Murder in the English Department (9 page)

Nan walked Lisa to the door. Just as she was kissing her curly forehead, Nan caught sight of two figures out of the corner of her eye.

‘Good afternoon, Professor Weaver,' said Officer Rodriguez.

‘Good afternoon,' Nan echoed.

Lisa regarded them steadily, betraying only an edge of fear.

Officer Ross kept his eyes on Lisa as Rodriguez continued, ‘We'd like to thank you for your cooperation earlier. And we may be back to you in a few days.'

‘All right,' said Nan politely.

After they passed, she hugged Lisa tightly and said, ‘All right. Everything's going to be all right.'

Chapter Eight

NAN WAITED IN THE
LOBBY
of the New World Sauna and Hot Tub Emporium, hoping Amy would not be late. They gauged you by the minute here, like a roast. Half-an-hour in the small redwood sauna and half-an-hour in the resting room—a precise recipe for relaxation. Nan had looked forward to and dreaded tonight as a time to unburden herself about New Year's Eve. Somehow she would discuss it without divulging Marjorie's identity.

She would simply explain … her mind darted to the time again. 7.29. Amy always cut right on the edge. Nan didn't mind that Amy had changed their dinner date to a sauna. She hadn't been able to eat for a week anyway. But why didn't Amy ever leave that extra inch? The young clerk behind the polished wood counter looked serene and clean, as if she alternated her hours between meditating and sweating. Nan often felt an adolescent gawkiness when she entered the New World Emporium, one foot on the accelerator and one foot in her mouth.

‘Hi, Nan,' called Amy, moving up the counter before Nan had a chance to focus. Speedy. How could Nan worry about speedy. Compared to Amy she was a regular turtle.

‘Just on time,' announced Amy, perhaps implying that Nan had been slothful to arrive two minutes earlier and just wait. ‘My treat,' she said before Nan could protest. Nan felt calmer already, just witnessing her friend's centrifugal force.

‘Room four,' said the pacific young woman, as if bestowing on them a special mantra.

‘Hope you don't mind my switching dinner to a sauna?' Amy peeled off her sweater and jeans, unplugged her earrings and popped out her contact lens. ‘But I've got this case to argue next week and Warren agreed to help me with the research tonight.'

‘Not at all,' Nan began to say, but Amy was already interrupting her.

‘He's such a good man really.' Amy stepped through the door to the little hot room. ‘I know everyone says her man is an exception, but Warren is …'

‘An exception,' answered Nan, climbing to the top bench. ‘He really is fine, Amy. Why are you so apologetic?'

‘Just that, as a feminist, I know what bastards men are. I had three rape cases last month. And it sounds like a cliché to say that Warren is, well, different.'

‘Perhaps it's more of a cliché to think he can't be different,' said Nan. ‘I mean he is thoughtful, generous, supportive of your work.'

‘There aren't too many of them around,' Amy muttered.

‘That doesn't mean he's a figment of your imagination.'

Amy turned on her side, sweat dripping down her stomach. ‘Warren wouldn't like being called a figment, that's for sure.'

Nan sighed and lifted her hands over her head, as if to stretch away all the tension.

‘You OK?' asked Amy. Was she commanding or asking?

‘Sure.' Nan waited hopelessly for the sweat to bead on her belly. Even in this she was six times slower than her friend.

‘You sound sort of … I don't know … lonely, maybe.'

Nan felt tired and frightened. How much she wanted to tell Amy what had happened. And what safer place than this steamy vault? The question was, where to begin.

Amy mistook her silence for confusion. ‘Lonely, you know maybe what you need is a relationship.'

‘Relationship,' Nan exploded. She sat up, tentatively resting her back against the hot wood. ‘I have plenty of relationships—maybe too many—with Lisa and Shirley and Matt and you. Now if you want to talk unfeminist, Amy, it's you thinking I need to be sleeping with someone to have a relationship. Lonely, I'm not. My life is very, very full—with love
and
angst.'

‘Calm down,' said Amy. Then she, herself, calmed down under the shower.

