by David Waters
“Well, well,” he said, “what brings the two of you over here?”
“Visiting the scene of the crime. We wanted to take a look at Monaghan’s old office.”
“What in heavens for?”
“Nothing in particular.”
He laughed. “A waste of time I’m afraid. Monaghan’s office has had at least four occupants since then, and at least as many redecorations.”
“Was your office always where it is now? I thought you said you had the office next to his.”
“Used to, but down the other way.” He pointed down the corridor. “But the whole floor has been redesigned, in part to give the dean a much larger space.” I glanced down the corridor and recognized Gooden’s corner office.
“Symansky had his office in this building as well, didn’t he?”
He frowned. “Can’t remember for certain. But now that you mention it, yes, it was in this building somewhere.”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m on my way to the faculty club. Care to join me?” But there was no enthusiasm in his offer and he seemed relieved when we turned it down.
“No. We’d better be on our way.”
Hendricks headed towards the stairwell. We followed. As we went down the stairs to the main floor, he said, “I telephoned Naomi.”
“Oh, yes?” I said. I tried to stare him into silence. He didn’t get the message. “She told me that you had dropped by for a visit.” I could feel Gina tense behind me.
“Did you know she was a lesbian?” I asked him.
“Lesbian?”
“Yes.” I could sense that Gina was hanging on to every word.
The information had startled him. “You’re kidding!”
“I don’t think so.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“She has a flat in the gay village. Shares it with a tough young woman who is very protective of her.”
“Well, well,” he said. His shoulders seemed to sag. He gave Gina a sad smile. “Who would have thought it.”
We parted at the main door. He picked up his pace as he headed towards the faculty club. Back in the quadrangle, Gina stared at me tight lipped.
“Men!” She said with both anger and distrust. I remained silent. I don’t know whether she was chastising me for singling out Naomi Bronson as a lesbian, or for not letting her know I had gone to see her.
“So what did she have to say.”
I spoke in a flat voice. “She doesn’t dispute your father’s innocence. Said she would be willing to talk to you. But not to me. You’re to call her next Monday.”
“Why not before?”
“She’s going out of town. She despised her husband. Called him cold and arrogant. Said he had known about your father’s affair. He had not been the least bit jealous. He had found it amusing.” I ran out of things to say.
“So why didn’t you take me with you?”
“I don’t know.” I began to walk across the quadrangle. “Anyway she wouldn’t have told you anything more, at least not in my presence.”
“How do you know.”
“She said so.”
“So why didn’t you call me? I could have tried to see her last night.”
“Because she said she was going out of town, that she would speak to you next week. And not before. Besides by then you had gone out to see a movie.”
“Only because you didn’t return my damn call!”
“I know. Look, I’m sorry. But I told you I prefer to work alone.”
“I know that! But you can at least let me know when you’re going to talk to someone. I’m not always going to insist on tagging along. I mean, I don’t intend to play Dr. Watson to your Sherlock Holmes!”
I grinned. “I’ve apologized. From now on I’ll keep you informed.”
She sighed. She knew there was no point in continuing the argument. “Is she really a lesbian now?”
“I’m pretty sure of it.”
I thought of her father. And the pointlessness of his affair. I wondered if she was thinking of him as well. We sat on a bench in the center of the quadrangle. I lit a cigarette and stared out into space.
“What are you thinking about?” She said finally.
“Everyone in that group seemed to be living lives that were a lie. Except Monaghan maybe.”
“Do you include my father in that category?”
“There must have been a brief period when he lied about the affair.”
She shook her head. “He may have tried to keep it a secret. But I don’t think he lied about it when my mother confronted him. My parents had their faults, but I never saw them as liars. And what about Gooden?”
“When I spoke to him yesterday, he lied to me about how well he knew Monaghan. That is, of course, if we believe Hendricks. But then Hendricks may have been lying to me too. He obviously doesn’t like Gooden.” I gave a disgusted laugh. “What a strange maze we’ve walked into. Odd, too, isn’t it, how Hendricks seemed to enjoy yesterday talking about a period which must have been very unpleasant for him at the time. Hanging out with a group that barely tolerated him. Probably even despised him. Maybe it was the booze. I don’t know. It just struck me as a bit unusual.”
“I can understand that.”
“Can you? Well I can’t.”
“I bet you’ve never belonged to a self-help group.”
“No. Can’t say that I have.”
She tossed her head in mock wonderment. “Man, you do live in a patriarchal world!”
“Stop being simplistic.” I said. “It doesn’t help.”
“Okay, okay.” She said. “But you should understand that it’s almost a policy for women to meet in small groups to share past experiences. And this may come as a surprise to you, but we do get relief, and even some pleasure from it. You and I were probably the first people Hendricks had a chance to talk to about an essentially negative period in his life. It was probably cathartic! And yes, even pleasurable.”
