New Haven Noir

by Amy Bloom

  “Did the police question you?”

  He smiled. “Of course. Happily, I’m dull and predictable. Tuesday, I was eating a late lunch at Calhoun and meeting with students. I’m a fellow, so it’s free. Then I was in the Apple store from four until about six. It was a nightmare—but a great alibi. Afterward, I had dinner at the Belgian place. The tall black girl with the dreads served me. Melisandre. She’s waited on me before, and I left there before eight. Also, you probably know this but the man had no kids, no surviving relatives, and not a lot of money. If I was a PI like you, I’d be wondering about motive.”

  I agreed and took us back to Daniel. Fiske said, after the usual disclaimers (“I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it . . .”), that Daniel was the administration’s golden boy but not so well thought of in academic circles. He said administration the way my father says Internet, with a sort of envious loathing.

  Daniel and Allison were talking softly across the big mahogany table and Allison looked moist. She choked on her coffee. Daniel didn’t seem worried. He put a hand on her shoulder, his long, thick fingers tucking away her bra strap. She froze, like a mouse tickled by a snake.

  “Allie. Allie. Allie.” Daniel’s honey flowed and we watched him tranquilize her.

  I couldn’t stand it. I went into the kitchen to see if there was any dessert. There was a Sara Lee pound cake on the counter and a carton of Ashley’s vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I went back into the dining room.

  “Dessert in five minutes, everyone,” I sang out, like Ina Garten. Everyone brightened up a little, as if this were a normal dinner party. Then one of the murder suspects came in to help the detective dish out ice cream, while the hostess snored and the host brought his bottle of Connemara to the table.

  I started slicing pound cake with a dull knife and putting pieces on little crystal plates. The plates were old and fragile, like dragonfly wings, probably given by someone’s grandmother to the young and hopeful Freemans. I think Mrs. Freeman must have once had great charm and her life with that perfectly adorable man just sucked it right out of her. Daniel took the ice cream out of the freezer and for a few minutes we sliced and scooped.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “You don’t.”

  “Allison isn’t my girlfriend.”

  “She’s my friend,” I said, pleased with myself.

  Unfortunately, just then the lightbulb fizzled in the kitchen, leaving us startled and stumbling to find the switch. We were chest-to-chest in the half-dark and he put one hand on the back of my neck and the other around my waist and we kissed. We kissed like movie stars. We kissed until Albert called out, “Boys and girls! Dessert?” We carried plates through the swinging door.

  Everyone gobbled their dessert. No one wanted to prolong the evening. Fiske and Allison cleared as Albert poured himself another drink, leaving his cake untouched. He lifted his wife’s head and slipped a napkin under her cheek, tenderly.

  Daniel turned to me and said, “Let me give you a ride home. Please.”

  “You’re very kind.” I rose quickly, thanked Albert, apologized silently to Mrs. Freeman, and went into the kitchen to say good night to Fiske and Allison and tell them I had a ride with Daniel. Fiske was thrilled. Allison frowned and dropped one of the pretty goblets. Fiske helped her pick up the tiny pieces. That’s right, I thought. Let him do that.

  Daniel held my arm lightly as we walked out of the house. We both sighed, standing for a moment in the warm night, breathing in the honeysuckle above the roses, and the cut grass. Other people still tended the lawns on St. Ronan’s.

  “This is mine,” he said, pointing to a little blue MG. “I finally got rid of that old Honda I was telling everyone about.”

  The car was dashing and silly. It could only be driven by Bertie Wooster or a seventy-year-old geezer with a checked touring cap perched on his bald head. I would have thought a man like Daniel would drive a mud-splashed Jeep or a Maserati bought for him by a grateful old lady.

  “Adorable. It’s not what I would have envisioned for you.”

  “Nice that you envisioned me and my car. I know what you mean—I wouldn’t have picked it out myself, but it’s what I got and I can’t complain.”

  I opened the passenger door and plopped in; it would have been just as easy to toss myself over the side. I wondered if he’d take me straight to my place or suggest a drive to the top of East Rock, a favorite stop for sex and suicide. If the world was run properly, all men who looked like Daniel would be wonderful human beings and all the good-for-nothings would look like Jim Fiske or worse, and women would be able to focus all of their energy on their children, their careers, and world peace.

