The Death of a Constant Lover

by Lev Raphael

  “I don’t know. Seeing Spartacus up close, maybe. It’s not as if we know a lot of people with dogs. He’s cute, even though he’s Polly’s dog. The racetrack stuff was kind of adorable.”

  “I wonder if thinking about adopting a dog is connected to Jesse and Delaney dying?”

  “Hey, I’m not talking about getting a guard dog.”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. It’s—it’s seeing death and wanting to be more involved with life.”

  I thought that over a little and told Stefan it made sense. “I know it’s a lot of work, and would really change our lives, but what kind of dog would you like if we got one?”

  The phone rang before he could answer, and since I was closer, I picked it up.

  “Professor Hoffman, it’s Margaret Case—are you all right?” she asked in her friendly but formal tone.

  “Sure,” I said, startled, and whispered who it was to Stefan. Stefan said quietly, “Ask her how Delaney died.”

  I nodded.

  Dr. Case was saying, “Remember I said I’d get you the number for her parents in Houghton? I tried it myself, but it’s always busy.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was worried about you. I saw your name in this morning’s paper. It didn’t say anything about how you were—except alive.”

  “Really, I’m okay.”

  “Well, you must be used to dead bodies by now,” she threw off, and I laughed for what seemed like the first time in days. I suppose her gallows humor was what kept her from running around in circles like Spartacus. Whatever its source or function, I was happy to benefit from it. I explained the joke to Stefan, who handed me a pad and pen.

  “I know you’re just itching to get a preview of the report on the latest death, Professor Hoffman—”

  “You have to call me Nick,” I urged. “Even if you want to be Dr. Case. I don’t mind.”

  “Deal. He suffered a minor injury to the head—he was punched, and that broke a tooth. But the cause of death was massive cranial trauma.” Case explained that Delaney had apparently been slammed against the wall in the men’s room, cracking the back of his skull. There were hair, blood, and skull fragments on the wall and plaster and paint in the wound at the back of his head. I jotted notes down, turning the pad around so that Stefan could read.

  “You’re sure about his being pushed? He couldn’t have fallen somehow, slipped? Or deliberately done it himself?”

  “Given the impact, it’s unlikely that he fell. The boy was pushed, and pushed hard. And he didn’t punch himself, then slam his head into a wall. If he wanted to kill himself, there are better ways to go about it.”

  “So whoever did it was very strong?”

  Dr. Case hesitated. “Strong, or outraged. Since there was no evidence of a struggle, no bruising, defensive wounds, nothing under his nails, surprise seems to have been a factor—”

  I pictured someone coming in after him, Delaney turning….

  “—no matter who was responsible, man or woman. Maybe more so, if it was a woman. He was a muscular boy, but not a super hero. And even though the bathroom window was open, there were no reports of a struggle, or noise, or shouting.”

  I scribbled some of this down for Stefan and showed it to him. “How about the time of death?” I asked, knowing that determining it wasn’t an exact science like economics.

  “I’m judging somewhere between four and when you found the body around six P.M.”

  The conversation was starting to wear me down as it brought back the horrible scene in that men’s room, and the glaring, hungry crow. But I’d been so overwhelmed by the shock, by the blood, that I couldn’t really recall a lot of details, so I asked Dr. Case if Delaney had been standing at or near the urinals when it happened, and if someone had snuck up on him.

  “Good question. I don’t think so. He had just urinated, as it turns out, but his pants were zipped and there were traces of soapy water on his hands, so he was actually leaving, I think, or about to. But that’s all I can tell you, Nick. My advice? Stay out of it now. I called because I was concerned, and told you this much because I knew you’d be poking around. But really, stay out of it. Detective Valley doesn’t like how you keep showing up when someone’s been murdered. And he doesn’t like you.”

  “What else is new?” I countered, thanking her for calling, for her concern, and for the info.

