We Keep the Dead Close

by Becky Cooper

  Detective Davenport pursued the clandestine affairs angle with Sarah Lee Irwin, too.

  “Do you know of anyone else in the class that she was attracted to, that she tried to make out with?”

  “Over a period of years?” Sarah Lee said. “Almost anyone.”

  What’re You So Afraid Of?

  DRAFTS OF A LETTER JANE wrote to Jim Humphries, found undated and unsigned by police among her belongings:

  DRAFT ONE

  Thoughts after reading your letters:

  T. E. Lawrence was neither independent nor free but he had passion which is an adequate substitute for both.

  If I’m free and you’re free, the combination of the two does not seem to me to be loss of freedom but a possibility of learning about other kinds of it. Just because you assume the risk of me and I assume the risk of you, does not mean that we put each other in a cage to insure the status quo—I mean face it kid, we’d both of us be mucking about with the same things and demons we muck about with now, mucked about with before we happened to each other…in many ways they’re the same things and demons so why not derive the benefit of another point of view—we’re both of us too chickenshit to dare to actually try and do something so you know the same damn demons will probably hound us all our days. We’re both of us, this I knew by ESP, all ready to fail.

  DRAFT TWO

  Thoughts after reading your letters:

  T. E. Lawrence was neither independent nor free but he had passion which is an adequate substitute for both.

  It is ridiculous for you to think that I want your love on my terms; if you can’t love me on your terms but have to use my terms then all I’m getting is a perverted mirror-image of myself, which I can get from my own head any time I choose, thank you very much. (My wishes in the matter are quite simple: I just want to continue being your own personal marmot and do whatever it is I do that keeps you cheerful for the rest of my days. I didn’t think I was doing too badly but then I’m often misguided).

  What’re you so afraid of? If you’ll pardon the Polonius-type tone, you simply have to learn that pain is not a necessary feature of living but merely an adjunct of having to plow through a lot of chatchka.

  Boyd

  AT THE END OF THE call, Elisabeth promised to put me in touch with Jane’s brother, Boyd. He was now an ordained minister out in California, after a “very dissolute life of being a radio DJ and god knows what.” I heard from her the next day by email. “As he says,” she wrote, “this is about all he can offer.” She pasted two replies from Boyd into the body of her message.

  Boyd’s first response:

  My trip to Cambridge […] was stonewalled by guilty cops who botched the case. I have 2 suspects: Jim [Humphries], who seems to be clean, and my old poet-piano-poseur pal Peter Ganick from Needham. Jane had the hots for him, he sold her pot. […] It would take rendition and waterboarding, assuming he still lives, so no case is ever likely. You can give this woman my e-mail but I have nothing further.

  Boyd’s second response, after Elisabeth prompted him to recall an affair with a married professor:

  I think the “affair” was one of (?) several, you may know of some.

  He added:

  She liked tall guys, and mutual manipulation. Poor brilliant, unhappy woman! Maybe more time might’ve made it even worse? Send this along, too…

  I was caught off guard by the whole package: the gruffness, the density of the language, how forthcoming he was without any accompanying warmth. Boyd’s stance felt so exaggerated in parts that I wondered if it was self-protection that had crystallized into something bordering on callousness.

  Before I could reply, Boyd wrote again, an hour later, this time cc’ing me directly.

  Don’t forget her neighbors Don and Jill (Nash) Mitchell—and Arthur and Andrea Bankoff, who’d been with her on the Iran dig. Two strands there…that the voluptuous but foulmouthed Andie enraged MRS Lemberg-Karlovski [sic], wife of dig leader Karl, and Jane took Andie’s side. Bad vibes but unlikely motive—or the notion L-K hyped the results of a pretty lame dig and Janie blabbed. […]

  Has this Ms. Cooper seen the “murder book”? […] I could not, even to get it on a Boston TV coldcase show. Wonder why?

  That was the first I’d seen of the theory that Jane had maybe threatened to undermine Karl’s claims about Tepe Yahya. I’d also never heard of a “murder book,” and asked him what it was.

  He didn’t bother cc’ing Elisabeth this time: “Perhaps I watch too many detective shows—by ‘murder book’ I meant the Cambridge Police files on the case.” He told me he’d been in touch with another writer, who, unlike him, had allegedly been allowed to see the police files twenty years ago. Boyd said that the files indicated that Jane had had sex within hours of her death, and that Jim Humphries apparently satisfied a polygraph that it wasn’t him. The email continued. Boyd told a convoluted tale about a suicide, a poison pen letter, and fingerprints on a horse-riding trophy. The story involved someone named Frank Powers, the veterinarian who had a connection with Jane’s horse camp on Cape Cod, but I found it very hard to follow, and since the gist was that this guy had nothing to do with Jane’s death, I didn’t worry too much about it. There was still more to read:

  I am a newsperson (CBS Radio’s KROQ in L.A.). I am also an ordained Christian minister. My job is not to prosecute, but perhaps to find out and definitely to forgive. […] You may call to arrange a voice interview, but I have nothing left except to say I think the faculty-affair line won’t pay off. There was at least one, maybe more. She was, as I said, both manipulative AND victim of men. […]

  Good hunting…

  Boyd Britton+

  Boyd had included his phone number at the bottom of his message, and I called him the following week.