  “Dell, I want to be open with you.”

  Oh, that’s never good. “Yes. Good, ” I said.

  “There’s something, well, in my past which most people don’t know about. I don’t want people to know. But I wanted to tell you about it so you didn’t hear it from someone else. Because I like you, and . . . well, that’s it, really. I just like you.”

  “Daniel, if there’s something you want to tell me, I want to hear it. I’m not a cop; I’m barely a PI. I’m mostly just a nosy person. I’m just curious. You can tell me anything.”

  How do I know there’s no God? Because I wasn’t turned into a sizzling pile of ash right then and there.

  He seemed indignant. “It doesn’t have anything at all to do with Bullfinch’s murder, Dell. It just doesn’t reflect very well on me.”

  I nodded encouragingly, hoping that there’d be more excellent kissing and then he’d slip and tell me that he was Oliver Bullfinch’s bastard son and that he had killed him with the bronze bust.

  He glanced and turned left, away from Whitney Avenue, away from the lights. I admired his beautiful forehead with one furrow creasing it, the thick golden-red brows, smooth fox fur above the strong Scandinavian nose, down to the movie-star jaw and the constellation of dimples from cheek to chin. Ridiculous. Like dulce de leche ice cream in human form.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I was trying to keep my detective brain working while my downtown party district was figuring how we could take a little break from all this tedious good behavior.

  “Sure. We’ll just drive. It’s easier to cruise and talk.”

  “Did the cops question you?”

  He frowned and pressed his foot down. The little blue toy took off like a kid was hurling it across the room. “Of course.” He smiled and put his hand on my thigh. “And would you like it if I told you what I told them?”

  “I would.” And I would try really, really hard to concentrate.

  “I was with Allison from two until about four. Then I went for a swim. Laps. You can check with her and with the kid at the desk at the gym. Lots of people saw me. I’m in the clear. Plus, I had no reason. I just got tenure.”

  He shifted and patted my knee. It seemed premature to object. I didn’t want to object. I didn’t want to die, but he didn’t look like he was planning to kill me. Crush me, maybe, in his arms. Squeeze me where a woman wants to be squeezed. Please, I thought, let him not kill me too soon.

  “I’m not like you—your professor father, your artist mother. You have a PhD of your own, is what Allison told me. You’re just slumming with this private-eye shit. I grew up in Rice, Minnesota, population seven thousand. The nearest big town was St. Cloud. My father drove a truck for the Prairie Potato Company and my mother worked at Katie Ann’s Country Pie. They are still there and I don’t visit the way I should. I got to Amherst because Katie Ann’s older brothers went there on hockey scholarships and she got them to take an interest. The MG was her brother Don’s—he died in May. If it wasn’t for Katie Ann and Don, I’d be the manager of Country Pie right now. When I got to Amherst, I had three pairs of pants, three shirts, one sweater, and my dad’s parka. No guitar. No bike. No car, no checkbook, and no ticket home.”

  I felt his anger and loneliness, still hot after twenty years of practiced charm and s
imulated ease.

  “I didn’t know what a salad fork was, you know? That was okay because at that time everybody who did know pretended they didn’t. But we all knew the difference between people who thought salad forks were bourgeois bullshit and people who just didn’t know what the hell those little forks were for. Anyway, my roommates were three very cool guys from Grosse Pointe and Hyde Park and Long Island. They were up and coming, and they made a consortium, started a business. Of course, I had no capital, so I was the legs. We sold dope and, for the first time in my life, I had money. I bought CDs. I bought a bicycle, I bought a box spring. I was as happy as a pig in shit.”

  “And you got caught.”

  “Yup, I got caught. They couldn’t expel the brains of the group since his father had just bought them a laboratory, so they just suspended all of us for a year. I waited tables.” He shook his head and chewed on a thumbnail. “When we got back to school the following year, the other guys moved into an apartment off campus. I couldn’t afford it. I was pretty upset. I did some damage to their apartment. And their car. And to the guys. They didn’t press charges.”

  He pulled to the side of the road, turned off the lights and then the engine in two quick, smooth passes.

  “It’s who you were a long time ago. Everybody has a past with something not so nice in it.”

