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

by Lev Raphael

  “You know about Perry Cross’s death?”

  “Friends filled me in last night when I got home. You see, there were messages on my answering machine, one from a colleague at Michigan who heard from a colleague at your university that Stefan might be involved in some way. Is he?”

  I nodded, stunned by the speed and accuracy of gossip.

  “Stefan didn’t call,” he said, with only the slightest stress on “Stefan.” And between us then was the story of how Stefan, years ago, had come late to his father’s second wedding reception here in Ann Arbor, arriving from New York a little drunk, too. Stefan missed the service completely after first having said he wouldn’t come, then changing his mind a few days before the wedding. Everything Stefan did wrong was like another malefaction added to the scales.

  I flushed and started to defend Stefan now, but his father cut me off: “Tell me what’s going on, please.”

  I took him through everything from before the dinner party the night Perry died up to the present. He didn’t look shocked or even startled, just nodded, drained and refilled his coffee cup, nibbled at a piece of babka, taking it all in.

  When I came to the end of my weaving, layered narrative, Mr. Borowski sighed.

  “So,” he said. “You want me to tell you that Stefan is innocent,” he summed up.

  I must have goggled at him, because he smiled. “Don’t you? Isn’t that why you came? You think my son is a murderer.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you ask him?” Then he smiled. “Forgive me. It’s not the sort of thing one does ask.” He sounded English then, disinterested, cool. “From what you say, this Cross fellow made people very angry. Angry enough to kill? Very possibly.”

  “But do you think Stefan could have done it?”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, what I mean is this, Nick. I couldn’t tell you that Stefan is not a murderer, could never do it. Which means anything is possible. I know that. After the war, I know that.”

  I was silent, humbled a little by everything he didn’t say.

  “However,” he went on. “I don’t believe that he did it, especially with so many suspects, and so much hatred for that man, if what you say is true.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow Mr. Borowski’s distinction, so I handed him the copies I’d found hidden behind the office door molding.

  “What is this? Oh yes, the German documents you mentioned.” He fished reading glasses from his shirt pocket and surveyed what I’d brought. “Poor copies,” he muttered. “Very poor. I’ll have to examine these closely. Can you wait?”

  I told him I had to get back to Michiganapolis, there were people I had to talk to.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your cousin—Sharon, was it?—seems to have inspired you. I’ll translate these today and call you at home, later.”

  “Terrific, Mr. Borowski.”

  “You’re a good man,” he said as I was leaving. “I suppose Stefan is very lucky.”

  I drove straight back to Michiganapolis without even stopping at any of Ann Arbor’s terrific array of bookstores. I was glad Mr. Borowski wasn’t my father, but I was glad he was Stefan’s father, because we needed dispassionate, insightful help.

  The ride back was pleasant at first, because of the music on the radio. Ann Arbor was on the edge of what I thought of as the Radio Zone—you could hear some of the good Detroit stations that played house and rap and solid R&B. Up in Michiganapolis, the stations were fairly bland, and as I got closer to home, Top 40 of today and yesteryear took over.

  I was nearing my exit when I heard Olivia Newton-John’s song “Physical.” I perked up—it was so brainless and cheery. And I was suddenly singing along with the chorus, only I found myself changing the words from “Phy-si-cal, phy-si-cal, I wanna get phy-si-cal” to “Criminal, criminal! I wanna get criminal.” I laughed aloud imagining Stefan staring at me, wondering if I was losing it. When the song ended, I felt flushed and triumphantly silly.

  That didn’t last. I had told Mr. Borowski there were people I had to talk to, but I wasn’t sure where to start, or how. Did I just show up and announce my intention? Was I supposed to act casual and try to surreptitiously draw the truth out of whoever I talked to, and then pounce?

  Geography decided for me. Driving into town I realized I’d be passing married student housing, so it made sense to see if the Malatestas were in. I remembered their address from a party Stefan and I had gone to last year, and I was able to park in one of the campus lots closest to Michigan Avenue.

  The married-student complex stretched for several blocks: a series of ramshackle two-story buildings with all the heartbreaking tackiness of a trailer park. Every attempt at humanizing the sterile cheap buildings—window boxes, colorful curtains, prisms hung from cord ends—had the opposite effect. You were that much more aware of the overall shabbiness. And inside, there was an awful smell of diapers, cat piss, mold, and sweat. It was as if all the anxiety graduate students lived with hung in the air like a mist.

  Wandering down a linoleum-floored corridor, I found the Malatestas’ unevenly painted door and knocked.

  Betty Malatesta opened it, looking suspicious but quite pretty in black jeans and what looked like one of Bill’s blue work shirts.

  “Hello,” she said, frowning at me as if she thought I was an impostor.

  “Could I talk to you? Are you busy?”

  She moved back reluctantly, and I walked in, aware that it would have been hard for her to say no to a professor.

  The living room was walled with brick and board shelves crammed mostly with paperbacks. Two plank desks were squeezed in with the shelves, and large Indian-print pillows lay about looking forlorn. I didn’t especially want to sit on the floor.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Betty said, and I squeezed past some shelves to sit at the tiny table opposite her. “Coffee?” I nodded and she poured me a cup. The cabinets behind her were worn and scratched.

