by Lev Raphael
I called Sharon back. I read out the list, and then started filling in the names. I explained about Bill, the chair’s whirlpool, their having shared a hotel room at the conference, all of that.
“Is Bill telling you the truth?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe he did sleep with the chair. That raises the stakes.”
“Which means Mrs. Broadshaw?”
“Exactly!”
I flushed like a little child who’s gotten a multiplication problem right with the whole class looking on.
“But why wouldn’t the chair’s wife kill Bill, or her husband, if she was going to kill someone?”
“Nick, murder doesn’t have to make sense to you, it has to make sense to the murderer. Someone had to feel angry enough, or threatened enough, or desperate enough to do it.”
I suddenly remembered the party a few weeks ago, and Mrs. Broadshaw crying out, and Betty Malatesta hurrying from the kitchen. What had happened between the two women? Now I was wide awake.
“Sharon, I can’t believe I feel good thinking about why somebody else might have a reason to kill Perry.”
“That may be the only way you can feel good for a while, Nick, so enjoy it.”
I was about to say something when she went on a little breathlessly, “Has anyone gone through Perry’s files, his effects? Maybe there’s a clue there.”
“Shit!” I was supposed to clean up his junk at the office.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“But it’s ten o’clock, won’t it look suspicious?”
“It’s your office, too, right? What’s the problem?”
I was so fired up I agreed, and promised to call her from the office if I found anything suspicious. Of course I hoped I would discover some neat clue or piece of evidence that I could hand over to Detective Valley and end the whole thing with quiet flair. I was relieved to be doing something instead of feeling sunk in misery for myself and fear for Stefan.
I left Stefan a note just in case he woke up—which I thought unlikely—and got to campus in five minutes. Michiganapolis is pretty quiet at night, at least early in the week, and campus seems like an enormous abandoned Hollywood set. Pulling into the lot behind Parker, I thought I saw Claire driving off, but the light wasn’t very good and I must’ve been mistaken. She was efficient, but not obsessed; I couldn’t imagine her working there so late at night.
If Parker Hall was depressing during the day, at night it was truly dismal. It wasn’t ruined enough to be romantic and interesting in the gloom, it just seemed more dilapidated. The building was locked as usual after ten, and since I rarely came in this late, I had to fumble with my key ring for a minute before I found the right one. Inside, it smelled bad, a smell you didn’t seem to notice during the day: some mix of bug spray, which was constantly deployed against the hordes of cockroaches, stale cardboard, moldy plaster, and damp pipes. I carefully made my way up the worn, uneven stairs to the third floor, turning on lights as I ascended.
The third-floor hallway was quite cool and musty, and even when I flicked the nearest switch, the light from the large globe lamps was too far away to be comforting or helpful. I hurried down to my office, hoping I wouldn’t see any bugs or bats. One night last year, working after dinner, I’d heard something slam against my office door, and when I opened it carefully, I saw a twitching stunned bat lying there. I called the Campus Animal Patrol, which was used to dealing with the wildlife that blundered into buildings and scared people, and left, assuming they would come right away. The bat died overnight, and in the morning, with the patrol still not there, the entire third floor reeked.
I got into my office, turned on my two desk lamps and the standing lamp in the corner, left by some previous inhabitant: a bronze gargoyle of a lamp with a pink-fringed shade edged in gold brocade you’d expect to see on someone’s epaulets. The office wasn’t bright enough, but it would do.
I started with Perry’s desk, methodically sifting through the ordinary items, the supplies and department directives, separating every object, every page, waiting for something to leap up at me. It was quiet there except for the noise I made, and the occasional creaks and groans of the building as it cooled and settled in the night air.
Nothing. No phone book or academic calendar. I packed it all away, taped the boxes shut after checking through the box I had packed a few days ago. I wondered why everything in his desk was so unexceptional, so stripped of the personal: there weren’t any postcards, letters, notes, no sign that he was ever connected to anyone else.
I imagined Stefan nodding at that, and saying, “See, he was lonely.” But it seemed less like loneliness and more like the efforts of a man covering his tracks. What did Perry have to hide?
Unless someone had gotten to his desk before me, and edited everything out that might be incriminating. Serena had already gotten the materials related to Perry’s classes, the ones she would be teaching. What if that wasn’t all she had taken?
I moved the chair over to Perry’s file cabinets. Since he’d only been at SUM since the end of the summer, his files were not extensive. No surprise there. I found student evaluation forms from different schools he’d taught at, copies of letters of recommendation written for him or that he had written, and Xerox copies of articles. Lots of copies. I leafed through every single one, hoping that I’d find some note somewhere, something in the margin, something that at first glance looked casual, but was deeply significant. An address, a Swiss bank account number. I wished Sharon were there with me, beautifully methodical. This was too boring, and I couldn’t see how it was going to help Stefan in any way.
If I were in a house, there’d certainly be more places to look, like a wall safe, for instance.
I blushed at what I was about to do, but I went ahead anyway. I got up and lifted the Fragonard print, which was quite heavy, off the wall. It was stupid, but I had to check the wall. It was blank and cracked, revealing no secrets. I felt the back of the picture, but it seemed completely sealed and ordinary. I hung the print back on the wall.
