by Amy Bloom
I had no mouse to lay at the feet of New Haven’s finest.
* * *
“Hi. Here you go.” Allison bumped into me, spilling the latte she was trying to hand me. She dropped her scone and I caught it. “How’s the private-eye biz? Any suspects?”
“It’s not my case. Of course. But it is interesting.”
“That’s a little cold, considering an actual person is dead.” She lowered her voice. “I went to the funeral. You know who wasn’t there? Seriously?”
I asked who, seriously, and she got coy and I got persuasive and, after pulling apart her scone, she sighed and said, “It probably doesn’t even mean anything, but . . . Daniel Markham.”
She told me all about Daniel Markham, rising star in the English department. She couldn’t stop telling me. Her face went into a spasm when she said his name. I told her that every woman had one man like that, the one who makes us look crazy, and I told her an edited version of mine. She blushed for me and laughed. We ate three scones and we had two lattes and I thought, there is nothing like a good talk with a good woman to make you not miss men so much.
“He had a nasty temper and they had huge fights in the department meetings. You could investigate,” she said. “The police’ll probably bungle it. Years ago, there was that poor girl who got stabbed to death in the middle of Edgehill Road. They never found her killer.” She stretched in the chair, her arms grabbing the edge of her seat. Strong, defined arms and short, muscular legs.
“You are in great shape. Yoga? Pilates?”
She couldn’t be a dancer; no one could go through years of dance class and still move like a puppet with tangled strings.
“I do Krav Maga.”
“Really?”
She jumped up and jabbed her right hand toward my face, then moved to my chest and swung another fist to my face, stopping short. I tried not to flinch when she whipped her right leg up and out and rested her heel on my sternum. She smiled a real and satisfied smile.
“It’s all about threat neutralization. All women should take it. I love it. I go to class six days a week. My teacher says I’ve made great progress. I’m taking the test for my black belt in two weeks.”
Her phone beeped again and she ran to her bike, waving.
“Be careful,” I called out to her.
* * *
I put my feet up in my office, also lately, sadly, my home. A shitbox room in a shitbox building at the ass end of Whalley Avenue, between Big Betty’s Bar-B-Q and Ahmed and Paula’s Groceries. Allison texted me: Dinner with English Dept tonight. Wanna be my date & investigate? I appreciated the offer. I didn’t have any plans. Nothing in my bank account. One frozen waffle in the freezer. I texted back: Ready to go. Pick me up where? She texted back: I know where you live. Hehe.
I didn’t want her to see my office home. I liked how she thought of me. I ran down when she leaned on the horn, before Betty could tell her to pipe down or lose her windshield. Allison went into drive with a painful crunch and we jerked forward and stalled. A bottle of cheap white wine rolled out under my feet. Other drivers yelled at us, the nicest remark being, “Learn to drive, ya fucking blind snowflake!”
“That’s for the Freemans. Our hosts.”
“Great. I didn’t bring anything. I hope this isn’t too much out of your way.” I didn’t want to upset her. She was gripping the wheel so tightly, little drops of water slid down the steering wheel.
We made our way up Whalley, toward Yale. She was an unusual and terrifying driver: slow, blind, and anxious. At twenty-two miles per hour, we rolled through stop signs and red lights, brushed against sidewalks, and straddled the double yellow line all the way to Freemans’ house.
Since she couldn’t take her eyes off the road, and I couldn’t bear to watch our near misses, I studied Allison. She looked the way she did when we first met: Not glamorous. Purplish-brown circles under the eyes, premature creases on her eyelids, a little eczema in front of the ear closest to me. She wore a baggy dark-brown dress, with little gray and yellow flowers, which was too big for her, as well as being fugly. The neckline kept slipping, revealing sensible white bra straps and knobby yellow shoulders. How could anyone stand to go through life with all their waifish vulnerability hanging out, for all the world to see and step on? I resisted the urge to fix her dress.
“So, is their house far?”
“St. Ronan’s. We’re almost . . .” The effort of answering distracted her and she swerved toward a parked car.
