Death of the Black-Haired Girl (23 page)

He called down to his wife. She came upstairs, grim-faced.

“Was that Stack?” she asked softly.

“Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

She shrugged.

“He’s in town,” Brookman told his wife. “He wants to meet me at the office. But he could be anywhere out there. Go down and lock up.”

She started for the steps.

“Listen,” he said to her. “I’m going up there. Lock up behind me and let nobody in here. No cop stuff or any such bullshit. Don’t open it.”

She nodded and went downstairs. Brookman went to a utility room at the end of the hall, locked himself in, turned on the light. It was the place he kept his outdoor equipment, his guns and fishing rods, his climbing gear, tents, protective clothing. One of the things he also kept there was a .38-caliber pistol, a few years old. He stuffed it in the wide pocket of an old parka and prepared to go out. When he switched off the utility room light there was a double knock at the room’s door. He opened it to Ellie. He had put on the parka in the semi-darkness. Her hand found the gun’s outline in his pocket.

“Steven! Don’t meet him with that. It’s wrong. It will destroy you. Destroy us.” She was trying to keep her voice down. They both were.

“Of course I’m taking it,” he told her. “He’ll have one. While I’m out, you should load the Mossberg. The shells are on the shelf. Oil it and load it. I’m going.”

“No,” she said. “You mustn’t!”

He seized her by the shoulder.

“Don’t be a complete fool, Ellie. He means revenge. He thinks I killed his daughter. He’s coming after us.”

Brookman hurried out before Sophia had time to come out of the kitchen.

I
T WAS ALMOST DARK
when Brookman walked across the half-deserted campus to Cortland Hall. A river fog shrouded the brick college structures and reduced the town’s Christmas decorations to a distant haze of holiday colors. The building’s hallway lights were off; Brookman switched them on, left the outside door unlocked and went upstairs to his office. He left his office door unlocked as well and sat down behind his fine oak desk.

Maud had left her paperback
Doctor Faustus
and a plaid scarf on one of the captain’s chairs with their emblazoned motto
Lux in umbras procedet.
Copies of the
Gazette
featuring her story were stacked in a rocking chair. For some reason there was a copy of
Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation
on his sofa.

Brookman felt guilt and bitter regret but it was not any illusion of atonement that drove him to face her father. He had a sense of debt to the man and to his daughter’s memory but he was not offering himself in reparation. For one thing, he wanted to draw Stack’s anger away from his house and his family. But it was not remorse for the most part that moved him to face Stack. Other forces inside him, old determinants of his life and fortune, drove him. Two things were foremost in his mind: his family in the house down the hill and his shame at bringing the gun along.

He did not believe that he had killed Maud by loving her, through what had happened between them. Still, there was some kind of blood debt, something to be endured as a result of what had happened. He thought of it as something to be learned, a mystery he was compelled to live out. What brought him to the office and the meeting with Stack was akin to every other high-risk venture he had ever undertaken. Maybe the temptation of oblivion, or an obsessive curiosity about the ineluctability of fate. And an ancient anger he had been born with, an insatiable rage against himself, his cast of mind—a sense that he had been born out of line, raised wrong, lived deserving of some unknowable retribution that it was his duty and honor to face down, prevent, overcome. His yielding to the spell of Maud, the pain he had caused Ellie, his coming into the path of the unfortunate old man’s revenge, all were mysteriously part of it.

He heard the outside door open slowly. When it shut, the building sounded with an echoing hush, the magnified whispery desperation of Stack’s breathing, in discord with his footsteps and the reports of his cane against the oak floors.

Brookman sat silent and unmoving, frozen in place. In the office, he could detect a lingering savor of the girl that quickened on the thoughts of her he had spent so many days resisting. Somewhere at the center of the confusion and grief of the past weeks, he remained trapped in images from the teeming street in front of his house in the moments before the phantom car had struck. At his heart was a dreadful sense of loss, of life, of love, all lost, so wrongly, so unjustly, so in accordance with the wretched laws of life. Maud lost. And Ellie and Sophia—every loving impulse he knew, dead at the source, dead on arrival. Can I have brought down all this death in life on us, Brookman wondered, through my fondness for a pretty girl? And could Maud have been led to death through so commonplace an adolescent adventure? It was all so good, he thought, all about the beauty of a girl and of the world, of its forms, its sublimest language. He waited, despising his own fecklessness and self-pity yet offering them to fortune as his alibi. He thought of the Thomas Wyatt verse in her pocket. God have mercy on her.

