Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  “You are home early,” said Sundeep when I stopped in the office of the Gray Knight to pick up my laundry. Because their family remained in India, my landlords tended to know when their long-term residents were home. They told me I was their favorite, perhaps because I was the only one whose job didn’t pay in cash.

  “One of your shirts had a stain,” said Jaysaree, Sundeep’s wife, whose thick accent had not dissipated in her decade in America.

  “Do not worry. I will find a way to remove it.”

  Jaysaree set down the laundry basket to hug me. She did this when she hadn’t seen me in a few hours. Sundeep draped his long, thin arm across my back, the way tennis players sometimes do while shaking hands after a match. Before dreams of a more stable life led him and his wife to the doorstep of a seedy motel in North Carolina, he played tennis professionally throughout the 90s. He had lost to all the greats.

  “Sundeep said a girl named Carly called you while he was cleaning.” Jaysaree said this with a teasing lilt. “Does she like Malai Kofta, Tate? We are having Malai Kofta tomorrow night.”

  I thanked Jaysaree for the clean clothes and made my way to the door.

  “I will get that stain out,” she shouted as the door closed.

  Edward greeted me at the door, looking like he wanted to go outside. I gave him the opportunity. He never took it. He thought it looked like a lot of trouble out there. He was a smart cat.

  I pushed play on the answering machine. Carly cleared her throat. “Tate? I got your e-mail. I’m kind of confused. What note are you talking about? I was planning to work on a short story later, but maybe another time, okay?”

  I took the note out of my pocket. The large black letters became smudges in my blind spots. I held it close enough to smell what I had thought to be her perfume, a scent I now recognized as the bittersweet

  ink of a felt-tip pen. Maybe she had changed her mind.

  I opened my laptop and searched online for Simkins’s obituary. In terms of evidence, those bullet holes were the best thing I had going for me. It might be useful to know when exclusive access to them would belong to worms. Grayford’s only paper, The Chanticleer, had posted the notice yesterday afternoon.

  “Randall ‘Scoot’ Simkins, cherished Dean of Collegiate Studies at Parshall College, passed away Monday. He was fifty-five. Simkins is survived by the faculty and students of the school, who will miss his wisdom and leadership. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in the dean’s name to Parshall College’s Annual Fund.”

  I called the number for the person in charge of obituaries.

  “This is Hoopel,” said a boy barely old enough to deliver papers, let alone write for one.

  “I’m calling to report an error in one of your obituaries.”

  Hoopel sighed. “Which one?”

  I told him. Hoopel put me on hold. When he returned, he sounded pleased to tell me there was no error.

  “You didn’t ask what the error was.”

  “I didn’t write it,” he said.

  “Then put your father on, or whoever did your work for you.”

  “We don’t write most of them. People send them to us as they want them to appear.” Suppressed anger leaked from the corners of his words, a sound familiar to anyone who has sat in on a faculty meeting at a mediocre college. It made me like Hoopel a little more, which wasn’t much.

  “I’d like to know who sent this one in. They gave you some

  bad information.”

  “I’ll look it up and get back to you. What’s the error?”

  “First off, it says he passed away. That phrase doesn’t generally encompass murder, does it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, Hoopel. Reporters are supposed to be

  good listeners.”

  “I’m not a reporter.” The disgust with which he said this seemed general and not necessarily aimed at me.

  “It also says he was cherished, another error. And I doubt he’ll be missed, but I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

  “Wait a second. We haven’t covered any murders this week. Who is this?”

  “I’m a concerned member of the faculty. There’s also an omission. It should say there’s a memorial service and public viewing tomorrow afternoon.” I gave Hoopel the details as I thought of them, not sure if their publication on The Chanticleer’s website would make them come true. “When can you get that correction up?”

  He was typing. After a minute, he said, “It’s up now. Sorry, but I can’t put anything about a murder until there’s a story to corroborate it.”

  “Maybe you ought to go find news instead of waiting for people to e-mail it to you.”

  Hoopel gave me what for. I gave him a dial tone. I stared one more time at the note Carly claimed not to have written. I kept staring until I realized there was no one in the room to convince I was reading it. “So much effort for such tiny lies,” Mollie used to say whenever I pretended I could see. Considering the falsehoods found in police reports and the local paper, maybe I should trade up to bigger lies.

  I switched off the lights and closed my eyes. My blind spots lingered behind my eyelids, tiny shapes waltzing to and fro like a broken kaleidoscope. Only in occasional dreams do they go away. Within minutes, I fell into the recurring dream in which I’m driving a car. It’s my favorite next to the one where I read a book without earphones, and the one where I return the smile of a beautiful woman from across a bar. There was a phone inside the car, but I couldn’t find it. The voice that answered was mine, but not mine.

  “Tate, are you there? Pick up, man. I need you.”

  I turned the light on and reached for the phone.

  “Londell. What’s going on?”

  He was out of breath. “Thank God you’re there. I need bodies, man.”

  “What kind of bodies?”

  “I’m at the club. It’s open mic night. I need five people at my table or they won’t let me go onstage. Can you make it? I’ll pay your cover.”

