by Lev Raphael
“Then we’re not paranoid, just smart. Better to think everyone’s guilty than to think that no one is.”
I suppose he was right, but I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like how our lives had changed in the last few years. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Of course it does, but….”
“But what?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t it bother you that the world watched ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and no one really did anything? All that talk about ‘Never Again’ after the Holocaust, and it happened right there on the nightly news. You couldn’t say you didn’t know, or it was only a rumor. It was incontrovertible.” Stefan sighed. “And compared to all that, SUM’s Bambi. The world is crazy—that’s reality.”
It was a grim conversation to have with the calm, echoing Gregorian chant drifting up from downstairs as background. Stefan cleared the tray, and I headed for the shower, glad that we had spent the money over the summer to redo the master bath so that we now had a two-person tiled shower with jets on both sides. It felt more refreshing than ever.
When I was dressed, I called the ME, but she was unavailable and I didn’t feel like leaving my name. I found Stefan in the sunroom, gazing out at the backyard with a contented, dreamy look. “I’m going to see Didier,” I said. He nodded, and I went across the street, enjoying another day of sunshine, which you can never take for granted in mid-Michigan.
Didier opened the door in only a thin white towel. Because of his baldness, he seemed more than naked.
“Nick, hi! Lucille’s out, and I was just about to get in the hot tub—want to come?” Warily, I followed him out back. Unlike our house, theirs was built on a slight hill that dropped behind the house to an unplanted yard surrounded by a six-foot cedar fence, which made the four-person hot tub on the two-level deck very private. The deck was lavishly appointed with a wrought-iron mosaic-topped table and matching chairs and a mammoth Frontgate cooking island and professional grill, which was perfect in case a wild boar should stumble into their yard and croak.
Didier dropped the towel, pressed some buttons, and slipped into the bubbling tub. Even with my eyes averted, I caught a glimpse of his brawny body.
“You look great,” I said as he groaned, arms flung wide on the edge of the tub.
“For fifty-five?” He laughed.
“For any age.”
“That’s what my agent says. Big biceps and good teeth will do wonders on the talk shows. Join me.”
“Thanks, but I just showered.”
“That’s perfect.”
Though I tend to be physically shy, I wagered that it would be a lot harder for him to be deceptive with both of us in the nude, so I changed my mind, drew off my clothes, and gingerly stepped into the tub. The water was just on the edge of being too hot for me.
“Good quads,” he said, shaking his head because he knew I didn’t work out as intensely as he and Stefan did. He said it in that matter-of-fact way that guys at the gym talk about each other’s muscles, but that would have sounded phony if I’d tried it. “Genetics,” Didier said with disgust. “I’d need steroids to get my legs that big.”
I almost blushed. My large thighs had always made fitting pants more difficult, and even though Stefan had praised my legs before, this assessment was from a relative stranger. Besides, I’d had too many years of being made fun of at school for the praise to get all the way inside.
I sat opposite Didier, legs drawn up so that I wouldn’t accidentally brush against his.
“You can relax,” he said with a toothy grin. “I’m not worried you’ll try to seduce me. If I was, I wouldn’t have invited you in, eh?”
I stretched out a little more.
“Okay, what’s on your mind? You look like a man with a mission.” He sounded as jovial as men in the hot tub at the Club who boomed at each other to create, I thought, a wall of sound to hide behind. They did it because they weren’t as nonchalant about sharing a confined space with other naked men as they thought they should be.
“How’s Lucille?”
He frowned. “About what you’d expect. Distraught. She was very close to Delaney. He was a good kid.” It seemed such an inadequate label for Delaney that I must have made a face, because Didier said, “You don’t think he was a good kid?”
“I don’t know what he was. But he wasn’t a kid.”
“Well, he helped me out. I’ve been so consumed by the revisions on my book, I’m glad he paid so much attention to Lucille. It was good for her. I mean, I’m not the man I was when we got married, and she’s hit her prime in bed.” He said this as matter-of-factly as a narrator describing a caterpillar’s camouflage on an after-school special. “Not that I know for sure they were sleeping together,” he added. “If they weren’t, I think they were going to, eventually.”
