by Liz Bradbury
When I’d opened the elevator doors Kathryn had whispered, “Oh!” Any hesitation I’d ever harbored about taking on this building or rehabbing this loft was forever erased at that moment.
“This is...” She stood still, looking. She put the laundry bag down on the floor, took several steps, then turned slowly around. She paused to look at the bookcases on the wall beside the kitchen. She ran her hand over the pine dining table and glanced over my sketches. She took in the fireplace and the large slightly abstract Mexican landscape painting over it. She walked around the arrangement of small couch and chair that sit directly in front of the windows overlooking the Mews. She looked out the windows then back around the room for several moments. I didn’t say anything. I just let her look. It was fun to watch her.
Finally she turned back to me with an unreadable expression. She said, “You did all of this?”
“Well, the view was already here.” She laughed at that. I was really scoring on getting her to laugh. “Friends helped,” I added.
Across the room, past the bedroom door a large spiral staircase circled up into the ceiling. She pointed, “What’s up there?”
“Still working on that.”
“I want to see it.” There was a demand in her voice that was kind of provocative.
“Too dark, too cold, not finished. I’ll let you see it sometime in the daylight.”
“Promise?”
I nodded.
“You’ve made me several promises tonight that I sincerely expect you to keep.” She was using that deep deliberate tone that made me ache again.
“I keep promises,” I assured her.
She paused considering me for a moment, then took a deep breath and said in another half whisper, “Seeing this loft has been the best part of my week.”
“What a nice thing to say.” I privately hoped she’d revise that statement after the rest of the evening’s promises had been kept. “Let me help you get the laundry started and then I can get the dinner on the table, OK?” I picked up her laundry basket, she grabbed the duffel bag.
I led her through the bedroom toward the laundry room. She stopped for a moment to take in the bedroom space. The fireplace is also open on the bedroom side of the wall. She took a step closer to look at the large photographs of August Rodin’s bronze lesbian sculptures.
“Goodness, where did you get these?” she asked eyeing the swirling erotic forms of women making love, that were done by the sculptor who created “The Thinker.”
“I took the pictures myself at a special show of his sculpture a few years ago.”
She tilted her head to the side staring for a minute at the organic flowing hair and bodies. She said absently, “I know a lot of women who’d love to have copies of these in their bedrooms.”
“Do you?” I teased leading her into the laundry room.
My laundry room is brilliant, if I do say so myself. I wanted a washer and dryer right next to my clothes closet. Only people who don’t have to do laundry decide to put the washer and dryer in the basement, two floors from the place where the dirty clothes start and the clean clothes are supposed to end up. Besides the machines, I have an area with a tile floor and a drain with rods over it to hang wet clothes.
“This is one of those high capacity machines,” I said, “you’re supposed to be able to put sixteen bath towels in one load.”
She was opening the duffel bag, “Well then, I guess I just have one white load and one dark. I didn’t want to be a complete leech, I brought my own soap.”
I showed her how to use the machines, then went back to the kitchen to get the food ready. I couldn’t help grinning at the effect the loft had had on her. It was completely worth the six months of backbreaking labor.
I put the pad Thai in a bowl and heated it up in the microwave. I dished the salad onto plates. The crunchy sweet me krob went into a serving bowl with a big spoon, with the plate of spring rolls next to it.
I went back toward the laundry room to ask her what she’d like to drink, and found her standing in front of my bedroom bookcases. She had her hand on the spine of some volume, but it was too dark in the room to see which one.
She turned toward me, a little guiltily. “I’m sorry, I can’t pass a bookcase without looking to see what’s in it. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“When you’re in my occupation, you can barely walk by a wallet without looking to see what’s in it.” I could see her eyebrows rise, even in the dim light.
“Well, I do try to control myself. Come and have something to eat. What would you like to drink?” I told her what I had available.
“I’m torn. I’d love a glass of wine, but I think I need coffee,” she sighed, “or maybe tea would be better with dinner.”
“How about tea now with dinner and glass of wine later?” I suggested leading her back to the kitchen area.
“Good idea. Shall I sit here?” She sat down at the end of the table, idly picking up a fork and looking at the pattern of the handle. “Sterling? Etruscan?”
“Yes it is, good for you. I have antique dealer friends who insist I buy sterling for tableware. They say it’s cheaper than new stainless steel at Macy’s and it tastes better,” I explained as I got out the teapot.
I put boiling hot water in the pot to warm it, then threw that out and put more boiling water in.
“Oolong or Darjeeling?”
“Darjeeling please.”
I put loose tea leaves in the pot. When the tea had steeped, I used a little strainer to hold over the cups to catch the used leaves.
Kathryn watched me as I went though each step, “I’ve only seen people make tea that way in England.” She made graceful gestures with her hand now and then to punctuate her sentences.
“A friend whose parents were Canadian taught me,” I explained. I brought the teapot and two large cups to the table.
“Milk, sugar, lemon?”
“Just lemon,” she said reaching for her cup.
