Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers

by Diane Capri

  In order to avoid the problem of getting lost, I didn’t park in the campus parking lot at all, but inside the lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts which is located directly across the street from the campus’s main entrance. Crossing over the double-laned Washington Avenue, I pat my chest for my .38 which is concealed under my leather coat. I already know it’s there, but somehow it feels good just to touch it. Not that I expected any kind of shootout to happen inside the state university campus. But a man has got to be prepared these days. Who knows what a frustrated writer like Gregor Oatczuk is capable of when push comes to severe shoving?

  Once on the main campus I shoot across the main green until I come to a campus directory that’s housed inside a glass case mounted to a concrete balustrade. It tells me that the big white, four-story, concrete-paneled structure set before me is the English Department. Not a very inspiring building for writing new poems and prose. But then what the hell do I know? I was groomed for the funeral business. I grew up looking at stiffs day in and day out. Maybe death is not the most inspiring thing in the world for a young kid, but it seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Maybe it explains why I had no trouble making the transition to cop and witnessing my fair share of violent deaths while on my near-twenty-year watch. Including my own near death.

  I approach the building and make a right around its far corner and onto the main quad of the campus. As promised, my liaison, MFA candidate and young poet, Erica, is waiting for me at our appointed time.

  “Hope I’m not stealing you away from your muse,” I tell her. She’s dressed in the same short skirt as earlier, knee high socks under a pair of brown leather boots. Her sandy brown hair is blowing in the wind and her brown eyes are lit up in the bright sun that’s beaming onto the open air quad.

  “Not at all,” she smiles. “I only write at night, when the cool, calm silence makes everything grow still and all right.”

  “You’re a poet and you know it, Erica.”

  “No lie that I try.”

  Reaching out, she takes hold of my hand. The feel of her hand wrapped around mine gives my heart a bit of a pleasant start. Moonlight the romantic. Or Moonlight the dirty old man.

  “Come on,” she insists. “Oatczuk doesn’t like it when people run late for an appointed meeting.”

  “God forbid,” I say. “We might make him late for a faculty meeting or something.”

  Together we head inside the building, take the stairs to the second floor where we enter through a pair of double doors. Erica leads me down a narrow corridor that accesses classrooms and faculty offices. We make it about midway down the corridor until we come to a closed door, a metal nameplate screwed into it bearing the name Gregor Oatczuk in embossed letters.

  Oatczuk. Poor bastard must have had a rough time in grammar and high school with a name like that.

  Erica knocks.

  “Come,” exclaims a deep voice from behind the door.

  Erica opens the door, steps inside. I follow.

  The writing professor is seated behind a big, antique wood desk. He’s heavyset, in his late thirties or early forties, and sporting horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s got a four or five day beard going, and this long, dark hair that’s parted over his left eye and draped over narrow shoulders. You can tell he’s proud of his hair and the fleeting youth it represents because I’m not through the door for three seconds and he’s running both his open hands through it, brushing it back like it’s a nuisance. But I can tell he’s showing off in front of his student.

  “This the man you spoke of, Erica?”

  “True dat, Professor Oatczuk. This is Dick Moonlight, honest-to-goodness private detective.”

  He smiles, stands, points to the free chair set before the desk. “This is certainly a first for this office, Mr. Moonlight.” He tells me to have a seat.

  “I’ll stand, thanks,” I insist.

  “I like that,” he says, settling himself back down in his chair. “A man who is always at the ready. Tell me something, do you carry a gun?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I can see his cheeks flushing under his scruff. He’s not used to people answering his questions with a question. He’s a professor after all, the master of his fenced-in kingdom. I don’t only represent the outside world and reality. As a former cop and now a PI, I am an object of both interest and curiosity to him.

  “When I think of private detectives, the ones made famous in genre fiction and the pulp magazines of yesteryear, I can’t help but think of guns, illicit sex, and sleaze galore.” He shifts his gaze from me to out the window onto the confusing campus. “Mediocre fiction for simpletons.”

  Erica clears her throat. “Mr. Moonlight just wrote his first novel, Professor.”

  He turns back to me, runs his right hand back through his hair. Nervously. As if the private detective has suddenly become competition instead of curiosity. “You’re a multi-talented individual, Mr. Moonlight. What’s the name of your opus?”

  I glance at Erica. She issues a me a confident smile that screams, Don’t be shy. Tell him.

  “Moonlight Falls,” I say. “Sort of autobiographical fiction. Or, if you will, Professor, detective fiction meets memoir.”

  His eyes light up under those horn-rims.

  “How interesting. False truths and true falses. A pioneering effort on your maiden literary voyage. How nice for you.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it literary, Mr. Oatczuk. More like a mystery novel. Something Dan Brown or Robert B. Parker might write.” Feigning a grin. “You know, a book for simpletons. Nothing Roger Walls or maybe yourself might waste your time with.” I’m blowing smoke up his ass here, and he either knows it and likes it. Or he’s just so used to being creamed on by his students that he’s entirely used to the praise and in fact, expects it.

  He nods.

