Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure (17 page)

“I’ll sic Boylan on him,” I said. “Stu will be thrilled. A little homicidal drama will take his mind off the horror of grading midterms.”

***

I left a message on Neil Boylan’s voice-mail, and headed immediately for Earlene’s office. “Earlene, I’ve got a serious problem.”

“Hmm?” She pressed the Save icon and turned from her computer, eyes still unfocused from concentrating on her work.

I crossed the office and sat in the chair by her desk. “I know this isn’t your bailiwick, but Miles said he doesn’t want anything to do with it, there’s no one else in my department I feel comfortable talking to, and I don’t know the college protocol for dealing with such a…an urgent issue.”

“You’ve got my interest now, girlfriend.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. “Want coffee?” She gestured toward her intricate little black machine. “I was just about to make some.”

“Sure.” But my head was already constricted by a band of caffeine pain. “No, wait—I’ve had too much already.” But I’d had a fearsome responsibility placed upon my untenured shoulders; maybe more caffeine would jolt me into action. “Oh, all right. You talked me into it.”

My friend laughed. “You’re easy.” Then she took a second look. “Man, you sure look a wreck today.”

“Yeah,” I swiped a lank strand of hair out of my eyes. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“What’s up?”

I told her about Joe having deceived the department about being Native American and about Ned’s decree that I not tell a soul. “So, I’m truly in a quandary. Ned doesn’t seem quite…quite stable at the moment, and I feel that it’s my obligation to go over his head with this. After all, for six years the college has employed a professor with fraudulent credentials. Who do I tell?”

An entire panoply of expressions from amused to appalled to aghast had played across Earlene’s face. “Well, yeah, no question—you’ve got to inform someone, and right away. But whom? I’d say go to the dean of faculty. He’ll probably call the president right in on it. Oh, God!” She slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Think of the headlines in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
!”

***

I went to Sanjay’s office immediately, only to learn that both President Avery Mitchell and Dean Sanjay Patel were off at a higher education administration conference in Detroit. Neither would be back until Thursday. I didn’t want to call them and give the bad news long distance, nor did I feel right about leaving it with their assistants. Oh, well, the college had survived six years without knowing the truth: another day or two wouldn’t hurt.

When I got back to Dickinson Hall, Sally Chenille pushed past me in the heavy doorway, seemingly without seeing me, and hustled into the English Department office. The air in the department hallway was rank with crisis. Sally was followed by Miles Jewell, who rolled his eyes at me. Clark McCutcheon strolled past, favoring me with his slow, appreciative smile, and vanished into Ned’s office, closing the door behind him.

Okay, let the games begin. Responsible department members were about to be informed of Joe’s deception. Surely one of them would inform the proper college authorities.

***

When I got to my office, Lieutenant Neil Boylan was stationed outside the door, tapping the ferrule of his sleek, black umbrella impatiently against the wood floor.

“You wanted to see me, right? Ready to turn yourself in?” With anyone else the quip would have been a joke.

“Come in, Lieutenant,” I said, “and close the door behind you. I’ve learned something you need to know.”

Grateful for the desk’s oaken mass, I barricaded myself behind it. Joe’s grade book was still in the top drawer, but unless the lieutenant had X-ray vision he wasn’t going to find it. And what if he did? I needed the grade book; I was teaching Joe’s course—at least for now. No one had to know that I planned to scrutinize the book for clues to his death.

Boylan stood ramrod straight, as if he had never heard of bendable joints, but when I gestured to the green armchair, he sat—stiffly. It was a discomfiting situation for both of us; he sure didn’t want to be here at my bidding, and I couldn’t wait to get rid of the man.

I told the lieutenant what Stuart had told me about the dead man’s true identity. “And so he was never really Joseph Lone Wolf. He was Frank Vitagliano the entire time.” I made my story simple, honest, and short, but Boylan sat there, silent, for a full minute before he spoke. “Convenient timing, Professor,” he said, finally. Skepticism and suspicion played across his angular features. Running his fingers through his damp ginger curls, he said, “You sure you didn’t brief this, er, old friend, Professor Horowitz, on what might make a good diversion from any…er…speculations about your possible culpability?”

I lost my hard-won cool. “Any ‘speculations’ you might have about me, Lieutenant Boylan, I fear are baseless. One thing I learned in graduate school was that speculation is merely a preliminary part of the process of reasoning and investigation. One begins with speculation, but one must have irrefutable evidence in order to come to a valid conclusion.” Anger always brings out the Latinate in my language. I rose as if I assumed I had the right to dismiss him and handed him a sheet of yellow lined paper. “You’ll find Stuart Horowitz’s full name here, Lieutenant, along with his academic affiliation, phone numbers, e-mail address. He says he’d be more than happy to talk to you and to provide the names of several of his former fellow graduate students who would also be able to identify Joe Lone Wolf as Frank Vitagliano.”

“I’ll bet he would.” Boylan was the master of the bad-cop evil eye—not even a cat’s grin today. “I’ll just bet he will. You sure do have a lot of male friends, Professor Pelletier, now don’t you?”