Without thinking, I put my hand on the wheel and whirled it in the other direction. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was presumptuous. It was just a reflex.”
She smiled tightly. “It’s okay. I’m not a very confident driver. Daniel taught me to drive last fall. I grew up in Manhattan.”
Her driving steadied a little bit and I took my hand off the oh-shit strap. Maybe everything would work out, maybe we’d get to and from the dinner party intact, maybe I’d find the murderer and get more work and a place to live, maybe Allison would calm the fuck down and we’d go to Tanger Outlets and redo her wardrobe. Maybe.
Allison took a deep breath. “Freeman’s a Shakespearean. He got tenure as a wunderkind a thousand years ago and hasn’t published much since. He’s always talking about his new project. He’s going to do a valorium edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor. He says that he’s just an old-fashioned scholar, which means he thinks everything after 1780 is trendy garbage. And he calls women wenches. And he drinks too much. But, you know, he’s seventy.”
“Is there a Mrs. Freeman?”
“Oh, yeah. Lois.” So much for feminism. “I guess she’s younger. I think she was his student. She helps out in the alumni office. She’s, uh, very nice. Well, I mean, classic faculty wife.”
Huh.
“He’s not so bad, really. It’s surprising that he’s interested in Gertrude Stein.”
Old age had defused Freeman and he’d been clever enough to stroke Marx a little. For all her criticism, if there were a departmental conflict, she’d be in his camp.
“I’m leaving in two weeks to go to Paris, to work on a new project. I got a grant from the Omni Foundation—it’s on Gertrude Stein, her theater projects. The radical inconsistencies are fabulous.”
“Sure. Omni Foundation, that’s a big deal. Your letters must have been stellar.”
She clenched the steering wheel. “We’re here.” She slammed on the brakes.
“And so we are. Maybe we can have coffee tomorrow,” I said.
She shrugged and then softened. “I hate seeing Daniel. It makes me tense. He makes me tense.”
I patted her shoulder. We walked, arm in arm, right through the neighboring sprinklers, all working well and making things verdant in front of the stately homes.
The house was classic East Rock, circa 1927: a big two-story home with two wings off the center, both needing repair. Ghosts of live-in help fluttered by. The slightly warped black shutters framed big leaded windows and a chipped slate walkway led to a slate front porch, with two unnecessary columns and exactly enough room for two guests and the big Japanese urn with hopeful pink geraniums in it. Dusty panes of stained glass marked the second- and third-floor landings. There was the general air of past grandeur (and current deep, cossetted comfort and protection, which I wanted even more than I wanted grand). And lovely, blameless mountains of late roses and banks of hydrangeas, in full blooming white, pink, and lavender. I rang the doorbell and smiled reassuringly at poor Allison, who was holding onto her neckline.
“You look fine,” I lied. “Fuck him.”
A leprechaun opened the door.
Professor Freeman was as bald and red as an apple, just about 5’6’’, wearing the standard-issue hairy Harris Tweed jacket in a novel shade of avocado. His baggy brown corduroys drooped under his round belly and his tie was emerald green with brown and beige diamonds. I expected his socks to be green argyle and the toes of his wee boots to curl upward—and I was right about the socks. There was so
mething irresistible about his delight in being such a snappy dresser at his age. He twinkled.
He ducked his head in a professorial half-bow and attempted to make eye contact with my breasts. “Artemis . . .” he murmured.
A lot of people find this kind of thing annoying, but I don’t mind it so much, nearing forty. “Professor Freeman,” I responded, grinning. “We brought wine!”
A faded pink wraith appeared next to my host. Mr. Freeman had used up their collective allotment of vitality and color. A little taller than he and ash-blond, she looked like a gladiolus at the end of the season. She tottered toward me on scuffed pink silk sandals and clutched her husband’s shoulder. My God, I thought, she must have muscular dystrophy or something. Then I examined her face and saw those wet, bluish-red eyes and knew she must have been downing vodka since lunch, if she’d had lunch. Mrs. Freeman stared at me, damply, for a long minute; we all stood very still while she tried to get into gear.