  Fragments of Jane

  A YOUNG BOYD DRIPPED WATER onto the pool deck after having chugged along in his life jacket and paddled his way down the length of the country-club swimming pool when no one was looking. He was proud of his accomplishment, until Jane quipped: “Pretty good for a baby.”

  * * *

  In fourth grade, Jane sat uncomfortably at her school desk. She needed to go to the bathroom, but the teacher refused to let her leave. Jane asked again. The teacher refused. A puddle slowly started to form under Jane’s desk. The other kids noticed but, mercifully, said nothing. Jane didn’t cry. She stood up and walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher again if she could go to the bathroom. “Well, yes, I guess you better had.” When Jane came back, she pulled out large sheets of manila drawing paper from her desk. They were filled with her sketches of horses and, still silent, she lay them on the floor to sop up the urine.

  * * *

  Jane and Boyd wandered into their parents’ room when their father wasn’t home and their mother wasn’t looking. They flipped through Theodoor van de Velde’s euphemistically titled sex manual Ideal Marriage, mesmerized.

  * * *

  In boarding school at Dana Hall, Jane and her roommate knit a scarf for their Chinese evergreen tree. The scarf had the tree’s name on it: Arthur. They draped it around his pot and joked about him having “Arthur-itis” and “roommate-ism.”

  In the school production of Oklahoma!, Jane was cast as Jud, the stocky male villain.

  Sometimes at night, in the main building of Dana Hall, Jane’s friends would catch her playing Cole Porter on the grand piano in the living room by herself.

  * * *

  The summer before Radcliffe, Jane told her friend Cathy about her plans to become a pilot. Jane said all kinds of knowledge and skills would be needed if there was a terrible war or some other disaster affecting the world, and she wanted to be ready.

  * * *

  She once tried to explain to Jill Mitchell her belief that God was more like a kind of electric force controlling people’s lives.

  * * *

  Jane called Karl, who was born in Prague, the “Canceled Czech” and Martha Lamberg-Karlovsky a “Porcelain Ass.�
�

  * * *

  In the fall of 1968, graduate student John Terrell and Jane crossed the street from William James Hall to the Peabody Museum. In what would turn out to be the last time John and Jane ever spoke, Jane turned to him and said, apropos of nothing: “I have dreams of waking up dead in that apartment.”

  First Talk with Boyd

  IN LOS ANGELES, WHERE BOYD had lived on and off since the ’70s, he was better known as Doc on the Roq, a morning news anchor on KROQ’s Kevin & Bean show. For a time Jimmy Kimmel was his sports announcer, and Jimmy made up a song called “What’s in Doc’s Butt?” It was a calypso: “I wonder what is hiding in there? / Is it a puppy or a polar bear?” I’d never heard his program, but when Boyd picked up the phone and his voice, deep and resonant, boomed on the other side, I knew it couldn’t have been anyone but him. Elisabeth had said that Jane and Boyd were both the kind of people to take the oxygen out of the room, and I could see what she meant.

  “So how goes your quest, and to what end?” he asked me.

  I started to offer pleasantries, but he plowed right through them. He’d clearly already decided where he would take the conversation.

  “There were twelve years in which I believe she was not necessarily frequently, but very possibly, sexually active.” I quickly did the math; it would mean Jane started having sex when she was eleven.

  “With whom?” he continued, as if in answer to my unspoken question of whom she’d lost her virginity to. “That would be hard to say except I’m sure that there was an affair with her music teacher when she attended Dana Hall. I also believe that boys’ attentions to her, as well as her own strong intellectual abilities, led my parents to take her out of the public schools in Needham, and put her in Dana Hall, which was all girls…I think she also may have had something going on with the purser of the motor vessel Augustus during our 1960 trip to Europe. Not sure. But she had a crush, at least, on a guy in Portugal.”

  He told me that even when she was supposedly so happy with Jim, she’d asked Boyd if he had any suggestions for aphrodisiacs, because he “lacked sufficient ardor.” A few days before her death, his friend Peter Ganick (“my old poet-piano-poseur pal”) had been over to her apartment.

  I tried to interrupt to ask a question, but he was already on his next thought.

  “What happened to her in college was that she was more independent and that she was more sure of herself. She was a pretty woman and very voluptuously built and very intelligent. Also a little threateningly so. She did not suffer fools gladly. But at the same time, she was on an overachiever’s path, trying to do as many things as possible. I think that was part of the influence of my parents.”

  I squeezed in a question about Jane’s relationship to their parents, racing to catch up to him.

  “I was more concerned about my own damn relationship with them, thank you.”

  I giggled nervously. I didn’t want him to hang up.

  “But anyway, Janie clearly was trying to gain control and approval in an area where it was prized and often withheld. So when she got off to school, I think she also sought sexual independence—it was the ’60s—and I think she sought control over men.”

