The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  He hadn’t had any kind of conflict with the professor, and the relationship between them might be described as “warm and friendly.” The professor had never told Flynn that he felt threatened by anyone or anything. As a rule, Wieder was easygoing and liked a joke. He was happy to talk about his new book, which was due to be published the following year, and which he thought was going to be a big success, both academically and commercially.

  Unfortunately for him, Flynn didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder. At the end of the manuscript, he wrote that he’d set off for the professor’s house twenty minutes or so after the visit from Timothy Sanders, which would mean around six p.m. I mapped it out, and it’d have taken him another twenty minutes to get there, perhaps longer, because of the weather, and about as long to come back. But he told the investigators that he’d gone to Wieder’s at around nine p.m., as he’d wanted to talk to the professor about something to do with the library before he went on Christmas break. He also said that he’d gotten back home at ten p.m., after having a chat with the professor, and that he’d gone to bed shortly after that. Had he lied during the investigation, or had he been lying when he’d written the manuscript? Or had his memory deceived him?

  In those years, as Flynn himself had confirmed in his manuscript, the crime rate was quite high in New Jersey, especially after the sudden influx of meth and crack into the suburbs. A few days after Wieder’s death, between Christmas and New Year’s, just two streets away from his house, there was a double homicide. An elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Easton, aged seventy-eight and seventy-two respectively, were killed in their home. The detectives found that the perpetrator had broken in at three a.m., murdered the couple, and then burgled the house. The murder weapons were a carving knife and a hammer. Given that the murderer had taken the cash and jewels he’d found in the house, robbery had definitely been the motive, and in actual fact there turned out not to be many similarities with the Wieder case.

  This didn’t stop the cops. They took advantage of the fact that a suspect was arrested just one week later, as he was trying to sell the jewels stolen from the elderly couple’s house to a pawnshop in Princeton. So Martin Luther Kennet, age twenty-three, an African American with a record and a known drug user, became the official prime suspect in the inquiry into the murder of Joseph Wieder.

  From then on—this was in early January 1988—Richard Flynn was mentioned only in passing in the press coverage about the murder. Wieder’s sister, Inge Rossi, inherited his entire estate, apart from a small sum of money that the deceased had left to Simmons in his will. “Haunted House for Sale” was the title of a story published on April 20, 1988, in the Princeton Gazette; the house in question was that of the late Professor Wieder. The reporter claimed that the property had developed a sinister reputation after the tragedy, and that a couple of people in the neighborhood swore that they’d seen strange lights and shadows moving inside, so the real estate agents were probably going to have a hard job selling it.

  Martin Luther Kennet turned down the deal proposed by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office—he’d have been spared a death sentence if found guilty—and claimed he was innocent to the very end.

  He admitted that he was a small-time drug dealer in the university campus area and on Nassau Street, and that one of his occasional customers, whose name he didn’t know, had left him the jewels stolen from the Eastons as a guarantee in exchange for a quantity of pot. He didn’t have an alibi for the night of the couple’s murder because he’d been at home alone, watching some videotapes he’d rented the day before. When the man who’d left him the jewels didn’t come back to reclaim them, he (not knowing they were stolen) had taken them to the pawnshop. If he’d known where they’d come from, why would he have been so dumb as to try to sell them in broad daylight, at a shop famous for ratting to the cops? As for Wieder, he’d never even heard of the man. If he remembered correctly, on the evening of the professor’s murder he’d been at a video arcade, and he hadn’t left until early the next morning.

  Kennet’s lawyer was a public defender appointed by the court, with an appropriate name for a brave fighter against injustice: Hank Pelican. Everybody wanted to get the trial over with as quickly as possible and save taxpayer dollars, so after just a couple of weeks the jury said “guilty” and the judge added “life.” The death penalty still existed in the state of New Jersey at the time—it was to be abolished in 2007—but the reporters noted that the judge had taken into account Kennet’s age when he’d decided not to hand down the death sentence for the Eastons’ murder, despite the prosecutor’s demands. I figured that the evidence presented by the prosecution to Judge Ralph M. Jackson, an old gunslinger with a lot of experience, probably hadn’t convinced him at all. Unfortunately, it had been quite sufficient for the jurors.