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall . . .

She carried it in her wallet, he thought. Carried it for me. God have mercy on her, he thought. On us, on me. How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.

The tapping of the old man’s cane was harrowing him. Then there was the knock on his door, and it was a four-beat measure that reminded him of Maud’s signal.

“Professor Brookman?”

“It’s open, Mr. Stack.”

He heard Stack pause for breath and cursed the impulses that had led him to wait seated at the desk like some lame victim of justice. He ought, he thought suddenly, to have stood by the door and taken the old guy down, weapon and all if he had one. Brookman grew angrier and angrier. In the hurried failing breaths of the man at his door he could sense the satisfaction of an avenger, and a sense of his own justification drove his rage. He put his hands on his desk and watched Stack come into his office.

Edward Stack looked to be a hard man with a practical cop’s face. A man used to being feared. Maud had his eyes, Brookman thought; you would have paired the two of them by sight because of the eyes.

“You,” Stack said. He did not say it in an agitated manner but softly, with an edge of satisfaction. It was an intimidating way to be addressed, but it fed Brookman’s anger. As Stack said it, the cane fell from his hand, clattered on the wood floor and rolled across it. It was the kind of stick chain drugstores sold to aging cut-rate cripples. Both men looked down after it. Stack made no move to retrieve the thing.

“Were you going to hit me with that, Mr. Stack? Were you going to cane me?”

He watched the old man struggle for breath, not able after a moment to conceal his gasping.

“For God’s sake,” Brookman said.

Brookman stood, his eyes on Stack’s, and came around the desk. Stack took a move back and put the right hand that had held his cane on the arm of the chair nearest Brookman’s desk. It was there for students’ use during office hours and Maud had sat in it often enough. Stack put his hands on the chair and eased himself into it, fighting for air.

Brookman saw that the old man had miscalculated. Whatever he had intended was beyond him, whatever havoc on Brookman he saw himself as wreaking in his mind’s eye was well past his capacity. He was settling for life and breath, propped on the chair. There were no threatening motions, no reaches for weaponry. He did not even try to talk. At first he could not bring himself to look at Brookman, and when he did, he was attempting not to show the fear he plainly felt. Brookman was ashamed.

“Are you all right?” Brookman asked him, avoiding his eyes. “Do you want oxygen? Should I get help?”

“You son of a bitch,” Stack said, breathing hard. “I came here to kill you.”

“That would have been wrong, Mr. Stack.”

Stack began to laugh. Brookman wanted to beg him to rest and be silent.

“We got to be friends over the years I was her adviser. I let it get out of hand. I was emotionally involved and she was . . .” Something in Stack’s expression made him stop.

“You . . . you phony obscene son of a bitch. You . . . bastard. She was a young child.”

“No. She was my student, Mr. Stack. I always respected her. I let the distance between us become too close.”

“Stop calling me that, you posturing fuck. Stop calling me Mr. Stack.”

“Sorry. What shall I call you?”

Stack tossed his head in what looked like a spasm of pain.

“It sounds like you’re passing yourself off as someone her age. You’re a married man, you bastard. She was a child.”

“Not to me.”

“Like you were a couple of kids, you dirty-handed son of a whore.”

“Two grown people.”

“She was younger than her age,” Stack said fiercely.

“She was a beautiful, educated young woman.”

“Oh, bullshit. She was a kid!”

“She looked that way to you.”

“You killed her, didn’t you? That’s what it comes to.”

“She died in an accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Stack insisted. He sounded as though he knew he was arguing against logic.

“She died in an accident. It could have been anyone in that street. It could have been me.” He leaned his forehead on the heel of one hand. His elbow touched the weight of the gun in his pocket and he was ashamed of having it. “It’s so cruel,” he said to Stack. “I’m sorry.”

