A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  “I’d love to,” he said. “But I’m bogged down with committee meetings this week. Listen, do you have any nights free?”

  Before I could answer, a voice broke into our conversation. “Oh, God, why do I keep going to these things? If there’s anything on earth I hate, it’s a poetry reading!”

  The voice belonged to a small, sharp-faced young woman who wore thick glasses and no makeup but wasn’t completely unsexy either. Mike introduced her as Samantha Fletcher, “our medievalist in the English department.”

  “That means I teach medieval literature,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I’ve got a medieval mind. For instance, I’ve never particularly enjoyed wearing a hair shirt. So what the hell am I doing here tonight?”

  “Well, what are you?” Mike said. “You certainly didn’t have to come.”

  “Oh, didn’t I? The place is crawling with spies. If the word got around I didn’t come, don’t you think I wouldn’t hear about it when my tenure decision comes up? ‘That Fletcher woman—yes, she does have a certain scholarly competence in her field, but she has no community spirit, never supports the cultural events on campus, and incidentally, did you realize she’s completely insensitive to poetry?’”

  I thought I saw Mike tighten up, as if he were giving a wince of pain.

  “Will you be at the great man’s tomorrow night?” Samantha Fletcher said.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Mike said.

  “Well, you won’t catch me staying away. They say he keeps a little grade book next to his bed table, and if you don’t show up, he puts an absent mark after your name.” She turned to Marcia and me. “Only joking, of course. I was talking about the party our department chairman is giving tomorrow. Once a month or so he has these get-togethers for his minions.”

  The auditorium doors were opened, and the audience started filing in. “This shouldn’t be too bad,” Mike said. “I’ve read some of his stuff in the little magazines, and he’s actually got something to say.”

  “Will his poems have rhymes in them?” Marcia asked.

  But before anyone could answer her, a new voice entered the conversation.

  “If you recommend him, Michael, he’s got to be good, doesn’t he?”

  It was a deep drawling voice, with a sarcastic edge to it, and it came out of a blond giant, about Mike’s age, with broad shoulders and a big chest. I recognized his outfit—a brownish tweed sport jacket and a green shirt, open at the collar—as coming from Willingham’s, the most expensive clothing store in town.

  “Excuse me,” he said, turning his smile, frosty and slightly bored, in my direction, “college professors have no manners, do they? So I’ll just have to introduce myself. I’m Stuart Bellamy. I teach in the English department, I’m the other American literature nut, along with Michael here. We’ve met before, haven’t we? I seem to recognize you.”

  I recognized him, too—not because we had met before, which we hadn’t, but because his type, smoothly polished by the best prep schools, the most prestigious colleges, and the most impeccable family connections, has given me a pain in the ass all my life. And why is it they’re always so blond? For a man to be as blond as this Bellamy was strikes me as positively obscene.

  I introduced Marcia and myself to him, and he raised an eyebrow at me. “A policeman? I’m impressed. One doesn’t think of our stalwart men in blue going in for poetry recitals. Some of the stuff we get exposed to at these affairs ought to be criminal offenses, I admit.”

  Of course, he didn’t wait for me to respond to his snotty crack about policemen. People like this Bellamy don’t make cracks to be responded to, simply to be heard.

  He swung back to Mike Russo and Samantha Fletcher. “Now what were you saying about our star performer tonight, Michael? You can personally vouch for the quality of his oeuvre? Well, that’s good enough for me. I can’t decipher most of this contemporary stuff myself, but fortunately you’re always around to explain it to me. Is it because you have that kind of tortuous Mediterranean mind? I really wonder how we’d ever get along here without you.”

  Bellamy laughed and put his hand, in a gesture of casual affection, on Mike’s arm. Mike jerked his arm away.

  “Stuart, dear,” said Samantha Fletcher, “why don’t you try not to be any more of an asshole than usual.”

  Bellamy chose to take this as a joke, and his hearty laugh rang out. Then he sailed ahead of us into the auditorium—he obviously had a lot of experience sailing ahead of people—and as we followed him, I saw Mike Russo’s face. He was staring straight at Bellamy’s back, and there was no mistaking that look. Hatred, pure, raw hatred.

  It never fails to give me a shock. You don’t see it all that often.

  The poet who read to us turned out to be an Englishman, wearing rumpled tweeds and speaking in a croaking voice much lubricated with alcohol. I couldn’t understand more than every third word of his poetry. As we left, Marcia said to me, just a little forlornly, “Did you hear any rhymes?”

  Her complaint went straight to my heart. In a short time we would go back to my house—we couldn’t use hers because of her child—and I would do my very best to cheer her up.

  Then I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see Mike Russo, looking at me with an expression of great urgency. “Meet me at the party tomorrow night, will you, Dave? It’s an open house. Marcus Van Horn—he’s the chairman of the English department—always says we can bring people along if we want to. I probably have to make an appearance for an hour or so, but we can go out for a drink afterward.”

  “Anything particular you want to talk about?”

  “I need your advice.” He looked around quickly, moved his face closer to mine, and lowered his voice. “You’ve got a lot of experience with murders, don’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “I think I’m on the verge of committing one,” he said. “You have to tell me how I can stop myself.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I went to meet Mom’s plane.

