Let's Get Criminal (A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery Book 1)

by Lev Raphael

  Stefan knelt by my chair. Here it comes, I thought.

  “What’s your opinion of Perry?” he asked.

  “Perry?” I reached for a napkin to blow my nose. “Perry? My opinion? Are we voting? Who breaks the tie?”

  Stefan shook his head, that beautiful head full of unexplored feelings. “You know that David Bowie line you like? ‘I looked in her eyes, they were blue but nobody home’?”

  “Perry’s eyes are brown. ”

  Stefan pulled a chair close, sat with our knees touching. “Listen—”

  “You said I was a jerk.”

  “Wait—you were real. Okay, a real jerk. But Perry’s just the idea of a person. Hollywood, you know, perfect stage set, you walk behind it, bare boards propping it up. And he was always like that. Nobody home.”

  “And I’m a jerk.”

  He took my hands with the gravity of a nineteenth-century suitor. “Perry can’t love, he’s too busy watching, seeing what kind of impression he makes. Not like you. I never really understood that about him. I had to see it.” He shook his head. “I was the jerk. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m going to torch his file cabinets and take an ax to his desk. Monday morning, I swear.”

  Stefan hugged me, a real hug, personal, alive.

  “You were wonderful tonight,” he murmured. “Perry’s so bland, really, but you’re—you’re various.”

  “Various? Why not call me sundry, too? ‘Nick Hoffman, Various and Sundry.’ ”

  “I mean you have shades, you have depth.”

  Well, I liked the sound of that, but I felt stunned, drained. I slumped in my chair. “So what happens now?” I asked wearily.

  “We finish cleaning up, we finish the Sauternes, we make love, we live happily ever after. How’s that?”

  “Then I want to go to sleep and pretend this never happened.”

  He smiled. “Whatever you say.”

  In bed, lying spooned against me with my right arm around his chest, Stefan said, “It’s an old story, isn’t it? The Triumph of True Love.”

  “We’ll do tableaux vivants some other time.” I had been thinking about the whole bizarre evening with unexpected relief. Stefan had enjoyed my bizarre performance, found me delightful.

  “I’m glad you didn’t try poisoning Perry’s wine or anything,” he said through a yawn, on the very edge of sleep.

  “Hey—there’s still plenty of time to kill Perry Cross.”

  6

  I HAD SOME PRETTY STRANGE DREAMS, and woke up once feeling almost drowned in nauseating and confusing events, with scenes and figures shifting and gluing together. At first I wasn’t entirely sure that I was awake—it might just have been a more normal-seeming part of my dream. But then I heard the throaty hooting and roar of the train that cuts through town every morning at two o’clock. It’s a warm and comforting sound, to me anyway, as it fills the night. I reached over for Stefan, but he wasn’t in bed. I looked up and through the open doorway, but there was no light on in the bathroom. I wondered if he was having trouble sleeping and had gone to work in his study—at least I think that’s what went through my mind. Because before I could get up to check, I was out cold again.

  There was no mistaking what truly ended my night’s sleep. The clock radio got us up with local news at eight o’clock on the public radio station. The unctuous voice said, “An SUM professor was found dead on campus early this morning. He has been identified as Professor Perry Cross of the English, American Studies, and Rhetoric Department. Campus Police have released no other details.”

  As the announcer went on to some item about the state legislature, I rolled over to find Stefan staring at me.

  I stared back. “How can he be dead?”

  Stefan frowned, shook his head as if he hadn’t really heard me and wasn’t even sure he was awake.

  “He was just here at dinner last night!” I shook my head. “And now he’s dead?” I sat up, leaned back against the headboard. “It was Perry, wasn’t it? You heard it too? I’m not dreaming this, am I?”

  “We’re awake,” Stefan said, and reached back to shut off the radio.

  I didn’t know what to say. Just before falling asleep, I’d joked about killing Perry; I felt disgusted to have said it.

