Cold and Pure and Very Dead (26 page)

He’d retained my hand, and now he patted it comfortingly. “So you’ve said, Karen. So you’ve said. But I know you’re not the type to …”

“What type is that?” I was so irritated, I wanted to smack someone. Preferably Jake Fenton. This pernicious rumor was going to live far longer than he had.

George looked at me, hesitantly. “The type to screw around … unless you have feelings for someone, that is.”

“Listen to me.” I raised a forefinger. Now he had me doing it. “One: I do not now have, nor have I ever had, any ‘feelings,’ amorous or otherwise, for the late, oh so great Jake Fenton. Two”—I raised a second finger. “I did not ‘screw around’ with Jake. He got drunk and passed out, and I didn’t know where else to take him other than my house. That’s why Monica Cassale saw his car there so early in the morning. Three”—A third finger popped up. “Everyone on this goddamn nosy little campus needs to learn to mind his or her own goddamn business.” The angrier I got, the more precise I became with my grammar:
His or her
.

George gazed at me steadily with those intelligent eyes, and decided to believe me. He reclaimed his spoon. “Well, good, Karen, then you wouldn’t be interested in what I was going to tell you about Jake’s search for his birth mother.” He began to eat.

But, of course, I was interested. And this is what George told me: After his epiphany in the gym, he had joined a semiunderground adoptee’s support group. The group was clandestine because, in order to tease information from sealed court records and the confidential records of private and county adoption agencies, many of its members would be forced to collude in breaking the law. Jake Fenton had been a member of the group, George said. Jake had been adopted at birth by an upstate New York high-school principal and kindergarten teacher who’d told him nothing about his origins. After the death of his adoptive mother the year
before, he’d begun the search for his birth mother, and at the last meeting of the group, he’d said he was close to finding her.

“It was all hush-hush, very confidential. He even said he might have some news that would probably
make
the news.” He paused and thought for a few seconds. “I wouldn’t be telling you all this if Jake were still alive. But I remember that I warned you against him rather forcefully, Karen. Now that he’s gone, I wanted to leave you with some insight into his softer side. But, if you didn’t really care for him—”

But I was thinking about the police investigation into his death, and I was thinking out loud. “Maybe Jake’s search for his mother set something in motion that proved fatal to him. Could it be …” But as I was engaged in some semiclandestine snooping myself, I decided belatedly that discretion was the better part of staying alive. I changed the subject back to George’s three-step plan for better living, and, now that he had started, he was only too happy to keep on talking.

Y
ou bitch!
You set the cops on me.”
On my office voice mail, Lolita Lapierre’s fury came through loud and clear. I cringed as the crash of the slammed receiver reverberated against my eardrum. The police had been busy since I’d talked with them yesterday. I wondered which team had trekked all the way up to the hinterlands of New Hampshire. Syverson and Williams, most likely. Lolita was connected to Milly Finch, the suspect in the New York killing, not to Jake Fenton, whose death lay in Piotrowski’s jurisdiction.

It was noon, and the life of the college swirled around me. My neighbor Ned Hilton was holding office hours, and the hallway swarmed with his students. Out the window I could see a student club fair in progress. Tables lined the walkways around the Common, identified by computer-generated signs: the African American Club, the Latino/Latina Club, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the French Club, the Womyn’s Alliance, the Student Investors Club. Student recruiters hawked their organizations as rock and rap blared from competing speakers. Everyone had a sense of purpose except me. All too abruptly it seemed that I had nothing better to do than to meddle in other people’s lives. My major scholarly project had just been yanked out from under me.

On my desk sat a memo from Avery Mitchell, the
President of Enfield College. Replacing the phone in its cradle, I read the note again. Once again I was stunned by its contents:
I regret to inform you that the legal proceedings involving the estate of Dr. Edith Hart have entered a new and more complicated phase. It now looks as if significant time will be required to resolve the differences between the claims of the Brewster family and Dr. Hart’s stated intention to bequeath Meadowbrook and ten million dollars to the college
.… Across the bottom of the memo, in his bold handwriting, Avery had scrawled:
Karen—I’m sorry!

