The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

“Well, why would he say it if it didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just beyond my experience in life, is all,” said Landau. “It doesn’t comport with my sense of things, of reality’s stolidness. She was a wild one, Samantha, ungovernable in many ways, but she wasn’t self-ungovernable. And she had a kind of delicacy, especially with young people.”

  “It’s an outlier kind of behavior, definitely, I grant you that. I’ve been reading about her in the New Yorker, by the way. Fabulous article. I can’t get enough of that math stuff, not when someone explains it clearly. What a powerful mind she had—powerful, idiosyncratic rational mind.”

  “She went far beyond the rational, Byrum—how wonderful, how endearing of her.”

  Jad had needed to tell him, tell the detective, to prepare for telling Landau. He was deeply ashamed, this thing had shadowed his whole life, the detective thought. His big fear for years had been that his father would find out and never have anything to do with him again.

  “Now, why would he be worried about that? I’m not a cutting-off sort of person, Byrum. Look at me, I’m an absurd softy, I take in everyone, I even took in Heitor.”

  Yes, yes, but Jad had been afraid, even so. This was primitive stuff, this mixing of parents and sex; it was Greek tragedy stuff. The murder investigation and the approaching trial hadn’t made Jad able to come out and confess it, that’s how powerful it was—only after the killer had been found was he ready.

  Landau shook his head. “I still don’t understand, I’m afraid. Was he prepared to let his father take the fall? Be charged with Samantha’s death, too? That doesn’t suggest wrestling with guilt, only not giving a fuck.”

  Perhaps it would help to try to say what had happened at Landau’s house. Could the detective make a stab at that? he asked politely. All right, here goes:

  “First of all, Jad was there, he now says. He found her, dead in your bed. They’d had some arrangement, she told him to meet her at your house and he still doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know the maid comes on Wednesdays, and probably she just comes in and goes straight upstairs. Lies down in your bed for a nap. Then, she hears voices downstairs—I’m speculating, but she goes down, thinking maybe Jad’s arrived, is coming in by the back deck, but it’s Elfridia, bloody on a tarp. Tied up with torture knots, breasts mutilated, throat half-cut, I don’t know what all. Heitor’s there. Confronts her with the box cutter. Doesn’t slash her, because she isn’t one of his sample, his brown girls. She’s someone he knows, and that throws him off.

  “Runs upstairs. Has a fatal heart attack. Heitor puts on rubber gloves to deal with her, because the blood of one shall never touch the other, that would violate some principle with him. Doesn’t cut her up, either, but does the thing with the vibrator up the behind, as a desecration I guess. Finding her there made him angry with her but with you, too, his idol. The two halves of his mind were coming together—that was exciting, it was overwhelming.”

  “What about Jad, though?” Landau asked. “Where was he this whole time?”

  “Jad arrives later. Had worked a half day at Kaiser then had meetings. I don’t know that he was going up there to have sex with her, maybe just to talk. Finds her in your bed. No sign of the maid because Heitor had carried her away in her car, Samantha’s car. Jad doesn’t stay around. His first thought is you’d killed her, because you’d found out and flipped. He didn’t know what to do—didn’t want to call the cops, that would make big trouble for you, so, he just left.”

  Landau wasn’t sure. It was possible but too antic, too Keystone Kops. He could imagine Samantha running up and down his staircase, though, pursued by a maniac, that image popped readily into his mind. Naked, breasts flinging, long thighs flashing. Beautiful thick hair all disarranged. Staircases and murders, staircases and kitchen knives, what was that from? Oh, Psycho, of course. The film that inaugurated modern times, released 1960. But who was the stuffed mother in this remake, the mummy down in the basement? He was, he was the dummy not the mummy, the stuffed shirt that all the other strands had come together around. Was there something about him that induced such madness, that drove colleagues like Samantha into dereliction and young men like Jad and Heitor Burgos-Pereira over a dangerous edge? Probably. Probably. Probably it was all his fault.

  “Byrum, thanks for putting this together. I’ve talked it over with Jad and we’re not yelling at each other anymore, which is good. The idea of him getting in bed with my all-time most important lover doesn’t hurt so much—maybe because she’s dead, I don’t know. And he is my son, after all. I’m glad he had her, in a way. She was, with all the unbearable things she ever did, a truly fabulous piece of ass.”

  * * *

  Martinez. Clear day, semi-cold. Spring in California doesn’t mean much, nor does autumn, it’s a digital climate, the rain is either on or off, the thrilling cloudless blue is up or not. Jad was at the wheel of his new Honda Insight, driving with ironical attention—he often looked lost in thought, yet still performed well. Maybe he was reflecting on the odd purpose of this journey, or on the Honda Insight itself, a most unflashy car for a former skateboarder. He wasn’t shredding but merely saving the planet now. And where had his furious edge gone? Did it matter?

