Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  I rejoined Parshall’s oldest junior by the telescope. “Good for you, Wade. You remembered how to do a cost-benefit analysis. If you had actually shown up for the exam, you might have earned the C that I ended up giving you.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” he said. “Like ninety-nine percent of these books are just sitting around my house. Most of them aren’t worth anything. The ones that are, nobody wants.”

  After some more tinkering, he got the base back together, and we carried it back to his house along with my wine. The broken telescope weighed a little more than the mummified corpse of the school’s first female graduate. Wade’s driveway led to the house with the thumping techno beat. Inside, the bass was palpable in my ribs.

  “You like it loud,” I yelled.

  “Do what?”

  White carpet and white furniture glowed in the black light. A mirror ball hung from a ceiling fan. My nose found it before my eyes had the chance. Most obstacles come at ground level, so I usually keep my eyes straight ahead.

  Wade turned down the volume from 747 to Cessna. The vibrations emptied from my chest. I felt as though I had gotten over a bad cold. Wade switched on the light above the mirror ball. He moved a coffee table from the wall to in front of the sofa.

  “This place used to be packed with so many freshman tits you could have opened a tit store, Dr. Cowlishaw. All I had to do was turn on the music. A minute later, they were knocking on the door. I was the pied piper of pussy.”

  I handed him my wine bottle. “Everyone goes through a slump, Wade.”

  He opened a drawer in the kitchen. “Yeah, it’s called my thirties. This one chick, Dr. Cowlishaw, she called me a pedophile. I don’t know, man. I used to be able to make girls laugh. Now it’s like I’m

  the joke.”

  Wade brought the wine into the living room with a pair of glasses. He had been struggling with the corkscrew for a couple of minutes.

  He examined the bottle from arm’s length, twisted off the lid, and filled a pair of glasses to the rim. We clinked them together without making a toast.

  I rolled the cabernet around my tongue. They had overdone it with the oak. I checked the roof of my mouth for splinters. “If you don’t mind my asking, Wade, how do you afford a place like this on the proceeds from used library books?”

  “My dad cut off my spending money a couple of years ago, but he still pays my rent as long as I’m in school. Is it true Dr. Bibb’s going to expel people who have been here longer than seven years?”

  “She’s throwing me out, Wade. I’ve only been here five.”

  “I hated Simkins. Every time he put me on probation, my dad gave me less money. The asshole kept changing the curriculum so that I would never graduate, but he was really good at cashing my dad’s checks. Not once did he mention expelling me.”

  I noticed the books around the room, stacks of them waist-high along three walls. The fourth wall, directly in front of us, was taken up by a white screen from ceiling to floor.

  “I just wish school wasn’t so boring,” he said. “How is reading and writing papers and taking tests supposed to prepare me for a job?”

  “What kind of job do you want, Wade?”

  “I don’t know. Why can’t somebody just pay me to sleep in and watch movies all day?”

  “It sounds like somebody does, Wade.”

  Wade topped off our cabernet. “Sometimes movies are too long. I mean, you have to sit there for like two hours. It’s like sitting through class. Lately I’ve been more into these videos on the Internet that are like two or three minutes long.”

  Wade set his glass on the coffee table and stood beside the white wall. A blue screen the size of a laptop computer came on. Cords knocked against one another as the white wall became the blue screen.

  “You’ve got to check some of these videos out, Dr. Cowlishaw. There’s this one with a bunch of retarded kids in a mosh pit.”

  Wade outed the lights and started the video. I didn’t mention the debate among faculty on whether or not Wade himself was on the spectrum of mental retardation. Wade did what I assumed to be his impression of the video’s participants. When the clip was over, he clicked a few times on his laptop. He typed a few words. We watched an impassioned speech by a mayoral candidate interrupted by a loud, sighing fart. We watched a montage of minor league batters taking fastballs to the groin.

  “Check this one out, Dr. Cowlishaw. It’s Dr. Bakker doing stand-up. Somebody puts up a new one every week.”

