Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (161 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I’ve driven through the state university campus at Albany. Whoever designed the place back in the late sixties must have had a grudge against anyone who enjoys knowing where they are going at all times. In a word, the place is a confusing maze of parking lots, white, post-modern concrete, glass, and steel buildings that look like they were constructed more for the set of a
Star Wars
movie than on behalf of educating the youth of the world. The campus wouldn’t be so confusingly intimidating if it were made up of only one type of each building. But instead, the planners decided to create four sets of identical buildings laid out in identical fashion on four identically sized flat-land parcels which, when combined, form a perfect giant square. It’s confusing because you can park your ride in one parking lot and then later on, mistakenly find yourself searching for it in an entirely different lot that looks exactly the same as the lot you originally parked in. You following me here? You won’t realize you’re looking in the wrong place until a half-hour or so has passed because the lot and its layout is identical to the three other lots set directly beside it.

In order to avoid the problem of getting lost, I didn’t park in the campus parking lot at all, but inside the lot of the
Dunkin’ Donuts
which is located directly across the street from the campus’s main entrance. Crossing over the double-laned Washington Avenue, I pat my chest for my .38 which is concealed under my leather coat. I already know it’s there, but somehow it feels good just to touch it. Not that I expected any kind of shootout to happen inside the state university campus. But a man has got to be prepared these days. Who knows what a frustrated writer like Gregor Oatczuk is capable of when push comes to severe shoving?

Once on the main campus I shoot across the main green until I come to a campus directory that’s housed inside a glass case mounted to a concrete balustrade. It tells me that the big white, four-story, concrete-paneled structure set before me is the English Department. Not a very inspiring building for writing new poems and prose. But then what the hell do I know? I was groomed for the funeral business. I grew up looking at stiffs day in and day out. Maybe death is not the most inspiring thing in the world for a young kid, but it seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Maybe it explains why I had no trouble making the transition to cop and witnessing my fair share of violent deaths while on my near-twenty-year watch. Including my own near death.

I approach the building and make a right around its far corner and onto the main quad of the campus. As promised, my liaison, MFA candidate and young poet, Erica, is waiting for me at our appointed time.

“Hope I’m not stealing you away from your muse,” I tell her. She’s dressed in the same short skirt as earlier, knee high socks under a pair of brown leather boots. Her sandy brown hair is blowing in the wind and her brown eyes are lit up in the bright sun that’s beaming onto the open air quad.

“Not at all,” she smiles. “I only write at night, when the cool, calm silence makes everything grow still and all right.”

“You’re a poet and you know it, Erica.”

“No lie that I try.”

Reaching out, she takes hold of my hand. The feel of her hand wrapped around mine gives my heart a bit of a pleasant start. Moonlight the romantic. Or Moonlight the dirty old man.

“Come on,” she insists. “Oatczuk doesn’t like it when people run late for an appointed meeting.”

“God forbid,” I say. “We might make him late for a faculty meeting or something.”

Together we head inside the building, take the stairs to the second floor where we enter through a pair of double doors. Erica leads me down a narrow corridor that accesses classrooms and faculty offices. We make it about midway down the corridor until we come to a closed door, a metal nameplate screwed into it bearing the name Gregor Oatczuk in embossed letters.

Oatczuk. Poor bastard must have had a rough time in grammar and high school with a name like that.

Erica knocks.

“Come,” exclaims a deep voice from behind the door.

Erica opens the door, steps inside. I follow.

The writing professor is seated behind a big, antique wood desk. He’s heavyset, in his late thirties or early forties, and sporting horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He’s got a four or five day beard going, and this long, dark hair that’s parted over his left eye and draped over narrow shoulders. You can tell he’s proud of his hair and the fleeting youth it represents because I’m not through the door for three seconds and he’s running both his open hands through it, brushing it back like it’s a nuisance. But I can tell he’s showing off in front of his student.

“This the man you spoke of, Erica?”

“True dat, Professor Oatczuk. This is Dick Moonlight, honest-to-goodness private detective.”

He smiles, stands, points to the free chair set before the desk. “This is certainly a first for this office, Mr. Moonlight.” He tells me to have a seat.

