Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  Just then, the department office door slammed open and Lynn Broadshaw charged out, cursing under his breath, heading down the hall to the men’s room.

  Serena shook her head, smiling. “He’s terrific,” she said.

  “Terrific?”

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if it was all just an act?”

  “An act,” I said, not following.

  Now she squinted at me, as if disappointed. “Nobody could be that frazzled all the time and not be putting it on a little. It’s camouflage,” she said, nodding. “Protective coloring. He makes so much noise you can’t take him seriously, and so you eventually tune him out.”

  “But he did have a stroke.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he?”

  I couldn’t figure out what she meant by that. “When you say camouflage, you think he’s hiding something?”

  Serena drew back and grimaced as if I’d eaten too many onions. “That goes without saying. We’ve all got something to hide, even bores. And then really interesting people, well—” She smiled expansively. “Like you and Stefan. I’m sure you have loads of secrets.” Then she added, in a different voice. “And Perry….”

  She lifted her head as if hearing triumphal music. “I can’t wait to see what our esteemed chair says at the memorial service.”

  “Memorial service?” It struck me that I must sound like an idiot to her, repeating everything she said.

  “You don’t think Lynn would miss the chance to boss people around and give a speech no matter how inane, do you?”

  “But Perry just got here. It’s not like he was a professor emeritus or anything.”

  “It’s got to be done. Everything has to be tied up neatly.”

  I was still struck by all the time off she had coming. “Will you do some writing?” I asked. “When you’re on leave?”

  “First I want to write a thank-you note to whoever bumped that bastard off.”

  Her expression didn’t change, so I couldn’t tell how much of a joke it was to her. I decided to play along a little, and asked her, “Why are you so sure he was bumped off?”

  Serena did something with her eyes that made her look both coy and goofy. Quite a combination. “Honestly, Nick, do you think Perry Cross could kill himself? He was far too conceited.”

  “It could have been an accident.”

  She shook her head. “That man was much too careful. At least he tried to be.”

  The way she said it made her sound as if she’d known him before he got to SUM, or at least knew him better than I would have imagined.

  I tried not to look suspicious. “Careful how?”

  She crossed her legs like a movie queen chatting with one of her fans, utterly in charge and center stage.

  “We’ll all be better off now that he’s gone,” Serena said, ignoring my question. “I’m sure you’re pleased.”

  I knew she didn’t mean that I was probably glad to have a whole office to myself again, even a small one.

  She said, “The way Stefan looked at him!”

  “Huh?”

  “At the party. It was obvious.”

  “What was obvious?”

  “Stefan and Perry went way back. How could anyone miss it? There was history in the way they sat there talking, talking.…”

  My first thought was what would happen if she told that to Detective Valley. Would Valley be asking her questions? Had he done so already? Shit!

  “Don’t be alarmed,” she said, and I cursed myself for letting anything show. “He’s out of your hair. It’s all over.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

  “It certainly looks like one, and isn’t that enough?” Serena rose and headed into the department office.

  Right then a gaggle of Rhetoric staff people came chattering out of an office down the hall. Their shabby quirkiness made them all blur together for me; it was a group worth the satirical eyes of Rowlandson or Daumier. They stopped when they saw me, fell silent, and stared.

  I rushed back to my office, feeling branded, accused.

  Was I a victim of too many episodes of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote? I had actually sat there in the hallway with someone I didn’t really know or especially trust, and chatted, yes, chatted about a death. It was one thing to raise the question of murder with Stefan, but with Serena Fisch? And the more I talked about Perry’s death, the less real it seemed. But it was also talking to Serena Fisch; something about her made me feel silenced, drawn in, diminished. Was it suspicion? Fear? Look at all the dumb questions I asked her; anyone listening would have thought I was a high school student conducting a lousy interview for the school newspaper!

  Now I sat turned from my desk, deliberately taking in Perry’s side of our office. His desk was neutrally covered with stacks of student papers, with a row of reference books between two green alabaster bookends along the back edge where it met the wall. Above it hung an elaborately matted and framed print of Fragonard’s The Bolt, which he had mentioned buying at the Louvre. It was a studied display of heterosexuality, I think—but the true message was in the taut satin-covered buttocks of the man almost on tiptoe, bolting the door to keep his fainting mistress trapped. That’s what I’m sure had attracted Perry, what drew him into the picture. Overall, though, Perry’s was not a very revealing desk, which made me suddenly want to start pulling open the drawers.

  I mean, what did I know about Perry except for his impact on Stefan, and what little I’d observed of Perry in the office and watching him with other people? He had been phony, arrogant, high-handed, superficial—a type as much as a person, and quite at home in an academic setting. And even his role in Stefan’s life—Heartbreaker—was nothing original. So who was the man behind these banal characteristics?

  And why was he dead now, so soon after I’d found out who he really was and why he’d come to our house for dinner?

  Jesus, I thought. If somebody did kill him, maybe they would try to frame me and Stefan. Weren’t we the ideal suspects?

