Deception (14 page)

I pulled myself up, leaning on Mulch, and opened the door to a pitch-black garage. I turned on the wimpy overhead light. The hundred-watt bulb was fifteen feet up, nearly worthless, barely enough to illuminate the velvet Elvis I bought roadside in Arizona twenty years ago as an anniversary gift for Sharon. I grabbed a flashlight and looked on the shelves, past toolboxes, hoses, and transmission fluid. I pointed the light up to the storage platform behind me, built to take advantage of the dead space. It was full of boxes of junk Sharon had asked me to toss. Miscellaneous sailing paraphernalia reminded me how, after Sharon died, I bought that used sailboat. I’d been out in it three lousy times in two years. Finally sold it.

I stopped rummaging and shone the flashlight around the garage. I passed Elvis and held the beam on an old blue plastic box by two studded snow tires. I stood over it, hands shaking.

I opened the box, pushed aside a block and tackle, some lures and line, and found a couple of ropes.

I pulled one of them out, laid it on the cement floor, pushed back Mulch, and aimed the flashlight. The rope’s end had been cut neatly by something sharp. Stretching it out, I guessed that three feet had been cut off, recently, since even in a dusty garage the cut fiber was still sparkling clean.

The rope was bright blue, with a red weave. Polyester with three-millimeter fibers. A Marlow.

I’d bought it three years ago at Strickland’s Sail Shop.

9

“I do not think there are any insuperable difficulties. Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
A
DVENTURE OF
W
ISTERIA
L
ODGE

S
UNDAY
, N
OVEMBER
24

MY IDEA OF FUN
is not discovering that the rope around the neck of a murder victim is mine. I sipped coffee at my kitchen table, pondering it.

Finally, I picked up that thought and set it on a shelf, making room on my mind’s tabletop to spread out Professor William Palatine. Who was he? And what made me think I was supposed to already know?

By all accounts, Palatine was brilliant, accomplished, and occasionally charming. He was popular among the students—especially intellectuals and females. Female intellectuals? They were crazy about him. Even so, I wouldn’t want to trade places with William Palatine. Not sure how much Teacher of the Year and a Princeton diploma means when you’re alive, but I’m pretty sure I know how much they matter when you’re dead.

In the absence of determinative evidence, you have to know the victim to figure out the most likely person to have killed him. That’s why I had to get to know Professor Palatine. Especially since the last phone call he ever made was to me.

Had I been home that night, maybe Palatine and I would have chatted. Or maybe he would’ve said, “There’s a man with a gun; he’s 5’ 10”, carrying a box and wearing a Pizza Hut jacket. The name on the jacket is Reggie.”

Jake tells me death’s not a hole, but a doorway—that dead people are now alive on the other side. He said that about Sharon. I hope he’s right. For her sake anyway. I don’t know what I hope about me. Or the professor.

I’m a trained observer of the real world. I know nothing about what lies beyond the senses. This much I do know … when a man is lying on his living room floor with a few gallons of his blood soaked into a blue carpet that’s now dark purple, he is not mostly dead, but as Miracle Max said in
The Princess Bride
, “he’s all dead.”

Solving a murder is a final gift to the deceased. Whether they know about this gift, or whether they can ever know anything again, is a matter of debate, a debate Jake and Clarence love to engage me in.

If Palatine has a soul and there’s a God, then it’s God’s job to judge his soul. Even though I have the distinct feeling I wouldn’t have liked him, when it comes to the crimes against his body, if anyone’s going to get him justice, it’s me.

That’s what I do. I get justice for the dead.

After moving from the kitchen to my office, down the hall past the bathroom, I opened up files of photocopied letters Palatine had sent. Many of them appeared to be love letters, saying how his heart was pierced and he felt a fire within and how he hated to be separated from her, blah, blah, blah. Yet not one of the letters addressed a woman by name. If I’d written love letters to Sharon, I’d have put her name on them.

And why make the photocopies? What was his future use for them?

The professor’s signature was there on other documents in his files. It was fancy and borderline illegible. Only the
W
and the
P
were clear—except the
Dr.
, which was prominent and unmistakable.

I spent the next hour reading various things written by him in school papers, as well as two introductions online from when he was a visiting lecturer in the ivied halls of academia.

I read again the printout of his supposed “I deserve to die” confession on the computer screen.

I went to the shelf and got down my
Webster’s
dictionary. I looked up the word
judgement
.

I stayed home all afternoon, making phone calls, trying to reconstruct Palatine.

