The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s an emotional roller coaster. The only thing even remotely like it is doing live theater. There are days when you feel you’re a prince among men, and the world is your realm. But there are other days when you leave the classroom, and it’s as if you had uncorked the very cask of despair.”

  I said nothing, waiting for him to go on. He wanted to.

  “My wife Anita and I lived near the campus in those days. It was a cozy ménage, with our cats. Our students were our kids—we never had any of our own. But that was long before Anita got wanderlust. An apt word, I’ve often thought. She left. Sex was part of it.” He paused to light the cigar and blew a wisp of smoke toward the shelves of books. “The scholar’s life is a solitary one, don’t you think? Right from the monastic days.”

  He seemed to want to draw me in, to make me party to old sorrows, perhaps, but I wanted to get the talk back to Jerry Corbin.

  “When Corbin was your student,” I said, “what was the relationship like?”

  He frowned. “What are you looking for, Mr. Rasmussen?”

  “I don’t know. Memories?”

  He studied me a moment from under tented eyebrows, then he opened his desk drawer and took out a photograph. He studied that a moment, too, then handed it over. It was a group photo. I wondered why it wasn’t on the wall with the others. In it stood a much younger Alfred Westrake flanked by a pretty woman and a tall young man. All three of them were grinning. The young man, without the beef he had now, was Jerry Corbin. He wore his hair in a flattop that gave him the clean-cut looks of a young Johnny Unitas. He stood to the left and slightly behind Westrake and was holding the veed fingers of his right hand above the professor’s head. Westrake either was blithely unaware or was enjoying the foolery.

  I handed the picture back. “Mister Late-Night Comedy.”

  “A fellow of infinite jest? I thought so for a time. Hoped so.” Westrake was staring at the photo, as if teleporting himself back in time to when it had been taken. Thirty seconds went by. A minute.

  “But?” I prompted him.

  He glanced up. “Do you know what was meant in Shakespeare’s day when a man was horned with that sign?”

  I hadn’t, until just that moment. My face must have signaled my recognition. He said, “Jerry Corbin was also coming to see my wife—that’s her there—though I honestly don’t believe any of us knew it at first. Eventually, only I was in the dark.”

  What did you say to a man who’s just labeled himself a cuckold? I kept quiet: the way Curtis Smyth had the other night in the boiler room when he had stopped himself from telling me his suspicions. I had an idea now of what Smyth had been about to say.

  “I’m a decade older than Anita,” Westrake went on. “I met her when I first took the job here. She was a popular teacher, new on the humanities faculty, too. Corbin represented what, youth?”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I saw them together, coming out of a thicket along the river. They were laughing. They stopped and he picked a willow leaf out of her hair … and I knew.”

  “Did you confront them?”

  “I never did.” Westrake knit his brows and looked down. He brushed a few shreds of spiral notebook paper and tobacco flakes off the desk. “Maybe I felt I had made Anita’s life miserable in other ways. You see, I…” He glanced at the books lining the room and sighed. “Like many a person who’s good with words, I’m remarkably inept when it comes to voicing my pain. I felt betrayed, angry, hurt, even—in an odd way—lustful. In spite of what students sometimes perceive as a misbegotten old fool, I’m quite human. Are you in a relationship, Mr. Rasmussen?”

  “Not anymore.”

  He smoked philosophically a moment. “What remains is an actor’s trunk of missed cues, stage anger, bad lines.”

  “Where’s your former wife now?”

  “Wisconsin. She’s a grandmother. She laughed over this photograph. She said that of all the students she’d known, Jerry Corbin meant the most, and the least. At any rate, I didn’t act on my passion. Not then—not now. If that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I guess I was.”

  “Then you have your answer. All of that was ages ago.”

  We looked at each other without our eyes quite meeting. He said, “Good night, Mr. Rasmussen.”

  I stood. All the books, the plays, the high culture, and where had it gotten him? He had checkered himself into a lonely corner. I closed the door as I left.