  I was just about to roll my chair over toward Perry’s desk when someone knocked.

  I looked up and gulped. It was Rose Waterman. Because she always wore red, like her suit today, I sometimes thought of Rose as the Red Death in Poe’s story.

  “Hello, Nick. I was in the building. Talking to your chair.”

  The way she said “your chair” was like somebody’s mother saying “your father.” It was both intimate and vaguely threatening, as if they had been consulting about my punishment for not doing my chores on time. And with her German accent, it sounded particularly ominous.

  Rose walked in without my asking or getting up. She stood close enough for me to smell her lush perfume and underneath it the cigarette smoke. She leaned against one of Perry’s gray file cabinets possessively, like a hunter displaying his dead buck for a photograph.

  “I was wondering how you were doing,” Rose said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged lightly, looking very European in her sleek pants suit, as if Marlene Dietrich were her standard of posture, poise, beauty. She said, “The Campus Police are stirring everyone up—and it can be very disturbing when death comes so close.”

  Rose made it sound so personal that it was all I could do not to crane my neck and see if Death were waiting out there in the hallway for me.

  “I’m okay,” I brought out, thinking that Stefan would never believe this conversation. Rose Waterman had come to my office to see how I was doing! It was grotesque.

  “Were you talking to Lynn about the memorial service for Perry Cross?” I asked, trying with a question to make myself feel a little more present and in control. Even though it was my office, I felt cornered.

  Rose shook her head. “There won’t be one. The publicity is bad enough already, what with the governor— Well, you know all about that.”

  I assumed she meant the governor’s last public address, in which he had not only threatened deep and bone-crushing budget cuts at all
Michigan universities, but was urging them to cut whole departments and thus eliminate low-level administrators, clerical staff, and tenured faculty.

  “But how is this bad publicity? It was an accident, right?”

  Rose breathed in slowly, as if annoyed. I was not used to asking her so many questions, but her pause actually made me feel a little better. She wasn’t sure how to answer me and Rose Waterman being unsure was a very comforting sight.”

  “It looks bad,” she said. “What was he doing there? How did it happen? Why did it happen?”

  I thought of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell loonily telling Jack that “to lose one parent … may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

  “If you’re worried about PR, doesn’t it look worse when we ignore somebody’s death?”

  Rose glanced around the office a little proprietorially; she could have been a future occupant casing it, imagining the changes and improvements she would make.

  “I don’t agree,” she finally said, and then wished me a good morning.

  When she was gone, I sat there thinking that it was very doubtful I’d get any work done at all today, what with people parading into my office—first Stefan, then the detective, now Rose Waterman. Where were all my damned students? Why couldn’t someone have had a problem with a paper, a question about one of the essays? I would have leapt at the chance to be busy and involved, too busy to talk to anyone except my students.

  But then I thought of the alternatives to Rose coming up to see me. I doubted that being summoned to her office would have been pleasant, and even getting a phone call from her would have worried and unnerved me. I just did not like or trust Rose. Her type of person always had an agenda, so I could not remotely believe that she had come by just to find out how I was doing. Why the hell would she care?

  Or did she for some reason think I was so unstable that I actually might be falling apart over the news of Perry’s death? Had Rose worried that there might be another campus crisis to deal with, another “problem” with a faculty member? Was that it? She certainly couldn’t have imagined I was Perry’s lover or anything, and distraught. I just didn’t understand.

  And what did she mean about the campus cops stirring things up?

  While I sat there mulling over our exchange, the phone rang. I hoped it was a student to see if I was still there, but it was Stefan.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Walking out like I did before was very rude.”

  I’m a sucker for his apologies, especially when they come with self-blame, so I think I just cooed a little into the phone. “Oh, honey.…”

  “Let’s go out for lunch,” he said. “I have an hour.”

  “Great! I’ll come down to your office.”

  I checked my watch. I had only fifteen minutes left in my office hours. I left a note saying I wouldn’t be back today, hurriedly grabbed my mail, and headed for the door.

  Locking it, I saw Priscilla Davidoff striding down the hall to her office. She glanced away as if she hadn’t seen me and, irrationally, that made me mad. I called out to her as she neared the turn in the hallway leading to her office: “Strange news about Perry, huh?”

  Without turning, she kept on toward her office. Taking out her key, she said, “He got what he deserved. He should never have come here.” She was inside with the door closed before I could think of a reply.

  Stefan and I had lunch at the small, charming Vietnamese restaurant right across from campus on Michigan Avenue, Michiganapolis’s main street. It was vaguely country French inside, with pretty rose and green café curtains and wallpaper. We both ordered bun—lemongrass, cucumbers, tomatoes, and chicken over noodles, artfully arrayed in a deep wide bowl and quite tasty.

  I especially enjoyed eating there because of our favorite waiter, a slim Vietnamese young man with a spectacularly bright smile and gorgeous thick dark hair. He always beamed when Stefan and I held hands on the table, and that made me feel deeply welcomed and comfortable.

