Let's Get Criminal

by Lev Raphael

  There was a silence, and somehow I felt accused by it, as if Chuck suspected me of stealing a manuscript or hoarding information.

  “He was in Canadian Studies,” I pointed out softly. And Chuck wasn’t.

  But Chuck laughed. “Scholarship is scholarship.”

  I felt strongly tempted to tell Chuck that he was a moron.

  “Well, Nicky, just let me know if you find anything, okay?”

  I told him I had work to do and hung up. How was I going to find anything? What did he think I was planning? A raid on Perry’s files? Then I flushed, remembering how I’d wanted to look through his desk. Didn’t that make me as intrusive and obnoxious as Chuck Bayer? Yuck.

  I was reminded of the first time an archivist at a rich southern university contacted Stefan to ask him what he planned to do with his “papers.” Would he consider loaning them until he made a definite arrangement? Would he consider donating or selling anything yet?

  We had laughed about it, until the reality sunk in. There were boxes and boxes in the basement and his study: diaries, journals, manuscripts, corrected galleys, correspondence with editors and interviewers, fan mail, and correspondence with other writers, some of them quite well known. My cousin Sharon was currently an archivist in Special Collections at Columbia University (having gone back to school at thirty-five to earn a degree in library science) and she was quick to explain to us how it was all potentially quite valuable. The money didn’t affect me as much as thinking that one day Stefan would be dead, and his papers exposed to the eyes of people who had never known or loved him.

  “You wouldn’t let anyone see my letters to you?” I had asked Stefan nervously. “Would you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I was as chilled by Stefan’s uncertainty then as I was today thinking about Chuck’s hunger to know about whatever Perry Cross might have left behind. I made myself a pot of very strong coffee, brooding about death. I had always thought of it with terror, because I imagined my own pain and agony, fighting to stay alive in some hospital bed, hysterically unable to leave Stefan behind. Or I’d imagined my parents’ death, but always in the context of a terrible family scene of grief and hysteria.

  But this was different, this was Perry’s death, not my own or anyone else’s close to me. Had he died alone? Did he know it was happening? I had no idea how he had felt, but I was certainly getting to study the impact of his death on people around him. Like our furious chair, who seemed to think it was an inconvenience; gloating Serena Fisch; image-conscious Rose Waterman; and greedy Chuck Bayer, hoping for an advantage of some kind.

  And Stefan—stunned, peculiar. I remembered then some years back at a party in Massachusetts, when Stefan, quite drunk, raised his glass for a loud toast: “To former lovers.” Everyone in the room smiled at his generosity, at his rising above circumstance, jealousy, and spite. Then he added: “May they all drop where they stand,” and there was embarrassed laughter, some frowns. A few people just turned away; his anger and contempt were nakedly inappropriate, and so unlike him.

  I thought of what Stefan had said to me before Perry came to dinner, that just because an affair ended didn’t mean it was over. Even when Stefan felt he had chosen between us, had seen Perry revealed as empty, Perry was still part of his life. We had happily and drunkenly made love after dinner, but something kept him awake, something made him get up to write.

  I would probably be seeing Perry in Stefan’s writing for years, like an atmosphere, a presence, a chill. Perry’s death was too ugly and unexpected not to scar Stefan in new and disturbing ways.

  I couldn’t help thinking of poor Kate Croy in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove crying out to her lover at the end of the novel, “We shall never again be as we were.”

  That was Stefan and me, irrevocably changed by someone—but someone we both hated. No. I hated Perry; what Stefan felt for him was a mystery.

  The phone rang and I monitored the caller leaving a message. It was a resonant, excited voice and every sentence seemed to end up in the air like a question.

  “Professor Hoffman? Your chair suggested I call you? My name is Mike Brewster, with Channel Nine? I’d like to talk to you, to get some information about Perry Cross?” He went on to leave an office number and a home number. I didn’t bother replaying the message, just erased it. Channel Nine was the best local TV news station, but I didn’t think much of their reporters or news anchors. All were pretty and on edge, like college seniors wearing their interview clothes, desperate to make a good impression. Watching Nine’s broadcasts, I often had the sense that they were little kids playing a schoolyard game of News.