  In a fast way of understanding his son that had to, therefore, be wrong, Landau imagined that Jad had packed all his rebelliousness into having sex a few times with his father’s lover, and after that he had never much wanted to go off the straight and narrow. Had become stodgy. But he was a good person, seemed happy, and maybe the developmental journey wasn’t over yet. There might be more odd steps along the way. Swerves to come.

  “I’m really afraid, Dad,” Jad said softly. “I’m all in a sweat.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do here? I feel completely at sea. Completely stupid.”

  “We’re both stupid, don’t worry about that. Do what seems least offensive. It’s all a colossal fuckup, a mass blunder for the ages. But now we have a chance to make it a little better. Start out by saying hello.”

  “Am I her father or her brother?”

  “I don’t know. But when you lay eyes on her, you’ll know you’re not nothing to her.”

  Since his imagination was carrying him away, Landau had come up with a new theory of Samantha at his house. She had wanted to talk to both of them that afternoon, to both Landau and his son. Knew that Landau would be home eventually, intended to wait for him as long as it took, wanted to have a little sit-down with her two special fellows. Knew that she was dying, had been having heart events, syncopes, who knows—a person knows, though, a medical person does. All right, now I’ve got something I have to say to you, fellows. Sit down and listen carefully.

  “At least, she worked it out with these people in advance,” he said. “Arranged it so she could come out occasionally and get to know the girl, and the girl could know who she was, and that gives us a little room to maneuver.”

  “Great. That should make it a piece of cake.”

  “You’re excited, Jad, that’s all. Excitement comes out in funny ways. My best hope for it all is that I end up a granddad. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have any best hopes. I have nothing.”

  “Come on. Don’t be a sourpuss. How’s Karin doing with this, by the way? Is she upset?”

  “Oh, God. I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t divorce me. She’s incredibly, incredibly upset.”

  Some late plum trees were still flowering, and wisteria was breaking out—every other house in the neighborhood was bedecked. They got briefly off-route because Martinez had both a John Muir Drive and a John Muir Avenue, and Landau couldn’t read the poorly printed MapQuest page without his reading glasses, which he had left at home. Then they were in the grid of streets of modest wooden dwellings, and here was the picket fence he remembered and the flowerless yard. He thought of the Nipponesque landscaping of the house w
here Heitor had imprisoned Graciela, and he remembered the Asian adoptive mother with a limp and the Japanese man on BART. Mere coincidence? Reality threw these resonances up at you all the time, as if a distracted author were tossing whatever came to hand into the mix.

  They parked the car. Landau waited for his son to catch up with him at the gate, so that they could walk through together. They were exactly on time, and he imagined the family watching them anxiously from indoors, even more on pins and needles than they were, if that was possible. Maybe the father would refuse to shake Landau’s hand. Maybe the brandy had been a mistake, should have been left behind, was likely to establish the wrong tone, an offensively celebratory tone. He imagined the eleven-year-old girl refusing to come out of her room, sobbing in there all afternoon. This was too much for an eleven-year-old to handle, she already had a father and a mother and all the family she needed.

  They walked through, and the front door came open. The young girl, not wearing her spectacles today, dressed in a pretty knee-length frock of dark blue, her hair done up fancy, paused for a second atop the stoop. Then she was hurrying down toward them, already holding out both hands to them, wanting to see them up close, wanting to know them.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank these advisers for their thoughtful and expert responses to his inquiries about criminal procedure, while absolving them of any responsibility for exaggerations or mistakings of their elegantly rendered advice: Michael Vitiello, Distinguished Professor and Scholar, Pacific McGeorge School of Law; Joseph Taylor, Professor of Law, Pacific McGeorge School of Law, and former Prosecuting Attorney in the Sacramento and Ventura County District Attorneys’ Offices; Dr. Elizabeth Albers, Forensic Pathologist, Sacramento County Coroner’s Office; and Venus Johnson, Deputy District Attorney, Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

  About the Author

  Robert Roper is the award-winning author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War (2008) as well as of Fatal Mountaineer (2002), a biography of the Himalayan climber Willi Unsoeld. His books of fiction include Royo County Tales, The Trespassers, Mexico Days, On Spider Creek, and Cuervo Tales. Many of his cultural essays appeared at Obit-mag.com and he has also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, Outside, The American Scholar, and other Web and print-based publications. In 2002 he was awarded the Boardman Tasker Prize, the principal world prize in mountaineering literature, given by the Royal Geographical Society of London and the British Alpine Club. Nabokov in America, a study of the Russian writer’s U.S. years, will appear from Bloomsbury in 2015. He lives in California and Maryland and teaches at Johns Hopkins.