  15

  “HOWDY, MR. R.,” Gripaldi said when he opened the hotel suite door at 7:40. He was slightly out of breath. “Come in. Mr. C. is with the press.”

  My hackles went up; I had expected to meet with Corbin alone. “What’s wrong?”

  “Not a thing. They love him.”

  Gripaldi had been using a pair of push-up stands when I arrived. Under his yellow tank top, his pectorals glowed. I followed him through the alcove into the main room, where Jerry Corbin stood with half a dozen people I didn’t know. There was champagne. Gripaldi punched my arm and went on down the short corridor to one of the other rooms.

  “So as a last resort,” Corbin was saying, “desperate, the guy goes to this swami, with the headgear and all, and the swami bows and says, ‘You’ve got to cut out some things.’” Corbin was into it, scrunching his body down, doing the swami voice, saying, “‘No liquor, no cigarettes, no greasy foods.’ And the guy goes, ‘It’s that simple?’ ‘Yes, that simple,’ the swami says. The guy goes, ‘Well, you’re the doc … booze and butts, sayonara. But what about women? I mean, you didn’t say nothing about giving up women.’ And the swami bows and says—”

  Corbin saw me and stopped. He straightened. He looked at his guests and held up a finger, signaling that he’d be right back. He came over, asking his question with a jab of his chin.

  “Hold the punch line and keep them waiting,” I said. “You sly old showman, you.”

  He didn’t smile. “What’s up?”

  I wondered if Justin Ross had remembered to tell him I was coming. “We gonna talk?” I said.

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come back in a half hour. I’ve got these reporters.”

  “You don’t want them digging up what I’ve got to tell you,” I said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “An old story about you and Anita Westrake—for openers.”

  He frowned. He started to say something, then didn’t. He took me by the shoulder. “Wait in the next room.”

  Two minutes later, he joined me in the room set up with the phones and fax machine. “Where’d you hear that?” he demanded.

  “From the guy you put the horns on,” I said. I told him what I had learned.

  His mouth made a tight line, angry maybe, or just resistant. “I don’t like the idea of you rooting around in my past. I hired you to protect me.”

  “It’s useful to know where potential danger lies,” I said. “My experience is it tends to come from behind us. It’s possible Lowell is your boneyard.”

  “Where I’ve got the bodies buried? Bullshit!” He scowled and went into the bedroom. It was as if, having spent his time in that most ephemeral of media, he had lost all sense of the long chains of cause and effect which linked the present with the past. In television, several seasons represented longevity. He appeared in the bedroom doorway with his shirt unbuttoned. “Did Westrake tell you anything else?”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He watched me closely a moment, then shook his head. His intensity softened and he called me into the room while he changed into a fresh shirt that someone had laid out for him on the king-size bed. “Yeah, Anita and I had a thing,” he said. “It didn’t last long, barely a semester. But it wasn’t just adolescent erotica.” His right hand went up. “She was the most interesting woman I’d known.”

  With men it was always possible to cloak actions in the safety screen of goatish lust. I respected
that he didn’t, even though, for a student, bedding a popular professor had to have been a coup.

  “The way it was,” Corbin said, “I had become tight with Westrake. I liked listening to him. He knew about all kinds of things that weren’t part of my reality. Literature, the theater. He was a pretty hip guy. Hell, he probably still is. Justin says he wears a ponytail. Anyway, I used to go over their place sometimes. Anita would be there, and she’d fix tea. But it wasn’t the routine I’d always experienced—you know, leave the menfolks alone to talk. She was an equal. She was a lot younger than him. Nice looking, and nice, too. Bright. The attraction was probably growing, though I wasn’t aware of it at first. One night I ran into her in the library. It was the first time we’d been alone together. We … connected. It was an early spring night, with forsythia and all.”

  “And gypsy violins?” I said.

  “Ah, Jesus, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You really think it relates?”

