A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  “Get out, get out!” his sister cried, practically shoving me through the front door.

  CHAPTER 18

  SINCE I HADN’T GOT around to Samantha Fletcher yesterday, I decided that my next step was to talk to her. But I drove back to the office first. Ann was there, so I told her about my interview with the Vallejoses, brother and sister.

  At the end of my report, Ann gave her noncommittal grunt. She’d rather die than show she was either upset or overjoyed about something. “So there goes our substitute for Mike Russo.”

  “I don’t see that at all,” I said. “Isn’t it obvious the sister is lying? She’d do anything for her brother, and especially to save her mother and father from grief. If I do a little digging into that alibi she’s giving him—”

  “Where are you going to begin?” Ann said. “You can bet she was working at her parents’ restaurant Wednesday night—she wouldn’t tell you that if it couldn’t be confirmed. She was in and out all night long, nobody’s going to remember if they missed her for half an hour or so. Okay, she can’t prove she talked to her brother in his car at five of eight, but we can’t prove she didn’t.”

  “Maybe you could break her down on the witness stand.”

  “Come on, Dave, that’s strictly from “Perry Mason.” You know as well as I do, any case that depends on breaking somebody down on the witness stand—unless you start off with a lot of solid facts to do the breaking with—is doomed from the start. Besides, how are we going to get her on the witness stand in the first place? The prosecution sure won’t call her, and the only way we could call her would be to lay some foundation ahead of time that her testimony is relevant to our case. It doesn’t do us a bit of good to prove Luis Vallejos has no alibi for the time of the murder. The world is full of people who have no alibi for the time of the murder. What we have to do is place him there, squarely on the spot—the way the tire marks of Russo’s car place him there. And I’m damned if I know how we’re going to manage that.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “One thing I’ll do is give our client a call. Try to make him see reason about that Emily Dickinson book of his. That mysterious character in the park looks to me like our only bet right now.”

  “You’ll let me know how it turns out?”

  She said she would, and I returned to my cubbyhole.

  For the rest of the morning I tried off and on to get hold of Samantha Fletcher. She didn’t answer her office phone till just before lunchtime. When I told her who I was and what I wanted, she said she’d have a cocktail with me this afternoon. Could I meet her somewhere at four?

  I suggested The Snuggery, which is one of several rooms at The Richelieu. Each of these rooms caters to a different taste: pretentious French, cozy old-fashioned American, swinging discoland, and so forth. The Snuggery is for those who feel the need to be English. It looks like a London pub and serves steak-and-kidney pie and Guinness stout. On the walls are framed posters that show the Thames at sunrise and Westminster Abbey at night, and the piped-in music features the voices of Noël Coward, Gracie Fields, the Beatles, and other British icons. It’s even possible, in one corner of the bar, to play darts.

  All of this isn’t cheap, but after all it was on the taxpayer.

  The Snuggery is usually crowded, and especially in the late afternoon, during the cocktail hour. Fletcher was there ahead of me, and as I approached her, sitting alone at the table, I got the definite impression that there were tears in her eyes. But they were gone by the time I sat down across from her.

  The waitress came over to us. Fletcher glared through her thick glasses and said, “I’ll have a bottle of beer. Ordinary light-colored American beer. None of this thick black English muck, okay?”

  I ordered the same, and the waitress said, “Amazing,” and went off.

  “Did you hear that word?” Fletcher said. “‘Amazing.’ That’s strictly a Mesa Grande word, pure middle America. For sheer inanity I rank it right up there with ‘neat’ and ‘real.’ As in ‘She’s a real human being!’”

  The waitress brought our beers, and Fletcher took a long loud gulp. Then she turned her attention to me.

  “You’re defending Mike Russo, are you? I hope you don’t think he’s guilty!”

  “He isn’t?”

  “Obviously he isn’t. It’s typical of this crazy town that anyone should think he did it, even for a moment.”

