by Lev Raphael
Looking somewhat woebegone, Delaney was sitting cross-legged on the floor right near our office. He rose as soon as he saw us, or Lucille, and rushed forward, full of concern. Lucille hushed him and there was something very motherly in the way she patted his shoulder.
“I was so worried,” Delaney said for the third time when we got inside the office and he sat down by Lucille’s desk. That’s when I noticed he tended to sit with his legs spread wide apart, as if giving himself room. I made myself not look more closely.
“That’s very sweet of you,” Lucille said. “But there’s nothing to worry about. Really.”
She was so comfortable with Delaney it suddenly made me uncomfortable.
I decided to work at home, and left them to their meeting.
STEFAN WAS VERY quiet when I told him about the postcard incident before dinner. We were sitting in the sunroom drinking some tonic water with lime, and it struck me as an incongruous setting for an ugly little story. Decrepit, roach-ridden Parker Hall, now that was the perfect place for bad news and misfortune.
Stefan didn’t dismiss the postcard as Lucille had. For him, every such act was an echo of the seething hatred that had smashed apart Jewish life in Europe and murdered millions as if sweeping tokens off a game board. Bigotry like that instantly stirred up his parents’ and his uncle’s past.
I did not try to palliate the story in any way—that would have made him angry. And when he heard how Lucille had shrugged the card off, his response was, “Of course, she’d have to say that.” I guess he meant that Lucille would have to say something to calm herself down, to resist succumbing to paranoia and fear, which is what I’d have done if I’d been unable to make that plane reservation out of town after the card came.
We didn’t have time to pick the event apart, because the doorbell rang and someone started pounding on the door at the same time as if being pursued by fiends.
“What the—?” I raced out to the entrance hall, and Stefan followed.
I glanced through the small fanlight window. “It’s Juno,” I said softly, amazed.
“Juno? What’s she doing here?”
“Let me in, you sonofabitch!” Juno shouted, pounding some more. “I know you’re home.”
I ripped open the door to shut her up. It worked. Face mottled and red, her Tina Turner-style blond hair a halo of rage, Juno glared at me as if I were Orpheus and she an advance scout for the Maenads, getting ready to tear me limb from limb.
Juno stepped in. I stepped back.
Stefan, puzzled and surprised, closed the door warily behind her. “Why don’t we talk in the kitchen?” he said, gesturing down the hall. He sounded composed, but he was clearly at a loss. I could tell by the way his face looked emptied of feeling.
Juno stomped down the hallway, and we followed, Stefan blank, me wondering what our neighbors were thinking. Then I realized this must have something to do with Lucille and me mentioning Juno to Detective Valley. I felt guilty and exposed.
“Coffee?” I asked inanely in the kitchen. From the look on Juno’s face, I knew she really wanted poison—for me.
Juno stalked back and forth across our kitchen in her black spike heels, muttering, and I studied her, enthralled.
Juno’s mission in life seemed to be overturning every conception Americans had of Canadians. She was brassy, vulgar, intensely and inappropriately sexual, with whatever she wore showing off her mesmerizing cleavage. Imagine Joan Collins on Dynasty as a foulmouthed busty blond, and you’ve got Juno Dromgoole. She had a smoky, sophisticated voice, and there was something else about her: She had this sheen to her nails, hair, and eyes—to everything, really—as if she’d been dipped in glitter and it had been absorbed by every pore in her body. Today she wore a black suit with a very short skirt that showed off fine legs in black hose. The cuffs and lapels of her jacket were faux leopard skin.
Elegant French-manicured hands on her hips, Juno surveyed me with contempt. “Who the fuck do you think you are reporting me to the police?”
Feeling my face get hot, I sat down and gestured for Stefan to make me some coffee. I certainly needed it if Juno did not. He busied himself with beans and the grinder. Over the noise I said, “I didn’t report you to anyone.”
