A Nice Murder For Mom

by James Yaffe

  “Yes, indeed,” I overheard Van Horn saying, “the discovery of that tape recording does cast a certain aura of suspicion over those of us who attended my party last Wednesday night. Especially over the English department, since most of us were English professors. Regrettable, truly regrettable. But no, Lewis, since you ask me, I don’t think it’s going to have a discouraging effect on enrollments in English courses. As a matter of fact, I’ve received half a dozen calls this afternoon from sophomores who have suddenly decided to become English majors—and school isn’t even in session today!”

  In another corner of the room was Bert Underwood, the college chaplain, coaxing cascades of giggling out of a trio of female students. I caught just a few words of what he was saying:

  There was a young woman from China

  Who was born with an extra vagina …

  The voices around me got louder and louder, the smoke was thick enough to make me cough. The Bartok ended, and somebody put on some rock music. The din made the ashtrays rattle, and made my teeth rattle, too. I wasn’t the oldest person in that house, but I felt as if I was at least a hundred and ten. God, how I wished I could go home!

  But I gritted my teeth and suffered until the exodus finally took place. And oddly enough, this wasn’t particularly late, not even eleven o’clock. The party hadn’t really been a good one. Everyone was jubilant because of Mike’s miraculous deliverance, but somehow the jubilation never seemed to get off the ground. I wondered if somewhere, deep inside all these well-wishing friends, was some small semiconscious inkling of the truth.

  Probably not. It was only me. I had the sour taste of that truth in my mouth.

  So I waited around till the last cluster of guests went pushing out the front door, yelling their congratulations over their shoulders. It was a little embarrassing, to tell you the truth. I’ve never been the type that holds on to the dregs of a party for dear life, as if I was afraid of facing myself alone in my bathroom mirror.

  As the last car careened off into the darkness, Mike turned back into the living room where I was sitting on his couch. He gave me a funny look. He was asking himself why the hell I didn’t have the good grace to go home with everybody else, but he was too polite to say this out loud. With his strict Italian mother, Mike was really a very well-brought-up young man.

  “So—Dave. Pretty good party, wasn’t it? I’m glad you don’t have to run off. You want another drink?”

  I told him I had drunk my quota.

  “So have I, if you want to know. When the evening started, I was positive my capacity was infinite. No limits to the appetite of a man who’s just been pulled from the jaws of death!” He laughed, then sighed. “But it turned out my capacity is the same puny thing it was before all this happened. Tell you what. What I really feel like is a cup of coffee. How’d you like to join me?”

  I didn’t much want him to serve me his coffee, here in his house. But I couldn’t think of any way to turn him down.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes,” he said. “It’s all made already. What do you take, cream or sugar or both?”

  I told him I took neither. Strong and black and bitter would suit me fine.

  As he moved out to his kitchen, he flipped a switch somewhere, and the music swelled out of his stereo speakers again. It was Tchaikovsky this time, the opening of Swan Lake—that long dark throbbing theme that lets you know that everybody on stage is doomed.

  He returned from the kitchen a few minutes later with two steaming cups on a tray. “I’ve got this new contraption,” he said, “it heats up the coffee in practically no time at all. It’s amazing what they can do with technology nowadays. I love new contraptions. If I had the money, I’d buy every different kind of invention that’s on the market.”

  We sipped in silence for awhile, letting Tchaikovsky flow around us.

  “Take this stereo of mine,” he finally said. “The latest equipment, every component is the best on the market. Well, the best I can afford. Terrific sound, isn’t it? I tape this stuff myself, right off public radio. It’s crazy, when you get right down to it. Ten years ago my equipment wasn’t nearly as good, I wasn’t getting anything close to this kind of fidelity and depth. But I was perfectly happy, in fact I was convinced nothing could sound better. Today, if I still had those old components, they’d drive me out of my mind.”

  “You’re a product of the age,” I said.

  “Well, we all are, more or less, aren’t we?” he said. “Maybe I just don’t fight against it as much as some. Or pretend to fight against it, like a lot of my fellow academics.”

  He laughed, took another sip of coffee, and silence pressed down on us again.

  “It’s a very nice house you’ve got here,” I finally said.

  “Glad you like it. As a matter of fact, it means a lot to me. I never had a house of my own till I came out here and bought this one. My homes were always shared with people. The place in the Bronx where I grew up, it seemed crowded with only Mama and Papa and me. And the dorms at college—always someone ahead of you in the bathroom. And those ramshackle grad-school boardinghouses.”

  “Actually I’ve never been in one of those.”

  “What I hated most about them was the noise,” he said. “You couldn’t shut any of it out. You had to live in the middle of other people’s laughing, fighting, snoring, belching. Yes, and fucking. Three years ago, when I put down the first payment on this house, I felt as if my existence as an independent human being was just beginning. I was twenty-six, and I was walking on my own feet, without a cane, for the first time in my life. That could be why I don’t want to get married. I’m still getting too much of a kick out of standing on my own feet.”

  He stopped talking and ran his hand through his dark, permanently unruly hair. After a moment, he said, “Well—tomorrow’s Monday, you know—I’ve been away from my class over a week now—” He paused, with an apologetic but definitely suggestive look on his face.

