Cold and Pure and Very Dead, page 22
“I have a few questions I need to ask you.”
After dropping Toni Croft off at Edgemont Trailer Park, forty bucks richer, I stopped at Vinnie’s Exxon, and took Vinnie Russo, the seventy-year-old proprietor, out for coffee. Vinnie remembered Lorraine Lapierre very, very well.
The gray-haired, ponytailed man behind the chairman’s desk in the Stallmouth College English Department office was Professor Richard Graves. Today instead of skimpy running shorts Professor Graves wore a sand-colored linen suit and a blue-checked oxford-cloth shirt. Gold-rimmed glasses lay in front of him on the thick green blotter. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he asked, after I’d introduced myself.
“We might have run into each other at the MLA,” I replied. I didn’t want Professor Graves to think I made a habit of lurking around the Stallmouth campus. “I do American. Nineteenth-century. How about you?” I was quite clear on my previous sightings of this man. He had long, lean, muscular legs, I recalled, and moved like a racehorse when he ran. Also, he’d been at Jake Fenton’s book signing, arguing heatedly with the writer.
“I do British,” he replied. “Eighteenth-century revenge tragedy.” Scholarly identities satisfactorily established, we exchanged social smiles. The Stallmouth chairman picked up his glasses, clicked the earpieces open, then closed them with another click. He sat back in his big leather chair and gazed at me curiously. “How can I help you, Karen?”
* * *
If some cultural critic of the late twenty-first century attempts an analysis of mid-twentieth-century American society based solely on the 1950s Stallmouth College yearbook, the Stalwart, he or she would come to the conclusion that all twentieth-century Americans were Caucasian, male, and monochromatically gray of hair, skin, and eye.
In the 1952 Stalwart I found what I was looking for. For fifteen minutes I brooded over it, then swallowed my pride and called Piotrowski. Sergeant Schultz took the call. “Yeah?” she said. “That’s interesting.” She listened some more. “Okay, I’ll run all this by the lieutenant when we get hold of him. He’s … well, he’ll … well, one of us will get back to you.” She paused, then added, “You take care, now, Professor.” The little sergeant sounded quite solicitous.
The Italian Delight was a pizza-and-pasta restaurant in a strip mall on the outskirts of Stallmouth. As I headed for home, it caught my eye, and I stopped for a quick sausage-and-mushroom slice. I entered the restaurant, my eyes adjusted to the dimness, and I saw Professor Richard Graves seated in a back booth, conversing with a woman whose face was turned away from me. But I immediately recognized the precision-cut blonde hair as belonging to Lolita Lapierre. I hovered uncertainly in the doorway. Then Richard Graves noticed me, tapped Lolita on the hand, and spoke urgently to her. She swiveled around and stared. Damn! I ducked out of the restaurant. The trip home was a long, hungry, and anxious one. What was the gray-haired wizard man’s relationship with Lolita Lapierre? Had he been talking to her about me? What had I initiated by going to Graves for information about the past?
Blood was everywhere, all over Sara, all over Cookie, all over the gray plush of the Packard’s wide backseat. When the doctor had hustled Sara out his side door and into the car he’d thrust a wad of towels in with her and told Cookie what to do with them. Then he slammed the car door and took the odor of gin away with him. Cookie jammed the towels between her friend’s legs in a vain attempt to staunch the flow.
“Faster, Joe. Faster,” Cookie pleaded. “If we don’t get her to the hospital, she’ll bleed to death!”
But it was already too late.
25
It was late when I pulled into the driveway after the trip to Stallmouth, one of those vast, clear nights when the little house seemed pinpoint-centered under a transparent bowl of stars. I stood by the car, stretched to relieve my cramped muscles, gazed at the sky, and tried to think about something other than Milly Finch, her ancient secrets, and their murderous modern consequences. But what else was there to think about? Oh—my life. I could brood about my life. Okay. So I was alone; so I had antagonized and alienated a man who was beginning to intrigue me; so Amanda was growing up and away, and would most likely be heading off to God-only-knew-where for graduate school; so my mother and sisters found my world as alien as if I’d been transported to some distant galaxy on one of those UFOs they read about weekly in the National Enquirer. So? So what? There was always this, the cool, crisp September darkness and the luminous bowl of stars.
