by James Yaffe
I stepped through the archway into the living room, the gray-haired cop right behind me. The murder scene looked a lot different than it had looked last night. It was a shambles, from the trampling of all those scientific specialists plus a herd of ordinary detectives who got a kick out of sticking their big clumsy hands into everything. One piece of clutter that was no longer there, of course, was the body, and the telephone had been returned to a small telephone table next to the desk.
“Mind if I take a look around?” I said to the policeman.
He shrugged. “Fine with me. You ain’t going to find anything. They’ve been over this place a dozen times, anything that’s evidence they already took away.”
“Well, I have to do something to earn my salary,” I said.
I started nosing around this room, with apparent aimlessness. Apparent? I didn’t know what I was aiming at.
I ran my eyes over every inch of the floor, which was uncarpeted, a nice shiny finished wood. I got up on tiptoe and examined the tops of the bookcases, then continued the examination along every shelf. Remembering Mom’s mysterious suggestion, I picked up the phone, peered at it closely, turned it upside down, took it off the hook and listened to the dial tone.
I came to the earth-shaking conclusion that it was a phone exactly like any other.
I got down on my knees to look at the piles of books on the floor. Mostly American stuff. Novels I’d read, and plenty more I’d never even heard of. A lot of it about blacks or by blacks.
I was getting up from my knees, when something attracted my attention. There was a space of about an inch or so between the bottom of the bookcase and the floor. In this space, way back where the wall and the floor came together, I caught a glimpse of something bright.
I didn’t reach under the bookcase for it. I stood up and continued wandering around the room, but I wasn’t actually looking at anything now, I was thinking hard.
I had a problem, no question about it. This bright object, whatever it was, had escaped the notice of the detectives who had searched the room. It might, it just might, have something to do with Bellamy’s murder. Suppose it was something incriminating to Mike—a cufflink, say, or a key that could be identified as his. Then, obviously, it was my duty to slip it out from its hiding place and turn it over to Ann without the police knowing what I was doing.
On the other hand, suppose it was a piece of evidence indicating that somebody else might be the murderer. In that case, what I ought to do was keep my hands strictly away from it, call out to the uniformed cop that there was a shiny object under the bookcase, make sure that he reached for it and retrieved it. Otherwise, the DA would accuse me of having planted it there myself, and Ann wouldn’t be able to use it in court.
But if I did that, and it turned out to be a piece of evidence that worked against Mike—
I tossed a mental coin and decided the lesser of two evils was to reach under the bookcase surreptitiously and bring the mysterious object out myself. After all, even if I had the cop bring it out, the DA would still accuse me of having planted it there. Since it probably wouldn’t do us any good in court under any circumstances, I might as well take a look at it and decide where I wanted to go from there.
I said to the cop, “Who’s at the front door?”
“I didn’t hear the bell,” he said.
“It wasn’t the bell. A sort of rattling noise. As if somebody’s trying the doorknob, trying to see if the house is unlocked.”
“One of those damned neighborhood kids again! I’ll be back in a jiffy!”
He went stamping out of the living room, and I was immediately on my knees again, reaching under the bookcase. I groped around until my fingertips came up against something sharp and metallic. I eased it toward me and was finally able to get a grip on it. I managed to scoop it up, jump to my feet, and shove it into my overcoat pocket, just as the cop returned.
“Nobody there. They must’ve run off when they heard me coming.”
“Probably my imagination,” I said. “I’ve got this tendency to hear things.”
“My mother-in-law had that problem for a while,” he said. “They found out it was wax in her ears.”
I told him I wanted to look through the rest of the house. So I returned to the hall and from there into the dining room and the kitchen, with the cop following me. Bellamy’s refrigerator was full, and the shelves had a lot of canned goods on them: fancy stuff, potted shrimp and pâté and so on.
Then I went up the stairs to the second floor, the cop going up after me, of course. There were two large bedrooms on the second floor, with a hallway between them, and a bathroom leading off the hallway. One bedroom had two life-size photographs on opposite walls: the head of William Faulkner and the head of Ernest Hemingway. They seemed to be glaring across the room at each other, as if they were about to step into the ring and fight it out for the World Championship. I assumed this had been Bellamy’s own room.
“Did somebody make up the bed in here after the detectives got through searching?” I asked.
“Nobody did much of anything up here,” he said. “They took a look upstairs, that’s all. Far as I know, the bed wasn’t touched.”
I wandered around the room awhile, opened the dresser drawers and the drawers in the bed table, looked into the closet. Bellamy had an extensive wardrobe—you didn’t buy that many clothes, and such high-priced ones, on an assistant professor’s salary. But I didn’t see anything anywhere that struck me as particularly out of the ordinary. For instance, I didn’t see any photographs, framed or otherwise, that might hint at the existence of some woman, or even of some other human being, in Bellamy’s life.
The second bedroom had even less to tell. It was obviously a guest room, it was neat as it could be, there were no sheets or pillowcases on the bed. Bellamy certainly hadn’t had any guests there recently.
