Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  "I saw a light on when I returned to Dr. Glenly's office. I'd made arrangements to go back that night to clean up, make sure we hadn't overlooked anything. Just routine. There wasn't any reason to expect foul play, up to that time. So the place wasn't guarded. Then I found Tewksbury . . . Dr. Tewksbury in the office, going through the papers and things of the deceased subject." Did that sound as awkward to everyone watching as it did to him? "The place had been neat as a pin earlier. Now it was a mess."

  "And you found something incriminating in Dr. Tewksbury's possession? Something that cast a new light on the death and made you suspect foul play?" said someone with an arm and a microphone.

  The lieutenant moved his mouth nervously, evidently to accommodate the words that had been put there. He moonlighted security at the Stop and Shop; he wasn't media-wise.

  "Yes," he said. "We think there might be more to it. It's just speculation at this point." He swallowed, darted a shy glance full into the camera, wondering if it was over. The little red light was still on. That meant the camera was still running. It wanted more. "It might have been murder." He hadn't meant to say that. “I think you should be talking to my superior . . . ”

  The lieutenant's picture went away and was replaced by the crisp lady, sitting at a white desk with lots of television screens behind her.

  Albert was glad none of them was tuned to the news.

  The woman was attractive in an antiseptic, sexless way - like a statue - and talked without using her eyebrows or moving her upper lip. "Sources close to the investigation report an ongoing animosity between Dr. Tewksbury and the dead man concerning credit-taking on some fine points of ancient history."

  "Etruscan," said Albert.

  "Glenly was widely respected in university circles for his controversial theories on the ethnic origins of certain Mediterranean peoples. Dr. Justin Glenly, dead at 48 of unknown causes; though police grant the possibility of foul play. We'll have more on the story as it unfolds."

  Albert shut off the TV. Usually the world left the room when he did that. Not now, though. It was still there, palpable in the darkness. The shadows were full of Lt. William Craig, Jr., and the Crisp News Woman, and the disembodied voice with the microphone, all talking at once; all implying that Tewksbury had killed Glenly.

  Isn't that what they were saying?

  And he'd denied the condemned man a cigarette.

  Albert cocked his head as if listening for something. He heard a siren in the distance; footsteps creaking on the ancient floor above. Rain. Traffic. Soft voices in the hall. A world of sounds, but the music was gone. The domineering mistress that commanded all his senses had packed her bags and gone - crowded from his brain newly inhabited by shadows - and no longer there to drown out the world.

  Would she ever find her way back?

  Chapter Two

  The police station represented everything that Albert didn't understand about the world. It had been a grand building once, but several decades of lead-based paint - added layer-upon-layer, like false testimony - were proving more weight than the plaster could bear; tearing it from the wall and exposing it to air and sunlight so that it turned to powder and rained down upon the blindfolded statue of Justice in the foyer. Every night the cleaning crew swept it up in bits and pieces. Someday they'd sweep up the last of it and all the official-looking people in polyester suits and uniforms would have to find a new place to drink coffee and ignore people.

  It was going to be one of those uncomfortable times that Albert hated. He went to the biggest desk and waited.

  There was a black woman seated in a green swivel chair on the other side of the desk, and an older man, white, with pale eyes; red, watery, and strained by cynicism. She was writing, he was on the phone.

  Albert cleared his throat. The woman finished writing one thing and started another. The man hung up the phone and began opening and closing drawers, looking for something. Albert sighed and put his hands on the desk. The woman looked at them out of the corner of her eyes, then sideways at him. It was a territorial warning. Albert put his hands in his pockets. He needed them to play the piano.

  The woman returned to her writing. "May I help you'?" she said. Odd how a sentence and the tone of its delivery can so emphatically contradict one another.

  "I'd like to see someone . . . in prison," said Albert.

  The man and woman looked at each other and laughed by merely flaring their nostrils. Albert reddened. He was a foreigner and didn't know the language.