  “Let me tell you something,” he says, once more gazing out the window. “The other day I had to take the train into Manhattan for a day-long conference along with some of my colleagues here at the university. Something happened that took me by complete surprise. The train was full of readers. Young, old, middle-aged. They were all reading, or so it seemed. Instead of the clatter of text messages being typed, or cell phones chiming, or video games spitting and spurting, people were reading.” He sighs as though suddenly deflated. “But then something else happened that would undermine my new-found optimism.”

  I glance at Erica. She catches my gaze and offers me a tight-lipped nod. It tells me she’s more than used to the good professor’s pontifications and ruminations.

  “I can hardly wait to hear,” I say.

  “I made a point of trying to find out what the people were reading,” Oatczuk goes on. “I actually physically climbed out of my seat and walked up and down the aisle gazing upon the titles of the paperback books. And in doing so, I was sorely disappointed. Because instead of seeing the names of the greats like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Melville, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner, I saw only Stieg Larsson, Dan Brown, and even some new writer who used to sell insurance but wrote a romance novel in his spare time and sold a million e-books. A man who now owns a fucking villa in the Tuscan mountains and a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue in New York.” Yet another gaze out the window. “E-books. Can you imagine a world in which books are not printed on paper?”

  “Some people would call that progress,” I say. “It’s a digital world. You don’t teach that in MFA school?”

  “Give us some credit here. We’re not only trying to teach tomorrow’s writers how to hone their craft, I believe we’re trying to save the written word from the people who abuse it while making millions on their bestsellers and their blockbuster movies.”

  “I wouldn’t mind selling a movie.” Nor would I mind a penthouse apartment in New York. Not that I’m about to admit it to Oatczuk.

  The professor bursts out laughing, like I suddenly ran behind his desk and started tickling him.

  “That’s just it, Moonlight,” he
exclaims, “it’s people like you … mere pedestrians … who pen a first novel and, entirely ignorant of the process, end up writing some piece of subpar material that shoots to the top spot on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list or some such shit. Suddenly you’re being called the next Stephen King or, if you will, Roger Walls. Suddenly you’re very rich and famous. And where does that leave real, serious writers like myself?”

  “Teaching,” I say. “You need to teach in order to make a living.”

  “Yes,” he whispers. “We teach. We have no choice but to teach young adults who have about as much chance of making a living as a writer as I do a private detective.”

  “Amen to that,” I say, my eyes once more shifting to Erica as she nervously bites down on her lower lip.

  I know that if I don’t begin to steer the obviously bitter Oatczuk off the literary versus genre fiction debate, we might never get to the real reason for my visit.

  “Speaking of Mr. Walls,” I interject, “I understand you both are great friends. As Erica here might have mentioned, he’s gone missing. I’ve been hired by his agent, Suzanne Bonchance, to find him, escort him back home, and sit him in front of his typewriter so that he might make a little money for them both.”

  Oatczuk peers up at me from behind his desk. He purses his lips, as if he wants to say something but can’t quite put the words together yet.

  “So, Oatczuk,” I press on, “any ideas on where I might start looking? Since you two are like this?” I raise up my right hand, make a gesture of togetherness by crossing the index and middle fingers.

  The professor exhales. Profoundly.

  “This isn’t about money, Moonlight.”

  “What isn’t about money?” I know precisely what he’s getting at, but I’m giving him a hard time. Just because. Moonlight the ball buster.

  “Writing. It’s not about money. It’s about a calling. What we have instead of religion. Or in the place of it anyway. A song inside of us that needs to be sung.”

  “Which is why you’ve chosen not to make money at it. Isn’t that right Oat … Czuk.”

  Out the corner of my left eye, I catch Erica suppressing a laugh by pressing her fisted hand up against her lips.

  The prof’s lips go tight, his eyes wide, bottom lip a quivering, trembling live wire. A little blue vein pops out on his neck under his chin. The scholarly writing professor has got himself a temper worthy of the mean streets by the looks of things, even though his wardrobe of jeans, moccasins, canvass button-down shirt screams of Vermont, cows, pot, and organic freshness.

  “I’m just playing with you, Oatczuk. I know you’ve been trying to catch a big commercial deal for years now. Suzanne told me so. But things ain’t going so great are they?”

  “And what business is that of yours, Moonlight?”

  “None. But it makes me happy knowing that you know that I know … If you catch my drift, Herr Professor.” I make sure to say Herr Professor with a genuine German SS accent. It makes the little vein on Oatczuk’s neck throb all the more. Stealing another quick look at Erica, I believe it’s quite possible she’s about to pee her little cotton undies. That is, if she’s wearing any.

  “You consider yourself a funny man, Detective Moonlight. And I suppose you have infused your charming personality into your writing?”

  “Almost certainly. Which is why Suzanne tells me she’s going to sell it for a million bucks. How’s about them apples?” It’s a lie of course, but I’m really beginning to enjoy watching that vein throb to the point of bursting.

  Oatczuk shoots up and out of his chair.