  The phone rang again, but it was Sharon this time. I snatched up the receiver as soon as I heard her start to leave a message. “Sharon, I’m so glad you called!”

  “How was dinner?” she asked warmly.

  “Terrible! Perry’s dead.”

  “He’s dead? Oh, my God—was it food poisoning? Are you guys all right?”

  “I’m fine. No, I’m not fine.” I filled her in on everything that had happened. “Don’t you think it’s suspicious he was found in the river?”

  “Possibly. Listen, do you want to come out to New York and stay with me?” she asked. “You sound terrible.”

  “I can’t. I’ve got my classes—there’s the investigation—and if he was murdered, I’m the chief suspect because he came here for dinner and I hated him. You should see the way people in my department are looking at me and they don’t even know the truth.”

  “Maybe you’re just feeling a little paranoid, Nick. I know I would.”

  “It’s not paranoia. They think I’m guilty of something. ”

  “If you’re so freaked out, then you should try to find out what happened to Perry, find out how he died. At least it’ll put your mind at ease if you know the details, won’t it?”

  “How do I do that?”

  It was so overwhelming a prospect I tuned out the rest of the conversation, and when she said she had to go, I hung up in a fog.

  I took a cup of coffee out onto the deck. In Michigan—as in Massachusetts—they like to say, “Wait an hour if you don’t like the weather.” It had been cool and cloudy before, but now the sky was clearing and it was warm and clear enough to get some sun.

  I had come outside to lose myself, to escape my thoughts, but it wasn’t working. I kept picturing Perry at dinner just last night: smug at first, then puzzled, finally looking triumphant and ready. He left our house probably expecting that Stefan and I would have a furious brawl and Stefan would move out, or kick me out, and Perry could move right in. I felt sorry for him, driving off into the night, not knowing it would be his last night alive.

  Stefan had often accused me of being melodramatic, and he was right. I did have a tendency to turn a hangnail into a whole film noir (though Perry’s burst into and exit out of my life was not exactly trivial).

  And I lived with a writer, for God’s sake. I wasn’t just lecturing about fiction in the classroom, it was the air I breathed; how could I not see everything around me in dramatic terms?

  But that dramatic sense was also driving me crazy, and I knew Sharon was right. The only way I could stop feeling powerless was to start finding answers on my own, and not wait for people like Valley to dole out the explanations.

  I tried to focus on the garden now to unwind a little. Late September, the range of colors was narrow, but it still looked pretty. There were purple and pink wild asters, silvery artemisia, redleaved plumbago with its sharply blue little flowers. Everything blended together well.

  I had come to love gardening after nurturing an ailing little soulangeana magnolia behind our rented house back in western Massachusetts. It had produced only two blossoms the first spring we were there, and I turned to gardening books with curiosity. I quickly discovered that the soil needed to be acidified, and for months afterwards I gave the magnolia regular feedings.

  “How can you spend so much time on that thing?” St
efan had asked.

  “It’s not a thing, it’s a tree. Well, it can be a tree if we help.”

  One night Stefan found me out there in the moonlight, gently holding two pathetic branches, murmuring.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re converting, you’re a Druid.”

  “I was just sending it love. It needs love.”

  I battled magnolia scale, I battled mites, and the tree grew more than a foot a year, bursting into dozens of lavish white and pink blossoms each spring—when the weather didn’t change and kill them off overnight, that is. I developed a more sustained interest in planting, adding foundation plants to our rented house, since the landscaping was rather sparse: interesting little slow-growing evergreens, mugho pines, some variegated dogwoods, viburnums, flowering quinces, and lots more myrtle for ground cover. The landlord certainly appreciated my efforts.

