At the exact moment Billy stepped forward, the house-lights came up. The place wasn’t that much brighter with them on, but I could clearly see two things about Billy Johnson: he wasn’t a Negro and he was a striking man, over six feet tall, slender but powerfully built, with shiny black hair that fell past his wide shoulders and brushed the colorful beadwork on the yoke of his fringed doeskin jacket. If he hadn’t been a full-blooded Indian, the getup would have looked ridiculous. But he was and it didn’t. I held out my hand and he grasped it strongly in long, cool fingers.
“Billy’s Indian,” Michele offered.
“No kidding?”
I smiled and Johnson smiled, too.
“Cree,” Michele added. “He’s also a draft dodger—or about to be.”
I shot Michele a warning glance. I felt tricked. I could just imagine what Sheldrake Tuppin, whose great-grandfather had been an admiral in the British navy, would think about aiding and abetting cowards and traitors. As if Michele could read my mind, he said, “I know you’re not into Vietnam, but this is more complicated than that, man. Way more.”
“Michele, I can’t . . .” I was about to tell him that I was leaving. That I had more important things to do than sit here on a rickety chair, assuming that I could actually get one, listening to some nonsense masquerading as literature. I was about to head for the subway and leave Michele to go home alone in the truck. I hated riding in that shameful heap of junk, anyway.
Only, before I could turn to go, the lights were suddenly doused again and I was stranded. I wouldn’t have been able to find the door. I had no choice but to lean against the wall and listen to whatever came next.
To my surprise, Billy Johnson stepped into the circle of light. Pleased whispers rippled through the room. In a clear, deep voice, he took command of the crowd, told them how honored he was to follow somebody like Marnie, and began to read.
It wasn’t until the spotlight fell on the planes of Billy’s handsome face that I noticed an odd mark on his cheek. It was darker than his dusky skin, like a birthmark or a tattoo. I was too far away to see it clearly, but it looked like two moons, crescents facing each other half an inch apart.
He turned his head slightly and his cheek was swallowed by shadow. Distracted by this observation, I realized I’d not been paying attention to the introduction of his poem. The first words of it I heard were “If you love me, leave me a kiss in the white cup of morning.”
I glanced at Michele to see whether the poem was making any sense to him. But I couldn’t get him to look at me. He was staring at Billy with the same rapt attention he’d previously reserved exclusively for Martin Luther King, Jr.
Chapter 3
All night I dreamed alternately of Billy Johnson and the dead woman with the hidden head. At times she reared above me, erect and threatening. At other times she sat propped on the shaky stool in the limelight reading some incomprehensible poem. At one point I yanked the bag from her head and discovered she was Billy Johnson. But in the dream, I knew that was an error. As if my subconscious were compelled to correct the mistake, the same dream would start all over and proceed identically to the same ridiculous conclusion.
In the morning I left home as quickly as I could to get away from my brother, who was distraught because two civil rights marchers had been injured when mounted sheriff’s deputies had charged the crowd of Selma demonstrators. Were I totally honest, I might have admitted to myself that I was also avoiding Michele’s accusation that thus far my efforts to find a project compelling enough to capture the attention of Tuppin had failed. Despite the fascination I had for the power Tuppin wielded in his court, I had little interest in criminal law per se. Perhaps the violence and disorganization of the lower social orders were quaintly appealing to a spoiled brat like Gleason Adams or touchingly inspirational to a bleeding heart like my brother. To me, crime was desperate, frightening and avoidable. Which did not explain why I stopped in the law library before class to look for a book that might help me understand what I’d seen at the morgue the night before. Despite the bizarre spectacle the corpse had presented, six or seven months of law studies had already convinced me that nothing much is unique in this world. I was developing the lawyer’s habit of seeking precedent. I was already used to hours of work before I even got to school. I had been doing that since ninth grade.
