by Matt Witten
Her answer was: "Ducky found out about us last week. It was horrible. I forgot to lock the door to Jack's office, and Ducky just walked in." She put her head in her hands. "Oh God, I'm so embarrassed."
Suddenly she burst into tears. I'd have suspected they were fake, except that she was crying for real when I caught her unawares in the Hack's office yesterday.
She gazed up at me with her moist hazel eyes. "I loved Jack, and now he's gone. I don't have anyone. I'm so lonely."
She sobbed some more, and I got up to give her a Kleenex. When I handed it to her, she gently took hold of my wrist. "Thank you," she said softly. "God, you don't know how much I need a little kindness right now. I'd give anything to just forget my troubles for a while."
She looked at me, her lips parted. I looked back, and I couldn't help myself: I got that old familiar tightening in my jeans.
Hey, you probably think I'm a chump, falling for such a corny pickup line. But what can I say? Having a Farrah Fawcett lookalike in a skimpy white T-shirt suggestively stroking my arm just took my breath away. I never knew wrists could be so erogenous. And on top of that, it sure would be a kick to fool around with the wife of State Senate Majority Leader Ducky Medwick.
I guess men are just plain dogs.
But I guess I'll never know exactly how doggish we are. I like to think I would've resisted temptation, but I can't prove it, because just at that moment the phone rang. It broke the spell, and Farrah the Second let go of me.
"Excuse me," I said, blushing, and practically ran to the kitchen, where I grabbed the phone and said, "Hello?" Actually, that "Hello?" was more like a shout. I didn't quite have control of my voice yet.
"Is something wrong?" my wife said over the phone.
"No!" I shouted again, and then fought to rein in my volume and act normal. "Why would you think that?"
"Well, because you're shouting. And you sound out of breath."
"Oh, it's nothing. I just came in from outside. So what's up?"
"Bad news. I got a flat."
"What a drag."
"I made it to Matt's Garage, but it'll be a while before they get around to fixing it. Would you mind terribly giving me a lift to school? I have a class in forty minutes."
The trip would seriously eat into my day's sleuthing. On the other hand, it would give me an excuse to get away from the vixen in the other room. "Okay, honey," I said, "I'll be right there."
I hung up and headed back toward the living room. But Farrah the Second was already at my front door, on her way out. She turned back to me.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to come on to you like that."
Yeah, I'll bet. "Linda, why did you come here?"
She bit her lip and gave me a shy, scared-little-girl look, and in spite of everything, my jeans tightened again. Dogs.
"Jacob," she said tentatively, "could you keep my . . . you know . . . private? Would it be too much to ask?"
"I'm investigating a murder here."
"But my affair with Jack had nothing to do with his death, I'm positive. The night he got killed, I was home. And Ducky was at the hotel."
"How do you know he was at the hotel?"
"Because he called me from there. We fought on the phone for an hour."
"Exactly what time was this call?"
Her eyes darted around nervously. I got the impression she was trying to remember when the Hack had been shot, so she could give an answer that would clear Ducky.
"I think around eight o'clock," she said.
Not exactly the world's most airtight alibi.
"If you won't do this for me," she went on plaintively, "what about my children? Do you want them to have to read in the newspaper all about their mom's sex life?"
I flashed on Linda's gangly eleven-year-old son. He'd seemed so vulnerable last night, cradling a basketball in his arms as he told me about his father staying at a hotel. The divorce would be tough enough on the poor kid, even without his mother's promiscuity becoming a major regional news story.
But now was no time to get all sensitive. I've always believed that Democrats need to learn to be just as cutthroat as Republicans. "Listen, you want something from me, then give me something. What dirt did Jack have on Ducky?"
She frowned. "I don't get you."
"Sure, you do. Your boyfriend was blackmailing your husband. That's how he got the big party endorsement." I had a sudden stroke of what felt like brilliance. "I'll bet you even helped him with the blackmail. You told Jack the dirt about your husband. So what was it?"
