Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  I sobered Felicity up and sent her home for the midnight feeding. Mom was long asleep. I sat at the laptop computer in my cramped study and wrote:

  From: kpelletier@enfield.edu

  To: Charles.piotrowski@army.mil.gov

  Charlie, my love, I don’t know if you’ll get this or not, but I’m frantic about you. I can’t get you by phone, and you don’t answer my e-mails. Please, please call me. Please, please be safe. All my love, Karen.

  P.S. Things are insane here. I’m drinking too much wine, and I’ll probably be arrested for murder.

  I stared at the e-mail for a long time, and then I pressed the delete button. At least I thought I pressed the delete button, but I’d had yet another glass of wine, and I couldn’t be sure.

  Chapter 19

  Tuesday 10/20

  The next morning I found Sally Chenille right where I hoped to—in Java Zone—and sat down at her table. She looked up from a sheet of scrawled-over class notes and blinked. Her mascaraed lashes flickered like the legs of dying centipedes. I needed to find out what the deal was between her and Joe. I’d managed to talk to a number of colleagues about him, but hadn’t been able to find Sally on campus.

  “I just wondered,” I began, “if perhaps you might be able to…ah…tell me anything about Joe Lone Wolf. I feel bad that I didn’t really know the man, and now he’s dead.” As an interview ploy it was pretty weak, but I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

  Sally denied that she had any particular knowledge of Joe Lone Wolf.

  “Really?” I widened my eyes. “But I saw him get out of your car in the college parking lot a week ago Saturday night—and it was past midnight.”

  Sally laughed. “Oh, that! It was just that we got to talking about casinos, and he volunteered to show me the ropes at Mohegan Sky over in Connecticut. We had a few good hours, but on the way home he definitely had something else on his mind.”

  “Sex?” I ventured.

  “Right. And I wasn’t up for it. He got pissed and slammed out of the car. That’s all there was to it.” She cocked her head at me. “So—why do you ask?”

  “Oh,” I said, “just curious. That’s all.” I picked up my coffee and headed for the office. An entire free day lay ahead of me in which to try to reconstruct my tenure file.

  ***

  “This is a voice from your past,” said a deep voice from the telephone receiver.

  “Stuart Horowitz! My God! It has been a long time. What’s new? You got my Facebook invitation.”

  “Well, yes, and I’m calling because I have kind of a strange question to ask you.”

  “Ask away.”

  “You know that photograph you sent out? The American Indian. Why the hell is Frankie Vitagliano wearing feathers?”

  “That photo? That’s Joe Lone Wolf, my colleague.” I added, ridiculously, “He died.”

  “Joe—Who? It’s Frankie Vee. I swear it. We were in grad school together. I’d know him anywhere.”

  “Frankie? Frankie Who? That portrait is of Joe Lone Wolf. Yes, he was an Indian.”

  There was a gap of silence, and then I could hear Stuart’s incredulous chortle. I could almost see him throwing back his head as he laughed and laughed. When he finally caught his breath, he said, “Holy shit! Don’t tell me Frankie actually did it?”

  It turned out, at least according to Stuart, that not only was Joe Wolf not Native, he wasn’t even Joe Lone Wolf. He was Frank Vitagliano of Brooklyn, a former grad-school classmate of Stu’s at the University of Montana, a guy nicknamed “Snake-Eyes” because of his gambling habit. “You know,” he said, “I think I remember the very night Snake-Eyes ‘became’ Native American. A bunch of us doctoral students were sitting around, smoking weed. You remember how it was in grad school? We’d have this once-a-week dissertation support-group meeting in someone’s room—it always smelled like beer and ganja and cigarettes and dirty socks. So one night we were bitching about how hard it was to get anything published. I said we needed an affirmative-action program for white men—I was pretty wasted at the time—and Snake-Eyes said, hmmm, maybe he’d become Joe Snake Eyes, because he sure as hell wasn’t getting anywhere as Frank Vitagliano. We all laughed, took another hit, and I thought that was the end of it.” He paused, then laughed again. It was more like a cough than a laugh, a wheezy har-har-har. “I haven’t thought about old Frankie in years! Jeezus, so the little S.O.B. went through with it! Who would’ve thought?”