  “Whatever. Well, that’s my dirty secret—poverty and a temper. What’s yours?”

  “I do have a PhD.”

  He held onto my hand and pressed it to his lips. “I don’t mind. I’m very attracted to you, Dell. You know I am.”

  He kissed me, warm, soft, firm, and I kissed him back.

  “You’re very special. You are, even you think you are,” he whispered.

  Not good. Whatever that was, that wish to demean and delight simultaneously, had made the hairs on my neck as stiff as quills. I began to think, with some urgency, about getting out of there.

  “I’d like to lie in bed with you a few times—before we make love. Just lie with each other, get to know each other’s bodies, enjoy each other without sex, without pressure.” He was murmuring in my ear. “I want to appreciate you, watch you, I want you to teach me all about your body and I’ll teach you about mine. And then, when we’re ready, we’ll make love.”

  Oh, that should have sounded good but it sounded awful. I’d have rather babysat Mrs. Freeman than listen to Daniel’s erotic plans. I’d have rather sat on the stoop with a warm beer, playing Fuck, Marry, Kill with Big Betty. I did want him to touch me—but without speaking. Sometimes men get upset when you say that.

  “Oh wow, Daniel. Gee, I’m a little overwhelmed. Could you take me back to my place, please? I can’t even think straight.”

  He laughed and started the car, snaking one hand under my shirt, stroking my stomach. My adrenaline was pumping along as visions of getting mutilated alternated with visions of Daniel’s golden head between my legs. I stumbled out of the car. Big Betty caught a glimpse of Daniel and gave me the thumbs-up.

  What was that?

  * * *

  They arrested him for the murder of Oliver Bullfinch—bronze bust included—the next day. A big day for the New Haven Register. We made it to the Times again, which managed to cluck, in its way, that this tragedy happened at Yale, that murders of one scholar by another and that murders on Yale’s campus seemed to happen all the time. The bust of Melville got a tremendous amount of play. Someone made a GIF of it falling off a shelf. The motive seemed to be mutual dislike and Daniel’s hot temper. People were found all over town to remark on his snappishness, his unnervingly good looks (which were held against him), and his high-handed ways. Most Yale murders were committed by people described as “gentle loners” or “isolated geniuses.” But Daniel was described as being like the rest of us: poor impulse control leading to kicking the shit out of a hated boss. The implication was that it was a fight gone wrong, that Bullfinch’s death was an accident in the end. I turned on the local news and there was attractive, intelligent Ann Nyberg telling us that his bail was very high and the charge was criminal manslaughter. She turned over the interviews with his idiot neighbors to a reporter who was just like the neighbors, but better looking.

  I wanted to cheer at justice done. I wanted to be unreservedly glad that the beautiful guy who creeped me out was getting what was coming to him. But all I could see was his alibi, Jim’s alibi, a big bunch of English professors, none of whom were persons of interest—and then way over in the corner and under the radar, little Allison. To the police, Paris denied and tenure denied might not add up to murder, but I could see it. See it? Hell, I’d felt it.

  The sequence of events leading up to the crime unrolled in my mind: Allison spent a year facing the fact that she wouldn’t get tenure, a year of bitter acceptance and endless hustle. She comes to terms with it. She hustles. She stays friends with Daniel, who has sway. She doesn’t completely disappoint Jim Fiske, who’s admired in the department. She puts herself forward for every committee and conference in North America. None of it comes to anything but there’s still the Omni Foundation, which could add a little sparkle to her CV. Maybe she speaks French. She has a shot.

  Omni says no. She knows—like you know when the airline says delayed but means cancelled—what’s happening. Bullfinch blocked her. She goes to his office and confronts him. He acknowledges it. He’s not sorry. Like the rest of us, he underestimates her. Her crush on Daniel, and those god-awful clothes, make her look weak. She’s not a weak person, in any sense. Bullfinch is infuriating. Maybe he grabs her shoulder to push her out of his office. She whips out a few Krav Maga moves, startling him the way she did me. She smashes his head on the desk. So far, not murder. He sinks to the floor. He loses consciousness. Or he doesn’t. He writhes and moans. The door is already closed behind her. She wrestles with her conscience, which she sees right now as a weakness, a hypocritical rag. She is not the kind of person who can easily bludgeon a man to death. But she does. She braces herself and bashes him in the side of the head one fierce, awkward time. He groans and lurches a little, away from her. She waits until he’s quiet. There are places near his body, under his shirt, where the blood is so deep, she can’t see the linoleum beneath it. She edges closer to his desk, avoiding the corner which shines with blood like jam on a knife.

