, department service—not to mention literary scholarship, which is what got me this job in the first place. And which is what will get me tenure someday. Maybe. If I ever get a chance to do any more of it. In between your investigations.”

  A chuckle on the other end of the line. Then, “I know you weren’t crazy about Professor Corbin, Doctor. But there’s no two ways of looking at it. He was your colleague, and now he’s croaked. We don’t have any idea why. I figured if you could spend one day going through evidentiary documents at the victim’s house, one day at his office—on the weekend, so’s no one knows you’re there—and a third day down here at headquarters with his computer files, you could maybe help us determine a motive.”

  “Evidentiary documents?”

  “Well, you know, we always look over stuff like datebooks, diaries, letters ourselves. But here we also got books—hundreds of them—and file cabinets full of scholarly manuscripts, letters to and from other professors, student papers. No one in the department’s got a clue what any of it means.”

  Oh, documentary evidence. “In the literary profession, Lieutenant, we call those things texts, not documents. Five hundred a day, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  Hmm. Christmas was near. Even one day working for the B.C.I. and I could get Amanda something great without driving my MasterCard balance sky-high. Not that I didn’t have disinterested civic-minded motivations as well, of course. “Could you get me seven-fifty?”

  Not a second’s hesitation. “Probably.”

  “Really?” For me, seven-fifty was not much less than a full week’s salary. I did some quick math. “Really? Well, okay, Lieutenant. Okay. I’ll do it.” So, who would it kill if my grades were maybe a little late?

  Sergeant Felicity Schultz was waiting for me in front of Elliot’s house. As I bumped the Jetta over the ruts in the overgrown driveway, the driver’s door opened on the nondescript dark blue Ford by the curb. Like me, the sergeant wore heavy-weather gear: quilted parka, knit hat, snow boots. And with good reason: the sky was gray and sagging, stitched precariously to the summits of the encircling hills, ready at any moment to dump its load of snow.

  “Doctor Pelletier,” Schultz said, without wasting time on such frivolities as “Hello” or “Nice to see you again,” “the lieutenant gave me instructions to let you in and show you what we want you to look at. There’s really no need for you to go through the entire house, just the rooms where Corbin kept books and papers.”

  “His library?” The lieutenant’s vivid description of the murder scene and the sight of Elliot’s blood-spattered notepad had combined in my imagination to form a nightmare vision—an entire chamber awash in blood.

  “That’s where most of the papers are. I know it won’t be nice for you.…” She let it trail off, a hardened professional speaking to a lily-livered amateur—as if the visual traces of violent death were “nice” for anyone. “But we’ve finished the forensic investigation and released the crime scene. And that’s where we need you.”

  Oh, goody. A crime scene. My stomach clenched as we passed over the threshold into the big, unkempt house.

  As it turned out, the crime scene was surprisingly mundane. The same book-lined combination recreation-room/library with the same mismatched furniture. Only now the room smelled … well, rusty … and it was hard to ignore the dark stains on the blotter and the floor around the massive oak desk. Outside the tall French doors, snowflakes slanted across the dead grass of the lawn. Local radio had forecast the first storm of the year, six to eight inches. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive home.

  “Can we lose the blotter, Sergeant?” Elliot’s desk chair was missing. I didn’t want to speculate about its condition. I hefted a yellow chrome-and-plastic side chair over to the desk as Schultz removed the large, rectangular pad. Not much of an improvement: the desktop now featured a clearly delineated rectangle of dusty, fingerprint-powdered oak partially surrounded by an irregular stain where blood had soaked into the wood. In a chipped ceramic vase placed precariously at the edge, rested a half-dozen ballpoint pens and an ornate Victorian-style brass letter opener. The whole room seemed soaked in death and gloom. I took a deep, sustaining breath and pulled out the bottom desk drawer to reveal a rank of obscurely labeled hanging file folders stuffed with papers. The drawers of the shoulder-high filing cabinet in the corner were most likely similarly crammed. The first folder had no label. I opened it. It contained cryptic teaching notes, seemingly for the course in modern poetry Elliot had been teaching. I stared at the notes for maybe a minute and a half, then closed the folder, and glanced up at Schultz.

  “Sergeant, what the hell am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “If we knew that, Dr. Pelletier, we could find it ourselves. Listen, the lieutenant told me to fill you in on some major points of our investigation, so’s you’ll have some context for your research. Let’s see if we can scare up some coffee in the kitchen. The less time we spend in this room, the better, far’s I’m concerned.” So much for the tough-guy act.