“Oh, no? Then why was that scrawny excuse for a policeman harassing me to find out what I think of that Lucille person?” She advanced on me, stood two feet away, her glossy lips quivering. Yet for all her rage, I wasn’t afraid. There was something delicious about her, she was so untamed, so naturally rude and confrontational. I deplored what she said, the way she thought, yet I found her entertaining.
“Know what I told him?” Juno said cockily. “I told him he had shit for brains.”
“Valley must have loved that,” Stefan murmured behind her. I don’t think Juno noticed.
“Does anyone in his right mind think that I have to send you a postcard if I think you’re a worthless piece of shit? Me?” she brayed, smacking her bust and letting out a very operatic “Hah!”
“That’s true,” I said. “They’d hear about it whether they wanted to or not.”
Juno squinted at me and chortled. “Damn right they would. Nobody ever called me a shrinking violet.”
“That’s probably the only thing you haven’t been called.”
Now she grinned and looked me up and down as if we’d just met.
“Fuck the coffee,” she said as Stefan offered her some. “I need a drink. A real drink. None of your foofy Campari and sodas. I want Jack. Jack on the rocks. Have you got any?”
Stefan didn’t miss a beat. “Coming right up,” he said. I changed my order, and soon we were all sitting around the table drinking Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. But it wasn’t a harmonious conclave, more like the Bosnian peace talks.
I believed Juno when she said again that she hadn’t sent the card to Lucille. “If you ask me,” she said confidently, “it sounds like one of those morons in town who send those bloody awful letters to the editor of that pathetic tripe passing for a newspaper. All about God damning everyone to hell except them. This place is crawling with drooling morons and twits.”
“And those are just the administrators at SUM,” I said.
Juno laughed. “You’re fucking marvelous.” Her approval of me was as fiery as her dislike of Detective Valley.
“Lucille doesn’t think it’s serious,” I said. “The postcard, I mean.”
Juno reared back, her well-plucked eyebrows waggling in mock astonishment “No! Really? Christ almighty! That girl might be smarter than she looks.”
Stefan was sending me silent distress signals, but we weren’t at a party we could leave, and I wasn’t about to usher Juno out of our house. She’d go when she was ready.
Juno socked back the last of her drink. She held out her glass for a refill, and Stefan complied. “I didn’t intend to come here, actually. I was going to have a nice chat with Lucille across the street, but there wasn’t anyone home. And I remembered someone saying you lived on this street in almost identical Colonial houses—is that what they’re called?—opposite one another.” She smiled companionably, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs. “Time to go,” she said abruptly, draining her glass and setting it down hard. Stefan’s eyes closed in relief.
Juno rose, and we trailed her to the door. “Just remember one thing,” she said. “I’m a mean bitch. If I want to do someone harm, it’s not going to be with any damned postcard.”
“I agree. Overnight mail is much more intimidating,” I said.
Juno grinned. “Marvelous,” she said, turning to sashay down the street to her gleaming black Lexus. Those heels, I thought. That’s what she’d use—I could see her stabbing one into someone’s heart.
Closing the door, Stefan said, “How could you trade lines with her? Didn’t you hear what she said? She wasn’t kidding about being mean.”
I felt guilty for having let my delight in snappy comebacks take me over once again. Would it ever stop? I’d been doo
med to this fate since the time my arrogant fifth-grade teacher sneered at a correct but convoluted answer I gave to one of her current events questions and said, “Nick, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The class didn’t quite follow, but tittered anyway. I got more laughs, though, when I shot back with, “Then you must be deadly.”
After that little victory, I also got letters sent home to my parents from my teacher and the principal, as well as an agonizing lecture from my mother and father about showing proper respect to my teachers and not mortifying my parents with such shenanigans. And my father growled out “Espèce d’idiot!” which felt like a smack in the face.
“No,” I said to Stefan. “You’re right. Juno was definitely not kidding.”
We sat in the kitchen, nursing our drinks, speculating on who in EAR might dislike Lucille enough to send her hate mail. I insisted that Juno was a very unlikely suspect, since her criticism of minority hirings like Lucille’s was so outspoken. Her disapproval was out in the open, while hate mail seemed underhanded, striking out at someone in secrecy.