  Gazing at the note on my nightstand, the large words completely disappeared. I said I had no plans.

  Chapter 7

  WALKING AT NIGHT, traffic lights are visible against the dark sky. I can cross streets when nothing is coming rather than waiting for cars to stop. With its awning of twinkling lights, I could spot Oral Tradition’s without counting doors. In six years, the space had used the same name as a gay dance club, a cigar store, and now a coffee shop and bar with a stage no larger than a table for four. Last year the acerbic British judge from the televised talent show, or someone who looked like him, stopped in for a drink, delaying the café’s inevitable demise; ditto the disappointment of Grayford’s amateur talent pool.

  The heavyset hostess ran a finger down an open book. “Looks like your cover’s been covered.” She laughed at the joke she thought she had made.

  “At which table will I find my party?”

  The hostess looked behind her at the darkened room. “I guess you can look around.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  I stood in the back for a few minutes, waiting to be seen. When no one said my name, I made my way to the bar. Most bars are built against walls, making them easy to find. The level of crowd noise suggested the room was less than a third full. A dim spotlight illuminated the wall behind the stage. I wasn’t sure if the show had started. I asked a bartender in a vest what he had on tap, and he gestured to the wall behind him.

  “Which would you recommend?”

  “I don’t drink beer,” he said.

  “You’re not very useful, are you?”

  The fellow in the vest found a customer who didn’t ask so many questions.

  Someone took the stage to a smattering of applause. A second bartender seemed friendlier than the first. It might have been her cocktail dress. I find them very friendly. Not wanting to play the same game, I forewent the beer and ordered an Americano.

  I looked at the ceiling while the bartender’s bac
k was turned. She had lovely shoulders, a dark tattoo on the left one. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of ways to get a good look at a girl’s face. Some of them you regret.

  A guitar started playing. I turned in my stool toward the stage. A female’s voice filled the room like shower steam. She sounded like a brunette with chin-length hair she didn’t like to wash every day. The lyrics referenced a beach and a hotel, looking for someone who was gone, gone. I could hear dark brown eyes and a smile just a little bit naughty. I’m not always right about such things. I don’t always care.

  “The girl singing,” I said to my barista-bartender. “Who does she remind you of?”

  She studied the stage. “Sort of a Mexican Garbo.”

  The song ended. Everyone clapped. The heavyset hostess went, “Woo.”

  The barista-bartender set both elbows on the bar. “People say I look like Kim Novak.”

  Staring into her eyes, I had a view of her smiling mouth and her breasts pushed together. I had no complaints with the view, but there’s something more appealing about what you can’t see. “Do me a favor, Kim.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Find out what Mexican Garbo’s drinking and send her another on my tab.”

  The barista-bartender blew a lukewarm breath into my face and walked to the other end of the bar. I sipped my watery Americano with tasting notes of sneaker and hard water. In my experience, cafés that are also bars aren’t much of either.

  “I’m going to read from a one-act play in progress,” the next amateur said nervously into the microphone. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a screenplay.”

  The familiar voice was high around the edges and deep in the middle. Voices you’ve never heard before can seem familiar, not unlike the faces of total strangers.

  “Thanks for the martini,” said another, even more familiar voice behind me.

  “Filthy and dry, if I remembered correctly.”

  Mollie DuFrange sat on the stool to my right. “You always had a great memory.”

  Perhaps the barista-bartender, from a few feet away, could see the difference between Mexican and half-Asian. As for Garbo, I would have gone with Joan Fontaine. I was right about the eyes and hair. The smile knew how to be naughty when it wanted to be.

  “My memory must be slipping,” I said. “I don’t remember you ever singing.”

  “I’ve been taking lessons. Maybe I’ll busk for quarters since poetry doesn’t seem to have a place in the new curriculum.”

  “Is Dean Bibb in attendance?” I glanced over Mollie’s shoulder at the crowd, giving me a better view of Mollie herself. She had on a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, the top couple of buttons undone. Red neon from behind the bar twinkled in the leather pants I hadn’t seen on her in a few years.

  “No, she isn’t.” Mollie hopped down from the barstool. “Londell’s been waiting for you, you know. You could have put aside your hubris for two seconds and asked the hostess to lead you to the table of the tall, freckled mulatto.”

  “I find things in my own time.”

  “How did that work out yesterday morning?”

  I reached for my coffee. “Thank you for the phone call. I didn’t realize you still cared.”

  Mollie brought her face within an inch of mine, balancing herself with a hand on my thigh, her martini on my knee. “Don’t tell Ben I called.”

  She held her uncomfortable pose until I found it very comfortable. She was offering her face for me to see. Her smile tried to be naughty, but had too much on its mind.

  The light musk of her hair, which she washed every third day, lingered briefly as she returned to a table near the stage. I picked out Tweel’s voice and made my way over, wondering what the last two minutes had meant, the same confusion I felt after reading one of her poems.

  The playwright was still onstage. “Suspect: They ought to get you a tape recorder. Detective: Where did that coupon come from? Suspect: I stole it from the dean’s desk not long after you were there. I assume you have my fingerprints on file from the myriad burglary investigations. I assume you’re no closer to solving any of them.” A little puff of the playwright’s breath hit the microphone. “That’s not the ending, but I guess that’s where it ends right now. Thanks for putting up with me. My name’s Thayer.”