I got a lemon from the refrigerator, cut some wedges and put them on a plate. She was pouring the tea into both cups when I brought the plate to the table with a sterling lemon fork on its side. We dug into the food.
“Thank you for ordering this. I was so hungry, you may have saved my life...” said Kathryn breaking her food focused concentration to smile at me.
“Tell me about the grant you were working on today.”
She outlined what the grant was for, then said, “It’s part of the satellite campus funding and the best part about it is that I’m done with it.” She took a sip of tea, then explained that it was part of her job right now to help various department heads finish grant applications by the end of the term. She added, “This is really dull. You couldn’t be interested in this.”
While she was talking her hand went to knead her shoulder again. She’d tried to turn her head to look out the window and had reacted to the stiffness in her neck.
“No vale la pena?” I said looking at her hand on her shoulder.
She smiled, “I can get by pretty well with German and Russian, but I’m ashamed to say my Spanish is terrible. Something about not going through pain?"
“It means, It’s not worth the pain,” I said nodding at her shoulder.
She stopped, looked at her hand and flexed it, “I seem to do that all the time... did you know the hat makers of London went mad in the mid-1800s because the paint they detailed the hats with had lead in it? They licked the brushes every few minutes to bring the bristles to a fine point. They ingested so much lead it destroyed their brains. That was the source of the Mad Hatter character in Alice in Wonderland,” she shook her head and went on, “and now in the 21st century, workers will go mad from the constant pain of the repetitive motion from keyboard typing in awkward positions. I forget about it for a while and then I move my head... ”
She turned her head to the right, cursed gently, and touched the bridge of her nose. “It gives me a headache too.”
“How about we try
a temporary maneuver?”
“Anything," she said, watching me closely. “What shall I do?”
I moved behind her, putting my hands on the outsides of her shoulders. The black flannel of her shirt was thin and worn to a comfortable softness. Like pajamas. Her sweater vest was way too thick to massage through. She’d have to take it off later. Wondering if she’d take off all her clothes for the massage distracted me for a moment. Shaking my head slightly I came back to the task at hand.
“Sit back and up straight.”
The chair is the swiveling office kind on casters; the type executives lean back in at fancy desks. All my dining room chairs are like that.
I put my palm against the left side of her face, just in front of her ear. Her skin felt soft and warm. I noticed her perfume. She hadn’t had that scent in her office. She must have put it on when she went back to her apartment. It was stimulating to imagine she’d done this sensual thing for me. I inhaled again and realized it was her shampoo. Her hair was slightly damp. She’d taken a shower when she’d gone home too, that was even more stimulating.
“Turn your head against my left hand,” I said as I guided the movement with my right, “harder, keep going.” I held my hand steady as she pushed against it. My foot braced the chair’s casters so it wouldn’t roll away. She groaned in effort as she did it. I was surprised at how strong she was.
“Just a little more,” I coaxed, my lips near her ear, “OK, stop now.” I took my hands away. She gingerly moved her head back and forth. She touched her shoulder again. “Better?” I asked.
“Ah... it is,” she said in a surprised tone. “So, you do know what you’re doing. Mmm, how nice.”
“You were in doubt?” I said with mock sarcasm as I picked up the dishes.
She just laughed lightly. I put the dishes in the dishwasher and the empty food containers in the trash. I got my laptop and sat back down to look at my notes.
“You were telling me about the grant part of your job. What’s the rest of it?”
She turned to the window. With her elbow on the table, she rested her chin in her hand. “Let’s see, Max Bouchet needed someone to check the grant driven programs,” she faced me and smiled, “and ask stupid questions.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well you see, everybody running a grant program expects the rest of the College to be familiar with it. There have been several serious... disagreements... when someone doing an evaluation asked an ignorant question and the program leader blew up in exasperation. Since I’ve been working away from the campus for so many years, Max figures I can ask anything and nobody will be too annoyed.”
“Of the people who were at the meeting, which of them have been working on grants?”
“As heads of departments, all of them are. I’m really like a grant information sherpa. I carry the data to a central place. Check credentials and personnel working on the grant... look over financial figures. I’m not particularly interested in the job. I won’t be doing it next semester.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Research for a basic art history textbook on women artists, which will grow into a major course of study for students here at Irwin.”
“That sounds fabulous,” I said earnestly. “Will you teach in the program?”
“I guess I’ll probably run the program, but the research part will be fairly quiet. I need a little time off from traveling around. I find that kind of research relaxing.”
“This might be kind of personal but I’m dying to know how you got to be a full professor at your age.”
“Easy, I slept my way to the top,” she kidded, “...don’t you believe me?”
“Well... it’s not that I think you don’t have the charms but...”
“Actually, it was a very hard time in my life. Did you hear about the Central Western University professors who were fired for dissertation fraud about 10 years ago?”
“Yes, I read about it. Quite a story. They plagiarized their research and then backed each other up?”
“I was the one who uncovered the fraud. These men were really scum. They not only faked their own work and lined their own pockets with grant money, they were terribly powerful and extraordinarily hypocritical. They routinely persecuted doctoral candidates, stealing their research and sometimes sexually harassing them.”
