Return to Dust (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

In the morning I slept late, too late, with no desire to jog or swim. The phone startled me awake at nine-thirty.

“You alone?” Liz again.

I wasn't smiling. “Liz…”

“You are. Good.”

“Liz…”

“I'm sorry about last night, that message I left. It was stupid, but that's not why I'm calling so early in your day. I'm at the office. Some of us do go to offices.”

I waited.

“I told you that I'd run all the names you gave me, and nothing came up. But a lot of the records aren't computerized yet, so I had an intern do a manual check. I made a few phone calls out of state. It's amazing the amount of info people are sitting on. I have a juicy tidbit for you. It has to do with Professor Charles Safako. Charlie Safako.”

Liz took her time.

“In going over his file I noticed he'd lived in Massachusetts years back, but there were noticeable gaps in his history. Something seemed questionable. You know how you can tell when things seem a little too doctored in a resumé? After a few phone calls—I have a colleague with the Massachusetts State Police—I learned that the venerable Professor Safako was arrested for manslaughter when he was a young man. At age twenty-three, in fact. In Methuen, Massachusetts. He served five years of a fifteen-year sentence. Did parole, and disappeared, ended up, suddenly, on the faculty of Farmington College. A felon, mind you. He couldn't even vote for president. Talk about your phoenix rising from the ashes. None of this is in his college resumé, of course.”

I was wide-awake. “Great work.” I was pleased. “Fax me the file?”

“Will do.”

“I knew he was hiding something.”

“Somebody didn't ask some questions when he was hired at the college.”

“Or somebody covered something up. Had to be. Somehow. That kind of conviction is hard to conceal. So I got some questions for him. Now I think he'll listen.”

***

When I arrived at Charlie Safako's office, a student was just leaving, opening the door slowly. She was grinning sheepishly as she walked by me. When he saw me standing there, he frowned, stood up, and looked as though he wanted to slam the door in my face. I held out my hand, a traffic cop.

“This hour is for students.”

“Let's take a walk.”

“Let's not.” He sat down and fumbled with some papers on his desk.

“Let's. Methuen. Five years. Manslaughter.” I mouthed the words slowly. “Shall I keep going?”

The minute I spat out the words he crumpled, his eyes blinking and pale. His body slumped in the chair. I shut the door behind me.

He looked up, dry-eyed, and forced himself to stay calm. When he spoke, his voice was clipped and crisp. “So you've come to stick a knife in my vulnerable ribs.”

“No, I've come for some straight answers.”

“That's what Joe McCarthy said as he ruined a life or two. Sit down.”

“Look, I'm only concerned with how any of this relates to Marta Kowalski's death.”

Again he looked surprised, as though he had forgotten what I was all about. For a second I saw relief in his eyes.

“What do you know?”

“No, you tell me.”

I stared at him, an out-of-shape guy dressed in professorial corduroy, complete with the crinkly leather patches on the elbows. Yet the thinning hair was a little too long and uncombed. Whether he was affecting a classic Bohemian style or he thought he was a little too late for the Summer of Love, I couldn't tell. I didn't like him.

I sat still, saying nothing. Eventually, I knew, people talk. Vacuums are for cleaning rugs.

I waited. I had all day.

A deep sigh. “Okay, okay. So you know. I'd just like to know how you found this out.” He smiled weakly. “Academics have no previous lives. Especially when we keep ourselves totally undistinguished in the profession.” He took another deep breath. “It was a stupid barroom brawl and I smashed a guy over the head with a bottle. He died on me. Dumb luck. A local bar I hung out in. I suppose I was trying to kill him—I had a temper. Still do, I'm afraid. Five miserable, stinking years in jail. It was a young man's stupid indiscretion.”

I thought murder occupied a category a little apart from indiscretion, but I let him talk.