  “Sure, you have to get to bed,” I said. “So do I, as a matter of fact. The only reason I’ve been hanging around so late—I thought it was only fair to tell you about it first.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The truth.”

  He lifted his cup to his mouth, and gave me a smile over the rim. “The truth about what?”

  “Stuart Bellamy’s death.”

  His smile didn’t waver a bit. “What do you mean, you’re going to tell me about it first?”

  “Before I tell anybody else. The people who have to know.”

  His smile grew a bit puzzled. “I don’t get it, Dave. Is this some kind of a riddle or something?”

  A wave of tiredness came over me, but I shook it off. “I probably ought to explain,” I said.

  And so I explained, and when I was finished, Mike lifted his hand and covered his eyes.

  “You’ll never understand,” he said. “In a million years I could never make you understand.”

  “Why don’t you try me?”

  “I’ll never even make you believe me. Everything you’ve just been saying to me—it’s all true. I did all those things. Except one. I didn’t kill Stu Bellamy.”

  CHAPTER 29

  AFTER A MOMENT, I said, “Come on out with it, Mike. From the beginning.”

  At this he uncovered his eyes. “The beginning!” A sardonic smile twitched at his lips. “They’re the ones who began it. That’s what you have to see. They pushed me into planning murder. If it wasn’t for them, I never even would’ve thought about it.”

  “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”

  “They! They! Marcus Van Horn, Dean Bradbury, Stu Bellamy—all those cozy, genteel, self-satisfied WASPS with their cultured voices and superior expressions—sitting in their beautifully furnished houses and screwing nobodies like me!”

  “How can you blame them for what you did?”

  “Because I’m not the kind of person who kills people. Violence of any kind revolts me. It horrifies me. I’ve never even liked
it in the movies. But they fixed it so I didn’t have any other choice. Like a cornered rat. You know what cornered rats do!”

  “You’re talking about your tenure decision?”

  “Damn right that’s what I’m talking about! Sitting there in Van Horn’s office last Tuesday—my God, was it less than a week ago? It seems like another existence! Listening to that genteel cultured purr of his—how kind, how sympathetic, what delicacy and finesse while he fastens his claws in my neck!

  “And you know what he kept saying to me? ‘Nobody could be sorrier about this than me,’ he kept saying. What the hell was I supposed to do? Commiserate with him because my life was being destroyed?

  “I remembered where I came from then, who I really am. Sure, I love the academic world, the intelligent cultivated people, the talk about books and ideas, the students looking up at you while they soak in your words. But with me that world isn’t bred into the bone, it isn’t where I was born, it isn’t how I grew up. I didn’t start off in some cozy Anglophiliac cocoon, like Van Horn and his kind. Where I came from you had to be tough. So I’ve been telling myself this last week—to protect what I’ve earned, what I’m entitled to, I’m willing to be tough again.”

  “Violence doesn’t revolt you so much after all?”

  “It does! It makes me sick. Do you think I wanted to go back to what I used to be? I’ve spent my whole life getting away from all that. But what could I do? Sometimes you have to do things that make you sick. In self-defense. People have a right to defend themselves.”

  “By killing somebody else?”

  “That’s what war is, isn’t it? Stu Bellamy was like—like an enemy in battle. It was him or me. It’s just one of those things, neither of you are to blame. Do you know what C. S. Lewis says about that somewhere?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He writes about two soldiers who kill each other in battle. Then the last trumpet sounds, and they rise from their graves together, they greet each other warmly like old friends, they march off to heaven arm in arm.

  “That could be me and Stu, don’t you see? Arm in arm. Even though we never liked each other much when he was alive. But afterward—when the last trumpet sounds—we wouldn’t be each other’s victims anymore. We’d both understand that we were victims of something bigger, the powers that make innocent people like us kill each other in war.”

  “Is the principle the same,” I said, “if only one of the soldiers gets killed—and the other one takes his job?”

  He shook his head in confusion. “You’re missing the point—”

  “So you decided Bellamy had to die. What did you do after that?”

  “I knew that I’d be needing an alibi. Nobody had a stronger motive to kill him, the police would pick me up in no time flat, unless I had an absolutely airtight alibi. For a while I couldn’t think of how to work it. And then, on Tuesday afternoon, when I was in my office, I heard Stu telling Samantha he was going to stay home the next night, not go to Van Horn’s party. And that’s when I got the idea.

  “It wasn’t very hard to do at all. I knew I couldn’t use my own tape machine, because people may have seen it and noticed it in this house. But I’ve got a second one, an old one that I bought in New York years ago—nobody’s ever going to trace it to me. Then I had to make the tape.

  “I called Stu up Wednesday afternoon and turned on the recorder while we spoke. I told him I was doing a paper for some conference next month—I invented the damn conference—and I wanted to bring in that passage from Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and I needed his help because I didn’t have a copy of the book. I nearly fouled up the whole damn thing when I said that.”

  “How so?”

