Let's Get Criminal (A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery Book 1)

by Lev Raphael

  Merely to listen to Bill’s story was to be involved.

  But I couldn’t tell him to stop. It would be wrong, and I was curious.

  “I said yes,” he repeated, shaking his head in amazement. “I was so surprised Perry asked me, I couldn’t pretend. It was a shock.”

  “I know.”

  He frowned, but I just gestured for him to go on.

  “It happened last year. I was going to that conference on Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson in St. Louis, not to do a paper, just to go. But you know it’s not cheap, so when I heard Lynn Broadshaw was going to the conference and wanted to share a room to save some money, I thought it would be great. I was nervous, of course. I mean, he’s the chair. But I also figured it couldn’t hurt to socialize with him some. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “So we drove down there together and basically he told me his life story—the Merchant Marine, grad school, teaching….” Bill shrugged a little, as if unsure how dismissive to be, so I said,

  “Boring?”

  “Oh yeah! I mean, he just talked and talked like he thought he was being interviewed, like he thought he was important, like he thought he had something to say, like—”

  “I get it, Bill.”

  He flushed and settled back into his narrative.

  “We were just there over one night. It was great being introduced to all these people I knew from their books, their articles, and listening to their opinions, you know.”

  I figured “opinions” was a polite way to say gossip, and I remembered what a hollow thrill it had been for me as a graduate student to associate with professors, imagining I was one of them when really they were demonstrating how relaxed and kind they could be, a sort of dreary academic noblesse oblige.

  “I was pretty drunk by the time I went up to bed, and I must have passed out. It was late, I think, when I heard the door open, and I was groggy. I heard him changing, hanging up clothes, washing up in the john. Then there was more light, and he came out of the john in….”

  I forced myself to wait and not say anything lurid.

  “He was wearing bikini shorts,” Bill said with his head high as if willing himself not to laugh. But then he added, “Tiger print.” I was glad the door was closed because I must have sounded like Cher in Moonstruck: “Animal!”

  Bill grinned now, but held a hand up to his mouth as if he were a little boy who had just tried out saying a bad word for the first time. “It’s not that he looked all that terrible without his clothes—well, actually he did. And he’s kind of old for bikini underwear.” Then Bill’s face changed and he dropped his hand. “He sat on the edge of the bed/talking about the conference, the papers we had heard, just talking, but looking at me like every word meant something different. I think he even put his hand on my knee—on the cover, I mean. I kept yawning and finally said I had to sleep ’cause I was wiped out. He looked at me real sharply and went over to his bed, got in, and that was it. In the morning I wasn’t sure I was right—I mean, right that he was making a pass. But he acted weird, wouldn’t look me in the eye, and we just listened to the radio on the whole drive home. It was miserable. I didn’t know what to say, because I wasn’t really sure what happened.”

  Wonderingly, I said, “Lynn Broadshaw is bisexual.”

  “We don’t know that!”

  “Forget what you call it. He wanted to sleep with you, right?”

  Eyes down, Bill said, “Probably.”

  “So what happened after that?”

  “God, it’s been terrible. He told me he didn’t think Betty was worthy of me when he heard we were getting married.”

  “He what?”

  “That’s what he said. I couldn’t believe it either. I mean, he’s not my father, he’s not my adviser, he’s just the chair, he has no business telling people who they should marry, come on!”

  I felt I should say something nice about Betty, but I didn’t really know her and I didn’t want to sound phony. Besides, I was still marveling at the picture of Battling Broadshaw on the make with another man, a student.

  “And I should have known it would be bad news for Betty to take one of his classes, because he’s been really critical about her papers. She’s gotten A’s from everyone else in the department till now, but he’s giving her B’s.”

  That was a disgraceful grade for graduate students—anything lower meant the course couldn’t count toward their degree. B’s were rock-bottom and embarrassing.

  Bill leaned forward. “He always gave me A’s, and so I wrote one of Betty’s papers for her, just to see what would happen when she turned it in.”

  “He bombed it, I bet.”

  Bill nodded. “But that also made me wonder about how I did in his classes before the conference. Maybe he only treated me well and said I was a scholar with promise because he wanted to get me into bed. I mean, you should see the letters he’s written in my file, for scholarships and stuff! But what if that’s all just bullshit?”

  I could see that this potential blow to Bill’s confidence was as upsetting as, maybe more upsetting than, the fear of being sexually victimized by Broadshaw. And I felt ashamed of my fantasy yesterday afternoon on the deck, ashamed of basking in Bill’s sexual allure.

  “You told all that to Perry?”

  “I did. It was good to get it out, and—I don’t know—maybe I thought he could help me somehow. But there isn’t anything to do.”

  “You could file a complaint.”

  “Yeah, right! Tell a committee of Broadshaw’s colleagues and friends that he sat on my bed in his underwear. I’m sure that would really sound terrible.” He shook his head almost violently. “It’s hopeless. I can’t risk not getting my degree, or a job. I mean, he told me I should forget using him as a reference. But what if he does more than that? He could really screw me over. Jobs are too tight now, I have to keep quiet, I have to not make him mad at me.”