I squinted at my watch as I climbed the front steps to the house: a blurry twelve-something-o’clock. Time to brew a cup of chamomile tea, pick up the latest volume of American Quarterly, tuck myself into my warm bed, open the scholarly journal—and fall asleep. I got drowsy just thinking about it.
But Monica’s voice on the answering machine jolted me awake. “Karen, you know that letter you showed me? The one you didn’t want me to put out in your box? Another one of those came in today’s late mail. I’m leaving for home now, but I locked the letter in my desk drawer like you said. The desk key is in my pencil cup. I put the cookie key on your desk so you can get into the office after hours.” A brief silence. “I wish to hell you’d tell me what this is all about.”
Within seconds, I was back in my Subaru. The night had shrunk down to me and Milly Finch’s fourth letter. As far as I was concerned, nothing else existed: no big cop with hurt feelings, no cup of chamomile, no scholarly journal, no warm bed, no firmament of stars. Just me and the missive that I was now certain would—finally—solve this mystery—would cue me into whatever it was that had occurred in the 1950s that carried its lethal energy smack to the cusp of the twenty-first century.
At that time of night, with no traffic and no traffic cops, I made the twenty-minute trip to campus in less than fifteen, the autumnal trees that arched the narrow country roads blurring past my speeding car with kaleidoscopic velocity. I pulled into the Dickinson Hall parking lot alive and undamaged in spite of my insane speed, and let myself into the darkened building. Dimmed hallway sconces provided sufficient illumination to guide me to my office, where I clicked on the overhead light. At the unconventional hour of—I glanced at my watch—12:22 A.M.—I’d rather not draw the security guards’ attention to my presence here, but I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight in from the car. The cookie key—our department’s passkey clipped to a ring with a grubby plastic chocolate-chip cookie—sat in plain sight on my deskpad. I scooped it up, doused the lights—they must have been on for all of seven seconds—and headed for the main office. Up and down the wide hallway, doors were solidly shut, sconce lights at their lowest settings, no security guard in sight: all was as it should be.
I inserted the key in the lock, heard the click, pushed the door open, slipped inside, and closed it. Damn! Complete darkness, except for a pale glow from the pole light just outside the window. I groped toward Monica’s desk and fumbled for the pencil cup that held the desk key. Crash! Pencils, pens, coins, and other secretarial detritus rolled across the desktop. The toppled cup clunked to the floor. I froze and listened for reaction from … anyone or anything. A faint hum from the electric wall clock. The distant whir of a car passing on Field Street. A boozy whoop from somewhere in the direction of the dorms. The usual creaks and groans in the walls of the old building. No storm-trooper-like stomp of Security descending on me in force. I took a relieved breath, and suddenly the absurdity of the situation struck me. I giggled at the thought of how ludicrous I would appear to any chance observer, standing here by Monica’s perfectly ordinary secretarial desk in this perfectly ordinary departmental office, paralyzed with terror about the possibility of being discovered on a perfectly ordinary professorial errand. Sheesh! I clicked on the lamp. This clandestine stuff was stupid! There was no reason whatsoever for me to slink around the office like some lowlife burglar: I worked in this department; Monica knew I was coming; she’d even made arrangements for me to be here. The buzz of the fluorescent bulb was comforting. So was the round, safe island of light that created its own little illuminated world.
That world—the desk cluttered with computer monitor, keyboard, telephone, piles of papers, stacks of folders, sponge-filled plastic dish for dampening postage stamps, Lucite-framed school picture of Monica’s son Joey, carved-wood hand-flexing gizmo for preventing carpal tunnel syndrome—was now strewn with a half-dozen pencils and pens, a balsa-wood letter opener, and a quarter that balanced precariously on the very edge of the desk. I didn’t see any key. I retrieved the red ceramic pencil cup and turned it upside down. Nothing. I tapped the cup. No key fell out. I peered inside. No key was stuck to the bottom with spirit glue. Whatever spirit glue might be. I sorted through the mess on the desk. No key under the piles of papers, the stacks of manila envelopes, the phone, the keyboard. I sighed and checked again around my feet. That far from the lamp, nothing but two sturdy brown walking shoes could be seen. It wasn’t until I got down on my hands and knees and groped around on the carpeted floor that I found the tiny key lurking underneath one of the wide chrome balls of the wheeled chair.