“And you exposed them?”
“I did. I had to. I had several friends who were being torn apart by these bastards. I was up for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor due to some research I’d published and also because the University system had vastly benefited from some grants I’d secured. Not being tenured is a tough position for any college teacher. You walk on eggshells every day. You do anything to avoid making waves, but I just couldn’t stand what these people were doing to the students. When I voiced concern in a minor way, they attacked me academically. They were foolish to do so,” she said sardonically.
“What did you do?”
“Found reams of evidence exposing their bogus research and grant manipulation. I took it all to the State Chancellor of Education, who brought charges. Really CWU is a good institution, a number of Irwin profs have studied there, Skylar did, so did Georgia Smith and Leo Getty, Max did a year there and I think Rolina Roth-Holtzman did a year there as an undergrad. I didn’t want the whole place to go down in flames. The University System was very embarrassed and didn’t want the publicity, so we all made a deal. Frankly, I really didn’t want to be branded a troublemaker. Not at that stage of my career anyway,” she smiled briefly, “they fired the worst of them, but the University didn’t publicly admit to its own gross negligence. I insisted the student files were made right. They also had to institute a checks and balances system on research and grants. The kind of thing I’ve been doing here.”
“But how did you get the professorship? Was that part of the deal?”
“Oh well, I passed the tenure and promotion board. So I was an associate professor, but there was a lot of political pressure to support reforms throughout the state system. The Chancellor suggested I chair the Governor’s committee, but also pointed out to the University that I really should be a full professor if I were going to lead this important panel. I didn’t want to work at CWU any more, so I got a leave, the promotion, and the reins to a committee that was more work than anyone could imagine.” She shook her head, “I worked 20 hours a day for months on that thing. We did a good job though. After a year and a half, the reforms were in place and I applied for this opening at Irwin.”
She stopped talking, lost in thought, after a long moment she said, “It wasn’t fun, believe me. One of the people who was fired was a major force in college basketball. There was a chaplain involved too, who tried to make an issue of my sexual orientation. There were threats from their supporters, but you know, the threats just made me stand fast.”
“It all sounds very hard,” I said sympathetically.
“Long time ago,” she shrugged. Her hand went to her shoulder.
“More tea?” I asked lifting the pot. She nodded, so I poured. “I’m sorry I have to tax you with this case.”
“It’s all right, go ahead,” she said more formally, sitting up squarely in her chair.
I looked into her eyes for a long moment, then I said, “I’m going to be very candid with you. I think someone at the Tenure Committee meeting set a fire bomb that caused the explosion.”
“No!” she said shocked, “...tell me.”
I told her what Daniel Cohen and his fire inspectors had determined. She listened carefully, her eyes growing wider. She said when I finished, “So one of them did it... it couldn’t have been an outsider. My God... who?”
Chapter 25
I scrolled to the Committee list on my laptop and recited, “Daniel Cohen, Leo Getty, Rowlina Roth-Holtzmann, Georgia Smith, Jimmy Harmon, Amanda Knightbridge, Skylar Carvelle, Bart Edgar and you, but of course you weren’t at the meeting. Also at the meeting were Max Bouchet, Miran
da Juarez, Connie Robinson. Skylar Carvelle is dead. Of the rest of those people, only you and Daniel Cohen have airtight alibis for Carl’s death. If we assume that this is all tied together and that Carl was murdered, that lets you and Cohen out of the loop.”
“Thank you,” she said wryly.
“I wouldn’t be telling you this if I thought you were a suspect,” I smiled. “I’d like your opinion on these people, I need to get more insight into them. If you were doing candid evaluations on them tell me what you’d write. Start with Skylar Carvelle because he wanted to talk to me about something important and someone killed him. Any ideas?”
“I’d say that Skylar was a bit of a weasel because he seemed to revel in being a first class snitch, but if I said that, I’d be doing what I was blaming Skylar for doing. Though, if Skylar had managed to... um... spill the beans to you, he might still be alive. I guess there’s a moral in there somewhere?” she asked with raised eyebrows.
“Yes, the moral is you must answer all my questions with veridicality and alacrity.”
She snorted, “And I must do this because you have a large vocabulary?”
“No Kathryn, do it because I’m the detective trying to stop the killer,” I said frankly.
She drew in breath at that and nodded, “Yes, OK. I’ll try. Um, I really can’t think of any reason why Skylar called you.”
“OK, then let’s talk about Bart Edgar.”
“Bart’s a fuck-up,” she said flatly.
“You’d write that on an evaluation?” I snorted.
“I don’t often use language like that. It demonstrates a lack of vocabulary, but it does seem to concisely describe the man.”
“What happened that day, when he picked you up at the airport?”
“Oh, my... well... Miranda instructed him to wait on a bench at the bottom of the main escalator. I finally found him on bench at the bottom of a different staircase.”
“Hey, he was close...”
“Uh huh,” she said dubiously. “We went to the baggage claim area...”
“Did you talk about anything?”