  “He does seem to have a pretty strong motive.”

  “Motive! Okay, I admit it, this whole screwy tenure business is practically an invitation for people to cut each other’s throats. I mean, it would turn Saint Francis into a cynic.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s so damned hypocritical, that’s how come. You spend three years or so of your life as a graduate student—which is another word for slave. You correct papers, teach three hours a day, pour on the flattery, generally break your ass so the Distinguished Professors can grind out their scholarly blather, in between sets of tennis. All of this so someday you, too, can achieve tenure, be a Distinguished Professor, and play tennis yourself. And what happens when you finally get out of graduate school and become a doctor of philosophy? They give you something to be philosophical about—they tell you there are no jobs available.

  “Or worse still, they put you on a tenure track, you waste another six years of your life, and then you find out there’s only one job available and somebody else is going to get it. Who could blame poor Mike if his thoughts turned to murder?”

  “So you are saying Mike Russo may have killed Bellamy?”

  “I’m not saying anything of the kind. All I said was, who could blame him? But the fact of the matter is, Mike Russo just isn’t the murdering type. He’s too much of a—a—” She groped in the air for the word. “—A believer! He actually believes that what he’s doing matters. He believes he can make the world a better place by pumping literature into those hard little heads. It sounds corny, I suppose, but Mike is on the side of life, not death.”

  She took a swig of beer and looked around at her surroundings. She made a face. “God, how can you stand this place? All these turtleneck sweaters and ascots!”

  “You don’t like it?” I said. “It’s a big hangout for independent-minded women who are making careers for themselves.”

  “And not one of them would be seen dead here without a man! Look at that table in the corner—why are those women laughing their heads off at the joke that guy just made? You can tell from the fatuous grin on his face it must’ve been a stinker. Independent minded! What’s the use of a woman going out into the world and making a career if she just lets her office be turned into another kitchen?”

  “Tell me about Van Horn’s party,” I said. “What time did you get there, what did you do before the phone call came?”

  “Well, let me see. I got to Marcus’ place around seven-forty-five. I was a little late, but I had to have a big dinner first, because I knew our beloved chairman isn’t the man to provide a groaning board. Ritz crackers, pretzels, and that dreary slop he claims to put rum into—that’s Marcus Van Horn’s idea of lavish hospitality for his departmental serfs.

  “Well, you were the first person I ran into, and while we were talking the phone rang, and a minute or so later I went out to the foyer and talked to Stu.”

  “That was in the middle of a crowd of people, lots of noise and confusion. Can you be absolutely sure it was Bellamy you were talking to?”

  “You think it could’ve been somebody imitating his voice? Not a chance. I’d know that Stu Bellamy superior drawl anywhere.”

  “Van Horn says Bellamy’s manner was strange. Abrupt, almost rude. Wouldn’t let you get a word in.”

  “What was so strange about that? That’s exactly how Stu talked to most people—that is, he did the talking and you did the listening. Marcus Van Horn thinks it’s strange because Stu was very careful never to keep him from getting a word in. Stu knew what side his tenure bread was butter
ed on.”

  “In other words, he was a pretty self-centered type?”

  “Oh, he tried to give the opposite impression. That eager, earnest all-American-boy manner he put on. Looking you in the eyes and saying, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ as if no subject on earth could possibly interest him more. But you wouldn’t get five words out of your mouth before he’d start telling you about himself.”

  “Were you surprised when he called you up at the party and read to you from that book?”

  “Surprised! I was flabbergasted! Stu Bellamy voluntarily eating crow—that’s a miracle I never expected to happen!”

  “Did it seem especially miraculous on account of his condition?”

  “What condition?”

  “He had the flu, he was feeling terrible—”

  “Flu!” She gave a sharp laugh. “He was faking it! He had this article to finish up by the end of the week, and Marcus Van Horn’s parties bored him to tears anyway.”

  “How can you be so sure he was faking?”

