Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure (22 page)

“Yeah, you see…” Hank’s words tumbled on top of Ayesha’s. “…He wanted to forge an ‘Alliance of Outsiders.’ Even though I’m white, he choose me to participate because I’m—” he used finger quotes, “‘disadvantaged.’ He was dead serious about this shit. ‘Authenticity, not assimilation,’ was his rallying cry.”

Fareed Khan was listening intently to Hank, while Sanjay continued to take notes.

“Yeah.” Ayesha again. “It was as if he considered all ‘Outsiders’ to be the same—and to be ‘wounded.’ I wasn’t buying it. I don’t feel ‘wounded’ at all. ‘Marginalized,” maybe, but not
wounded
. I thought he was very condescending, and I told him so.”

“So, Ms. Ahmed,” the campus cop said, “you didn’t go to this…what did you call it? Anti-Columbus Day event?”

She shook her head. “No way. Muslims don’t do drugs, and I told him it would be disrespectful of him to insist that I do.”

The police captain turned to Hank and asked, “And what about you?”

“Oh, I went, all right. I had to, if I didn’t want to fail. But I didn’t—”

I tried to lighten things up with a laugh. “You didn’t
inhale
, right?” Sanjay and Earlene gave weak grins, but the students were too young to get the joke.

Hank gave me an indignant glare. “Of course, I didn’t inhale. And anyhow, it was peyote. You don’t
smoke
peyote. But there were a few other students there—four or five. They participated.”

Earlene casually reached for a pen. “Can you give me the names?”

He frowned. “I’m no snitch. I’m not going to tell you who my classmates were.” He glanced at Ayesha, then looked back at Earlene. “But I will tell you something I overheard the two professors talking about. There was going to be an after-party, and I think it was only for faculty. They expected other professors.”

Sanjay dropped his head in his hands and let out a strangled groan. “Professor Hilton was one of those two, wasn’t he?”

“How did you know?”

Sanjay didn’t respond.

Fareed Khan leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Now, tell me the truth, Hank, did you use any drugs at that party?”

Hank sat up straight. “No, sir. I did not use drugs in any form at any time at Professor Lone Wolf’s party. And, now, I think we’ve answered enough questions. C’mon, Ayesha, let’s get out of here.”

“Just a minute, young man.” Fareed was up and out of his chair. He wasn’t tall, but he was at least twice the body mass of scrawny Hank. “One more little thing. When Professor Lone Wolf was found dead, did you inform the homicide investigators about this party and the ‘afterparty’?”

“Are you kidding? And get myself arrested for going in the first place? You see, it was Catch 22. I was damned if I didn’t go, and now I’m damned ’cause I did.”

***

“You know, we’re going to have to pass this info about Joe Lone Wolf’s involvement with drugs on to the state police investigators,” Fareed said, after the students left.

I stifled the impulse to protest—these two vulnerable students didn’t need any more hassle.

Sanjay and Earlene looked at each other, sober with the ramifications. A long silence ensued.

Earlene sighed. “Yes, of course we do. But let’s keep the students out of it as much as possible.”

Fareed opened his mouth, but Sanjay stopped him with a raised hand. “I’ll call the staties. I’m Dean of Faculty, and Joe was one of mine.”

The security director regarded Sanjay soberly. “Hilton, too, I’m afraid. Has it occurred to anyone else but me that Ned Hilton is in this up to his eyeballs?”

Chapter 26

“And, so,” I told Felicity on my cell phone as I walked back across campus from Earlene’s office, “here’s yet another possible motive for the homicide. Joe Lone Wolf was supplying Enfield College students with free drugs, and Ned Hilton was involved. I think the new top cop here on campus suspects Ned of being the killer.”

“Really?” Felicity replied, and there was a long silence on the other end of the line. Then, “is there anyone at all left on that campus who
didn’t
have a motive for wanting Professor Lone Wolf dead?”

I laughed. “You’re a funny lady, Schultz.”

“Yeah, right. Funny as gangrene. I assume college authorities will be looking into Hilton, but I gotta say he seems like too much of a loser to do something as decisive as commit homicide. You and me have to keep looking into this. So where do you think we should go next?”

“I don’t know where you’re going, but I’m going back into cyberspace. That’s how I found out Joe’s true identity, and that’s how I got onto the drug connection. Now I have yet another idea. Who knows what else I might be able to learn.”

“Watch it, Karen,” Felicity said, in that flat, patronizing cop tone that so infuriates me when Charlie uses it. “Someone out there is damn good at covering up his—or her—tracks. No telling what they’ll do if you start turning over rocks.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I replied. “I know how to take care of myself.”

“I’ve heard people say that before,” Felicity replied. “It’s usually the kiss of death.”

***

Minutes later, with the cold late-afternoon sun streaming through bare branches and into my office windows, I found the Facebook alumni site for the Montana University Graduate English Program. Even though he hadn’t actually graduated, this was where Joe…er…Frankie Vitagliano…had done his graduate work. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, simply cruising for stray pieces of information about the man that might lead me to his killer.

