Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  None of my astonishment or pleasure at the revelation this letter offered appeared on my face or was revealed by my slow, lazy movements. Holy cat, I thought, a phrase I hadn’t used since I was too young to know swear words. (Funny, really, how the usual nasty epithets have become so overused that the innocent swear words of one’s youth carry new emphasis.) Easy does it, Woody, I said to myself. Hand the lady—I was sure she would have been pleased to be called a lady—back the letter, smile in a bored but gracious sort of way, and leave before the dear dean discovers what you’ve read. “Nice to have met you, and many thanks for your help,” I said casually but politely, and departed.

  But I hadn’t quite made it out of the building when my cell phone rang. It took me a few minutes to realize that the ringing was coming from my bag and was my new phone. Feeling ridiculously flustered, I put my bag down and rummaged in it for the phone, which kept on ringing. I hoped to get it before five rings, when my message to please leave a message would come on. I barely made it, but managed to push the right button and say “Hello” into the damn thing.

  “Woody,” the voice said. It was Don Jackson. “Are you finished with the administration yet?”

  “Just finished,” I said, looking around as other people in the corridor stared at me. I found myself flushing because I had reacted so badly to people I passed on the street shouting into cell phones and talking chitchat as though walking and thinking weren’t sufficient activity for a person. I also resented having their phone voices intrude on my thoughts. To say nothing of those who drove while talking on the phone, which a few old acquaintances from my lawyer days told me were causing a lot of accidents. Then there were those who talked on trains, bothering tired commuters who wanted quiet. There was even a plan—

  “You there, Woody?”

  “I’m here—trying to get used to this damn thing. Is there a problem about supper?”

  “There’s a problem on the campus where you are; I’m on my way. Do you know some guy named Kevin Oakwood?”

  “Not to say know. I’ve listened while he drank beer and talked.”

  “Good enough. Well, he’s just beaten up a professor in the English department.”

  “Really?” I said. “Which one?” I was torn between hope and anxiety. Anxiety won.

  “His name is Petrillo. Mr. Oakwood seems to have knocked him about pretty badly. They’ve called an ambulance.”

  “Where was all this?” It occurred to me how sheltered the dean’s office—and the president’s, of course—were from outbreaks elsewhere on the campus.

  “Near the building with the English department. Just step outside of wherever you are; you can’t miss it. A big crowd, I gather. Meet me there.”

  And he was gone. Perhaps people signed off cell phones faster than the usual kind, where, if you weren’t hanging up on someone, you managed to say goodbye in a friendly way. I left the building and saw that Don was right. One could hardly miss the crowd outside standing around as though they were watching a prizefight. Which, I told myself, in a way they had been.

  Once there I found the student Mr. Ferguson shouting with the rest. Pulling him aside, I demanded a report on what had happened. The police were on their way, though without sirens. Apparently they respected the quiet of this bucolic college too much for that. Mustn’t frighten the students. From what I could see, the students were enjoying themselves and unlikely to be frightened by anything. An ambulance was also on its way, its siren going full blast, paying, I was relieved to see, no attention to the niceties influencing the police.

  I looked demandingly at Mr. Ferguson. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t here at the beginning, though I came in during the worst of it. What can I tell you? That guy”—he pointed to Kevin Oakwood, who was being restrained by two policemen—“was beating up Professor Petrillo. Maybe he didn’t like medieval literature any more than I did.”

  “I don’t think this is funny,” I said, scowling.

  “I know. But why would anyone want to beat up Petrillo? I mean, he’s a really nice guy; what harm could he do anyone? It isn’t even as though this was a student who’d been failed in a course. Maybe the guy was drunk.”

  Having spent all the time I had talking with Kevin Oakwood in a bar, I thought that very likely. He had obviously possessed a quick temper, restrained with difficulty. Although I didn’t say this to Mr. Ferguson (I reminded myself to ask him his first name), I thought the likely scenario was that Petrillo had interfered between Oakwood and a female student with whom Oakwood was doing whatever Oakwood did with students. That seemed the likeliest explanation and fit in with both their characters as I had observed them.

