3 Strange Bedfellows (7 page)

She frowned. "I don't get you."

"Sure, you do. Your boyfriend was blackmailing your husband. That's how he got the big party endorsement." I had a sudden stroke of what felt like brilliance. "I'll bet you even helped him with the blackmail. You told Jack the dirt about your husband. So what was it?"

Farrah the Second shot me a venomous look. If looks could kill, I was maggot food for sure.

"Screw you," she hissed, and walked out.

For a two-year commuters' school, Northwoods Community College has a surprisingly beautiful campus. Okay, the buildings aren't much, just your basic institutional boxes, but they're located at the edge of a forest, with hiking trails out back and a clear view of the Adirondack foothills. It's almost enough to give you the illusion that you're at a classy place.

As I drove Andrea through the campus, it was teeming with students bustling to their 10:30 classes. Every last one of them was white, and I wouldn't be surprised if every last one was Christian, too. Beyond that, though, they came in all ages, shapes, and sizes.

A lot of these students were eighteen years old, not overly bright, with no clear idea why they were here. They chewed a lot of gum, drank a lot of beer, and bored me stiff when I used to teach at this joint.

Then there was another group of students, also fresh out of high school, but more fo
cused and generally smarter. These were kids from small-town, working class families who already knew they wanted a B.A., but couldn't afford a four-year school for the whole four years. So they were planning to put in two years at Northwoods, then transfer to a "real college," as they would say. My heart went out to these kids.

But my favorite students of all were the older ones, the returning students in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties. Most of these were men and women stuck in six-dollar-an-hour service jobs who were eager
to better themselves and become nurses, physical therapists, or computer technicians. Sometimes you'd run into a homemaker hoping to return to the workforce after a decades-long hiatus.

As I pulled up in front of McCracken Hall, which houses the English Department, I wondered again: why did Susan Tamarack enroll in Rosalyn's Comp 102 course? With her husband about to become a United States congressman, and all the changes that would mean for both of them, surely she wasn't considering going back to work at this stage of her life.

And another question: did Susan know about her husband's affair? If only there were some way to—

Andrea broke into my thoughts. "I'm late, gotta run," she said, kissing me and hurrying out of the car. "Thanks for the ride!"

"No problem," I replied. I waited until she was safely out of sight. Then I parked the car and got out.

I had a plan.

Keeping my head down, I slinked inside McCracken. The main floor was full of people scurrying around like ants, but I didn't see anyone I knew. I slipped down the side stairs to the English Department.

Rosalyn's office, if I remembered correctly, was at the far left corner of the rear
corridor. I tried to act nonchalant and slow my rapidly beating heart as I passed two students on my way back there.

Don't be so uptight,
I told myself. After all, it wasn't like I was plotting to steal a computer or something truly valuable. All I wanted to do was borrow a stupid portfolio.

I located Rosalyn's office without incident. But it was locked. Now what?

Using my body to shield my larcenous activities from anyone who might be coming up the hall, I took out my keys and tried them all. No go. I guess that would be too easy.

Next I took out my Visa card, wiggled it under the lock, and tried to open the door that way. But it didn't work. No surprise there
—I've never been able to pull off that trick. Somebody should hold a special course in lock picking for us sensitive
artiste
types who are trying to make it in the wild, woolly world of cops and robbers. Or maybe I could ask one of the prisoners in my Creative Writing class to give me some tips.

On the theory that my Visa card might be too stiff to wiggle properly, I took out my AAA card and tried that. I didn't have any real hope that it would work, I was just going through the motions.

But then I heard a small click. Miracle of miracles, something seemed to give—and when I turned the knob, the door actually opened!

My heart burst with pride. I felt like I had just
completed an important rite of passage—

"Jacob," someone said.

"Aauuh!"
I screamed.

"You okay?" Jeremy Wartheimer asked, as he stood there about two feet away from me. He was close enough that I could see the large pores in his unhealthy, acne-scarred skin. Jeremy was a colleague of Andrea's
—her least favorite one.

"Sure, I'm fine," I said. "You just startled me a little, that's all."