Edith Hart was the great-granddaughter of Serena Northbury, the nineteenth-century popular novelist whose biography I had planned to write. Upon her death, Edith had left the bulk of her estate, including her home, Meadowbrook, to Enfield College to found a research center. The institution was to be called the Northbury Center for the Study of American Women Writers, and I was to serve as its director. In this memo Avery was telling me not to hold my breath, either about the Northbury Center, or about research access to the multitude of Serena Northbury’s manuscripts and personal papers that had been stored at Meadowbrook. Quite effectively, this lawsuit would derail my plans, not only for the center, but also for the biography, since now the papers I needed to research it would be unavailable: maybe for years; maybe for decades; maybe for millennia. I’d been afraid that this might happen, but the certainty communicated by Avery’s memo numbed me. My immediate scholarly future was suddenly as blank as a newly erased blackboard.

At a loss for what to do next, not only for the next five years, but in the next two-and-a-half minutes, I looked around me. On the left side of my desk were piled a half-dozen social histories of mid-nineteenth-century
America, background material for the proposed biography. On the right side sat three literary histories of the 1950s; I’d planned to plunder these book-length histories for any mention of Mildred Deakin’s literary career.

I reached to the right, and the phone rang. It was Piotrowski. “Doctor, you’re a better investigator than I gave you credit for.”

“Huh?”

“The way you threw Lapierre in our laps yesterday—that was real smart. Turns out she’s the missing link.”

“She’s the
what?”
I resisted the image of a Cro-Magnon woman in a double-wide that came lurching into my mind.

“She’s the link between the two homicides. We knew there had to be a connection, and she’s it. Ms. Lapierre is gonna have to answer some hard questions. She probably knew both victims, Katz and Fenton, and she definitely knew one of them well.
Real
well. If you get my drift.”

“Piotrowski, what are you talking about?”

“The Lapierre woman. She and Fenton had a hot thing going. They spent the month of August together on one of those Greek islands. Paros. You know it?”

Piotrowski had more than a nodding acquaintance with the circumstances of my life. I couldn’t imagine why he thought I would know anything about Greek islands other than that there were some. But my untraveled status was not foremost on my mind.

“Lolita Lapierre and Jake Fenton!” My voice rose an octave with each word.

“Don’t screech at me, Doctor.” His tone was acerbic.

“Sorry.” I settled back into my normal alto range. “But are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s my business to be sure. It’s all written down here in this big, fat diary we found in Fenton’s bedroom. Pretty hot stuff. I looked it over a couple days ago, but it didn’t mean anything to me then. Fenton referred to his … er … companion as Lolly—ya know, like the pop. Could of been anyone. Then you input that stuff about Lolita Lapierre and got me thinking.
Lolita. Lolly
. Ya get it?”

“Yeah, I get it. But it doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure it’s the same … ah … Lolly?”
Like the pop? I didn’t even want to think about it
. “And, by the way,
input
is not a verb.”

He ignored my grammatical fastidiousness. “How many Lollies could there be? But, yeah,
it’s the same … ah … Lolly
. I don’t go around making unfounded accusations—you know that. A few calls up Stallmouth way ascertained Lapierre’s whereabouts during the month of August. According to her boss, she was in Greece. On the island of Paros.”

I recalled Lolita telling Sophie and me about her travels—and that she didn’t always travel alone. “But … but … how did Jake know Lolly … ah … Lolita?” Then it hit me. “Oh!”

“Oh,
what?
Don’t stop talking now, Doc. You’re on a roll.”

“Well,” I mused, “these elite New England colleges provide a sort of writer’s circuit. A teaching job for a year or two at Yale, one for another year at Amherst. It keeps poets and novelists solvent when their published books don’t pay the bills. And—I remember now—someone, Miles Jewell, I think it was, mentioned that Jake spent a couple of years at Stallmouth before he came to Enfield.
That’s
how he would have met Lolita.”

