Cold and Pure and Very Dead (29 page)

His level gaze hardened, told me he knew I knew. But he shook his head. “Andrew Prentiss? No, not me. There never was an Andrew Prentiss. Andrew Prentiss was merely an imaginative projection, the overheated fantasy of a maladjusted schoolgirl. The product of an overly repressed sexuality.” Surely Ralph Brooke knew that the Freudian psychobabble of the fifties was long passé; even if he had never been a scholar on the cutting edge of any of the various postmodern intellectual discourses, he was a sophisticated academic. Yet at this moment of crisis, he slipped back into the familiar jargon of his youth.

I ignored his denial. “And
you’re
the one who stole Milly’s second letter from my desk.”

He smiled, as if I’d let something slip. “Was it her
second?
I only saw the one. No, Miss Pelletier, you can’t blame me for stealing your letter. Not that I haven’t held it in my hands. Not that I haven’t read it—while it still existed in readable form, that is. But did I take it from your desk? No, not I. That theft was the unfortunate—and unfortunately fatal—misdemeanor of your … your … dear friend Jake.” A pause allowed the momentary softening of his adamant expression. “Too bad about Fenton,” he mused. “A true loss …” I held my breath. Was I about to learn—at long last—the truth about Jake’s parentage? Brooke sighed. “A fine strong, virile writer. A true loss to the literary world.”

I don’t quite know how the gun got into his hand; he must have been packing it in his raincoat pocket. It was a good-sized revolver, gray and steely, and glinted in the harsh overhead light as if it contained an independent
luminosity. “And too bad about you. You’ll be a loss, too.” The hard-boiled expression on the elderly professor’s face—eyes slit, mouth a hard straight line—was right out of film noir.

Me? A loss?

“You’re really quite decorative, you know.”

Decorative!
I scowled. Women’s Studies 101, lesson number one, the pernicious aesthetic objectification of women.

“Now, what am I going to do with you?”

I shrugged, but my mind was racing. I was a healthy, agile, not-yet-forty-year-old woman—and a feminist!—and he was an elderly man. The bulky gun collapsed the age differential, but, still, there must be some way I could overpower—or outwit—this man. I surreptitiously checked the desktop for some potential weapon or distraction. The heavy wooden hand-flex gizmo? No. Neither big enough nor weighty enough. The keyboard. No. Too clumsy to clobber him with, and besides the cord was too short. Something in the drawer? I took a rapid memory inventory of its contents. Scissors? Scotch-tape dispenser? No. And no. My hands tingled with the need for a weapon. Then, without warning, almost independent of my brain, those very same hands identified the shape of the puzzling object they’d brushed against in the back of the drawer. The awkward shape. The object that was hard and heavy and cold.

“I had plans for Milly,” Brooke reminisced. “She was supposed to be at Dash and Lillian’s for the weekend. A drowning accident would have taken care of the problem, and none of this would have been necessary. A neurotic, vengeful woman would have vanished, and without yet another no-talent lady writer the world would have been a better place.”

No-talent lady writer!
A powerful rage surged through my fingertips. Women’s Studies 101, lesson number two, the misogynist trivialization of the female literary tradition! Professor Brooke had gone too far! His gun terrified me, but his smug condescension infuriated me even more.
Decorative! No-talent lady writer!
No goddamned, sexist, superannuated son-of-a-bitch was going to—

“Milly had a psychological complex about me. A twisted sexual fixation,” said the goddamned, sexist, superannuated son-of-a-bitch. “She was a vicious slut, even when she was a scrawny kid.…”

Slut! Twisted sexual fixation!
Women’s Studies 101, lesson number three, the masculine terror of female sexual aggression. The Vagina Dentata—the vagina with fangs.

“…  vengeful. Spreading lies. Besmirching my good name—”

“There’s another one,” I said. The words popped out of my mouth, surprising even me.

“Another
what?”

“Another letter. From Milly Finch—Mildred Deakin, that is.”

Ralph’s eyes narrowed. “Another letter? Where is it?”

“In here.” I gestured toward the desk drawer.