  "This is a jail, not a prison,” the woman explained. The distinction was lost on Albert. “Name," said the woman, twisting an official-looking form into the laundry ringer of her typewriter. It was a question without a question mark. Albert's heart skipped a beat. He had a fifty-fifty chance.

  "Dr. Tewksbury."

  "T-o-o-k ." said the woman, typing.

  "T-e-w-k . . . " Albert corrected.

  The woman scalded him with a glance, ripped the triplicate form from her typewriter, slam-dunked it into the basket, and began again. By the time the spelling was worked out, Albert felt his clothes had outgrown him. "And who do you want to see, Dr. Tewksbury?"

  In the end, Albert told them he was Tewksbury's brother-in-law. Whether that got him into the little waiting room or not, he didn't know. Albert was pretty sure Tewksbury wasn't even married. Almost positive.

  He hadn't been prepared for the search. He should watch more TV. It was embarrassing and they seemed suspicious when they didn't find anything in his pockets but a sax reed and a tidal chart. It took him a long time to remember where the chart came from, then he realized he must have gotten it when he went to see his mother in Maine last year. He used the sax reed as a guitar pick.

  They asked him why he didn't have a wallet or any money. He said he didn't own a wallet. He didn't need folding money or credit cards . . . they didn't fit in cigarette machines. Finally they called the school and got someone to identify him. Apparently it wasn't that difficult.

  The waiting room was small, with a wooden table and two folding chairs. The table had lots of scratches on it. The walls were painted to a wavy mid-point with glossy dark brown paint roughly the color of excrement and the rest of the way with a color Albert couldn't imagine a name for. Most of the linoleum tiles on the floor were torn or warped and there were deep scuff marks in them on either side of the table. Cigarette burns pocked every surface. A thick metal grid covered the room's solitary window which looked out onto the soot-baked bricks of an adjacent building. The view discouraged escape.

  The wait dragged on. He couldn't dispel the notion that they'd found him out on the brother-in-law lie and were going to ignore him into confession. Finally the door opened and Tewksbury came in. A uniformed policeman came in, too, and stood against the wall and looked out the window at the bricks.

  Tewksbury looked confused and frightened. It was a world he didn't understand, either. He sat on the other chair and asked for a cigarette. Albert gave him one, and a match. Tewksbury looked at them, then gave them back. "It's not that bad yet, is it?"

  Albert shrugged his shoulders. "Are you all right?" It was a rhetorical question. The answer was obvious. "It was on the news. What happened?"

  Tewksbury leaned across the table. The policeman yawned, looked at his watch and back out the window. Albert leaned in.

  "I've been framed," said Tewksbury. His breath was very bad. "I . . . got a call in the office after my last class. I don't know who it was. A man. He said he knew about the letter. He said the police would find it interesting." His hands busily sculpted the air with his tension. "I thought it was a blackmailer. I waited for him to say something . . . make some kind of demand, you know? But he didn't. I heard him breathing for a minute, then he hung up."

  "You went to Glenly's office?"

  Tewksbury nodded. "It was a mess. There were papers everywhere." Tewksbury's concept of "mess" differed wildly from Albert's. "It looked like your place."

  Albert nibbled at a hangnai
l. It tasted like stale cigarettes.

  "Who'd want to kill Glenly?"

  "You can start with his mother and work your way out in ever-widening circles, I should imagine. He was a . . . pestilence. I'm surprised the meteorologists haven't commented on the improvement in air quality since he died," Tewksbury bounced a twitching smile off Albert's blank face, "but I didn't do it." He grabbed Albert's hands and squeezed them tightly. "I didn't, Albert."

  Albert instinctively retrieved his hands from archaeology's grasp. Some leftover sunlight squeezed through the window grate to see what was going on. Albert traced the patchwork of shadows on the table.

  "I had a motive," Tewksbury continued. "I don't deny it. But there were others, Albert. Lots of others." He seemed to be struggling not to say what came next. "He was a . . . he manipulated people. No scruples. He knew just what everyone wanted to hear, and said it. They ate it up! Smart people. The Dean, the Chancellor. Women."

