Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

Then I did recognize the backseat occupant: shivering and miserable, hazel eyes looking up at me, pleading. Hank Brody.

  “Hank? My God!” I pivoted around to the lieutenant. “What are you doing with this boy? He’s one of my students!”

  “He is, huh? Whaddya know—he was telling the truth after all. Well, sure doesn’t look like a college boy to me. That ratty hair. Looks homeless or like some kinda Deadhead.”

  I began fiddling with the toggles on my sweater. “And you’ve arrested him?”

  “Thing is, don’t know if we’ve got us a witness here—or a suspect. He’s the one found the body. Called 911. But the whole story sounds fishy to me.”

  I pulled out my cell phone, scrolled down to Earlene’s number.

  Boylan grabbed my hand before I could press the send button. “Hold your horses, Professor. We haven’t arrested him—he’s just being detained for questioning.”

  I snatched the phone back and pressed the button. I heard it ring in Earlene’s office. She picked up right away. Secretary must be gone for the day. “Earlene—Karen. Listen, Joe Lone Wolf’s dead, and the state police have Hank Brody in detention.” I told her where we were.

  I motioned Hank to move over on the hard plastic backseat, then I slid in next to him. The car smelled of cleanser with a faint overlay of cigarettes and vomit. “The dean’s on her way, Hank. Don’t you say another word to this man till we get you a lawyer.”

  He nodded, wide-eyed and speechless.

  “The dean? Hey, now,” the lieutenant said. “Don’t go overboard. If he’s really one of yours, that’s a different story…”

  I turned my back on him, closed the door firmly, and was alone in the car with my student.

  Tears were beginning to fill Hank’s eyes. “Professor Pelletier, you did say I could call you if I had a problem.…”

  “I’m glad you did. What happened, Hank?”

  “I c … c … came to see Professor Lone Wolf.” Hank was shivering so hard he could barely speak. I pulled off my heavy sweater and draped it around his shoulders. “The door was unlocked. It always is. When he didn’t answer I went in. He was in the living room, just lying there on the couch—like he was asleep. But the place didn’t smell right. I didn’t want to use his phone—you’re not supposed to touch anything, right? And I don’t have a cell. So, I started banging on doors. A guy let me call 911. I told that cop all this, but he wouldn’t stop asking questions.”

  I had questions for him, too, not least of them how he knew the door to Joe’s apartment was always unlocked. But now was not the time, and besides a campus police car came to a screeching halt at the curb, and Earlene jumped out. It was cold in the blue-and-gray; I was envious of her long wool coat.

  I handed Hank over to Earlene with a sigh of relief. I’d intended to stay with them, but she told me to go back to my office and get warmed up before I came down with pneumonia.

  The college cop, a black man of about sixty named Artie Crawford, offered to take me back to campus, but Boylan wasn’t done with me. I’d barely gotten myself settled in the passenger seat, when he hustled over. He held the car door open and leaned in to speak to me. “Hey, wait a minute, Ka…ah…Professor.…” He didn’t know what to call me. Good. I didn’t want him getting all palsy. “I’m not done talking to you. You say you knew Lone Wolf. But you didn’t really say how well you knew him.” He ran his tongue over his front teeth.

  At Boylan’s smarmy tone, I heard Officer Crawford suck in his breath. His graying military brush-cut seemed to bristle. Immediately he turned the key in the ignition.

  I tried to tamp down my rage, but Boylan must have seen it in my burning face, because he held up a hand to silence me. “I gotta ask these questions, ya know. Gotta look at all the angles. Good-lookin’ lady like you, I wouldn’t blame a guy—”

  I snapped at him. “Cut it out, Boylan.”

  I hadn’t noticed before, but his eyes were pale gray, almost like Nordic ice. “Answer the question.”

  “I already did—he was my colleague.”

  Officer Crawford slid the gear-shift lever into drive. The car lurched forward. Boylan slammed my door, but not before he got the last word in. “I’ll be talking to you again,” he said. The eyes were slits of glass.

  I think I must have been in a state of shock, because as Crawford drove me back to campus, I was still struggling to frame the situation in terms of cold logic. People who’ve done nothing wrong will be okay. Hank hadn’t done anything wrong; therefore Hank would be okay. I hadn’t done anything wrong; therefore I would be okay. Faulty syllogism.