“Get it,” he said, motioning imperiously. The old goat seemed to like bossing a woman around at gunpoint. I shuddered as I reached into the drawer and fumbled through its contents.

“Well?”

“I can’t seem to find it.” And I couldn’t, dammit!

“Do you have it?” He waggled the gun.

No!
Then—
wait! Hard. Heavy. Cold
. My fingers clutched.

“Yes,” I said, and shuddered again. I had it.

“Then give it to me.”

“If you say so,” I replied, clicked the safety catch off the small handgun I’d found secreted in the far reaches of Monica’s desk drawer, swiveled around, aimed squarely for Ralph Emerson Brooke’s chest, and pulled the trigger.

Y
ears ago
, when Tony had insisted on giving Amanda and me shooting lessons, he’d told us to aim right for the target’s torso. “If you’re ever in a position where you have to fire a gun—and, God willing, you won’t ever be—don’t putz around with trying to wing someone. If the situation is dire enough that you have to shoot some son-of-a-bitch, then, for Chrissake, aim straight for the heart. Shoot to kill.”

Luckily my aim had never been terrifically good, so I didn’t end up with the death of an éminence gris on my conscience. I’d aimed for Ralph Brooke’s heart, but I’d winged him in the shoulder. Winged him well enough to drop both him and his gun. He fell to the hardwood floor. I kicked his big gun away; it skittered across the polished floorboards into the hallway and came to rest with a clunk against the recessed base of the Xerox machine. Suddenly the little automatic with which I’d shot him seemed to scorch my fingertips. I hurled it out into the hallway after the larger gun. I didn’t know if Ralph was alive or dead; I just wanted to get the goddamned lethal weapon as far away from me as possible. Within thirty seconds, alerted by the gunshot, a campus cop was on the scene, a pair of town police joined us within a handful of minutes, and then, as I huddled in the window seat in a state of shock, a stream of officers that seemed to go on and on.

W
hen’s Piotrowski
going to get here?” I asked Sergeant Schultz. She showed up at 1:37
A.M
. in the company of a tall, thin uniformed trooper with a hawklike beak of a nose. The first troopers on the scene had called the homicide squad even before the ambulance had arrived to transport Ralph Brooke to Enfield Regional. Schultz had responded with surprising alacrity in spite of the lateness of the hour. Since the English office had been taken over by scene-of-crime technicians, we had been seated in my office catty-corner across the hall for the half hour it took to give the cops my story.

“The lieutenant’s not coming,” Schultz replied.

“Not coming?”

She cast me a sideways look. “No.” The sergeant looked especially youthful tonight in jeans, a baggy yellow sweater, and scuffed white Nikes. Reddish highlights glistened in her cropped brown hair.

“Why not?”

Schultz exchanged glances with the tall, saturnine trooper. Both remained irritatingly expressionless. “He’s taking care of a personal matter,” the sergeant replied.

“Oh.” An inexplicable bleakness invaded my heart: Piotrowski must be out with a woman. What did I know about the lieutenant’s personal life, anyhow; maybe he was out with a
dozen
women.

Schultz studied my face with that disimpassioned manner all cops learn—as if they themselves have somehow been exempted from the messier exigencies of the human condition.

“You know, Professor, we oughta have a talk, you and me. We’re almost done here, that right, Lombardi?” The trooper cast his sergeant a cryptic glance, then nodded. Schultz returned his stare, equally enigmatic. Then, abruptly, she turned back to me. “So, Professor, you just sit here in your office for, oh, say, ten minutes, while I … uh … take care of some business. Then we’ll go get coffee. That okay with you?”

I nodded. I could use coffee. I was cold, shaky, and definitely disoriented; it’s not every night I shoot a senior colleague.

Obediently I slumped into my green vinyl chair. Ten minutes lengthened into fifteen, then twenty. I was nodding off when I heard the scene-of-crime team lug their equipment back to the van. The slam of the vehicle’s doors jolted me awake. Where the hell was Schultz? Did she think I wanted to hang around here all night? And, besides, I had to go to the bathroom. Bad.