  In any case, the prosecutors decided not to accuse Kennet of Wieder’s murder. They hadn’t come up with any other leads. Other stories made the news, so the dust slowly settled. The West Windsor murder remained a cold case.

  I watched the eleven p.m. news on NY1, a habit from my days as a reporter. Then I made myself a cup of coffee and drank it by the window, trying to connect the information from Flynn’s manuscript with what I’d found out online.

  The relationship between Professor Wieder and his protégée, Laura Baines, which had maybe been more than just a professional one, should have been well known among the professors in the Department of Psychology, so I wondered why she hadn’t been interviewed by the police. She could have had another set of keys cut at any time, even if the ones the professor had given her were with Richard Flynn that evening. But nobody seemed to have brought her name to the attention of the cops or the press: neither Flynn, nor the professor’s colleagues, nor her own colleagues, nor Derek Simmons, who’d also been questioned a couple of times. It was as if the relationship between the two had to be kept from public knowledge at all costs.

  The professor was a strong guy; he’d boxed in his youth and still worked out regularly. He’d survived the first blow and had tried to struggle with his attacker, even after his forearms had been fractured. If a woman had been involved, she’d have had to be exceptionally strong to stand up to a counterattack from such a man, especially one who was fighting for his life. What’s more, the very brutality of the killing seemed to point to the murderer being a man. It was unlikely that Laura Baines—who Flynn described as quite slender and not in good shape at the time—could have been the assailant. And the most important thing: What would be her motive? Why would Laura Baines have wanted to kill the man who’d helped her and on whom her career had most likely still depended?

  Nevertheless, Flynn had told his partner that Laura had “ruined his life” and that “he was going to make her pay for it.” Did he suspect her of murder, or was he merely reproaching her for having dumped him and for leaving him to face the music alone? But his actions didn’t seem very logical. If Laura was guilty of leaving him in the lurch, why hadn’t he taken his revenge during the investigation, when he was a suspect and didn’t even have an alibi? Why hadn’t he exposed her to the press or tried to shift at least some of the blame in her direction? Why had he protected her then, only to change his mind nearly three decades later? Why did he think Laura had destroyed his life? He’d escaped from the prosecutor’s clutches in the end. Had something else happened after that?

  I fell asleep, still thinking about everything, almost certain that beneath the surface the case concealed something much darker and more mysterious than Flynn had revealed in the partial manuscript or the police had discovered at the time. I was grateful to Peter for entrusting me with the investigation.

  There was one other detail that was vaguely drawing my attention—a date, a name, something that didn’t fit at all. But I was exhausted, and falling asleep, and I couldn’t quite place it. It was like when you glimpse something from the corner of your eye for a fraction of a second, and afterward you’re not sure whether you really saw it or not.


  THREE

  The next morning I drew up a list of people I had to locate and, if possible, persuade to talk to me. Laura Baines was at the top, but I had no idea how to track her down. At the same time, I started to look through my old address books, trying to find a contact or some connection in the West Windsor Township Police Department, which hadn’t moved since the time of the incident in the late 1980s.

  A good few years back, during an inquiry I was carrying out for the Post, I’d met a guy named Harry Miller. He was a private detective from Brooklyn who specialized in missing persons investigations. Short and overweight, dressed in a rumpled suit, wearing a necktie so skinny that you could barely see it and a cigarette behind his ear, he was like a character straight out of a 1940s noir movie. He lived out in Flatbush, and he was always looking for solvent customers, given that he was constantly broke. He was a gambler, regularly betting money on the horses, and mostly losing it. I called him on his cell phone and he answered from a noisy bodega, the clients yelling to be heard over a salsa beat.

