by Iain Levison
“Hello, Professor White,” she said cheerfully. “I’m Agent Lupo, FBI.” She eyed the flyer on his desk, and leaned over it for a second, studying the caricature. “That looks like fun.”
“Yeah,” Elias nodded, no longer fatally self-conscious. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” They both laughed. “Have a seat.”
Denise remained standing. “No, I don’t want to keep you long. I just have a couple of questions.”
Not long. That was good. No, it was great. Elias leaned back in his chair. “Sure, about what?”
Denise took out a notepad. “Last Saturday, according to the gate monitor, you visited the campus?”
They were asking about that? Jesus, what had that nurse told them? The self-consciousness and the awareness of his hands returned. He made an effort to keep them still. He started formulating a lie in his head. Dixon was holding him hostage. Dixon was threatening to burn his house down. It wasn’t his fault. Melissa had come on to him.
“Gate monitor?” Elias asked.
“Yeah. It’s a device that records the license plates of all cars going through the faculty entrance. The security guards check the photos of the license plates periodically, so if there’s one that isn’t registered, they can have you towed.”
Elias nodded thoughtfully. “Modern technology,” he marveled.
Denise smiled. “Why did you come up here on a Saturday?”
“I had some extra work,” he said, pointing to all the papers on his desk. He was tempted to say something else, start describing all his extra work, of which he had none, but she didn’t know that, and he decided it was better just to stare at her expectantly. She was very pretty, in an aggressive, forthright way, not like Ann, who had an aura of intellectual pretense about her. Elias wondered how long she would be in town.
Denise nodded. “Do you know a woman named Angelique Davenport?”
“The nurse? Sure I know her. She gave me some shots last year. For flu. I hate getting the flu, so I . . .” Elias became aware that he was babbling, talking almost excitedly about his flu shots. Calm down. “Got shots,” he trailed off.
“Mmmm hmm,” said Denise. She looked around his office for a second. “I hate the flu too,” she said.
“Why are you asking about Angelique?”
“Angelique? You were on a first-name basis?”
Elias threw up his hands, a gesture of exaggerated innocence. “You just told me her first name. Besides, everyone is on a first-name basis around here.”
Denise laughed. “I’m just giving you a hard time.” She stared at him for a second, seemingly amused, and Elias wondered if he was being toyed with or flirted with. She fumbled with a file she was carrying, then extracted a piece of paper with a mugshot of a man on it, with prison numbers on a clipboard under his name: Philip Turner Dixon.
“Do you know this man? Have you ever seen him around?”
“No,” said Elias quickly.
“Take a look at it for a second.”
Elias stared at the photo, wondering exactly how long a completely innocent person would stare at a photo before denying they knew the person in it. “No,” he said again, shaking his head.
“Well,” Denise said, putting the picture back in the file. “Sorry to take up your time. Please give me a call if anything occurs to you.” She handed Elias a business card, and pointed at the yellow flyer and said, with a mischievous smirk, “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Elias laughed, partly at her little joke, and partly out of relief that she was leaving. “You came all the way up here to ask about Angelique?”
Denise smiled at him again, but this time, Elias detected something, an instantaneous expression of victory, as if he had just given something away. Maybe it was in his imagination. Anyone getting questioned by the FBI was bound to be a little paranoid.
“We just like to know what’s going on,” Denise said breezily.
“How long are you in town for?”
Denise turned away from the door. “Probably leaving tomorrow.” She shrugged. “I might send my partner back down and stay the weekend. It’s a beautiful town you got here.”
“Tiburn? You think so? This time of year it’s not so bad.” Elias grabbed a piece of memo paper off his desk with his letterhead and was pleased to notice his hands were steady. He quickly wrote his home phone number. Let no opportunity go to waste. He wrote “Elias” under the number, even though the letterhead clearly gave his name. He had ordered the letterhead memo pad the day he had been given a professorship, and now, three years later, had found his first good use for it. “Give me a call if you decide to stay the weekend,” he said. “I’ll show you around.”
“Thanks,” Denise said, popping the paper in the file with Dixon’s photo. She could have at least put it in her pocket, separated it from her business papers. “See you around,” she said.
Elias nodded, quickly searching for a pleasant, memorable way to say goodbye, something that would leave her thinking of him as she went about her rounds. “Take care,” was the best he could come up with.
She nodded and was gone. When he heard her leave the outer office, he exhaled, long and hard. Alice knocked on the door.
“What’s the FBI doing on campus?” she asked.
“They were asking me about the school nurse,” he said. “I have no idea what that’s about.”
“Terrible isn’t it,” Alice said.
“What’s terrible?”
“She just disappeared. No one’s seen her for days.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
Alice shook her head. “I hope they find that man,” she said as she came into the office and dropped off an appointment slip. “Terrible thing. Anyway, Jenny Hingston wanted to reschedule. She had an appointment at 10:30. Is one o’clock OK?”
“Yeah,” Elias nodded. He took the slip and tossed it next to the flyer. His hangover was gone, he realized. Adrenaline. That was best cure of all.