Stack stared at him wide-eyed, his handsome ravaged face ugly with animal suffocation and his hatred.

“But emotionally,” Stack repeated, “she was younger than her age. She was a kid.”

Without meaning to, Brookman shrugged. He sat silent, to let the old man catch his breath and because he did not know how to answer.

“You say cruel,” Stack reminded him. “How about you for cruel? To crush a kid’s feelings like that. Break her heart! You act like I don’t understand. Like I don’t know what you did.” He coughed, took out his handkerchief, turned in the chair and folded his hands over the back of it.

A nice-looking man, Brookman thought, his adversary had been. But his basically lean, intelligent looks were utterly blasted, the fine eyes swollen, the fair skin flanneled and flayed, marred under his high cheekbones by sickening spidery angiomas.

“I saw your family, Professor,” Stack said. “I bet they’re good people. They weren’t enough for you? Why didn’t you leave us alone?”

“Maud was my friend and my student, Mr. Stack. I never, ever meant to hurt her. I respected her and I respect you. If you thought I was patronizing you, you were mistaken.”

“You picked her up, you seduced her, and you dropped her, and you should not have done that. I swear to God I came here to kill you.”

For that, Brookman had no answer. Only the pistol he was more and more ashamed of having.

He stood up, walked around the desk and picked up Stack’s cane. Standing over Stack’s chair, he offered him the handle. As he did, he realized that Stack had caught a glimpse of the gun in the right pocket of his parka. Stack struggled to his feet, reaching toward him, and Brookman gave him a shove that drove him toward the wall. The old man was wheezing, reaching for his inhaler. Brookman backed away. For a moment, he thought he might have killed him. But Stack caught his breath.

“You son of a bitch, Brookman!”

“Sorry about the weapon,” Brookman said. “I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t come up here to shoot you.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Professor. I got nothing to lose, Professor. You better think before you let me walk out of here. Because I’m gonna have it done. Too bad about your nice family. And maybe everything was the way you claim. But I’m gonna see you get done for what you did to me, and the people who are gonna do it know all about cruel. So you can give them your thoughtful reflections while they work.”

After a moment he saw that Stack was laughing at him. Or pretending to. His eyes were alive, blazing with contempt that was altogether genuine.

“You conniving scumbag. You brought a weapon. You have a fucking piece on you!”

“I have a family too, Mr. Stack. The way things are . . . I mean, I didn’t come up here to hurt you.”

“No, you would have got fired, wouldn’t you? No, Professor. I don’t think I would have used a gun on you either. I’m too old and feeble to get myself arrested and locked down and endure all those fucking formalities over a piece of shit like you.” Brookman watched him and realized he was unarmed. “All that uncomfortable confinement in the shitty jail you people keep for your menials. Not me! I mean, the shame of it all? Over you? No way.”

He thrust his fist against his palm, trying to act out a triumph he lacked the breath for.

“You should be in a hospital, Stack,” Brookman told him. “Are you sure you can get home?”

“Let’s see the pistol, cowboy. Let’s see what you brought for me.”

“I want you to leave, Stack. If you won’t, I’ll have to call security.”

Stack stood up slowly.

“I’m so sorry,” Brookman heard himself say. “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

The old cop looked him over.

“You’re really upset, aren’t you? You’re sorry. You’re telling me you’re sorry?”

Brookman only nodded.

“It was bad luck, right? Bad luck for everybody. Like a mistake.”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“Well, Professor Brookman,” Stack said, “the people I’m sending to you have a saying. They say when somebody makes a mistake, somebody got to pay. So you’re gonna pay. They’ll explain—the people I’m sending. They like to talk, you like to talk, like to listen. So you’ll understand.”

“Get out,” Brookman said.

“You know,” said Stack, “you want to do the right thing, man, you should use that weapon. You should never let me walk out of here.”

Brookman picked up the phone to call security. Stack went out before he finished dialing. Brookman supposed he himself had been bluffing, would never have completed the call. He replaced the receiver, sat down behind his desk under the faltering ceiling light and listened to Stack’s footsteps and the tapping of his stick.