  The ambulance men had gathered up Professor Petrillo, who really looked the worse for wear. I heard one of the students in the crowd tell another that Oakwood had been kicking his opponent once he was on the ground; clearly poor Petrillo was in really bad shape.

  The police did their best to disperse the crowd as the ambulance pulled out. I saw Don there then, taking names and talking to witnesses. I managed to get near enough to Don to exchange glances with him. “See you as arranged,” he said, so I gathered he would be able to make supper. If not, he could always call me on the cell phone, whose uses I was beginning to appreciate.

  After you’ve read an outlandish letter in the dean’s office and seen a brutal fight, or anyway the tag end of it, it’s a little hard to think what to do next. But Mr. Ferguson was still nearby, so I asked him if he would introduce me to other students in the crowd from the English department. “And by the way,” I said, “what’s your first name? Mine’s Woody.”

  “Alan,” he said. “But most people call me Cap.” He reached over and grabbed a nearby guy. “This here’s Phil,” he said. “Takes English courses like the rest of us, but not a major. Will he do?”

  Phil glared at Cap, but Cap explained I was a private eye with a motorbike who wanted to talk to English students, which seemed to calm him down. “Any others here?” Cap asked.

  “Some girls,” Phil said, after looking me over. “You want them?”

  I nodded and turned to Cap. “How did you know I was a private eye?” I asked.

  “Oh, shit, everybody knows,” he said. “You can’t be much of a private eye around here if you don’t know how a college grapevine works. Shit, Woody, I found out you were a private eye ten minutes after I met you. Well, ten minutes after I looked over your wheels.”

  I realized I had fallen in his estimation, and was sorry about that. But at that moment Phil returned with two girls in tow, both of them talking at once. “They were here from the beginning,” Phil said, jerking his thumb toward the girls.

  “You were here when it started?” I asked them hopefully. They had been, and speaking contrapuntally, occasionally correcting each other, they told me all they could remember of it. We stood around when most of the others had gone, but though I heard them through, and asked lots of questions, and although Cap and Phil joined in the description from the moment they had come upon the scene, I wasn’t exactly left with a clear picture of what had happened, except that the two men had met, the girls thought by accident, and Oakwood had screamed “You goddamn fucking fool,” and leaped on Petrillo.

  “It was horrible,” the girls assured me. I gathered that Petrillo was plainly not a fighter, had tried to reason with Oakwood and ask him what the matter was, which had only seemed to infuriate Oakwood further. He punched Petrillo in the face, and when Petrillo didn’t get up again, he began kicking him. “It was horrible,” was the refrain of their account. Phil and Cap had arrived by this time, and were a little more descriptive of the fight moves they had witnessed.

  “It was exactly as though he, Oakwood, had been sent by someone to beat Petrillo up and teach him a lesson,” Phil said. “You know, you borrow money from the mob, you don’t pay up, or you don’t pay your gambling debts, first they beat you up as a warning, and the next time they kill you. This was the beating. That’s the way it looked t
o me.”

  “I agree with that,” Cap said. The young women nodded their heads as though once it was explained to them the explanation fit what they had seen.

  I hardly thought Petrillo owed Oakwood or anyone else money, but there was something about the description that fit Oakwood as I had observed him. Not that he was likely to be a thug working for gamblers, but he seemed to me the sort who might enjoy beating people up and who might have some practice at it. But why Petrillo? It was only slowly that I realized Phil and Cap had been referring to scenes in movies, but they were scenes they thought more than likely to occur in real life. And when it came right down to it, so did I. We lived in violent times, even on a pleasant college campus.