  My mind was full of flickering images of people in movies and on TV finding out about a death: they were usually shocked, they screamed, cried, rushed around, stuffed fists into their mouths, stumbled backwards into a chair, quivering—did things that seemed extreme, no matter how limited the compass. But I was just dumbfounded.

  I guess Stefan was too.

  Suddenly, last night’s dinner felt retrospectively eerie, a portent of even worse things to come.

  We had been eating dinner with a corpse. That’s what it seemed like here in bed this morning. I felt deeply ashamed of how upset I’d been to have Perry over—that seemed trivial now when weighed against his death.

  “I guess I don’t have to share my office anymore,” I brought out. “Or not for a while.”

  Stefan grinned a little strangely, and I realized that joking was definitely not the right tack.

  We got up. We showered and ate breakfast without saying much at all. I felt as if I’d taken too many antihistamines: my vision, my hearing, my thinking were all clouded and dull.

  Stefan had an early class and left before me. Luckily I didn’t have to teach that morning. I only had a long stretch of office hours, and it was somewhat too early in the semester for students to have questions, problems, or even feel like coming in to chat.

  Usually, I went to the department office first to check my mail, say hi to the secretaries and whoever was there, plugging in to the prevailing current. But today I headed right up to the third floor of Parker. I didn’t want people reminding me that I’d seen Perry the night he died, had made dinner for him. It seemed embarrassing and grotesque to talk about him at all, especially since he wasn’t a friend. How could I mention his name without some of my antagonism leaking through? I could imagine Serena Fisch’s smile when she met me. It wasn’t that long ago that we had acknowledged how much we despised Perry.

  I felt guilty somehow, as if saying good night to Perry Cross had sent him off to death. It was weird that I was so affected, but perhaps I was responding to Stefan’s heavy silence.

  If you’ve lived with an introvert, then you know that they can have many different levels and kinds of silence. You become expert at tuning in, listening, interpreting. Or sometimes ignoring. But I didn’t know what to make of Stefan’s silence at breakfast, and felt sucked into my own.

  Unlocking my scarred office door, I shuddered at the two cheap black and white plastic nameplates, mine and Perry’s. Someone would have to remove his, I thought. And I pictured his mailbox right above mine in the department office.

  Inside, at my desk, with the office door open just a crack, I was glad that Perry’s desk and file cabinets were not in my immediate sight line but behind my back, where I could ignore them. I would have to make an effort to either inspect what was on his desk or to take in the still life his death had left behind.

  I knew the student newspaper was downstairs and wondered if there was an article in there yet—or was it too soon? “Found dead on campus”—what did that mean? Where did it happen? Who found him, and when? How did he die? Was he wounded? Were there witnesses?

  I sat at my desk, unable to take out any papers to grade, unable to push my thoughts in some productive direction.

  I hadn’t liked him even before I knew what he had done to Stefan, so I wasn’t sorry Perry Cross was dead, but I wasn’t relieved. His dying so soon after dinner even made me feel cheated, a little. Lying in bed with Stefan last night, I’d imagined many scenes of quiet but vindictive triumph in our office. Like heading off up north to our cabin on Lake Michigan for a weekend. Or coming back from an opera in Chicago. I’d be casual as I shared information about our good times with Perry, a nasty kid holding a scrap out of his hungry dog’s reach, wavi
ng it back and forth hypnotically.

  I was also ashamed of myself for being so vindictive. Perry was dead; nothing that I felt, nothing that had happened really made a difference now.

  Perry’s death was bound to create confusion in our department, and not just because of the need for someone to cover his classes. Broadshaw would probably take Perry’s death personally, and storm around kicking desks and shouting. I dreaded the chaos our chair would make. I’d seen him enraged last year by a snowstorm that kept some faculty members at home in their rural towns. I felt sorry for everyone who’d have to put up with Broadshaw, which of course included me.

  There was a knock and Stefan came in. I checked my desk clock; he had another hour before his next class. He was pale and more out of it than he had been at home. Today his clothes looked incongruously good on him—they fit so well that the dark green and black checked shirt and black slacks only heightened how miserable he looked.

