Murder My Past

by Delia C. Pitts

  “And you’re the sheriff with the key, I hope?” I fastened my thumbs in my beltloops like a Texas lawman.

  She grinned. “Nah, there’s no keys for those cabinets. Lost ’em when we moved offices a year ago. Anybody wants one of them old things, they can have ’em.”

  I ambled to the nearest glass case and toggled the latch. When the door swung open the guns clicked against each other. Every weapon was bright and dust-free. “Nice collection,” I said.

  Stretching my fingers over the pistols, I felt a static spark leap from the steel to my skin. Gerry Keith had access to these guns. Would he use a weapon like this on Annie? I needed the police ballistics reports to confirm if slugs from one of these guns matched the murder weapon. I closed the door and returned to the admin assistant’s desk.

  Still no sign of Chairman Gerry. I had a hunch and I played it: “I’ll visit the men’s room while I wait.”

  Johnetta’s smile said I was the brightest boy in class. “It’s next to the elevator. Can’t miss it.”

  The washroom offered a place to compose myself and assess the damage. Deep purple tiles and burnished copper surfaces contrasted with the glassy gleam of the rest of the building. I splashed water on my face. Cooling Reva’s scratches would give me time to arrange my story before confronting Keith.

  According to the mirror, I looked okay. Maybe wrapping up this little case, despite the violence, had smoothed the tension I’d been carrying for days. The harried hyper-alertness pinching my expression in the days since Annie’s death was eased. I patted my cheeks with paper towels. Even the charcoal at the inner corners of my eye sockets looked brighter. I’d shaved the post-Annie stubble and shiny cheeks knocked a few years off my age. Thanks to Reva Nakamura’s three nasty marks, I looked even younger. Like a punk after a schoolyard rumble.

  “Rook, is that you? Hombre, you look like you just went fifteen rounds with Ali in Kinshasa.”

  Voice booming, Gerry Keith stepped from a stall. He stood beside me to rinse his hands in a copper basin. A navy sports jacket over black jeans gave him a formal air that the orange and green zig-zags of his tie were meant to counter. He loosened the knot to a rebellious drape and smoothed the flaps over his stomach. I grimaced, but said nothing.

  He smirked at the mirror, red goatee bobbing, his eyes grabbing for mine. I waited for him to deliver the quip he had ready. “I trust the other guy looks worse than you.”

  His cackle prompted me. Did the whole campus know about the fight in Dean Pindar’s office already? I wouldn’t add details to the juicy story. “It was a pretty one-sided fight. But I made out alright. Thanks for your concern, Gerry.”

  Smirks bloomed into sneers. “Hey, de nada, pal. Us guys have to stick together. Especially when women get the upper hand. Speaking of which, I understand it was Reva Nakamura who stormed into Galaxy Pindar’s office.”

  Maybe Annie had told him my mother was Mexican-American. Or maybe he’d figured it out from studying my face. Either way, Keith was slathering his version of south-of-the-border culture with a thick trowel.

  Fishing for details, he clapped a damp palm on my shoulder. “Can you beat that? Nothing like an academic cat fight, is there? Two ladies, pregnant with the burden of degrees and intellect, mixing it up in public. Knives, nails, teeth. Reminds me of Henry Kissinger’s old line about Ivory Tower battles: the hostilities are so fierce because the stakes are so low. I mean, come on! What sane woman would go to war over a beardless wimp like Jimmy Nakamura?”

  Keith’s sarcasm didn’t deserve answers. I nodded, balled up the paper towel, and tossed it.

  He didn’t care if I spoke or not, and continued his nasty rant as though I’d agreed with him. “Right? I mean, have you met the man? And I use the term loosely. A lavender peacock on toothpicks, that’s Jimmy Nakamura for you. Maricón.” Keith shook his head in mock horror. I thought James Nakamura looked decent enough; his appeal to female taste wasn’t something I’d try to measure.

  My silence gave Keith more room to crow. “Say, why don’t you come with me to the faculty reception? I bet Jimmy’s there right now, sucking up to some vice president, weaseling more money for his department. I want to see the look on Jimmy’s face when he hears Reva attacked Galaxy. It’ll be epic, hombre!”