  I told Stefan about my talk with Rose Waterman first.

  “Can you believe they would think about finding Perry in the river as a public relations problem?”

  Stefan expertly scooped up some chicken with his chopsticks.

  Chewing, he said, “Don’t be so outraged. You know what universities are like.”

  That was certainly true. When you hear complaints about colleges not being the real world, believe me, they’re more accurate than you can imagine. Universities function as holding tanks for people—the academics—who just couldn’t make it in business of any kind. Professors are hardly answerable to anyone, have little contact with reality, see people consistently for very few hours a week. It may keep them off the streets, but their lunacy has plenty of room to grow and spread when they’re supervised so damned little. What might just be an eccentricity could become something monstrous, given enough time and disappointment. Most academics have an inflated view of the importance of their work and the range and depth of their talent, and they tend to be habitually disappointed, waiting for the glorious trumpet fanfares of recognition. What they usually get is not much more than the fart of a balloon losing air.

  “But why would Rose Waterman bother talking to me?”

  “It’s obvious,” Stefan said, putting down his French iced coffee. “She’s obsessed with details. She wants to know everything.”

  If it weren’t daylight, I might have shuddered a little. There was something nasty and Gothic about Stefan’s assessment.

  “Maybe she’s nosing around to help the Campus Police,” I said. “Maybe she already knows Perry’s death was suspicious. They’d probably tell the President first, and she’s so tight with him.”

  “Maybe she came by because she likes you,” Stefan said thoughtfully.

  “Likes me!”

  Silence spread out from our table as people stopped eating and talking, and looked at us. I flushed.

  “Sure, likes you. I don’t mean sexually. But I don’t think someone like Rose would really be able to be friendly. I think she antagonizes everyone more or less, even when she might not want to.”

  The careful way he said that made me ask, “Are you using Rose for a character in your next book?”

  He grinned. “Somewhat.”

  Now I was pleased. I liked the way Stefan pieced together his characters from different people we knew: using a tic from one, the stance of another, the history of a third. All of it was doubly transformed, of course. First by the new combination, and then in whatever way Stefan decided to disguise the original source. So he might be basing a character on Rose Waterman who could end up to be her opposite—which still left Rose the inspiration. I couldn’t wait to see what Stefan made of her.

  Then I told him about chatting (or whatever it was) with Serena Fisch. “Is she playing with a full deck?”

  Stefan nodded. “She’s just very angry.”

  “Tell me about it! Couldn’t you see her in a dungeon strapping somebody down, tightening the cords?” But then I remembered Larry Rich and said, “The Campus Police think we’re involved, somehow, in what happened. We’re obvious suspects—at least I am. God, what if they arrest me! It could be like one of those movies where they frame somebody. I’m sure Valley hates queers—and he’d probably get a promotion for nailing me.”

  Stefan frowned. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No it isn’t,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. “If Perry Cross was murdered, who are the suspects around here?”

  Stefan didn’t answer.

  “It’s just me. Can’t you see what it would look like? A Gay Love Triangle Gone Bad.”

  “What about Serena?” he said. “Perry got the position she wanted.”

  “Serena wouldn’t kill anyone—she’d just poison their reputation. I’m the most logical suspect.”

  “Nick, you need to calm down.”

  I breathed in deeply. “I need sex,” I murmured, my lips barely moving. “That’s what I need.�
�� Stefan smiled until my comment led me to ask a natural question: “What were you doing last night? When I woke up and you weren’t in bed?”

  He looked down and shrugged. “Writing. In my study.”

  “So late?”

  “It was hard to sleep.” He looked at his watch and called over our waiter for the check. Once again, I felt shut out, dismissed.

  Driving home a little while later, I thought that Stefan must have been writing about Perry and was too ashamed to admit it.

  8

  WHEN I GOT HOME, THERE WAS A MESSAGE on my tape to call Chuck Bayer. I groaned. Was he going to be hassling me about helping him on the Didion bibliography again? Didn’t he listen to me at Broadshaw’s party? I wasn’t interested in working with him on anything.

  I called Chuck right away to get it over with quickly, and stood at my desk while his number rang as if to distance myself from the phone, from Chuck, from my annoyance.

  “Terrible about Perry, huh?” was the first thing he said.

  I muttered something that might pass for sympathy. I was already sick of Perry, but he seemed to be haunting my every move now. That’s what I got for wishing he was dead!

  “Did you know if Perry was working on something?” Chuck asked me, and I hesitated, because I didn’t know what he meant right off. Chuck explained: “Any manuscripts? A book, maybe?”

  Then I got it, and I was disgusted: Chuck was a vulture, hoping to profit by Perry’s death. Chuck wanted to know if there was something unfinished of Perry’s that he could finish and take credit for, research and work that he would benefit by. Finishing a dead man’s work would be easier than tackling a project of his own, and would bring him certain praise—as if it were some kind of charitable endeavor.

  I almost slammed down the phone, but told Chuck that I really didn’t know what Perry had been working on, if anything.