I tried to act cool, but I was shocked by how casually he said it, as if Lucille were contemplating a hobby or a new hairstyle. “Didn’t you ask her?”
He smiled. “We don’t spy on each other. No interrogations. You see, I don’t need anyone else but Lucille. Never have. But she gets restless, she needs adventure, variety. So if Delaney was giving her pleasure of any kind, great. That department isn’t the friendliest place to work. Whatever helps make it easier for her there is fine with me.”
He made an affair sound like air-conditioning or an ergonomic desk chair, and I felt as prudish as a monk talking to Casanova. “Delaney was her graduate student,” I pointed out.
Unfazed, Didier said, “I’ve never interfered, never criticized. Lucille promised me she would always be safe, and so I’m satisfied.” It was almost as if he’d delivered this rap before. Closing his eyes, he leaned his gleaming bald head back, rolled his neck and shoulders, and I heard some muscles crack. “That’s what matters.”
If this equanimity of his was an act, it deserved applause. “It really doesn’t bother you?”
“Well, aren’t you and Stefan in an open relationship?” he asked, head up.
“No!”
“I just assumed—”
“Because we’re two men together?”
He nodded, unabashed. “Plus you’re both from New York. And Lucille did mention the way you look at Delaney.”
“Jeez, so what? Everyone looks. Stefan and I have no problem with looking, but that’s all we do. I know the stereotype is that gay men are as hot for random sex as Republicans are for constitutional amendments, but that’s not true for us. I mean, we love sex, just not with other people, okay? And in case you’re wondering, we don’t do drag, don’t wear leather, and have no intention of getting pierced or tattooed.”
“Sure,” he said equably, luxuriating in the hot water.
I was amazed at what he had told me about himself. Lucille and Didier seemed so ordinary in some ways, a happy couple, but despite his hints a few days ago, I hadn’t imagined their private life was so colorful.
“You’ve been trying to figure out if I killed Delaney,” Didier brought out with a wicked smile. “Eh? But I had no reason to. Not that I have an alibi. I was working at home all afternoon yesterday. On my book. That’s what I told Detective Beanpole last night.”
“Valley was here? Does he know about—whatever there is to know?”
“I gave him an edited version of what I told you.”
“What did Lucille say?”
“I don’t know—Valley interviewed us separately. Like I said, I don’t spy on her.”
“You’re not that upset Delaney’s dead.”
“Should I be?” Tongue working in his cheek, he considered that. “I am sorry that I won’t ever get to work out with him. The guy had killer lats—back work would have been something.” He drifted off for a moment, obviously hearing the clank of barbells. “In general,” he continued, “when someone young like that dies, it’s sad. But I was more broken up about Princess Di, frankly, and me a Québecois! I just didn’t know Delaney well enough.”
Either I was right that Didier couldn’t hide the truth
in the hot tub, or the hot water and jets were diminishing my capacity to weed truth from fiction. He seemed honestly at peace with himself, with Lucille, and not at all deeply troubled by Delaney’s death. But couldn’t he have killed Delaney and be satisfied and quiet inside?
That’s what I asked Stefan a little while later when I was back home. “Or would you have to be a psychopath to be that calm?”
Stefan couldn’t say, but he asked me to sit with him in the sunroom and reflect on walking into Parker Hall yesterday, and what everyone looked like—the dean, Bill Malatesta, Iris and Carter, Juno—to see if I’d missed something. Clearly he was as hooked by what had happened as I was, and unwilling to let the puzzle go.
He’d brewed some vanilla hazelnut coffee, and it was just what I needed. I tried remembering, but nothing came to mind.
“I’ve been wondering,” Stefan said. “You told me there was a lot of blood, right? Then wouldn’t you have noticed it on somebody? You can’t wash it all away, can you?”