Chapter 20

After Neil Boylan left, dragging his malice behind him, I went to the door and twisted the knob to make sure it was locked. Then I threw the bolt. In the cold, rain-blurred light of the departing afternoon, I shivered and pulled my thick sweater tighter around me. Then I opened the top desk drawer. Finally, I had a moment to look through Joe’s grade book.

It was the usual thick-cardboard-covered class record and roll book, the kind I bought every few years at OfficeMax. This one had dark green covers, its light green pages featuring wide vertical columns for student names, narrow columns to mark attendance, and boxy columns at the end of each row to record mid-term and final grades. Oddly enough, throughout the book, the only columns filled in by Joe were the wide ones on the left for names and the boxy ones on the right side for final grades. In between, there was a huge swath of emptiness; Joe hadn’t recorded attendance, quiz grades, essay grades, class participation, or any of the multitude of small cues that allow a teacher to remember whether or not her students are conscious in the classroom. Also, over the years of teaching at Enfield, he hadn’t given actual letter grades; he’d chosen Pass/Fail grading, a not uncontroversial option. I leafed through the book. From Joe Lone Wolf’s first Enfield course to his most recent completed course in the Spring semester, grades were marked in a bold black script. And without exception they read P—a solid column all the way down of P, P, P, P, P.

Then I reached his current class, and in an otherwise blank final-grades column, Hank Brody’s semester grade was already listed—a bold black, indelible-ink F.

I gasped. An F for a scholarship student? That meant death. Well, not literally, of course, but it meant a severe blow to his financial aid. And Hank was an exceptional student; his essay for me had picked up on the discussion about magic in the Native tales. It had been both insightful and eloquent. This grade had to be a mistake. And why had Hank praised Joe so highly at the poetry competition? You would have thought he’d want to kill the man who had threatened his academic future.

Wait—bad choice of words, but I did have to talk to this kid as soon as possible. I checked my cellphone for the time: 5:35. Too late to see him today.

Then a worrisome thought plagued me; a failing grade could be seen as a motive. Someone who didn’t know Hank might suspect him of the murder. I had to keep Lieutenant Neil Boylan from getting his hands on this grade book. Especially since Hank, as the student who’d found Joe’s body, had been under suspicion at the start. This time Boylan would think he had his perp for sure.

I stood in the middle of the office and looked around. Should I keep the grade book in my desk? Should I hide it among my own books?

In the end, I decided to take it home with me. I’d call Hank first thing tomorrow morning and set up a talk with him.

Wednesday 10/21

“Do you believe in magic, Professor?”

“Me?” Hank’s question took me aback. “Hell, no. I’m much too rational a thinker for that—maybe too rational for my own good. Why do you ask?”

“Because you gave me an A on that essay I wrote about magical transformation in the Trickster tales.” The sun through the window next to our table in the Java Zone fell on his shaggy dreadlocks, and their straw turned to gold.

“I didn’t
give
you anything. You
earned
it. You made a passionate and intelligent argument for the cultural importance of magic in the tales.”

He sipped from his extra-large mocha latte with whipped cream. This early in the morning—not yet eight o’clock—the mere sight of the super-size concoction nauseated me. “It was just that Garrett Reynolds was so damn contemptuous about the magical elements in the American Indian stories that he pissed me off.”

“Better lower your voice, Hank.” Classes were about to begin, and Java Zone was more of a grab-it-and-go zone than a sit-and-eavesdrop zone, so we hadn’t been particularly quiet. “Garrett’s at that table, over by the doors.”

Hank turned his head and stared. “That jerk! He—” He abruptly clamped his teeth over his words. “Never mind. I promised…Well, anyhow, I don’t really believe in magic, either, but don’t you think it’s truly arrogant to say that something’s impossible just because we don’t understand how it works?”

I laughed. “Imagine someone turning on a light bulb in Puritan New England. She would have been burned as a witch.”

“Yeah, and the light bulb, too.”

I peeled the top off my cardboard cup of black coffee and took a cautious sip. “So…” I said, “that’s why I asked to meet you here. After reading that terrific paper of yours, I was surprised to see the “F” Joe Lone Wolf was planning to give you in
his
course.”

“Oh.” His shoulders sagged. He pushed the latte away, half-finished, and slid me a glance I could only think of as cagey. “How do you know about that?”

I told him.

“Shit! I was hoping you wouldn’t find out. Sorry for the language, but if I fail that course, I’ll lose my scholarship. If I lose my scholarship, I’ll have to leave Enfield.” He dropped his head to his hands. “Oh, God—I’ll end up just like my father.”

A sigh expelled itself from somewhere deep in my torso. Life is in constant conspiracy to turn English professors into therapists. “Like your father?”

“Yeah, I come from coal mining country. Last summer Pop had a heart attack and died.” Hank’s head was still hanging and his hands were clenched into fists somewhere in the center of his chest. “He was only forty-three. I don’t know whether it was the coal that killed him—or the alcohol.”

