The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  Stefan said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with you, Nick.”

  “No? Then who? My officemate is killed, people die when I organize a conference; hell, I’d be criminally irresponsible to teach a mystery class—the students would probably all be wiped out by a mass murderer! And I can’t believe I just saw Delaney a few hours ago.”

  “What are you talking about, Nick?”

  “He showed up before I had lunch to talk about the mystery course again. I wanted to shut him up, so I told him you might be leaving next year. We might. So talking about him as TA was moot.”

  Stefan frowned, eyeing me as if he thought I was delirious. Then he surprised me by grinning. “At least you didn’t tell him we were both getting sex changes and moving to Northampton. But sometimes, Nick, you are a very silly person.”

  I bristled. “George Bush, he was silly. Innately silly. I’m—I’m picturesque.”

  Stefan rose, and I watched him put on the sound track CD from How to Make an American Quilt. As the dreamy, cool music flowed out into the room, it was like a soothing flow of water, and I shut my eyes and leaned back. Just then, the doorbell rang. Cursing to myself, I hoped it wasn’t Valley again or a reporter.

  Stefan went to the door, and I heard Lucille’s and Didier’s anxious overlapping questions about me.

  “I’m okay,” I called as they surged into the living room. “I’m okay.”

  Lucille and Didier sat down protectively on either arm of the couch.

  Didier said, “We heard your name on the news, that there was an accident at Parker, someone was dead, and you’re a witness.”

  “I hope it was Juno Dromgoole,” Lucille said viciously, and when Didier hushed her, she retorted, “That woman works my last nerve.” Lucille peered down at me hopefully.

  “Not Juno,” I said. “Delaney.”

  Lucille looked utterly blank, as if the name meant nothing to her, and then slid from her perch to stand over by the fireplace, facing away from us all, shoulders hunched. “Can’t you turn that damn music off?” she said bitterly. Stefan hurriedly complied, but the abrupt silence was so uneasy that he turned the radio to a classical station, which was playing something painlessly Baroque.

  Didier had also switched places, easing himself into a chair, where he crossed his legs and brought his tented hands to his mouth as if stilling the desire to talk—or making plans. Underneath his habitual self-possession, he seemed agitated and trying to control it.

  Stefan rejoined me on the couch and slid an arm around me. I launched into what I knew Lucille and Didier wanted to hear, making my description short and vague enough to keep myself from wincing, though Lucille, still with her back to us, shuddered once or twice. “Lucille. Valley’s going to be asking you questions,” I said, painfully aware of the letters I’d seen in her desk drawer.

  She whirled around. “What for?”

  “You were his adviser,” Didier said equably, as if he were a lawyer rehearsing her in a narrative she had to tell in court. But the effort to calm her down didn’t work, and looking quite fed up and angry, she said, “Let’s go, they don’t need us around.”

  After they left, Stefan asked me if I’d followed what was up with them, but I could only tell him I was going up to bed.

  “For the night?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  It was only two hours later when I woke up, but instead of feeling logy or sick, I was remarkably relaxed—and hungry. Perhaps because something smelled wonderful downstairs. I slipped on sweats and followed the scent. In the fragrant kitchen, Stefan had set the table and lit the Shabbat candles. Their gentle flickering was amazingly soothing, and it touched me that Stefan had lit them by himself.

  “I turned the ringer off on your phone. You got some calls from reporters. Minnie and my father called me. I told them you were all right, and not to worry.”

  I breathed in. “Not the most peaceful Shabbat, huh?”

  “They’re all different,” Stefan replied, ruffling my hair. “Sit. Are you hungry? I made dinner just in case.”

  I was ready to dig into the gnocchi with broccoli, sun-dried tomatoes, lots of garlic—and shrimp—the last a rebellion against my parents’ kosher home.

  “We can skip the blessings tonight,” I said.

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  Surprised, I looked to him for an explanation, but all he said was, “I need the peace. Tonight more than ever.”

  So we stood, blessed the wine and drank it, then blessed the challah, holding the braided bread together while I felt tremendously thankful that Stefan had come so far from his alienation and ambivalence about being Jewish. Stefan dipped the small piece he’d broken off into salt—a reminder of incense in the Temple—and handed me half. We wished each other good Shabbos. I was moved beyond words by these simple ceremonies that brought peace and order into our lives each week. This was very personal tikkun olam: repairing the world.

  He had chilled a crisp Muscadet that went perfectly with our meal. Had anything ever tasted this good? Or was it the comfort and security of sitting there with Stefan? Safe. Alive. We didn’t talk much and ate too quickly, but that was okay.

  Finishing the after-meal prayers, we settled down even more with some freshly brewed Kona decaf, and I let Stefan tell me about all the calls he’d fielded while I was asleep. Reporters, faculty members. As he laid it all out calmly, I found myself flooded with relief that he was such an unflappable man. While sometimes I wished he were more demonstrative, I knew that in this household, if he were more outgoing not only wouldn’t I get to talk as much, life would also seem too bruising because there wouldn’t be his deep inner calm to shelter us both.

  “And Minnie warned us to get out of town,” Stefan finished. “She says we can hide out at their place if we need to.”

