Cold and Pure and Very Dead (20 page)

B
ut he wasn’t
right back. Except for the glow diffused from the glaring police lights, the night sky was totally black by the time Piotrowski returned. I’d finished the sugary coffee, and it had helped. My tears had been replaced by numb detachment. I knew that all too soon I would begin feeling things again, and when I did, the memory of Jake Fenton lying sprawled on his living-room floor, blood gushing from his dark curls, would visit me with a case of the midnight horrors. Less important was the embarrassment I knew I was doomed to feel about the way I’d clutched the lieutenant when he’d offered me consolation, grabbing the
man as if he were the last life preserver thrown from the
Titanic
. For now I welcomed the numbness.

When he returned to the car, Piotrowski was grim. Gone was the teddy bear of our earlier encounter. He took the wheel and backed cautiously past an ambulance and an emergency services truck without saying a word.

At a rear booth in the Blue Dolphin Diner he ordered for both of us—hot turkey sandwiches, Cokes, coffee. Then, with the waitress behind the long counter and out of the way, he sat back, gazed at me intently for a long ten seconds, pursed his lips assessingly, then sighed. “Doctor, you can’t ever make a move without stepping right in it, can you?”

“Stepping in
what?”
Whatever I’d expected from him, this was not it.

Piotrowski retrieved from his jacket pocket a clear plastic evidence envelope and, unsmiling, slid it across the tabletop toward me. Inside the transparent envelope was another envelope, this one ordinary paper, letter-size, hand-addressed, stamped, postmarked. “You recognize this?” he asked, curtly.

“That’s mine,” I said, puzzled. It was the letter from Mildred Deakin Finch that had been stolen from my desk earlier in the day.

“I could tell that, Doctor: It has your name and address on it.”

“But, but … where’d you find it?”

“In a wastebasket. In the victim’s bedroom.” He was studying me with cool cop eyes.

“Huh? How’d it get there?” Then I recalled that Jake had been hanging around the English Department office when I’d gone to retrieve Syverson’s fax. When he’d left, the door to my office had been open, Milly Finch’s letter unattended on my desk.…

“You don’t know?” He smiled perfunctorily at the waitress as she set down a tray of Cokes and coffee mugs. “You didn’t give it to him, maybe? Or leave it at his house?”

“Why would I?” I responded, slowly. “I hardly knew him. And I’ve never been in his house.”

Piotrowski’s forehead wrinkled again, a topographical relief map of puzzlement.

I was thinking hard, but I wasn’t thinking about the envelope. I was focused on Charlie Piotrowski, putting two and two together, trying to read his eyes, his shoulders, his hands, trying to come up with some clue to this abrupt and unwelcome change of attitude. His earlier words echoed in my brain:
I know how much he must have meant to you
. I married those words to a memory: me standing with Piotrowski on the Dickinson Hall steps the first day of school, the day he’d called and told me Marty Katz was dead. In the memory, the attractive newcomer Jake Fenton emerged through the front door onto the broad landing, and I smiled at him and made a date to show him the town. Piotrowski must have put that incident together with my presence at Jake’s house tonight and jumped to the conclusion that … 
Oh, hell!
And now he’d found this letter in the dead man’s bedroom wastebasket—a letter addressed to me!
Hell, damnation, and every single wailing circle of the eternally lost!

“I did not have a relationship with that man,” I blurted out.

Piotrowski’s face froze for an instant—no longer—brown eyes still, lips immobile. Then he concentrated busily on stowing the evidence envelope in the pocket of his blue Red Sox jacket. “Is that right?” He looked up at me and repeated his question more deliberately. “Is. That. Right?” His tone had become one of
detached professional assessment; I found it frighteningly unsettling.

“Yes. That’s. Right,” I snapped. “And I can’t imagine where you ever got such a ludicrous idea in the first place.” I ripped open a paper packet and dumped sugar into my coffee, stirred it vigorously, sipped it, then pushed the cup away.

“A
ludicrous
idea?” he replied, sliding his still untouched mug across the table toward me and taking my sweetened coffee. “Jake Fenton was a real good-looking man. Famous, too.”

“Of course he was.” I scalded my lips with the first sip of coffee.

“And I had a feeling he was attracted—”

“So? You think I put out for every nonrepulsive guy who …”

“Gives you the eye? No, I don’t think that at all. Not at all.” Then he said, oddly, “Believe me.”

The sandwiches arrived, and I discovered that in spite of everything I had an appetite.

Piotrowski let me finish my meal without further interrogation. I knew he hated that word—
interrogation
—when it was applied to anything other than the proper context of an official, formal effort to extract crucial investigative information about a crime from a recalcitrant suspect or witness. Nonetheless, that’s what it felt like: interrogation. Especially since the interrogator was so stupidly and blindly focused on extracting evidence about a love affair that had never existed.

When I’d sopped up the last of the gravy with the last of the soggy bread, I glanced up at Piotrowski and thought I surprised a fleeting warm expression in his brown eyes. No. Not
brown
, I mused. Chestnut, maybe. Or coffee. Or maybe a good rich chocolate. By the time I’d decided on a delicious toffee, any suggestion
of warmth had vanished. He nudged his plate aside and said, “Tell me about the letter.”

“The letter? Well, you must have read it. You tell me.”

“There
was
no letter. Just the envelope. That’s what took me so long in there. One of the officers snagged it outta the basket—which sorta puts you on the scene twice, I’m sorry to say. Then we did a search. No letter. So. Tell me about it.”

He was a cop, first and foremost, and I was a witness.

I sighed. “You’re not going to believe this … Lieutenant.”