  Now that I did think of it, Joe had looked more Italian than Native. His skin was dark olive rather than brown. His cheekbones were pronounced, but in a less sculpted manner than many Indians. And his eyes were not quite black. I’d assumed all that was because Joe had European ancestry as well as Native, but maybe we’d all been misled. “So Joe wasn’t really American Indian?” I said, slowly, as the implications began to dawn on me. No wonder the police hadn’t found his home town or his mother—both were fictions.

  “Not even remotely Indian. Frankie was a Brooklyn paisano. As I recall, he said his family ran a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria somewhere—maybe Bay Ridge. We got sick of him bitching about how you couldn’t get a decent slice in all of Montana.”

  I grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and wrote down Vitagliano, pizzeria, and Bay Ridge. “If you’re right, Stu,” I said slowly, “Joe was nothing but a slick opportunist—passing himself off as Native American so he could snag a prime teaching job.”

  “I’m right. Believe me.”

  I shook my head. “I’m stunned. I can’t get my mind around it. Well, that answers some questions, for sure. Like why he kept such a low profile in the profession—he never, ever, went to conferences.”

  “Of course not. Someone would have recognized him as Frankie Vee and blown the whistle. And, really, in the long run, he wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting away with it forever, would he? The academic world is like a gossipy small town. Sooner or later your sins will find you out.”

  Joe Lone Wolf’s years in the cushy Enfield College job had been based on a lie. Had his petition for tenure pushed the envelope of that fabrication just a little too far? Was his death related to his deception?

  Stuart said, “so, Frankie Vitagliano became an affirmative action con man, huh? You gotta at least admire the chutzpah! But how the hell did he pull it off?”

  ***

  How the hell did he pull it off? And what should I do about it? I took a brisk walk around campus, my brain in turmoil: what should I do with this knowledge? Should I go to the police first and tell Boylan that his Native victim was really a guy from Bay Ridge? Or should I go to the English Department? Or the Dean? Or maybe even President Avery Mitchell? And tell them…what?…that for six years a con man had pulled the wool over their clueless eyes. I was stunned, in a quandary I could never have imagined. I was the sole denizen of Enfield College who knew that we’d been bamboozled by an academic fraud, a shape-shifter of the first water. A Trickster.

  When I walked past Miles Jewell’s office on my way back to my own, the door was open. I took that as a sign—Miles, the history and institutional memory of the department, sitting in his winged armchair, stalwart and ancient as an old oak tree. He was reading the Globe and eating a tuna-fish sandwich on whole-wheat bread. A cup of tea steamed on the side table, next to a flattened square of waxed paper spread with a dozen regimentally aligned carrot and celery sticks. I tapped on the open door and entered, pushing it shut behind me with a click. He looked up, startled. Junior colleagues were not in the habit of visiting Miles Jewell unsummoned.

  When I told him Stuart’s story, Miles went parchment white. “Oh, God,” he moaned, “and I was department chair when he was hired.” He mopped his face with a white handkerchief. “That damned search committee. I knew something was dubious about the hiring, but the more questions I asked, the more they stone walled me. I never should have trusted them.”

  “Who was on the committee that year?”

  “Oh, let me see…hmm, it was Sally Chenille, Harri
et Person, and Ned Hilton.”

  I groaned.

  “I should have known that triad would be nothing but trouble. It’s never about literature with any of them—and hiring is always about politics. They were so ecstatic about an application from a minority candidate they just rammed him right through the process. It was the perfect opportunity to expand the ethnic diversity of the department.”

  “That’s a good thing, of course, but didn’t anyone do a background check?”

  He shrugged.

  “What about letters of recommendation?”

  “The letters were glowing.” He dropped his sage old head into his hands. “Must have been faked.”

  “No one double-checked?”

  “No. I asked about that. Hilton said the committee didn’t want to. He said it would be patronizing and offensive to do a background check on a Native candidate. Only by a policy of absolute trust could we erase from our literary praxis the psychic vocabulary of genocide.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That’s just what I said, ‘oh.’ But how can you counter that kind of smug self-righteousness?