  Keith’s eyes danced with glee. Next, he’d rub his hands like a ghoul in a silent movie. He raked fingers through his red curls to fluff them and finished the preening with a pass over his stylish whiskers. I frowned at the invitation and pivoted for the door.

  Keith took the challenge, as I’d intended. He doubled down on his offer. “Hey, come on, dude. You’re going to catch a cab on the avenue anyway, right? The faculty club is just across the quad. You’ve got to pass it to get off campus, so why not stop in? You’ll be my guest. Come on, Rook. Take the sting out of your war wounds with a drink or two, why don’t you?”

  As Keith babbled on, the mellowness of my post-skirmish mood circled the drain. Anger I’d banked for eight days churned in my gut again. I’d never hit Reva Nakamura, of course. But the pent-up energy stoked by that one-sided contest burned in my fingertips. Pounding on chatty Gerry Keith might be a nice substitute.

  I clinched my fists as I leaned on the bathroom door. Keith pursued me down the corridor, talking ninety miles an hour. My silence didn’t daunt him. Some kind of lousy anthropologist he was. Ignorant was too gentle a word for this galloping oaf. With observational skills this dim, how’d he escape scalping by some fed-up local during his field research?

  An hour ago, I’d told Galaxy Pindar I was forging my anger into something more productive. I hadn’t wanted to scare her by using the term vengeance. But that’s what I was after. Time to put words into action. I dialed the rage to a low simmer. A drink or two on Alexander University’s tab was the ticket. I wanted more time with a gabby Keith. His loose talk might give me new clues into his relationship with Annie. Something he dropped might help me solve her murder. This was my opportunity to dig.

  We’d reached the elevators. “Thanks for the invite, Gerry. I’ll stop in for a minute, see how you academic types party.”

  Keith’s grin broadened. He clinched his hand over my shoulder, like he’d greet a tribal elder. No doubt, he could blurt “Take me to your leader” in seventeen languages.

  “Awesome! But don’t get your hopes up too high, mi amigo. Faculty receptions tend to be pretty sedate affairs. Lots of posturing, not enough booze. Plenty of politics, zero authenticity.”

  Comfortable on his home turf, Gerry let his jerk flag fly free: “And despite all those affirmative action hires, bro, still too many sausages, too few ladies. No hot mamitas, I’m afraid.” He rolled his eyes.

  I shrugged to remove his hand, then poked the down button. “Warning noted.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-One

  From the elevator, we walked through the glass doors and along a ramp onto the deserted quadrangle in front of the Barstall Building. The sun had dipped, stealing the Indian Summer and all those pretty girls who’d basked in its warmth. The last jeweled bars of light slid between the Manhattan towers, throwing stains of purple and ruby across the brooding trees.

  Keith matched his loping strides to my slower pace. We cut the corner of a grassy triangle to meet a pebbled path. I wanted him talking. It didn’t take much to get him babbling about his own accomplishments. A nudge was all.

  “So, tell me about your new book, Gerry. I see it’s up for some kind of prize?”

  “Yes, the Blackistone Prize. That’s the biggest scholarly award at Alexander. Categories alternate, so one year they give the prize for teaching, the next year for academic achievement in original research. Then for teaching again. This year it’s for scholarship and I’m one of three finalists. Lovebirds Jimmy Nakamura and Galaxy Pindar are the other two. Can you believe that?”

  I believed it, but Keith expected compliance, so I s
hrugged. “Yeah, pretty weird.”

  “Rigged, if you ask me. Mighty suspicious. How are they even in the running with me? Jimmy’s research was in a microfilm repository, scrolling through reels of old newspapers, for God’s sake.”

  Keith pursed his lips in disdain at this armchair investigation. In his telling, the dean had done even less.

  “Sure, Galaxy went to West Africa a few times. But she did most of her work in the British Public Records Office and the Foreign Office archives in London. The dried-up old biddies in those libraries lugged the crumbling volumes to her, and Galaxy leafed through them wearing white gloves to prevent shredding the pages. How’s that real research, I ask you?”