“I’ll stand, thanks,” I insist.

“I like that,” he says, settling himself back down in his chair. “A man who is always at the ready. Tell me something, do you carry a gun?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I can see his cheeks flushing under his scruff. He’s not used to people answering his questions with a question. He’s a professor after all, the master of his fenced-in kingdom. I don’t only represent the outside world and reality. As a former cop and now a PI, I am an object of both interest and curiosity to him.

“When I think of private detectives, the ones made famous in genre fiction and the pulp magazines of yesteryear, I can’t help but think of guns, illicit sex, and sleaze galore.” He shifts his gaze from me to out the window onto the confusing campus. “Mediocre fiction for simpletons.”

Erica clears her throat. “Mr. Moonlight just wrote his first novel, Professor.”

He turns back to me, runs his right hand back through his hair. Nervously. As if the private detective has suddenly become competition instead of curiosity. “You’re a multi-talented individual, Mr. Moonlight. What’s the name of your opus?”

I glance at Erica. She issues a me a confident smile that screams,
Don’t be shy. Tell him.

“
Moonlight Falls
,” I say. “Sort of autobiographical fiction. Or, if you will, Professor, detective fiction meets memoir.”

His eyes light up under those horn-rims.

“How interesting. False truths and true falses. A pioneering effort on your maiden literary voyage. How nice for you.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it literary, Mr. Oatczuk. More like a mystery novel. Something Dan Brown or Robert B. Parker might write.” Feigning a grin. “You know, a book for simpletons. Nothing Roger Walls or maybe yourself might waste your time with.” I’m blowing smoke up his ass here, and he either knows it and likes it. Or he’s just so used to being creamed on by his students that he’s entirely used to the praise and in fact, expects it.

He nods.

“Let me tell you something,” he says, once more gazing out the window. “The other day I had to take the train into Manhattan for a day-long conference along with some of my colleagues here at the university. Something happened that took me by complete surprise. The train was full of readers. Young, old, middle-aged. They were all reading, or so it seemed. Instead of the clatter of text messages being typed, or cell phones chiming, or video games spitting and spurting, people were reading.” He sighs as though suddenly deflated. “But then something else happened that would undermine my new-found optimism.”

I glance at Erica. She catches my gaze and offers me a tight-lipped nod. It tells me she’s more than used to the good professor’s pontifications and ruminations.

“I can hardly wait to hear,” I say.

“I made a point of trying to find out what the people were reading,” Oatczuk goes on. “I actually physically climbed out of my seat and walked up and down the aisle gazing upon the titles of the paperback books. And in doing so, I was sorely disappointed. Because instead of seeing the names of the greats like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Melville, Fitzgerald, or Faulkner, I saw only Stieg Larsson, Dan Brown, and even some new writer who used to sell insurance but wrote a romance novel in his spare time and sold a million e-books. A man who now owns a fucking villa in the Tuscan mountains and a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue in New York.” Yet another gaze out the window. “E-books. Can you imagine a world in which books are not printed on paper?”

“Some people would call that progress,” I say. “It’s a digital world. You don’t teach that in MFA school?”

“Give us some credit here. We’re not only trying to teach tomorrow’s writers how to hone their craft, I believe we’re trying to save the written word from the people who abuse it while making millions on their bestsellers and their blockbuster movies.”

“I wouldn’t mind selling a movie.” Nor would I mind a penthouse apartment in New York. Not that I’m about to admit it to Oatczuk.

The professor bursts out laughing, like I suddenly ran behind his desk and started tickling him.

“That’s just it, Moonlight,” he exclaims, “it’s people like you … mere pedestrians … who pen a first novel and, entirely ignorant of the process, end up writing some piece of subpar material that shoots to the top spot on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list or some such shit. Suddenly you’re being called the next Stephen King or, if you will, Roger Walls. Suddenly you’re very rich and famous. And where does that leave real, serious writers like myself?”

“Teaching,” I say. “You need to teach in order to make a living.”