I shrugged. “Bully for him, then.” But I didn’t quite buy her explanation. “He seemed to hold a lot back for someone who wanted catharsis,” I muttered. The uneasiness he exhibited still bothered me.
“So what do we do next?” Gina asked, changing the subject.
“Go back to my place. Examine the stuff we got from Joe Gibbs. Organize a visit to the Symanskys.”
“For when?”
“This weekend.”
“Why not strike while we’re hot?” She said with just a hint of sarcasm. Understandable, perhaps. She was probably still riled about my solo meeting with the former Mrs. Monaghan. I know I would have been. “Because I need time to prepare myself properly. And because we have a ball game to go to on Friday.”
“And it takes precedence! A lousy ball game?” She seemed genuinely puzzled as well as annoyed. “You do really want me to meet with this cop who believed my father was guilty?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I want you to sow the seeds of doubt in his mind. He still believes your father was guilty. I’ve asked him to get out the old file. He finally agreed to try. I want to see how much ground they covered back then. I want to find out whom the police questioned and who said what. Compare it with what they’re telling us now. Any discrepancies may give us a lead.
CHAPTER SIX
On Friday, I went to pick up Gina to go to the ball game with Phil Ryan. I was worried about Gina. We had talked on the phone a number of times. She had not offered to pitch in with any of the petty aspects of this kind of work that thoroughness required. And she was spending more time with her new found friend, Linda Kahane. Her friend moved in a sleazy crowd. De riguer, given her profession. I hoped Gina had enough sense to stay away from them. But I am not my sister’s keeper, I tried to remind myself.
On the drive to Olympic Stadium, she asked me about Ryan.
“He was a pretty good detective,” I said for openers.
“Ha!”
“And he’s not ha
ppy at having been put out to pasture prematurely. I didn’t say he was perfect. But he’s not your enemy.” We listened to the hiss of the tires as we sped along the Ville Marie Expressway.
“If he still thinks my father was guilty, he will be.”
I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this encounter. She was clearly not looking forward to meeting him, and I knew he was anything but enthusiastic about meeting her. But maybe they were just putting up a defensive screen in case the meeting turned sour.
We met at the entrance to the Section D seats near third base. When I introduced them to each other, he extended his hand. She shook it. Not exactly a peace offering, but some of the tension went out of the air. The Expos pitching fell apart in the second inning, and their hitters would probably have missed the kind of puff balls I could have thrown. By the fifth inning the seats around us had emptied and conversation about other matters had become possible.
“So you believed my father was guilty,” Gina muttered.
Ryan sighed. “The evidence was strong enough to put him on trial.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“He was at the scene of the crime the night the murder was committed. His fresh fingerprints were in the office. His relationship with Mrs. Monaghan provided a motive, at least for the kind of confrontation with Professor Monaghan which could have resulted in Monaghan’s death. When we questioned him, he was obviously in a state of deep depression. He did not protest any of the evidence.”
“But he didn’t confess.”
“No. But no one expected him to.”
“In fact he told you he did not murder Professor Monaghan.”
“True. But he said that kind of pro forma.”
I was sitting between them, shifting my head left and right as they spoke as if I were at a tennis match rather than a baseball game. “Could you explain that?” I asked puzzled.
“It was the way he said it.” Ryan explained. “His tone was indifferent. He sounded like a man who had given up hope. It was not unusual. Experienced detectives almost expect it from people who are guilty of unpremeditated manslaughter, particularly if they have had no previous experience with that kind of violence. It’s as if the act caught them by surprise. They’re in a state of trauma. They’re not yet ready to explain the how and the why. Or their degree of guilt, which may be minimal.”
Gina had been watching his face carefully. “But you charged him with first degree murder.”
Ryan nodded. He too had lost interest in the game. The Expos had yet to get someone past first base.
“But,” Ryan said, “the charge would probably have been downgraded, if and when he decided to explain how and why it had happened.”
“But he was innocent.”
It was Ryan’s turn to study her face. “Tom has told me of your certainty about his innocence. Why are you so sure? The fact that the case was dropped only acknowledges his legal innocence.”
“The legal question doesn’t interest me. The law,” Gina scoffed, “is an ass. Everyone knows that. It’s making amends for what happened to him after he was released that I care about. I care about that because of how he will be remembered, because of what it might mean to my mother, and because of what it might mean to me.”
Her emotional concerns had not side-tracked him. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
I would have been happier if he had shown some sympathy. I put it down to his years of being a hard-nosed detective. But Gina did not seem to care. It was almost as if she wanted him to be tough and unemotional.