  “He told me so himself. The day before, it must’ve been around three in the afternoon, I came in to his office to ask him something about an advisee of mine who was in his Twentieth-Century American Novel class. The kid’s also in Mike’s poetry class, and Mike’s office is in the same row as mine and Stu’s, but I could hear Mike’s typewriter going so I didn’t want to disturb him. Anyway, as I was leaving Stu’s office, I mentioned I’d be seeing him at Van Horn’s the next night, and he said something like, ‘Oh my God, I forgot all about the damn thing!’ And then he said he was doing this article for one of the literary reviews, and he had to finish it before the end of the week.”

  “Did he say what magazine he was doing it for?”

  “I don’t remember. These days every third college in America publishes some kind of scholarly rag that nobody reads except the people who write for it and the people who are gunning for them. So he said he was going to call Marcus up the next day and tell him he had the flu, and I wouldn’t give away his guilty secret, would I?”

  “Did he let anybody else in on this guilty secret?”

  “He said he wasn’t going to.” She gulped her drink, plucked up a pretzel, and popped it into her mouth.

  “Suppose we get back to the tenure decision,” I said. “Who did you vote for, Russo or Bellamy?”

  “Good God, you don’t think they’d let us lowly untenured worms cast a vote, do you? I can tell you who I would’ve voted for. Mike is ten times the teacher and scholar that Stu ever was.”

  “One more question,” I said. “Who do you think did it? Was there anybody on the faculty, for instance, that Bellamy was particularly close to?”

  “People don’t get close in the academic world,” she said. “You live right on top of each other, you see each other every day of your lives, but that doesn’t mean anybody actually gives a damn about anybody else. What you give a damn about is your specialty. Your discipline, as they like to call it nowadays. Keeping up with your field—that doesn’t leave you any time for people. Take me, for instance. I’m a medievalist. The castration of Abelard means a hell of a lot more to me than the murder of Stuart Bellamy.”

  “What about students? Do you know of any who might’ve had it in for Bellamy?”

  She turned her head and waved her empty beer glass at the waitress. “Another bottle over here!” Then she turned back to me. “Students didn’t like him much. And the feeling was mutual. But I don’t think any of them would kill him for that.”

  “You don’t know anything, then, about a student who’s in one of his classes now? Short, thin, dark-haired boy. Wears earrings. Bellamy had an argument with him a few days ago.”

  “He never said anything about it to me.”

  “What about people outside the college? Social relationships?”

  She looked at me for a moment, and though her face didn’t give a quiver I had that feeling again that she was going to start crying. “Women, you mean,” she finally said. “Yes, that might be a good way for you to go. He was a bastard about women. Maybe he wasn’t going to work on an article the night he was killed. After all, that’s why he bought that house way out in the middle of nowhere. So he could bring his women out there, and there wouldn’t be any nosy neighbors around to keep tabs on him. Yes, indeed, why don’t you look into his sex life. I’ll bet you’ll come up with somebody he just gave the boot to—only she had enough guts to get back at him, instead of sitting still and nursing her wounds, like—like most of his snuffed-out flames would’ve done.”

  “You could supply me with some names?”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, even if I knew any. If it wasn’t for Mike being in this terrible spot, I’d be sending her my congratulations and a bottle of champagne.”

  I watched her steadily. She lowered her eyes, became occupied with her glass. Then I said, “You can understand why she might’ve thought about killing him because you’ve had that thought yourself?”

  She looked up at me, anger flaring in her eyes. And then, just as quickly, the flare went out, and a kind of exhaustion took its place. “Yes, I thought about it for a while. But it’s all been over for a long time.”