  I pulled out the empty chair between Benjamin Tweel and one of the panhandlers Londell occasionally rounded up to meet his quota, promising them free vodka. Thayer sat down at the table to our left. Londell slapped his hand on his way to the stage.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here, Cowlishaw.” Benjamin Tweel rarely bothered to look at me when he spoke.

  “How’s outer space?” I asked.

  “Closer than you realize.”

  I got up to change seats, letting Tweel have the last word. He needed it more than I did. I sat beside the short detective who had stolen my lines. Londell asked us to imagine Jack Nicholson as a depression-era prostitute. Thayer laughed along with everyone at his table. I didn’t hear his partner’s distinctive guffaw.

  “I’d be interested in how the play turns out,” I said. Thayer looked at me.

  “Does your partner write the endings, or is it a collaborative process?”

  Londell took the mic out of its stand. “This next one’s for my colleagues in the audience. This is our late dean as played by the late great Redd Foxx.” He sat down on the stage. He breathed heavily into the microphone. “I’m comin’, Elizabeth! This is the big one!”

  “Are you watching, Thayer? A heart attack. Your erroneous conclusions are impacting the future of comedy.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I told him what I was talking about. He kept his eyes on the stage.

  “Seemed like the autopsy results came back pretty fast. A few hours, was it? Is that pretty typical for a suspected homicide?”

  “I’m no coroner. I never even saw the body.” Thayer raised his voice, but his anger didn’t seem directed at me. “I’m trying to enjoy myself, Cowlishaw. Why don’t you do the same?”

  I had nothing else to say. His ignorance seemed sincere. So did Carly when she claimed not to have written the note on my desk. I hoped I sounded half as sincere as I complimented Londell on his new material and apologized for not sticking around.

  Two doors down, kids stood in line to get in the former art museum that had reopened as a dance club. Orange cones in front of the old theater reminded people not to wait around for the box office to open. I made a left at the public library, which had converted the first floor into a coffee shop. They had talked of doing the same to the second and third floors. Presently, someone in flannel had converted the front steps into a bedroom.

  A block from campus, a growling dog propped his front paws on the top of a picket fence, making himself a head taller than me. I scratched behind his ears. When everything is unknown, you don’t startle easily. They say fear is useful, that the little hairs on your neck alert you to the presence of danger. My little hairs hadn’t gotten off the couch in years.

  Campus was quiet. The days of movie nights on the quad and Spring Sing talent shows were in the distant past. Fewer than fifty students still opted for the overpriced, under furnished dorms. At a quarter of nine, the windows of Furley Hall remained dark. I waited under the oak tree until five after. The note’s author, if he or she still wanted me inside, must already be there.

  I opened the front door one inch at a time. Inside, a few creaks overhead were not necessarily footsteps. I took the quieter side of the stairs. When I reached the landing between the first and second floor, a sound like an out-of-tune cello moved from one side of the ceiling to the other. What might have been a drop of water came down hard on the step in front of me.

  From just inside the doorway that opened to the second floor, I listened for the cello’s next overture. There were only the eggshell moans beneath my own feet. I could sense someone in the hall or classroom. In spite of the abiding faith of F. Randolph Parsh
all, this was the extent of my extrasensory perception, the magic beans I had received in exchange for my optic nerves.

  I took inventory of the shadows: three diagonal and one round. I was thinking of round objects that were not someone’s head when the shadow shifted.

  There was nothing within reach that I could use as a weapon. I thought of the keys in my pocket. I didn’t think much of them. I wasn’t wearing a belt. In one swift move, I leapt into the hall and swung at the shadow. I swung again. I generated quite a breeze.

  Beside the elevator, my leg tangled with something hard and soft in the proportion of a body. Losing my balance, I grabbed it, pulling both of us to the floor. I landed on the bottom. Her perfume had a citrus base with notes of cardamom, peach, and mildew. That last one might have been the carpet.

  “I thought you didn’t write the note,” I said.

  Carly’s earring grazed my cheek. “I didn’t. I wanted to know who was using my name to leave messages on your desk.”

  Our bodies remained stacked on the floor. The weight of an attractive woman isn’t one you hurry to remove.

  “I’ve been texting you all evening,” she said.

  “I think you need a cell phone to receive text messages.”

  “You don’t have a cell phone? Who doesn’t have a cell phone?” “People who know better.”

  We helped each other to our feet. “So why are you here?” she asked.

  “I was invited. I’m trying to find out by whom.”

  Her head turned in both directions. She walked into the stairwell and returned. “Do you think someone else is in the building?”

  “If so, they’re trying hard to make us think otherwise.” I took a few steps into the condemned classroom with water damage. Detecting the presence of multiple people was more than my modest gifts could handle.

  “I don’t like my name on that note, Tate. I don’t like it at all. Besides Duncan, who else knew we were here last night?”

  “I’m sure no one saw you leave, fast as you were moving.”

  Carly let out a breath. She leaned forward. Her lips offered me more than an apology. They were sticky with gloss.