In the best modern way, the law library was sleek, cool and unadorned. Morning light from bare floor-to-ceiling windows competed with the banks of fluorescent fixtures stretching the fifty-foot width of the reading room. At plain teak tables, men in white shirts and dark ties were bent silently over their books, their crooked elbows shielding the volumes protectively.
I couldn’t get much reading done in the hour that remained before my first class, but I did manage to find a few titles in the card catalogue that dealt with unusual methods of homicide. Suspicious Death: A Compendium. By Whose Hand: Suicide or Murder? Assessing Evidence: A Guide for the Homicide Investigator. I made a note of them for future reference, then walked over to Falconer Hall, adjacent to the library but clearly from another era. Its warmth embraced me the moment I entered its oak-paneled halls.
In the coffee room I searched for Gleason among the students gathered around the ornate silver coffee urn that was nearly as tall as the uniformed server who stood behind it. Everyone in the room wore a suit. Everyone was male except for one startlingly beautiful redhead. She winked when she saw me, and I made my way toward the little crowd that habitually surrounded her. “Have you seen Gleason Adams?” I asked her. She shook her head, sending the room’s low light careering along the sleek line of her hair, drawn into a chignon.
“He was probably out playing last night, as usual,” she replied, giving her head a small shake of disgust.
“I don’t think so,” I said, but I didn’t tell her what I knew about his activities last night, about the morgue, about his unusual nervousness. Though it would have been totally out of keeping with Gleason’s usual careless attitude, it was possible that he’d been too upset to come to class.
I myself had trouble concentrating in my classes: Criminal Law, Personal Property, Torts. Gleason had no such trouble, because he never did show. I gave up looking for him when he failed to appear in the student lounge for lunch. By then all my thoughts were centered on my impending meeting with Professor Myron Kavin, my assigned adviser.
If I missed the comforting clutter of law books in the library, it certainly wasn’t a problem in Kavin’s office, in the nether regions of Falconer. His room was a cell, no bigger than ten feet square. Worn Turkish carpets hid a cement floor. An iron-banded, wood-planked door creaked ominously whenever it opened. Shelves were stuffed with books, and more books covered the small lamp tables and a couple of scuffed leather armchairs. His desk and the chairs always had to be cleared before his students could sit and tutorials begin. This was a movie-set version of a law professor’s lair. I had been there before and I knew the clichés ended with the decor. Myron Kavin was a modern man, a clever, hard-nosed realist.
“Good afternoon, Portal,” he said, running his fingers through his sandy hair and rising from his chair to simultaneously usher me into the room and glance into the dim hallway in expectation of finding Gleason dawdling somewhere behind me. “Where’s your disreputable associate?”
I smiled, moved a pile of books and took a seat. “Apparently lost in the labyrinth of the law,” I responded.
Professor Kavin smiled back. “Has he let you in on the secret of his choice of projects?”
Secret? For a moment I wondered whether Kavin knew about the morgue, but I soon realized he was being ironic. As far as the professor knew, Gleason had no project. That, of course, was as far as I knew, too.
“What have you got for me, Portal?” He stacked several files and piled them atop a leaning hill of books on the corner of his desk, then waited expectantly for me to deposit the outline of my own nonexistent proposal in the space he’d made.
“I have
n’t finished the outline yet, Professor,” I admitted. “I’ve completed my review of Tuppin’s most significant cases, but . . .”
Kavin ran his fingers through his hair again. The gesture had no effect on the locks, which lay perfectly whatever he did to them. Nor did it have any effect on the professor’s impatience, a trait for which he was famous. “It’s the middle of March, Portal. You’ve known since January that you need a convincing proposal to present to the faculty. Tuppin is not going to be impressed by the fact that you’ve read a large number of books. What do you plan on saying to the magistrate, exactly?” He paused, searched for his pipe and tobacco beneath some journals, filled the polished wood bowl and tamped it down. He shook the pouch, put a few more shreds into the bowl, tamped it again and lit it with a few strong pulls of air against the flame of the wooden match. The smoke filled the little room and I fought the urge to cough. “Of course,” Kavin continued, “if you and Adams want to be called to the bar a year later than everyone else, you certainly have the right to exercise that prerogative.”