“Depends on how much time the killer had. And on other things, too. Carter and Iris went by pretty fast, and Juno flew down the stairs. How could I tell?” And then I sat up so sharply I almost spilled my coffee. “Bullerschmidt said he couldn’t shake my hand because his were still wet from washing them! And he was standing right near Parker, so what if he’d just come out?”
“Did he seem strange?”
“Stefan, that man always seems strange. Like a gigantic land mine. Like Marlon Brando playing Attila the Hun in assisted living. ”
“Okay, okay.”
But something else had been bubbling away under all this retrospection. “Stefan. I forgot someone. There was a light on in the History Department office.”
“Polly?” he asked.
“Yes, Polly,” I agreed, and we put our coffee down to head for the door, Stefan obviously as curious as I was now to know what she’d seen or heard yesterday in Parker Hall.
Her unassuming pale blue ranch house was on Didier and Lucille’s side of the street, near the end of the block.
As we headed down toward it, I could have sworn I saw the guy I thought was Napoleon dart around the far corner, but by the time I got Stefan’s attention, he was gone. Stefan glanced at me as if he was hoping I hadn’t fallen prey to hallucinations.
“Maybe it was a ghost,” I threw off, annoyed.
Though Polly’s house was one of the smallest on our street, the yard was as well tended and attractively landscaped as any in the neighborhood, her weedless brick path lined now with crocuses and narcissi. Polly was flustered to see us, probably because we’d never visited before. And as she let us in, her gauzy blue sleeve making a little paisleyed flag under her arm, I couldn’t help thinking of that sweet elderly witch opening the door in “Bell, Book, and Candle” for Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon. The house reeked of incense, and angel mobiles hung everywhere I looked, twirling languidly above angel sculptures, crystals, candles, and other New Age impedimenta. All the bulky furniture in the small, squarish living room was covered with velvet throws in purple, crimson, and midnight blue, sucking up what light did manage to filter through the heavy dark blinds.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been critical. It was probably a great room for an out-of-body experience or a Vulcan mind-meld.
More agitated than I’d ever seen her before, Polly asked if we wanted some mulled apple cider. It was an unusual choice for spring, but I said yes, since I didn’t want to displease her. Stefan was silent, already in his author’s mode, observing her as she swirled and rustled out of the room.
Her mild-mannered bichon frise, Spartacus, appeared at my feet, looking up with his adorable Ewok-like face. Before I could even bend down to offer him my hand for a sniff, he suddenly tore off behind me as if late for a train, but he didn’t leave the room. He circled the couch and chairs and did it again and again, a silly fuzzy blur of white. Stefan smiled indulgently.
“That’s what they do,” Polly said, returning with two steaming hand-thrown dark mugs she set down on the tree-stump coffee table. “He’s an Aries, but it’s a characteristic of the breed.”
I was relieved to hear that, since I had suspected that Spartacus had simply been driven mad by living with Polly.
“It could be worse,” I said. “He could be into drugs, or cyber porn.”
Polly smiled wanly. Just then, Spartacus stopped at her feet, panting, grinning. She scooped the tiny dog up and plopped him in her lap, where he stretched and nestled for a bit while we talked, then fell asleep. I wondered idly if Stefan and I should get a dog. Neither one of us worked full-time, so it wouldn’t ever be alone for long stretches of time, which I knew was important. Would all this turmoil be easier to take if we had a pet?
Stefan launched right in after some pleasantries about the weather.
“You probably heard about Delaney Kildare?”
Polly nodded, biting her lip.
Stefan turned to me, and I took my cue, saying, “The light was on in the History office after five, so I figured you were there and might have heard something.”
“That’s right.” Polly nodded eagerly, I guess relieved that I wasn’t going to accuse her of murder.
“How late did you work?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Did you hear anything?”
She frowned, eyes on Spartacus where he snored a little in her lap. “I was filing,” she said slowly. “Banging drawers. You know. Oh, and the radio was on. That new country station,” she added brightly. “I just love Shania Twain, don’t you?”