Y
ou have eleven messages,”
announced the robot voice on my home answering machine at 2:37
A.M
. I pressed the
OFF
button, clicked the phone’s ringer to
MUTE
, fell into bed in my wrinkled khakis, and slid into my exhaustion. I slept like the dead.

T
he doorbell
hadn’t worked in months—it needed something complicated that I couldn’t handle, something high-tech, like a new battery—and the pounding on my front door at 10:12 the next morning sent me bolting out of bed in a sudden cold sweat.

“I’m coming. I’m coming!” I yelled. I was dazed. I’d been dreaming about Tony. In the dream we’d been lying in the big bed in our Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, and he’d been chopping firewood:
thunk—thunk—thunk—thunk
. At least, I
think
he’d been chopping firewood; the details were vague, but I know I’d felt warm. Now the chairs and tables in my real house seemed far too solid and shiny after the dreamy furniture of the night.

I peered out the front door’s glass panel. A severe-looking young woman with a scrubbed face, cropped brown hair, and a green wool jacket that bulged under the arm peered back at me. Sergeant Felicity Schultz, Piotrowski’s partner. She’d probably been at the scene of Jake’s death last night, but sequestered in the Jeep as I’d been, I hadn’t seen her.

When she glimpsed my groggy face through the glass, Schultz seemed relieved. I opened the door and she greeted me, “You’re not answering your phone these days?”

I shoved a lank clump of hair out of my face and
rubbed my eyes. “You thought maybe I’d done a bunk?” I muttered.

“A
bunk
, Professor? A
bunk?
Now just what kind of edifying books you been reading?” She scanned me, head to toe, and grinned at my disheveled state—bare feet, matted hair, sleep-mussed shirt and khakis. Then she got serious. “No, we knew you were here, but, Ms. Pelletier, I gotta tell ya, when we have an individual that’s so close to a homicide, and she doesn’t pick up the phone, we—the lieutenant, that is—gets a bit antsy.”

The lieutenant! That’s
who I’d been in bed with in the dream, the lieutenant,
not
Tony. And he hadn’t been chopping wood. I hoped the hot blush wasn’t spreading to my face.

“I turned the ringer off,” I said, sharply. “I needed to sleep.” I tucked my wrinkled cotton shirt in at the waist. Traces of the dream seemed to cling to my body. “What’s up, Sergeant? You want some coffee?”

“Nah, I’m coffeed out.” But she trailed me through the kitchen door, then wandered over to the plant stand by the window. She poked at a wilting ivy in a cracked yellow pot. “This needs water.”

“So, water it, then.” I measured out beans, dropped them in the grinder. Surprisingly, the sergeant did not react to my gibe. Neither did she water the plant. Moving to the counter, she lifted a chef’s knife out of the block. “Nice knife,” she commented, balancing it in her hand.

“Thanks.” It was one of a set Tony had given me on our first Christmas. “You taking a forensic interest? I thought Jake Fenton was shot, not stabbed.”

“Real funny, Professor.” She slid the big knife back in its slot. “No, I’m just in the market.” She pulled out the carving knife, tested it on her forefinger, winced.

I pressed a button, and the coffee grinder sprang into earsplitting action. “You’re in the market for
cooking
knives?”
I asked once the beans were ground. Somehow I couldn’t envision Schultz functioning domestically.

“And other things,” she replied and fluttered her left hand in the air. On her fourth finger, Felicity Schultz wore a gold ring with a tiny diamond, the size I always imagined when I heard the word
microchip
.

“Oh, my God, Sergeant! You’re engaged!”

She blushed. I couldn’t believe she was capable of a blush. I oohed and ahhed over the ring, asked all the expected questions. Schultz’s pink face glowed.

Then, female bonding accomplished, she sat with me at the round oak table while I drank my coffee, and got down to business. “So, you want to know what’s up, huh? Two things, Ms. Pelletier. The lieutenant wanted me to ask you if you ever noticed anything … unusual in Professor Fenton’s office at the college?”

“He wasn’t a professor,” I replied automatically. “He was just a writer.”

“Just
a writer?” Schultz queried, breathing on her ring, then polishing it on her sleeve. “Is that inferior to a professor? I thought English professors
studied
writers?”

But they’ve got to be dead
, was the response that sprang, unbidden, to my mind. Then
Ouch!
Jake
was
dead.

“Well, of course we do. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” It’s creeping up on me, the intellectual ossification I’d sworn a blood oath to avoid when I became an academic. “And … I don’t think I was ever in Jake’s office. He’d only been on campus for two or three weeks. Why do you ask?”

“Because”—she drew it out for dramatic value—“because in the drawer of the desk in Mr. Fenton’s office this morning we found a Colt thirty-eight Commando Special.” She waited for my reaction.

“Wow!”

“That’s exactly what I said—
Wow!
Tell me, Ms. Pelletier, is possession of handguns customary on a college campus?”

“A gun in a college teacher’s desk drawer? No, I wouldn’t say that was customary at all. It’s not like he was teaching high school.…”

She nodded; that went without saying. “You ever have any reason to think that Professor … ah, Mr.… Fenton was
afraid
of someone?”

I thought about it. “Looks like he had good reason to be, doesn’t it. But, knowing him, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t just part of the macho image, carrying a gun, I mean.”

“He was like that, huh? All balls?”

“You ever read any of his books?”

She gave me a flat look,
You think I waste my time with that crap?
“Nope.”

“He was like that.”

“Oh.” She slitted her eyes. “Well, he was a bit of a stud muffin—at least, from the picture on his books. And speaking of
knowing
him, how well
did
you?”

I groaned. Here was Piotrowski’s misconception raising its ugly head again. “Not well at all, for your information, Sergeant.” I dropped two slices of rye bread in the toaster and slammed the lever down. “No matter what Lieutenant Piotrowski thinks.”