  “Like Anita Hill,” I said quietly.

  “Exactly.”

  “So you tried to leave Perry a note to keep things quiet?”

  “Yes. I was afraid it would get around the department and hurt me, hurt Betty, too. Lynn could make sure we never get academic jobs. What if I’ve interviewed really well somewhere, and the choice is down to me and one other person and they call SUM to talk to someone who ‘knows’ me, huh? Broadshaw wouldn’t have to say a whole lot to fuck up my chances.”

  I could imagine just such a scene, Lynn Broadshaw making veiled references to having “heard something” about a problem with drinking, or unreliability with getting papers back to students, any number of damning little remarks that would say very subtly but very clearly: Don’t hire the man.

  It was ugly. “Is that the whole story?” I asked. “There’s nothing more between you and Lynn?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He bit his lower lip and breathed in once, twice. “Well, there was this time before the conference, I had to drop a paper over at his house, at night….”

  “And?”

  Eyes closed, head drooping, Bill went on: “And he came to the door in a towel. He’d been in his hot tub out back, and he asked if I wanted to join him.”

  It was hard for me not to sound suspicious. “And did you?”

  “He’s the chair! When he asks you to do something, you can’t say no. Once he called me to take over another grad student’s class, which meant I was teaching three classes and taking three—nobody ever does that. I got bronchitis that semester I was so tired, but I had to say yes. He’s the chair.”

  “Did he offer you a bathing suit or”—I paused—“or did he blithely say it didn’t matter?”

  Now Bill’s cheeks were bright red. “I just went in nude. But nothing happened!”

  I nodded, taking it all in. How could Bill complain to anyone? He had sat in a hot tub with Lynn Broadshaw nude, not at a health club but at his home, and then shared a hotel room with him at a conference. Who’d
believe that he didn’t know what was going on, who would resist blaming him? Even I was beginning to feel suspicious.

  “I left after he had another glass of wine. He was pretty looped.”

  Another glass of wine, I thought, but kept silent.

  “Okay, it was stupid to share the hotel room, but I didn’t know how to tell him I couldn’t. I mean, I was planning on going to the conference, how could I back out all of a sudden without making him mad?”

  Bill sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than me, and failing. I felt sure this was not the first time.

  “So when you came to my house yesterday, what was the sweaty stud routine about? You wanted to distract me?”

  “No!”

  But I stared at him, held his eyes until he looked away, ashamed.

  “Yes,” he said softly. “I didn’t want it to be obvious what I wanted.”

  “And you blew it, kiddo. Asking me about Perry was a mistake.” But then so was slipping the note in my box instead of Perry’s. Bill was not careful, he was too rattled. Why? Was there something else he wasn’t talking about?

  “I had to know if Perry told you anything. I have to get a job, Betty has to get a job, we have to keep this quiet.”

  There was no need for me to tell Bill that his chances were slim, given the economy, and given that he and Betty were both in an incredibly over-saturated area: modern American fiction.

  “It’s okay,” I assured him. “Perry’s—” I was going to say Perry’s dead, but I realized how cold and awful it would sound. I glanced at my watch and cursed. I was going to be late for my next class. “I have to go,” I said, standing.

  Bill rose and reached out to shake my hand. “Thanks,” he said. “I know I can trust you.”

  He left, and grabbing my briefcase to head for my class, I couldn’t help wondering if I could trust Bill.

  After class I headed for the gray steel and concrete Administration Building bridge, which seemed to be about twenty feet above the river. I wasn’t the only gawker. Dozens of people were on the bridge and at opposite ends pointing at a spot on the bank that looked as if it had been trampled by lots of feet. There wasn’t any yellow Police Line tape up anywhere, so you couldn’t really tell exactly where the body had been found.

  I mingled with the crowd, looking for something that could explain what had happened—but it was impossible to concentrate. I wandered back a little off the bridge and sat on an empty bench, relaxing despite myself.

  The terrace and banks right next to it formed one of the most popular areas on campus. For some people—like me—the river was a wonderful place to sit or nap by, a channel for dreams and canoeing, a quick and easy reminder that classes and exams and student loans and job hunting and promotions were ephemeral and even ugly. For others, I suppose it was a mirage of sorts, a false escape from the inevitable judgments, deadlines, pressures, fears that hung over every building on campus with the thickness and weight of the battered-looking weeping willows lining the riverbanks.

  That place was sometimes a strange mix of the peaceful and violent. Students, faculty, alumni, parents, townspeople, came here on sunny days, on weekends, to watch and feed the ducks, to watch each other. You almost always found delighted toddlers not much bigger than the ducks they waved their arms at, chased, loved, possibly feared. People went through whole bags of stale bread, ripping and tossing. It was like a National Geographic special—intimate, exciting, a bit unnerving.

  With just one piece of bread, you could wreak mayhem on the water, sending the fat glossy dark ducks into furies of diving and stealing. The flapping of wings, the splashing and quacking spiraled as more bread flew and sank, and some ducks were pecked, nearly trampled down into the water, while other smaller ones fled to quieter spots on the river, or waddled up the grassy sloping bank on the north side to lurk hopefully by picnic blankets. The softly besieged picnickers usually took pity until duck radar spread the alert that there was a new outpost for food, and the noisy demanding cloud shifted. It was sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting and cruel. So much commotion, so much transient violence, so much apparent hunger—though even the ducks found there in the height of winter when most of the river was frozen over never looked underfed.