“In jail I read and read, and when I got out I finished my Ph.D. at Tufts. Obviously I would have trouble getting a teaching job—murder doesn't look good on a
curriculum vitae
, shall we say, although it's preferable to most scholarly journal publications—but I had connections at Farmington College. Actually on the Board of Trustees, a distant cousin or something of my mother's. Favors owed, et cetera. All hush hush, to be sure. Records were falsified, and the Board appointed me—actually established a position for me. Trustees cavalierly usurp faculty power when the right connections are in place. So I was an assistant professor, without past or portfolio, and the rest was easy. Knee-jerk promotions by means of flattery and fakery. No one ever looked back. No reason to. Here I am. Until you snooped into my life, no one has ever discovered it. No one even
looked
.” He lifted his arms into the air, as in surrender. “Now I've filled in your blanks.”

“I'm not on a witch hunt.”

A bitter smile. “So they all say.”

“But I'm curious, Charlie. What about all those rumors about you? The affairs with students.”

He lowered his voice into a whisper. “You mean that I fathered a child with a coed?”

“For one.”

“Not true. I don't know where that started, but it got ugly for a while. That was a long time ago when I was first here. Then I stopped denying it, and a generation passed. On university campuses such rumors then take on a mythic life of their own—they actually contributed to my reputation. Undergraduates find nothing interesting these days, so legendary bed-hopping by balding professors who still make sexual remarks in class—all that passes for intrigue. The classroom itself is tedious. Legend rarely is.”

“And somehow that baby rumor would keep people from your real past.”

He smiled. “Precisely.”

“So the legend of lady killer is just that.”

He seemed piqued. “Well, women have loved me,” he hissed.

“I mean students…”

He cut me off. “I repeat—women have loved me. Don't be so smug. We both shared the same woman, you and I.”

That stunned me. “What?”

Then I remembered his throwaway remark about Selena.

“You make it seem like such an impossibility. She's always been rude to me—she actually sat in on a class of mine some time back and never shut up—but you do know she's a little bizarre.”

“What happened?”

Charlie sat back, slipping into the present tense. “We're at this party, separately of course, and Selena's drinking and giggly. I'm ready to leave when someone made a crack that I alone of our little Russian tour party will be the last survivor, once the aging Richard Wilcox is dead. Joshua, Marta, Richard—and me. I live. At the door there's little Selena, looking like an understudy for Martha in Albee's little domestic farce. Then, weird, she's all over me. We leave, get a bite, end up chatting like magpies, and then she comes to my place. Couldn't shut her up, and I'm wondering if she's insane. She unbuttons her blouse, and the minute my hand finds forbidden territory, she slaps me, bolts out the door.” He shook his head.

“Why?”

“I guess the liquor wore off.”

“When was this?”

“A few weeks back.” He smiled. “I gather, from the rumor mills, that you did not have such a painful experience with the lovely woman.”

“I don't care about that—or her. I'm here about Marta Kowalski.”

He jumped, knocked over a folder of papers.

“You think because I killed someone at twenty-three I'd kill decades later?”

“It's been known to happen.”

“Look, Marta was not even a friend. She was Joshua's friend, Richard's. I was
their
friend. We almost became friends at one point, but I didn't like her most of the time. Too judgmental. So am I, but frankly”—he smirked—“I'm usually right about things. She thought me a bitter, cynical man.”

“I think the same thing.”

His mouth curled for a second. “Well, the majority opinion is in then. We've heard from the disenfranchised.”

I laughed. “You can't be nice, can you?”

He actually smiled. “Look, Marta at the end was all business with me. She cleaned my apartment. We talked. Damn it, she'd just dusted my apartment before she died. I wouldn't kill her because she left cobwebs on the light fixtures.”

“No romance?”

“Please.” He stretched the word out. “That Catholic crone. A woman who got her credo from a Walmart catalogue? Please.”

“I still don't understand her power over men.”

“There was no power, really. Some men, just a few lonely old souls. My God, man, she did something no one else will do for us.”

“What?”