  So far, there’s nothing in the room to indicate that Allison has been a part of anything except a chat with a colleague. She carefully sidles over to the window to let in some of the humid air. It feels good, warm and scented. He has stopped making noise and his hands appear relaxed. She climbs over the furniture, avoiding the red floor. She stands behind his desk. His computer is on. His screen is open. It’s nothing to get into his e-mail, which is set up just like hers.

  I imagine myself in front of the laptop. What would I do? I’d write the letter of recommendation I should have had in the first place.

  Back in reality, I sent an e-mail to easy-to-find Sandrine Boulanger, using my old Wesleyan e-mail address, pretending I was still on the faculty. If I was wrong, that’d be good. If I was right, that’d be gratifying. Sandrine Boulanger wrote back promptly because I’d hit just the right time for a French office—August behind us, between coffee and lunch—and because I was a polite American professor.

  Dear Dr. Chandler,

  Thank you for your kind words about the Omni Foundation. We appreciate your inquiry and your interest in hiring Dr. Marx for the spring semester at the estimable Wesleyan University. The reason you did not see Dr. Marx’s name on the original list of grant recipients is that her application was approved a bit later.

  I can share with you, as you contemplate hiring Dr. Marx, that we had an exceptionally strong letter in support of her application only recently from Professor Oliver Bullfinch of Yale University, one of the most esteemed American literature scholars in the world.

  We are delighted to host Dr. Marx this summer and we hope we have been able to help you.

  Sincerely,

  Sandrin
e Boulanger

  Only recently. I was sure that meant the end of August. Bingo—or whatever they say in France.

  Allison had known just what Bullfinch should have said. He apologizes for his previous opposition to Allison Marx (she doesn’t know if he wrote or made a call, so she doesn’t say) and blames it on ill health and a misunderstanding. It would kill him—I would have written—if his flu had interfered with Dr. Allison Marx’s well-deserved grant. He expresses regret that there was so much competition at Yale in her field that they could not offer her tenure. It’s a wonderful letter and if the miserable old fuck had written it in the first place, he wouldn’t have wound up the way he did. I would have wiped the keyboard with his old cardigan, which is always on the back of his chair. I’d wipe the window latches too, and put the cardigan back. I’d tiptoe to the door and close it behind me. It’s the first of September on a college campus. There’s not a soul around.

  * * *

  In the Harry Bosch novels, Michael Connelly often has his hero say, Everybody counts or nobody counts. I don’t quite understand that (does Hitler’s well-being have to matter?) but I appreciate the tone. I felt bad, meaning furious and stupid, that someone I knew (not just murderous thugs in other countries, or even murderous thugs in my own country) was actually getting away with murder. Allison Marx was getting away with it, I was now convinced. Her getting away with it was more upsetting to me than the snuffing-out of Oliver Bullfinch’s crabby, elderly candle. And the universe was rewarding her with a trip to Paris and a crack at tenure. I hadn’t killed anybody at all. I hadn’t even tried, and still, there was no trip to Paris for me.

  * * *

  Students were arriving up and down High Street, Elm Street, Church Street. Parents double-parked like crazy and five well-dressed, upper-middle-class white men screamed at each other to Move that fucking Volvo right now! Boxes, bags, baskets, and books came in waves. Parents and siblings and friends in little parades from the street to the door. Twin sisters from Shanghai in Chanel suits and killer heels, each carrying one small box while a member of their father’s staff lugged the large, matching suitcases. Two slim, dark boys in clean, new Yale sweatshirts, each carrying a battered suitcase and a garbage bag, exchanged looks of excitement and apprehension. Some, with experience, did a bucket brigade and let their parents take them out for lunch. A father and son opened their beers and sat on the wall while two burly uniformed men moved the kid’s stuff. The other families observed them with envy and resentment and disgust. The first-year students clung to every object as if only they knew where it should go and how it should be handled.