  “It might.” I sat on the foot of the bed.

  He began to pace slowly. “I walked her home, and she invited me in. It happens Westrake was away, giving a paper at a conference. I stayed the night—talking; maybe we read some poetry. At dawn we went to bed.”

  Corbin’s voice had softened with the telling, as though the spring night were upon us now. He roamed the hotel bedroom. “We got together a lot after that, in my room, along the river. Once in her office, on the desk! God, she was hungry for it, all of it. I was just … hungry. It was one of those intense, frantic, lovely affairs.” He stopped moving. “‘Lovely.’ Sonofabitch! Is that stupid?”

  “What ended it?”

  “Spring ended. I don’t know. I met someone … someone else.”

  Corbin went to the mini-bar, opened it with a key, and squinted at the selection before drawing out two dwarf cans of beer. He held one up. I shook my head. He popped open a can and took a pull that must nearly have drained it.

  “What about Westrake?” I said. “Wasn’t he a friend?”

  “You think he’s the one sending the notes?”

  “Do you?”

  “Justin thinks it could be.”

  “Is Justin aware of what you’ve just been saying?”

  Corbin thought about this and shook his head. “He’d have mentioned it. We bumped Westrake’s Shakespeare. Justin thinks envy is motive enough. Simmering frustration.”

  “Sometimes is,” I said. “Though it seems kind of thin after all this time.”

  “So where are we?”

  I rose and went over to the big window, looking past our reflections at the night. The mill buildings on the other side of the river glimmered with lights. What once had been sweatshops were now costly condominiums. I wondered who was in them and what they might be doing. I wasn’t impervious to what Corbin had been telling me. In a way I envied him the emotional risks he had taken, the passion he had felt. It made his life bigger than mine in a sense, and diminished my own, and it reminded me in a way I didn’t need to be reminded that Lauren was really gone.

  “The first night I met Justin,” I said, turning, “he told me he’s a man who gets things done. I’d guess most of the time he does, but he’s been schooled by television. His method is full frontal attack.”

  “Doesn’t always appreciate the situational subtleties, huh?” Corbin said.

  “Something like that.”

  “And are there subtleties here, Rasmussen?”

  “I think so.”

  “What are they?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Surprise—then anger—altered his features. “What?”

  “Come on, Jerry. The love story is touching, but you’re wasting your money if you aren’t going to give me the rest.”

  “Shit! Is this the kind of help I’m buying? Is this how you run an investigation? Well you can walk right the hell out that door!”

  I said nothing. I kept looking at him. I didn’t move.

  He went over, grabbed the second beer, and punched it open. He drank. He glared at me and drank some more. He said, “Westrake wanted more than a doting student.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe my affair with Anita was a way of telling him where my inclinations lay.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said.

  “It’s why I put the horns on him in that photograph.”

  “Are you saying—?”

  “He liked guys and chicks. Okay, Mr. Detective? He came on to me. Satisfied?”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “And forget the outburst. I want you to stay with it. You came recommended.”

  I remembered Justin Ross saying that the night he’d hired me, but he had never explained. Before I could ask now, the fax machine in the adjoining room beeped and came to life. Corbin and I both watched a sheet of paper curl slowly into the reception tray. He picked it up. As he read it, several emotions came and went on his face.

  “Another one?” I said.

  He handed the sheet to me and sank into a chair.

  The fax had been sent from Los Angeles, from the Starr and Brown Agency, at 5:12 West Coast time.

  Jer: Just talked to Steelsmith over at network. The shit-heel won’t come right out and say it, but they’re probably not going to pick up your option after this season. Man, I am truly sorry. But listen: my contact at VARIETY says tomorrow they’re running a piece on your new show that will up the salivation factor considerably! Bad news is you’re out. Good news is you’re in.

  The message was signed with a little star; agent Starr, I assumed. Corbin said listlessly, “I wish it just said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’”

  I handed back the fax.

