The Edith Wharton Murders

by Lev Raphael

  Her memoir, I thought. He wants to publish her memoir. Chloe shook him off.

  “He’s going to have a stroke,” Serena said behind me, instantly captured as I was by Davenport’s contorted, shocked face. We both heard him mutter, “You’ll never get away from me.”

  What the hell was going on here?

  I turned to Serena and found her glaring angrily at Chloe over the tops of her sunglasses. This wasn’t the outrage of a hostess saddled with a bumptious guest; Serena looked as if she had an old score to settle. When she found me studying her, she turned away.

  As if that wasn’t enough, Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones, at opposite ends of the room, were staring at Chloe as if she were something horrible your dog had rolled in on the beach. The Gillians showily turned their backs on Chloe, but I doubt she noticed or cared.

  I didn’t have time to think about any of the peculiar reactions to Chloe and Vivianne, or about their public and embarrassing altercation. It was almost nine o’clock, and Serena and I had to shepherd everyone down the hall to the next event: the keynote addresses by Grace-Dawn Vaughan and Devon Davenport.

  “Hurry up, please, it’s time,” I said, quoting T.S. Eliot, because the tired old line never failed to make academics who recognized it smile. “The auditorium is down the hall to your left,” I called, waving my hands in what I hoped was a convivial manner.

  People slowly surged to the doors, slower than usual at a conference because like little kids afraid of getting “cooties,” members of the different Wharton factions avoided brushing against each other.

  I brought up the rear, and out in the hallway, Priscilla rushed up to me, breathing hard as if she’d been running. But even red-faced, she looked vibrant and glamorous in a black sweater dress and black boots, her thick hair drawn into a loose ponytail.

  “Oh, Nick! I’m sorry! I was just so—”

  Serena was down the hall, waving me along. “Come on, Nick.”

  Chloe and Vivianne were arm-in-arm in front of Serena, and they both turned at Serena’s voice, catching sight of Priscilla, who broke off talking.

  With a haughty smile, Chloe descended on us. On Priscilla, really. And even though she was a foot shorter than Priscilla, she proceeded to dress her down—sweetly.

  “I know you arranged for Vivianne to find out about my reading here back in February. But you see, it didn’t work. You think a pipsqueak like you can break up a bond like ours? You can’t write worth a damn, so why did you think you could plot against me? It wasn’t even an original plan, darling. It’s right out of one of your crummy little mysteries. Dabbling with death?”

  I had no idea what Chloe DeVore meant by those last comments, but Priscilla was dumbfounded, and looked on the point of tears.

  Priscilla clearly couldn’t reply, couldn’t even think, I bet, and Chloe serenely headed away from us. Bob and Joanne Gillian were arguing quietly nearby, and Joanne moved away from Chloe as if she had a contagious disease, heading off to the auditorium by herself.

  Serena waved impatiently to me, and strode away.

  But I turned from the crowd to take Priscilla’s hand, and squeezed it. “You okay?” She shook her head and proceeded down the hall like a zombie, clearly beyond my help right now.

  Chloe and Vivianne were sitting on one of the many couches lining the central hallway of the Campus Center, looking perfectly relaxed together, as if they hadn’t been yelling at each other only an hour ago. Maybe they weren’t going to attend the keynote speeches—wouldn’t that be great? Vivianne smiled and headed for the ladies’ room, I think.

  Suddenly thirsty, I walked over to a water fountain but the cool stream made me head for the men’s room instead, where I splashed my face with cold water a few times to calm down. I breathed in and out, willing everything to go right.

  After all the drama, when I walked into the cool auditorium, it was a shock to me even though I’d been there before. Such a pretty little room, with its 150 gold velveteen seats, lovely blue, burgundy, and gold carpeting, warmly stained oak paneling, and the stage as intimate as a setting for private theatricals in an English country home. I paused in the doorway, taking it all in.

  The hall was far too quiet, ominously so. Here, too, as during the reception, the Wharton Association and the Wharton Collective sat apart on opposite sides of the center aisle, or as much apart as possible. Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones across the aisle from each other in the third row, both very straight in their seats as if they were standard-bearers for opposing armies.