Ah! I plucked the key from the floor between my thumb and forefinger, rose, rolled the chair away from the desk, and inserted the key into the small lock in the narrow central drawer. The letter wasn’t immediately visible. Front and center I found two rubber-banded stacks of neatly labeled computer disks. I felt farther back in the drawer. Scissors. Scotch-tape dispenser. Stapler. Monica was known to guard her personal office supplies with the ferocity of a pit bull. I felt even farther back. Plastic stamp box. Then I noticed the envelope, right up front, anchored by the stacks of computer disks. As I pulled my hand back to retrieve the letter, my fingers brushed against something hard and heavy and cold that I was in too much of a hurry to identify—yet another piece of office equipment Monica habitually locked away from marauding professors, no doubt. My eyes were all for the envelope. I slid it from under the disks and positioned it in the center of the lamplight circle. Hudson postmark. Pinched handwriting. Professor Karen Pelletier, English Department, Enfield College. Eureka!
“Miss Pelletier, whatever are you doing here at this hour of night?”
In the suddenly blinding overhead light, a bulky male figure stood in the abruptly opened office door. My hand fluttered melodramatically to my heart. I caught my breath with an audible gasp. “Jeez, you scared the sh—. You startled me.”
“So it seems.” No apology. In his damp navy raincoat and black beret, Ralph Brooke filled the doorway. Why do men have to be so goddamned big? He squinted at me from behind his thick glasses. “What are you up to in here?”
“Me? Oh, I just …” This was not the person I wanted to see right now. I smiled sweetly. “How about you, Ralph? You habitually prowl the ivy halls after midnight?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied. His frown let me know I’d failed to insert any feminine charm into the situation. “Remembered a book I wanted.” He cut it off sharply. The Palaver Chair does not explain his actions to an assistant professor, the lowest of the low. Now, if it had been Monica he’d disturbed, the elderly scholar might have been more polite; Monica he needed things from.
Ralph noticed Milly’s letter on the desk. I noticed him notice it. His magnified gray eyes fixed on the hand-addressed envelope as if he recognized the letter for what it was, a missive from the past. We grabbed at the same moment. I was closer, but he slid the unopened envelope from my suddenly nerveless fingers, and studied the handwritten address. The lines of his rubicund face were fixed and unreadable. Then he glanced up at me. “For someone who hasn’t written a word for decades, Milly Deakin has turned into quite a correspondent, hasn’t she?”
I had no response. The various levels of Milly’s story, past and present, had come together for me. I said: “You’re Andrew Prentiss, aren’t you?”
His level gaze hardened, told me he knew I knew. But he shook his head. “Andrew Prentiss? No, not me. There never was an Andrew Prentiss. Andrew Prentiss was merely an imaginative projection, the overheated fantasy of a maladjusted schoolgirl. The product of an overly repressed sexuality.” Surely Ralph Brooke knew that the Freudian psychobabble of the fifties was long passé; even if he had never been a scholar on the cutting edge of any of the various postmodern intellectual discourses, he was a sophisticated academic. Yet at this moment of crisis, he slipped back into the familiar jargon of his youth.
I ignored his denial. “And you’re the one who stole Milly’s second letter from my desk.”
He smiled, as if I’d let something slip. “Was it her second? I only saw the one. No, Miss Pelletier, you can’t blame me for stealing your letter. Not that I haven’t held it in my hands. Not that I haven’t read it—while it still existed in readable form, that is. But did I take it from your desk? No, not I. That theft was the unfortunate—and unfortunately fatal—misdemeanor of your … your … dear friend Jake.” A pause allowed the momentary softening of his adamant expression. “Too bad about Fenton,” he mused. “A true loss …” I held my breath. Was I about to learn—at long last—the truth about Jake’s parentage? Brooke sighed. “A fine strong, virile writer. A true loss to the literary world.”
I don’t quite know how the gun got into his hand; he must have been packing it in his raincoat pocket. It was a good-sized revolver, gray and steely, and glinted in the harsh overhead light as if it contained an independent luminosity. “And too bad about you. You’ll be a loss, too.” The hard-boiled expression on the elderly professor’s face—eyes slit, mouth a hard straight line—was right out of film noir.