I moved out to the hall and went into the upstairs bathroom. The great discovery I made was that Bellamy had used after-shave lotion and underarm deodorant. Just for the hell of it, I ran my fingers along the back of the toilet bowl, where it was close to the wall. A little bit of dust, not much. Brilliant deduction—the cleaning woman hadn’t been in for a couple of days.
I told the cop I was finished, thanked him for his cooperation, and left the house. The sky was purple, though there should still have been a few more hours of light.
What about the neighbors? I walked along the street and realized there were only two houses within a few blocks. All the people in them would’ve been questioned by the police already, of course, but I spent the next half hour ringing doorbells and questioning people again. I came up with absolutely nothing, which didn’t surprise me a bit.
So I got into my car and started back to town. A snowflake fell on the windshield. Then several more. Before I’d gone another two blocks, the snow had reached the proportions of a flurry. That’s how it goes in our section of the country. The local saying is “If you don’t like the weather, stick around for an hour, it’s bound to change.”
A mile or so away from Bellamy’s house, I pulled the car up to the curb and turned on the light. Then I reached into my pocket and took out the object I had retrieved from under Bellamy’s bookcase. It was small and metal, with a piece of red glass set in it.
An earring.
CHAPTER 12
IT WAS AFTER TWO-THIRTY when I got back to the courthouse, hoping to show Ann what my search of Bellamy’s house had produced. But she wasn’t in, Mabel Gibson told me she was in court for Mike Russo’s bail hearing and had no idea how long it would take.
“And look at the snow!” Mabel added. “I hope she goes straight home. I really worry about her driving her car in weather like this.”
“I worry about you, too, Mabel,” I said. “Why don’t you go home before this gets too bad.”
“Oh that’s sweet of you, David, but I haven’t got my car today, my husband is picking me up at five in our little truck. It’s got four-wheel drive, so
we’re really quite safe.”
I took the earring into my cubbyhole and studied it for a while. It was a cheap mass-produced item, nothing valuable about it at all. Was there anybody involved in this case who might be connected to it? Bellamy hadn’t been wearing an earring, the one time I’d met him, and Mike Russo didn’t wear earrings either. Male college professors pretty much stayed away from such suspect adornments. What about Samantha Fletcher, had she been wearing earrings when I saw her at the poetry reading two nights ago or last night at Van Horn’s party? No, I didn’t think so.
At any rate, who could say how long this earring had been lying there under the bookshelf? Maybe somebody had lost it there months ago, long before the murder.
Except that the tidiness of the house suggested Bellamy had a cleaning woman who came in regularly. If the earring had been under his bookshelf for any length of time, how come the cleaning woman had never found it?
On the other hand, I remembered Mom’s little lecture to me last night, about the efficiency of cleaning women.
I slipped the earring into my pocket and decided not to waste the afternoon waiting around for Ann. I drove up to the college, which was a sacrifice beyond the call of duty, because the snow was really heavy now and, if the truth were known, my windshield wipers had seen better days. The main problem with them was, they did a beautiful job of wiping the right-hand side of the windshield, but the left-hand side, where the driver sat, looked strictly like mush.
I got to my destination in one piece, though, and went to the college coffee shop. Nursing one cup of coffee and a doughnut, I sat at a booth in the corner and listened to what the students who sat near me were saying about the murder.
Mostly they seemed to be divided into two factions. One faction said that Mike Russo was guilty, and they thought he should get a medal for it—Bellamy had been asking to get himself killed for years. The other faction said that Mike was innocent: Some said it was because he was too nice a guy to kill anybody, he was positively not into violence; others said it was because he was your typical professorial wimp, too weak and indecisive to do anything as practical as commit a murder.
In addition to these factions, there were a number of individuals with highly imaginative theories. The president of the college killed Bellamy, because Bellamy was having an affair with his wife. (You should see his wife!) Bellamy was killed by a black activist who didn’t approve of honkies teaching books by brothers. Bellamy was killed by a psycho who was going around the Southwest knocking off people who wear tweed jackets.
College students haven’t changed much since my day, I thought. When time hangs heavy on their hands—in between drinking, fucking, and cracking the books—they enjoy spreading rumors.
I left the coffee shop and made my way, with the snow whipping my cheeks and clogging my nose, to Llewellyn Hall. It was nearly three-thirty, most of the faculty at Mesa Grande College ended their office hours around now—if they weren’t of such scholarly eminence that they were absolved from holding office hours at all. If I didn’t get up there pretty soon, there wouldn’t be anybody around for me to talk to.
I went up to the second floor, where the English department was located, and found Marcus Van Horn’s office. His voice rang out when I knocked, “Come in, come in!”
The office was total chaos, exactly the way Mike Russo had described it to me. The clutter was thickest in the area of the desk. There was nothing on that desk but books and papers, as far as I could tell, but they made it hard for me to see the occupant of the room; his head and shoulders seemed to be part of the debris. Only when he spoke—“Sit down, please take a seat!”—was I able to sort him out from the inanimate objects.
In order to accept his invitation, I had to remove several books from the chair. I couldn’t see any clear surface to put them on, so I put them on the floor. Van Horn raised no objection.