  “From what? Cameramen?”

  Stefan grinned. “From the Grim Reaper, I think.” But then his expression changed and he said, “She was really worried about us. And so was my father.” Wonderingly, Stefan said, “He sounded emotional.”

  “You were surprised.”

  “Very.”

  “How much did you tell them?”

  Stefan stirred more cream into his mug. “Not everything. But enough.”

  “That Delaney was the victim of a serial killer?”

  “Nick, maybe you’re being an alarmist—”

  “You didn’t see all that blood! It was spattered on the wall like a Rorschach. And that gruesome crow sitting on his head, pecking at his eye. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Okay, okay. But a serial killer?”

  “But you practically said that on the phone!”

  “Practically. I was scared for you.”

  I shrugged and finished my coffee. When I got up to pour myself some more, Stefan waved me back and poured it for me. “Well, somebody killed him, Stefan. And Didier looks like the best possibility. He’s probably been seething underneath all that composure—that could be why he was so defensive about his brother. What if they’re both explosive? Didn’t you see him tonight? He looked like he was hiding something.”

  “Seething? About what?”

  I described the letters in Lucille’s desk drawer.

  “What were you going through her desk for?”

  “I wasn’t snooping, Stefan. Valley asked if I had anything to drink, and I didn’t, so I looked in her file drawer.”

  “You were drinking with Valley?”

  “No!” I grimaced. “He wanted me to have a drink, to calm down, I guess. Or perk up. I probably looked like Death eating a sandwich.”

  “You did look terrible when you came out of Parker. But the letters—lots of people sign their letters ‘love.’ It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  “True. But put it together with the way they’ve been acting around each other. Remember when Delaney called her at their house the other night when we were having dinner? How strange was that?”

  “So Didier could
n’t take it anymore,” Stefan said slowly, the words like an advertising slogan flying behind a biplane. “And even though he got half a million dollars for a book that could be a best-seller, he threw that all away to kill some kid?”

  “I know it sounds stupid, but—”

  “It doesn’t just sound stupid, it is stupid. No writer would give up success just because he suspects his wife’s having an affair. Trust me.”

  “You make writers sound pretty superficial.”

  He nodded. “In some ways we are. Like actors without the glamour. And you don’t really know they were sleeping together. She cared about him, and probably he had some feelings for her, too.”

  “Had some feelings? You make it sound like having gas.”

  “Did Delaney strike you as somebody thoughtful and deep? It was all on the outside. He was a human Potemkin Village.”

  “If you get any nastier, I’ll start thinking you killed him to keep him from TA’ing for me.”

  Stefan shook his head. “Let’s clean up.” We loaded the dishwasher and took our coffee into my study.

  “I guess you might be right about Didier. But Bill Malatesta was much more jealous of Delaney, and not just because of Betty, remember? He couldn’t stand Delaney’s success. And the way he had pull with the dean.”

  “Did you say Bullerschmidt was right near Parker Hall tonight?” Stefan frowned. “I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s a monster.”

  “What if Delaney was blackmailing him? And he decided to end it.” It was easy to picture Bullerschmidt’s massive bulk turned deadly, bearing down on the well-built but smaller man. I would have quailed at 350 pounds of vengeful dean determined to wipe me out.

  “We don’t know how he was killed, what the weapon was,” Stefan brought out regretfully. “And you didn’t hear anything in your office? I guess not,” he answered for himself. “That hallway’s pretty long, and all those old doors are thick. So Delaney might have been dead by the time you hit your office, but maybe not….” Then he shook himself. “We’re talking about a murder again.” He looked down, embarrassed or distressed. “Unbelievable.” Now he must have been feeling something similar to what I’d been talking about before. The sheer improbability of it all.

  “Well,” I quipped, “look at the alternatives. What do most academics talk about? How nobody appreciates them enough and how other academics don’t deserve whatever they have. Or boring new research in their field that isn’t really new. Or they gossip—”

  “Aren’t we gossiping?”

  “We’re detecting. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “There’s no turning back,” he said quietly, eyes closed, and after a moment he began to quote what I instantly recognized as Moby Dick, though I’d never been able to wade all the way through that soggy masterpiece. “‘In the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti,’” he said, his voice as rich and round as an actor’s, “‘full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!’”

  I was going to tell him that Melville seemed just a bit melodramatic for tonight, but then as I let the words sink in, I realized that nothing could be more appropriate than that terrible dark vision. We sat there letting the silence fold in upon itself.

  It was Stefan himself who broke us out of the mood. “Okay, Sherlock,” he said at last. “What about Carter and Iris?”

  “The gruesome twosome? I know they were leaving the building when I showed up, but what would they have against Delaney? That he was young and attractive and had his life ahead of him and they’re miserable middle-aged failures?” I stopped talking for a moment “Hey—that’s possible, that’s really possible.”

  “There’s always Juno Dromgoole.”

  “God, you must hate her.”

  “No, I just think she’s dangerous. And you did say she tore out of Parker like a harpy, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but—” I finished my coffee and set the mug down on my blotter. “It looked like she was chasing after Iris and Carter. Maybe they pissed her off somehow, or the three of them are plotting a coup. Juno would never kill anyone, no matter what kind of line she spins. She’d never risk ruining her manicure.”