“He wrote me a long letter a month before he died.” This was news to me. Ryan and I both waited. “I think he knew he was dying. He wanted to be sure I knew everything that he knew about what had happened. He wanted to be sure, also, that I would continue to believe in his innocence after he was dead. He emphasized that a number of times and with a reason.”
“What reason?” I asked.
“Because he believed the real murderer, to protect himself, would subtly let the word out, once my father was dead, that my father had indeed been guilty.”
“Did he suspect anyone in particular?” I asked. I was annoyed that she had kept this pertinent bit of information from me.
“No.”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. Surely he must have advanced some thoughts about the possible motives of others who had been part of that inner circle. But maybe not. I had little experience about letters from dying men. The Expos began a rally and our attention was forced back to the game by the screams of the die-hard fans who were still in the park.
I was surprised to find myself watching with lukewarm enthusiasm. Last year’s strike still bothered me. So too did the loss of key players to teams with big money south of the border. I used to listen to every game, sometimes late into the night when the Expos were playing on the West Coast. Beside me Phil Ryan was shouting encouragement. I looked at the field of players and their hunger for the big bucks. I could no longer cheer for them now, anymore than I could cheer for Ted Turner or members of the Saudi royal family. The rally petered out. A glum silence descended on the stadium. Gina resumed where she had left off.
“You see, he really did not know whom to suspect because he had lost his grip. That’s also why he could no longer teach or function as an historian. To teach history you have to believe in your capacity to understand at least something about what has happened in the past. He had believed in his friends at the university. People he thought he understood, people he believed understood him. With his arrest all of that got turned upside down. Events had traumatized him. He could make no sense of what had happened. As he put it in the letter, his world had turned into a purgatory of smoke and mirrors. When he opened a book or tried to teach, words seem to float about and change meaning on him in mid-sentence.”
“He could have got counseling.” As soon as I spoke, I wanted to take back the words. What do I know about such things?
“He tried that. But it didn’t work. He wrote that he became a frightened man. Never knowing when a few days of normalcy would be replaced by weeks of horror and despondency. It was his fears, the humiliation, and the shame he felt at his inability to control those fears that finally drove him away from us. My mother was aware of what he was going through. I wasn’t. I only saw the front that he tried to put up to protect himself, and us, I guess. He wrote that doing simple tasks, washing floors, cleaning up, kept the fears at bay best. But in the end he could not even look at wood or stones without the knowledge that they were not what they seemed and that he could never know them for what they really were.”
“I think you’ve lost me.” Ryan said. “Wood and stones are wood and stones and nothing more.”
The ball game had dwindled down to a depressing end. A strike-out, a pitiful grounder, and a weak pop-up to center field. But we remained in our seats. Gina tried to explain. “I once watched a documentary on PBS where some scientists using computer graphics explained that a baseball and a baseball bat are really nothing more than a lot of magnetized space, with atoms and particles rushing around doing god knows what! But the important thing was that they were certainly not the hard, solid objects we think we perceive with our senses.”
“Okay. Maybe the scientists are right,” Ryan said simply, “but so what? Most of us don’t dispute what science says, but we stick it in the corner of our minds somewhere, trust what our senses tell us and get on with our lives.”
“But my father couldn’t.” Gina said with a touch of anger, “the trauma he suffered at Winston stayed with him. Psychologically, his mind had gone out of sync. He lived, he wrote, like a mature Alice in a horrible wonderland beyond the looking glass.”
Ryan frowned. Gina waited until both our gazes had shifted back to her from the empty field where the tarps were being rolled out. A nervous smile trembled at the corners of her mouth, but her voice came through strong and clear. “That’s why I’ve agreed to sit here with you two bozos and try to explain
about my father.”
Here we go again, I thought. Another attempt at aggression and intimidation. But her phrasing only seemed to amuse Ryan. Perhaps he was impressed by her determination. Or maybe it was the respect and concern she had shown towards her father.
“I want you to find a way to help me to make amends,” She spoke firmly looking at both of us. But her eyes shifted past me and focused on Ryan.
“And how do you think we can to do that?” Ryan prodded.
“By finding the real killer, and then writing a letter of apology to my father and mother.”
“I see.” Ryan stared at her. There was a glint of anger in his eyes. “There are billions of people in this world who suffer injustice. Millions are traumatized by violence each year. Amends get made to only a pitiful number of them. Life moves too fast. Besides, the resources are simply not there.”
“That doesn’t justify not trying. Particularly now that you both have the time.”
Ryan seemed unmoved by the taunt. His eyes remained locked on her. There seemed to be some struggle going on between them. It was the only explanation I could find for what he said next.
“If we now have the time, we should probably be using it to prevent new injustices, not trying to make amends to those who are now dead.”
A fragile mask clouded Gina’s face. I sensed how difficult it was for her to say what she said next. “I’m asking you to help in my father’s case. Please. If only because there may still be a killer out there.”