I decided to see if there was anything behind the file cabinet drawers or the desk drawers. I pulled each one out and reached back to feel, but there wasn’t anything there and I felt a little foolish. I sat down again and leaned back in the desk chair, looking around the office. There was no rug to check under.
I stared at the Fragonard print, at the intense frozen struggle, draped in such shiny elegance. Once again, my eyes went up to that straining hand, and then down. But this time I looked up. I followed the hand up along the wall, above the print and to the edge where it met the ceiling. If there’d been some kind of molding there, I would have tried prying it from the wall just for the hell of it. I felt stumped.
Then my gaze went back to the picture, and I turned sharply to the deep-set dark office door. There was a thick piece of crown molding stretching across the top. I dragged over one of the metal department chairs and stood on it. I could just reach the top of the molding. It was thick with dust, but as I felt around I was sure that it didn’t quite meet the wall. I had to get higher.
I jumped down and lugged over my enormous Webster’s, plopped it on the seat, and climbed up. Perfect. I was high enough and there was enough light for me to see down into the space between the wall and the molding, which looked like the result of settling. There was something beige-colored in there. I yanked out what I saw was a folded-up 9x12 manila envelope.
I hurried down from my perch, tossing the dirty envelope onto my desk. I replaced the dictionary and chair.
Then I thought I heard a noise out in the hallway. It wasn’t the sliding pail of a janitor, but something quieter, furtive. I tensed and looked up at the door. Was there someone out there, somewhere in Parker Hall? Or was I just scaring myself like kids at a campfire telling ghost stories?
Then the lights in the hallway went out. This was no story. Someone had turned them out—I knew they weren’t on a timer.
Breath
ing fast, I could feel the skin on my face go tight and cold. I wanted to say something, to pretend someone was there with me, or just ask if anyone was outside, but I couldn’t speak. The window was three flights up, I thought, and it was closed. If someone burst through the door, I’d have no way to get out. I waited, terrified, wishing I had taken that self-defense class Stefan had talked about last year, wishing I weighed less and went to the gym every day, feeling vulnerable, feeling my body would not be able to protect me, but would be a source of danger. I was too clumsy, too out of shape.
I could have sworn somebody tried the handle, it seemed to move a hair. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
14
AND THEN THE LIGHTS CAME ON OUTSIDE, and I heard brisk strong footsteps heading my way, headed right down the hall to me. There was a knock and I jumped.
“Nick?” A woman’s voice.
I couldn’t answer.,
“Nick?” It was Priscilla Davidoff.
I leapt up and opened the door, grinning with relief.
Priscilla looked startled, since I’m sure I had never smiled that widely at her before. She had on a heavy black sweater, black jeans, and running shoes; with her hair tied back she looked formidable.
“I came in to look for some journals I forgot to take home,” she said. “I didn’t see your car downstairs. You working late?”
“Sort of.”
Priscilla peered behind me at the boxes on Perry’s desk, and the Fragonard print. “I thought you were all done with Perry’s stuff.”
“It’s taken longer than I expected.”
She nodded. “Not a great job, huh?”
“Yeah—it’s pretty weird.”
“It would depress the hell out of me,” Priscilla said. “I can’t stand cleaning up my own mess.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
Priscilla nodded genially. “See you later, Nick.”
As she turned away to head for her office, I blurted out, “Did you see anyone in the building? Out in the hall?”
Priscilla frowned and shook her head. “It’s just us here. Do you want the door closed?”
“Thanks.”
She shut it behind her and I listened as she walked across to her office and shut the heavy door.
It was quiet enough for me to hear her moving around her office. I snatched the rolled-up envelope and headed out, locking my door and leaving as quickly as I could, trying to be alert and ready.
I hurried down the stairs like a burglar and burst out into the parking lot with relief. Even the dim pole lights were comforting. There was one other car there, Priscilla’s battered Honda.
I checked the backseat of my car before I got in, and locked the door before starting up. Edging out of the lot onto Michigan Avenue, I suddenly felt faint, like someone who’s escaped an accident reliving the moment when everything could have gone wrong.
What if that was Priscilla who turned off the lights, and not to save the university on its light bill? I had imagined her as trained in karate, confident about walking into Parker alone, at night—but what if that wasn’t just confidence? What if it was menace? What if she had wanted to get into my office for some reason, and had thought the light had been left on and no one was inside? I was sure I’d heard something and that someone tried the doorknob.
And hadn’t Priscilla been too specific about why she was in the building at night? Why so much detail? She said she hadn’t seen my car—how was that possible, when there were only two in the lot?
“Very good,” Sharon said over the phone when I told her about Priscilla. “Hercule Poirot says, ‘You should trust nobody—nobody at all.’ I think that’s from Death in the Air. ”
I was feeling quite pleased with myself, reporting back to Sharon about searching through Perry’s things, the Fragonard print, the discovery. I was curled up on my favorite chair in my study. The danger, or the thought of danger, was over, and here at home I felt less like I was trapped by circumstances than faced by a puzzle.