  “I guess this puts paid to our discussion about why I keep you around, pal,” he said. “Now I’ve gotta stay healthy, and out of the bad-news column. The good news is … you’re in.”

  “Only if I’m free to do what I have to. Ask my questions where I ask them.”

  He balled the message and hit the can with it. He pushed to his feet slowly. “What the hell do people expect? They see us on TV, smiling and full of wit, flirting with starlets, and they think that’s reality squeezed into that box, that hour. They’re sitting in their living room in bunny slippers with a glass of milk, thinking my life is bigger than theirs, for God’s sake, that I’m having a ball. It’s a crock. Fairy dust and mirrors. It’s the scared little man behind the scrim, talking through the megaphone, trying to convince everyone he’s the Wizard of Oz. We’re ego freaks. We’re surrounded by people who kiss our ass but hate us. We drink too much. Our personal relationships are crash sites. My third wife is holding me up for a shitload of money, and I’m paying lawyers and accountants a shitload to keep it from happening. And what’s the payoff? We get laid a little more than the average person. And we make a lot of money. You got any idea how much I’ve made since we started this conversation?”

  The question was rhetorical; he was still talking. “What nobody sees is it’s all crap. That fax hurts. I’m the same guy now I always was. I’m no different than anyone.”

  “Your valet still puts your pants on one leg at a time,” I said.

  His reaction teetered on anger, then tipped over to a cheerless smile. “I envy you, man,” he said. “How much are you worth?”

  “Since we started this conversation?”

  “You’re the first person in long memory who’s told me to my face to go take a flying leap. That’s worth something.” He sighed. “Yeah, ask your questions. Do what you’re hired to do. I need you, man.”

  On the subject of need, I told him about his fan, Curtis Smyth, over at the boiler room at the university. I asked if we could get him a complimentary ticket to the show.

  “I’ll take care of it myself,” Corbin said.

  As he put on his suit coat, there was a knock at the door. Gripaldi called in that the limo was there to bring Jerry to the evening rehearsal. “Want to take a ride?” he asked me.

  I told him I’d catch him there
.

  I was surprised to see some of the reporters still in the outer room. I guessed the champagne hadn’t run out yet. Corbin joined them like he had been gone only a moment. His smile was cunning.

  “So the guy says to the swami, he goes, ‘You haven’t said anything about women. Have I gotta give women up, too?’ And the swami says—”

  I closed the door behind me.

  16

  ON THURSDAY MORNING I called police headquarters and asked for Ed St. Onge, but was told he had taken a sick day. “That’s rare,” I said.

  The desk officer laughed. “The sonofabitch has got over a hundred accrued.”

  I made one stop, then drove over to Centralville.

  Pronounced “Centerville,” it’s a section of the city where French-Canadian families staked out turf in the days when the looms and shuttles were going full tilt and the mills were glad for cheap, honest labor. More than a few families had stayed. Vinyl siding in pastel shades was popular on the close-packed homes, along with side-yard shrines of recycled bathtubs set on end in the ground, sheltering statues of Christ and the Blessed Virgin. And now, with city elections looming near, lawns were pegged with campaign signs. Possessed of neither shrine, sign, nor siding, the St. Onge residence made do as a pale gray asphalt-sided ranch with a detached garage. I parked in front.

  I was on my way up the cement walk when I heard sounds coming from the garage. The door was up and St. Onge was inside, his back to me. He was puttering among a clutter of garden tools and cardboard boxes.

  “Is it catching?” I said from far enough away not to startle him. He turned slowly, squinting out into the rectangle of daylight at my back. He didn’t go for a gun. I went in. “What’re you looking for?”

  The gray cardigan he wore over a T-shirt exaggerated his shrug. “Purpose,” he said. “Inspiration. Some reason to keep on doing it.” He frowned and gazed about. “A leaf rake. I know I put it out here last spring. What are you doing?”