  “Hi, Harry, what’s up?” I asked.

  “Keller? Long time no see. Well, another day on the Planet of the Apes,” he replied in a surly voice. “I’m trying to pretend I’m not human, so I won’t wind up in a cage. Do the same. Now tell me what’s popping, son.”

  I filled him in on what the case was broadly about, asking him to jot down two names—Derek Simmons and Sarah Harper—and told him what I knew about the pair. As he was taking notes, I heard the clatter of a plate being set down on his table and he said thanks to someone named Grace.

  “Who are you working for now?” he asked suspiciously.

  “For a literary agency,” I said.

  “Since when have literary agencies gotten involved in this kind of investigation? There must be quite a bit of cash in it, eh?”

  “Sure there is—don’t worry on that score. I can wire you some dough right now. I’ve got other names, but I want you to start with these two.”

  He seemed relieved.

  “I’ll see what I can do. Derek should be easy, but all you’ve given me on the woman, Sarah Harper, is that she got a master’s in psychology from Princeton, probably 1988. Not a lot to go on, dude. I’ll call you in a couple of days,” he assured me and gave me his PayPal details before hanging up.

  I opened my laptop and wired him some cash, then sat back thinking about Laura Baines again.

  Six or seven months ago, before Flynn began working on his manuscript, something must have happened to push him in that direction, something out of the ordinary and significant enough to change his whole view of the events that had taken place in 1987, just as he’d hinted in the query letter to Peter. When she met Peter, Danna Olsen had been disturbed enough by his illness, so she might have overlooked some details that could be highly important to my investigation. I decided that it would be best to start by having a chat with her, and I called her at the number I’d gotten from Peter. There was no answer, so I left a message on her voice mail, explaining who I was and saying that I’d call back. I didn’t get a chance to, though, because she called me back just a couple of minutes later.

  I introduced myself and found out that Peter had already talked to her on the phone about me, telling her that I was gathering information about Joseph Wieder’s death for a true-crime book.

  She was still in New York but was planning on leaving in a week or two. She’d decided not to sell the apartment, so she’d contacted a real estate agent to rent it out. However, she’d asked the agent not to list it until after she’d left—she wouldn’t have been able to bear the thought of people poking their noses around the place while she was there. She’d donated some stuff to charity and had started boxing up the things she meant to take with her. A cousin from Alabama who had a pickup truck was going to come and help her move. She told me all these things as if she were talking to a pal, though her voice sounded monotonous and robotic, and she took long pauses between words.

  I invited her to lunch, but she told me she’d rather meet me at her home, so I set off toward Penn Station on foot. Twenty minutes later, I rang the intercom at her building.

  The apartment looked upside down, like any home on the eve of a move. The hall was full of cardboard boxes sealed with duct tape. The contents of each was inscribed in black marker, so I was able to see that most of them were full of books.

  She invited me into the living room and brewed some tea. We drank it while we made small talk. She told me how shocked she’d been when, during Hurricane Sandy, a young woman had picked a fight with her while she was waiting in line at a gas station. Back home in Alabama, she’d been told about old floods and hurricanes, but they were epic tales, concerning neighbors who’d risked their lives to save people, heroic cops and firemen who’d rescued folks in wheelchairs in the midst of the cataclysm. In a big city, she said, you wondered which you had to fear the most in such cases: the fury of nature or the reaction of other people.

  She had a nicely arranged hairdo and healthy skin, set off by the plain black dress she was wearing. I wondered how old she was—she looked younger than her late partner’s forty-eight years. She had a small-town air, in a pleasant way. Her words and gestures suggested an upbringing from a time when people used to ask each other how they were in the morning and genuinely mean it.

  From the very start she asked me to call her Danna, and I did so.