“How do you remember all that stuff from those books?”
“Context,” she said. “If you were talking about Russian history I’d probably think of lines from War and Peace.”
“Amazing.”
“So, what was in the envelope?” Sharon asked.
“I was so spooked I never opened it. I wanted to calm down. I think I’m ready.” I pulled it from my desk and tore slowly along one side. I slipped out several Xeroxed sheets, folded in thirds.
“It’s something in German,” I said, very disappointed. “Newspaper articles? The copying is pretty bad. You know German, don’t you?” I put the papers down; even the look of German repulsed me, made me anxious and uneasy. It was an inescapable doorway into marching, bombs, destruction. Though my family hadn’t lost any. relatives in the Holocaust, like all modern Jews, we lived in its shadow.
Sharon was saying something: “Fax them to me tomorrow at my office. I’ll give you the number. It must be important, if Perry went to all that trouble of hiding it there.”
“Why put anything in the door frame? Why not keep stuff at home, or in a safe-deposit box?”
“Maybe so no one could find it, or he was trying to be clever.” I could picture that. I agreed to fax her what I had found, but I couldn’t imagine how these sheets of Xerox paper could be connected to what I was beginning to think of as my case.
“You have to get some sleep,” Sharon said. “Do you have anything you could take?”
“I hate pills,” I said. “I guess I could take some Nyquil—that usually knocks me out.”
“Whatever works. Don’t forget the fax tomorrow, okay?”
I assured her I wouldn’t forget, hung up, and drifted off to the bathroom and then to bed, wondering if I wasn’t just fooling myself and stirring up a lot of dust that would settle and leave me exactly where I’d started: facing Stefan’s certain arrest for murder.
Soon after I got up in the morning, I realized I had to lie to Stefan. Checking my date book, I had found a notation that Stefan’s father would be back in Ann Arbor from vacation. Mr. Borowski knew German too, and I decided to drive the hour down there and ask him to do the translation instead of faxing Sharon. I felt the need for more help, and help that was both nearby and in the family. I called while Stefan was showering, welcomed his father home, and said I had to see him. Mr. Borowski didn’t seem at all surprised. I called Sharon next, but she must have been between home and her office, so I left messages on both her answering machines, letting her know my plan. Then I called Claire at the department, and asked her to cancel my office hours because I wasn’t feeling well.
At breakfast, I told Stefan I was leaving early to go shopping before I got to campus. He looked so tired and worn down, I don’t think he really heard me, but I drove off feeling ashamed of myself. I wasn’t weighing this small lie against Stefan’s original partial truths about Perry, or his later silence about seeing Perry on campus. I was judging this lie against my own honesty with Stefan, and I was not pleased. Thankfully, there had been nothing in the newspaper that morning about the murder.
Ann Arbor and Michiganapolis were very different college towns. While the University of Michigan is smaller, urban, and somewhat undistinguished-looking, the town itself is larger than Michiganapolis and more picturesque, its many hills lined with big, well-kept Victorian homes bristling with turrets, porte-cocheres, elegant long verandas, and confidently fronted by crisp lawns. It was a town where automobile industry money as much as taste had left its mark, and where respect for the past—if not reverence—had left it relatively intact despite the accretion of newer buildings. It was very unlike Michiganapolis, where many of the older homes had been bulldozed for parking lots or mini-malls.
Mr. Borowski’s house was up one of Ann Arbor’s steeper and prettier hills, planted right in the middle of a circle of other small homes—small for Ann Arbor, that is. It looked charming and almost English to me, with mullioned windows, gabled roof. I rememb
ered lots of polished oak trim inside. Stefan and I had visited only once since moving to Michigan, and not very comfortably, but I was glad to be there again, maybe because I was connecting myself to Stefan’s life before Perry.
Stefan’s father opened up the door before I knocked. “Nick, you look good.”
“I look tired, Mr. Borowski.” He had once asked me to call him Max, but it felt too familiar, and it seemed to bother Stefan.
Stefan’s father nodded, gracefully accepting my correction. He shook my hand and waved me inside. As always, I found it hard to imagine this short, plump, white-haired old man had been a tyrant to Stefan as a boy. He was wearing a white buttoned-down shirt, large charcoal gray cardigan^ black and white plaid pants, and black carpet slippers. In his late sixties now, he was a Jewish version of the actor who played Santa in Miracle on 34th Street.
“You’ll have lunch?” he said.
It was early, but I readily agreed, sure that we’d feast on goodies from the authentic Jewish deli in town. We did. I was soon reveling in a thick pastrami sandwich on real seeded rye bread, and Max Borowski was eyeing me with the warm indulgence of parents enjoying their children’s appetites. I half-expected him to caution me not to eat so fast, but he just smiled and chewed and sipped his coffee. We went on to a chocolate babka that was exquisitely flaky and sweet.
“So,” he said when we were full. “You came because of the—” He considered his next word. “The incident at your university.” I had never heard him refer to SUM by name; it was an example of the snobbery that infected almost everyone who taught at the University of Michigan or lived nearby.
“You know about Perry Cross’s death?”