  “That was, what, six, seven years ago? How could Joe have gotten away with the deception so long?”

  “Oh, God!” Miles groaned and ran his fingers through his tousled white hair. “How could I let him take me in like that?” Now his pallor was greenish gray. “I bent over backward for him. I’m such a patsy!”

  “Wh-a-a-a-t?”

  “You know how he refused to go to scholarly conferences? Well, that damned impostor had the effrontery to come into the chairman’s office one day and plead debilitating illness.” Now Miles’ face was in his hands. “I should have known! I’m such a dupe!”

  “What kind of illness?”

  Miles looked me straight in the eye. “Severe social anxiety related to a psychosocial disorder compounded of dyslexia, racial trauma, and a disadvantaged childhood. All of which manifested themselves in a crippling and incurable agoraphobia triggered by large scholarly gatherings, where his symptoms could become exacerbated to the point of aphasia. If I wished, he told me, he could bring me a note from his psychiatrist.”

  “Slick,” I mused. “At any academic conference he ran the risk of running into someone who knew him as Frankie Vitagliano.” So that’s how he’d gotten away with it for so long. My colleague and I stared at each other, equally aghast. Ironically, after years of acrimony the elder statesman of my department had suddenly become my ally.

  “But, you know,” Miles concluded, “I’m not responsible for handling this, thank God. That goddamn pantywaist Hilton insists he’s still department chair, so you can throw this hot potato right in his lap.”

  ***

  Ned Hilton seemed even more horrified by Joe’s fraudulent identity than he’d been about the man’s death. “Don’t you dare,” he said, “tell the police about this. Or anyone at the college.” He stared into my eyes with a intense single-minded determination to subjugate any independent action on my part. “I’ve got to call a meeting of the senior faculty right away—before this appalling news becomes public.” He’d been losing weight all semester, and his pasty skin now pulled tight over his eye sockets, bony nose and jaw. His thin hand trembled. “The Enfield English Department,” he said, “will be the laughing stock of the profession. Allowing ourselves to be duped into hiring a false minority.” The shaky hand was already straying toward the phone. “Let me see, yes, tenured professors for a crisis-management meeting.…”

  A pow-wow, I thought. Big chief medicine men.

  “It’s imperative that we gear up immediately for damage control.” Ned gave me a warrior’s fierce glare, and I felt like laughing in his face. If I’d wanted to, I could have knocked the puny dude flat on his back with his hot-pink stress ball. “After all,” he continued, “our first loyalty is to the department.”

  Lotsa luck, Department, I thought.

  “And, I repeat, Karen, not a word to anyone until I tell you. Especially not to the police.”

  ***

  As soon as my office door clicked shut behind me, I called the police.

  Of course the police officer I called was Felicity Schultz, who was not currently on active duty. “This information changes everything, you know,” she said. “It’s a whole new ball game—widens the investigation way beyond Enfield, Massachusetts. Now we gotta take Brooklyn into account and the entire friggin’ state of Montana. Well, we don’t gotta—Boylan does. That onionhead probably hasn’t even thought to look at anyone outside Enfield.”

  “I’ll call Boylan, then,” I said pensively, “and tell him I need to see him. Not that I want to have anything more to do with that S.O.B., but, you’re right, this does change everything. No wonder the investigators couldn’t find anyone from Joe Lone Wolf’s past—he didn’t have a past. Only Frankie Vitagliano had a past. You know,” I continued, “the knowledge of Joe’s true identity could really take the focus off of Enfield College.”

  “And off of you,” Charlie’s loyal partner said.

  “And off of Ayesha Ahmed.” Which lightened my heart; I hadn’t realized how worried I was about my Muslim student. Well, I worried about all my students—I was an equal-opportunity worrier—they were so much more vulnerable than they knew, so lacking in experience of the inequities that the world could hurl at them. Well, most of them, anyhow, I thought; life had not been kind to Hank Brody, the coal-miner’s kid from Pensylvania—at least so far. Enfield College was his chance to turn it around.

