by J. L. Newton
As the speaker continued, a low click told me that someone was entering the seminar room. I looked back to see Vice Provost Vogle dart through the door, wearing a bright baby blue suit. I had to give her credit. That suit was a spark of life among the pale shirts and khakis—like a blue bird or like the sky outside now that it was October. Lorna tilted her head as if trying to get a better view of her surroundings. She had at least shown up, but I wondered if it were out of genuine interest and concern or just for show.
The pale young woman raised her hand. She could have been attractive, but her pinched-up face looked dour, and she wore the drabbest outfit in the room—a navy polo shirt and beat-up jeans.
“I’m Jenny Archer of Plant Biology. Are we going to address the welfare of graduate students? Because there are a lot of things I could say about that.”
“Yes, we do want to address graduate student issues,” Katherine said.
“She’s one of Peter’s students,” Tess whispered to me. “He’s her major professor.”
“I’m tired of professors getting us to work on their topics and do their work for them and then not giving us proper credit on the papers they publish. To get jobs, we need publications that have our own names on them.”
More greed on Peter’s part, I thought. He was sounding worse and worse.
“We need more oversight, someone we can go to, someone who will listen and who can exert some power.”
A recent survey had revealed that female graduate students in general wanted better mentoring and that they preferred women. Women gave more of their time and attention, understood them, and listened to issues about combining family and career. I assumed that women professors in science were also less likely to publish their students’ work without giving them credit, though whether this was true or not, I wasn’t certain. I’d also heard a number of women graduate students express serious doubts about pursuing a life in science, despite the attraction of its flexible hours and exciting new discoveries, because they desperately wanted families as well as careers and were daunted by how hard women faculty in science had to work.
“We don’t want to follow your model,” one young woman had said pointedly at a women-in-science talk last year.
It wasn’t hard to understand. The culture of science in the university had taken shape when most men had stay-at-home wives to take care of children and their other domestic needs. Now, women in science were a growing part of the work force, but no provisions had been made to reflect that shift. Tess was lucky—she had a husband who shared childcare and household labor. Many women did not. The competitive nature of work in the sciences, the lack of provision for child-rearing, which women still took care of by and large, and women’s uneven access to resources made for a workload that was hard to bear. I wondered for a fleeting moment what Wilmer’s arrangements with his wives had been.
I felt sorry for Jenny Archer, who was angry and looked distressed, and now her major professor was in a coma. That couldn’t be good. At the same time, I wondered what Jenny’s relation to Peter had been. I hoped she was not one of those with whom Peter, according to rumor, had gone too far. At the conclusion of the meeting, I approached Tess once again.
“Listen, Tess, do you think the police know that Juan Carlos confronted Peter at the GMO panel? I don’t think Frank would have told the police that.”
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “But if they’re questioning people who disagreed with Peter, I must be next.”
Baked Tortilla Chips
1 12-ounce package corn tortillas
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 tablespoons lime juice
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to 350°F
Cut each tortilla into 8 chip-sized wedges and arrange the wedges in a single layer on a cookie sheet.
In a mister, combine the oil and lime juice. Mix well and spray each tortilla wedge until slightly moist.
Combine the cumin, chili powder, and salt in a small bowl and sprinkle on the chips.
Bake for about 7 minutes. Rotate the pan and bake for another 8 minutes or until the chips are crisp, but not too brown. Serve with salsas, garnishes, or guacamole.
Recipe provided by www.Allrecipes.com.
Recipe submitted by Michele O’Sullivan.
Chapter 6
I gazed through the French doors to the swimming pool outside. It was mainly for Polly, who was a dedicated swimmer, but I also liked to look at it, as if it were a private lake or a reflecting pond. It helped distract me from the fact that most of my life took place in my study and my office, in the offices of other people, in classrooms, and in meeting rooms all over campus. Today, however, I was eager to sit at my desk and turn on my computer. After yesterday’s information about Juan Carlos Vega, I wanted to explore the website of Environmental Toxicology. The situation of the toxicology professor Juan Carlos Vega was not promising. He’d been at the reception, had had access to my corn bread and to poison, and had publically confronted Peter. I didn’t want to think him guilty, a man with ties to my colleagues in Native American and Chicana/o Studies, but I was worried and curious nonetheless. If I could talk with him, maybe I could put my mind at rest, and since we both were suspects in the case, perhaps, together, we could think of clues. I wanted to find his office hours and pay him a visit.
I’d had little contact with Juan Carlos at the GMO panel in the spring, but in a brief conversation with him after the proceedings, I’d learned that we’d both grown up in Compton, just below South Central Los Angeles. Long ago, the region had been horse fields, but after World War II, pastures and farms had given way to tracts of houses and to factories, and Compton had supported modest families like my own for many years. For most of my childhood, I’d thought of Compton as just an ugly town, its main boulevard displaying so many glinting car lots that it was hard to tell where one began and the other one ended. I recalled the dried fields, the aging oil rigs, and the acrid smell of petrol that I’d been driven through on the way to my favorite beach.
