Murder Misread

by P. M. Carlson

  “God, Charlie!”

  “Yeah. Well, later I realized she wasn’t stupid at all. She’d pretty much run the drugstore where she worked. The pharmacist was the owner and he did the ordering and so forth. But she rang up sales and knew every box and bottle in stock. She always talked to the salesmen. Could give the pitches herself. Amazing woman.”

  “Yes.” Maggie straightened, flashed a grateful smile at the plump waitress, and greedily devoured one of the stuffed grape leaves set before her. “Want one?” she mumbled, pushing the plate toward Charlie.

  “Thanks.” It was good, the savory rice filling set off by the faintly bitter stringiness of the grape leaf.

  Maggie reverted to their conversation. “What did you mean, you realized it later? When you were small did you believe your aunt when she said she was stupid?”

  “Everyone in the family said that. Her parents, her brother—my father. He always said so too. How he hated to leave his son with…. And if I did anything he didn’t approve of, it was because I was stupid the way she was.”

  “But you could read.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t say he was consistent. And for me, reading was a good escape. I was happy reading. But he said—” Charlie replaced his glasses. Why the hell was he nattering on about olden days? No need to present his statistical consultant with his whole life history. He said, “Anyway, there you have it. The reasons this knight decided to slay the dragon of illiteracy.”

  She smiled. “Good reasons. But it’s a big and complex dragon.”

  “Yes. There are so many theories about, so many complexities. But if we….” He trailed off, becoming aware of Maggie’s gaze fixed behind him, of a strong stale-smoke scent, of a massive tweed elbow by his ear. “Oh, hi, Bart!”

  “Hullo.” Bart Bickford’s small eyes, set deep in their bony sockets, scanned the interior of the restaurant. “I was supposed to meet Tal Chandler here. Have you seen him?”

  “We’re waiting for him too. Sit down.” Charlie slid across the seat to make room. Bart needed a lot of room. “Maggie, this is Bart Bickford. Teaches development of creativity. Maggie Ryan, our project statistician.”

  Maggie murmured, “Mmph,” pleasantly around a mouthful of dolmas, swallowed, and asked, “What kind of creativity are you interested in?”

  “Last couple of years I’ve been working with verbal creativity. There are musical prodigies, math prodigies, but it’s harder to set criteria for poets or storytellers at very young ages.”

  “Are you finding the criteria?”

  Bart shrugged diffidently. For such an immense man he always seemed to Charlie to be apologetic, even timid. He said, “We’re developing a couple of criteria. Long road ahead.” He glanced back at the door. “Do you have any idea what Tal’s up to?”

  Charlie suggested, “Probably got another book accepted for publication.”

  “Yeah.” Bart continued to stare at the door. He drummed his fingernails on the tabletop almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of the bouzouki. “Probably. But he seemed so excited.”

  “Well, maybe he’d had good news from the doctor.”

  “Yes, but—did he say anything to you about old enemies?”

  Charlie frowned. “Enemies? Tal said something… a quote, wasn’t it?”

  Maggie, having swallowed, nodded agreement. “From Cyrano. ‘Old enemies who round me loom. ’ But the enemies he’s talking about are pretty abstract—falsehood, cowardice, prejudice.”

  “Well, Tal has certainly always been against those,” Bart said, fumbling in his jacket pocket. “Still, it seemed odd.”

  “He could still have been talking about the cancer,” argued Charlie, warming to his own idea. “It’s in remission, but a couple of years ago it was a very real enemy.”

  “Could be.” Bart was fussing with one of his buttons, winding a loose thread around the shank. “I suppose there are academic opponents too, though I don’t know a hell of a lot about research on reading.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Charlie admitted. “A couple of younger guys at MIT are attacking his theory.”

  “And your work?” asked Bart shrewdly.

  “It’s not exactly an attack,” said Charlie uncomfortably. “More a development. Anyway, you know Tal, he’s always ready to argue almost any side of an issue. Though he claims to be flattered that his work is still being noticed.”

  Bart squinted at the button, seemed to approve, and looked back at the door. “Hell, I’m probably reading too much into it. Look, there’s Nora!”