  The Gillians were in the last row, and I saw Priscilla not far away, arms crossed and neck bent as if she were trying to stay warm, or com fort herself.

  I trooped down to the front row to sit next to Serena, smiling at Grace-Dawn Vaughan a few seats down from us. She simpered. “Where’s Davenport?” I asked her. She shrugged.

  I quietly apologized to Serena for taking so long, but she was intently studying large index cards for her introduction of Grace-Dawn Vaughan. “We’re running late,” she muttered. “I hate that.” Serena’s sunglasses were off, and when she asked a bit testily if she could get things rolling, I nodded.

  Serena was true to her name. With no sign of annoyance, she strode up the low side staircase to the podium that was fixed center stage, smiling benevolently at us all.

  She introduced Grace-Dawn Vaughan with so much warmth you’d never have guessed she’d called Vaughan “that awful woman” a few weeks back.

  The applause was heartier than I would have expected, but maybe people were just glad to hit something, if only their own hands. Vaughan wafted up onto the stage with her many scarves billowing and her New Age earrings and bracelets clattering. Serena’s more graceful and much quieter exit as she passed in the other direction seemed an ironic comment on all the noise.

  Vaughan yanked the microphone down closer to her mouth. “Edith Wharton,” she announced in a hortatory, evangelizing voice, “Edith Wharton has never been truly understood!”

  Most of the people in that auditorium stiffened a little, since there was hardly a soul there who hadn’t written a book or an article about Wharton with the firm belief that he or she alone knew what made Wharton tick, and could give the truest interpretation of her work. I knew—I’d read every word anyone had written on Edith Wharton.

  “She wasn’t complex at all. She was simply a woman in love, a woman of many loves, a woman of passion and pain,” Vaughan said rhapsodically, and you could feel waves of hostility beating at the stage. “And only a woman who has loved with her passion, her desperation, can know Wharton’s core.”

  Out of the side of her mouth, Serena muttered, “That would have been a good song cue for Marlene Dietrich and ‘Falling in Love Again.’”

  I tried studying the audience behind me as surreptitiously as possible. Davenport still wasn’t there. Men were squirming, and some of the women smirked at each other. But it didn’t last, because Vaughan drifted into talking about her own “passional life” (which seemed largely imaginary) as a template for reading Wharton’s.

  I tuned out. I’d been absolutely right that Vaughan didn’t have a damned thing new or interesting to say about Edith Wharton. She was just turning Wharton into a Harlequin Romance cartoon.

  “Marvelous,” Serena said next to me, sotto voce.

  Vaughan blathered on for only ten more minutes, making me glad we hadn’t been able to give her a speaker’s fee. She ended with a plug for her book, and then bowed her head for the expected applause. It came, but only out of strained politeness. I’m sure if someone had suggested a lynching right then, there would have been plenty of volunteers.

  Vaughan then introduced Davenport as “one of publishing’s most influential editors,” and her “personal friend.” I turned to see him bounding down the aisle from the back of the hall. Thank God he’d finally made it, I thought, when he moved to the stage. Vaughan grinned as Davenport took the steps like an eager valedictorian. While the podium changed hands, so to speak,
I could hear people leaving the auditorium, some grumbling aloud.

  Vaughan drifted back down to her seat, looking very pleased with herself. I suppose she was happy to insult all the academics who she must have known thought she was a fraud.

  A fraud with a six-figure advance.

  Davenport surveyed the auditorium with a disgusted mien. “Most of you are academics,” he said. “And you can’t write for shit.”

  There were outraged cries throughout the hall.

  Davenport upped his volume. “You’ve got such a hard-on for your own rhetoric that you can’t be understood by intelligent readers. And the rest of you are just plain, old-fashioned bores.”

  I tried not to grin and refused to look at Serena, who I knew was eating this up. If we had wanted to unite the two Wharton groups, these two outrageous speakers were bound to do it. But I could imagine Stefan asking me: At what cost? Even though Serena had said she’d claim responsibility for the choice of speakers, I knew I’d be facing bitter complaints.