  Occasionally you saw pop cans, condoms, even SUM notebooks in the river.

  I thought that Perry’s was probably the first body.

  I was about to leave when a student hurrying by stopped and hissed my name: “Dr. Hoffman!”

  It was Chad, who was on the SUM wrestling team. He had surprised me last semester by writing so maturely; his prose was as lean and powerful as he was.

  He sidled over, looking uncustomarily furtive. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  He sat down and shook some of his thick Hugh Grant hair out of his face.

  “I’m the one who called the police.” He gestured discreetly back at the bridge.

  “You found the body?”

  He nodded. “I was jogging before six, this morning.” He kept his voice as low as if he were a spy. “I always come across the bridge. And I heard all these ducks quacking like crazy, really loud. So I stopped and looked over the rail.”

  “And?”

  “It was like hunting dogs that corner a fox, you know? They were all around it. Him, I mean. His arms and legs were snagged in some rocks or something, I think. He wasn’t completely under the water, and the current was pushing at him. It was almost like he was trembling from the cold.”

  Chad blinked rapidly as if to fight off the scene he was describing. I felt breathless.

  “He was soaked through,” Chad went on. “His suit looked black from all the water.”

  “Did you try to see if he was—?”

  “Oh, man, the dude was dead. You could just tell. Nobody could be alive lying there like that with their head mostly under water.” He gulped. “He looked stiff.”

  I nodded. “Why wasn’t there any mention of you finding the body in the newspaper?”

  He lowered his voice even more. “Because I called the Campus Police from a public phone and didn’t give them my name. I can’t risk getting involved in anything like this—I might get thrown off the team, then I’d lose my scholarship and have to drop out.”

  “Wow,” was all I could manage.

  “But I had to tell somebody—it’s just eating me up. And I trust you.” Before I could say anything else, Chad darted off.

  Bill trusted me, Chad trusted me—or so they said. What was going on here?

  Stefan made dinner, and while he prepared the sole meunière, I had a vermouth cassis and filled him in on my conversations with Bill Malatesta and Chad. I had considered not telling him everything, or editing the stories somehow, because I didn’t want to feel more deeply involved. But after ten years together, I was once again struck by how unreal events could be until I told them to Stefan, shared and relived them. Did that make me codependent?

  “You don’t seem surprised about Lynn coming on to Bill,” I said. “Or whatever it was.”

  Stefan carefully coated another piece of sole in flour and put it in the hot buttered fry pan. I enjoyed cooking, but I liked watching him cook even more. Without turning, he said, “People go to conferences to get laid. They expect it.”

  Maybe so, but I didn’t expect Stefan’s cynicism. “So you think it’s Bill’s fault?”

  “Not at all. But he made some mistakes. You said that too.”

  I was waiting for outrage, surprise, disgust—some intense reaction from Stefan. But then, maybe that was because I wasn’t really sure how I felt about Bill’s story myself. Was it true? If so, should he have known better after the hot tub incident? Or was Bill deliberately using his good looks with Broadshaw for some advantage, just as he had when he talked to me on our deck, lounging, shirtless, sweaty.

  And I wondered what Lynn Broadshaw’s version of the story would be.

  “Well,” I said, as Stefan turned down the heat
under the sole. “What should we do?”

  Stefan muttered, “Nothing.”

  When Stefan cooked, everything always looked good. His eye for detail always delighted me, like tonight. The sauteed red and yellow peppers went beautifully in their curved slices with the golden brown sole sprinkled with freshly chopped parsley. I tended to be less artistic, and could sometimes mistakenly serve a meal in which everything was the same color—as if I were stocking a school cafeteria line.

  Over dinner, Stefan showed me his copy of the campus newspaper, which I had somehow forgotten to get for myself. The article about Perry Cross there wasn’t substantial either, though you rarely expected that with student coverage anyway. But a professor’s death—surely that warranted more attention?

  “No memorial service,” I said to Stefan. “Short articles. Serena almost bragging at the party that Perry won’t last here, and she’s already assigned to teach his classes. Rose Waterman saying it’s bad PR.”

  Stefan forked some of the sautéed peppers and brought them up to his mouth, raising his eyebrows. “And?”

  “Don’t you feel like we’re supposed to forget about this as quickly as possible?”

  Chewing, he said, “Maybe.”

  “And what about Chad? Should I tell him he has to come forward? Does keeping quiet about what he told me make me some kind of accomplice?”

  “Accomplice to what? We don’t know that anything happened.”

  Later that evening we sat on the living-room couch with the stereo playing Bach’s soothing Goldberg Variations. We sat side by side, shoulders touching. Stefan was reading a set of student papers and I was trying to do the same thing, but finding it difficult to concentrate.

  Did he want me to forget about Perry too? Why? What was Stefan hiding? I didn’t think I could forget, and I didn’t think Stefan could either.