  Betty waited, as if saying anything was too risky. I was not used to seeing her so ill-at-ease, and it made me even more uncomfortable. Unless it was just her embarrassment about my being there. I knew that many graduate students didn’t invite professors to their homes because they were ashamed of being at such different stages in their career, and unwilling to be cheerful about their relative poverty. I had already been here, but that was at night, in a crowd, with the lights low.

  “You probably heard that they’re investigating Perry Cross’s death again.”

  Betty nodded, not giving away a thing. I didn’t know how to proceed, and I wondered if she wasn’t enjoying my awkwardness.

  “Bill told me something about Broadshaw harassing him—”

  It was the worst thing I could have said. Betty’s eyes widened, and she practically hissed at me, “I don’t believe it! Why doesn’t he go on public access TV and tell everybody in town! That moron … that asshole … that wuss! He’s going to ruin us and we’ll never get out of this dump! Why can’t he shut his goddamned mouth and keep things to himself!” Her mouth and neck were quivering and tight.

  She was saying all this in a powerful stage whisper, obviously controlled by the fear of her neighbors overhearing—and it was very strange to see her so flushed and furious, but still conscious of where she was and who might be listening.

  This was a woman I had no trouble imagining as a murderer.

  “It’s his fault going to that damned conference and asking Broadshaw if there was anyone who’d want to share a room with him. He knew Broadshaw had the hots for him!”

  But that wasn’t the way Bill had told me the story.

  “And then going over that night when he knew Broadshaw’s wife was out of town—to ‘talk about a paper.’ And he’s surprised Broadshaw jumped him in the hot tub!”

  This was exactly what Sharon had said would happen: let people talk, and they would reveal something. If Betty was right, then Bill had been lying to me. But before I could think of some way to draw her out further, she s
uddenly stopped, breathed deeply, and sat back in her chair as if she had fulfilled her day’s quota of self-expression.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked, her voice back at a conversational level.

  “Do you know anyone who’d have a reason to kill Perry Cross?”

  “Besides me and Bill?” She laughed. “Perry was such a weasel, I bet he wormed secrets out of other people too. But I don’t really care who did it, because we have alibis.”

  “What?”

  “We couldn’t have done it because we were visiting Bill’s parents in Cleveland. We flew out the day before and got back that night.” She smiled a little maliciously, I thought. “I told this to that jive detective. You could have saved yourself a visit.”

  If I were a cop or a private detective I would have given her a phone number or business card, and asked her to call me if she thought of anything significant. As it was, I just thanked her and started to slink off.

  But then I stopped. “What happened in the kitchen at Broadshaw’s party when his wife burned her hand?”

  Betty grinned maliciously. “Oh, that fat bitch made some veiled comment about the sanctity of marriage and how sad it was that good men could sometimes be tempted to do things against their nature. Can you believe it! I told her she was full of shit and she tried to smack me. I slapped her hand and it hit a burner on the stove that was off but still pretty hot. I should have hit her harder.”

  When I got home, my answering machine showed several messages. The first was from Stefan, telling me he was on campus, and asking me to call. The next was from Sharon and I called her at her office right away.

  “How do you have so much free time?” I asked.

  “For you I do.”

  Just hearing her voice I felt more cheerful.

  “Will Stefan be angry that you went to see his father?” she asked after I’d filled her in on my day.

  “I hope not. It’s about time they settled things between them.”

  “Sweetie, you don’t have time to stage-manage heartfelt reconciliations for other people.”

  I knew she was referring to the fact that I wasn’t much closer to my family than Stefan was to his.

  Then she said, “But I’m sure you did the right thing.”

  “Do you think Betty Malatesta is lying about her husband, or the trip to Cleveland? I mean, I can imagine either one of them doing it. There were times as a graduate student I went into a rage about being jerked around by professors on my doctoral committee, or bullied into rewriting work to match a professor’s opinions. So much stuff simmers underneath, but you’re forced to keep it in. Betty’s much tougher than I ever suspected. And she even said she and Bill had a reason to kill Perry. Isn’t that”—I hesitated—“well, couldn’t she be trying to mislead me, by being honest?”

  “You said she and her husband flew to Cleveland? It’s not that far, is it? Why not drive?”

  Sharon had a good point. If you figured getting to the airport, waiting there, probably switching at Detroit, getting your bags when you landed, then it would probably be the same as driving, and certainly more expensive.

  “What airline would they have taken?”

  I thought about that. “I guess the cheapest flights right now are on Northwest. Anyway, they have the best connections out of Michiganapolis.”

  “I’ll check into it, see if they did fly Northwest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know someone who works at Northwest. No, not a ticket agent. A bit higher up. I’ll just call.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s nothing amazing. I just have lots of friends who have lots of friends. I met people when I was modeling.”

  “You weren’t involved in the Iran-Contra stuff, were you?”

  “Please, those folks had no style.”