  A mouthful of cabernet settled warmly in my chest. Wade and I shared laughs at Londell’s stories of underachieving students, one of which might have centered around Wade. My host started another video and sat down.

  “I don’t like these as much,” he said, “when he just does impressions.”

  Londell did his Cosby and Barack Obama. From where I sat, the picture on his cell phone camera was rather blurry. The audio was as crisp as a wet potato chip, but was strong enough to pick up chatter from neighboring tables. I could hear my own voice, if not quite every word, talking to Thayer about his screenplay. The whispered words of Benjamin Tweel, only a few feet from Londell’s phone, occasionally overwhelmed the ones onstage.

  “What’s your little boy toy doing here?” Tweel asked. “As

  I understand it, he’s going to be meeting Miss Worth in a little while.”

  Someone shushed him.

  “I’m more excited to put a bullet in his head than I was Simkins,” whispered Tweel. Whether it was loud enough for his wife to hear I wasn’t sure.

  Londell shouted, “I’m comin’, Elizabeth. This is the big one!”

  A loud, possibly pot-induced laugh from the adjunct who didn’t bathe covered more whispering. Wade Biggins shifted in his seat.

  The video was five minutes old. Were he not in his own house, he doubtless would have left, as he often did when classes went on this long.

  Applause followed Londell back to the table. I heard myself offer him a quick compliment before my departure. Moments later, the emcee announced the next performer, Oral Tradition’s very own hostess, Ms. Sara Freyman.

  Wade got up. I held him in place by his crewneck collar. “But it’s over, Dr. Cowlishaw.”

  I reached for the wine bottle and filled his glass. I filled my own and took a big swallow. I was wrong about the oak. The vanilla arrived just in time.

  “As some of you know,” said Sara Freyman, “I’m going to be following my dreams to Nashville real soon. Tonight I want to dedicate a song to the lady who’s helping to make that possible. She’s been taking singing lessons from me, and y’all got to hear her earlier tonight. Miss Mollie DuFrange. How did she do, everybody?”

  The audience clapped politely. Someone close to the cell phone hooted loudly. The screen went black before Sara got to sing.

  Chapter 36

  WADE TRIED TO GET ME TO STAY for footage of a fellow throwing turtles across a lake. I took a rain check and made my way to the foyer. My foot clipped the corner of a metal cabinet. “That’s my bad,” Wade said. “This is a new arrival. I haven’t found room for it yet.”

  “Where did you get this?” I asked of the black file cabinet, three drawers high.

  “From a closet on the second floor of the library.”

  I ran my thumb along the top drawer. Deep scratches formed the crude curvature of a penis. “This wouldn’t be your artwork, would it?”

  Wade examined the engraving and chuckled. “Maybe. Sometimes when I’m nervous I draw dicks on things.”

  “When did you steal this?”

  “Earlier tonight. It’s the weirdest thing. Two days ago I found one just like it in the janitor’s closet of the dorm.”

  “Do you still have that one?”

  Wade led me into a second living room and turned on the light above a pool table. He lined up the cue ball and broke the rack. He asked if I wanted to shoot a game.

  “The file cabinet, Wade.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

/>   Between air hockey and foosball tables, both covered with books, sat a file cabinet identical to the one in the hall, minus Wade’s artistic contribution.

  “Check this out.” Wade turned it around to the left side.

  I ran my thumb along the holes. Three-inch dents radiated from the spot where each bullet went in. It was too late to match these to the bullets in Simkins’s head, but I knew of a few other places Tweel had fired his gun. This and the whispered confession on YouTube ought to be enough for an arrest.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks for this, Wade.”

  “It’s yours, Dr. Cowlishaw. No charge. Without your classes, I’d still be a sophomore.”

  I told him I’d be back for it. The techno beat returned when I reached the sidewalk. I pulled out my phone. I was getting the hang of this walking and talking. I’d have to add it to my resume under “skills.”

  “Are you alone?” I asked Thayer in lieu of a greeting.

  “I tend to be at this hour.” He made me hold while he finished writing a line of dialogue. “What do you need?”