  He sunk into the comfy chair I had bought for my students (since I couldn’t requisition anything from university stores that was acceptable). Students are usually nervous enough talking to a professor, and watching them twitch and stretch in a stiff-backed unsteady chair would have been distracting for me.

  “They found him in the river,” Stefan said.

  “The river? How? What the hell was he doing?”

  Stefan shook his head absently, like a parent staying connected to his child with vague murmurs and smiles, but not really listening. “It’s just what the secretaries told me. In the river, by the Administration Building bridge.”

  The narrow, shallow Michigan River runs through the center of campus and widens a little right by the Roman Revival-ish Administration Building with its gorgeous Corinthian pillars looming nearby like the calm classical backdrop for a bloated opera. There’s a four-foot drop in the river’s depth at that spot, and a row of artfully planted boulders makes what passes for rapids on our flat campus in the flattest part of Michigan. Three sets of wide granite steps descended on the southern side to a spreading terrace low enough for you to sit and dangle your feet in the water. It’s one of the loveliest spots on campus, the setting as ordered and restful as an ornamental pond in a formal garden, and it draws ducks and students all year round.

  “But what happened to him?” I asked. “How did he die?”

  “Nobody really knows.”

  “What do you mean? This isn’t New York, this is Michiganapolis. We don’t have dead bodies turning up all over the place, like in dumpsters. How can they not know what happened?”

  “All that takes time, I guess. They just found him this morning.” Stefan cleared his throat. “Why do you think he was over by the bridge?”

  I wondered why we weren’t saying Perry’s name. Was it superstition, fear that naming him would call him back in some way, or make the death seem more terrible?

  “I don’t know. And how’d he end up in the river?”

  “An accident?”

  “What kind of accident?” I asked.

  “Heart attack? Stroke?” I must have looked dubious, because Stefan said almost defensively, “It can happen to someone his age.

  “He was healthy. He looked it, anyway.”

  Stefan frowned, trying to puzzle it out. “Okay,” he said. “What if he was walking on a path by the river, and a biker zoomed by and knocked him over. You know how reckless they are even during the day.”

  “And he fell and rolled down the bank into the river?”

  Stefan nodded thoughtfully. “And there’re all those rocks there by the bridge. If that’s where it happened.”

  “But which side of the bridge—the rocks are to the west of the bridge.”

  “Maybe he fell in somewhere else, and drifted.”

  “Drifted? Is that possible?” I asked. “Is the river deep enough? Is there much of a current?”

  Stefan shrugged.

  “I guess you could fall somehow and knock yourself out, get a concussion or whatever. If that’s what happened.” I found the picture rather unlikely. “But what time was it? We heard the news at eight o’clock. Was it just before that—or a lot earlier? And what would anybody be doing on the bridge that early? And wouldn’t there be witnesses?”

  “Do you think it was suicide?” Stefan asked.

  “Please! If you wanted to kill yourself by drowning, you wouldn’t do it in the Michigan River. And if you wanted to jump from someplace on campus, you’d throw yourself off a building or something, wouldn’t you? If you were serious?”

  “You think he couldn’t have jumped off the bridge?”

  “But it’s not that high up, is it?” I thought then that I had to get to the bridge and check out the scene for myself.

  Stefan frowned. “If it wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t suicide—”

  I nodded. “I can imagine wanting to kill Perry.”

  Stefan grimaced. “No—that’s not what I meant. It could’ve been a robbery, or a gay-bashing, or something like that.”

  “Who’d attack a professor? I don’t buy it. Listen, Stefan, I just met him, and I hated him. There must be lots of people who know him better who feel the same way—like everyone at all the other schools where he ever taught at before.”

  “Hate him enough to come out to Michiganapolis and kill him?” Stefan shook his head.

  “I’d believe that before I’d believe he was robbed. Murders are almost always committed by someone who knows the victim well—that’s what the papers always say. Didn’t you tell me he had two ex-wives? Maybe he was stiffing them for alimony or child support.”