  I gave her the dates Betty said they’d flown. When I hung up, I took out a new sheet of paper to puzzle over who might have wanted to kill Perry Cross. This time, I decided not to put Stefan at the top. It wasn’t loyalty, I just needed to think clearly before I waded into the swamp of what Stefan might have done and why.

  Serena Fisch seemed obvious. She had been passed over for the position Perry got. She was still bitter about having lost the chair of her department when it was absorbed by English and American Studies. And now she had Perry’s courses. But would someone kill for that kind of jealousy?

  Then there were the Malatestas. They were afraid for their futures, afraid that Perry would blab about what had happened—whatever that was—between Bill and Lynn Broadshaw. That fear seemed to me a much more compelling reason than Serena’s envy. And I could imagine it would be intensely satisfying to knock off a professor—what a way to strike back at institutionalized powerlessness.

  Powerlessness made me think of Chuck Bayer. Why had he been so desperate to get help with his Didion bibliography—and even more important, why was he interested in Perry’s stuff? Was that just opportunism, nosiness? But he was such a nebbish, I couldn’t see him as having the guts to even punch anyone out.

  Lynn Broadshaw—now he was bad-tempered and unpredictable enough to hurt someone accidentally. If he really had been harassing Bill Malatesta, and maybe other students, and he had somehow figured out that Perry Cross knew about him and he could lose his job—well, then, that was a perfect motive for murder.

  Stefan wasn’t off-base about Priscilla Davidoff—she did write about murder, so it was natural to her in a way it wouldn’t be to other people. Why had she been in Parker Hall last night? Following me, perhaps? And why did Broadshaw’s secretary act so secretive when I asked her about Perry; was Claire just being professionally discreet? If that was her I saw the night I found the envelope, why was she on campus so late?

  And what about Chad? He said he’d found the body, but why was he so nervous when he talked to me, and what was he afraid of? Why couldn’t he identify himself to the Campus Police when he called them?

  I surveyed the list, imagining them all in some fabulous wainscotted English study bristling with old bronzes and family portraits, and me, the intrepid investigator, confronting them with the truth, dragging it out slowly, like they did in the movies, showcasing my own brilliance.

  But there was something off with the scene. I wasn’t even thinking of Stefan or who else might have wanted Perry dead, or had simply been acting suspiciously. Maybe that was the key—just because motives were obvious didn’t mean they were good ones.

  I threw down the pad, feeling helpless. None of this was getting me anywhere, and I hadn’t made any real progress at all. I was just spinning my wheels, while Stefan was in danger of arrest.

  I had saved his name for last because I couldn’t help believing he had a far better motive than anyone—money, revenge for being humiliated. I could play detective all I wanted, but how did I know for sure that Stefan had not killed Perry? Gone for a walk with Perry on campus, for instance, and then hit him or tripped him or pushed him.

  Stefan had left me a message to call him, but I didn’t have the heart to talk to him. How was it possible to suddenly be so uncertain about the man I had loved for ten years? I felt disloyal, hopeless, and trapped.

  15

  THERE’S NO WAY I COULD HAVE GUESSED I’d be saved by the bell. The doorbell. I dragged myself out to answer it, and was shocked to find Detective Valley standing there, looking eager and mean.

  “Can I come in?”

  I felt like someone in a horror movie, faced with a werewolf or vampire in human form, about to make the terrible mistake of inviting the creature into their home. But what could I do? Shut the door behind me and talk to Valley out on the front steps? I didn’t even want to do that.

  I stepped aside and followed him as he strolled into the living room with the cockiness of a landlord about to eject a tenant from a valuable property.

  He nodded, looking around, nodded some more, as if what he saw proved something he’d suspected. I was sure he was trying to intimidate me.r />
  He said, “How about we sit down?”

  “Sure.” He sat on the couch and I sat at the other end, not because I wanted to be that close, but because I thought he’d interpret my sitting any further away as furtive behavior. I had a lot to hide, and had to keep from showing it. Nervous, I plunged in: “Is the investigation still open? Do you think that Perry Cross was murdered?”

  He chewed that over for a bit. Then he nodded.

  “Why? Is there some new medical evidence? What’s happened?”

  “The will, for one thing. It’s pretty clear. And your friend not being honest about how well he knew the deceased.”

  “If you mean Stefan, he’s my partner.”

  Valley shrugged, crossing his arms and peering down his nose as if about to pass judgment on me. “Partner. That’s a funny word. It means business to most people.”

  I was not about to tell him the reasons why spouse or lover didn’t feel appropriate to me.

  He smiled. “Maybe you were in business together—and the investment paid off? To the tune of a hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Stefan strongly recommended Professor Cross for the position here. Did you know that?”

  Glumly, I said that I did. “He was trying to be helpful.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Stefan didn’t lure him to Michigan to kill him. He’s not a killer.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe that.”

  Stung, I said, “I think you should get out.”

  “I think you should tell me who else might have wanted Professor Cross dead. No one else has even suggested the possibility.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “You mean people are telling you he was a saint?

  “Not exactly…. Let’s just say nobody paints the same portrait of him that you did.”

  It all came tumbling out because I was so angry and desperate. “That’s bullshit! What about Serena Fisch!”