  Boyd was unafraid to tell me about the affairs that Jane had had with people in the Anthropology department. Several of her section men, he said, some of whom Jane told him about, and another he caught with Jane at their childhood home. They were fully dressed, but the upstairs bedroom, Boyd said, “had been pretty well used.” Still, “of all the people she knew, none of the academic people make any sense at all,” he said. “I don’t see Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky or his wife pissed off at her, coming over to argue late at night, bashing her head in. None of that seems to print for me.”

  I asked if that meant he knew she’d had an affair with Karl.

  Boyd said he had no memory of it. If anything, there was animosity between the two of them, he said. Jane didn’t respect him as an archaeologist, and she made no secret of the fact that she thought his claim about having discovered Alexander the Great’s lost city of Carmania was exaggerated.

  It was a blow to the central tenet of Jane’s story. It wasn’t that the story of an affair had ever been a convincing enough motive on its own, but if that part of the story wasn’t true, then neither was the certainty with which history pinned the story on Karl. The sudden enormity of the question of who had killed Jane was nauseating.

  “So I’m left with either the stranger, or, since she liked them tall, the tall lover,” he said.

  Boyd said he had also heard about Jane’s “Jerry Roth” and didn’t know who it was a cover for. Jane had told Boyd that Jerry’s diary called her a dreary, pretentious bitch, which Boyd said was true: “Jane could be dreary and pretentious and a bitch.” I again had no idea what to do with a brother who was talking about his dead sister like that.

  Instead, I tried to stay focused on “Jerry.” I asked if he was the prime suspect during the grand jury hearing.

  “I didn’t know there was a grand jury hearing,” Boyd said, a fact I found hard to believe.

  “Did your parents ever try to reopen the case?” I asked.

  “No, they did not,” Boyd said. “The gossip really shocked my mother.”

  “Did you—” I started to ask.

  “I’m sorry, go ahead,” Boyd said, after interrupting me. It was an improvement, at least, from the unabated monologue at the beginning of our conversation.

  “Oh, I was just going to ask whether you and your father ever talked about what happened with Jane.”

  “No, not the murder,” he said. Well, just once. After that time the Cambridge cops refused to show Boyd the files, he flew to Florida where his father was living in a retirement community. “A grand hotel for the aging,” Boyd called it. He told his father that he felt the Cambridge cops had stiffed him, and his father just shook his head. “‘I don’t know anything about that,’” Boyd said, imitating his father. His voice became softer and breathy. “I think he pretty much blocked it, if he knew. Again, I don’t really know what people knew.”

  He was back to booming. “Murder cases are never closed technically within the law, but the cops don’t want to reopen this one because it makes them look terrible.”

  I asked why, and he said, “The police misconduct. It’s that simple.”

  “And the misconduct was what, exactly?”

  “With the Frank Powers false lead,” he said, speaking slowly and enunciating, as if to get it in my head, finally. It was the same horse trophy story that he’d tried to explain in the email. “They went down that track so far and this cop said he raced to the crematorium to get prints off Powers, and he matched one off a trophy from the horse-riding summer camp from four or five years before, and they thought they had a slam dunk with a dead suspect so they could close the case. Wrong. He wasn’t in the country. And at that point, we never heard anything else. I was never brought in for a follow-up.”

  Boyd changed the subject in a flash again, unwilling to go any deeper into that trough.

  “Fifty years now on the radio. Never done anything else. And in the last, we’ll see, it would be at least eighteen years now, my revived Episcopalian faith led me to an offshoot of the Anglican church where I’m now an ordained preacher. So that makes my journey pretty bizarre. Because, you know, I used to hang out with Tim Leary, for Christ’s sake.” He laughed. “So it’s been a long strange trip.”

  He paused for a moment to let the pun sink in.

  “What would Jane have done had she lived?” he asked himself. “God only knows. I have a feeling that, were she alive today, she’d have been divorced a couple of times, with or without children. She might or might not have had tenure at a university. She might or might not have had a successful career in archaeology. I doubt very much that she would have been happy. Just have that feeling. She was always upset about something, it seemed to me. Often a cheating boyfriend”—he laughed strangely—“or worried about something. She was a gre
at worrier. Me, in those days? I didn’t give a shit. It was the easiest way to treat things.” He laughed again.

  “Listen,” he said, an hour into the phone call, “I’m burning out this cell phone. If you have a follow-up, let’s just do them by email, okay?”

  There was so much more I wanted to know. His feelings about her death. Why his parents didn’t force their own investigation. But I knew I only had time for one question.

  “You don’t know where Jim Humphries is?” I slipped in as quickly as I could.

  “No, I don’t. You might check Canadian academic directories. Okay, Becky, well, good luck with wherever you’re going to go with this. It’s a fascinating story of course, and it’s a reflection of a particular time as well, and it’s a cold case, unsolved. It’s got all the elements. But we’re all getting too old. The people who know may already be…You know, whoever the perp was—whether it was a street person or somebody with a PhD—is probably dead by now. So, maybe they left something. I don’t know. But good luck to you.”

  We hung up.

  I felt deeply uneasy. Finding a way into the conversation with Boyd felt like trying to run up a wall—every time I nearly found my footing, I slipped back, confused and disoriented and just a little bit hurt.