  In a crisis, reliance on pure logic is a sign of denial. I went home and wrote an anguished e-mail to Charlie. And then I deleted it. There was nothing he could do about this anyhow. Why worry him?

  Chapter 10

  Wednesday 10/14

  From: nedhilton@enfield.edu

  To: englishdepartmentfaculty@enfield.edu

  Subject: Death of a Colleague

  At ten a.m., the English faculty will meet in the department lounge to process the untimely death of Professor Joseph Lone Wolf and review the ramifications, procedural, pedagogical, and psychological, of that death for the department. This meeting is mandatory.

  Please inform your students by e-mail of the cancellation of tomorrow’s English Department classes.

  As I walked toward the English Department lounge the next morning, I first smelled the burning incense, and then I heard the flute music and the birdsong. Good God, don’t tell me the department was going to get all touchy-feely about Joe’s death. Oh, no—not emotion! Could we survive the self-exposure? I gulped and walked through the door.

  The long mahogany table that sits against the lounge’s side wall had been pulled out a yard or so and held a projector, a laptop computer from which the Native music emanated, and a small clay smudge pot from which smoke emerged, smelling something like cedar or sage. Folding chairs were set up facing in the opposite direction. I turned. It was as if the pallid blue wall had vanished, and I was confronting the forest primeval, sunlight flickering through ancient trees, branches blown in a gentle breeze. Trees. Breeze. It rhymed. It scanned. I was thinking in poetry. On the shores of Gitche Goomee, / Of the shining Big Sea water…The room was nearly full of my colleagues, shifting in their chairs, shuffling their feet, clearing their throats. I glanced over at Sally Chenille, seated next to me. She rolled her eyes. It was the first time ever I’d felt like smiling at Professor Chenille. Then I recalled that the last time I’d ever seen Joe he’d been getting out of Sally’s snazzy sports car. And he seemed to be in a bit of a snit.

  An empty easel sat in the corner of the large room, and as Miles Jewell took the seat on my other side, sighing deeply, Chairman Ned Hilton came through the door lugging a photograph the size of a wall poster. Centering it on the easel, he stepped back to contemplate the effect. It was a black-and-white portrait of Joe Lone Wolf in full ceremonial garb: fringed leather shirt and pants, feathered war bonnet, menacing face paint.

  The English Department faculty was too civilized to gasp out loud. Oblivious to the discomfort of his colleagues, Ned took the podium. He was dressed all in white, loose cotton pants and tunic, and around his neck he wore a black leather thong with a circular pendant in a Native style—a silver rim with dangling feathers. A dream-catcher, that’s what it was. Ned was wearing a Native dream-catcher.

  “Colleagues,” our chairman intoned, “we are here to pay tribute to our Native friend, returned now to the Great Father and to Our Mother the Earth. Ahwhooah. Ah woo ah ay. Let us—”

  My gaze was focused intently on my folded hands, for fear of catching someone’s eye. Ned sounded a little…off-center…to me, but what did I know? Beyond mastery of the Native songs, speeches, and narratives I’d learned for my American literature survey courses, I was as clueless as most literary scholars about American Indian life and culture.

  “What is this crap?” The voice that boomed from the doorway belonged to Clark McC
utcheon. He stood there with each hand up high against the doorframe and his feet spread wide. He looked like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, only with fewer limbs—and wearing denim.

  I recalled seeing Clark with Joe at Rudolphs’ bar. I breathed a sigh of relief. They’d seemed friendly. Maybe this was the cavalry riding to the rescue.

  “Hilton, don’t tell me this is some bungling attempt at a Native ceremony! For God’s sake, don’t you understand the egregiousness of a politics of appropriation? This farce exploits sacred traditions, desacralizes shamanistic rituals, and perpetuates hegemonic misrepresentations of outsider culture. Cease at once!” I thought I heard the hoof-beats of the great horse, Silver.

  “No, no.” Ned appeared shaken. To the extent that a pale face could become paler, his did. “This isn’t cultural appropriation—just a respectful effort to reenact the signifying practices of Native Indian bereavement ceremonials.”