I shifted in my chair. “No, sir,” I said.
He eyed me as if to say, “Well?”
My relationship with Kavin was not what anyone would call personal, but he and I had spent hours examining the intricacies of the law. He was my mentor, the doorkeeper, the person able to let me into the world I so longed to enter. I cleared my throat. In that moment I wanted to tell him what we had seen at the morgue, to explain to him that my desire to figure out what had happened was beginning to eclipse my desire to impress Magistrate Tuppin. Kavin would know whether homicide was the most likely explanation, I believed, and could tell me whether Chief Coroner Rosen’s actions appeared in any way inappropriate. I opened my mouth to speak.
But then I thought of the little packet Gleason had stolen. I had no idea what was in it, but that was not the point. The item was evidence no matter what it contained. It was not only potential evidence of murder, it was certain evidence of our having stupidly put ourselves at risk. “I’m thinking of posing a central question about the law based on a thorough study of Tuppin’s work,” I offered.
Myron Kavin glared at me from behind the cloud of pipe smoke. His eyes were shrewd. He would have made an excellent judge because he saw everything, heard everything, analyzed everything, but never inadvertently let you know what he was thinking. “Portal,” he said calmly, “you are a young man of exceptional talent. It mystifies me that you consistently fail to rise to the dictates of that talent. Tuppin wouldn’t give a fig about a weak idea like yours. He’s a warrior of the court. He’s a man who spends every waking moment in the eternal battle between the law and the men the law seeks to control. Tuppin is not about books, he’s about the drunk in the gutter. He’s about the drug addict stoned in the street. He’s about the thief who charms your mother while he’s emptying her purse.”
Kavin shook his head. “If you’re really a book-and-paper man, criminal law is not for you. Compared to the orderly progression of the work of commercial lawyers or estate lawyers or of civil litigants, the work of the criminal lawyer is a daily descent into chaos and desperation. I thought you understood that. I thought you said you’d already asked yourself why a man would deliberately choose such a life.” He paused for a moment. “Pose that question to Tuppin and he just might persuade himself to grant you a few moments’ audience.”
“Would Tuppin be interested in homicide?” I dared to ask.
Kavin’s pipe suddenly required his undivided attention. “Repeat yourself, Portal,” he finally said. “I don’t believe I heard you.”
“Nothing, sir,” I mumbled. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“Listen, Portal, you’ve still got a choice here,” he said, biting down on the stem of the pipe and speaking through partially closed lips. “Either write a logical and articulate proposal outlining exactly what you intend to accomplish with Tuppin or drop the idea of meeting with him. Act strongly while you can still choose, otherwise your indecision will make the choice for you.”
I had to smile. His advice sounded like the platitudes my mother dished out. Make up your mind or it will make up itself.
Kavin removed his pipe from his mouth and studied its shiny bowl. “Tuppin likes to surprise people, Portal,” he said. “Don’t let him surprise you.”
Before I could ask the professor what he meant by that cryptic remark, our time was up. It was part of Kavin’s job, as he saw it, to teach law students that lawyers never talk for free. Once your time with Kavin was up, it was up. I left his office confused and a little afraid.
WHY DID I GO in search of Gleason when I considered myself lucky to have him off my back? Maybe I feared he planned to blackmail me into helping him on his project. Considering the trouble I was having with my own, the thought made me laugh.
There were, I soon discovered, two families named Adams in the little enclave of Whitney Square, part of the upscale neighborhood of Rosedale. I had to make apologies to the people at number twenty-six before I found the right address.
Flakes of snow clung to the collar of my coat. I brushed them off, but more took their place as I shifted from foot to foot waiting several excruciating minutes for someone to respond to the cascading notes of the door chime.