Farrah the Second shot me a venomous look. If looks could kill, I was maggot food for sure.
"Screw you," she hissed, and walked out.
For a two-year commuters' school, Northwoods Community College has a surprisingly beautiful campus. Okay, the buildings aren't much, just your basic institutional boxes, but they're located at the edge of a forest, with hiking trails out back and a clear view of the Adirondack foothills. It's almost enough to give you the illusion that you're at a classy place.
As I drove Andrea through the campus, it was teeming with students bustling to their 10:30 classes. Every last one of them was white, and I wouldn't be surprised if every last one was Christian, too. Beyond that, though, they came in all ages, shapes, and sizes.
A lot of these students were eighteen years old, not overly bright, with no clear idea why they were here. They chewed a lot of gum, drank a lot of beer, and bored me stiff when I used to teach at this joint.
Then there was another group of students, also fresh out of high school, but more focused and generally smarter. These were kids from small-town, working class families who already knew they wanted a B.A., but couldn't afford a four-year school for the whole four years. So they were planning to put in two years at Northwoods, then transfer to a "real college," as they would say. My heart went out to these kids.
But my favorite students of all were the older ones, the returning students in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties. Most of these were men and women stuck in six-dollar-an-hour service jobs who were eager to better themselves and become nurses, physical therapists, or computer technicians. Sometimes you'd run into a homemaker hoping to return to the workforce after a decades-long hiatus.
As I pulled up in front of McCracken Hall, which houses the English Department, I wondered again: why did Susan Tamarack enroll in Rosalyn's Comp 102 course? With her husband about to become a United States congressman, and all the changes that would mean for both of them, surely she wasn't considering going back to work at this stage of her life.
And another question: did Susan know about her husband's affair? If only there were some way to—
Andrea broke into my thoughts. "I'm late, gotta run," she said, kissing me and hurrying out of the car. "Thanks for the ride!"
"No problem," I replied. I waited until she was safely out of sight. Then I parked the car and got out.
I had a plan.
Keeping my head down, I slinked inside McCracken. The main floor was full of people scurrying around like ants, but I didn't see anyone I knew. I slipped down the side stairs to the English Department.
Rosalyn's office, if I remembered correctly, was at the far left corner of the rear corridor. I tried to act nonchalant and slow my rapidly beating heart as I passed two students on my way back there.
Don't be so uptight, I told myself. After all, it wasn't like I was plotting to steal a computer or something truly valuable. All I wanted to do was borrow a stupid portfolio.
I located Rosalyn's office without incident. But it was locked. Now what?
Using my body to shield my larcenous activities from anyone who might be coming up the hall, I took out my keys and tried them all. No go. I guess that would be too easy.
Next I took out my Visa card, wiggled it under the lock, and tried to open the door that way. But it didn't work. No surprise there—I've never been able to pull off that trick. Somebody should hold a special course in lock picking fo
r us sensitive artiste types who are trying to make it in the wild, woolly world of cops and robbers. Or maybe I could ask one of the prisoners in my Creative Writing class to give me some tips.
On the theory that my Visa card might be too stiff to wiggle properly, I took out my AAA card and tried that. I didn't have any real hope that it would work, I was just going through the motions.
But then I heard a small click. Miracle of miracles, something seemed to give—and when I turned the knob, the door actually opened!
My heart burst with pride. I felt like I had just completed an important rite of passage—
"Jacob," someone said.
"Aauuh!" I screamed.
"You okay?" Jeremy Wartheimer asked, as he stood there about two feet away from me. He was close enough that I could see the large pores in his unhealthy, acne-scarred skin. Jeremy was a colleague of Andrea's—her least favorite one.
"Sure, I'm fine," I said. "You just startled me a little, that's all."
Jeremy eyed me quizzically, then glanced over at Rosalyn's open door. Had he seen me unlock it with my AAA card? That would be a very bad scene. Andrea was up for tenure next year, and I doubted it would help her case any if her husband got caught breaking into her colleagues' offices. Palming the card, I stuffed my hand in my pocket as casually as I could.