  I felt a bit ashamed of the fact that I regretted having missed the fight, having arrived just too late for the action. I’m not bloodthirsty, really I’m not, and I dislike enactments of male violence. But I couldn’t help suspecting that any clue to what went on between those two ill-matched men might have been evident at the start of the fight, but by now was probably lost or in need of being painfully dug out, with little hope of complete success.

  Between Haycock’s letter and this fight, the plot was getting more complex but hardly providing any clues to the murder. Haycock was hated; not all the members of the English department loved one another, to put it mildly, but how did that account for murder? If Petrillo had murdered Haycock, and Oakwood had loved Haycock, their fight might make sense. But it didn’t make sense. Probably poor Petrillo had said something provoking to Oakwood, who was hardly one to restrain his violent, aggressive impulses.

  I decided to go over to the local hospital, where they had taken Petrillo. Maybe he would talk to me; maybe I would find out something. But by the time I had reached my bike and made it to the hospital, I was told that Petrillo had been moved to a larger “medical facility” where they had CAT scans, MRIs, and all the rest of it. I asked if that meant he was in critical condition, but they weren’t telling me anything. I would have to wait and see if Don had learned more; the police were better at extracting information from hospitals than I could hope to be. I felt bad about Petrillo, a nice guy, and hardly able to defend himself against brutal fists and feet.

  My next move was to pursue the fists and feet to the police station, where Oakwood was in jail, or so I assumed. I doubted they’d let me see him either, but you have to keep on trying. You never know.

  As it turned out, my instincts were correct. Don Jackson was there, and agreed to let me interview Oakwood, or at least sit in on Don’s interview with him.

  “No point getting you into hot water,” I said, giving in to my conscience and defying my investigative urges. This wasn’t altogether out of consideration for Don or my feelings for him. If the police had anything against me it wouldn’t help me much in the end.

  But Don said not to worry. “They know you’re investigating the murder, and they’re as anxious as you are to have it solved. As I suggested earlier”— and he grinned at me—“they’re particularly eager for you to solve it. Less backlash at them. So let’s go.”

  Oakwood was in a cell. They didn’t seem to have interview rooms here, or not one available, or maybe they just wanted to make him feel locked up, but we interviewed him in the cell. That meant Don and I both stood, while Oakwood sat on his bunk and scowled.

  “What the fuck is she doing here?” he said to Don. “I already talked to fatty here, and I don’t need to talk with her again.”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” Don said. “You answer them and otherwise shut up. Do I make myself clear?” This last question was accompanied by Don’s making himself bigger and taller, which of course he already was—big and tall, I mean. I knew the trick: if you’re large, use it. I guess Oakwood had had enough physical activity for the day, because he backed down at once.

  “I have nothing to tell you,” he said, but in a quieter way. “The guy pissed me off and I have a short fuse; so convict me of assault, which can’t be a felony all the way at the top of the alphabet, and tell me what the bail is.”

  Don didn’t explain that he had all his facts wrong about the process; he just asked, “What did Professor Petrillo say that bothered you?”

  “Oh, some stupid thing, something against writers who teach because they can’t write—something like that.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Petrillo,” I said. “That’s not the kind of thing he would say. It’s totally out of character.”

  I hadn’t planned to speak, but Don didn’t know Petrillo even as well as I did, and I thought it worth making the point that Petrillo was the least likely of anyone I had ever encountered to say something pointedly unkind. One thing about Petrillo: nastiness wasn’t in his nature.

  “Okay,” Don said. “Try again, Oakwood.”

  “I’m through talking,” Oakwood said. “I beat the guy up. You’ve got plenty of witnesses, so why should I deny it? Let’s just say I hate professors who have too easy lives, too many vacations, and too little real work. Will that hold you?”

  Without another look at Oakwood, Don called for the guard, who opened the cell door. We parted in silence, a silence I hoped Oakwood would regard as ominous. I thought it was a good move of Don’s. We weren’t going to get anything more, and the more Don asked, the more reason Oakwood had to dig himself in and elaborate on his lie, or just keep repeating it.