  “I need you to arrest someone for the murder of Randall ‘Scoot’ Simkins.”

  I told him everything I knew, including where he could find the erstwhile scholar of space tourism.

  “I’ll send a car,” he said.

  “Perhaps you should be inside it. The officer you put on the Gray Knight went AWOL. This was around the time an eyewitness saw

  your sensitive partner help himself to a dead body that didn’t belong

  to him.”

  Thayer let out a long, perforated scream. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to carve writing time into a detective’s schedule?”

  “Seems like I’m doing the detecting. All I’m asking you to do is read someone his rights.”

  Thayer gave me a big sigh befitting a man of the stage. I gave him the address of the late Sarah Freyman. After a long silence and a few keystrokes, Thayer asked me to hold on while he got a pen. I threw in the Cedar Street address in case Space Boy proved stronger than a knitting needle.

  Maybe I should have asked for an officer to pay Mollie a precautionary visit. Who was to say what Tweel would do with that gun once he got his hands on more bullets? I swallowed my concern and pocketed the phone. My worry, I admitted to myself, was only hope that Mollie wasn’t already long gone. I thought instead of her voice teacher, Sara Freyman, who seemed a more logical candidate

  for the role of Tweel’s mistress. How the two of them were connected to Stashauer and his former teacher I couldn’t say. Nor did I see a motive for any of the lost lives, Simkins and Duncan and Sarah Freyman the elder, beyond Delilah’s new salary, which didn’t seem worth killing for after it was split four ways.

  I was only a block from Wade’s house when a white sedan pulled beside me, well short of the stop sign. The passenger-side window came down.

  “Do you need a ride?” Carly’s question sounded sadder than

  it needed to. It was closer to the tone people use to ask how your

  parents died.

  “How far to New York?” I said.

  If she was smiling, I couldn’t see it. I opened the door and got in. Instead of pulling away, she killed the engine.

  “I waited for you at the Gray Knight. As soon as you got home, your landlord went in, and then you left. You bought a bottle of wine and I followed you at a distance. I almost shouted your name, but you were walking so purposefully, like you knew exactly where you were going and wanted so badly to get there.”

  “I was looking for a corkscrew. Turned out I didn’t need one.”

  “There are things I need to tell you,” she said, her voice somewhere on the floorboard.

  “I probably don’t need to hear them.”

  “I want you to hear them.”

  She removed her hands from the steering wheel and looked

  at them. The volume of her weeping rose only slightly above her

  shallow breaths.

  “So you told a few fibs on your CV,” I said. “We all embellish. On mine I included a second-place finish in an eighth-grade spelling bee. Maybe I didn’t include the year. Maybe instead of spelling bee I called it a contest for linguistic retention.”

  Carly brought her hands to her face. I touched her arm. She had on a thin sweater that didn’t prevent her from shivering. “I’ve never even been published,” she said.

  Her words came out wet. I looked inside the glove compartment for napkins or tissues. I found one in the door and handed it to her.

  Carly blew her nose. “I was rejected by Iowa. I was rejected, in fact, by twenty-two writing programs, some of them multiple times.”

  “I take it your novel is fiction in more ways than one.”

  “I haven’t even written a novel. I made up the book deal a few minutes before the meeting. I figured it would give me an excuse to leave town before the truth got out and obliterated any chance I had of ever finding another teaching job. That was when I thought Simkins was the only one who knew.” Carly raised her head to stare out the windshield at the street in which no cars had come or gone since she shifted into park.

  “I think I know where your files are, if you still want them.”

  Carly said nothing. Her teeth chattered. I placed my hand on hers.

  “I don’t think a reasonable person would say you profited from your deceit. Your salary certainly refutes that.” I gave Carly my other hand, but hers continued to tremble.

  “I suppose you’ll have an easier time finding work than Tweel,”

  I said.

  I tried giving back her hand, but Carly wanted me to keep it. She faced me for the first time since I got in the car.