  Charlie twisted to look back over his shoulder at the door. Outside the plate-glass windows, the sun glinted on College Avenue’s boutiques and trash cans, on bicycles, motorcycles, aging rusty Fords and gleaming Camaros, on blue-jeaned students strolling languidly through the sleepy, sparkling vacation day. One of the figures, not blue-jeaned but dressed in navy skirt and jacket, pushed open the door and stood for a moment blinking at the dimness.

  “Over here, Nora!” called Bart.

  Her head turned with a little puzzled frown at Maggie, then she saw Bart and smiled. A knot of apprehension gathered in Charlie’s stomach. Nora was okay as a colleague, but after hours…. Well, she hadn’t referred to the incident since, and they managed to behave civilly enough in their daily interchanges. But he still cringed with embarrassment to think of last fall’s Halloween party. He’d parted his curly hair in the middle, removed his glasses and added a tiny mustache and tramp clothes. “My God, it’s Chaplin!” everyone had exclaimed. Nora, a little tipsy, had declared herself so smitten she wouldn’t leave his side. And she hadn’t. He’d had to drive her home, practically push her weeping out of the car. But she wasn’t tipsy now; she was her usual businesslike self. Nora’s skin was fine, tight, as though a size too small for her facial bones. Her eyes were brown and intense, and her dark hair was scraped back smoothly from her brow, softened only by the first streaks of gray.

  At the Halloween party, she’d been wearing a slinky thirties gown and a platinum wig. Jean Harlow, he supposed. Though at one point she’d borrowed someone’s shawl and claimed she was the blind girl in City Lights.

  “Hi, Bart,” Nora said, squinting at them. “Oh, and Charlie too! It’s hard to see anything in here at first.”

  “You want my thumbnail lecture on dark adaptation?” teased Charlie, pleased that she was keeping her distance.

  “Not in the least! One of my few joys in life is that I don’t have to worry about physiology any more. I’m Nora Peterson,” she added, turning abruptly to Maggie.

  “Maggie Ryan. Statistical consultant for Charlie’s project. If you’re waiting for Tal Chandler too, have a seat.” She slid farther into the corner, patting the space next to her.

  “Thanks.” Nora took off her dark jacket, folded it carefully, and placed it with her briefcase on the seat beside her as she sat down. Her cream-colored blouse, though simple, had an unexpected tiny edging of lace that reminded Charlie of Deanna’s underthings. He forced his eyes up to focus on Nora’s thin, smiling, talking lips. “Well, things must be going well with your project, Charlie! Getting the statistician signals phase two, right? Are you going to give us a report soon?”

  “Can’t give much of a report until the numbers are properly crunched.” Charlie smiled at Maggie. “But now that the cruncher is here, it shouldn’t be much longer.”

  The plump waitress arrived, dealt out menus like blackjack cards, and asked Maggie hopefully if she wanted anything else.

  “You bet! But I’ll wait until Professor Chandler comes.”

  The waitress beamed. “Oh, good! I’m glad he’ll be here. Okay, I’ll be back soon.” She bustled away.

  “How’s your brother doing, Nora?” Bart asked.

  “Fine.”

  “It’s a different world for teenagers these days. Hard to stay out of trouble. Drugs and all….” Bart shook his head.

  “He’s twenty-two, and he’s doing fine.” Nora turned to Maggie. “You’re not from NYSU, are you?”<
br />
  “I’m a partner in a New York City consulting firm now. But in fact, I got my Ph.D. here a few years ago. So it’s not completely new.”

  “A nostalgia trip?”

  “Partly. Mostly business, some pleasure. What’s your field, Nora?”

  “How children solve problems at different ages. I’m applying some of Piaget’s theories to moral dilemmas that I pose to children. Though I’m not ready for a statistician yet!” Her taut face split into a smile.

  Maggie smiled too. “Good. I’m not looking for more work. I want to have time to enjoy the beautiful country summer.” She gestured at the window. “Sunshine, trees, graffiti—”

  “Now there’s a moral dilemma,” said Bart. He shifted in his seat, causing a small earthquake at Charlie’s end of the booth. “Tell me, Nora, if a person knows someone who sprays the walls, is it moral to turn him in? I mean, weighing the relatively trivial nature of the crime against—”

  “Excuse me.” Maggie stood up on the seat of the booth, placed one sneakered foot neatly between the salt shaker and the dolmas plate, bounced across the table, and landed on the floor running. She was pulling open the door before Charlie could turn his astounded head.