Someone had taken a lot of time with this website, and it was beautifully organized. I scrolled through the graduating classes year by year, scanning the accomplishments of newly minted English PhDs: faculty positions at universities from East Podunk U. to UPenn, tenure won, books published.

Nothing from Frank Vitagliano.

I concentrated on the site for the graduate class of a decade or so earlier, when he would have been enrolled at the university. There I found something that really touched me: a memorial website for a PhD student named Sandra Begay, who, tragically, had committed suicide during her final year of courses. Sandra must have been a popular gal, because, on the tenth anniversary of her death, her classmates had bestirred themselves to post tributes, poems, and brief remembrances. One link led to Sandra’s own poems and essays, which were lauded by the webmaster as brilliant. When I saw Professor Clark McCutcheon’s name listed as the teacher for Sandra’s seminar in literary theory, I clicked on the link for her class essay. Sandra Begay’s topic was literature, culture and racial theory. The title of the essay was, “Whaddya Mean, ‘We,’ White Man?”

Oh. My. God.

I began to read, and there on Facebook, in plain sight of any inquisitive Web surfer, and, surprisingly, not password protected, I found the essay that had made Clark McCutcheon famous. It had been written by a brilliant graduate student, now deceased. I sat back in my desk chair with a thump, astounded. The great man’s reputation rested on a plagiarized grad-student paper? Was Joe Lone Wolf not the only fraud, but also Clark McCutcheon?

I pictured Clark, tall, blond, certain of his territorial rights, striding into Joe’s office a week earlier, surveying the rows of exquisite Native artifacts just as his forbears had surveyed Native land and villages. In my memory of that day, he seemed to swell until the air was sun-drenched and dry, and he filled the room with his presence. I’d been uneasy about the man then, and this new evidence of his lack of integrity made me sick at heart.

In the academic world, laying a charge of plagiarism against a scholar is an extremely grave move and is never done lightly. Stealing another scholar’s words, work, and ideas not only violates the ethical ideals that bind the scholarly world together, it also constitutes theft of intellectual property, leading to career advancement, power, and material gain. I was disgusted by Clark’s abuse of professional trust. The ideals of disinterested inquiry, the acquisition of knowledge and the passionate interplay of ideas: did these mean nothing to him?

However, before I would be in a position to make an accusation against McCutcheon, I would have to obtain evidence—
hard
evidence, as Earlene had exulted in earlier this morning with Cat’s photo—not simply memory’s soft evidence of an essay I had read years earlier.

Where could I find a copy of McCutcheon’s essay? There must be one in Joe Lone Wolf’s office. If it wasn’t there, among the newly orderly piles of papers, I’d head for the library. “Whaddaya Mean, ‘We,’ White Man?” had been published first in the journal
American Literary History
, and then in a volume of “seminal” essays on the new comparative American literature. It was certain to be somewhere in the periodicals room or in the stacks. When I got my hands on the published essay, I’d compare it word for word with the one on the Montana U. website. Then, if my suspicions were confirmed…what would I do? Call Sanjay or Avery? But it was still Saturday. Should I wait? After all, plagiarism, while the most blatant form of academic misconduct, is hardly on a par with drug use and murder, both of which the college administrators were dealing with already.

Printing out the website essay as a comparison text, I snatched up my key ring with the passkey I’d copied and sidled out into the deserted corridor. Security lamps illuminated the hallway only dimly, but sunlight still shone through the arched transom over the west door.

Perhaps because the building now seemed devoid of any conscious life, I tip-toed down the hall. Taking a deep breath and letting it out through my teeth in a long hiss, I stopped at Joe’s door with the key gripped between my thumb and forefinger, extended my hand, and slid the key into the keyhole. I turned the knob, opened the door as quietly as possible, and stepped inside.

I smelled him before I saw him—that scent of high skies and wide open plains and…maybe…sagebrush? Then I heard him. “What the fucking hell!”: Clark McCutcheon’s big voice coming from behind the desk.

I let out a screech, my heart thudding in my throat. Dust danced in the slats of light stabbing through the now fully open venetian blinds. I swallowed hard. “You almost scared me to death, McCutcheon.”

It looked as if Clark had been riffling through the desk’s deep file drawer. Still seated, he gazed at me with slitted blue eyes. I could hear the effort it cost him to modulate his voice. “Karen, what are you doing here?”

My heart was still pounding. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I asked first. And close that door behind you.”

“I don’t think so.” I was uncomfortable being here alone with him. I’d suspected Clark of lusting for Joe’s Native artifacts, and if he had been standing over by Joe’s display shelves, handling the dead man’s Indian treasures—the jewelry and pottery, the tomahawks and little dolls—I wouldn’t be thinking the unspeakable thought that was beginning to invade my mind. If I had found the shelves looted, and the war bonnet and baskets packed up and ready to be appropriated by an academic grave robber, I would have been appalled but not surprised. But the Native goods in their neat rows were intact. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Obviously it was not the precious Indian objects that Clark was after. Why was he here, then, in Joe’s office—behind Joe’s desk? I backed toward the door as unobtrusively as possible.

