Red White and Black and Blue (8 page)

I stuck it in the black shoulder bag I carried when traveling in Europe and Asia. The gun nestled in there nicely with my map of Istanbul and my Imodium.

I phoned the SUNY economics department. A secretary said Dr. Paul Podolski might be able to see me after his two-hour nine o'clock summer-school class. SUNY was on the way to Rotterdam, more or less, so I went out and was about to climb into the Toyota when I thought, oh shit, car bomb.

With effort, I got down and checked the wheel wells—

nothing amiss—and then popped the hood and examined the engine. Nothing wrong there either, other than some corroded battery terminals. I thought, this is nuts. What the hell am I thinking? The Serbians warned me to get off the Louderbush investigation, and they don't even know that I'm still on it, so why would they try to blow me up? Several people—two of them other Crow Street denizens I knew vaguely—strolled by while I was inspecting the car. None seemed to be watching me or showing any interest at all in what I was doing.

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I got in and turned the key and was not blown to bits. I pulled out onto Crow, then turned up Hudson. I checked the rearview mirror periodically and headed out Lark and then left on Washington Avenue toward the SUNY main campus. Some fair-weather clouds drifted across a pale early summer sky, and I opened the car windows and sucked in air that felt unusually clean and fresh. I thought, I hurt but I am inhaling and exhaling like a pro.
Nice.

The State University of New York Albany main campus—

which cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it was strewn across a field by Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s but by now looked only a little more alluring than a hot-sheet motel in Fort Lee—was sparsely populated during its summer semihiatus, and those few students and others out and about were in no big hurry. I parked and soon located Quad Four, the classroom tower from which Greg Stiver had plunged to his death. I thought I figured out the spot where he had landed. There were no aftereffects, no memorial plaque. I paused for a minute, then moved on.

Paul Podolski had a third-floor office in a nearby building, another cement and glass upended shoe box, the public architecture of a society wary of overspending in an area it was ambivalent about, such as learning.

I was told by the department secretary to knock on the door of room 318, but when I found 318 the door was open and a man looked up from a computer terminal.

"Yep? What's up?"

He looked like one of the Smith Brothers on the cough drop box, skinny, shiny on top and black beard from upper lip 74

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to midsection I introduced myself and said I understood he had been Gregory Stiver's thesis adviser, and I asked if I might talk to him about Greg for a few minutes.

"Maybe. Who are you working for, may I ask?"

"I can't really say who my client is at this point. But I can tell you it's somebody entirely sympathetic to Greg, someone who is very sorry about Greg's death and the circumstances leading up to it."

He sat there sizing me up. Who was I, and what was I up to? "What circumstances are you referring to? What circumstances leading up to Greg's suicide? That is, if it was suicide."

I helped myself to a seat in the chair across Podolski's desk from him. "I'm talking about Greg's unhappiness in the weeks before he died. The police and press reports both refer to Greg's supposed despondency. What do you mean, if it was suicide? You have doubts?"

"All I'm saying is, I didn't expect Greg to do such a thing.

It was shocking to me."

"He hadn't been depressed that you were aware of? Two friends say he was. Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman were neighbors of Greg's and rode with him from his place on Allen Street out here to the campus a couple of times a week."

"It's true," Podolski said, "that I didn't see as much of Greg after his thesis was accepted as I did in the previous months.

Which I was actually sorry about. I always enjoyed talking with Greg. He was quite bright, and I always thought somebody that smart could be led away from his rather simplistic ideas about the vaunted glories of laissez faire 75

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capitalism. And he loved to explain to me how my supposedly socialist ideas—I'm actually a kind of Jack Kennedy accomodationist Democrat—were a form of the very tyranny the founders of the republic had rebelled against.

"Greg and I spent a lot of time poking and jabbing at each other on these matters, without either of us ever giving an inch. But we respected each other, and Greg's thesis on the half-century erosion of the work ethic in the German Democratic Republic was a well-written and nicely argued piece of work. I had encouraged Greg to turn the thesis into an article for, say, the
National Review
—I know an editor there—and he seemed quite eager to do that. I know he had just about finished a draft when he died, and he was planning on showing it to me. So, really, I was just stunned when he fell off Quad Four and was killed, and pretty soon out came an official verdict of suicide, of all things."

Was this the Greg Stiver Insinger and Jackman had described to me? Could there somehow be two Greg Stivers?

I said, "Wasn't he anxious about getting a teaching job? His friends said he was, and he'd been turned down by two colleges."

"I think there were a couple of things that didn't pan out, yes, but one of those institutions—someplace out near Rochester—Hall Creek Community College, I think I recall—

had a spot that opened up unexpectedly. Greg knew somebody out there who tipped him off to the opening and was lobbying for him. So the job situation wasn't all that bleak, in my estimation. And then suddenly Greg died. It was 76

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appalling, really. One of those deaths that, when it happens, is just incomprehensible."

"Did you attend the funeral?"

"I did. It was depressing too. No acknowledgement of the absurdity of Greg's death at all. But then I do understand that that isn't what funerals are for. For absurdity we go to Beckett or Sartre, not Calvin."

"Who attended the funeral? Did you know the people there?"

Podolski fidgeted. "You know, I'm really curious about who is asking questions about Greg's death five years after it happened. So does this mean that someone besides me is suspicious of the suicide verdict?"

"Yes, someone is," I said, and I wasn't lying because I knew as soon as I said it that I meant myself. "There's no evidence of foul play. At this point it just has to do with someone Greg was involved with. May I ask what you knew about his personal life?"