I regarded him sadly. “And, really…” I sighed again. “Really, the coal and the alcohol were the same thing, weren’t they? Hopelessness.”

His head jerked up. “You understand?”

“Oh, yes. I understand. More than you can imagine.” Garret Reynolds was directly in my line of vision, so I couldn’t help but notice how agitated he seemed, tapping his fingers on the table, swiveling his head toward the door whenever anyone entered.

“This is what happened with Lone Wolf—I mean Professor Lone Wolf—I just couldn’t write what he wanted me to. He assigned us offensive…creepy…topics, like ‘In Defense of Killing Indians,’ for example, or ‘In Defense of Auschwitz.’ We were supposed to write an essay endorsing that position. He said if we could develop the skills to argue the inarguable, then we could use those skills to persuade readers of anything.”

“‘In Defense of Auchwitz,’” I mused. What a hell of a topic to inflict on students.

“Yeah. Professor Lone Wolf said we should become provocateurs, intellectual firebrands. Whatever the common wisdom was, we were to argue against it, and do it well enough to outrage and infuriate readers. It seemed perverse to me, but…what do I know? I got the topic ‘In Defense of Poverty,’ and in the end I simply couldn’t write it. What is there to endorse about poverty? Hunger? Ignorance? Fear? Disease? Listen, I’ve been living in poverty all my life—there
is
no defense. So I ended up writing a satiric essay, you know, like Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’ But when he read it Professor Lone Wolf said we weren’t allowed to be satirical. We had to present a straightforward persuasive argument. So that’s why I got a failing grade.”

“In essence you got a failing grade because you were sincerely satiric—or should that be satirically sincere.”

“That’s what he said—I was too earnest. Then I tried to drop the course, but he wouldn’t sign off on it. He told me that if I rewrote the assignment to his specifications, he’d grade it again.” Hank sat with his fingers twined together, twisting them over his stress-whitened knuckles. “I’m hoping you’ll let me write about something different, something I can believe in.” This unsophisticated kid had little practice in appearing blasé; his eyes pleaded like those of a Bassett hound.

“Oh.” I really didn’t have to think too hard about this. I understood that Hank’s scholarship meant everything to him; what would his life become if he had to drop out of school? “You know what, Hank? No sense in you writing another essay. Just give me the satiric one. If I think it’s worthy, I’ll grade you on the effectiveness of the satire. If not, you can write about something else. Okay?”

He jumped up from his chair, and for a moment I was afraid he would throw his arms around me, right there in the Java Zone.

My coffee was cold now. And I still needed ten minutes or so to review my notes for class. But I simply couldn’t run off without asking him: “Um, Hank? There’s something I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” Hank folded his gangly limbs into the chair again

“I was at that poetry slam the other night—where you read the eagle poem. After such a bad experience with Professor Lone Wolf, what upsets you so much about his death? It just doesn’t seem to compute.”

Hank looked me right in the eye. “Damn right, I’m upset. He…he was terrific.”

“Really? Even though he threatened to fail you?”

He sighed. “Did you know Joe Lone Wolf well?

“No. Not at all, to tell the truth.”

“Were you ever in his office?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s where I found the grade book. He’s got…interesting things.”

“Yeah, he does. First day of class he let us handle those beautiful baskets, those kachina dolls—do you know some of them are sacred? Then he told us that Western culture had it all wrong about the arts, separating them from ordinary life the way we do—confining them to books and museums and academic study. That drains the spirit from them, he said—stories and pictures and exquisite objects should be part of daily life in order to be alive. They should be beautiful and also be of use, like those pots and baskets. They should always be
at hand
and
in hand
. Then he picked up a plain little stone-headed tomahawk from a shelf by the door—an authentic throwing axe, he called it. The only truly ancient thing he’d been able to collect, he said. That old tomahawk, he told us, was just as infused with spirit as any Shakespeare sonnet.”

“Really? A tomahawk?”

“Yes. And he showed us how to use it. Like this…” He raised his arm high and back , then whipped his wrist forward. The motion appeared so effective I half expected the window on the far side of the room to splinter into shards. “Throwing the tomahawk, Professor Lone Wolf said, was as beautiful a motion as any ballet step in ‘Swan Lake.’”

“Really?” I repeated. I raised my own arm high and replicated his motion. Then I looked around sheepishly. Garrett Reynolds was gaping at me. Damn. But the motion of my arm and wrist had felt good, almost like a move in a dance.

“That turned my world around. I’ll never be the same again. Somehow,” Hank said, “I just can’t find it in my heart to hate him.”

Behind him, out of his range of vision, Ayesha Amhed entered the coffee shop in a cool yellow flowing robe and green head cloth. I couldn’t find it in my heart to tell Hank that at a signal from Garrett Reynolds, she’d sat right down with him and begun an earnest conversation.

“Oh, by the way, Hank,” I said, hoping I could distract his attention as I led him past their table. “The day you found Joe dead, you told me Joe’s apartment door was always open. How did you know that?”

“What? Oh, he told the whole class. Just drop by any time you want to, he said. The door’s always open.”