  “And one of them murdered him?

  “She could have hired somebody to do it,” I pointed out, warming to the possibility.

  “Kill him and stop the money completely?” Stefan shook his head.

  “Why are you so dubious?” I asked. “Didn’t you ever wish he was dead? I did.”

  Stefan’s eyes hardened. “But I would never do it—and you wouldn’t either.”

  I shrugged. “You’re right. We don’t even know how he died or what kind of wounds he had. Was he stabbed, or strangled, or shot? He could have been bludgeoned to death.…”

  Stefan looked pale. “This is gruesome.”

  “Professor Hoffman?” someone said at the door, pushing it open without knocking.

  I looked up.

  “Detective Valley. I’m with the Campus Police Squad. I’m investigating the death of Perry Cross.”

  I stared. Detective Valley was a gangling, freckled man with curly red hair and an incongruous Vandyke; he was wearing a dark pinstripe suit, maroon print tie and blue buttoned-down shirt, shiny black oxfords. He looked less like a detective than a salesman at a “Going Out of Business” furniture outlet.

  “Why do you want to talk to me?”

  As if speaking to someone a little dense, he said carefully, “I’ve seen the chair already, and you’re next on the list. This was Professor Cross’s office, and you shared it with him.”

  I snorted. “I thought all you guys did was hand out parking tickets. How come the Michiganapolis police aren’t investigating?”

  Valley walked on in and handed me a business card with his name, address, and phone number on it under a shield logo with CPS in the middle. Across the top, the card read: “Serving the SUM Community.”

  Valley said, “The Michiganapolis police don’t have jurisdiction on campus.”

  I didn’t stand or move forward to shake the detective’s hand, and he didn’t seem to expect it. I disliked his dry supercilious voice, his knowing eyes.

  I glanced at Stefan, who didn’t seem to be paying attention. Valley said to Stefan, “And you are—? Stefan Borowski? Good—you’re on my list, too. I’d like you to stay.” The detective gestured to the small chair near Perry’s desk, said, “May I?” and pulled it over before I could say anything. “I want to ask you some questions, Professor Hoffman.”

  I asked, “Where’s your notepad?”

  He smiled as
if at the antics of a puppy chewing on a rug. “I’ve got a good memory,” he said.

  Stefan just sat there like a patient waiting for the doctor to give him bad news.

  I asked Valley, “How did Perry Cross die?”

  Suddenly Valley was warmer, more expansive, leaning back comfortably. “Well, right now it looks like he fell from the bridge, struck his head on a submerged log, and drowned while unconscious.”

  “He fell from the bridge? How do you know that?”

  Valley shrugged off my question.

  “And the river’s too shallow to drown in,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Not really. Water in your lungs is water in your lungs.” There was a creepy kind of enthusiasm to Valley now that made me feel like I was in some movie with Vincent Price playing the mad scientist delightfully sharing his forays into darkness.

  “How long have you known Professor Cross?” Valley asked me.

  “Professor Cross” sounded strange to me, distancing. “A couple of—no, since just before the semester started.”

  Valley nodded, crossing his long thin legs. He waited, but I didn’t add anything.

  “Was he happy here?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Was he unstable? Nervous? Hysterical?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wasn’t he a homosexual?” The clipped dispassionate way he said it made it sound like he was using a word he was as disgusted by as terrorist, pervert, kidnapper—but trying to deaden his feelings for the sake of law and order. I realized then that this man might be the one in charge of responding to the incidents on campus like the gay student leader’s car being trashed.

  “What’s your point?”

  “It was a question, not a statement.”

  “You think he might have killed himself because he’s a queer, because all queers are miserable and sick, and that’s how they end up, that’s how they should end up?”

  “I just asked if he was a homosexual. It’s part of the whole picture.”

  “Well, I’m gay, and so is Stefan.”

  Valley surveyed us coolly. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’re not dead.”