  “Be careful, though,” Felicity said. “Boylan’s likely to think you’ve concocted the entire story in an attempt to derail his investigation.” Young Buster began to cry in the background, and Felicity sighed. But it wasn’t the bawling I might have expected from such a bruiser; something more like an informational cry: Poop! Poop! Hey, lady, poop here! Nonetheless I could hear Felicity give another deep, resigned sigh. “Adele, no, you don’t have to do that—I’ll change him.” Then she addressed me again. “Listen, see if this Horowitz guy can tell you a little more precisely where Vitagliano came from.”

  “I’ll sic Boylan on him,” I said. “Stu will be thrilled. A little homicidal drama will take his mind off the horror of grading midterms.”

  ***

  I left a message on Neil Boylan’s voice-mail, and headed immediately for Earlene’s office. “Earlene, I’ve got a serious problem.”

  “Hmm?” She pressed the Save icon and turned from her computer, eyes still unfocused from concentrating on her work.

  I crossed the office and sat in the chair by her desk. “I know this isn’t your bailiwick, but Miles said he doesn’t want anything to do with it, there’s no one else in my department I feel comfortable talking to, and I don’t know the college protocol for dealing with such a…an urgent issue.”

  “You’ve got my interest now, girlfriend.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. “Want coffee?” She gestured toward her intricate little black machine. “I was just about to make some.”

  “Sure.” But my head was already constricted by a band of caffeine pain. “No, wait—I’ve had too much already.” But I’d had a fearsome responsibility placed upon my untenured shoulders; maybe more caffeine would jolt me into action. “Oh, all right. You talked me into it.”

  My friend laughed. “You’re easy.” Then she took a second look. “Man, you sure look a wreck today.”

  “Yeah,” I swiped a lank strand of hair out of my eyes. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “What’s up?”

  I told her about Joe having deceived the department about being Native American and about Ned’s decree that I not tell a soul. “So, I’m truly in a quandary. Ned doesn’t seem quite…quite stable at the moment, and I feel that it’s my obligation to go over his head with this. After all, for six years the college has employed a professor with fraudulent credentials. Who do I tell?”

  An entire panoply of expressions from amused to appalled to aghast had played across Earlene’s f
ace. “Well, yeah, no question—you’ve got to inform someone, and right away. But whom? I’d say go to the dean of faculty. He’ll probably call the president right in on it. Oh, God!” She slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Think of the headlines in the Chronicle of Higher Education!”

  ***

  I went to Sanjay’s office immediately, only to learn that both President Avery Mitchell and Dean Sanjay Patel were off at a higher education administration conference in Detroit. Neither would be back until Thursday. I didn’t want to call them and give the bad news long distance, nor did I feel right about leaving it with their assistants. Oh, well, the college had survived six years without knowing the truth: another day or two wouldn’t hurt.

  When I got back to Dickinson Hall, Sally Chenille pushed past me in the heavy doorway, seemingly without seeing me, and hustled into the English Department office. The air in the department hallway was rank with crisis. Sally was followed by Miles Jewell, who rolled his eyes at me. Clark McCutcheon strolled past, favoring me with his slow, appreciative smile, and vanished into Ned’s office, closing the door behind him.

  Okay, let the games begin. Responsible department members were about to be informed of Joe’s deception. Surely one of them would inform the proper college authorities.

  ***

  When I got to my office, Lieutenant Neil Boylan was stationed outside the door, tapping the ferrule of his sleek, black umbrella impatiently against the wood floor.

  “You wanted to see me, right? Ready to turn yourself in?” With anyone else the quip would have been a joke.

  “Come in, Lieutenant,” I said, “and close the door behind you. I’ve learned something you need to know.”

  Grateful for the desk’s oaken mass, I barricaded myself behind it. Joe’s grade book was still in the top drawer, but unless the lieutenant had X-ray vision he wasn’t going to find it. And what if he did? I needed the grade book; I was teaching Joe’s course—at least for now. No one had to know that I planned to scrutinize the book for clues to his death.