Denise was at the lunch counter in the student cafeteria, waiting for her pizza slice to come out of the oven, reminiscing about her college days. She looked around, seeing all the characters she remembered. Over there, the disaffected youth, all wearing black, probably reading Sartre or Wittgenstein. A few tables over were the backwards hats and sandals boys with the sports pages open, discussing the merits of a certain running back. There were three girls behind her in line, dressed as if to go clubbing in New York City, talking about a guy in their Intro to Acting Class. “He’s so hot,” one was saying. There was screeching and giggling. Denise suppressed a smile.
“How’d it go?” Kohl was waiting for her at the end of the line. Had he not been wearing a suit and tie, he would have fit right in. He was only a year or two older than most of the kids.
“Interesting,” Denise said. “How about you?”
“Not interesting. Just a lot of ‘I don’t knows’ and ‘I never heard of this or that’. And,” he added, “no babblers. What was interesting?”
“I had a babbler,” Denise said as she sat down, motioning for Kohl to do the same. “But I think he just wanted to get laid.”
Kohl smiled. “A horny old professor?”
“He wasn’t so old. Young guy. But he said one thing that kind of interested me.”
“What was that?”
“He asked me if we’d come up here just to investigate the nurse.”
Kohl shrugged. “Yeah? So?”
“He said ‘up here’. Everyone else who asked me about why we were here said ‘down here’. They assumed we’d come down from the office in Concord. This guy assumed we’d come from the south. New York City.”
“Sounds like enough for a conviction right there,” said Kohl absently, eyeing one of the well-dressed girls who had been behind Denise in line. Denise laughed. Sometimes Kohl could be almost funny, when he wasn’t taking himself so seriously. It was occurring to both of them that this trip to New Hampshire might not have been a great idea, that there was little chance o
f finding Dixon, that he could well be in the truck that had been speeding across Kansas. Or had been. Probably in Texas by now, probably home and safe, while two FBI agents sat in a college lunchroom in a New England college trying to piece together his whereabouts.
“Do you think he’s here?” Kohl asked, sounding tired. There was disappointment mixed in there, too, like he had really been hoping to find a lead here, something more significant than a college professor using the wrong preposition. Denise imagined that, in a few years, he might become a decent agent. Maybe he would get transferred to the Profiler program. Maybe he would crack key cases, bust a serial killer who terrorized whole cities. Maybe he would have the career that Denise had once imagined. It wasn’t really his fault that he would wind up getting the breaks she never had.
Denise shrugged. “You don’t think him saying ‘up here’ was that significant?”
Kohl laughed. “Why would he assume New York City? Do you think he knows where each bureau branch is located?”
“He might have known where the robbery occurred. New Jersey. Down there. So we came up here.”
Kohl laughed again. So did she. She threw up her hands. “It’s more than what you got.”
“I’m gonna get a sandwich,” he said.
“Hey Dick, it’s me. Denise.” She was leaning back in the rickety chair in her motel room, her cellphone on the table, her earpiece in, as she rolled another joint. It was two in the afternoon, and she had been thinking about getting high again the whole time she had been in the lunchroom with Kohl, the whole time she had been interviewing people at the college. Denise had kept suggesting they go back to the hotel to “regroup”, as she put it, though Kohl had kept coming up with bizarre suggestions: let’s do this, let’s do that. Let’s go stake out the nurse’s house. Why? So they could watch her abandoned boyfriend stumble around drunk? Let’s re-interview the travel agent. Maybe there was something we missed. He was a good kid, a little too enthusiastic. Raised on television.
“How are you, honey?” She found Dick Yancey’s voice strangely comforting. She didn’t have to be the adult with Dick. Training people, even a sharp kid like Kohl, took a certain mindset, a certain patience, which she was aware she lacked. She twisted the joint tight and held it up, admiring its sleek uniform shape. This was going to be a good one.
“I’m good. How are things back at the office?”
“Full of bullshit.”
Denise laughed. “I need a favor.”
“Sure thing. But I’ve got an appointment with the oral surgeon later . . .”
“This won’t take long.”
“Go ahead . . . what do you need?”
“I’ve got a guy I want you to run a check on. See if he’s got a file.” She paused while Dick Yancey gathered pen and paper, put the joint in the corner of her mouth, held up the lighter she had bought when she and Kohl had been getting coffee that morning in the convenience store.
“Go ahead,” Dick said.
“Elias White.” She spelled his name. “He’s a professor here at Tiburn College. See if we’ve got anything on him.”
“Will do. What’s the story on this guy?”
“Just a possible,” Denise said breezily. “Nothing serious.”
“Possible what?” asked Dick with a snicker. Damn. How had he known something was up? “Possible date for this evening?”
“Dick!” Denise laughed. “No, he’s a possible suspect. See if you can find anything that might connect him to Dixon.”
“What does he look like?” asked Dick Yancey, not letting it go. She gave in.
“OK . . . he asked me out. Sort of. But he is a suspect. There’s just something not right about him.”
“I’ll look into it, honey,” Dick Yancey said. “Have a little fun up there.” She was about to protest again when the phone went dead. She looked at the freshly rolled joint in her hand, kicked off her shoes, propped her feet on the cheap, pressboard end table, and fired it up. Damn, was she really that transparent? Maybe Dick just knew her too well.