  "Women?"

  "Girls. Students. He teased them. Innuendo, you know? Sophomoric behavior. Detestable especially for someone in his position. But . . . they'd giggle. He'd giggle. The gargoyle."

  Albert had witnessed this kind of unreasoning hatred years before, on the playground. In the classroom. It resulted from the hoarding of offense and bridled at the slightest provocation.

  "People were afraid of him, like they are of sharks. A terrible fascination." Eyes downcast, slow deep breath vacates lungs all at once. "It was like he cast a spell on people. I don't know. I never understood it. I mean, intellectually he was a cipher. I’m not just saying that. Everyone on the faculty will tell you the same – would have, anyway, if he wasn’t dead. Academically his accomplishments were practically nil. Even his teaching abilities were rudimentary; Cliff notes, probably. But he had a way. I don't know."

  There was a silence during which the guard had time to look at his watch twice.

  "What now?" said Albert after a while.

  "They've denied bail, pending arraignment day after tomorrow."

  "What's arraignment?"

  There followed a brief lesson in American jurisprudence headed by its most recent victim, who understood the subject only in the light of the last few hours' events.

  "Do you have a lawyer?"

  "The school has lawyers for this type of thing. I'm sure they'll send someone over. I know I can't afford one." Tewksbury exhaled through his nose. "They've assigned me a public defender in the meantime, compliments of the legal system. They said he'd be here, but I haven't seen him yet." He looked where his watch would have been if he'd been wearing one. "I'm sure the school will do something. They have to, don't you think?"

  Would the sun rise? To Albert the school was the womb. It defined the parameters within which he lived and breathed. It sheltered him. It abided his imperfections. Forgave him for being clueless. Together with Huffy, his agent at William Morris, it coordinated his life; told him when to be where and got him there. Best of all, it welcomed him when he returned.

  He ate free at the cafeteria.

  "Of course it will," he said.

  Both men studied their fingers for a minute. "I told them I was your brother-in-law," Albert confessed in a whisper.

  Tewksbury smiled. The guard smiled, too. "Good idea," said Tewksbury.

  "I just felt like I should see you. I wanted to know if there was anything I could do," said Albert. "Does your family know?"

  "I just have my father," said Tewksbury, "in Vermont. He's had enough problems in his life since my mom died four years ago. I'm not going to bother him with it." Pause. "He's old." Pause. "Besides, I'll be out of here soon."

  Albert nodded. "Who do you think it was who called you?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't recognize the voice?"

  Tewksbury replayed the phone call mentally. "No. It was breathy. Almost a whisper. Whispers all sound the same."

  It was a ridiculous assertion to Albert. Faces, names, relationships . . . they all congealed in an amorphous mass . . . but voices, sound, that was the currency he dealt in. He never forgot a sound.

  Over the next several days Albert poked his head out into the world like a Disney character waking from hibernation. He listened to the radio, watched TV, read the newspapers, inputting all the information he could get on theI.Q. Murder as the press dubbed it. The edges of the story were trimmed with other news, having to do with other lives, other events. They told about a world too big and disturbing to cope with. So he didn't. If the news didn't pertain to Tewksbury, he simply tuned it out.

  Things weren't going well for Tewksbury. His fingerprints had been found all over Glenly's office. The incriminating letter had turned up and was reprinted in the papers; combustible material for gossip in a small college town. Blackest of all, the school had decided not to sully itself with the business. Its concern was summed up in a brief statement to the press. "The college will do everything possible to aid the police in their investigation."

  Albert had once seen a film run backward. A building lay in ruin amid a cloud of dust and debris, then, magically, reassembled itself. The analogy came to mind as the days passed. From the initial confusion and chaos an orderly array of evidence fell into place, as if by magic, forming an edifice of implications around Tewksbury. A place with no doors and no windows. No room for movement.

  The story faded from the front pages. History. There was a touching human interest piece when Tewksbury's father finally visited him in jail. Albert had met him, a confused old fellow who couldn't hear well and didn't understand why his son was there.