The Dickinson Hall corridor was now brightly lit by overheads. Except for a round-faced red-haired officer on duty at the open front door, the hallway was empty, and the sergeant was nowhere to be seen. From the main office, a staccato male voice participated in a telephone conversation. “Right. Right. Right. Right. Got it. Right.” I headed toward the dim alcove under the stairway where the women’s room—an afterthought in this once all-male college—was located in a former broom closet. At the sight of the embracing couple sequestered in the shadows of the staircase, I skidded to a halt. “Oh!” I gulped.

Felicity Schultz’s startled face emerged from behind
the gray mass of Lombardi’s uniformed shoulders. “Uh, Professor, I, uh, I thought I told you to wait in your office.”

“That was a half hour ago.” While I’d been waiting in good faith for this supposedly consummate professional to return, she’d been making out underneath the stairs.

“Uh, we were just … well …”

I grinned at her. “I know—taking care of business.”

She grinned back, sheepishly. “Lombardi here is my fiancé, Professor. It’s been a few days since we saw each other.”

Trooper Lombardi towered over both of us. In a sallow face, his expression was perfectly impassive; he was letting the sarge handle this. I nodded at the trooper. So this was Schultz’s fiancé? Funny, the plain little officer had told me she was engaged, but somehow I’d never thought of there being a real man involved, a rather prepossessing man with that dark complexion and beak of a nose, and not unattractive.

I gazed at the sergeant with new eyes. A blush pinkened Schultz’s cheeks, and her lips were soft from kissing. I sighed with envy.

A
t the Blue Dolphin
, Schultz bubbled about her plans. Big wedding. Catholic church. Holiday Inn reception. Swing band. Dancing.

Sounded like fun. Sounded like my kind of scene. If I wasn’t shell-shocked from almost killing a colleague, I’d want to boogie right now.

When my coffee came, along with Schultz’s Sleepy-time tea, the sergeant got serious. “Ya know, Professor, I gotta say, for someone in your business, you sure got smarts.”

I started to protest: someone in
my
business! Why,
smart
was the very
essence
of my business!

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You got a Ph.D. and all. But
smarts
is something different from head knowledge. That scene in there tonight coulda ended bad.” She shook her head.
“Real
bad. But you pulled that trick on Brooke about the letter … That was
smart
. And … how’d you learn to shoot like that, anyhow?”

I told her. She flashed me the look of reluctant affirmation I remembered from Tony and his pals: Civilians related to cops are somehow not quite as totally clueless as other civilians.

“So,” she said, “just so’s I get this right for the record, let’s go over it one more time. Tell me again exactly what the hell was going on in there.”

“Well, Sergeant, this is how I see it.” And I told her about Ralph Brooke’s early professional life at Stallmouth College and his seduction of Mildred Deakin’s friend Lorraine Lapierre. “According to
Oblivion Falls
—that’s the novel Deakin wrote about Lorraine—”

“I know. I read it. I didn’t know they wrote such hot stuff back then.”

“Umm. Well, according to the novel, Lorraine—who was the Sara character—died during an illegal abortion. Now, this is what I think: Ralph Brooke, on whom the Andrew Prentiss character was based, was responsible for Lorraine’s death—after all, he was the one who got her pregnant—and Milly knew it.

“Marty Katz was doing deep research on Deakin, and he picked up the connections between Deakin, Lorraine, and Brooke. When he approached Brooke, my dear distinguished colleague must have feared his reputation—which seems to have been his most cherished possession—was threatened. That old scandal connecting him to the dead girl was going to be dragged up
again. Instead of being immortalized for his intimacy with the great Beat writers, he would end up with his memory tainted by some sordid story about what he clearly thought of as a mere youthful indiscretion. Then, when Brooke learned that Katz had actually located Mildred Deakin in Nelson Corners, he was terrified. Who knew what she’d say now? Maybe she’d even publish a sequel to
Oblivion Falls
and openly reveal his part in that old story. And here he’d just gotten this prestigious little sinecure at Enfield College—”