  When I hung up, Stefan asked me to pour him some more coffee and then nipped off to the john. While he was gone I found myself regretting not just the mess I was plunging myself into, but that I was doing it on Shabbat, a day that was supposed to be given over to rest and retreat from the outside world, a sanctuary in time. Stefan had over the years come to enjoy the meditative tranquillity, the exaltation of inwardness, as much as I did. Yet here we were, the world way too much with us. I wished at that moment that we were doing more by way of observance, had more of a structure for our one truly sane day of the week. I wished that we did more, made more of Shabbat. But how? I wasn’t wild about the only synagogue in town, where people struck me as either stuffy academics or stuffy businessmen, and even the new young rabbi already seemed embalmed.

  Was this longing for a deeper connection to Shabbat of a piece with thinking about a dog? What was going on with me? Was it about aging? It certainly had nothing to do with nostalgia for home, because to my parents, Shabbat was a set of strictures: no TV, no radio, no movies, no playing, no activity beyond walking to synagogue and taking part in services.

  When Stefan returned to the kitchen, sat down opposite me, and said, “Tell me everything,” I knew he wanted to hear about Dr. Case, and that sharing what I’d been thinking about would be bad timing. But I was tempted.

  Instead I repeated everything that Margaret Case had told me, including the warning. We tried imagining what might have happened in that men’s room. Someone followed Delaney in, or perhaps was already there, and attacked him. Given the lack of a struggle, we agreed that it must have been someone Delaney knew but wasn’t afraid of. Obviously still gunning for Juno, Stefan argued that it must have been a woman, because that would have been more of a surprise, but I couldn’t see it.

  “No,” he said. “Think about it. Killing him right there in Parker Hall where anyone could find you, anyone could walk in? That’s so cold and calculating. Sneaky.”

  I went to the sink to wash out my cup and set it in the drainer, then rejoined him at the table.

  “Men aren’t sneaky? Come on, Stefan, use your imagination—you’re a novelist! It had to be a man, because no one would notice a man going into the men’s room or be surprised seeing him leave. A woman would risk calling attention to herself.”

  “But where are the witnesses? I can picture a woman doing it, someone daring, wild.”

  “Juno?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, let’s say she did kill him? Why?”

  “Why did anyone who could have killed him do it? Bullerschmidt, Iris Bell, Carter, Benevento, Polly.”

  “Let’s just hope Valley doesn’t start suspecting you,” I said, “if he finds out we had an argument about Delaney.” At Stefan’s frown, I said quickly, “Don’t worry—I won’t tell him, it’s not important.”

  Stefan cracked his knuckles and leaned back in his chair. “We should invite him to dinner, ply him with wine, and while he’s surprised, get him to tell us about his investigation.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I’d suggest, and it would never work.”

  He smiled wryly. “I know—that’s why I said it. You can’t always be the one to have the good lines.”

  “So what now?” I asked. We both glanced around the kitchen as if the answer would leap out at us from the simple array of ordinary things. “Will you come with me to talk to Bullerschmidt?”

  “The dean?”

  “That’s the one. Polly said he was involved with Delaney moving from History to EAR, and he was outside Parker, and he did say his hands were wet. The man’s got killer written all over hi
m.”

  Stefan washed out his cup. “I don’t know, Nick. He’s a bureaucrat, an administrator. He’ll strangle people in red tape, drown them in memos, crush them with committee work—but actually commit murder? Besides, he’s the dean of our college, we can’t just drop in.”

  “I know that. But I never get to see him on campus, and besides, it would have to be an official visit. Seeing him at home is just a neighborly call.”

  “Bullerschmidt lives in Michigan Estates—that’s a mile away.”

  I sighed. “Are you going to carp, or you going to help? I have to pursue this, I can’t let it go and sit around forever waiting to find out what happened. But I don’t want to go it alone.”

  He said, “Sure.” And if it wasn’t quite as stirring as crossed swords and “One for all and all for one,” it was good enough for me.

  After checking the dean’s address, we set off on the short drive in Stefan’s Volvo. Michigan Estates, due north of us, was an exclusive walled community with enormous, lavishly landscaped 1960s-era homes, many of them worth over half a million dollars, which is a lot in Michiganapolis since housing in the Midwest is more reasonable than in any other part of the country.