  “You must be joking!” he spits. “Suzanne Bonchance … the Suzanne Bonchance … has decided to take on your book.” It’s a question for which he already knows the answer, but is having a hard time swallowing. He and his throbbing blue vein.

  “Why’s that so hard to believe, Oat. Czuk?”

  “You my friend … you are merely a poseur.” He’s speaking to me through a bittersweet smile, the fingers on his hands once more combing back that lush hair. “A wannabe. I can bet your talent, or lack thereof, is not even worthy of this writing program. Still, here you are trying to push your first novel through one of the best and most accomplished literary agents this country has ever seen, and ever will see.”

  “Well now you’re hurting my feelings, Professor.”

  “I believe you are a bald-faced liar, Moonlight. Or, perhaps you did something for her to make her take your book on. It’s no secret Bonchance has experienced a rash of poor luck lately. So what is it then? Did you fuck her, Moonlight?”

  Erica’s jaw drops. It’s possible mine does to. But there isn’t a mirror around for me to confirm it.

  “Professor Oatczuk,” I say in as calm a voice as I can work up, “I’m surprised at you. A man of your academic standing and respectability, issuing the f-bomb in front of a student. Tsk Tsk.”

  He slowly sits back down.

  “I truly wanted to help you, Moonlight. But I can see now that you don’t need my help. You, your book, your agent, and your attitude may now kindly fuck off all the way out of my office, my campus, and my life.”

  “Oops you said it again,” I sing, mimicking a horrid song from an even more horrid pop star from the 1990s. “Sure you don’t want to give me at least something to go on that might help me find your good buddy Roger Walls? This ain’t about me, Oatczuk, and it ain’t about Bonchance, or about you. It’s about the safety and well-being of Roger Walls, New York Times, USA Today and Amazon Dot Com bestseller.”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he hisses. “Maybe you should talk to his present wife.”

  “Already been there. She has no clue either.”

  “And did you fuck her too?”

  I find myself shooting a glance at Erica. She returns my glance with a look that says, Yup, you did fuck her, didn’t you.

  “Jeeze, prof, your full of angry f-bombs today. You should write a new poem.”

  “Yes, fuck you and the fat horse you rode in on. Now, please, exit these quarters.”

  “With pleasure … Oat. Czuk.”

  I turn, take hold of Erica’s hand, just like she took hold of mine earlier.

  “And I’m taking your student with me,” I add.

  “I’ll see you at workshop professor,” she says, little bits of laughter spurting out between her words.

  “I’d like a word with you later, Ms. Beckett,” Oatczuk says as we exit his office, closing the door behind us.

  #

  Back outside in the common, Erica doubles over in uncontrollable laughter. When she’s done, she straightens up, wipes the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  She says, “You are the first person I’ve ever seen who actually succeeded at putting Oatczuk in his place. You were positively brilliant, Moonlight. “ She laughs some more, then adds. “I’m not entirely sure why you chose to piss him off like that, and how good it’s going to be for my grades, but it was truly a sight to see. Believe me. But now you still don’t have any clue on where to start looking for Roger.”

  The afternoon sun and its warmth are fading fast, but the absolute relief that comes with leaving the English department behind feels really good.

  “Because Erica, I knew from the very second I met old Oatczuk that not only does he have zero clue about Roger Walls’s whereabouts, but that he’s been lying about being his friend. He’s probably met him a few times at college readings and some other university-sponsored events. Maybe emailed with him a few times. Its sounds impressive to his students when he talks about Roger Walls, his quote … ‘close friend’ … unquote.” Making quotations marks with my fingers. “But trust me, he’s no more buddies with Walls than I am.”

  “Then why invite you in to offer his help?”

  “To make himself look important. Like he’s needed. Wanted. Or maybe he’s just nosy. Shit, maybe he just wanted to show off his hair.”

  Erica shoots me a quizzical look with her very young
but very stunning eyes.

  “It’s like this,” I go on. “Your Mr. Oatczuk, as good and important a writing professor as he seems, has been trying to break the bonds of the academic prison and become a bestselling novelist in his own right. My built-in shit detector—and it’s a finely tuned one I might add—tells me he’s a little obsessed with Suzanne Bonchance, Walls’s agent. Oatczuk feels that if Roger can be a superstar writer than not only can he be a star too, but he is in fact entitled to be a mega-superstar writer. After all, he’s a long-haired superstar on the campus of Albany State. It’s just a matter of Suzanne giving him the break he needs; a matter of her seeing the light, as it were. Recognizing his particular brand of genius. Maybe he feels that by helping out with Walls, he will somehow place himself in Bonchance’s good graces. Hell, maybe he feels she owes him a favor, like taking on one of his books.”

  We start walking in the direction of the parking lot under the university common’s bright sodium lamplight.

  “But why not just try another agent if Bonchance doesn’t want him?”

  “Because he doesn’t want another agent. Even with Suzanne being in trouble, and barely hanging on to her own career, he’s obsessed with her representation, simply because she represents Roger. That’s what Oatczuk is focused on and obsessed with. Nothing else will satisfy him.”