Years later, someone had written an essay about the city which I’d read and underlined out of fascination with a past I’d lived through but hadn’t understood. I’d learned that when I was a child, forty-five thousand people had lived in Compton, only fifty of whom were black. A settlement of Mexican Americans had been confined to the north of the city in a barrio I’d never seen. But after the Supreme Court had overturned race covenants barring nonwhites from the city’s center, middle-class blacks and Latinos had begun moving into town. Racial tension and violence had exploded.
Until high school I had little sense of these tensions. My family had lived in an all-white neighborhood, and I’d attended all-white schools. It was only in high school, which was at least formally integrated, that I had come to some sense of social injustice and to an understanding that people on the margins could act together on their own behalf. Now, I found myself wondering what Juan Carlos’s experience of Compton High had been. I tried to imagine him, tall and rangy as a colt, with a mane of dark hair, walking down its crowded hallways some fifteen years after I myself had been there.
As I scanned the website for more information about Juan Carlos, I was intrigued to see that a Teresa Fuentes-Elliott, an associate professor of Environmental Toxicology, who studied pesticide residues on fruits, vegetables, and coffee, was one of Juan Carlos’s colleagues. Could Teresa Fuentes-Elliott be married to Peter? In her picture on the website, Teresa looked nothing like the plain, long-suffering woman whom I had so confidently imagined Peter’s wife to be. Teresa was pretty with thick brown eyebrows, a larger-than-life smile, and long, wavy, caramel-colored hair. She’d come from Colombia, and she looked young, much younger than Peter. I wondered if Teresa had met Peter as a student herself. If so, Peter’s reputation for womanizing might not surprise her. Was she used to it? Or, as I now began to speculate, did she lead an independent life as I had
tried to do with Solomon? I remembered thinking how wives were always the first suspects. Would a young, independent, and pretty woman be more or less likely to have fed poisoned corn bread to a cheating husband than the modest homemaker I had first fancied her to be? I wasn’t sure, but I resolved to ask Juan Carlos whether Teresa was married to Peter, and, if so, how she was taking her husband’s illness.
* * *
Juan Carlos’s door was open for office hours when I arrived in the Department of Environmental Toxicology in Bauman Hall. I knocked on the door frame and stuck my head inside. Juan Carlos sat at a desk, which faced the door and was dominated by a large computer. To the right some black metal bookcases were stuffed with books and many teetering stacks of paper.
“Juan Carlos, I’m Emily Addams. I don’t know whether you remember me or not. We spoke briefly after the panel on GMOs last spring. We both grew up in Compton.”
“Oh, yes, Emily, I remember,” he said, standing up. “Come in, please, and have a seat.”
He smiled. His even white teeth stood out against his tan skin. He’s very good-looking, I thought. I had a weakness for men wearing long, black braids. We shook hands and I sat in the chair next to his desk.
“Let’s see, you came to Compton in the eighties, after I’d already left. Were the used car lots still there on the boulevard?”
“Oh yes, they were still there.”
“And did you go to the beach through the oil fields?”
“I didn’t go to the beach much, but I remember the fields and the rigs. Things were getting rough in Compton by the time we came, but we lived in Richland Farms, a rural part of Compton out near the airport. My dad raised horses and we farmed a little. It was a different life from what went on in the rest of the city. There’s a picture of my family.” He gestured toward the bookcase. I could see a picture of a mother, four children, and a father wearing a cowboy hat. Horses in the field behind them had stretched brown necks to graze.
“I’ve never heard of Richland Farms. All I think of when I imagine Compton are rows of shiny cars. I think you told me you were born in Mexico?”
“We crossed over when I was ten from Michoacán where my family ran a farm. After we came to California, my parents picked grapes for a time in the Central Valley, but they began to get sick from working in the fields—headaches, nausea, vomiting. My father’s vision started to go. People didn’t care what they did to farm workers.” Furrows appeared between his dark brows.
“What did they get sick from?”
“Furadan. It’s a liquid pesticide you spray on crops.” Juan Carlos paused. “It’s one of the reasons I went into toxicology.”
“Is it something you work on?”
“I’ve studied it. But I’m more interested in developing pesticides that don’t make people sick.” Juan Carlos tilted his head as if my presence had begun to puzzle him.
“Juan Carlos, I’ve come to you because I think it was my corn bread they found in Peter Elliott’s hand the day he was poisoned. The police questioned me and even searched my kitchen, and I think they already knew I was the one who’d made it, though I don’t know how. I understand they came to talk to you as well. I left the reception before you did. Did you notice anyone carrying the bread away?”
The muscles in Juan Carlos’s jaw tightened.
“No, the police already asked me that. Look, Peter Elliott is a corporate pig, though that’s an insult to pigs. He basically works for Syndicon, and he’s effectively a lobbyist. There are a lot of people on campus who dislike what he stands for.” Juan Carlos pushed up the sleeves of his blue cotton shirt. “Syndicon owns ninety percent of the world’s market in GMOs. They take native seeds, modify them, and then patent the seeds and technologies. If a farmer is caught growing their corn, even if the corn seeds have drifted into his field from somewhere else, they sue the farmer.”
“I know. It’s outrageous!” It really was outrageous. I’d learned about it for the first time on the panel last spring.