Me? A loss?
“You’re really quite decorative, you know.”
Decorative! I scowled. Women’s Studies 101, lesson number one, the pernicious aesthetic objectification of women.
“Now, what am I going to do with you?”
I shrugged, but my mind was racing. I was a healthy, agile, not-yet-forty-year-old woman—and a feminist!—and he was an elderly man. The bulky gun collapsed the age differential, but, still, there must be some way I could overpower—or outwit—this man. I surreptitiously checked the desktop for some potential weapon or distraction. The heavy wooden hand-flex gizmo? No. Neither big enough nor weighty enough. The keyboard. No. Too clumsy to clobber him with, and besides the cord was too short. Something in the drawer? I took a rapid memory inventory of its contents. Scissors? Scotch-tape dispenser? No. And no. My hands tingled with the need for a weapon. Then, without warning, almost independent of my brain, those very same hands identified the shape of the puzzling object they’d brushed against in the back of the drawer. The awkward shape. The object that was hard and heavy and cold.
“I had plans for Milly,” Brooke reminisced. “She was supposed to be at Dash and Lillian’s for the weekend. A drowning accident would have taken care of the problem, and none of this would have been necessary. A neurotic, vengeful woman would have vanished, and without yet another no-talent lady writer the world would have been a better place.”
No-talent lady writer! A powerful rage surged through my fingertips. Women’s Studies 101, lesson number two, the misogynist trivialization of the female literary tradition! Professor Brooke had gone too far! His gun terrified me, but his smug condescension infuriated me even more. Decorative! No-talent lady writer! No goddamned, sexist, superannuated son-of-a-bitch was going to—
“Milly had a psychological complex about me. A twisted sexual fixation,” said the goddamned, sexist, superannuated son-of-a-bitch. “She was a vicious slut, even when she was a scrawny kid.…”
Slut! Twisted sexual fixation! Women’s Studies 101, lesson number three, the masculine terror of female sexual aggression. The Vagina Dentata—the vagina with fangs.
“… vengeful. Spreading lies. Besmirching my good name—”
“There’s another one,” I said. The words popped out of my mouth, surprising even me.
“Another what?”
“Another letter. From Milly Finch—Mildred Deakin, that is.”
Ralph’s eyes narrowed. “Another letter? Where is it?”
“In here.” I gestured toward the desk drawer.
“Get it,” he said, motioning imperiously. The old goat seemed to like bossing a woman around at gunpoint. I shuddered as I reached into the drawer and fumbled through its contents.
“Well?”
“I can’t seem to find it.” And I couldn’t, dammit!
“Do you have it?” He waggled the gun.
No! Then—wait! Hard. Heavy. Cold. My fingers clutched.
“Yes,” I said, and shuddered again. I had it.
“Then give it to me.”
“If you say so,” I replied, clicked the safety catch off the small handgun I’d found secreted in the far reaches of Monica’s desk drawer, swiveled around, aimed squarely for Ralph Emerson Brooke’s chest, and pulled the trigger.
Years ago, when Tony had insisted on giving Amanda and me shooting lessons, he’d told us to aim right for the target’s torso. “If you’re ever in a position where you have to fire a gun—and, God willing, you won’t ever be—don’t putz around with trying to wing someone. If the situation is dire enough that you have to shoot some son-of-a-bitch, then, for Chrissake, aim straight for the heart. Shoot to kill.”
Luckily my aim had never been terrifically good, so I didn’t end up with the death of an éminence gris on my conscience. I’d aimed for Ralph Brooke’s heart, but I’d winged him in the shoulder. Winged him well enough to drop both him and his gun. He fell to the hardwood floor. I kicked his big gun away; it skittered across the polished floorboards into the hallway and came to rest with a clunk against the recessed base of the Xerox machine. Suddenly the little automatic with which I’d shot him seemed to scorch my fingertips. I hurled it out into the hallway after the larger gun. I didn’t know if Ralph was alive or dead; I just wanted to get the goddamned lethal weapon as far away from me as possible. Within thirty seconds, alerted by the gunshot, a campus cop was on the scene, a pair of town police joined us within a handful of minutes, and then, as I huddled in the window seat in a state of shock, a stream of officers that seemed to go on and on.