  She gave a twisted little smile. “Looking back at myself then, I can’t believe what I was. Naive little girl-scholar, just out of graduate school. The handsome young professor bats his sexy eyelashes at me, and I melt like a bobby-soxer, I jump into bed with him like any simpering little Victorian salivating when she hears the voice of her lord and master. And I knew what he was doing, too! I knew exactly the type he was! I’d read about his type a million times, my consciousness was raised, I’d seen the way bastards like him put friends of mine through the wringer. But I’m not even on my own for a month when I’m letting it happen to me!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to have heard me. “There was a kind of inevitability about it, when you get right down to it. The poor ugly overweight little girl who’s terrified that no man will look at her—which will prove, of course, how hopelessly inadequate she is. Look at my bringing-up. Beverly Hills, California—the guilt center of the world! My father makes a mint as a sound technician, my mother’s the champion committee-and-board member of all time. Between them they tutored me in feelings of inferiority until I became an expert. How could Stuart resist me? Can a dog resist the piece of meat that’s thrown to him?”

  Her smile twisted a little more. “He kept it going for two years—I should’ve been flattered actually, they tell me none of his other harem favorites lasted that long.”

  And now at last there were tears in her eyes. “Poor Stu,” she said. “What was he anyway? A mechanical doll—programmed to display his charms for the opposite sex. The Seducer Doll. Because from the day he was born, that’s what people told him he ought to be doing, that’s what his ego was tied up in. His looks were stunning, that you have to admit. But he was as much a victim of our rotten sexist society as I am.”

  She broke off with a harsh laugh. “So if you want to find out who really killed him, you can do a lot better than mysterious Chicano students with earrings. Find out who his next-to-last bedmate was. Find out the name of his most recent Samantha Fletcher.”

  Suddenly she gave a smile, and then she began laughing. “Better still, as long as you’re collecting motives, here’s a terrific specimen for you—how about Marcus Van Horn? It’s hard to think of anybody who would’ve been happier to live without Stu Bellamy.”

  “But he seems to have pushed pretty hard for Bellamy’s tenure.”

  “What else could he do? The word came from on high. Since neither of the candidates fell into the uncomfortable category of minority—which nowadays, of course, includes women—our leaders gave Marcus a clear message that they wanted the job to go to a Member of the Club. And Marcus has the world’s most sensitive radar for picking up messages from on high. But that doesn’t mean he liked the guy.”

  “What didn’t he like about him?”


  “What do you suppose is the most important thing in Marcus’ life, the very center and essence of his being? Not to keep you in suspense, it’s the chairmanship of the department. And what do you think Stu Bellamy had his eye on, in a year or two? And made very little secret about it either. And with his connections in the administration—he played handball once a week with the dean, and the president is a distant relation of his mother—don’t you think his chances of prying the treasure out of Marcus’ hands were better than even? Take my word for it, Marcus was scared shitless of him.”

  “Would one human being really kill another human being just to go on being the chairman of a department?”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize we were talking about human beings. I thought we were talking about college professors.”

  She drained off the rest of her glass and gave a shake of her head. “Look, I’ve got to get home, I have a class to prepare for Monday morning.”

  We left The Snuggery, and I walked her to her car, which was near mine in the parking lot.

  “I’m sorry I lost my cool,” she said, her hand on her car door. “I’d be better off if I could take the advice of that modern poet—what’s his name? Oh yes, William Shakespeare. ‘Moving others, are themselves as stone, unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow.’ That was Stu’s great talent, you know. It’s the only thing he had that I ever envied. I told him once it would protect him for the rest of his life.”

  She looked startled, as if she were just that moment listening to her own words. “Seems as if I was wrong, doesn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 19

  IT WAS SIX O’CLOCK when I got home that night. Mom had dinner heating up already, because it was Friday and she planned to go to Sabbath services at the synagogue.

  At six-thirty we sat down to eat—lamb chops with a beautiful-looking mint sauce.

  We talked for a while about Mom’s drive to the mountains with Mr. Bernstein. “Beautiful views,” Mom said. “You look out over the edge, you can see a hundred miles away. What you see is too small for you to recognize anything, but even so—”