“And then there’s the whole issue of pollution.” Juan Carlos raised his hands in the air. “Some of their corn is used to create inedible products. What if that corn drifts into a farmer’s field of edible corn? And there’s the matter of culture as well. Many Mexicans see corn as sacred, as the origin of life. Some indigenous people believe that humans were born from maize, and our seeds go back ten thousand years. To endanger those seeds is an aggression against our culture, our deeply held beliefs, our very identity, and it’s a threat to plant diversity in general, which is necessary for sustaining life.”
Juan Carlos’s bark-brown eyes held mine steadily. How had Peter managed to ignore a gaze like that?
“But Syndicon cares nothing about that. Profit is everything. The rest of the world be damned.” Juan Carlos let his hands rest on the desk once more. “Big farmers put profit before the health of their workers, and big corporations elevate profit over everyone and everything in the world, and now, throughout the whole country, some university scientists who are supposed to make public service come first are almost paid employees of corporations.” Juan Carlos paused, stretched his fingers flat on the desk, and looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry to go on like this.”
“It makes me angry too.” I thought briefly about Lorna’s lack of concern for those she saw as lower forms of life. Lorna, despite her bright scarves and perky suits, was beginning to remind me of Peter. “I hope that Peter’s not the future. Do you think he is?”
“I hope not, but nationally it’s the way research is going. Look, if this is why you’ve come—to find out whether I poisoned Peter—poisoning Peter would not go far in changing the new system. Besides, given my work in toxicology, would I be stupid enough to poison someone? Not to mention that I don’t believe in harming other human beings.”
Oh no, I thought. I’ve put my foot in it.
“No, that’s not why I came. Frank wouldn’t have poisoned anyone either. I just thought if we could put our heads together, think of who might have wanted to kill Peter, how it might have been done, we could protect other people who might be in harm’s way—who knows if this will be an isolated incident. And we could get our own names cleared. Both of us are suspects along with Frank.” I fell silent for a moment and glanced at the family photo once more. “I noticed that a Teresa Fuentes-Elliott is a colleague of yours. Is she married to Peter?”
Juan Carlos blushed, and then, appearing not to hesitate, said yes.
“How’s she taking all this?
“I hear she’s doing all right. She’s on leave this quarter, so we don’t see her often. But I’ve heard she’s taking it well. Apparently, she’s at the hospital a lot.”
“Well, thanks for talking with me.” I’d made Juan Carlos uncomfortable and was eager to be off. But I’d learned something that might be important in the future. There was more than collegiality between Juan Carlos and Teresa.
* * *
I stood before my bathroom mirror. Wilmer and I were going on our first real date, but there was barely enough time to get ready. I’d spent more time researching, and then visiting with, Juan Carlos than I’d intended. All I could do was put on more makeup. My eyes were my one good feature, and I liked to play them up. I relined them, applied more lipstick, powdered my nose, and sighed at my hair. It hung straight again. I’d curled it with an iron that morning as usual, but the curl, as always, hadn’t lasted. My hair was straight and fine, and my hairdresser assured me that every hairdo I admired was beyond its meager capacity. Miriam had had long thick hair before the brain tumor and for a long time after. How I had envied it, so lush and so obedient at every length and in every style.
Tonight, I would wear the long black jacket, the bronze long skirt, and the white T-shirt that I’d worn to see Juan Carlos. No time to change, but I added turquoise earrings. On cue my eyes picked up the color. Okay, I have one gift, I thought. Best be thankful for that.
“I thought we’d do Chinese,” Wilmer said when he arrived.
Was it my imagination or did he linger a bit at my eyes?
“There’s a place I really like in Valley Town and then we can see the movie we talked about, The Sixth Sense. I found a theater where it’s still playing.”
“Sounds good.”
“Any more developments in the Peter Elliott affair?” Wilmer asked as we began to drive east.
“Several.” I filled him in about my own questioning, about the police search of my kitchen, about Frank, Juan Carlos, Teresa, and the man in red. We were passing the rice fields on the side of the freeway, which served as a wildlife sanctuary, when I saw a flash of snow. An egret had taken sudden flight. “And then there’s the young woman you encountered. I’ve thought about her reaction. She must have had some personal connection with Peter to be that upset. I’ve learned that he has a reputation for being sexually involved with some of his students.”
“I wondered about that myself. She called him ‘Peter’ at first, but when I asked her who he was, she said ‘Professor Elliott.’ And she was crying as if her heart had been broken.”
“Yes, there must be something between them.” I found Wilmer’s analytical turn of mind much to my liking. He was willing to apply it to human relations and everyday affairs, things that I cared about and that the poisoning and my own status as suspect had made of crucial importance.
“Tell me in more detail about what happened that morning.”
“I’d gotten up early to photograph the hog barn.” Wilmer glanced at me with a tentative smile. “I like to take pictures of rural things—barns, old houses, fences. My grandfather taught me photography, though he never let me touch his expensive cameras. He was a tough old bird, a farmer.”
“Where’d you grow up?”
“Arkansas.”
“Ah, go on.” I was right about his country-like appearance.