“So there wasn’t anything unusual?”
“I like working late on Friday, it’s easy to get things done,” she said, somewhat inconsequentially, slim hands combing back her hair. As she did so, I realized that not only was she quieter and less energetic than usual, but she looked a bit haggard.
“Did you know Delaney?”
“Of course I knew him,” she snapped, and the abrupt change of tone woke her dog, who muttered a little. “He was once a history graduate student, wasn’t he? Getting his M.A.? So of course I saw him around.” Spartacus slipped from her lap and started on his Grand Prix thing again.
Stefan asked, “Why did he change departments?”
Polly shrugged and told him to ask Dean Bullerschmidt. “He was involved somehow.”
I was struck that the usually garrulous Polly was so close-mouthed, her reticence thrown into higher relief by Spartacus’s manic activity. Stefan eyed me with the signal to leave, but I was convinced Polly was holding something back. At the door, I asked if Detective Valley got the same story as we did. “He probably interviewed you at the office yesterday.”
“It’s not a story!” she shouted. “I’m not a liar, and I told him exactly what I told you!”
Nixon, I said to Stefan outside on the sidewalk. It was the same as Nixon claiming he wasn’t a crook. “Except she doesn’t sweat as much,” I said. He nodded. Letting ourselves in back home, I stopped in the doorway, key in the lock. “I’m assuming she was still there when the campus police arrived, but what if she was gone by then? What if she just forgot to turn off the light, or ran out because she was scared?”
Stefan gently pushed me inside. I disengaged the key and followed him to the kitchen, where we sat at the table. “What’s your point?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t even remember if the light in the History office was on when I left—I was so freaked out. I should have asked her, huh? But I don’t think she’ll want to talk to us again right now.” I beamed. “Hey—maybe getting angry was a stroke of luck. Maybe she’ll stop barging in on us!”
Stefan poured us some Perrier while we puzzled over why Polly had been so defensive. Stefan thought it might simply be reality. “She’s a space cadet, and this is too concrete for her. A murder, an investigation.” But he was smiling, and I could tell he was imagining what fictional possibilities a character like her would have in a situation like this.
“I don’t see why you’re not trying to write mysteries. How many authors have material like this falling at their feet? You wouldn’t have to invent much at all.” As soon as I said it, I realized he might think I was disparaging his fiction. I tried explaining, but it was okay.
“I know you’re trying to be helpful, Nick. And maybe in a way you’re right. Maybe it’s time to rethink my career. If my novels aren’t going anywhere, then I should write something else. But mysteries?” He shook his head. “That’s just not how I see the world.”
“Meaning—?”
“In a mystery, everything gets solved at the end, right? There’s chaos, and then there’s order. Life isn’t that neat.”
“But I’m not talking about life, I’m talking about fiction! You know what Wilde said, ‘The good end happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’”
He smiled.
“Wouldn’t it be fun, Stefan? We could even write it together. You could do the nasty stuff, and I could do the jokes.”
“There’d have to be jokes?”
“For sure. How else could you stand the grim parts?”
“Let’s stick with Polly. Now, she’s so out of touch, I bet that if she saw or heard anything, she might not even have realized it.”
“Stefan, she’s a secretary, and she must be good if she’s working for the History chair. Give her a little credit. And didn’t you notice how she wasn’t doing any of that spirit-in-the sky crap today? No astral projection, no canals on Mars? She seemed normal, for her. And scared, or at least worried.”
Stefan agreed, but it didn’t lead us anywhere.
“Her dog’s cuter than I remember,” I heard myself say.
“You’ve only seen him digging up our yard,” Stefan pointed out.
“Exactly. You didn’t have a dog when you were a kid, did you?”
“No. I told you that before.”
“Just checking. I didn’t, either. Do you think we’d make good parents?”
“We might need some counseling first,” Stefan mused, and at first I thought he was serious. His next comment was, though. “What makes you bring it up now?”