Jeremy eyed me quizzically, then glanced over at Rosalyn's open door. Had he seen me unlock it with my AAA card? That would be a very bad scene. Andrea was up for tenure next year, and I doubted it would help her case any if her husband got caught breaking into her colleagues' offices. Palming the card, I stuffed my hand in my pocket as casually as I could.

"What's up?" Jeremy asked. "Is Roz in?"

"No."

"I'm surprised she left her door unlocked."

Desperate to distract him, I queried, "So how goes the struggle?"

"Well, you know how it is," he began, then launched into a lengthy detailed analysis of The Struggle.

You see, Jeremy Wartheimer was emphatically not a man who only stood for filberts. No, Jeremy was a Marxist in a big way, and a Trotskyite too, whatever that means. He would have made me nostalgic for the old days when I believed passionately that we could Change the World, except that he was such a jerk.

Jeremy and a couple of
other teachers at the college—they called themselves a "communist cell"—had decided that the best way to bring about the long-awaited Revolution was to send frequent long memos to all the faculty members. Generally the memos were addressed like this:
“To our fellow worker citizens."
The memo itself would consist of ten or twenty pages of unbearably convoluted prose, which, if you cared enough to puzzle it out, usually boiled down to this basic message: In a capitalist society, true knowledge is impossible. Therefore, teachers know nothing. In fact, it is absurd for us to call ourselves
teachers
. We should all immediately inform our students that we're complete and total frauds.

Since this is not the sort of thing teachers usually like to say to their students, these Trotsky-inspired memos had no discernible effect besides making people cranky. However, that didn't se
em to bother Jeremy and his fellow cell members in the slightest. They just kept plugging away.

I let Jeremy plug away at me for several minutes, long enough for him to forget about Rosalyn's unlocked door. Then I interrupted him in the middle of a harangue about "outmoded liberal humanist principles" and told him I had to be off.

But Jeremy stopped me. "Oh, Jacob," he said, "one more thing."

"Yes?"

His dead serious, dogma-infested face broke into an incongruously ingratiating smile. "Do you think you could read a screenplay I wrote?"

Good grief, was there any way out of this? I couldn't think of one. Since Jeremy was a colleague of Andrea's, I couldn't just go with my gut instinct and tell him to soak his nose with a rubber hose. "Sure, I'd love to," I said, feeling like a coward.

"Great, I'll go get it. I left it upstairs. I'll be right back." He dashed off toward the stairs, apparently eager to bring me his screenplay before I magically disappeared.

I followed Jeremy's example and did some dashing of my own, into Rosalyn's office. I was planning to throw open her desk drawers and do a quick search, but lo and behold, I got lucky. Right there in plain view on the edge of her desk was a pile of manila folders containing portfolios
—and Susan Tamarack's was the third from the top. I grabbed it, stuffed it under my jacket, and made it back out to the hallway seconds before Jeremy reappeared.

"My screenplay is entitl
ed
Contestation,"
he said, handing it over gingerly, like a fragile treasure. "It's a comedy about the inadequate representation of working-class Americans in the electronic media."

"Sounds like a hit," I said. "I'll read it as soon as I get the chance." I waved Jeremy a quick good-bye, sped upstairs, and on an impulse tossed his screenplay into a garbage can in the front lobby. Then I walked quickly back to my car and got in. Before I even had the door closed, I was already eagerly examining my stolen loot.

My eagerness abated quickly, though, when I began to actually read. There were five essays in Susan Tamarack's manila folder. The first two, "My Mom's Death" and "What the Fourth of July Means to Me" were chock full of the kind of sentimental treacle that makes English teachers bald and sardonic before their time. Reading this stuff made me sympathetic to Jeremy, trying to add a little excitement to his life with Trotskyite intrigue.

Susan's third essay was about
Charlotte's Web.
It started off,
"This book is very good for kids. It teaches them that true friendship can save the life of a pig."

And this person was running for
Congress?

Ah, well. I guess there's no law that politicians have to be intelligent.

The fourth essay wasn't too promising either: "How to Make a Good Pancake." And when I saw the title to her fifth and last essay—"My Favorite Animal"—I was about ready to give up in despair.

