3 Strange Bedfellows (3 page)

Well, no doubt the widow would be grateful for all that chicken pot pie in the lonely weeks ahead. Speaking of which, where was the widow?

Maybe right here in the kitchen. I searched the room for a female specimen who looked more stricken with grief, and less preoccupied with casseroles, than the rest.

But these specimens all looked equally bland. No grief here. I moved on.

I wandered down a hallway toward the bedrooms. At first I thought they were all deserted, but then I heard voices seeping from behind one of the closed doors. It sounded like they were arguing—quite heatedly, in fact. I put my ear to the door, but was confounded by all the competing noise from the kitchen and living room. On an impulse, I opened the door and walked in.

All six people in the room immediately shut up and looked my way. There were three frowning middle-aged men sitting beside each other on the edge of the bed, reminding me somehow of the Three Stooges. Standing in front of them were a man and a woman, both in their thirties, and both of
them red-faced and angry. Meanwhile a bald man with an ironic expression stood apart from everyone else, leaning against a wall. He tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for me to leave.

The polite thing would have been to say, "Excuse me," and close the door quietly behind me. But instead I stared back at them, trying to remember where I'd seen them before. In particular, I was trying to place that angry thirty-something man with the square jaw and piercing blue eyes
—Pierce, that was his name, Robert Pierce, the state assemblyman from Wilton.

Pierce was only about
five-foot-seven but he was definitely on the rise, a star in local GOP politics, their new fair-haired boy. Everyone had expected him to be chosen as the next congressman when Mo Wilson was laid low. But the party bosses fooled everyone by picking the Hack instead, and Pierce was said to have swallowed his pride and accepted their verdict.

Now, though, with the Hack out of the way, it looked like Pierce would get his big chance after all. According to the newspapers I'd read that morning at Madeline's, the local Republican big cheeses
—the county chairmen of the 22nd District—were about to endorse someone as their official, party-approved write-in candidate. All the pundits were predicting that they would select Pierce, who would of course go on to clobber his opponent, the Jewish liberal suspected murderer, in the election.

The lone woman in the room broke into my thoughts. "Looking for someone?" she asked, trying to soften her irritation with a hint of a smile.

She was too waif-like for my tastes, but attractive in an Ally McBealish sort of way. Though she looked more exasperated than grief-stricken, I finally recognized her anyway: she was the Hack's widow. I'd seen her mug on the back of his campaign brochures, gazing up at him adoringly.

What argument had I interrupted? And who were all the other men in the room? Unfortunately I didn't have time to figure it out. "Excuse me," I said belatedly and withdrew, closing the door behind me.

The quarrel instantly started up again—but quieter this time. They were trying to be discreet. All I could hear was an occasional "Screw you!" or "The hell with that!"

Disappointed, I started back down the hallway. But then I noticed an open bathroom to my left, immediately next door to the bedroom in question. Even better, there was a connecting door, now closed, between the two rooms.

Carpeing
the
diem,
I snuck into the bathroom and shut the door to the hall. The noises from the living room and kitchen fell away. I tiptoed to the connecting door, dropped down to the floor, and put my ear as close as it could go to the crack under the door.

The voices began leaking through. "If you think I'm gonna lie down and let you fuck me," a man was saying, "dream on."

"Damn it, Pierce," another man growled, "if the widow goes through with it, and you two split the vote, that asshole Shmuckler could win."

"Give it a rest," the first speaker
—Pierce—said. "Shmuckler'll be lucky to get five percent."

"We don't know that," a third voice whined. "What if people get some sick kick out of voting for a murderer? We can't risk it."

"So you're gonna let this bitch scare you into doing what she wants?" Pierce yelled, outraged.

Then there was a sudden silence. What was going on in there? I wriggled even closer to the door, putting my ear right up against the crack
—

And the door burst open.

I looked up from the floor. The bald guy was standing there with his hand on his hips, glowering down at me. Behind him, five other pairs of eyes glowered down at me too.

Feeling like a poor excuse for a worm, something too low to even use as fish bait, I scrambled awkwardly to my feet. "Excuse me," I mumbled for the second time in two minutes, grinning inanely, and got the hell out of there.

My wife laughed her head off later that day, when I told her how I'd been caught in the act. "Hey, it wasn't funny," I complained.

"I'm sure it wasn't," she said, and laughed even harder.

I didn't get too riled at her, though. I knew this was just Andrea's way of releasing nervous tension. She had gone along with my decision to help Will beat his murder rap, since she'd become friends with him too over the years. But she wasn't too thrilled about the whole thing. She still maintained
—with some justification, I must admit—that the only reason I'd escaped my previous Sam Spade impersonations alive was because I got lucky as hell.

Finally she got her guffaws under control. "So what were these people quarreling about?" she asked.

I'd had plenty of time to cogitate about that quarrel, with its allusions to "splitting the vote" and "letting this bitch scare you." "I think the other men in that room were Republican county chairmen," I said. "Pierce and the widow were both asking them for the party endorsement. And the widow was threatening to run anyway, even if they didn't endorse her—and even if that meant the Republican vote would be split."

Andrea whistled. "She'
s acting pretty ballsy for someone who just lost her husband."

"Yeah. And she didn't seem too horribly broken up about his death, either."

"I'll have to ask Rosalyn about her."

Rosalyn was Andrea's friend, a fellow English prof at her community college. "Why Rosalyn?"