  But then he heard it too, still partly masked by the bouzouki music but getting louder. A woman screaming: “Help! Oh, my God, help! Help!”

  3

  Anne Chandler’s wandering attention was caught by her own stubby fingers pulling yet another Gauloise from the pack. Unwillingly her eyes slid to the ashtray: this would be number seven. No, eight, damn it. She tapped the cigarette back into the pack regretfully and tucked it into her jacket pocket.

  “So, uh, do you suppose you could give me the extension?” asked the pimply student sitting stiffly on the other side of her desk. His Adam’s apple bobbled in his scrawny young throat. Knot, the French called it: noeud de la gorge, knot of the throat. And noeud de la question, the crux of the matter. The crux was that this poor kid wasn’t suited for college at all. Anne wanted to pat his downy cheek, set him on a tractor, let him earn a living in the healthy open air with no need to decipher any more funny-looking French words.

  But no doubt he was pursuing some other, less suitable goal. Ambitious parents, perhaps. It would be kindest to get it over with. Anne squashed her maternal instinct and said briskly, “Three more days. But that’s it, Bill. I can see that it’s a problem for you to get the paper in by next Wednesday”—somewhere in his maundering account he had made some excuse or other, she remembered vaguely—“but I really have to close the books on this course. It’s already a week past the final.” She stood up to signal the end of the conversation.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll try, Professor Chandler.” He stumbled to his feet glumly.

  “I’ll look forward to getting your paper,” she lied with her best inspiring-teacher smile. His gangly height loomed a good twelve inches over her own stocky bantam figure. “See you later, Bill.”

  “Thanks, Professor Chandler.” He shifted his bookbag apologetically and ambled out.

  Anne fingered the cigarettes and looked at her phone.

  It didn’t ring.

  What the hell was he up to?

  With sudden decision she plopped back into her chair, picked up the receiver, and dialed Ken Little.

  “Ken, sorry to call you so late, but I can’t meet you for lunch today. Could we reschedule?”

  “Sure thing, Annie. I have some kind of bug anyway, woke up feeling woozy, and I wasn’t really looking forward to lunch that much. You know, with the food at the Union—”

  “We really should get the film schedule set soon, though,” she broke in, paging through her calendar. “How about tomorrow, at ten?”

  “No good. Eleven?”

  “Fine, I’ll start my office hours late.”

  “Okay. Do you know if there are any bugs going around? I mean, this just came out of the blue. When I woke up—”

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow, Ken. See you then.” She pressed down the cradle before he could reply and, without letting herself think, dialed Tal’s office. But again it rang fruitlessly, over and over.

  Dr. Lambert, then.

  God, why was it so difficult? She had muscled her way brashly into the academic world long before women were welcomed. La plastronneuse, some catty old professor had nicknamed her: the pushy one, the show-off. Or, more literally, the starched shirtfront, the breastplate, the chesty one. Tal had been delighted with the pun, burrowing his nose into her ample bosom and murmuring lasciviously, “Mmm, la plastronneuse!” and they’d both giggled like kids. Well, pushy she’d been, she’d had to be. She had defended countless papers at conventions, had traveled alone in France and French Africa, had force-fed the glories of French literature to generations of linguistically lazy students. But now, instead of making a simple call, her fingers were again twitching at the Gauloises.

  She pulled her erring hand from her pocket, placed it firmly on the receiver, made herself dial the well-known number.

  “Can you hold a moment, Mrs. Chandler?” asked the receptionist.

  And in a moment, miraculously, John’s voice: “Dr. Lambert here.”

  “John, it’s Anne Chandler. I haven’t been able to catch Tal, and I wondered….” She trailed off. What she wondered could not be put into ordinary English.

  And didn’t have to be. John exclaimed enthusiastically, “Looked great, Anne! Still shrinking. He keeps on like this another six months and he’ll be good as new.”

  “You’re… sure?” she faltered.

  “The X-rays were as clear as they could be. He’s winning, Anne!”

  “John… thanks.” She hung up, dazed. Braced to deflect the worst, she found that this good news could not penetrate her defensive walls either. She was adrift, unable to believe or disbelieve.

