by Lev Raphael
“But why is your husband doing this to us now?”
“Don’t you understand? The anniversary of Casey’s death was a few weeks ago,” she brought out sadly. Then she flared up: “I didn’t think Casey was miserable enough to kill himself, but what did I know? When the autopsy report said it was suicide for sure, that’s when I understood.”
I was dumbfounded by the ease with which she told a stranger she had suspected her husband of murdering their son.
“So he’s abused you and Casey?”
“Yes, and that’s why Casey changed his name to mine when he turned eighteen.”
“Have you ever reported the abuse?”
She sneered. “To the police? Sonny boy, he is the police. He’s invulnerable, he’s a detective in the Michiganapolis police. Detective Quinn.” She explained what she seemed sure I was going to ask: “When we separated, I changed back to my maiden name and when Casey turned eighteen, he took my name, too, because he hated his father. He was right to. My husband is a real snake. That’s what you get when you mix Irish blarney and Italian charm.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, still not entirely able to absorb what she was revealing to me: we were being stalked and harassed by a cop, the very person who was supposed to keep people safe. But then what did that cliché mean anymore, now that I’d experienced police brutality firsthand, and Vanessa Liberati had taken us behind the scenes of what some of the local police were really like.
“What do I mean? His mother’s Italian, that’s why his first name is Dante.” She sneered. “I wanted security, he seemed so solid. I married a man with a first name like that, I ended up in hell right from the get-go. What a crummy joke.” She glanced off as if seeing the young woman she’d been before her life had changed for the worse. “It’s not just what he did to us. He beat up people he arrested, he lied on police reports, stole evidence, and he’d brag about it to me.”
But how had she stayed silent so long?
As if she’d read my mind, she said, “Nobody would believe me. He’d tell them I’m a drunk, and that’s true. I drink too much. That was the only way I could live with him. Besides, you don’t report people like Dante to anyone no matter what they do, you don’t tell your friends about him, you don’t even tell your minister. My husband, he’s—” She seemed to struggle with a description. “He’s a devil.”
If Detective Dante Quinn really was behind everything that had been happening to us, then she wasn’t exaggerating. And that’s when I remembered Vanessa Liberati asking who was in charge on the night of the raid, and some cop telling her, “Detective Quinn.”
I could still barely absorb the revelation and clung to what we’d been talking about, asking her, “But don’t people go to prison for spousal abuse?”
She nodded. “They can. Sometimes. And they get released. You don’t stay in forever. And he would get revenge.”
“Then how were you able to manage a separation?”
“That was Dante’s idea, for whatever reason. Maybe it was Casey getting big and muscular, able to stand up for himself and for me, that made Dante want to get rid of the both of us. I don’t really know and I didn’t ask. But I know nobody leaves him, nobody crosses him. He’s the one in charge, always. He’ll never let me go, never give me a divorce.”
“So you’re in limbo,” I said.
“But at least he’s stopped beating on me. Now he has you and your … your partner to punish.” She shrugged and drank some more tea as if she’d merely made a remark about the weather.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Why?” She sneered. “I hate all of you at the college, but I hate him more.”
I wondered that she had the university’s radio station on at all, given how she felt, unless it was just mindless background noise to her.
“You’re telling me there’s nothing I can do.”
“Oh, you can fix things easy enough,” she said calmly after a moment. “You can sell your house and move to another country, because I guarantee it, if you stay in the U.S. Dante will eventually hurt you real bad, maybe even kill you. He’s that crazy. And he’ll get away with it.”
While I tried to assimilate the threat, and wondered if she could possibly be inventing all of what she’d been telling me, or even some of it, she shook her head a bit as if answering to some inner voice. With a show of vestigial hospitality, she asked “Would you like some of these sugar cookies? I baked them myself.”
“I have to go.”
She nodded, and rose unsteadily to her feet.
“I am truly sorry about your son.”
She waved it away. “Too little, too late.” By the door was a small console table with a wedding photo. It was clearly her and Quinn. She saw me study it, and said, “He won’t let me put it away. He wants me to remember who’s the boss every time I come home, and every time I leave.”
I took in Quinn, my nemesis. He was much taller than she was, an imposing, square-jawed type with a thick neck, dimpled chin, and dead eyes. Even on his wedding day, he wasn’t smiling.
20
In my car, I texted Vanessa that I’d found out it was Detective Quinn behind the last week of horror, and then I drove straight to campus to tell Stefan the astonishing story Quinn’s estranged wife had revealed to me.
But could I believe Pat Silver? Hadn’t Stefan told me Casey said both his parents were harsh?
Upstairs, when I exited the elevator on the third floor, I could see Stefan standing in the doorway of Celine’s office, off to the left across that small sea of low-walled cubicle partitions. There were only a few bent heads among the warren of desks, and once again, it struck me as a remarkable and bizarre reversal in my departmental fortunes that I wasn’t among them. But I knew from Shakespeare that Fortune’s Wheel could turn sharply, and hadn’t it done just that only days ago?