“Come in, come in,” she finally barked. “Don’t just gawk, Albert. Make them drinks.” She wasn’t able to do the hostess routine very well anymore, but she knew the basics and did what she absolutely had to do. “Dumb as a bucket of worms,” she mumbled, kicking their fat gray cat out of her path. I didn’t ask to whom she was referring.
The living room was cheerful, in its way. There was a shabby beige velvet couch (covered with gray cat hairs) and four matching armchairs, their nap rubbed off at all the corners. And everywhere there were bits of Ireland. Shillelaghs on the walls, four-leaf clovers in amber cubes, ceramic mugs with John Kennedy’s face, sepia prints of lasses and laddies kissing in the back streets of fair Dublin. The floor-to-ceiling curtains were green linen. It was a shrine to Irish kitsch and you knew that Albert Freeman had lovingly collected and arranged every bit of it. (Freeman, I thought. Irish?)
I sat down and jumped again. Underneath me was a horsehair cushion depicting the saint with embroidered snakes, 3-D style. I settled back in with the white wine Freeman handed me. I would have gone for a real drink or three, but then I would have gotten friendly, and then I would have gotten nasty. If I’ve learned nothing else in my thirties, it’s that I have to drink the way Allison has to drive—slow and worried. Allison, the party animal in question, drank apple juice. Mrs. Freeman continued to sip from a tall clear glass, with not so much as an ice cube or lemon slice for camouflage. Freeman (who was starting to seem more like “poor old Albert”) drank Connemara whiskey and discoursed about its pedigree as he gulped. There was no food on the table, except one small bowl of fuzzy cashews. I sniffed for a reassuring scent of cooking, but I couldn’t pick up anything. My stomach growled.
The doorbell rang and a man burst through the door. Apollo in white jeans, white cotton shirt, and blue blazer. No socks. No little tiny wings on his ankles. He hugged Mrs. Freeman, who smiled and said, “Daniel!” Daniel Markham focused a dazzling smile on me and gave the tail end of it to Allison, who started to perk up, then wilted back into her chair.
“Great to be here. Great whiskey, Al. How about on the rocks, with just a splash. Great.”
Just as Daniel, gleaming from tip to toe, settled into one of the armchairs, the doorbell rang again as our last guest arrived. Mrs. Freeman yelled, “It’s open!” and a dull mouse of a man came in.
“Hey, Jimbo,” Daniel said.
Poor man with thinning brown hair worn long and floppy, a pronounced overbite, little pink mouth, small, sharp nose, and an unfortunate tendency to wear gray. But his eyes were not unfortunate. They were shiny brown and bottomless, seeing everything and thinking, clicking on all cylinders, about all he saw. At the moment, he was fastened on Allison, whose gaze was locked onto Daniel’s perfect profile. Things happen in New Haven, don’t think they don’t.
Mrs. Freeman made the introductions in her abrupt way: “Jim, this is . . . Jesus, who? Wait, Allison told me. Dell Chandler. She didn’t make it in psych at Wesleyan, now she’s like a junior lawman or something. This is Jim Fiske, he was visiting this year. Rising star but not here. Don’t get attached. He’ll be gone in another week or two. The rest of the department? I guess all those fuckers are out of the country.”
She certainly didn’t make you squirm with her desperate efforts to please.
We sat around, passing the inedible cashews back and forth, and they talked about the kinds of things academics talk about: Albert’s latest bird-watching venture, the faulty transmission in Daniel’s old Honda, Jim’s love of all things Apple. Mrs. Freeman’s eyes closed, Allison couldn’t take her eyes off Daniel, and I was bored out of my mind, hoping that at any moment someone might leap up with that bloodstained bronze bust and head for the library, Colonel Mustard in tow. I thought about whiskey. I needed to focus.
Suddenly, Mrs. Freeman lurched out of her seat and headed toward the kitchen. She quickly emerged again, shouting, “Dinner!” I still didn’t smell anything.