  Whenever I’d be out there, though, with the knees of my jeans brown and moist from the soil, sweating, smiling, Stefan would come outside and eye me as if about to say something sarcastic; but he never did. Perhaps he thought it was ridiculous that a born and bred New Yorker like me could take to gardening.

  “I’m a shrub queen,” I told him. “You’ll just have to live with it.

  But the garden in our Michiganapolis house was so well designed—with its gazebo, herb garden edged with miniature roses, and brick walks—I hadn’t fussed with it much at all, had simply weeded and protected what had been passed on to me. I wasn’t yet prepared to make major changes; I wanted to live with it for a few years, to study it, which was actually a soothing prospect. It was like the house itself. When we moved in, there was nothing that needed immediate attention, and we didn’t even have to buy rugs or curtains or redo wallpaper because we liked the colors that were there and everything was in pristine condition.

  I closed my eyes now, sipping the strong coffee, enjoying the rustle of leaves, the muffled sound of cars, the mourning doves up in the shagbark hickory at the back.

  Something Angela had said to me yesterday suddenly floated back to me now. After she’d asked if I was investigating Perry’s death on my own, she suggested I contact the Medical Examiner, who was Neil Case’s mother. I could do that easily, since Neil—bright and hardworking—had aced my course last year and wouldn’t have had any reason to gripe about me. I was about to go back into the house to get the Michiganapolis directory when the doorbell rang.

  I called out, “Back here!” Someone came down the side path and opened the gate. It was Bill Malatesta as I’d never seen him. He was sweaty, bare-chested, with a light blue T-shirt stuffed into the back of his soaked-through blue running shorts. His sneakers looked very dirty.

  “Are you busy?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Do you want some water?” When he came over and sat on the Saratoga chair opposite me, I went in and brought back a large plastic tumbler of spring water, well filled with ice.

  He gulped from it, and we talked running for a while. That is, he did. He told me his favorite routes in town and on campus, and about running marathons, training for them. I was barely paying attention to what he said, I was too struck by his body, which I had never seen so uncovered before. Usually I don’t find blond or hairless men attractive—they always seem undernourished, even a little anemic. Bill struck me differently. He was very big, but incredibly lean, with body fat so low that his veins, his muscles, seemed not just alive but glowing. The tan helped, as did the sheen of sweat. Watching him, I felt like I was in the opening sequence of a porn movie—me the stuffy professor, him the student hunk who happened to drop by. Or he could be a pool boy, someone delivering pizza, whatever. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. He could have been framing and reframing the still life gathered at the center of his barely adequate shorts; I thought of a Cézanne bowl of fruit, the refracted echoing shapes gravely, heavily beautiful.

  And I wished Stefan was there, so I wouldn’t feel so much like a voyeur. With Stefan on the deck, it would seem less tacky to find Bill appealing—we would be sharing the moment as if it were a field trip.

  Suddenly I was snapped out of my reverie by the sound of the name that had been vibrating around me the whole damned day.

  “Did you know Perry Cross well?” Bill asked me, and I was instantly sure that this was why he had come by. He had told me that it was a spur of the moment decision: he was running, he needed a break, he realized our house was nearby. But I didn’t believe a word of it now. He could have splashed himself with water and simply come right over; after all, the SUM married students’ housing complex wasn’t all that far away. I sat up a little straighter.

  “Why do you ask?”

  He smiled. “Well, he’s dead.”

  “And?”

  Bill’s smile stiffened. Evidently he had not expected me to bristle. And I was a professor, not his best friend. I did nothing to soften my reaction, and I could see the uncertainty hitting him, but he went on.

  “We’re all talking about it,” he said. “The graduate students.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty typical. You know, somebody dies, people want to know whatever they can find out, people gossip, somebody says, ‘Last time I saw him—.’ That kind of thing. He was at the party. And not that many grad students knew him or were in his classes. So suddenly you’re important if you know something about him, or if he said something to you, or—” He grinned helplessly, shrugging at his growing incoherence.