  Had I been too cavalier about unleashing so much hard feeling in a public place? Was the damage repairable, or would the conference burst into flames and crash?

  “What the hell do you know?” someone shouted from the back of the auditorium, and for a wild second I thought he was yelling at me, not Davenport.

  So the question-and-answer session was starting early—and with naked hostility, instead of the customary disguised brand. Before I could rise and ask for quiet, and before Davenport could lash out at his opponent, there was an ear-splitting woman’s scream at the door.

  Joanne Gillian staggered into the auditorium, sobbing, white-faced, wringing her hands. “There’s a woman out there! I think she’s dead!”

  5

  RUSHING UP THE aisle along with Serena to the doorway where Joanne Gillian had appeared, I noticed with concern that the back rows of the little auditorium were completely empty. Grace-Dawn Vaughan and Davenport between them had certainly done quite a job.

  Serena reached Joanne before I did, grabbing her arms and quietly demanding, “What’s going on?” Serena was like an experienced, unflappable nurse, and the cool force of her question—or maybe her grip—seemed to instantly calm Joanne Gillian down. She pulled Serena out into the hall and pointed across to one of the darkened corridors where the construction work was still unfinished.

  I followed, feeling the press of conferees behind me.

  Voice unsteady, Joanne Gillian said, “There.” She broke away from Serena and fell into her husband’s arms.

  I could barely make out a body lying at the far end of the very dim hallway, head down near a pile of those polished granite tiles being used to reface the lower part of the corridor walls.

  Serena and I exchanged a blank look, and then without thinking, I headed into the shadowy corridor.

  That’s when I could see it was Chloe DeVore.

  One of her arms was outstretched as if she’d been trying to grasp something, and I felt drawn closer as if by a tractor beam. Nothing could have kept me back.

  “No!” Serena called. “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch anything.” Someone else cried out for a doctor, and I heard confused voices shouting in the crowd that swelled in the hallway behind Serena.

  I stooped down to feel for a pulse in Chloe’s wrist. It was still warm, but lifeless, and I set her hand down as gently as possible. That’s when I noticed a bloodied granite tile not far from where she lay. Taking a closer look at Chloe’s body, I could see that her face was grayish-blue, and that her skin looked waxy.

  I closed my eyes and backed away, praying that this was some kind of accident. She’d slipped, I thought, or had a heart attack, and hit one of those tiles the wrong way. It couldn’t be murder. I couldn’t be involved in another murder—how was that possible?

  “No need for a doctor,” I said to Serena when I was out of the hall way. “It’s Chloe DeVore, and she’s dead.”

  “I didn’t do it!” Priscilla shouted from the middle of the conferees. “I didn’t!”

  I stared at Priscilla, and so did everyone else as she burst into tears. The astonished crowd erupted in a jabber of questions, opinions, and exclamations.

  I heard several people ask with pique, “Who’s Chloe DeVore?”

  I felt both frozen and amazingly clear-sighted. Vivianne was nowhere in sight and I imagined her shock when she heard that Chloe was dead. A number of other people weren’t there either: Grace-Dawn Vaughan and Devon Davenport, who had probably beat a retreat to avoid being harassed. Van Deegan Jones and Verity Gallup were missing, too. I was surprised that the two Wharton society leaders hadn’t stuck around to rally their troops after the inflammatory keynote speeches, or at least to take me aside and say they were very concerned with the tone being set at the beginning of the conference.

  Bob Gillian supported his now-tearful wife with surprising tenderness. Serena was quietly talking with the Campus Center manager, a balding, thin man who looked stunned. He was nervously pulling at his beardless chin and I heard him say the Campus Police—who had jurisdiction over all crimes and disturbances at SUM—were en route.

  “Back off!” came a loud voice with a Grand Rapids twang, and I was suddenly being shoved away from the corridor entrance by a burly campus cop with the angry red face of a drunk and the swollen muscles of a bouncer. Several cops spread through the area, cordoning off the corridor and herding back the crowd of Wharton conferees and everyone else who’d gathered to stare: students, staff, hotel guests.