I was not yet a person who knew how to measure land, but had I been asked, I probably would have guessed that Whitney Square, which was really a kind of rounded triangle bordered by three city blocks, was an acre, an acre of land in the heart of an old, rich section of the city, an acre worth the same amount of money as a thousand acres to the north or the west or the east. At the center of this triangle was a park spread beneath two dozen stately oaks whose bare branches sketched a calligraphy of black strokes against grass that had yet to turn green. A wooden bench circled the base of one of the oaks, its dark green paint scaled by months of freezing weather. Soon a private gardener, or perhaps one of the minders of the city parks, would sand and repaint it, prepare it for anyone who wanted to sit here and dream of what it would be like to live in this part of town.
I glanced at the buildings on the square. The gray stone church with its strong, boxy Protestant tower, the stately red-brick Georgians, the stolid Victorian family mansions held little interest for me. I was captivated only by Gleason’s house, which sat at the southernmost corner of Whitney Square, nearest the bridge that led out of these hallowed precincts and back toward the streets of the poor.
It was a rambling sort of house to find in the heart of the city. I remembered my mother showing me houses like it when I was a boy and teaching me that every chimney meant a fireplace. I counted three in front and more in back, though I couldn’t see much beyond the steeply sloping slate roof. In the front, Tudor-style timbers crossed in a high peak. On the ground floor, a carved stone arch beside an intricately leaded window announced the main entrance. It was far more elaborate than the entrance to the house of God across the street.
The door opened suddenly, startling me from my musings. I was even more startled to find Gleason himself standing there, instead of the maid or butler I’d expected. He was dressed in a suit that made his blue eyes look gray. For a moment he stared as if he’d never seen me before. He looked so solemn, so serious, so much more like a concerned man than a student. Embarrassed, I realized I’d obviously come at a bad time. Clearly I’d interrupted Gleason while he was engaged in some important matter. The fact that I’d never known him to consider anything important momentarily escaped my recall.
“I’m sorry, Gleason,” I blurted. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’ll go. I’ll see you at school.”
I turned to leave, but he caught my arm with an urgency as unusual as everything else about his manner on this cold afternoon. “Hey, no. Come in,” he said. “I’ll take it like a man. You came here to bawl me out because I missed classes, right? And my tutorial with Kavin. I’m such a drag! What did old Smokestack have to say, anyway?”
“Not much, Gleason. Because I had nothing to say. Yo
u should have been there. You’re better at snow jobs than I am. Maybe you could have told Kavin why a person from Rosedale is so interested in the death of some poor female rooming-house tenant. Maybe you could have made up some story about what we saw last night, make it sound like a case.”
“It is a case,” Gleason responded, ushering me into a small sitting room with the kind of old furniture that probably cost more than every item in my parents’ house put together. “Wait here a minute, will you?” he asked me, then disappeared. A moment later I heard voices from another room—the stern tone of a man with the cultured accent, vaguely British, of the well educated and wealthy, interspersed with Gleason’s more youthful tones and those of a third speaker, a woman who sounded distressed.
I strained to make out what they were saying, but failing, I amused myself by studying the room’s fine furniture and accessories. On a table near me in a glass case sat a hinged enamel object shaped like an orange, encrusted with gold and set with what looked like diamonds, topaz and some deep yellow stone I’d never seen before.
“Portal, it is a case,” Gleason repeated from the doorway. I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to the woman in the morgue or berating me for showing impolite interest in the belongings of his family. He saw my confusion and laughed, but he quickly returned to his former seriousness. Again I wondered whether he had found our experience at the morgue as disturbing as I had found it. I had to ask him what he thought it all meant, to try to get him to explain not only how he had arranged our presence there, but more importantly, why. Anyone else would have responded to a straightforward question. That was the worst way to get information out of Gleason Adams.
He sat, legs spread, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. “I’ve been thinking about that dead woman all day,” he volunteered. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on classes or Kavin today, so I skipped.” He looked up as if startled by an idea. “You didn’t tell Kavin about the morgue, did you?”
Leave Me by Dying Page 4