Andrea frowned at me. "I thought I told you. The Hack's wife took a course from her."

"Oh, right, I rememb
er." Actually, I didn't. Yet another symptom of the alarming forgetfulness I'd been having lately. Dreaded middle age strikes again.

Any further discussion of Rosalyn and the widow was halted by my two sons, who suddenly raced into the room whooping with joy. "Daddy, guess what?" Derek shouted. "We found the Yankees' web page!"

"It's so cool!" his little brother, Bernie, exclaimed. "It tells you everything about Bernie Williams.
Everything!”

Three months ago we bought the kids a fancy new computer, and now that machine gave both of them their reason for living. We limited them to an hour apiece of computer time per day, but that hour was the absolute high point of their existence. The hard drive went on the fritz for two days last month, and Bernie was still having nightmares about it.

We bought the computer because we felt guilty that All the Other Kids Had Them, and maybe we weren't preparing our own children sufficiently for the computer age. In retrospect, I have doubts about our purchase. Okay, it wasn't nearly as foolish as the Stairmaster that's rusting away in our basement. But Derek and Bernie were just as happy—and more creative—doing the stuff they used to do before the computer came, like reading, playing catch, and drawing pictures of baseball players.

Even worse, now I was
stuck listening to endless anecdotes about their computer experiences. Myself, I find computers incredibly uninteresting.

Although in truth,
maybe my real problem was jealousy. How could my seven-year-old—heck, even my five-year-old—understand computers better than I did? Every time I try to get information from the Internet, I end up with a headache.

Eager to change the subject from computers, I asked, "So how was school today, guys?"

"Fine," they answered in unison. Then they hurried back to their beloved machine, which had completely taken over Andrea's study—or as it was now called, "the computer room."

"Fine."
School was only two days old, and already they were totally blasé about it.

Ah well, at least school wasn't traumatizing them, I comforted myself as I picked up the phone book and looked for Rosalyn's number. I doubted she'd be at home, though. She was probably at her boyfriend Sam's house, locked into som
e heavy discussion about Commitment and Children and "Are We Ready?" Sometimes it seemed like half of Andrea's unmarried friends were having that exact same discussion with their boyfriends, which Andrea and I privately called the "Marry me, asshole" conversation. After marriage, of course, it's replaced by the ever popular "You never tell me I'm pretty anymore."

But I guess Rosalyn and Sam were taking a break from the deep stuff, because she was home when I called. "Sure, I had Susan Tamarack," Rosalyn said. "She was in my Comp 102 class this summer. Why?"

"What was she like?"

"Don't know. She was
pretty quiet, one of those students that always sit in the back. So you must feel pretty bad about your friend killing Susan's husband."

"I'm not so sure he di
d it. Listen, why was Susan Tamarack taking a community college course? Seems like an odd thing to do, when your husband is in the middle of a huge political campaign."

"Doesn't seem odd to me. Maybe she wanted to try a new thing, you know, s
omething just for herself. I remember on the first day of class, when I had the students interview each other, she said she hadn't been working or going to school for ten years."

And now she wanted to get elected to Congress. Not a bad entry-level position. "She ever say anything about her marriage?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Anything."

There was a brief silence, then Rosalyn said, "I think she felt pretty fried, trying to take care of her kid and get her schoolwork done at the same time she was doing the whole politician's wife routine. But nothing really sticks out."

"How about in her writing? Anything stick out there?"

"Hey, I had
thirty students
in that dumb course, just about ruined my summer. I was in such a hurry to grade those papers, I could've had J. D. Salinger himself in my class and I wouldn't have noticed it."

She was exaggerating, I knew; Rosalyn was actually a painfully committ
ed teacher who marked every misplaced comma and obsessed over whether to give an A- or B+. "Are Comp 102 students still required to do portfolios?" I asked.

I knew about these portfolios
—or, as I always thought of them, "port
folly
os"—from my pre-Hollywood millionaire days, when I used to teach Comp 102 at the community college as an adjunct. At the end of the semester, I'd have to gather together five of each student's best essays for two other profs in the department to read. The profs could then fail the student, even if his actual teacher—in this case, me—had passed him.

In theory, this was su
pposed to introduce accountability to the grading process. But in reality, the portfolios had absolutely zilch impact, because no professors had ever had the social gaucherie to overrule their colleagues. The whole setup was just typical academic folly.

"Yeah, we still have portfolios," Rosalyn said. "Which reminds me, I have to get my summer portfolios to the committee."

"I'd like to take a look at what Susan Tamarack wrote," I said.

No answer.

"Rosalyn?"

"I can't do that," she finally responded.

"Why not?"

"Wouldn't be ethical. Some of these students write pretty personal stuff. I promise them at the beginning of the semester, no one will ever see what they write except for me."

"And two other professors."

"Well, yeah."

"Come on, Roz."

"Hey, it's a privacy issue. Would you want random people reading
your
personal stuff?"

"If it might help solve a murder and keep an innocent man out of jail, then sure. No problem."

"I really don't see how Susan's portfolio could help you."

In all honesty, I wasn't so sure it could help me either. But I had no idea where else to start my investigation and I was getting despe
rate, so I kept my doubts to myself. "She was married to the man. Maybe she knew something. Maybe she
did
something."

"I'm sorry, Jake
—"

"Get real, will you? These aren't exactly privileged communications. You're an English
professor grading papers, not a Catholic priest taking a confession."

"You'd be surprised. Sometimes there's not much difference."