We shuffled along to the dining room and stared at the table. The Freemans didn’t give us any indication of where to sit and, in any case, we were all mesmerized by the table laid with a huge platter of cold sliced corned beef, another of salami—both garnished with clumps of potato salad, with each clump topped by a big sprig of parsley (Mrs. Freeman, asserting something)—a third platter covered with slices of bologna, laid out like a mosaic, a tiny bowl of macaroni salad, a bigger bowl of coleslaw, and a breadbasket filled with sliced white bread. All in dusty Waterford glasses and Belleek plates.
“What lovely crystal,” I said, and maneuvered to sit next to Mrs. Freeman, who seemed a likely informant if I could get to her before the next six ounces of vodka. Allison slouched toward Daniel while looking elsewhere. Very I’m-not-really-doing-this. I understood.
“Do you get your corned beef from Katz’s? Or do you make your own?”
I wasn’t sure how far gone she was. Mrs. Freeman stared at me flatly and smiled a slow, shaky, genuinely amused smile. “Right,” she replied drily. “I don’t make my own anything anymore. I did beef Wellington with two screaming babies, I made salmon en papillote when that was the thing, until it was coming out of my fucking ears. I did baklava from scratch while carpooling my brats to violin and swimming lessons, so they could become swimming violinists or some goddamn thing. Now, one’s a what?—a hedge manager—and the other one, I think she is a swimming violinist. I don’t cook a goddamn thing.”
I smiled pleasantly. “That’s why God made takeout. I live for Royal Palace. So what do you do now that you’re no longer chained to the stove?”
“I drink, detective girl. My chains are right here.”
She waved her glass around, not spilling a drop. At the other end, Albert regarded me questioningly. I smiled back. He turned to Allison.
“Albert drinks a little too much and he paws the girls. Harmless, harmless, harmless. On the other . . .” She stared at her glass.
“On the other hand . . .” I prompted.
She paused, the way they do, as though they’re gathering their thoughts when all they’re really doing is trying not to drool or spill the drink. If I could knock over the glass, maybe we could get somewhere. If I could have met her before whatever it was that had shriveled her, maybe we could have gotten somewhere. Mrs. Freeman took a big gulp of her drink and glared at Allison, who felt it and turned toward our end. Mrs. Freeman opened her mouth, shut her eyes, and slumped back in the chair. Her night was over. For the first time since we arrived, Allison smiled. We ignored Mrs. Freeman’s little faux pas.
Albert got up to make coffee and, since the dinner partner on my right was no longer available, I turned to Jim Fiske. I have manners.
“So how do you find Yale after a year?”
The bright-penny eyes took me in with appreciation but absent the passion he had been casting at Allison. Takes all kinds. I needed to encourage the Jim-and-Allison thing.
“I find it interesting. Love Mamoun’s. And squirrel fish at Taste of China. I’ll miss that when I go to Iowa. I’ll miss the people here: som
e new friends, some of my colleagues. And you, how do you find it, from your novel perspective?”
“Well, this is my hometown. Elm City. I wish I’d known Professor Bullfinch before his death. His habits, his likes and dislikes, his congeniality or lack thereof. I’m sure he was a complex person and, honestly, I just find myself wondering, why would anyone, you know . . .”
“Murder him,” Jim said.
“What’d you think of him, just from faculty meetings and things like that? Did you hang out?”
Fiske snorted. I’d asked the right question. He told me about Bullfinch going all out to see that Allison was denied tenure, even undermining a summer grant to get her to Paris. That’s all she wanted, he said. She admired Sandrine Boulanger, the Omni’s director. He almost wept when talking about this vicious, doddering old man, vain about his reputation and indifferent to those of his junior colleagues while punishing Allison, cast in the part of Shirley Temple in The Little Princess—hard-done-by and plucky, brave and pure despite her shameful treatment. I looked at Allison, leaning toward Daniel, who never took his cerulean eyes off Jim and me.