I reminded him who I was and told him I was gathering information for Mike Russo’s defense. Right away his face got very solemn, and he shook his head and made a little clucking sound with his tongue. “Terrible tragedy. Simply terrible. Poor Stuart! Poor Mike! Both such fine young men. Did you know, Mike is the sole support of his mother, who lives in some kind of old-age home in New York? Well, I’m certainly happy to give you any help I can. I should tell you, however, that you’ve come at a rather bad time. I usually leave my office around now, I’m engaged in a scholarly project, an interesting point about the relationship between Samuel Johnson’s poetic style and the way he defines certain words in his dictionary. Late afternoon is when I do my research and dictate my notes.”
“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” I said. “Could you tell me first about that phone call.”
“Oh yes. Terrible, terrible. To actually hear a man being killed—well, you know what I mean, you heard it yourself, didn’t you?”
“You’re positive that was Professor Bellamy on the phone?”
“No doubt about it. His voice was unmistakable, that drawling tone of his. I’ve talked to him practically every working day for the last six years. I assure you, nobody could have imitated his voice with any chance of fooling me, if that’s what you’re wondering about.”
“The call was for Professor Fletcher. How come you happened to get to the phone at the same time she did?”
“Well, let me see. I heard the phone ring, and naturally I wanted to answer it, but I was at the other end of the living room, and there was such a crush of people between me and the hallway. I always get quite a substantial crowd at these monthly gatherings of mine. What attracts people, I think, is the easy informality. Just a pleasant get-together, a totally nonthreatening atmosphere, at which my younger colleagues can rub elbows with some of us seasoned old veterans. The dean was there, and the president was invited, too, but of course he’s out of town this week. He always manages to be out of town when some kind of campus crisis arises. The man’s instincts are infallible—”
“So when you heard the phone ring, you started through the crowd to get to it?”
“Precisely. But by the time I got there, Samantha—Professor Fletcher—was already on the phone. You were there, too, as a matter of fact. I realized she was talking to Stu Bellamy—”
“Weren’t you surprised to hear his voice?”
“How so?”
“According to what you told the police, he’d called you a few hours before to say he had a touch of the flu and wasn’t feeling well enough to leave his house.”
“Oh, yes, that’s true. I did wonder if it was wise of him to use his voice under the circumstances. I wonder if that accounts for a certain oddness in his manner—or was I just imagining—?”
I leaned forward. “Imagining what?”
“The way he talked to Samantha, hardly acknowledging her greeting when she got on the phone, never addressing her by name. It was almost rude, and whatever anyone might say about Stu, nobody could ever accuse him of bad manners. He had the finest type of bringing-up. Such a fine family—Rhode Island people—the grandfather left him a nice bit of money, I believe.”
“When you found out the reason for that phone call, did it surprise you?”
“No, not really. It arose, so I’ve been told, out of some dispute between Samantha and Stu—on some sort of feminist issue, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
He smiled gently. “You’ve met Samantha, haven’t you? She’s our medievalist, the newest as well as the youngest member of our department. She’s been with us only two or three years, a lovely young woman, and from what I hear an excellent teacher and a first-rate scholar. But after two minutes of conversation, she does let you know exactly what she is, doesn’t she?”
He gave a little sigh. “I’m totally in sympathy with the principle of women’s rights, you understand—equal pay for equal work, and so forth—but there’s a certain fanaticism afoot these days, an urge to carry everything beyond the limits of common sense, not to mention good manners. Well
, that’s why the subject of her dispute with Stu Bellamy didn’t surprise me.”
“What about the book they were arguing about? Do you happen to be familiar with it?”
“Something by a black writer who was rather prominent in the forties, wasn’t it? Now what was that title? Black Beauty?”
“Black Boy.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve never actually read the work, I’m afraid.”
“How come?”
“Frankly, because life is too short. There are too many truly great masterworks I haven’t read—and too many treasure troves to which I can return again and again, always finding new riches. After one reaches the age of sixty, one begins to hear Time’s winged chariot drawing near. Why should I clutter my mind and use up my precious hours with second-rate stuff by second-rate people?”
“Black Boy is second-rate?”
“It’s a topical work of some relevance to the racial tensions of our time, or so they tell me. And its sentiments are on the side of the angels, I’m sure. But after all, the racial tensions of our time will pass, won’t they? And long after they fade away, the eternal verities, the universal issues the greatest writers concern themselves with will still be with us.”
“Still, you didn’t find it strange that an argument over a book should have been so important to Professor Bellamy? After all, he made that phone call even though he was in bed with the flu—”
“Good grief, that wasn’t the least bit strange. In the world of academia, trivial disputes have a way of becoming important. That’s the reason why poor Stuart’s death, while it’s certainly come to me as a shock, wasn’t really a surprise.”
“You expected somebody to kill him?”
“No, no, please don’t misunderstand me. Not him specifically. All I’m saying is, the groves of academe aren’t as serene and peaceful as the outside world would like to believe. Tensions, jealousies, ambitions, bitterness—all of these seethe beneath the surface of this ivory tower. And especially here at Mesa Grande, where we’re isolated from the great world, no nearby centers of culture or intellectual life. We’re forced in on ourselves, we’re sardines in a can.”