Three seconds passed as Piotrowski processed this information. “Hmm. So that’s how those two got together.
You’re being real helpful here, Doctor. Of course any connection of Lapierre to the homicides is purely circumstantial at this point. She knew both victims. You provided us with a possible motive. But we gotta have evidence … or maybe a confession. Syverson’s up there now.…” His words trailed off, as if he were mentally speculating on the effectiveness of Syverson’s interrogation techniques.

I recalled Lolita’s furious imprecation on my voice mail. “Ah, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah.”

“Somehow I don’t think you should count on a confession.”

I
called Sophia
. “Hey, kid, how ya doin’?”

“Terrific! Just got a poem accepted by a little magazine in Seattle. The editor said she was
enchanted
by it!” I could hear the hum of excitement in Sophia’s voice. “Can you imagine?
Enchanted!”

“That’s great, Soph!”

“And she paid me a whole seventy-five bucks!” She laughed.

“Don’t quit your day job, kid.” I winced as soon as the words came out of my mouth.

“That’s a sore point, Karen!” But she was too buzzed to be angry.

“I know. Sorry. I’m an insensitive jerk. Which poem was it?”

We talked about her poetry for a minute or two, then I got down to the purpose of the call. “That day we went to Stallmouth, Sophia? I was wondering … do you remember whether or not Lolita Lapierre said anything about Jake Fenton?”

“Jake Fenton? Noooo. We talked about Mildred Deakin’s book, but nobody mentioned Fenton’s.”

“Not Fenton as a writer, but Fenton as a person. A friend, maybe?”

“A
friend?”

“A … 
boyfriend?
”

“You kidding? Like we both wouldn’t have been right on top of that if she’d dropped even the teeniest hint!” A silence. “I
do
remember, however, I got the distinct impression that Lolita had no shortage of men in her life …”

“Yeah, me, too. Not that
I
haven’t got a shortage. What I mean is, I got the same impression. No shortage of men in Lolita Lapierre’s life. No shortage at all.”

O
n the way
to lunch, I checked my mail. Monica took the opportunity to bend my ear about the virtues of her new boyfriend, Victor Perez. The evil fax technician had been fired and then had threatened Monica for costing him his job. The two men had engaged in some kind of a violent altercation, and Victor had been heroic. I was half listening to her as I sorted through the day’s offerings. I saw the envelope addressed in Milly Finch’s pinched handwriting and gasped, effectively terminating Monica’s monologue.

“Karen?” the secretary queried, “you okay?” Now that I was so tragically bereaved, the Department’s designated mourner for Jake Fenton, Monica had become sweetly solicitous of my welfare. “You poor thing, you went all pale just now, like you mighta seen a ghost. Maybe the ghost of Jake Fenton.”

“Monica, I’ve told you—Jake and I were
not
in a relationship.”

“So brave.” Monica patted my hand; she had seen what she had seen.

I shook off my annoyance and her hand, clutched Milly’s letter to my chest, and recalled Jake’s fate all too vividly; he’d been the last person to possess one of Milly Finch’s communications.
No ghosts, Monica. No grief. Just a missive someone might find dangerous enough to kill for
.

The English Department office was busy. Miles, our chairman, sat at a long conference table collating a set of poems he’d photocopied for a class. It took more courage than most of us possessed to request that Monica undertake such a menial task as preparing teaching materials. “Donne, Keats, Whitman, Eliot,” Miles muttered as he sorted. Then,
thwack
, he hit the stapler. He had a rhythm going.
Donne, Keats, Whitman, Eliot, thwack. Donne, Keats, Whitman, Eliot, thwack
. The copy machine was, of course, programmed to collate and staple, but that procedure involved the sophisticated technical skills of reading electronic directions and pressing electronic buttons. Miles simply wasn’t up to it.