Amy slumped back on to the bottom bench with uncharacteristic pensiveness. She stretched full length and stared at the ceiling. Nan thought, uneasily, of bunkbeds in a prison cell. Before the image paralyzed her, Amy spoke up, ‘You're right. Projection. My therapist tells me how I'm always doing this projection number on people. I guess it was the stuff about Warren. Here I am running around worrying whether I can love a man, so I get hyped up about your not being in love right now. Pretty thick for someone with my brilliant mind, eh kid?'

Nan noticed sweat beading to the surface beneath her breasts. She began to laugh, whether out of relief or affection or hysteria, she didn't know.

‘I can't believe I haven't asked you about the department, about Murchie's death, about how everyone is holding up.'

Nan lay back and breathed deeply, wondering where to begin. Should she say she had been in Wheeler that night? Should she say she was afraid that suspicion might be cast on her?

Amy, who was not very good at silences, stood under the shower again. Shiny and dripping, she emerged, looking to Nan for an answer.

‘Everyone's being pretty tight-lipped,' said Nan.

‘What about Matt?'

‘We're planning to talk soon.'

‘And that student, what's her name, the one you said Murchie was trying to seduce by sniffing her mistletoe, Mary, Maureen, what's her …'

‘Marjorie,' slipped Nan, regretting it immediately. Had she been stupid enough to talk to Amy as well as to Lisa about Marjorie? How could she hide someone she had already introduced to the world?

‘Yeah, is Marjorie broken up by this?'

‘How would I know.' Nan groped for a change of topic, but her mind was full of fear.

‘Sounded like you were pretty close,' said Amy, ‘like she was one of your favourite students.'

‘It did?' Nan recovered, answering coolly, ‘No, not really.'

Above the door a light blinked, signalling five minutes for them both to shower and retire to the next stage of relaxation. Nan felt dizzy as she climbed down off the benches. She had sat in the heat constantly for half-an-hour, while her friend had been dousing in and out of the shower. Amy noticed her unnatural flush and lent an arm.

‘I wondered how long you were going to bake up there, old pal.'

Nan nodded once.

‘They burn witches, don't they?'

‘What?' said Nan, exaggerating her bewilderment to avoid the unfinished topic of Marjorie Adams.

‘And martyrs,' Amy continued good-naturedly, as she held her friend under the cool water. ‘Your good Catholic girl sticks out all over the place, you know that, honey?'

Nan nodded thanks and ducked into the resting room, closing her eyes and breathing deeply while Amy finished her stint in the sauna.

By the time her friend had settled down, Nan was prepared with a new topic.

‘Lisa seems to be doing better.'

‘Great,' Amy responded enthusiastically. ‘So you think you've finally rescued her from the torpor of Hayward?'

‘She's rescuing herself.'

‘So what do you feel guilty about?'

‘How could you tell?' asked Nan.

‘Takes one to know one. Jews and Catholics. We have an illegal monopoly on guilt.'

‘I can't keep any distance about Lisa. Shirley and Joe live in a different world. I have a hell of a time accepting that.'

‘Nan Weaver, you sound like one of those bourgeois jerks nattering on about the romance of the working class. You know what's better about your life-choice. And that's all you want for Lisa. You remember the narrow bigotry, the limited expectations. The same for me in Brooklyn. Don't go on like one of those working-class-is-chic kids. Do me a favour.'

‘Well,' Nan frowned. ‘I know my life is better for
me
now. I just wish I wasn't so critical of theirs. About potato chips and beer and TV bowling tournaments.'

‘Critical of junk food and the mind corrosion of the mass media?'

‘I'm serious, Amy. If I escaped, why do I get so angry at them?'

‘I suppose you have papers to verify your release?'

‘Sorry?'

‘Nan, it's your turn to be thick. When I go home, at first I feel like an immune foreigner, then I settle right back into the old resentments. My parents' resentment that I “escaped” to a life for which they prepared me. My own resentment that they weren't Forest Hills Jews with Bach playing in the background. We're destined to be peripheral, honey. You don't belong in Hayward. And you don't belong in Berkeley.'