But out of a sense of duty, I skimmed the thing. It
sure was oddly written. Maybe Susan was in a hurry or stressed out when she wrote it, because it jumped around like a bad Hunter Thompson piece. She started out talking about her favorite animal—the turtle, in case you're wondering—and then somehow mysteriously segued into a discussion of her son's love for baseball. He would be playing in a Saratoga rec league this fall, the same one my own kids signed up for.

Then the essay did a sort of sideways shuffle into a long description of turtles' virtues.
"They're very patient, and they never pass judgment on people,"
she wrote. I couldn't really argue with that. I think I can say in all honesty that I've never had a turtle pass judgment on me. Though if one did pass judgment, I'm not sure how I would know.

After that she did a qu
ick comparative analysis of turtles and people, in which people turned out to be decidedly inferior. In all fairness, this was not a badly written passage. But it was the next two paragraphs that grabbed my eyeballs and glued them to the page.

"Like, for instance,"
Susan wrote,
"people get all sanctimonious when they hear about a woman who's getting beat up by her husband. They think, why doesn't she just leave him? But it's not that easy. It's really not. What if you've got no money of your own and not much education, and he's this really high powered-lawyer and everything? What do you do then?

"I think people should really put on the other person's shoes before they start criticizing his bunions."

The essay stopped right there. Ordinarily I would have taken some time to contemplate that bunion metaphor. But I was too busy contemplating something else.

Was the Hack a wife beater?

And if he was . . .
what did Susan do about it?

I got my car in gear and headed down the highway. It was high time to have a little chat with the widow.

7

Yes, it was high time indeed. But when I got to the widow's house, no one was there.

And when I hit the widow's campaign HQ, she wasn't there, either. Instead, there were five elderly ladie
s licking envelopes and four middle-aged guys working the phones. That was about nine more volunteers than we usually had working for Will even
before
he got busted. I stood at the front door and just watched for a few moments, feeling jealous.

Before I could step forward into the room, Oxymoron, the black Republican, appeared out of a side door and planted his large bulk in front of me. "Yeah?" he growled, folding his arms. "What do you want?"

"You probably remember me, I'm with the
Saratogian
—"

"I remember you," he said, not sounding all that nostalgic about it.

"Is the candidate here?" I asked. "I'd like to do an interview for the newspaper."

"She's not here."

"Could you tell me where she is?"

"No," Oxymoron said.

"What's with the attitude?" I blustered. "Don't you want some free press?"

"What did you say your name was?"

"Jacob Burns." I'm not above trying to use my fifteen minutes of fame to my advantage, so I continued, "You've probably heard of me. I wrote the movie
The Gas that Ate San Francisco."

Oxymoron stood there with his massive arms folded across his chest. "Yeah, I've heard of you, all right. Even saw your movie, thought it was a piece of crap. But I haven't seen your byline in the paper. So beat it."

He moved forward and I had to back up, almost banging my head into the door. I sidestepped. "You sure she's not in the back? I just have a couple quick questions," I said.

He put up his arms to grab me and shove me out of the room. But then a strange thing happened. My own skinny arms reflexively flew upward to ward him off . . . and the knuckles on my right hand somehow connected with his lower lip. It split open, and blood trickled out.

Oxymoron didn't take too kindly to that. In fact, he came at me with both fists. His first shot was a hard left aimed at my
shnoz
. I ducked under it just in time.

"Hey, I'm sorry!" I said. "I didn't mean to hit you!"

But Oxymoron wasn't listening. He came at me again. I was lucky to find a folding chair a couple of feet away. I grabbed it and flung it at him as hard as I could. That slowed him down enough so that I could make it out the door three seconds ahead of his next punch.

Ah well, I thought to myself as I hustled back to my car. Yet another setback for black-Jewish relations.

I went home and played phone tag with a pair of Shmuckler volunteers who'd left regretful messages that they were leaving the campaign. Then I called the Shmuck-man himself an
d gave him the latest investigation news, after first swearing him to secrecy. I didn't want him blurting anything to the press, because that might make Susan, Linda, Ducky
et al
clam up.