8
. . . and which ultimately have left German people as the victims of one of the greatest propaganda movements in the modern media.
Dixon put the masterwork of Elias White down on the table and looked at it. It wasn’t thick enough to be a book. Maybe it was a pamphlet. A pamphlet for the White Aryan movement, full of big words, trying to convince people that their points of view were the opinions of men of science. If you said something the right way, everyone figured you were smart. Not too many people had the hang of it, though. A lot of people Dixon had known came off like they were putting on airs. It was always easy to spot. “I purchased” instead of “I bought”. “I adore” instead of “I like”. The last time he’d had sex was with a woman who purchased things, adored things, and ate “supper”. One of the things she’d adored, apparently, was black men, judging by the two mulatto kids running around her wreck of a house, for whom she had purchased supper with WIC coupons.
Dixon looked around Elias’s study, wondering if there was more Nazi paraphernalia lying around. How deep into this shit was this guy? Maybe he was the head of some weird organization. The baldies who handed out leaflets in the joint had to get the leaflets from somewhere. They didn’t write that shit themselves. But Elias’s writing wasn’t the type of shit you saw on the prison Aryan Nation pamphlets. It contained words like “synergy” and “paradigm”, and it was nearly sixty pages long. He shrugged. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t care what Elias was into. Sex with high school girls, Nazi shit – and why the hell didn’t he open the letter from that chick in Germany?
Dixon coughed and noticed the pain in his ribs wasn’t as severe as it had been the day before. He was healing up well. But each day, as he started to feel better and notice his mobility improving, he found himself getting increasingly bored. He was no stranger to boredom. Boredom in prison had been so severe it was like physical pain. But he hadn’t anticipated experiencing it when he was free.
He turned on the computer.
Dixon had spent four of his months in Falstaff in their supposedly educational Right to Work program, sitting in a chair in the only carpeted room in the entire prison. The carpet was there to deaden sound. There was something comforting about the carpet, as if being in that room, even for only six hours a day, carried some kind of status. He would field calls from people trying to find cheap hotel reservations, and he earned forty cents an hour, which was a nickel more than they paid the guys who made license plates. Being literate had its advantages, as did being white.
“You’ve been specially selected,” the company flack had explained, as if some powerful bond now existed between them. “We’ve reviewed your record and we think you’d be a good fit for the computer room.”
Here’s where I give him the sign, where I acknowledge that I’m special, Dixon had thought. Dixon knew that this man, this ferrety-faced college graduate with a veneer of self-confidence, had never said those words to a black man. Here’s where I wink and nod. Give the special handshake. The real reason this man didn’t want blacks working in the computer room was because they sounded black. They had accents. Travel International didn’t want a voice like that on the phone. But Dixon’s southern drawl was slight enough to be considered unobtrusive, even charming.
It was cool with him. He was always picking shards of metal out of his hands in the machine shop, even when he wore gloves. Sometimes, he picked them out of his face, right near his eyes. If he could sit in one of these chairs and just chat with people for a nickel more an hour, it was cool.
They had taught him how to type, and to use the web, though the only sites that weren’t restricted were the ones directly related to Travel International. He had a headset, and two men from the office would listen in to his conversations with the clients, making sure he obeyed the thick book of rules. The most important rule was to never let the people you were talking to know you were in a prison. “It’s company policy that we don’t
give out that information,” he was supposed to say, if anyone inquired about the whereabouts of the office. Giving their credit card numbers to convicted criminals might upset them. But TI was determined to give a second chance to America’s unwanted, especially if they were working for forty cents an hour.
Three months into his dream job, Dixon had been having a conversation with a woman from Kentucky who inquired about his accent, and he had mentioned he was from Texas. She asked what town, and just as Dixon was about to say “Texline” the phone had gone dead. Dixon looked up to see one of the corporate men in the glass booth overlooking the room shaking his head.
“You can’t give out personal information of any kind,” he said. “That’s your first warning. There won’t be another one.”
Then, about a month later, a woman had called to complain about one of Travel International’s services. She and her family had apparently been offered a free vacation stay in some Caribbean hot spot, but every morning a salesman would visit them and pester them about buying a timeshare. Before any trigger from his brain arrived to stop it, Dixon said casually, “These people are a bunch of fucking snakes.” The line went dead.
Back to the machine shop.
That would have been OK. The machine shop was hard physical work, but there was no glass booth. But a note from the TI people appeared in his report at his next parole hearing, and was the sole cause of his rejection.
“You still seem to have issues with authority,” they had told him. Apart from that one incident, his last eighteen months had been clear sailing. Not even a harsh word with any of the other prisoners. One time he had even prevented a fight in the weight room by stepping in and talking rationally to two men he barely knew. That wasn’t in the record. But a comment he made to a woman over the phone was justification for keeping him incarcerated for another six months.
And shortly after getting out, he had robbed a bank. Six months, ten years, ten thousand years. It’s not like he was going to suddenly start liking them one day.