‘That's it,' said Nan. ‘Even my most basic reflexes fail me—in both places.'

‘But you keep trying. I don't believe it. You keep up with Shirley and Joe in a way that would drive me to Bellevue if I visited by family more than once a year.'

‘It's different,' said Nan.

‘No you're different,' said Amy. ‘Braver.'

‘Well, I don't know.'

‘Of course you don't,' answered Amy. ‘That's one of the things I love about you.'

‘Are you folks about finished?' asked the attendant's mellow voice over the intercom.

‘Relaxed enough to rush right back to life,' said Amy.

‘Thank you,' came the amiable reply.

Chapter Nine

THE COMMITTEE MEETING HAD
been scheduled
for the first Monday of the New Year. And notwithstanding grief over the passing of Angus Murchie, the meeting would proceed.

Nan was the only person in the large room at five minutes to ten. She was always early—another survival tactic: you get there first and watch the adversary walk in. It was a pleasant room, with huge windows overlooking the campus. Millie had arrived several minutes before to draw up the long, yellow blinds and plug in the percolator. Then she had dashed out to collect the Xeroxed agendas and finish the dozen tasks which would keep Professor Nelson, the Chairperson, from looking like the lousy administrator he was. So Nan sat alone, wondering at the clarity of blue in the January sky and sipping black coffee from her styrofoam cup.

Once these meeting rooms had been as restricted as a Mormon sanctuary. When she was an undergraduate, Nan could only imagine this place. She always knew there must be large rooms here on the third floor of Wheeler, larger than those used for classes and offices. She could tell from the outside, looking up at the pattern of windows. Later, when she was in graduate school, she had a quick peek at the room when the Student Equal Rights Council had presented a petition. Never did she expect
she
might be sitting here as a token female professor.

Nan didn't know what she had expected. Her ambitions had always seemed more like dreams—so unrealistic even for ‘the girl brain'. When she was in graduate school, yes, of course, she hoped to be a professor. She was doing her PhD because she loved literature and she wanted to help young people love it, too. But if you had asked her on any particular day whether she would finish her thesis, she could not say. She continued to regard herself as slow, as behind, even though, throughout her entire life, she had been early.

Hammerly and Augustine were the next to arrive. They nodded cordially to her, filled their coffee cups, looked around irritably for cookies and then sat down, back into their conversation.

‘I know this will sound a little crude to you,' Hammerly was saying to Augustine, as though Nan were as invisible as a waitress might be to them, ‘but I think we should move fast to fill the job, before the university freezes any more of the budget.'

‘My friend,' Augustine said, then murmured something she couldn't catch.

Nan remembered now, with some sympathy, that Augustine and Murchie were old chums, had been at Oxford together.

‘I have no doubt as to your fine intentions,' recovered Augustine. ‘And I know that Angus, himself, would be concerned about maintaining department positions. However, one does find it hard to bury the dead so easily, if you know what I mean.'

Nan was keeping busy with her felt pen and steno pad. Making lists. Distracting herself from the gruesomeness of Murchie's death and from these strange, implacable fears. Fear that she might be a suspect. Fear of the murder, itself, of the kind of power and morality it takes to commit such an act. Most of all fear for Marjorie Adams. How could she help Marjorie? Because she had no answers to this, she thought of Lisa. She wrote lists of doctors to consult. Of arguments to convince Shirley that Lisa should stay in school. Of plans for her first lecture and for finishing the journal article.

This week, Nan hadn't done much work on the article, or on anything else for that matter. She had barely been able to sleep at night and to stay awake during the days. She knew such events changed people at the deepest level. How was she different? Right now, she was too exhausted to tell. She felt like an actor playing herself. Nan Weaver, Professor of English, Feminist, Aunt, Murder Witness … All the portrayals were low key—bit parts whispered from the wings. And her friends and family, like most normal people during a catastrophe, were caught up in themselves. The few who did notice her lethargy just accepted that she was feeling a little overwhelmed and probably tired from the holidays.