“No,” he raised his voice, “not that. She paid attention to us. When we talked, she acted interested. Batted her eyes and made us think we were still important.”

“But that came to an end.”

“Well, even Joshua was getting sick of her. Of course, he was fickle. I'd see him at the town library. The last time I saw him he told me he missed Marta, even though—as he put it—she was imperious. He wanted her back, in fact. Imagine—that old fool. He started to say something else, but he stopped. They'd stopped talking, you know. Had a terrible row. A spat over the gardener, then
another
blow out, so I understand. He did say he was sick, but he was ambivalent about leaving Farmington. His home here. He'd changed his mind. Again. Again and again. Imagine my surprise at that. I tried to talk some sense into him. Colleague to colleague. Old guard to old guard. Told him to get out before his world fell down around him. Thank God he listened to me.”

“And they never reconciled.”

“The man had a brain, young man.”

“But somehow you escaped her power?”

“That rumor about the baby has its genesis in one true fact. I like the young ones—like the one that just left my office. The curvaceous coeds whose blouses I look down in class. They know it and know I reward them. They brush against me in the office, so I reward them. It's real pathetic, my needs. The young ones, in the first flush of womanhood. Little girl red cheeks bathed in a harlot's perfume. My lord.”

I stood up, ready to leave. He was making me squirm.

His sarcasm returned. “You're a prude, like all young men. You know nothing about nothing.”

I opened the office door. “How do you know I'll keep your secret?”

He preened like an exultant bird. “But this is not the secret you care about. You'll keep quiet.” He hardened his face. “You're a coward, like all young people. You're afraid of the consequences. Dangerous liability for a PI, no?”

“What about ethics?”

He laughed. “Mr. Lam, you probably can't spell the word.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

The next afternoon, dressed in baggy slacks and a ripped-at-the-elbow sweater that always made me feel at home, I settled in with coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. I took down all my note cards, shuffled them at random, spread them out. I checked them against the files on my laptop. Marta and Richard. Marta and Joshua. Marta and Davey. Marta and Karen. Marta and…On and on. Trying to make new connections.

Marta on her last day—the secret lay there, I knew. That last day. And somehow that last day involved the men she'd been friendly with. My gut instinct kept pushing me back to Joshua. Back to Russia, in fact. Even back to Atlantic City and the photo taken on the boardwalk, all of them vacationing together. But it was Russia where it all began, the professors getting to know one another for the first time, huddled against a dark Moscow skyline, beginning the friendship that shifted and altered and blossomed or declined in the years to follow. Marta's wooing of the resistant Joshua. Back to Joshua, buried with his secrets. Was the mysterious Mary Powell in New York City one of those secrets?

I repositioned the cards on the pegboard and scrolled through files on the Mac.

Marta on her last day. A conversation on the telephone with Richard Wilcox. Slurred drunken speech. An aborted stroll to his condo. Marta had something to tell him. She was
different
that last day. What did she know? Playing around with Richard Wilcox's file, I was coming up with nothing. It was time to visit him again—to replay that final day. I started drawing correspondences of Richard with people other than Marta—with Joshua, for one, with Charlie Safako, with Hattie, with other faculty at the college. The old Farmington guard, rarefied patrician and discreetly removed from the hopelessly roustabout younger faculty members, that newer generation with their herbal teas, fat-free micro/macro lives, and lifetime memberships at Bally's Health Spa.

There was a knock at the door, which surprised me. It was midday and usually I wasn't home. The rapping continued, almost insistent now, and I paused the computer, debating. Then I heard a voice. “Rick?”

It was Ken Rodman. After his surprise visit the other night, he'd disappeared. Out of town, Gracie told me. I'd left a note on his door: “Call me when you get back.” When I opened the door, he was ready to knock again, his face contorted, angry.

“Ken?”

“I saw your car.”

That made no sense. My old Beamer often sat in the yard when I walked to the campus or into town. I waited.