  “Tweel killed Simkins,” I said. “He was the one who arranged

  for us to meet outside the dean’s office Tuesday night. I don’t think

  he liked the questions I was asking, or that both of us had seen Simkins’s dead body. I believe Tweel had been cleaning up the office Monday night when you and I stumbled upon Duncan trying to get

  in. We left. Duncan stayed behind to receive some threats from Detective Stashauer. I’m not sure how he’s connected, or if

  Delilah’s involved at all.”

  Carly stared at me for a long time. If she blinked, I missed it. “Did you just say Tweel killed Simkins?”

  “I said some other things, too. Do you need me to repeat them?”

  “What makes you think Tweel killed him?”

  I dictated the web address for the video of Londell’s most recent set at Oral Tradition’s. We watched Tweel’s confession on her fancy phone.

  “It’s not overly surprising, as angry as Tweel has always—” Carly shushed me.

  “Tate, I don’t think it was Tweel.” Carly said this with disbelief

  and incipient joy. She touched the screen in two places, rewinding the video and turning up the volume much higher than it had been on Wade’s laptop.

  “I don’t think Duncan’s going to do it,” Tweel whispered, his sigh just reaching Londell’s phone. “This whole thing is beginning to feel like a failure of the imagination.”

  “You’re a failure of my imagination,” whispered the voice that had whispered much nicer things in my ear. “I can’t thank you enough, Benjamin, for making me finish the job. At least sex with you prepared me for something.”

  “It was a bad angle,” whispered Tweel to his wife. “I wasn’t expecting him to be asleep.”

  “You’re just lucky he could sleep through gunshots. And that I thought little enough of your aim to wait outside his fucking office.”

  “He was shot?” Carly asked.

  “What did you think when you saw the body,” I said, “that he hit his head?”

  “All I saw were his legs. I thought he had a heart attack or something, so I called 911.”

  I took out my phone and dialed Thayer.

  “Since when do you have a cell phone?” Carly asked.

  “Men who discover dead bod
ies have to make a lot of phone calls.”

  Thayer’s voicemail picked up. I told him to save room in the car for a dark-haired poet in her thirties with terrific aim from close range. I returned the phone to my pocket and pulled out the clump of wet papers Mrs. Thopsamoot had removed from my soiled clothes. The sheets tore in several places as I separated them.

  “Can you read this?”

  Carly turned on the dome light. She struggled to decipher Mollie’s handwriting on the note she had passed me in Monday’s meeting. “Simkins won’t be here. I think that’s what it says. The words are small and super messy.”

  “Of course they are. She didn’t expect me to read it. When I asked how Simkins had died, she knew I had been in his office. That’s how I ended up at the police station.”

  In my hand was the note with much larger, much neater words asking me to meet Carly outside Simkins’s office. I slid my magnifier over the first letter of the late dean’s name, the bottom curve looping around itself to form a curlicue. I held my loupe over the first word on the other note. The writing was small, but it isn’t as hard to see things when you know they’re there.

  “I’m so sorry I doubted you, Tate. I never will again. Never ever.”

  “I’ll put you down as a reference on all my job applications.”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist.” She leaned over the emergency

  brake, smiling before she kissed me. “All’s well that ends well,

  Tate Cowlishaw.”

  “That depends on your definition of well, Carly Worth.”

  Carly turned off the car five seconds after she had started it.

  “One more confession,” she said. “My name isn’t Carly Worth.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s Sara Freyman.”

  Her laugh was small and not entirely fake. “It’s Carla,” she said. “Carla Butterworth. That’s why I’m sure very little came up when you searched my name. Frankly not much comes up when you search who I really am.”

  “And who are you, really?”

  “Nobody.” Her voice retreated once more to the floorboard. “There’s a story about this writer named Kathy Smith. She had

  written this wonderful novel. Everyone who read it fell in love with it, but no agents or publishers would read it. She started submitting it as Kathryn Smythe, and sure enough, within a month, she had an agent and offers from four publishers. She sold the novel for six figures. What’s in a name, right? Sadly, things haven’t turned out the same