"Not much. I knew Greg was gay. He was active with the Log Cabin Republicans. Or had been. I know during his second year in the graduate program he cut back on most of the extracurricular stuff so he could concentrate on course work and on his thesis. And of course on playing rugby supposedly."

"Greg played rugby? This is the first I've heard that."

"That's what he told me. Though I sometimes wondered.

He'd come to see me all banged up—bruised, a split lip, a shiner one time. It happened every so often, and he'd shrug it off and say rugby was just something he needed to do to 77

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burn off tension. But I have to say, I knew a few other rugby players, and none of them ever looked like they'd been run over by a truck the way Greg did. And this seemed to happen regularly. It occurred to me he might be—let me just put it bluntly—in an abusive relationship."

"You never asked him?"

"Once I did, actually. I thought I had to. I said something about his black eye, and had somebody socked him one? This was a chance for him to open up if he wanted to. But he didn't pick up on this. He said oh, no, it was just a wicked weekend game with some of the rougher players in his league. I let it go after that, thinking that either he had to work this out on his own at his own pace, or that maybe I was just imagining the whole thing as to any abuse.

Educators used to be inattentive about this sort of thing, and now maybe we've overcompensated and we've gotten hypersensitive. It's hard these days to know when to butt in and when to butt out."

"Any signs of a rugby team at Greg's funeral?"

"Not that I noticed. It seemed to be mainly family and friends of the Stiver family, plus a few other faculty and students from the econ department. There was somebody from the Federalist Society I recognized."

"Both of Greg's parents were there?"

"I believe so. Why wouldn't they be?"

"I've been told Greg's father, Anson, is a nasty piece of work, and they didn't get along."

"I didn't know that, but then Greg never talked about his family at all with me. He preferred to talk economic theory 78

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and history, and it was the nature of our relationship that he could do that with me and just lose himself in it, the way some people lose themselves in drugs or sports memorabilia or line dancing. I'm a little bit that way myself with economic theory, although I do manage to have a life otherwise. My wife sees to it that I come out of my academic cave from time to time, and I am grateful to her for that."

"What about political figures? Were there any at the funeral?"

Podolski tugged at his beard as if to stimulate memory.

"None that I'm aware of. Why do you ask? Is your investigation politically related somehow?"

"Possibly. It's too soon to tell what my investigation is really about or where it might lead."

"Does somebody think Greg might have been pushed off Quad Four? I have to say, I've been haunted by that possibility ever since he died. I assumed at the time that the police would have considered foul play, and then they rejected it based on the evidence they had. Of course, if they had asked my opinion about Greg committing suicide, I'd have told them that to me it was unlikely. But they never asked. Apparently they based their conclusion on the physical evidence and little else."

"The Albany cops did talk to Greg's neighbors, Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman, who told them that Greg had been anxious and depressed for many weeks. Did Greg ever mention Insinger and Jackman to you?"

"Not that I recall."

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"Those two also told me that Greg was romantically involved with a political figure he met when this man visited one of Greg's classes at SUNY. Do you know who they might have been referring to?"

More beard tugging. "None comes to mind. Political figure?

On rare occasions members of the State Legislature are on campus for one reason or another. Or the governor. Who was governor five years ago? George Pataki, I guess. Or—I have to ask—do you actually know who the politician was that Greg was getting it on with and you're just being coy with me?"

"I'm trying to be discreet. Call it coy if you want to."

"Then I suppose I could figure it out. I could ask around the department. But why don't you just tell me who it was and save me a lot time?"

"Kenyon Louderbush."

"The Tea Party guy running for governor?"

"Yes."

"Yuck."

"Republicans can be sexy. I've read that one reason Laura Bush has stuck with her doofus of a husband for so many years is, she considers him a hot number."

"That's enough about Laura and W behind closed doors. As my students sometimes say, TMI."

"Couldn't Louderbush have visited a class without your knowledge?"

"Possible but not likely. I'm vice chair of the department, and faculty always give me or Doris Carpenter, who's the chair, a heads-up as to any visiting royalty. Legislators have to be wined and dined, at least figuratively speaking. And 80

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Louderbush is one of those budget-committee characters whose presence in the department—or on campus at all—

would be taken very, very seriously by the powers that be around here. No, I would have known about Louderbush showing up on campus. I really doubt that that's where the two of them met."

This was getting confusing. I said, "I keep getting different stories from different people as to who Greg Stiver was and how he led his life and what his state of mind was in the months before he died. He was depressed, he wasn't depressed. He was an isolated economics wonk in an abusive relationship, or he was an eager young man looking forward to launching a career in academia who let off steam regularly by charging around and getting banged up on a rugby field.

Greg's story gets more
Rashomon
like by the hour."

Podolski seemed to be gazing at my bandaged ear. "It looks like you're into rugby pretty heavily yourself, Donald. Or is your own story also more complicated than you're letting on?"

"You could say so, yeah."

"Anyway, I love your bag."

* * * *

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Loitering in a car outside an elementary school is a good way to draw unwanted attention if you're not the parent of one or more of the pupils inside. So I parked in what appeared to be the staff lot, locked the shoulder bag in the trunk of the Corolla, and strode up to the uniformed security guard outside the main entrance. The stout, seventyish, Caucasian man was shifting this way and that, looking as if he was about ready to finish his shift and get the heck off school property and go somewhere and have a smoke—I could smell it on him—and a brew. The curb fifty feet away was lined with idling school buses, their drivers poised, awaiting the onslaught.

"Sir, I'm looking for Jennifer Stiver. Is she likely to come out this way?"

"Prob'ly."

"So, school's out in three minutes?"