“I just got back to town. Away on business. I had to see you.” But he took a step backward.

I motioned him in. He stood inside the door, but didn't move.

“Does any of this relate somehow to the case, to Marta's death?”

“Wait,” he cut me off. “Whoa.” He actually said that—
Whoa
—like in an old Roy Rogers black-and-white western, recycled these days on Nick at Nite. “I don't think this has anything to do with
that
business.”

“Then why come to see me?”

A long silence. “I didn't care for Davey's reaction to seeing you, you know, on that street in New Haven.”

“And you think that doesn't relate to his aunt's case?”

“It never dawned on me. I thought it was, well, because of…”

“Is Davey gay?”

“He's like me,” he faltered. “He's bisexual.” Again, the silence.

“Your marriage?” I prodded.

He nodded. “We agreed it was best. It was a good marriage, and I love her, but I was seeing more and more men, and she was scared for my health, and there was tension, and we had kids and I wouldn't come home. I was a bastard, and suddenly I find myself alone at my age. Alone.”

“And Davey?”

“Well, I knew him from town. For years, casually. From the garden shop. Nothing much. When I had a yard, I shopped there. I went to this bar in Hartford called Mirage and he was leaving. Actually I don't think he even went in, he was so scared. I think he was hanging out in the parking lot. But we talked and we went out just twice, but it was awful. He's a mess.”

“Why?”

I had trouble hearing Ken because he was whispering.

“Davey doesn't want to be gay. He just is. He refuses to be. He, well—like now and then has sex with a guy but then he hates himself and he hates the guy and he goes back to Mass and prays. He's like his aunt, I guess, from what he told me. A devout Catholic yet he can't stand the sex thing—but he can't help himself. Like I said, we saw each other twice, I think, but he was so fucked up, I stopped.”

“And that bar in New Haven?”

“Pure chance, let me tell you. I was in the bar and I saw him pacing in front, back and forth. He was going through one of his stepping-out periods. I went out and got him, dragged him inside where I bought him a drink. Christ, he spilled it, he was so nervous, and we were both leaving when we saw you. He was actually laughing and loosening up. It blew his mind—you right there and all—that's why he ran away.”

“You see him since?”

“He called me and told me to keep quiet. If you said anything to me or anybody, to deny it. He was scared of his aunt—like she was still alive. It gave me the willies. He was crying and sputtering, and it was awful. He's told me he's praying a lot.”

Standing there, I recalled a guy in New York City years ago, a weird perp I busted. A Jesus freak, a holy-roller type who wore huge crucifixes, prayed out loud on subways, and saw himself as God's faithful buddy. But every once in a while his dreaded sexuality drove him to cruise waterfront bars below Christopher Street, picking up young guys in alleys. Then, filled with self-hatred, he'd get violent. One time he beat a teenage boy to death in an alley. When I found him, he was praying in St. Patrick's, his fingers wet with holy water.

Thinking of Davey, I wondered how this bit of autobiography sat with the fiercely homophobic Aunt Marta.

“And his aunt,” I asked Ken, “did she know?”

“Yeah, he talked about that. He was real bitter. He didn't tell me how she found out—but she hated faggots. They had a wild fight and that's why she cut him out of the will. He hated her.” He stopped, listened to his own words. “But, come on, he's not gonna kill her for that. He's a devout Catholic.”

“Catholics kill.”

“Not Davey. He's just, well, fucked up about this gay thing.”

“Okay, so Davey still has to deal with it.”

“You can't mention this conversation.”

“I can't promise that.”

“I told you—he begged me. He doesn't want people to know.”

“I can't promise you that. This opens up questions I might have to ask. I'm sorry.”

He turned abruptly, making me jump. And as he did, the pleasant face crumbled, twisted, an unlovely face.

“You'll be sorry,” he swore.

“What does that mean?”

“Davey is a ticking bomb.” He stared at me for a second, and then left.