  “You want a colorful anecdote?” I asked.

  Bill flushed. “Nothing like that! I just … I just wondered, that’s all.”

  And I wondered, too. Was Bill asking questions for somebody else—like Detective Valley? First Rose spying on me, now Bill! No, that was paranoid and silly. But why was he asking?

  “You and Perry weren’t good friends, then?”

  Bill was certainly persistent.

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “So he wouldn’t have confided in you about—?”

  “I can’t picture Perry Cross confiding in anyone.”

  Bill seemed startled by my vehemence, which only drew me out further. “I don’t know why you’re interested in him, but he wasn’t an interesting person.” I was lying, of course, so I hurried on. “And anyway, I think that you should spend your time on your dissertation and teaching your classes, instead of wasting it on—” But here I didn’t know what to say. What the hell was he wasting his time on, exactly? Why was he so curious about Perry Cross?

  Then it clicked for me. I recalled overhearing Bill and his wife at Lynn Broadshaw’s party, Betty angry that Bill had let something out, Bill apologetic, helpless. He had said, “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Did you tell Perry Cross something about you and Betty?” I asked. “Did you ask him for advice?” It was a ludicrous notion, but then Perry might have seemed more like a contemporary to Bill, given his low rank in the department, wiser than another graduate student but not unreachable.

  “What? No, of course not! Why would I ask him anything like that?”

  “Then what did you ask Perry? What did he know about you?”

  Bill stood up, practically slamming the tumbler on the small glass table. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a god-damned thing!” And even in the middle of this strange scene, I found myself admiring his tight and concave abdomen, which was tensed as if he expected an assault.

  “I should go,” Bill said. “Sorry,” he threw off over his shoulder as he headed down the side of the house to the street.

  Not a typical conversation between a graduate student and a professor. And not the way your typical porn sequence ended, I thought wryly, already unhooked enough to imagine describing it to Stefan with appropriate embellishments. That was a quirk we joked about—the way I occasionally told stories. I could never be counted on to describe an event accurately; I was almost always shaping and editing. I punched up colorful details, or added them if necessary, conflated comments, and left out whatever didn’t quite fit my angle of vision the p
articular time I told the story. And I frequently backtracked, filling my description with elaborate parentheses.

  “Listening to you sometimes is like watching an anthill,” Stefan once said.

  I beamed. “You mean I’m industrious and productive?”

  He glumly disagreed. “No, there’s all this commotion that’s hard to figure out.”

  “Not true! I make sense, eventually.”

  Stefan was not convinced, perhaps because he, the fiction writer, felt obliged to be careful, even scrupulous describing real events.

  When Stefan got back, from campus an hour later and we brought a nicely chilled bottle of Vouvray out onto the deck, I was disappointed that Stefan didn’t let me get a full head of steam going about Bill Malatesta’s visit.

  Stefan asked, “What makes you so sure Bill wasn’t telling the truth?”

  “When he said he stopped here in the middle of a run? Because he was too curious about Perry. And he softened me up first—lounging there like he was Dolf Lundgren or I don’t know who! He knew I was checking him out. And all that boring talk about running. Then bang, suddenly we’re on Perry Cross. You know, they might as well offer an elective course in that creep with everybody so fucking interested in him all of a sudden.”

  Stefan smiled sweetly. “Who’d teach it?”

  “Not me!”

  “Was Bill nervous?”

  “When?”

  Stefan waved his hands. “Anytime while he was here.”

  I thought about it, sipped from my glass, enjoying the cool sweet wine. “Not really. It’s more like he was on a mission.”

  Stefan frowned.

  “No, seriously. He wanted to find something out, he wanted to pump me.” And then we both started laughing. “Maybe he does,” I groaned.

  “He is hot.”

  “He always wears those loose chinos, but today!”

  “Let’s call his wife and ask if he’s curious.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Stefan raised his eyebrows. “Am I?”