Nan knew she would feel better once she had told someone. Now she felt a shell of her former self, her insides consumed by the secret. She had intended to drop by Matt's apartment with a bottle of brandy and spend an evening confessing and being comforted and plotting the rescue of Marjorie Adams. But something stopped Nan from seeing Matt that night and half-a-dozen times since then—madness perhaps—some conviction that complete silence was necessary to protect Marjorie. She was caught in a spiral, where it became more and more impossible to share her secret with anyone. Impulse had got her into this. She had cleaned up after Marjorie that night on impulse. On instinct. There was no sensible way of understanding it, no logical way out of it. Deep down she simply believed that if she didn't tell anyone—not Matt, not anyone—Marjorie would remain safe.

While everyone else wondered ‘Who killed Angus Murchie?' Nan wondered, ‘Who was Marjorie Adams?' For she had the answer to the first mystery, didn't she? How did she
know
Marjorie was the murderer? How could she know from a few brief words heard through the walls of Wheeler Hall? How could she know from the back view of someone running across a dark campus? These doubts would drive her mad. But what was her peace of mind compared with Marjorie's life? Yes, she would keep silent, even with Matt, a while longer.

Nan glanced up from her list as the other professors filed into the meeting. Cool, sober, formally cordial. All the places were taken except two, Matt and the student representative, Marjorie. Nan was left sitting between those two empty seats. Nelson, the Chairperson, cleared his throat, as if to summon the spirit of administration. At that moment, the big oak door creaked, admitting a visibly embarrassed Matt.

‘Sorry, friends,' he smiled, ‘but I had eight hundred and eighty-eight class cards to dispense this morning.'

As usual, Matt managed to clear the air with the charm of a Good Humour Man. People broke out of their tense knots of conversation to greet each other and several even managed smiles.

‘We have a full agenda today,' said Nelson in his broad Boston accent. ‘So I'd like to begin. Discussion of the number of teaching assistants and readers for next fall. Advertisements for the junior faculty member in Victorian, the senior in seventeenth century, a replacement for Professor Murchie.'

Augustine spoke up, ‘May I suggest that we acknowledge the passing of our colleague with something more respectful than plans for an advertisement.'

Augustine wasn't a bad fellow, thought Nan, a little sentimental, but decent. He had been thoroughly incapable of seeing the pain and humiliation Murchie had caused others.

‘Hmmmm, yes, well, quite,' said Nelson. ‘What do you suggest?'

‘Perhaps a moment's silence,' offered Hammerly, clearly anxious to please Augustine and then bloody well get on with the meeting.

‘Yes,' said Matt, ‘that seems properly ecumenical.'

Nan frowned a little.

‘No, I mean it,' said Matt, pulling off his glasses and cleaning them. ‘I think it would be a fine gesture.'

‘And perhaps,' added Augustine, ‘a short quote, one of Angus' favourites from “Samson Agonistes”,

With peace and consolation dismist

And calm of mind. All passion spent.
'

As they sat around the
table
with their heads bowed, Nan wondered what moved through their minds. Augustine's thoughts were easiest to read—genuine sadness and loss. Actually, she was relieved he hadn't read four or five pages from ‘Paradise Regained' to sustain them all. Hammerly was another story. Probably he was thinking about his friend Henderson at Princeton, a Milton scholar who had been itching to move out of the snow for years. Poor Nelson must be counting Murchie's committees and classes and wondering how he would ever find a replacement as expansive as their departed colleague.

And how many of them, she wondered, were silently guessing who killed Angus Murchie? There were a number of motives at this very table. Christianson, for instance: everyone knew that Murchie had had a three-year affair with Christianson's wife before she left both of them for a graduate student. And Methor—there was some old gossip about Murchie doing a reader's report on Methor's book—which was then rejected by the publisher. Perhaps not a motive for most people, but Methor bore deep grudges and was very competitive with Murchie. What about Matt? Murchie had been known to do a certain amount of queer baiting. And herself? Their personal animosity had escalated over years of his sexual passes and her political outspokenness. Everyone knew about their clash on The Sexual Harassment Campaign.