  “Crap,” McCutcheon repeated, striding to the front of the room.

  Harriet Person interrupted him before he could go further. “Ned means no disrespect—”

  McCutcheon sputtered, “Replication without authenticity equals appropriation—”

  But Miles Jewell jumped up and cut him off at the pass. Moving spryly to the podium, Miles assumed the age-old stance of department chairman: shoulders squared, feet wide, confronting his fractious faculty head on—something like an aged bison. “This is an egregious waste of time. Hilton, sit down and shut up.” Ned closed his mouth abruptly and plopped down into a front-row chair. “You, too, McCutcheon.”

  Clark stood his ground for a second or two, an alpha male studying Miles and then his colleagues. His eye caught mine and held. He took a deep breath, relaxed his stance and winked. Surprisingly, he sat down, too.

  Miles continued, “We’ve got real work to do here. The death of Lone Wolf presents us with crucial administrative issues. Here we are, halfway through the semester, and we need an immediate replacement for one of our colleagues. Who’s qualified to take over Joe’s classes for two or three sessions until a replacement can be hired?”

  Twenty or so colleagues stared at each other in hapless bewilderment: Not me.

  Miles cleared his throat and continued. “Karen, as an Americanist, you meet the criteria.” He paused. “But would it be fair to ask you to teach his classes while you have a tenure decision looming over your head?”

  Nobody breathed—least of all me. As it had for me, realization dawned—I could see it on every face—that, with Joe’s death, I suddenly had no opposition for the English Department’s one tenured position. Everyone stared at me: Professor Plum, in the faculty apartment, with…what? We hadn’t yet been told the cause of death.

  “Okay, Hilton,” Miles barked. “What are Joe’s courses?”

  “His course in the major is American literary Outsiders,” Ned squeaked.

  “Okay. Hmm, literary Outsiders.” Miles seemed to have grown two or three inches in the moments since he’d wrested the reins of power from Ned. “Who’ll take over this course? McCutcheon, sounds right up your alley.”

  McCutcheon, seated now, pushed both hands out in front of him, palms out. “Oh, no. Not me. I’ve got too many duties as it is—I’m on the editorial staff of American Literature, I hold an MLA office, I oversee a section of the Heath anthology—”

  “I’ll teach it,” I said, with a sigh that came from somewhere beneath my insoles. How hard could it be? An extra class or two? “But you’ll find someone else right away, won’t you? Maybe someone from the university? A Ph.D. candidate…”

  Ned looked at Miles. Miles looked at Ned, the chairman. Ned looked away, abdicating responsibility. Thus do dynasties fall in academe. “Yes, okay,” Miles said. “I’ll get right on it.” I swear he grew another inch. “And what’s his other—”

  A brusque knock and the lounge door flew open. Lieutenant Neil Boylan strode into the room, snapping his badge case open in front of him. “Boylan. Massachusetts state police. Homicide.” He was followed by Trooper Lombardi, tall, saturnine, and impassive. I nodded at Lombardi, but he remained expressionless.

  “Professors,” Boylan said, wearing his neutral face. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re going to have to interview each of you about the death of your colleague, Joseph Lone Wolf.” He gestured around the room. “Is everyone in the English Department present at the moment?”

  Miles, who had pushed forward toward Boylan when the investigator had entered, huffed at him. “We’re holding a confidential meeting. You can’t just barge in here!”

  Boylan’s fair Irish face was solicitous as he bent toward Miles, but his voice was flat. “I’m sorry about that, sir, but I’m afraid we can. Finding you all together like this makes it very convenient. Are you in charge, sir?”

  Miles regarded the lieutenant as if the younger man was a truant freshman. “Yes, I am. And your unannounced arrival is highly inconvenient, not to mention rude.”

  “Well, sir, as I said, I am sorry. I understand that you are all important, busy people, and we’ll do our best to keep the…inconvenience…to a minimum.” Without actually achieving sarcasm, something ambiguous about the tone of his mellow baritone on “important, busy people” took all the ego salve out of the words. “Sergeant, get this…ah…senior gentleman’s name and put him on the interview list.”

  Lombardi flipped open a notebook and began to write.