Stefan demurred. “That woman is out of control. Look at the way she dresses.”
“Short skirts and a short temper don’t make you a maniac,” I said. “I think she’s just doing all that to be outrageous. My money’s on someone like Iris Bell. She’s all twisted up with jealousy, I bet, and here comes Lucille right out of grad school making all that money, even if she is in her forties.” But then I had to add, “Well, the whole department’s full of bitter people. It could have been a committee sending that card to Lucille. A consortium.”
“Here we are again,” Stefan said sadly. “Trying to figure out if someone we know might have committed a crime.”
“Well,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “This is just hate mail, right? It’s not murder.”
Stefan nodded. “Not yet.”
6
“Still nothing new about the bridge murder,” Lucille said in her kitchen, checking the spinach lasagna that she and Didier had put together with homemade pasta and one of the best marinara sauces I’d ever tasted. It was Tuesday night, only four days after the riot, and yet I felt I’d been living with the story forever. Still, after all the wild excitement, there’d been nothing at all in the papers or on the radio except brief reports of no progress.
“You know, I hope you’re using organic spinach,” I said by way of reply.
Lucille closed the oven light and turned around. “Is there any other kind?”
“And I hope it’s imported,” I said. “Grown in Northern Italy by a remote order of Midianite nuns, prayed over daily, and brought across the Alps on the back of handpicked mules because truck transit bruises the leaves.”
Lucille grinned. “SUM needs more people like you.” She was wearing bright blue plastic sandals better suited for a beach, a white T-shirt, and a magenta-and-white, flowered wraparound skirt, looking cool and relaxed.
The warmth in her voice reminded me of my cousin Sharon, and I almost felt in that moment that Lucille and I had known each other for a very long time. Or was that simply a projection into the future, a hope? Now that Lucille was in the EAR department, I felt less isolated and besieged. So I guess I wanted to reach a point where we had shared countless such companionable times in the kitchen. I knew it was possible, because Stefan liked Lucille, too, and she and Didier seemed fond of both of us. And we all liked cooking and eating a good meal.
“That smells wonderful,” I said. It was not a low-cal lasagna: she’d made it with milk, cream, butter, sweet Italian sausage and ground sirloin, fresh mozzarella, and Parmesan, with nutmeg giving it that special tang.
Lucille nodded as if all she’d done was slide a frozen entree into the microwave. Though I’d known her only a few months, I’d learned that Lucille was always offhand about her cooking, which she excelled at—just like Stefan.
When Stefan and I had come over for drinks earlier, the pasta had been hanging near a kitchen window like some sort of sculpted chime. Making pasta was something neither one of us had gotten into, and I’d been half tempted to see what sort of sound it would make, if any, but Stefan had caught my curious look and yanked me away from the drying rack.
“Did you hear from Juno?” I asked.
“Juno Dromgoole? Me? Why would she contact me?”
I told her about our confrontation with Juno the day before, and Lucille seemed as appalled as Stefan had been. “What makes someone like that tick?” she asked.
“A time bomb.”
“You’re probably right. But if she came to see you only because I wasn’t home, why hasn’t she stormed the gate here yet?”
“She could have gotten the shouting out of her system,” I suggested. And then a darker possibility hit me. “Unless she never intended to talk to you, and it was me and Stefan she wanted to intimidate. But God knows why. Maybe she’s just nuts and thrives on making a scene.”
“Did it work? Did she intimidate you?”
“Stefan thinks she’s a menace. He doesn’t like her.”
“And you do.”
I tried to explain it. “Juno is like performance art, or a one-woman show. She’s so over the top, and that’s saying a lot given our department. I can’t help enjoying the spectacle a little.” I realized as I said it that my reaction to Juno was similar to Stefan’s when Polly Flockhart came by—why hadn’t I seen that until now?
“You must be starved for entertainment.”
“Well, you’ve figured out by now that Michiganapolis isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a cultural mecca. It’s a great place to live—”
“—but an even better place to leave?”