  It got in on time, and I ran toward her as she came off the ramp, carrying a battered old cloth suitcase. I was surprised, as I always am when I see Mom after a long absence, at how small she is. This little gray-haired old lady, with the bony wrists and wrinkled face, invariably swelled up in my imagination when I was away from her.

  I took her in my arms, and her hug, I noticed, was quick and brisk, as it has always been. This is very nice, it seemed to say, and naturally we love each other, but life is short, so let’s not waste too much time on sentimental foolishness.

  She broke away from me and swiveled her eyes around, taking in the airport lobby. “It’s a real airport, isn’t it?” she said. “Not so big as LaGuardia, but definitely up-to-date.”

  “Oh, yes, we’re very proud of it,” I said. “Next year they’re going to install lights, so the planes can come in at night.”

  We moved up the ramp and walked down the stairs to the baggage claim. Luckily Mom’s suitcase showed up on the conveyor belt. If it hadn’t, I could imagine what she would have had to say about efficiency out here in the middle of nowhere.

  I carried her suitcase across the airport parking lot to my trusty little Ford. Mom gave it a sour look. “You drive this thing slowly, don’t you?”

  “I’ll stay under the speed limit, Mom.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “You can get it to go over?”

  It’s a fifteen-minute drive back to town, and you’re pointed toward the mountains all the way. Mom was silent for a long time, leaning forward a little, staring ahead through the windshield. Finally she said, “The big one, the one that’s sticking up over the others—it’s got a name?”

  I told her. She grunted and said she had heard of it.

  “It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “It’s nice,” she said. “It’ll never beat the Empire State Building, but I wouldn’t knock it.”

  “Some people prefer it to the Empire State Building,” I said.
“Because God made it.”

  “That’s a reason? Who do they think made the Empire State Building? New Yorkers did. And didn’t God make New Yorkers?”

  “A lot of people out here aren’t so sure of that.”

  “They don’t like New Yorkers out here?”

  “Let’s just say they’ve got their own way of doing things in this part of the country, and they think it’s superior to New York’s way.”

  Mom sighed, as if she could hardly believe that such ignorance still existed in the world. Then she turned away from the mountains and started looking out the sides of the car.

  The ride from the airport to downtown Mesa Grande is dotted with hideous jerry-built housing developments, most of which have sprung up in the last four or five years. Everybody wants to move out to our section of the country these days, and the local real-estate developers, who have our town firmly in their claws, are not about to dilute their profits with any schemes for sensible growth planning. “Don’t Californicate Our State,” say a lot of bumper stickers that you can see around town. But when our local developers smell money to be made, they would gladly fornicate their own children and mothers.

  “This is the kind of house you live in?” Mom said.

  I assured her that I lived in one of the older sections of town, where the houses were very nice and didn’t look as if they would collapse at the first angry word from the mortgage-and-loan company.

  We reached downtown, where the oldest and nicest stores in Mesa Grande are located. Naturally it’s fighting a desperate battle right now, in competition with the shopping malls that have popped up like fistulas to the east and north of town.

  “This is the main drag,” I said. “It’s got some very nice places for shopping, I’ll bring you down here tomorrow morning if you want. It’s not Fifth Avenue, of course.”

  “If the prices also aren’t Fifth Avenue, that could be a good thing,” she said.

  We went through downtown, no building higher than four stories and the same parade of stores—Woolworth’s, Rexall Drugs, Florsheim Shoes, etc.—that you find on any Main Street in any middle-sized city in America. Leave it to Mom, though, to notice the peculiar twist that the parade takes in Mesa Grande. “A lot of windows with rifles in them,” she said. “People go in for killing each other around here?”

  “No more so than in New York,” I said. “The guns you see are mostly so people can kill animals. Deer, pheasants, ducks, an occasional bear. In the same stores you’ll find fishing gear, skis, climbing equipment—around here people like to get up into the mountains.”

  “Who can blame them? How else are they going to get away from the town?”

  Downtown was behind us now—it didn’t take long to get through it—and we were driving through the older residential section of town. Wide old streets lined with trees and modest frame houses: residential area, middle grade. Then into another residential area—upper-middle grade: larger houses, higher hedges blocking them off from the outside world.

  Finally the houses got smaller and the hedges lower: We were in my own neighborhood. I pulled up in front of my house, which is painted white, with green shutters, in a style much closer to New England than to the Southwest. Why was I feeling so nervous? Why should I care if Mom liked it or not? I’d been living in it contentedly for over a year, the first house I’d ever owned in my life.

  Mom got out of the car and stood at the end of my front walk for what seemed like a long time, her eyes scrunched together, peering hard. At last she gave a nod.

  “At least it’s all right on the outside,” she said.

  I was relieved. My house met with Mom’s approval: I wouldn’t have to raze it and start over again.

  I won’t go into detail about what happened when we went inside. I had known the interior would fall below her standards, and it did. Her comments on my carpets, my furniture, my drapes, my plumbing, and the size and shape of my rooms will go unrecorded. She was obviously having the time of her life.