  Keith’s ears reddened. Pink blotches painted his cheeks, and his throat quivered with disdain. If apoplexy blew off his head, there wasn’t a campus cop in sight to catch it.

  Nakamura and Pindar could defend their academic credentials without my help. I wanted Keith to expand on his own field work. “Your research with the maids in Anniesha’s company was different? How so?”

  My question calmed him; the high color drained from his face, replaced by a sallow gloss. Lecturing was his favorite mode. With me as round-eyed student, he was happy to educate.

  “You remember Sarah Anastos? Sally, right?” He wriggled his eyebrows until I nodded. “Cute kid. My lead research assistant. Between us, we interviewed almost three hundred individual workers in Miami. We spent thousands of hours in their homes, interviewing not only the maids themselves, but their families, husbands, neighbors, bosses, and customers. Using all that first-hand data, we built a 360-degree picture of the lives of those maids.”

  I scrunched my nose as if I could smell the stench of the ghetto rising around us. “Must’ve been tough.”

  “Not just tough, amigo. The work was tedious, grinding, boring. And sometimes what I did was dangerous. Those neighborhoods weren’t the safest in Miami, you know. A slum is a slum, even with palm trees lining its streets. And those gals hung out with a pretty unsavory bunch of lowlife hombres.”

  I clutched my fists at my sides to contain the weight of undelivered punches. Blows straining to let loose on Gerry’s smug mouth. His scorn for Annie’s employees was breathtaking. But I let him go on. He was giving me information I could use.

  “With a few exceptions, Anniesha’s girls were on the up-and-up. Not smart, but decent and diligent. She screened all the girls and hired the best she could. But a lot of the people her girls hung out with were pretty dicey. You know, running drugs up from Latin America and the Caribbean. Money laundering, child trafficking, all the shit you read about. Those people were not the types you want to rub elbows with, if you value your life.”

  As the tired clichés dripped, he dropped his jaw in a mask of horror. Then he winked. Had Keith really spent time in Miami? Acid rising in my mouth threatened to choke me. I was one of “those people.” I clamped my teeth shut and let him talk.

  “But I had to do it, to get the research done. And to get it done right. That’s the kind of risk Sally and I took every day. And that’s why I’m so damn proud of what I accomplished in Miami.” A few more boasts and Gerry Keith would inflate like a Goodyear blimp. I pictured him floating over the ivy-draped gothic towers, a dark blob merging with the dusky sky.

  To stop him from launching into outer space, I tossed a softball. “Was your book, The Dirty and the Clean, based only on your research in Anniesha’s company?”

  “Mostly, but we used another cleaning company in upstate New York as a control group. An outfit run by that blonde woman, Pearl Byrne. Frowzy and dim. Classic washer-woman. You know the type: thick waist, potato-sack breasts, red hands, crow’s feet. Did you meet her at the conference?” His mouth puckered in disdain as he picked at lint on his lapel.

  I nodded. He plunged on.

  “We did lots of interviews there too. Maybe almost two hundred. I forget exactly how many girls we interviewed up there. Plenty. Different kind of crowd from those Miami gals, I’ll tell you. But that bitch Pearl Byrne is one first-class liar. If she tells you something, you can bet the farm it didn’t happen the way she claims.”

  The complaint against Pearl came out of the blue. What did the “washer-woman” do to him? Like the others, she was capable of protecting herself against Keith’s attacks on her professional credibility. I let his smear slide.

  I wanted to push him further on the academic award. There’s nothing a jackass enjoys more than the sound of his own braying. So, I slathered compliments over his tender ego. “You got that Blackistone Prize locked down, right?”

  He grinned. “If they evaluate it with intellectual objectivity, I’ll win. No doubt in my mind.”

  “Nice load of cash. What is it? Five, ten thousand?” I knew the right answer, just like I knew Keith would enjoy correcting me.

  “Oh no, it’s fifty thousand.” As he named the sum, Keith worked his fingers around his beard to erase the smile.

  He wanted me to be impressed, so I whistled. “Do they give runner-up awards?”

  Keith snorted. “No, dude. This isn’t flag football where every kid gets a participation trophy. The winner of the Blackistone Prize gets the whole award – fifty thousand dollars. The others get nada. Zip.” He popped his lips in juicy satisfaction.