  I had learned last year that the Campus Police, with its staff of close to sixty, were not the dregs I’d imagined them to be. Many had master’s degrees, and the job was considered a plum for people in other Michigan law enforcement agencies like the state police.

  Someone said “Dr. Hoffman” behind me. It was not a voice that I was glad to hear.

  I turned to face Detective Valley. “Surprised?” he said, reading my face too well.

  We’d met last year under unpleasant circumstances that hadn’t gotten much better. There were a dozen detectives on the Campus Police force—why did I have to run into him again?

  “Are you surprised?” I asked. Then I wondered why I couldn’t have just said hello.

  “Not really.” Detective Valley didn’t look like a Campus Policeman or any kind of policeman. He was more like a salesman you’d find in one of those furniture slaughterhouses, not the eager convivial kind, but the subtler, nastier ones who seem to quietly mock you for not having enough money or taste to shop somewhere else.

  Tall, thin, freckled, with curly red hair, I imagined he might have been the caustic kid in junior high who could imitate all the teachers with devastating accuracy—but only when he wanted to. All that sarcasm was just under the surface in the adult, ready to bubble up.

  “Has anyone disturbed the scene?” he asked, and I said I’d tried for her pulse.

  Valley stepped carefully down the corridor to Chloe DeVore’s body to inspect it and the area, jotting notes in a small pad as he squatted by the corpse. He took out a cellular phone, made a call before he walked back, and then ordered the excited, confused mob to be quiet. “Does anyone know who the woman is? Who found her?”

  Joanne Gillian meekly held up her hand, and Valley waved a cop over to take her aside. Bob Gillian followed and I saw the three of them move down the hallway to a seating area where the policeman could, I supposed, take her statement without interference.

  I told Valley that the dead woman was Chloe DeVore, a well-known writer who lived in Paris. He didn’t seem to have ever heard of her.

  Again, Valley addressed the crowd that looked on with the dumb eagerness of bystanders coming upon a movie being filmed right in the middle of their city. “Did anyone notice anything suspicious? Did anyone see this woman enter the hallway, or see anyone follow her or leave the hallway?”

  Some of the conferees looked frustrated, as if they wished they had been witnesses and could grab some attention. But no one came forward
or spoke up.

  Valley shook his head. “Nobody leaves,” he ordered, “until we get statements from everyone, or your names and phone numbers.” There were annoyed sighs, mixed with the expectant murmur of people about to ride a truly fiendish roller coaster.

  Valley called over the manager, who he seemed to know, and asked for some rooms on this floor to be set up so that he and other Campus Police could interview everyone on the scene.

  He beckoned me away from the crowd so we couldn’t be overheard. I asked him if it looked like a stroke or a heart attack—or an accident. Valley hesitated, and then seemed to relax, as if there was no point hiding what he’d observed. He told me he’d noticed a head injury which looked suspicious.

  “Suicide?” I asked, a little desperately.

  “Not likely. Now, what’s this got to do with you? What are you doing here? Was she your dinner guest?”

  I ignored his nasty reference to the murder I’d been involved in last year.

  “We’re having a conference and I’m the chair,” I said, gesturing at the dozens of people in the hallway. “A Wharton conference.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You mean who, not what. Edith Wharton.”

  He looked right at me, expressionless.

  “Edith Wharton’s a writer,” I explained. “A famous American writer.”

  Silence.

  “You know, Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence?”

  No response.

  Exasperated, I said, “Michelle Pfeiffer! She was in the movie of The Age of Innocence. Just a couple of years ago.”

  “Okay. And this Edith Wharton wrote the screenplay?”

  “Wharton is dead,” I snapped. “She died in 1937. She’s a major American writer.”

  But even the mention of Michelle Pfeiffer didn’t seem to convince Valley of Wharton’s stature. Why should he believe me? I’d claimed that Chloe was a well-known writer and her name hadn’t registered, so why should Wharton’s? I wondered if he even knew of the writers who made it onto the best-seller list, or did they only get his attention if their books were turned into big-budget movies?