  Outside the station, Don told me that the police were asking all the students who had witnessed the fight and given their names to the police—and there were many—how the fight began. But he didn’t have much hope of learning anything new.

  “My guess,” Don said, “is that he had worked up his anger at Petrillo before they happened to meet, and meeting him was enough to set off the explosion. But we have to see what else we can find. Are we still meeting as agreed?”

  I assured him that we were, and went off to the coffee shop to think. First, of course, I called Octavia on my cell phone. It was nice, I had to admit, not to have to track down a public phone, not to have to find the money or my charge card, and not to find the public phone broken, as they so often were. I was generous enough to tell all this to Octavia when I reached her.

  Octavia merely grunted. “Just remember to carry an extra battery,” she said. “They don’t last forever. You don’t want the phone to fail when you need it most.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said formally. Sometimes Octavia gets ahead of herself. But of course, I would carry a spare battery from now on. The most annoying thing about Octavia is that she’s so often right. I ask you, what’s more annoying than that?

  That which we are, we are.

  —TENNYSON, “Ulysses”

  Twelve

  AT supper, over the only beer I could allow myself, Don told me that all the stories the police had gathered from the fight’s onlookers were similar, and similarly uninformative. He said only one was different, and he wasn’t sure what it meant, if anything.

  “One girl was passing by there at the actual moment when Oakwood accosted Petrillo,” Don said between bites. “She said he leaped on Petrillo, who hadn’t even seen Oakwood coming. And while he leaped, according to this girl, Oakwood shouted, ‘You better learn to shut up, you pompous religious shit.’ The girl was so shocked by his words that she seemed to have stood there transfixed while Oakwood was punching Petrillo. And then she began to scream, and other people crowded around, and eventually someone called the security guards, and the security guards called the police. Obviously the security guards felt they couldn’t handle the fight and the crowd, and that’s a strong indication of the degree of violence. Police are called onto the campus unwillingly, and only when it’s the case of danger from a person ‘not a member of the campus community,’ as they put it.”

  “They probably thought Oakwood was a thug from the big, mean outside world,” I said. There may be something better than a hamburger and a beer, but I don’t know what it is. But it was finished; I could have eaten and drunk it
all over again, but some restraint in life is to be encouraged. I waved at the waitress and asked for coffee. “And,” I added, having partly subdued my hunger, “in a sense they were right: Oakwood was an outsider.”

  “I sent his prints and description through the system. No record.”

  “I said he was an outsider, not a career criminal.”

  “I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t assaulted someone before, maybe many someones. That beating he gave Petrillo was not a first try.”

  I told Don what Cap and Phil had said about how the attack had struck them. “It’s all very well to say that they’d seen too many movies, but movies not only reflect real violence, they encourage imitations.”

  Don nodded. There was no need to elaborate on that point. We both thanked whatever gods there are that no guns had been involved. In a violent society like America, with guns as easy to come by as cigarettes, it’s a miracle if anyone these days resorts to his fists and leaves it at that. We despised Oakwood for attacking Petrillo, and praised him for being an old-fashioned, weaponless bully. It’s a crazy world, all right.

  “What do you think Oakwood meant about telling Petrillo to shut up? What had he been blabbing about?”

  Of course, as I told Don, I’d been wondering about that myself. There was no doubt Petrillo was a bit, well, sanctimonious in the way he talked about sin, and maybe he’d just gotten on Oakwood’s nerves. Or maybe, and I thought this more likely, a female student had talked to Petrillo about Oakwood’s having come on to her, and Petrillo had confronted Oakwood, who’d seethed for a while, and his short fuse had reached the exploding point. Around then, I guess, poor Petrillo happened along. But they were bound to meet sooner or later.

  “By the way,” I asked Don, after we’d both thought about this for a while, “did you look into the students who were serving at Haycock’s party the day he was killed?”