  Stefan vigorously disagreed. “Nick, if Juno had been the one fighting Evander Holyfield instead of Tyson, she would have won, and she would have bit off more than a piece of his ear.”

  “Well, I know what I need to do tomorrow. I’m going across the street to have a good long talk with Didier and find out the truth. I can’t live with them as neighbors and friends unless I know.”

  Stefan cut his eyes at me and asked if I thought Didier would wither under my cunning barrage of questions and confess. “That is, if he did kill Delaney, which I still think is impossible. Why can’t you leave the whole thing to Valley, to the campus police? Stay out of it.”

  “No. I found his body, remember? And Delaney was trying to hook up with me somehow. I feel obligated.”

  “To Delaney?”

  “To myself.”

  “Nick, we can talk about who might have killed Delaney, but your looking for the killer isn’t sensible. Coral won’t like it. She told you to stay out of trouble. Besides, you have to do Summer.”

  I told Stefan that tenure didn’t seem very important right now, and he didn’t challenge me.

  We closed up shop and headed to bed. I took some melatonin and two Benadryl to make sure I slept and wasn’t kept awake by the image of that casually brutal crow picking at Delaney’s bloody, battered face.

  Even though Stefan had been trying to discourage me from looking more deeply into Delaney’s death, I could tell that he was as captured by events as I was. How could it be any other way when I’d found Delaney the way I had? Lying there in bed trying to fall asleep, I ran through everyone I’d seen on my way into Parker: Lucille, Bullerschmidt, Harry Benevento, Bill Malatesta. Then inside, Iris Bell, Carter Savery, Juno Dromgoole. If Delaney was already dead by the time I got there, it could have been any one of those people.

  “So what exactly did you tell Delaney about next year—what was your story?”

  “That you got offers from other schools you were considering. Why? Are you worried he might’ve told someone? There wasn’t much time,” I said, wincing at how crude it seemed to talk about Delaney’s death that way.

  “If he did, and it gets around, we’ll have a lot to explain.”

  “I’m sorry, Stefan.”

  “Well—there are worse things to worry about.”

  Like his writing career, I thought.

  The last thing I remember Stefan saying before drifting off was, “We’ve been thinking about who killed Delaney, but the real question is whether Delaney and Jesse’s murders are connected, isn’t it?”

  11

  Saturday morning I woke up feeling somehow dazed and emptied out, perhaps like someone in Florida after a tornado has crushed neighboring houses and left his standing: unaccountably saved, but desolate just the same. Once again, our lives had been raked by devastation.

  Stefan had woken up before me, put Chant on downstairs, and left me the New York Times, the Detroit Free Press, and the Michiganapolis Tribune on his side of the bed. When I started sorting through them, he appeared in the doorway with a bed tray.

  “Omelette aux fines herbes with chèvre,” he said. “Peppered bacon, grapefruit juice, and green tea.”

  “That’s it? No choices?”

  He carefully settled the tray down on the bed over my outstretched legs, ignoring the joke. Or maybe he didn’t hear it. With an introvert, you can’t always be sure that something you said gets through the first time you say it. So much of his attention is focused inward. Even though Stefan is a writer and a keen observer of people, he can often just mentally slip away. It’s a gift I wish I had, because even when he does go to department meetings, they don’t fray his nerves like a yappy little dog.

  “I’m not sick,” I said, p
ointing to the tray. “You didn’t have to.”

  “How about just enjoying it?”

  Chastened, I thanked him and settled back into my pillows after a bite of omelette and some juice. Stefan held up the Tribune for me with its enormous headline: SERIAL KILLER STALKS SUM. As bad as I’d expected.

  While I appreciatively consumed the omelette, making sure he heard each and every yummy sound, Stefan read the garbled article out loud to me, interrupting with sarcastic comments about the writing. “At least they spelled your name correctly,” he said. “But this is stupid. Serial killers have a pattern. There’s no pattern here.”

  “Friday,” I said. “Two stabbings on the same day, a week apart.”

  “You don’t know if Delaney was stabbed.” And when I glanced at the phone, he added, “Margaret Case won’t talk to you this soon. We’ll have to wait for the official report.”

  I decided I would call the ME later. Sipping my tea, I countered Stefan’s assessment. “What do we know about serial killers? We’ve watched a few gross movies like Seven and read a couple of Patricia Cornwells, that’s all. What if this murderer is canny and disguising what he’s done? And what if there’s stuff at the scene we don’t know about, or the pattern he’s leaving won’t show up right away?”

  “Or she.”

  “Right. Or she.” I thought about Lucille’s reaction to the news last night. What could be better cover than hurrying over and pretending she didn’t know who was dead? But I felt uncomfortable suspecting my new friend of murder. “You know, Stefan, we’re turning into conspiracy freaks. Paranoids. Not that we think somebody’s trying to take over the country, or that Clinton slept with Vince Foster and that’s why Foster had to die. But it’s sad—”

  “—that we can imagine people we know committing murder?”

  “Exactly. Because it’s happened—too often. It’s not farfetched anymore.”