Estella was dressed in clinging pink and black Lycra today like an aerobics instructor. She smiled absently as I passed, though whether at me or her smart phone where she was texting, I couldn’t say. Stefan waved, and as I skirted the cubicles and got closer, I could see he was talking to Celine who stood just inside the doorway of her office. I greeted them both. She was wearing a lime green cottony outfit almost like loose pajamas. She looked cool, but she said with an unusual hint of shyness, “A nephew of mine is in the Iowa writing program and a really big fan of memoirs, so he wanted me to get him a signed copy of Stefan’s book.”
Stefan grinned as he always did (and probably always would) at any mention of his only best-selling book. He pulled a copy out of his black leather Ferragamo messenger bag. This was also the only book of his with an author photo plastered across the back cover, a sign of how well the publisher had thought the book would do.
“Are you sure I can’t pay you for it?” Celine asked him.
He nodded.
“Listen,” I said, voice low, since the echo on this newly redesigned floor was unpredictable, “you are not going to believe what I just found out.” I ushered them both into Celine’s office, and shut the heavy oak door behind me. It closed with a thud.
Celine sat down behind her desk, Stefan on the deep, cushioned windowsill, setting his bag on the floor at his feet.
I paced back and forth as I recounted everything Quinn’s wife had told me: their contempt for all of us at SUM, his abuse, her suspecting him of killing Casey, her conviction that he was our tormentor. Stefan was still, back straight, brawny arms folded, but his eyes got wider and wider. When I was done, Celine nodded almost as if she had suspected this revelation.
“Nothing the po-po does surprises me,” she said. I knew that was African American slang for the police, like “5-0.” “I can’t begin to count how many times my eldest son has gotten stopped around here because his Daddy splurged and gave him an Audi A3 for his eighteenth birthday.”
“Driving While Black,” Stefan muttered.
Celine nodded. “And you two, no matter what somebody thinks you did or
didn’t do, you’re gay and that puts you way down the totem pole no matter what happens. You can’t tell me that isn’t part of all this shit that’s been going down. It’s not just that you’re professors.”
I’d never heard Celine use even mild profanity before, or slang. I was about to ask her more about her son when I noticed Stefan had turned and was staring out the window.
“There are people running down there,” he said, frowning. “Something must be happening. A car accident?”
We hadn’t heard any crash, so I doubted that.
Celine and I moved to the window, and I realized that the people were running out of Parker Hall and scattering in all directions. But there hadn’t been any fire alarm, so what was going on? Some of them had stopped across the street and were on their smart phones, making calls and gesticulating wildly with their free hands. Others were pointing, taking pictures with their phones. But pictures of what?
That’s when we heard muffled shouting from somewhere in the building and another sound I couldn’t identify. We all stood there, frozen, holding our breath, as if somehow being utterly still could magically protect us. Then I heard that weird clanging echo of the stairs, and from the office below us, there was a terrifically loud, bizarre grinding and shaking that rattled the framed Hitchcock posters on Celine’s walls.
“The copy room is right below us,” Celine said. “I think someone’s trying to move one of the copy machines.” Celine’s forehead creased in puzzlement.
Stefan and I asked “Why?” at the same time.
“To blockade the door.”
“From what?” Stefan asked.
That’s when we heard what I was sure was a gun shot, and a scream. Both of them traveled up through the floor the way dark spirits swoop into and out of people in horror films. I felt just as shaken and hollowed out. I waited for something to fill the emptiness: memories, visions, anything.
“It’s Quinn,” Stefan said dully. “It’s got to be Quinn. He probably followed you to his wife’s house, or maybe she even told him you were there after you left. How do you know she’s not as crazy as he is?”
“This is not possible,” I said. “This is not happening.”
Celine was on her cell. As she dialed 911, she said, “I don’t think we can get out of here. We’re too high up to jump and we could get caught on the stairs or in the elevator.”
I listened to her efficiently and calmly report who and where we were, what we had heard and what we thought was going on. After she finished, she told me and Stefan, “They’re getting other calls about a gunman and that at least one person’s been shot. Campus is being evacuated. They told us to hide and protect ourselves as best we can if we can’t escape.”
I felt as if I had silently shrunk into myself, and all I could picture was the first of the Twin Towers imploding and collapsing, sending up a mountain of dust and ash. We were going to die as surely as everyone who couldn’t get out of those buildings had died. Quinn would find us and he was going to kill us. It was over.
I could suddenly hear my breathing: short and fast. My chest felt tight and there was a strange tension at the back of my throat as if I were about to start choking. Despite what Celine had said, I wanted to try jumping from one of the windows, but then I pictured myself breaking one or both legs and lying there unable to move, helpless, an easier target than I was already.
Celine grabbed my arm and shook me hard. “Nick! Stay focused.” I looked at her as if I were at the bottom of a pool and she was dragging me to the surface. Then I saw that Stefan’s lips were moving and I could just make out that he was praying the “Hail Mary.” And that’s when it hit me: Maybe I was going to die, but I wouldn’t die alone. We were together. And perhaps that could save us somehow, but my thinking had slowed down as if I were drugged.
I nodded at Celine anyway, to show that I wasn’t giving up.