  We parked at the end of the cul-de-sac where he lived so our car wasn’t visible and approached the house as if expecting wild dogs to tear us apart. Faced with glossy white bricks, it was right out of a movie: large and vaguely oriental under an ominous low-slung roof with a deep overhang guaranteed to make for a sepulchral interior.

  Before we even knocked or rang the oversize doorbell, one of the enormous double doors swung open to reveal Nina, the dean’s well-dressed, reed-thin wife. I’d seen her at some official gatherings and decided that she was either tragically shy or deeply miserable because her mouth seemed perpetually on the edge of trembling. I could imagine that being married to the dean was as demoralizing as living in a village clinging to the side of an active volcano.

  Today she looked as tormented as usual, despite the elegant aquamarine silk dress with matching pumps and a pearl torsade. We introduced ourselves and said we wished to talk to her husband.

  “He can’t see anyone,” she stuttered. Behind her I could make out that the house was as shadowy inside as I’d guessed. But before either one of us could plead or insist, Bullerschmidt, who’d obviously been listening, loomed at the door and swept his wife aside. “Lovely of you to drop by,” he said, without smiling. “Nina, bring us some coffee.” He was wearing a huge smoking jacket with braid-trimmed lapels and a richly patterned ascot.

  Bullerschmidt shepherded us across the marble-floored foyer right into the dark, crowded library, which looked like a Ralph Lauren Home Collection ad, complete with spaniels snoozing by the fireplace, where one log burned a bit fitfully. Sitting in one of the two club chairs opposite the nailhead leather sofa where he perched like a pharaoh, I felt suffocated by heat and clichés: the leather-bound author sets, the hunting prints, the lead crystal bottle stoppers on the Renaissance-style bar cabinet, the smug air of anglo-fraudulence.

  More gracious than I’d ever seen him, Bullerschmidt made some small talk about various SUM matters, none of them controversial, clearly killing time until beaten-down Nina returned with the coffee, which she set on a red lacquered coffee table designed like a chinoiserie trunk. She decamped from the room as if she thought we were dangerous, closing the door hurriedly behind her.

  As he poured coffee for us from what I suspected was a Georgian silver pot, I wondered why I couldn’t be a dean making over $150,000 a year to intimidate people and produce blizzards of pointless paperwork.

  The pretty cups didn’t prepare me for how bitter the coffee was. Bullerschmidt didn’t seem to notice, unless he liked it that way.

  “Following up on Detective Valley?” the dean said pleasantly—for him. “Do you think he can’t do his job well without amateur assistance?”

  I felt as tongue-tied and ashamed as a tiny grade schooler called before the principal for a major infraction; what were we doing here?

  “I know all about your previous escapades. You weren’t hired for your forensic skills, you know. You were hired to teach.”

  Stefan tried to rescue me. “Nick was the one to find Delaney’s body. It was very traumatic, for him, and—”

  “—and you’re trying to help him achieve what they call closure?” he said scornfully. “By quizzing all the ‘suspects’ on their whereabouts? Or is it just me you’ve come to exercise your ratiocination upon? Well, since I’m sure that our Detective Valley has better things to do than talk to the Snoop Sisters, here’s my story. Yes, I was in Parker Hall yesterday afternoon, on the way back from a very late lunch with the provost in town. I stopped in Parker to use the men’s room. But not the one on the third floor, or the second. The one on the first.” Spreading wide his hands to highlight his bulk, he said, “I’m not in the habit of ignoring a perfectly good bathroom to climb stairs I don’t have to. I neither saw nor heard anything the hysterically minded would call suspicious. Satisfied?”

  Since he asked, I plunged on. “Delaney said he got you to approve funding for his becoming my TA because you were good friends.” It was something of a lie, but I said it to see if it would shake him out of his elephantine composure. It didn’t.

  “I’m sure he was exaggerating for effect,” the dean rumbled. “He made a good case for the assistantship, that’s all. I’m sure you’d agree that he was a very personable young man. It wasn’t a significant sum of money. Why shouldn’t you have a teaching assistant? That way more students can take the class without burdening you. No doubt it’ll be a very popular course. We are in the business of satisfying our students, or haven’t you heard?” And he peered down his tuber of a nose at me.