“Yes,” he whispers. “We teach. We have no choice but to teach young adults who have about as much chance of making a living as a writer as I do a private detective.”

“Amen to that,” I say, my eyes once more shifting to Erica as she nervously bites down on her lower lip.

I know that if I don’t begin to steer the obviously bitter Oatczuk off the literary versus genre fiction debate, we might never get to the real reason for my visit.

“Speaking of Mr. Walls,” I interject, “I understand you both are great friends. As Erica here might have mentioned, he’s gone missing. I’ve been hired by his agent, Suzanne Bonchance, to find him, escort him back home, and sit him in front of his typewriter so that he might make a little money for them both.”

Oatczuk peers up at me from behind his desk. He purses his lips, as if he wants to say something but can’t quite put the words together yet.

“So, Oatczuk,” I press on, “any ideas on where I might start looking? Since you two are like this?” I raise up my right hand, make a gesture of togetherness by crossing the index and middle fingers.

The professor exhales. Profoundly.

“This isn’t about money, Moonlight.”

“What isn’t about money?” I know precisely what he’s getting at, but I’m giving him a hard time. Just because. Moonlight the ball buster.

“Writing. It’s not about money. It’s about a calling. What we have instead of religion. Or in the place of it anyway. A song inside of us that needs to be sung.”

“Which is why you’ve chosen
not
to make money at it. Isn’t that right Oat … Czuk.”

Out the corner of my left eye, I catch Erica suppressing a laugh by pressing her fisted hand up against her lips.

The prof’s lips go tight, his eyes wide, bottom lip a quivering, trembling live wire. A little blue vein pops out on his neck under his chin. The scholarly writing professor has got himself a temper worthy of the mean streets by the looks of things, even though his wardrobe of jeans, moccasins, canvass button-down shirt screams of Vermont, cows, pot, and organic freshness.

“I’m just playing with you, Oatczuk. I know you’ve been trying to catch a big commercial deal for years now. Suzanne told me so. But things ain’t going so great are they?”

“And what business is that of yours, Moonlight?”

“None. But it makes me happy knowing that you know that I know … If you catch my drift, Herr Professor.” I make sure to say Herr Professor with a genuine German
SS
accent. It makes the little vein on Oatczuk’s neck throb all the more. Stealing another quick look at Erica, I believe it’s quite possible she’s about to pee her little cotton undies. That is, if she’s wearing any.

“You consider yourself a funny man, Detective Moonlight. And I suppose you have infused your charming personality into your writing?”

“Almost certainly. Which is why Suzanne tells me she’s going to sell it for a million bucks. How’s about them apples?” It’s a lie of course, but I’m really beginning to enjoy watching that vein throb to the point of bursting.

Oatczuk shoots up and out of his chair.

“You must be joking!” he spits. “Suzanne Bonchance …
the
Suzanne Bonchance … has decided to take on your book.” It’s a question for which he already knows the answer, but is having a hard time swallowing. He and his throbbing blue vein.

“Why’s that so hard to believe, Oat. Czuk?”

“You my friend … you are merely a poseur.” He’s speaking to me through a bittersweet smile, the fingers on his hands once more combing back that lush hair. “A wannabe. I can bet your talent, or lack thereof, is not even worthy of this writing program. Still, here you are trying to push your first novel through one of the best and most accomplished literary agents this country has ever seen, and ever will see.”

“Well now you’re hurting my feelings, Professor.”

“I believe you are a bald-faced liar, Moonlight. Or, perhaps you did something for her to make her take your book on. It’s no secret Bonchance has experienced a rash of poor luck lately. So what is it then? Did you fuck her, Moonlight?”

Erica’s jaw drops. It’s possible mine does to. But there isn’t a mirror around for me to confirm it.

“Professor Oatczuk,” I say in as calm a voice as I can work up, “I’m surprised at you. A man of your academic standing and respectability, issuing the f-bomb in front of a student. Tsk Tsk.”

He slowly sits back down.

“I truly wanted to help you, Moonlight. But I can see now that you don’t need my help. You, your book, your agent, and your attitude may now kindly fuck off all the way out of my office, my campus, and my life.”