Will was excited about my discoveries and would have kept me on the phone longer, but I had to take a break from the investigation to pick up Derek and Bernie at the bus stop. Then we spent the afternoon playing catch in the backyard. They were both having their first official league practices on Sunday, and they wanted to be ready. As Bernie explained, "Today is our
pre
-practice."

There's nothing in this world that gives me greater pleasure than playing baseball with Derek and Bernie.
Or maybe
pleasure
isn't a profound enough word. Watching my sons dive for popups and race after ground balls brings back my own boyhood to me. When Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa saved the game of baseball, they saved my childhood too.

After the boys and I were thoroughly pooped, we went inside for some apple juice, then headed upstairs to lie in bed and read together. It's quiet moments like this when we have our best talks, so after I read them a chapter of
Greatest World Series Thrillers,
I got the conversational ball rolling. "How was school today, guys?" I asked.

"Fine," they both replied. If I had my way, the word
fine
would be stricken from the English language. Then Derek asked, "Can I have computer time now?" and his little brother chimed in, "Me, too! Me, too!"

But I was too stubborn to give up just yet. "Come on, guys, tell me about school. What did you learn today?"

"Nothing," Derek said.
"Please
can I play on the computer?"

"Come on, you must've learned
something."

"No, I didn't," he repli
ed irritably. "Really, Dad, second grade is a
joke
. You know what we did in math today? It was, like, how much is ten plus eight? I'll bet even Bernie knows that, and he's just in kindergarten."

"Eighteen!" Bernie called out proudly.

"See, I'm right," Derek said triumphantly. "And reading is even worse, 'cause I have to sit there waiting for all the other kids to finish. And . . . they . . . read . . . about . . . this . . . slow. It's so boring!
Now
can I play on the computer?"

So this was how my child spent his days
—getting bored silly? Three cheers for our ultra-homogenized, one-size-fits-all public school system. I felt like tearing my hair out.

Little Bernie, who i
s beginning to assume the peacemaker role in the family, realized I was feeling bad and decided to cheer me up. "Daddy,
I
learned something in school today."

"Well, that's certainly good to hear," I said. "What did you learn?"

"But I didn't really like learning it."

"What was it?"

"No, I don't want to talk about it."

"Oh, come on, Bernie."

"Yeah, tell us," his big brother said.

Finally Bernie gave in. "Well, this lady came to class? Mrs. Demarco?"

"Uh-huh."

"And she talked to us about our private parts."

That threw me, all right. "Your what?"

Bernie giggled. "You know, our penises and stuff."

Derek spoke up. "Yeah, I remember her. Mrs. Demarco. She's
always
talking about private parts."

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or take this seriously. "What exactly does she tell you about private parts?"

"I don't know," Bernie said in a complaining voice. "It's, like, embarrassing. Why does this lady have to come in and talk to us about our penises?"

"Well," I said hesitantly, "I guess she wants to make sure the kids know their private parts are private, and no one else is allowed to mess with them."

"But it's
embarrassing
. How would you like to have some lady come in and start talking about
your
penis?"

"And your butt," Derek added.

"And vaginas," Bernie threw in.

"I always hated it when Mrs. Demarco came in," Derek said. "It was, like, weird."

"It's just really embarrassing," Bernie said. "Can we go down and play on the computer?"

I didn't answer right away. I was thinking, maybe this explains why our boys
—especially the older one—were so into the computer. After a long day of wasting their brain cells at school, squirming in their seats and learning a little bit about their private parts but not much of anything else, they were probably desperate to exercise their noggins. Despite my fear and loathing of computers, I had to admit that the computer games we had, and the Internet stuff they were getting into lately, gave them a chance to mentally stimulate themselves. Unlike school.

On the other hand, maybe Derek was exaggerating the problem. And hopefully, after the first couple of weeks school would get more interesting
—

"Daddy,"
Derek said.

I shook myself. "Sure," I told them, "go play on the computer."

And that's what the three of us were doing two hours later, after dinner, when all hell broke loose.