  “Oh,” I said, flattened by his rhetorical juggernaut. But then I rallied a little. “Why did Delaney move from the History Department to EAR?”

  “I don’t know. Shifting intellectual pursuits, I’d guess.”

  “But didn’t you have something to do with that?”

  “I barely knew him,” Bullerschmidt said with a sneer.

  “I find all this hard to believe,” Stefan said, sparked to anger by Bullerschmidt’s ponderous show of contempt.

  The dean said, “Mr. Borowski”—I’m sure stripping him of Dr. or Professor was both an insult and a warning—“I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe. That an assistant professor like your little friend here, who’s just starting the tenure review process, would go out of his way on a weekend to harass the dean of his college.” He put his cup down on the tray, and the gentle clink was to me like the pounding of a judge’s gavel. He eyed me with open fascination, as if he were one of those eighteenth-century English aristocrats amusing himself by surveying inmates of Bedlam through his monocle.

  Chastened, we sat there silently until the dean said coldly, “We’re done now. You can leave.”

  We took him at his word. Nina Bullerschmidt stood out in the foyer, holding one of the doors open for our ignominious exit.

  Our abashed silence continued on the brief ride home. Once back in the kitchen—our apparent command and control center—we did the only sensible thing. We each had a bowl of Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream with some Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies.

  12

  So where did this day’s inquiries leave us? We put off debating that while we made a caesar salad with grilled chicken for lunch. Stefan was in charge of the washing, drying, and tearing the romaine and preparing the chicken, while I handled the dressing, mashing anchovies into olive oil, adding crushed garlic, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce, and whisking it all together. We broke out the small hoard of garlic croutons I’d actually made myself one recent afternoon in a fit of Martha Stewart madness. These moments were like time portals opening up in a sci-fi film: captivating, but unpredictable and potentially dangerous. They could lead to unbridled wallpapering.

  The mixing and clanking, the mild, familiar joy of working together in t
he kitchen, our paths weaving in and out, helped calm me after the humiliating encounter with Bullerschmidt.

  “Not humiliating,” Stefan corrected when we sat down to eat our Shabbos lunch after blessing the wine and the challah.

  “How so?” I crunched one of the delicious, buttery croutons.

  “He’s lying about his relationship with Delaney.”

  “Of course he is. Whenever an administrator claims something’s good for students, you know he’s blowing smoke. Students are the very last thing they care about—protecting their butts and expanding their power is what’s important.” It was well known that compared to other big midwestern schools, SUM was exceptionally top-heavy with untalented but entrenched administrators pulling down exorbitant salaries. Even the state legislators had complained about it, but nothing had changed. Bullerschmidt, a junior-league Pol Pot, was a prime example of bureaucratic bloat and abuse, widely loathed for his rudeness, his overbearing presence at poisonous and often unnecessary breakfast meetings, his dreaded meteor shower of e-mail when you worked on something with him, and his persistent complaint that no one on campus was willing to work. The implication was that he was alone, slaving away to make SUM a better school.

  “He’s lying,” Stefan repeated. “Why else would he have to threaten both of us?”

  “Well, someone like that thrives on smacking people down. He’s a kind of vampire; he feeds off everyone else’s misery.”

  “But he knows he can’t carry out the threats. I’ve got tenure, and you can claim discrimination if you get turned down for tenure.”

  I goggled. “Is that your failsafe plan for me? Why haven’t you said anything before?”

  “Because it’ll be ugly, and I hope we don’t get cornered. Maybe the Norton Edition will do the trick. If not, or if he’s out to get you, then we can always go nuclear, right?” He held out his hands and shrugged, looking very French.

  “Wow.” Fighting for tenure—now, that was a new thought. I had never been given to public protests or even signing petitions, perhaps swayed by my immigrant parents’ sense—out of gratitude that they had escaped the European inferno—that they should never make waves here. This was something Stefan and I shared, even though our parents were from different parts of Europe and very different Jewish worlds. He said it was fear, though, and not gratitude.