  She ended up by dashing into the kitchen and flinging open the refrigerator door. “So let’s see what you’ve got for dinner!”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, you don’t have to cook dinner tonight. I thought I’d take you out somewhere.”

  “This town has restaurants?”

  “Well, of course—”

  “What salary do they pay you, working for the public offender?”

  I told her, and she made a humphing noise. “On your salary we’re not going to any restaurants. All those fast foods, I can imagine how you’ve been ruining your stomach the last year. That’s one thing I can do for you while I’m here, I can at least feed you up and keep the ulcers away for another few years. This is it? This is what you keep in the icebox for eating? It’s too late for the supermarkets, I suppose? All right, I’ll do what I can. At least you heard about eggs.”

  She shooed me out of the kitchen fast, and for the next hour I could hear pots banging and plates clinking, and Mom accompanying it all with a tuneless humming. Out of all this came a cheese omelette, a quick delectable reminder of what I’d been missing.

  After dinner, we settled in the living room, where Mom found a chair—an old rocker, with chintz covering—that she admitted was “fairly comfortable.” I told Mom I was meeting a friend at a party given by one of the professors at the college. Come to think of it, why didn’t Mom come with me?

  “It’s a female friend?” Her eyes lit up with a familiar gleam I hadn’t seen for years. “Somebody you’re serious about?”

  “If what you mean is, are there any future plans—it’s just not the direction of my thinking right now.”

  “Thinking, he calls it! It isn’t healthy a man your age living alone. It’s terrible for the drapes and the carpets.”

  “As it happens, Mom, the person I’m meeting tonight is male, not female. He’s got some kind of problem, and he needs a pair of sympathetic ears. I’m sure he’d be grateful for two pairs.”

  “It’s nice of you to ask, thank you for the invitation. But tonight I’ll go to bed early. It’s two hours later in New York, already my bedtime. Have fun at your party, Davie. It’s a professor who’s giving it? So there wouldn’t be any heavy drinking or smoking pot, I suppose.”

  “You’d be surprised what these academic types get up to nowadays,” I said.

  Before I left the house, I gave Mom a hug and told her how happy I was she had come. She responded with one of her humphing sounds.

  CHAPTER 4

  MARCUS VAN HORN, the chairman of the Mesa Grande College English department, lived in one of the more expensive neighborhoods in town. He had money over and above his salary, or at least his late wife had had it.

  His whole house was lit up, and cars were lined up on both sides of the street: I had to park around the corner. Party noises came from inside as I moved up the front steps: laughter, talking, but no loud rock music, which was a dead giveaway to what generation the host belonged to.

  The front door was wide open, and I stepped into a foyer packed with people and thick with smoke. In this crush I might easily have got through the whole evening without encountering my host, but as luck would have it he was standing only a few feet away from me. I knew him from a case I had worked on when I first got to town. (Ann had defended one of the college janitors, accused of stealing computers from the classrooms. She got him off when I dug up evidence that the guilty party was the technician who had installed those computers in the first place.) With his round face, his wispy gray mustache, his terribly genteel English-professor purr, Van Horn reminded me of a cat. A sixtyish, kind of decadent cat.

  I introduced myself to him, and he said, “How nice to see you again! How nice of you to come!”

  “Mike Russo asked me to drop in tonight,” I said. “He said it was an open house—”

  “It certainly is! I welcome unexpected guests, especially members of the local community, I believe it’s vitally important to bring the town and the gown together. I do
n’t think Mike has arrived yet—at least he wasn’t here ten or fifteen minutes ago, the last time I looked. I’m sure he’ll be along shortly, it’s after seven-thirty, come in and have a drink, won’t you? Right through this archway—if you can fight your way over to the table. There’s sherry, and of course my hot rum punch. I’m rather famous on campus for my hot rum punch.”

  He ran interference for me to his living room, which looked huge even though it was full of chattering college professors. Polished brass, leather bindings, finished wood: pretentious coziness.

  Sherry is one drink that I really can’t stand, so I settled for the hot rum punch. It was pretty hot.

  “Well, how are things in the public defender’s office?” Van Horn said. “Any exciting cases these days? Any innocent men you’re about to snatch from the shadow of the death house?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I began, but I never got the chance to finish the brilliantly witty response I was about to make. Unfortunately, it’s completely slipped my mind by now.

  “Good heavens, we’re running out of punch!” Van Horn cried. “I must pop into the kitchen and whip up another batch—the secret, you know, is the cinnamon and cloves—” And I hardly had time to close my mouth when he was gone.

  For the next few minutes I made my way aimlessly through the crowd, balancing my glass with the hot rum in it while I also attempted to wolf down some slivers of cheese.

  “We meet again!”

  I turned around and found myself looking into the spectacled face of Samantha Fletcher, the medievalist I had met at last night’s poetry reading. “Two academic gatherings in a row,” she said. “And you don’t even work at the college! You must be some kind of masochist.”

  “I’m supposed to meet Mike Russo here,” I said.

  “Isn’t he here yet? I just got here myself. I hope he arrives soon, because I’m very anxious to finish up an argument the two of us got into last night, after the poetry reading. About deconstructionism and fascism. We were both too tired to really dig into the subject.”