  Elliot’s kitchen had last been updated in the sixties: avocado appliances, green-speckled
Formica-top table, brass and frosted-glass light fixture, cutesy matching maple spice rack and paper towel holder. By the avocado Princess wall phone, a black-cat cork bulletin board was layered over with what looked like years’-worth of grocery coupons, movie schedules, old postcards, departmental memos. Schultz located a can of store-brand coffee and an electric percolator. As she fussed with cups and spoons at the counter, I watched the random flakes outside become a steady swirl of snow. Maybe if I hustled through the files, I thought, I could get out of this place and on the road before dark. Fat chance.

  While the coffee was brewing, Schultz brought me up to speed on the police investigation. I knew that Monica Cassale had discovered Elliot’s body. According to Monica, no one else had been on the premises, and, because of the secluded location of the house, no neighbors had seen anyone arrive or depart anywhere near the time of the murder. The murder weapon had not yet been located, but, as Piotrowski had told me earlier, it was presumed, from the size and trajectory of the wound, to be a knife with a four-inch-long blade. Elliot had been seated and only a minor struggle seemed to have preceded the stabbing, so it was assumed Elliot knew his assailant and had no fear of him.

  “Or her,” I said.

  “Or her,” Schultz amended, without rancor. “No reason it couldn’t of been a woman. And as per SOP—standard operating procedure,” she translated, “we’re looking at the victim’s sexual relationships. Nobody has a … a perfect life, and Elliot Corbin, believe me, is living proof—well, was living proof—of that. Most recently, as far as we were able to determine, he had an … er … business arrangement with Ms. Cassale—”

  “Lieutenant Piotrowski told me about that.”

  “Yeah, well … And we’re looking into other relationships. Corbin was married briefly in the eighties, to a former student, and they had a kid. You know anything about that?” She gave me a peculiarly intent look.

  I shrugged.

  “No, huh?” She pulled out a notepad, scribbled something on it. “Okay, what else have we got? As for prior records, back in the sixties, Corbin had numerous arrests, possession of marijuana, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest—”

  I laughed. “In those days, Sergeant, that kind of record was practically de rigueur for a young intellectual. It doesn’t mean Elliot had criminal propensities.”

  “I guess.” Schultz’s sour expression demonstrated her contempt for trendy infractions of the law. “Other than that, we got nothing on him. Let’s see, no living family—except for this kid he had with his ex-wife. His associates seem to be limited to other profs. His interests seemed kinda narrow, too. No clubs or hobbies, other than academic organizations. He taught, wrote, lectured—all literary stuff.”

  I chose not to comment on her assessment of a colleague’s life. Instead, I took a second coffee into the library and got to work, pulling out folders, sifting through their contents. Financial records. Teaching notes. Research notes. Copy-edited manuscripts of a few essays and page proofs of his Poe book. Elliot Corbin, it seemed, was a pack rat. He even kept xeroxes of student essays. I leafed through a few. No student names I recognized. Then Amber Nichols’ name flashed by on a paper, and I realized this must be graduate student work. Everything seemed to be as expected; absolutely nothing here seemed to relate to his murder. I skimmed it all. To read each document thoroughly would’ve taken days.

  One letter did claim my full attention, however. But only because I’m nosy. Reading through a folder labeled Current Professional Correspondence, I came across an exchange of letters with a superstar literary theorist from Duke. One paragraph in particular intrigued me, probably because of my situation with Freddie Whitby. There can be no such phenomenon as “plagiarism,” Elliot wrote. That which is denoted “plagiarism” is merely a naive concept based upon the notion of “originality,” also illusory. “Originality” is in itself a fairly recent development within the historical continuum of authorship and is, it would seem evident, an inevitable consequence of the rise of commercialized print culture. All texts circulate within a prior textual matrix, and aside from meretricious capitalist claims of “ownership” of “intellectual property,” no such act as “plagiarism” can be seen to exist, for, plainly, who can “own” ideas or hold “property” in language—

  “Jeez,” I exclaimed, halfway through the dense paragraph.

  “You got something there?” Schultz asked. She’d been wandering around the library, pacing restlessly from window to window, staring out at the ever-thickening bluster of snow.

  “No, no. It’s just that my colleague had some really … ah … unthought-through ideas about literature.” And I explained how Elliot had bought into the poststructuralist idea that all reality is nothing other than a series of “texts.” Elliot’s personal twist, I told Schultz, was that all writing is then nothing but a constant recycling of texts. Therefore no author “owns” a text, and therefore there can be no such thing as literary theft—or plagiarism. “Unbelievable! As if his own comfortable tenure and salary—not to mention royalties—weren’t based on the concept of ‘intellectual property.’ But that was Elliot for you, always following the most trendy ideas to their most untenable conclusions.”