“Exactly. Well, sometimes.” I hesitated, and then asked Lucille what I’d wanted to since Stefan and I had come over. “Do you really think the postcard you got was a fraternity prank?”
She came to sit by me, hauling herself onto one of the diner stools, which were decorative but very uncomfortable, I thought, unless you had perfect posture.
“No. But I didn’t want to say that to Detective Valley.”
“Why not?”
Lucille sighed. “Because it might not have come from someone at SUM.”
“You mean you have some enemy out there?”
“Nick, enemy’s a pretty loaded word.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if sorting and shaping what she was going to say, then opened them and looked very sad. “Didier’s family is split. Not by divorce, it’s by politics. He may be Québecois, but he moved from Montreal to New York right out of college to live with some cousins, and he never returned. He went into education, taught English, then he married an American—half black, too. If my mother was from Benin or some francophone country, that might have been acceptable. But Brooklyn—? His family saw him as a traitor, and his brother took it worse, for some reason. Didier was supposed to stay in Montreal, have children, and fight for Quebec’s independence.” She shook her head. “It’s not as if I don’t understand how the French have been beaten down by the English there. Second-class citizens, humiliated for two centuries, and having it shoved in their faces. There’s a column celebrating Nelson’s victory right in the middle of Old Montreal, right? So how could they ever forget?”
I thought of the Quebec license plate with its slogan, Je me souviens: I remember. But connecting all that with what had happened to Lucille, well, it seemed far-fetched.
“If somebody in Didier’s family sent the card, how would they get it to Michiganapolis for the postmark? And why now?”
“Well, I just started teaching at SUM this year, right? And his brother’s doing a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, in international relations. It’s just an hour away. Maybe he wants to be an ambassador when Quebec becomes independent.”
I nodded. “Younger brother? Older?”
“His brother? Oh, much younger. It’s a huge family, nine kids.” She smiled. “His name’s Napoleon, can you believe it? They haven’t talked in years, but you know how it is in families, news filt
ers out about the big things: moves, babies.”
I nodded. My parents and my cousin Sharon’s parents were likewise distant, but they still kept track of each other through me and Sharon, and also more tangentially through neighbors and friends.
“Didier doesn’t suspect it might be his brother, at least he hasn’t said anything.” She went to the fridge, removed a wine-bottle-shaped magnet and a photo from one of the doors. “This is his brother,” she said, handing me a crowded family snapshot and pointing to one corner.
Napoleon didn’t look at all like Didier, but he looked very French: dark, wiry, with a foxlike face and almost pouty lips. I handed back the picture. I could see why Lucille wouldn’t want to share this story with Valley, having lied to him myself before, or at least held things back. Telling Valley could cause more friction between Didier and his brother, but it bothered me. I would have been glad to have Valley’s attention turned away from EAR and our campus.
“Wait a minute, Lucille. If Didier and Napoleon are estranged, why can’t you talk about your suspicions? It couldn’t make the relationship any worse.”
“Are you kidding? Didier would drive down to Ann Arbor and beat the shit out of his brother. He’s a Taurus, and they don’t explode very often, but when they do, it’s like Mount St. Helens.” She gave me a long, hard look as if warning me never to make Didier angry.
I had no trouble picturing Didier on the rampage. He may have been in his fifties, but he was more fit than most men half his age, and there was a great deal of power in that barrel chest, those enormous arms, and his tight springy walk.
The image of violence triggered another question for me. “Say Napoleon is the one who sent the card, and he sent it from here in town. Doesn’t that classify as stalking? Aren’t you worried?”
“How about another Sidecar?” Lucille asked, her smile a clear “Don’t go there.”
Lucille made a great version of that Roaring Twenties cocktail, so I said yes, then watched with anticipation as she carefully poured equal parts Cointreau, sweet-and-sour mix, and Courvoisier into a 1930s-style monogrammed silver shaker filled with crushed ice, shook it well, and strained the drink into a large martini glass whose rim she’d sugared. The sweet, strong drink was very potent and knocked me on my ass if I had more than two.