As she looked around the room, she realized with a cold rush of terror that she was the most likely suspect. As she looked around, she realized that she was the only one looking around.

Nan bowed her head thinking, surely this has been longer than a minute; surely this has been enough false grief.

The heavy door creaked again to admit Marjorie Adams. The young woman's look of surprise at the silent gathering was quickly composed into appropriate mourning.

Marjorie took her seat next to Nan with quiet dignity. But her pink lurex dress shone under the fluorescent lights. The lipstick was a new shade to match the dress. Her blonde hair was wrapped high at the back around a pink silk gardenia. Dorothy Lamour, Nan tried to remember, ‘The Road to …' Sometimes Nan wondered if there wasn't something feminist in Marjorie's choice of attire. Compared with her own understated, academic style, Marjorie expressed a strong individuality and quite a nice sense of humour. Why
had
Marjorie come to Berkeley from her fashionable Eastern circuit? Nan thought with sympathy that this move must have been as traumatic as her own emigration from Hayward.

Nelson cleared his throat, as if everyone needed to be roused from deep despond.

‘Shall we resume?' he said, then suggested that they keep the discussion of Murchie's death, the police investigation and his replacement to a minimum.

So they proceeded through the teaching assistants and the tenure questions and the faculty advertisements with vigorous dispassion. Dispassion. Nan remembered how one of her articles had been rejected for ‘lack of dispassion'. It had been about suicidal themes in Anne Sexton, for god's sake, but perhaps suicide warranted an objective approach. Apparently murder did.

Nan stole a glance at Marjorie Adams. She felt chilled by her composure. Was this steadiness sustained by valium or a more expensive tranquillizer? Nan found her eyes fixed on Marjorie's fingernails, so perfectly manicured and so fastidiously matched to the silk gardenia.

The agenda was covered by 11.30, an unprecedented fifteen minutes early. No one stayed for cordialities. Those at the other end of the table left with the hasty relief of physicists escaping a nuclear testing site. Matt paused to confirm a lunch date with Nan. Then, as she turned from her friend, Nan was startled to find Marjorie Adams waiting to talk with her.

Nan appreciated the power of Marjorie's seductiveness; ingenuous politeness laced with poise.

‘Yes, Marjorie,' said Nan, as though she were a grade school teaching discussing a fairytale. That was it—‘Rapunzel', with Murchie as the wicked father.

‘There's something I have to say to you,' began Marjorie, saying it all with her blue, blue eyes.

‘Not here,' Nan whispered. ‘Perhaps we can make an appointment.' She was mesmerized by Marjorie's confidence. Yes, together the two of them could create an innocence.

‘That's exactly what I mean to say,' responded Marjorie, slightly unnerved by Nan's intensity. ‘I just want to apologise for missing our appointment. I know how valuable your time is, especially at this period of the year.'

‘That's quite all right.' Nan was leaning heavily against a chair. She shouldn't be so stunned. She knew that a lot of rich people were impervious to danger. It was as if they never learned a whole set of survival signals.

‘Well, do you think we might make another appointment,' Marjorie enquired in that patient tone that Nan, herself, used for noticeably thick students.

‘Certainly,' said Nan, recovering and pulling out her diary. Tomorrow was packed with tasks that at any other point would seem crucial.

‘How about tomorrow morning?' Nan suggested, having no idea how she could cancel her class.

‘Oh, well, um,' Marjorie was hesitant, ‘actually I'll be out of town for several days. Could we make it Friday?'

‘Yes,' said Nan. Was Marjorie going to see her lawyer, or maybe she had an uncle in the Mafia who could buy her out of this nasty business?

‘How about one o'clock?' asked Nan, with concerted coolness.

‘Yes,' agreed Marjorie, ‘that would be perfect.'

Perfect, thought Nan, as she watched this woman waft from the room. There was only one thing about Marjorie Adams that was not perfect. And perhaps Nan had even imagined that.