  “Will you share the winner’s purse with co-researchers. Like Sally Anastos?” I knew the answer to this one too, but playing dumb worked like a charm.

  The great man used simple words to explain the mysteries of academe to me. “Look, here’s how it works: I’m the sole author of the book nominated for the Blackistone. The committee deliberates over the three nominees. If the committee selects my book, I win. And I’m the one who gets the prize money. Every peso.”

  I bugged my eyes and nodded, open-mouthed. “That’s a boatload of cash, Gerry. Plus, lots of publicity and prestige.” And Sally Anastos cut out of the whole thing. Did his adoring groupie know how Keith planned to horde the prize and the glory after his big victory?

  “Yeah, this will be a definite boost for my academic career. Not that I’m slacking or sliding, obviously. But this recognition will put me at the front ranks of the field. I can write my own ticket from here on out, maybe even score an endowed chair out of it.”

  “What’s that?” I had no idea a chair could be endowed with anything other than upholstery, so my ignorance was real.

  “The university development office is talking with an extremely wealthy donor right now. I mean, loaded. Some Richie Richenstein with lots of money, tons of white privilege guilt, and an ego as big as Trump Tower. If they get that fat cat to agree to it, the anthropology department will establish a special faculty position for me with Richie’s name on it.”

  Hard to tell whose condescension was bigger, the moneybag donor’s or the self-satisfied jerk lecturing me.

  Keith was on a roll, no prompt needed. “The donation is invested and the earned interest from it pays the salary of the professor who’s appointed to the named chair. That endowment also pays all the professor’s expenses for research, travel, support staff, equipment, graduate assistants, all that razzmatazz.”

  “An endowed chair is a pretty big deal, hunh?”

  “Well, if a Tyrannosaurus Rex is a ‘pretty big’ reptile. Then yeah, an endowed chair is a ‘pretty big’ fucking deal. If I win the Blackistone Prize, I nail down the endowment too.”

  “Sounds like you got the prize sewn up, Gerry. Too bad Anniesha isn’t here to celebrate your victory with you.” Ice sharpened my words into stinging lances.

  Purple rushed across his face. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that too. She was a great informant, a dear friend to me.”

  He blinked twice to soften his comments, make them more personal. He tried to squeak sounds an actual human being might utter. If he’d had a heart. Or a soul. The croaking noise didn’t even come close. “She brought me into t
he Miami scene, showed me around, made me feel at home. Anniesha was a great gal. A wonderful gal.”

  I kicked a stone, watching dust spurt as it skipped across the path. More evidence about Keith’s relationship with Annie might help the investigation. But it wouldn’t help me. I touched a hand to my waist, just above the belt on the left side. A slow pulse, not quite pain, jumped in time with my heart. After twenty seconds the throbbing slowed, another ten and it disappeared. I lowered my hand and rubbed the damp palm against my slacks.

  I stared at Keith. A shallow crease twitched above his nose. He realized I had a position in the equation too. Even if I was only a ghost from Annie’s past. He eyed me, imitating empathy with a lizard’s slow blink.

  “Hey, look, amigo. I meant to ask you, how’re you dealing with her death?” He licked at the corners of his mouth. “I know you were just the ex. Nothing current. But still, it could have hit you hard too. Even as hard as it shocked those of us close to her. Losing her like that.”

  His tongue gummed to the top of his mouth. He hocked saliva, the sound coating his words with phony compassion. This was the right thing to say, he knew from books. Keith didn’t care how I felt. He lowered his gaze for a moment because he’d seen the gesture in a movie once. It was almost human.

  My response was correct too. “It was a blow. But I’m doing alright, Gerry. Thanks for asking.”

  We both passed the manners test, our status as hypocrites intact.

  He jogged both shoulders. Wind tangled the mantle of leaves above us, filling the silence with brittle rustling. The oak trees smelled parched, as if sand had replaced sap in their veins.

  After a minute, Keith broke the hush. “You in mourning? For Anniesha?” He gestured at my black shirt, jacket, and trousers.