  Felicity Schultz had remained expressionless throughout my somewhat heated explanation. Now she gave me a fishy look. “I’m sure all that intellectual stuff is real interesting to you, Professor Pelletier. But it’s snowing like hell out there. Could you get on with the investigation so we can get the heck out of here? Please?” It was a mark of Schultz’s somewhat improved opinion of me that she thought to add the please.

  Two hours later, the slamming of the front door and stamping of feet in the entrance hall caused the sergeant and me to exchange startled glances. The pervasive silence of this old house, so recently the scene of a vicious death, had obviously spooked us both. “Who’s there?” Schultz demanded, and Lieutenant Piotrowski tramped into the room toting a bulging plastic grocery bag. The wind had become so loud and the snow so deep that neither of us had heard the lieutenant’s car pull up in front of the house.

  “Jeez, Lieutenant, you could of let us know you were coming. I practically went for my gun.”

  “Yeah? Well, Sergeant, no wonder you’re jumpy, the way it’s coming down out there.” Schultz threw him an offended look: jumpy? Was the boss implying she wasn’t as macho as the best of them? Piotrowski seemed unaware of her pique. “I thought I’d relieve you so you could get back to headquarters before the roads get any worse. I’ve got the Jeep, so I’ll be okay. And I’ll see that Dr. Pelletier gets home safe.” As Schultz left in a miffed silence, the lieutenant turned to me. “Ya have any luck here?”

  “Not yet,” I answered. “But I’m working on it. What’s in the bag?” It was getting to be lunchtime, and I was interested.

  Piotrowski had brought sandwiches, roast beef with horseradish on marbled rye. As we ate—in the kitchen, not the library, thank you—I gave him an update on my progress. “I’ll finish the file folders in another hour—I’m just speeding through them, which is about all I can do here since I only have one day. Then I’ll start on the books.”

  “Thanks, Doctor. I really appreciate it. You look wiped out. Here, have a cookie.” He’d brought huge ginger cookies about six inches in diameter and two twenty-ounce cups of coffee. Mine was black, no sugar; he’d remembered how I liked it. I sat back in my chair and opened the coffee. The wind had sculpted snow ghosts on the sash bars of the windows, obscuring what little natural light existed. Even with the overhead fixture glaring, the kitchen was about as cavernous and gloomy as it was possible for a kitchen to be. We drank our coffee in silence. I was indeed wiped out, and Piotrowski seemed fixated on the steady snowfall outside the windows. He must not be as consummately intrepid a human being as I’d assumed.

  “Piotrowski,” I said impulsively, “tell me about your life.”

  “My life?” His expression instantly became guarded.

  “Yes, your life. Presumably you hav
e one. Outside of being a homicide investigator, that is.”

  He gave a short, dry laugh. “What do you want to know, Doctor?”

  “You’re cagey, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a professional liability.”

  “Yeah. I know. Believe me.” My years with Tony had taught me that. “Well, for starters, are you married?”

  “That’s your very first question, huh?”

  “For God’s sake, Piotrowski, this isn’t an interrogation. Forget it! I thought we could have a conversation while we’re finishing our coffee, like normal people. But maybe you’d rather talk about the weather? Hmm. Look at that. Seems to be snowing out.”

  “Yeah it does. Hard. But the answer to your question is, not anymore.”

  “Not anymore?” What was the question? “Oh—married—Not anymore?”

  “I used to be married. Now I’m not.” He didn’t seem very comfortable with this conversation.

  “Like me.”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  “The thing is, Piotrowski, we’re going to be spending some time together for a while, until this investigation is over. You know so much about me—that investigation and all—and I know diddly-squat about you. It’s awkward.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s not a lot to know. My ex-wife and I, we had two kids—”

  “Boys, you told me once.”

  “Boys. One’s at Fordham Law. One’s … in a band.”

  “Law school? You must have gotten married young.” I’d figured the lieutenant was in his mid- to late-forties.

  “Oh yeah. You could say that.” He eyed a cookie I hadn’t touched. I pushed it toward him. He took a bite, then laid it on the table, and ignored it. He wasn’t hungry; he just wanted a momentary diversion. “So … So we got divorced a while back. That’s about it.”

  “You live alone?” Why was I pushing this? But I knew the lieutenant was a feeling man, and that a whole complex history of pain and loss must underlie the dry recital he was offering me.