She stalked through the connecting doorway into my office, closed and locked my outer door to the rest of the department, then passed back through the connecting doorway to rejoin me and Stefan, closing that door behind her.
“Your office is closest to the elevator,” she said. “And if he breaks in that way, he’ll probably come through there.” She pointed at the door between our offices. She whirled around and started scrabbling in her desk. “Damn. I never lock that door, I don’t know where the key is.” Then she smacked her forehead, reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out her keychain, found the large brass key, locked the connecting door and sighed as deeply as if she’d just finished a marathon.
She locked her other door, then glanced around the room, clearly trying to figure out what we could move in front of the connecting door to slow Quinn down or even stop him. But he’d find us eventually.
“Help me with that book case!” she said to us, pointing at the four-foot-tall metal book case behind her desk. Stefan and I got on one side and slid it across in front of the door between our offices. Some of the binders and books toppled out of it onto the floor, lying splayed open like corpses in a morgue. Stefan grabbed her desk chair and stacked it on top of the bookcase, then added the only other chair in the room and a small three-legged table that had stood under the window and held a philodendron. It wasn’t much, but the door was also one of the old, heavy, recycled doors from before the building renovation and maybe would gain us some time till the police came.
The Michiganapolis police. They’d ruined my life, ruined Stefan’s life just a week ago, and now we were waiting for them to save us. It was terrifying. One of their own had started this whole nightmare and was in the building determined to kill us and who knew how many other people. It had to be Quinn, who else would be going berserk like this?
All three of us were staring at Celine’s office door out to the department now, and then we circled the room for anything big enough to make a barricade for this one, too. We tried moving the file cabinet standing to its left, but it was too heavy to slide and if we just tipped it over on its side, it wouldn’t do much to keep anyone out. Her old oak desk didn’t budge. Even if we’d pulled out the desk drawers I didn’t think we could maneuver the desk onto one end and ram it against the door.
Celine shook her head. “Okay, stay away from the door, anyway. The bullets penetrate much easier than through a wall, even these old walls.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, making sure I did what she said.
“They train us for emergencies like this. We just have to hold out somehow till the cops get here. But we need weapons. If he gets in, we have to try to disarm or disable him.”
Her assurance calmed me down, but I cursed myself for not having moved faster after that terrible first night to apply for a gun license and buy a gun. If only I had a gun, any kind of gun, we’d truly be able to defend ourselves.
Celine surveyed the office again, and yanked the fire extinguisher from its wall mount behind her desk. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I lifted the Psycho poster from its spot near the door, turned it glass side out and figured that if she and I and Stefan hit Quinn at the same time, maybe we’d have a chance. It was heavier than I’d expected, and could possibly do enough damage to buy us the time we needed.
But just as I was wondering what Stefan could use to try to disarm Quinn, I saw him bending over his messenger bag, and then he pulled out a handgun. I thought I recognized it from one of the brochures I had been reading: it looked like a Walther PPK .380, but different from the ones I’d seen in catalogues, and it had what I guessed was a custom wrap-around grip of some fancy wood. I watched Stefan check to see that it was unloaded, grab ammo from a small cardboard box, take out the magazine, carefully but quickly load it and slide it in, then click off the safety as smoothly as if he’d handled it many times. He was ready.
I no longer recognized this man, and I didn’t know what to say. Celine was silent, too. Time seemed to stop. No, that wasn’t it. We had stopped. We stood at the dead center of a ravenous storm whirling around us.
<
br /> He met my eyes, unabashed. “Those times this past week I haven’t been around? Father Ryan took me out to a friend’s farm to try out a bunch of different handguns. He knew how scared I was. This was the one that I got off the best shots with.” Stefan was holding the PPK safely, pointing it down to the floor, but the image of him with any kind of gun was surreal. “Nick,” he said, “I’m not going to die without fighting back.” And before I could say anything, he added, “No, I don’t have a license to carry it. I don’t have any kind of license and I don’t give a fuck.”
I didn’t either. “But why didn’t you want me to have a gun?”
He shrugged. “You’re too combustible.”
I would have laughed if we weren’t in so much danger. It didn’t matter that he had berated me when we had talked about gun permits after Vanessa Liberati had urged us to protect ourselves. I was grateful that at least one of us had a real weapon, and adjectives from the Walther website I had once taken a look at drifted through my mind as if I were hallucinating: “classic,” “timeless,” “elegant.” They seemed obscenely frivolous now that we were about to face a maniac, words that were better suited to a fashion show. The PPK was small as semiautomatics went (six inches long, about four inches high), and I’d read somewhere that it was worthless for self-defense. I hoped to God that wasn’t true.
I nodded at Stefan, still speechless, but I think we had lived together long enough for him to know that I was commending him.
Stefan nodded back, grimly, then waved me and Celine with our makeshift weapons to the right side of the massive door. To the left was the gray metal file cabinet like millions of others across the country, one that we had tried to move but couldn’t, not that it would have made much difference since it was much narrower than the door. Stefan crouched down next to it. If the door gave way, it might block Quinn’s view—for a moment.