  And Tal? Maybe this was why he hadn’t called, this inability to believe. Anne slung her bag over her shoulder, locked her office, and hurried out into the June sunshine.

  The air was pleasantly tepid, scented with the first blooms on the rose plants around the Modern Languages building. To hell with you, roses, with your little pink smell. She pulled out her Gauloise and lit it defiantly, sucked the delicious stinking smoke deep into her chest, then spewed it contemptuously at the blossoms.

  To hell with you, too, cancer.

  The Ed Psych office was locked when Anne arrived, the halls nearly deserted in this peculiar between-semesters slack. Les vacances, the French said: vacation, vacancy. Tal’s office, as it turned out, was vacant too, locked and dark. Puzzling over her next move, she wandered back toward the door. Maybe she shouldn’t have canceled that meeting about next year’s French film season. But she couldn’t face Ken and his need for mothering today.

  At the door she met Cindy Phelps approaching from the library walk. “Oh, Cindy! Just the person I wanted to see!”

  “Really?” Cindy’s light blue eyes looked kindly at Anne from under shelves of enhanced black lashes. She dragged her rose-colored cardigan from her shoulders and tossed it over her forearm, then reached into her bag for the office key. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for my wayward husband.”

  Cindy glanced over her shoulder at the hall clock. “Twelve-thirty. He’ll still be at lunch.”

  “Yes. But do you know where he is?” Anne followed Cindy into the departmental office. Eric, the plastic brain model on the shelf, stared at them with blank blue eyes.

  Cindy stowed her bag and hung up her cardigan. “For once, yes. He said he’d be at Plato’s. Invited me to come with him and celebrate.”

  “Celebrate?” An avalanche of hurt battered Anne’s heart, stirring buried memories of that horrible long-ago winter when she’d discovered Tal’s affair with that bosomy premed student.

  Cindy laughed, preening. “Oh God, that sounded wrong! This wasn’t like a tryst or anything. A bunch of people went. He asked Bernie too, but Bernie had to have lunch with some computer people from Japan. I
couldn’t go, so Tal said he’d save me some champagne.” The hand patting her exuberant hairdo into place slowed, and she frowned at Anne. “Are you okay? I mean, he said you had an appointment. How come you’re here?”

  “Oh, it got canceled.” Anne smiled at Cindy, the weight lightening. It was true—Tal had known about her lunch with Ken. Still, why hadn’t he called? “So he’s at Plato’s?”

  “Right. Say, what’s he celebrating? His birthday? Seventieth, right?”

  “Right, you might say that. Cindy, I tried to call him this morning but he didn’t answer.”

  “Well, he got in late.” Cindy lifted the cover from her typewriter. “And he was running around the halls, in and out of everyone else’s office. Busy busy. So you didn’t have much of a chance of getting through.”

  “Well,” decided Anne, “I’m going over to Plato’s. If I happen to miss him again, tell him I want to talk to him, okay?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Cindy, how are you doing?”

  For an instant their eyes locked. “Okay,” said Cindy. “It’ll be okay.” Then her gaze slid away and she glared at the smiling man who was pushing a wire cart laden with manila envelopes into the office. “Oh, damn, here comes the mail to sort.”

  Anne waved good-bye and walked back out into the sun. She was jumpy today, wasn’t she, unable to make phone calls, thinking of that curvy premed for the first time in years. Well, months. She crossed the parking lot, surprisingly full for vacation time. Probably people who usually had to park at the peripheral lots, taking advantage of les vacances. A high proportion were the old rusting hulks driven by grad students, instead of somewhat newer Toyotas or Vegas favored by the faculty. The undergraduate Porsches were probably off to the beach.

  The woods were lovely, washed by yesterday’s rain, each leaf defined in the chiaroscuro of June sun and deep shade. The noises of civilization—motors, sirens, voices—faded rapidly as she descended. Birds called, a squirrel ranted in high-pitched hoarse indignation, foliage rustled. Almost nice enough to take that old bastard Rousseau seriously, all his drivel about getting close to nature. Anne tramped stolidly down the path, her bag swinging from her shoulder, her face turned up to catch the occasional dazzle of sky beyond the rippling leaves.