  Miles lost his newfound inches. I don’t know where they went—just got swallowed up by his old-man clothes.

  The lieutenant slowly eyeballed the members of the department, one by one, with his cool, gray gaze. There was nothing unpleasant or confrontational about his expression; being scrutinized by him was an experience akin to going through an airport security scanner. While he may not have thrown the fear of God into my colleagues, he certainly had impressed them as being in earnest. Cell phones appeared in the hands of those department members most likely to have their attorney’s number on speed dial.

  Clark McCutcheon, one hand-tooled boot crossed casually over the opposite denim-clad knee, seemed the most unfazed. “Lieutenant, may I respectfully ask just, exactly, how Joe—ah, Professor Lone Wolf—died?” Although his voice was as smooth as soy milk, the boot remaining on the floor jiggled up and down.

  Boylan checked out McCutcheon—the shoulder-length gray-blond hair, the faux working-man’s denim, the expensive boots. “You may certainly ask, Professor, but that information is strictly on a need-to-know basis.”

  “Was it really…murder?” This came from Ned Hilton, slumped in an armchair in the corner. If he’d been pallid before, now, in his white cotton togs, he was bleached and hung out to dry.

  “His death is being investigated by the homicide division,” Boylan responded. “You’re free to draw your own conclusions.” Then, squinting his eyes at Ned, he asked, “You sick or something, fellow? You don’t look very well. Should I be calling EMS?”

  “No,” Ned squawked.

  I spoke up for the first time since the officers had entered. “He’ll be okay, Lieutenant Boylan. He just…doesn’t handle stress well.”

  “Is that so? Lombardi, get him on the list, too—along with the cowboy, there.” Then Boylan turned to me, smiled his cat’s smile, and waited a long beat before he spoke again. “Of course Professor Karen Pelletier and I have already spoken.”

  Every professorial head turned. Every professorial eye fixed itself upon me. Every professorial imagination went to work—on overtime.

  ***

  “Pssst, Karen!” Monica, red-eyed and blotchy faced, beckoned me into the department office, closed the door and locked it. She pulled a pink tissue from the box on her desk, raised a finger indicating that I should wait a minute, then blew her nose. With another tissue she mopped her eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen the feisty department secretary reveal the slightest vulnerability. “I’m sorry, Karen, but it just got to me—that sweet man. I can’t believe he’s gone.” She plucked another tissue
from the box.

  Sweet man? “Joe?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I didn’t get you in here just so I could cry on your shoulder. I’ve got a message for you from Felicity Schultz. She wants you to call her.”

  “Sergeant Felicity Schultz?”

  “Yeah, she’s your boyfriend’s partner, right? She says you’re in deep doo-doo with the staties and need to talk to her, ASAP.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Monica. “Why would she tell you all this?”

  “Felicity and I go way back. I sat for her.”

  “You mean—for her baby?”

  “No, for her. When she was a little kid, a real brat, she lived downstairs from me. One of those triple-deckers in Springfield? You know—rickety porches and dripping radiators? Anyhow, Felicity knows I work here, of course, and she thought I’d be the most—what’d she say?—discreet—way of getting in touch with you. Discreet, whoops! Better keep my voice down.

  “She said to tell you—and these are the exact words—she said to tell you not to tell that asshole, Boylan, anything and to call her at this number.” Monica pulled a pink memo slip from inside her bra, glanced left and right before palming it over to me. “Good luck,” she whispered and unlocked the door.

  ***

  At the Dunkin’ Donuts in Greenfield, Sergeant Felicity Schultz was sitting in the back booth with Buster asleep in the stroller beside her. Motherhood didn’t seem to have transformed her at all—still the same plain oval face and roundish cheeks. Her red-brown hair was longer, though, probably because she didn’t have time now to get to the barber every two weeks like she used to. And she smelled of baby powder.

  On the phone she’d told me she wanted to meet somewhere away from Enfield so Boylan wouldn’t catch her fraternizing with a “suspect.”

  “A suspect?” I’d squeaked. “Me?” I’d thought Hank was a suspect, but Earlene had gotten him back on campus after only a couple of hours working the phone. But now Boylan’s crude question about “how well” I’d known Joe began to take on a new and sinister significance.