Andrea was lying on the living room sofa reading a Georgette Heyer novel at the time. Meanwhile, the boys were showing me how to get information off the Internet about Susan Tamarack. I figured it wouldn't hurt to know what she was about.

I had planned to search out this info myself, without the kids' help, to keep them from getting more involved in the murder. But they came in the room and started giving me advice, and before I knew it, the computer search had turned into a group project.

Unfortunately, even with the kids' expert help I couldn't find out much. Susan Tamarack had not been a very public figure. I did learn that she originally met the Hack ten years ago, when she was a secretary in his office. Interesting
—he seemed to have a thing for secretaries. With that as background, I was willing to bet that Susan guessed about his affair with his latest secretary. The widow's murder motives were piling up higher than a politician's promises.

After we exhausted the Internet's limited wisdom about Susan Tamarack, Bernie asked, "Daddy, can we play Triple Play now?"

"Just one more thing," I said. "Let's see what we can find out about Linda Medw—"

And then it happened:
KA-BOOM!
It came from right outside. Instantly the window behind us splintered open. A bullet thudded into the wall just above our heads.

"Down!
"
I yelled at the kids.
"Get down!"

I shoved them off their chairs. We hurtled to the floor as another gunshot rang out, and another. It sounded
like the shooter was in our driveway. Window shards rained down on us. Two more bullets hit the wall.

There was a brief silence, then Andrea screamed from the other room,
"Are you okay?!"

"Yes! Stay where you are!"

The kids were whimpering. I crawled with them into the living room, where the shades were drawn and no one could see inside. I quickly reached up and shut off the lamp for good measure, as Andrea grabbed the portable phone and dialed 911. Then we all lay down on the rug and waited for the cops to come.

"Daddy?" Bernie said, his voice shaking with fear.

"Yes?"

"Is the computer okay?"

I couldn't stop myself. I started laughing hysterically.

"What's so funny?" Bernie asked, his feelings hurt.

I sobered up as much as I could. "Nothing, honey. Don't worry. The computer's fine."

The police came in waves. The first cop to blare his siren our way was my friend and neighbor Dave, back from his little getaway with Madeline. Unfortunately he was out on patrol that evening, so he wasn't around when the shots were fired. By the time he got to our house, the gunman—or gunwoman—had already fled.

Dave's main job was to sit with us on the living room rug and keep us safe and
relatively calm until reinforcements arrived. I was glad for his company, since he's much more
human
than the other local cops I've had run-ins with. Dave is the only black cop in town, and I think being an outsider has upped his sensitivity quotient.

After a couple of minutes of cowering, I went outside with Dave to do some quick surveillance by flashlight. We didn't find any muddy footprints or dropped guns. We did find a bunch of dried leaves on the driveway that I hadn't gotten around to raking up. They crackled loudly under our feet, and I wondered why I hadn't heard the crackling under the gunman's feet when I was at the computer. The window had been open about a foot.

We ended our surveillance when the other cops started coming. My opinion of Saratoga's finest was not improved by my encounters with them that night.

Not counting Dave, five other cops made the scene, including the grand poohbah himself, Chief Walsh. As I've mentioned, Chief Walsh was not exactly my biggest booster. He once tried to bust me for murder, and I tried to bust
him
for conspiracy to extort. Given how intensely we disliked each other, I guess he gets points for at least showing up at my house in the first place. But that's all he gets points for.

Andrea took the boys upstairs and went to bed with them while I told the chief and his square-jawed minions exactly what had happ
ened. First I described the gunshots, then filled them in on my recent activities. "Because it's obvious," I declared, "that whoever shot at me was trying to stop my murder investigation—either by scaring me off or by killing me."

Chief Walsh eyed me dubiously. He was handsome and distingue, with classical features, clear blue eyes, and perfectly coifed silver hair, and I hated everything about him. I always thought he would have made a perfect Nazi colonel, casually sipping Rhine wine with his pinky extended as he sent victims off to the camps. "Have you learned anything in your 'investigation' that someone might actually be worried about?" Walsh asked with a tinge of sarcasm.