  “Danna, you knew Mr. Flynn much better than I can from having read the fragment of his manuscript. Did he ever talk to you about Professor Wieder or Laura Baines, or about his time at Princeton when they met?”

  “Richard was never a very open person. He was always reclusive and gloomy, usually distant with people, so he had few social acquaintances and not one close friend. He saw his brother very rarely. He lost his pa when he was at college, and his ma died from cancer in the late nineties. In the five years we were together, nobody ever visited us and we never paid anyone any visits. His relationships at work were strictly professional, and he wasn’t in touch with the people he’d gone to college with.”

  She paused and poured more tea.

  “Once he received an invitation to an event at the Princeton Club, on West Forty-Third Street. It was a kind of reunion, and the organizers had found his address. I tried to persuade him that we should go together, but he refused. He curtly told me that he didn’t have any pleasant memories of his time at college. He was telling the truth. I know, I’ve read the fragment of the manuscript—Peter gave me a copy. Though maybe it was that after the episode with that woman, Laura Baines, he reset all his memories, which is what usually happens, and his view of that time became a dark one. He didn’t have any kind of mementos, photos or other knickknacks, to remind him of that time. Nothing but a copy of the magazine he mentions in the manuscript, Signature, where he’d published some short stories, which an old acquaintance had given him as a present when he came across it by chance in a bookstore. I’ve put it in one of the boxes already, though if you like I can dig it out. I don’t have any pretensions to being an expert in literature, but his stories struck me as exceptional.

  “In any case, I understand why people usually kept their distance from Richard. Probably most of them saw him as a misanthrope, and maybe he was, to a certain extent. But when you genuinely came to know him, you realized that underneath the stony surface he’d built up over the years, he was a very good man. He was cultivated, and you could discuss almost anything with him. He was fundamentally honest and prepared to help anybody who’d have asked him. That’s why I fell in love with him and moved here. I didn’t agree to be with him because I was lonely or because I wanted to get away from a small town in Alabama, but because I was genuinely in love with him.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” she concluded. “I’ve told you a lot about Richard, but it’s Professor Wieder you’re interested in, isn’t it?”

  “You said you’ve read the excerpt—”

  “Yes, I’ve re
ad it. I tried to find the rest of the manuscript, especially since I’ve been curious as to what happened next. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to. The only explanation is that Richard eventually changed his mind and erased it from his computer.”

  “Do you think the woman who called him that evening was Laura Baines? The woman he told you afterward had ‘ruined his life’?”

  For a while Danna didn’t answer my question. She was lost in her thoughts, as if she’d forgotten I was there. Her eyes traveled around the room, as if she were looking for something; then without another word she got up and went into the next room, leaving the door open. She came back after a couple of minutes and sat down in the armchair she’d just left.

  “Perhaps I might be able to help you,” she said in a rather official-sounding tone, one she hadn’t used up until then. “But I want you to promise me something: that in what you’ll write, when you write it, you won’t do any damage to Richard’s memory, regardless of the results of your research. You say you’re interested in Wieder, so Richard’s character isn’t necessarily relevant to you. You can omit certain things that concern him and him alone. Do you promise?”

  I’m not saint material, and sometimes, as a reporter, I’d lied a whole sack of crap trying to grab a piece of information necessary for a story. But I told myself that she deserved my being honest with her.

  “Danna, as a journalist, it’s almost impossible for me to promise you something like that. If I find out anything important about Wieder’s life or career that was directly connected to Richard, there’s no way I can omit it. But don’t forget that he’d written about the events, that he’d wished to make them public. You say he changed his mind and pressed the delete button. I don’t think so. I guess that it’s more likely that he hid the manuscript somewhere. He was a practical kind of person. I don’t think he’d have toiled over a manuscript for weeks and weeks, during which time he must have thought about every aspect implied by his intention, only then to erase it just like that. I’m almost positive that the manuscript still exists somewhere, and that Richard wanted to see it published right up to his very last moment.”