"What's up?" Jeremy asked. "Is Roz in?"
"No."
"I'm surprised she left her door unlocked."
Desperate to distract him, I queried, "So how goes the struggle?"
"Well, you know how it is," he began, then launched into a lengthy detailed analysis of The Struggle.
You see, Jeremy Wartheimer was emphatically not a man who only stood for filberts. No, Jeremy was a Marxist in a big way, and a Trotskyite too, whatever that means. He would have made me nostalgic for the old days when I believed passionately that we could Change the World, except that he was such a jerk.
Jeremy and a couple of other teachers at the college—they called themselves a "communist cell"—had decided that the best way to bring about the long-awaited Revolution was to send frequent long memos to all the faculty members. Generally the memos were addressed like this: “To our fellow worker citizens." The memo itself would consist of ten or twenty pages of unbearably convoluted prose, which, if you cared enough to puzzle it out, usually boiled down to this basic message: In a capitalist society, true knowledge is impossible. Therefore, teachers know nothing. In fact, it is absurd for us to call ourselves teachers. We should all immediately inform our students that we're complete and total frauds.
Since this is not the sort of thing teachers usually like to say to their students, these Trotsky-inspired memos had no discernible effect besides making people cranky. However, that didn't seem to bother Jeremy and his fellow cell members in the slightest. They just kept plugging away.
I let Jeremy plug away at me for several minutes, long enough for him to forget about Rosalyn's unlocked door. Then I interrupted him in the middle of a harangue about "outmoded liberal humanist principles" and told him I had to be off.
But Jeremy stopped me. "Oh, Jacob," he said, "one more thing."
"Yes?"
His dead serious, dogma-infested face broke into an incongruously ingratiating smile. "Do you think you could read a screenplay I wrote?"
Good grief, was there any way out of this? I couldn't think of one. Since Jeremy was a colleague of Andrea's, I couldn't just go with my gut instinct and tell him to soak his nose with a rubber hose. "Sure, I'd love to," I said, feeling like a coward.
"Great, I'll go get it. I left it upstairs. I'll be right back." He dashed off toward the stairs, apparently eager to bring me his screenplay before I magically disappeared.
I followed Jeremy's example and did some dashing of my own, into Rosalyn's office. I was planning to throw open her desk drawers and do a quick search, but lo and behold, I got lucky. Right there in plain view on the edge of her desk was a pile of manila folders containing portfolios—and Susan Tamarack's was the third from the top. I grabbed it, stuffed it under my jacket, and made it back out to the hallway seconds before Jeremy reappeared.
"My screenplay is entitled Contestation," he said, handing it over gingerly, like a fragile treasure. "It's a comedy about the inadequate representation of working-class Americans in the electronic media."
"Sounds like a hit," I said. "I'll read it as soon as I get the chance." I waved Jeremy a quick good-bye, sped upstairs, and on an impulse tossed his screenplay into a garbage can in the front lobby. Then I walked quickly back to my car and got in. Before I even had the door closed, I was already eagerly examining my stolen loot.
My eagerness abated quickly, though, when I began to actually read. There were five essays in Susan Tamarack's manila folder. The first two, "My Mom's Death" and "What the Fourth of July Means to Me" were chock full of the kind of sentimental treacle that makes English teachers bald and sardonic before their time. Reading this stuff made me sympathetic to Jeremy, trying to add a little excitement to his life with Trotskyite intrigue.
Susan's third essay was about Charlotte's Web. It started off, "This book is very good for kids. It teaches them that true friendship can save the life of a pig."
And this person was running for Congress?
Ah, well. I guess there's no law that politicians have to be intelligent.
The fourth essay wasn't too promising either: "How to Make a Good Pancake." And when I saw the title to her fifth and last essay—"My Favorite Animal"—I was about ready to give up in despair.