  “He got suspicious as hell for a few minutes. You have to understand about academics. Stu has been doing a lot of stuff lately about American black writers. He couldn’t care less about them, if you ask me—what he really thought about blacks was, they should go back to the slave quarters where they came from—but blacks are in these days, and Stu was carving out a nice little niche for himself: the white upper-class professor who isn’t too proud to get his hands dirty in lower-class minority literature. In other words, Richard Wright was his property, the live game he’d marked out for himself, and he didn’t much like the idea of some pushy little wop poaching on his preserves.

  “I had to do a lot of fast talking to keep him from hanging up on me then and there. I told him I wasn’t really planning to deal with Wright at all in my paper. My paper was about Walt Whitman’s ambivalent attitudes toward slavery, and I just wanted to use the Wright book for a couple of unimportant footnotes. What’s more, I’d make sure to give credit to the wonderful articles he had done on Wright’s work. Well, that calmed him down. He liked the idea of his name being read out to all those academic big shots. That’s fame for people like Stu and me—how many footnotes you can muscle your way into.”

  “So he got the book and read you the passage over the phone?”

  “Right. And then, as soon as he was off the phone, I started editing the tape with our conversation on it. I’ve got an editing attachment, I use it all the time with my own tape machine, it didn’t take me too long. And it was kind of an interesting problem, too, like a jigsaw puzzle. Taking my own voice out, and rearranging his words, and putting in the pauses. Then I set it up on my machine, and had myself a drink, and at a quarter of seven I started driving out to Stu’s house.”

  “Did you know what you were going to do when you got there?”

  “Sure I knew. I was going to give him some excuse for my dropping in—maybe I’d tell him I was hoping to borrow Black Boy from him for a few days, so I could find some other beautiful passages in it—something like that. Then, as soon as he turned his back to get that book off his shelf, I was going to hit him over the head, hard enough to kill him. I figured I could bring it off, even though he was bigger than me. I’d have the advantage of surprise, and I’m stronger than I look. And I took a weapon with me, a wrench from my tool chest, I put it in the pocket of my overcoat. It’s a big heavy thing, but it fits neatly into my hand, and they design them so they’ll be easy to manipulate.”

  “All right, what happened when you got to his house?”

  “I parked my car down the block, next to a vacant lot. You’re right, I was careful to pick a spot with a lot of nice wet mud in it. I wanted my new tire to show up clearly for the cops. Yes, you were right about that one, too—I did puncture my own tire, so I’d be sure to have a brand-new one that I couldn’t have put on before that afternoon. Actually, Dave, it was pretty smart of you to see that.

  “Then I went up the porch, and I saw the front door was halfway open. I knocked on it and called out, but I didn’t get any answer. I knew he was there, I’d talked to him only a couple of hours earlier, and besides all the lights were on in the house. I figured he was at his desk, typing or something, so he didn’t hear my voice. And by accident he’d left his door open. He should’ve been more careful, a burglar could’ve got in. But that was Stu. He didn’t believe any burglar would have the nerve to break into his royal palace.

  “So I went into the hallway, still calling out his name. Then I thought I heard noises from the living room. I went in there, and—” He hesitated, his voice suddenly losing power. But a moment later he forced himself to go on. “He was lying there on the floor. He wasn’t dead. He was making these noises. Not words, kind of—gurgling noises. Somebody got there ahead of me—a burglar, maybe—he shouldn’t have kept that front door open.”

  “Was he lying on his back or on his stomach?”

  “Face down. One leg twisted under him.”

  “What about the paperweight, the open book?”

  “It was on the floor next to him. A foot or two away from his head. Bloody as hell.” Mike jumped to his feet suddenly. “Don’t you see, Dave, that proves I didn’t do it! Why would I hit him with that paperweight when I had a wrench in my pocket?”

  If you had it in your pock
et, I thought, but this wasn’t what I said out loud. “So what did you do?”

  “I got on my knees by him. Those gurgling noises were still coming out of him. He was moving his lips a little. I said, ‘Stu, what happened?’ He didn’t answer. His lips stopped moving, and the gurgling stopped, too. He was dead. He died right there, while I was kneeling down beside him.”

  He paused, seemed to see something in my face, and went on in a higher voice, “You don’t believe me.”

  “If you’re telling the truth, if you just found his body there, how come you didn’t call the cops?”

  “How could I? I knew nobody would believe me. I knew it right then, while I was kneeling next to him. I had the motive, I had the opportunity. What’s more, if I called the police, they’d search my house before I could get rid of that tape of Stu’s voice. The whole damn situation was so frustrating—like one of those nightmares where you’re running and running but you can’t seem to get anywhere. I was royally screwed, and I did it to myself. I could’ve sat tight and made no move at all, and Stu would’ve been killed anyway, and I would’ve got my tenure—and I wouldn’t have a single thing on my conscience!

  “Well, that was when I decided what I had to do. The only thing I could do. I couldn’t call the police. I couldn’t hotfoot it right out of there and drive back to Van Horn’s house, because I’d still be the chief suspect, on account of my motive, and a whole crowd of people would testify that I didn’t get to Van Horn’s until eight or a little before, which would make it highly possible I killed Stu before I arrived. In other words, the very thing would happen to me I’d been trying to avoid with all my fancy preparations.