  Albert stopped reading papers after that. The TV died a violent death. There must be some chemical in coffee that destroys electronic things. A scientist could explain it. He turned the radio back to the classical station but kept the volume low, otherwise he’d hear it.

  He visited Tewksbury regularly. He was the only one who did.

  The black lady even smiled now when he came to the desk. She'd hand him something to sign, which he did, then a policeman would take him to a room and search him. He'd bought a wallet for the occasion. It had a picture of Howdy Doody on it; a precaution that should keep it from getting mixed up with others.

  Tewksbury was an official prisoner now, his life reduced to shades of gray. Albert had brought him the reading matter he'd requested from the school library,Plutarch's Lives, the works of Josephus, Aristobulus, Strabos, Justinian and Herodotus, and various professional journals and periodicals.

  At first he seemed to gain some inspiration from them. Then he stopped asking for more. He stopped reading. His mind imploded in helplessness. His words spewed the dust of his internment.

  "What about the phone call?" asked Albert. "Didn't you tell them about it?"

  "Of course I did," said Tewksbury. "Over and over. They don't believe me."

  Albert hadn't thought of that. What could be expected, though, in a world where even the school couldn't be depended upon?

  Tewksbury was chain-smoking now. "Somebody's doing this. It's all too perfect."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's like I'm trapped under ice," said Tewksbury. "Every time I find some breathing space, it freezes over before I can get to it."

  "What's the public defender doing?"

  "He's gone, thank heavens," said Tewksbury, tossing the public defender out of the picture with a quick jerk of the head. "He resented the fact I wasn't some drugged-out homeless pariah. I don't think he'd ever defended a taxpayer.

  "The school retained a private firm." Tewksbury brightened a little, like a child who has just been told he may keep the light on in the hall and the door open a crack. "Goldstein, Perlman, Quimby and Bowles," he said. It was clear from the look in Albert's eyes that he might as well have recited the phone book. "Connors recommended them."

  Albert seized on the one name that had a ring of familiarity.

  "Connors?"

  Tewksbury's optimism, newly born and self-generated, wasn't proof against the unmask
ed doubt in Albert's eyes. Somebody shut the door on his little room of hope and it was dark again. If there was a light on in the hall, he couldn't see it. "Professor Connors, Dean of the Law School."

  Albert mouthed the words, "The Law School." He was aware of it; an intimidating Secret Society . . . like the Masons or the NEA. Lawyers, his mother had said after losing a boundary dispute with a neighbor, were ‘practitioners of dark arts who lick sustenance from the mucousy fringe at the edge of the Underworld . . . where they spend their holidays.’

  Mother - at heart a Maine housewife, despite her Brahmin upbringing - would have found it difficult to edit her opinions, had she ever tried.

  He’d seen emissaries of the Law School at faculty meetings; older men who always looked elsewhere when they shook your hand; younger men who seemed to be driving fast German sports cars, even when they were sitting still in the conference room, smiling.

  "Goldman?"

  "Goldstein . . . Perlman, Quimby and . . . " Tewksbury felt as if he was reciting a nursery story about four dwarves. The last gentleman caught on the lump at the back of his throat. He coughed him up. "Bowles. They're supposed to be the best. Reputable."

  "Reputable," Albert repeated. "What do they say?"

  "About what?"

  "About your being framed."

  Tewksbury's remaining confidence shrunk like a wool sweater. "It's hard to say. I told them all about it . . . the phone call. I don't know what they think. They don't talk in straight lines." Pause. Sigh. "I don't think they believe me."

  Albert imagined himself in Tewksbury's place. He was sitting at the end of a long table in a windowless room. The table was lined with young lawyers wearing manicured expressions that all shifted in unison. First-degree concern. Shift. Second-degree concern. Shift. Worry. Shift. Mild amusement. Shift. They parenthesized in Latin and refused to commit to so much as the color of their coffee. He shivered.

  "Shouldn't they believe you?"