Earlier I had seen the professionally sorted and classified stacks of books and papers, the evidence of an evening’s search through the printouts, Xeroxes, and books that had previously cluttered the room. Now Clark seemed to have been systematically sorting through the personal files in Joe’s desk drawers. It must be papers he was looking for. But what papers? And why?

The late Indian-summer sun shone straight through the blind slats, now and, right there, at that moment, all the pieces fell together: Clark McCutcheon had killed Joe Lone Wolf. Joe must have found the source of the famous “Whiteness” essay on the Montana U website and confronted Clark with it. Clark’s high standing in the profession was based on that essay. His opportunity to be awarded Enfield College’s prestigious Palaver Chair was based on it. Had Joe threatened him with exposure? I recalled that evening at Rudolph’s bar, when the two had been huddled together in the corner. Was that what had been going on? Had Clark responded to Joe’s threats by eliminating Joe?

Standing there in the dead professor’s office, I knew it wasn’t the wisest thing in the world for me to be shut up alone with this man. I sidled closer to the door.

“You don’t think so, huh?” McCutcheon barked. “I said ‘close the door.’ Do it! Now!”

When I saw the gun in Clark’s hand I stopped stock still. The small, shiny nickel-plated automatic was pointed directly at me. Clark stepped out from behind the desk, his stance that of a man who knows how to use a gun, holding a gun he intends to use. “Well, I
do
think so. Shut that door and get away from it.”

“You don’t want to do this,” I said, with as much bravado as I could muster. A lot of good that open door a mere two yards away would do me, this quiet afternoon with no one in the building and a gun aimed in my direction.

“You’re right, I don’t.” His long white-blond hair was in tight braids today, pulled forward, one hanging over each shoulder. He shook his head, and the braids shifted back and forth across the shoulders of his fringed deerskin jacket. “Such a waste of fine womanhood.” His
tsk, tsk
of regret sounded sincere. “But, you
know
, don’t you? I saw it just now in your expression.” I couldn’t tell from his sky-blue eyes exactly what his intentions were toward me. Then he shook his head as an annoyed stallion shakes off flies. “Goddammit, woman, why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”

“You
really
don’t want to do this,” I repeated, gesturing toward the gun. My mind raced, looking for a way out. “That would be ill-considered. The police aren’t stupid. Think about how hard they’d pursue a second homicide investigation.” The half-open door behind me offered no escape; a bullet could fly faster than I could run.

“And, besides…” I tilted my head seductively, widened my gaze. Maybe I could delude him into thinking I’d make some kind of sexual
quid pro quo
deal. I knew he was…interested in me; he’d told me often enough.

But his eyes were arctic blue now, cold, killer’s eyes. “Nothing escapes me, Karen, I told you that before.” He shook his head slowly. “And I can see your mind working. I’ve killed one man. He was blackmailing me, the fool. And I can’t afford to dally around with you.” His white teeth flashed, but there was no humor in the grin. “No matter how much fun it might be.”

The sunlight was slashing through the blinds now, straight from the west. Facing the windows, I could see the dancing dust motes thicken in the bright air. “Corpse dust,” I thought, though I didn’t know what that meant or where I’d heard the term. The light just about blinded me, but every object in the room was illuminated. Eagle feathers gleamed. Kachina dolls shone. Light flashed off a silver squash-blossom necklace. All these beautiful artifacts seemed alive, infused with spirit, and there I stood, paralyzed. Helpless.

Faced with a gun, what could I do? I was without a weapon. My brain was frozen. I’d tried my seductive wiles in vain. Certain death was only moments away.

To die like this, with Charlie and Amanda, the two people I loved most, half a world away.…To leave my poor mom alone and grieving.…To abandon my students when I still had so much to teach them.…No. No. I couldn’t allow it to happen. Desperate with despair, I felt my hold on rational thought lift and diffuse itself into the swirling air

the pulse in my ears quickened

its beat my spirit loosened

its ties with this time and

this place I was in the light

a dancing mote in the light

then suddenly a single ray of brightness concentrated itself within the dancing dust was it the pounding of my heart or did I hear the low steady beat of drums louder now and louder voices from the darkness of the past chanting

And then the hovering arrow-shaft of radiance whizzed across the room, striking the battered stone-headed hatchet on the shelf by the door with its illumination.

On the shelf, just out of reach.

Hank’s story joggled my mind. Joe Lone Wolf had told his students that the homely little tomahawk by the door held more spirit than a Shakespeare sonnet.

Clark spoke again. “Anyhow, I wouldn’t believe any seductive come-ons, Karen—not from you,” he scoffed. “You just drip with integrity.” He made “integrity” sound like an STD. “Now get over there and shut that door.” He motioned briskly with the gun, then quickly trained it back on me.

In that room filled with Joe Lone Wolf’s spirit-infused relics of an ancient culture, I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “If you insist.” Taking two steps in the direction of the door, I snatched up the small plain tomahawk from the shelf, spun on my toes, raised my arm high, flexed my wrist, and, as if I’d been doing it for centuries, whipped the ancient little throwing axe straight at Clark McCutcheon’s head.