But out of a sense of duty, I skimmed the thing. It sure was oddly written. Maybe Susan was in a hurry or stressed out when she wrote it, because it jumped around like a bad Hunter Thompson piece. She started out talking about her favorite animal—the turtle, in case you're wondering—and then somehow mysteriously segued into a discussion of her son's love for baseball. He would be playing in a Saratoga rec league this fall, the same one my own kids signed up for.
Then the essay did a sort of sideways shuffle into a long description of turtles' virtues. "They're very patient, and they never pass judgment on people," she wrote. I couldn't really argue with that. I think I can say in all honesty that I've never had a turtle pass judgment on me. Though if one did pass judgment, I'm not sure how I would know.
After that she did a quick comparative analysis of turtles and people, in which people turned out to be decidedly inferior. In all fairness, this was not a badly written passage. But it was the next two paragraphs that grabbed my eyeballs and glued them to the page.
"Like, for instance," Susan wrote, "people get all sanctimonious when they hear about a woman who's getting beat up by her husband. They think, why doesn't she just leave him? But it's not that easy. It's really not. What if you've got no money of your own and not much education, and he's this really high powered-lawyer and everything? What do you do then?
"I think people should really put on the other person's shoes before they start criticizing his bunions."
The essay stopped right there. Ordinarily I would have taken some time to contemplate that bunion metaphor. But I was too busy contemplating something else.
Was the Hack a wife beater?
And if he was . . . what did Susan do about it?
I got my car in gear and headed down the highway. It was high time to have a little chat with the widow.
7
Yes, it was high time indeed. But when I got to the widow's house, no one was there.
And when I hit the widow's campaign HQ, she wasn't there, either. Instead, there were five elderly ladies licking envelopes and four middle-aged guys working the phones. That was about nine more volunteers than we usually had working for Will even before he got busted. I stood at the front door and just watched for a few moments, feeling jealous.
Before I could step forward into the room, Oxymoron, the black Republican, appeared out of a side door and planted his large bulk in front of me. "Yeah?" he growled, folding his arms. "What do
you want?"
"You probably remember me, I'm with the Saratogian—"
"I remember you," he said, not sounding all that nostalgic about it.
"Is the candidate here?" I asked. "I'd like to do an interview for the newspaper."
"She's not here."
"Could you tell me where she is?"
"No," Oxymoron said.
"What's with the attitude?" I blustered. "Don't you want some free press?"
"What did you say your name was?"
"Jacob Burns." I'm not above trying to use my fifteen minutes of fame to my advantage, so I continued, "You've probably heard of me. I wrote the movie The Gas that Ate San Francisco."
Oxymoron stood there with his massive arms folded across his chest. "Yeah, I've heard of you, all right. Even saw your movie, thought it was a piece of crap. But I haven't seen your byline in the paper. So beat it."
He moved forward and I had to back up, almost banging my head into the door. I sidestepped. "You sure she's not in the back? I just have a couple quick questions," I said.
He put up his arms to grab me and shove me out of the room. But then a strange thing happened. My own skinny arms reflexively flew upward to ward him off . . . and the knuckles on my right hand somehow connected with his lower lip. It split open, and blood trickled out.
Oxymoron didn't take too kindly to that. In fact, he came at me with both fists. His first shot was a hard left aimed at my shnoz. I ducked under it just in time.
"Hey, I'm sorry!" I said. "I didn't mean to hit you!"
But Oxymoron wasn't listening. He came at me again. I was lucky to find a folding chair a couple of feet away. I grabbed it and flung it at him as hard as I could. That slowed him down enough so that I could make it out the door three seconds ahead of his next punch.
Ah well, I thought to myself as I hustled back to my car. Yet another setback for black-Jewish relations.
I went home and played phone tag with a pair of Shmuckler volunteers who'd left regretful messages that they were leaving the campaign. Then I called the Shmuck-man himself and gave him the latest investigation news, after first swearing him to secrecy. I didn't want him blurting anything to the press, because that might make Susan, Linda, Ducky et al clam up.