Manny and I are both on T-Mobile, for the free minutes, since we can exchange a dozen calls a day. In the last three hours this was call six.

“You know his stupid habit of not putting a name with the number?” Manny asked. “I’ve been calling all the numbers on papers in his desk. A real estate agent, plumber, and computer tech. A student named Brandy who said she had no idea why he had her phone number. He’d never called. But there was another number. A private detective.”

“No kidding? Who?”

“Ray Eagle.”

“Wait … the guy who helped us with Abernathy’s sister’s case? Why would the professor have his number?”

“Ray Eagle,” Manny said, clearly irritated, “says to give you this message: ‘If Ollie Chandler wants to know why the professor called me, I’ll meet him at the precinct tomorrow morning.’ He said he read Abernathy’s article on the investigation, so he’s invited too.”

I heard the slow burn in Manny’s voice.

“Can you join us?”

“No. I’ve got work to do. Trying to solve a murder.”

Mulch got restless and talked me into a 9:00 p.m. walk. As we headed toward a nearby greenway, a light, cool rain blew into my face, and a thought hit me like a bolt out of nowhere.

What if that call to me from the professor’s house wasn’t made by him? What if it was made by the last person there after he died?

M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
25

Before leaving for work, I saw Saturday’s newspaper on the recycle pile. It inspired me to pull out the VCR manual. I put on my reading glasses and found the page about setting the clock. I didn’t manage to set the correct time, but at least I stopped it from flashing. I raised a Budweiser in victory when it turned to 12:01.

You never know when some smart-aleck journalist might drop by.

Ray Eagle, short and athletic looking, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, Levis, and an OSU baseball cap, met Clarence and me at the Justice Center. I refreshed my memory before he came. He’d been a Detroit cop fifteen years, five as a detective before moving back to Portland.

After we took five minutes to catch up, I asked, “So what was the professor doing with your number?”

“Palatine called me twice. He wouldn’t identify himself. Caller ID gave me nothing. I had the next call traced.”

“How?” I asked.

“Friends in the right places,” he said. “I used to be a cop, remember? Anyway, he called from his home, not the college. He said he’d gotten some threats, but they were oblique.”

“He used the word
oblique
?
”

“Yeah. I checked it online five seconds after he said it to make sure I knew what it meant.”

“It’s a college professor word,” I said. “They throw it out there to impress you. Journalists do the same.”

“People like you are why we write at a sixth-grade level,” Clarence said.

“If I were one of your readers, I’d be insulted.”

“If you were one of our readers, you’d be informed.”

“You guys need a counselor,” Ray said, raising his hands.

“What was the threat about?” I asked.

“He’d been getting phone calls every week, near midnight. The caller implied that Palatine was going to be held accountable for how he’d wronged someone. I think he knew what it was about but didn’t tell me.”

“Why’d he call you?”

Ray took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. “Somebody recommended me. I told him if he thought his life was being threatened he should call the police. He didn’t want to. His second call was Tuesday morning, thirty-six hours before he was killed. When I heard about the murder, I wished I’d done more. Maybe I should’ve called the cops.”

“Why didn’t you call us after the murder?”

“Cops don’t like PIs sticking their noses in. I figured you’d be calling me. Sure enough, you did.”

After Ray Eagle left, I drove the five minutes to the PSU library, by the Park Blocks. It would have been a fresh but drippy half mile walk. Showing my badge to a wide-eyed librarian, I requested the videos of the professor’s lectures, which I’d learned existed from a previous call. He carried three videos and escorted me to a private viewing room with an uncomfortable metal chair.

I’d asked computer forensics to send me all Palatine’s lecture notes. With a keyword search, I’d located the notes corresponding to these exact lectures and had them with me. Two were the same presentation from his Philosophy 102: Ethics class, given in back-to-back sessions. I watched both sessions to see what I could learn about him. What struck me was how he would roll his eyes up, as if searching for a word. Then suddenly he’d come up with it, when it was right there in front of him in his notes and he’d said the same thing in the previous class, also rolling back his eyes and searching for that same perfect phrase.

In other words, Palatine was the south end of a northbound horse.

He spoke about the dominance in literature and philosophy of dead white males. Never mind that he was a white male. And dead to boot.

He talked about the naïveté of believing in moral absolutes. Listening to the professor, and the student comments that mirrored him, reminded me that many educated people believe there’s no such thing as right and wrong. And that many educated people, therefore, are stupid.

Why would I be a cop if there wasn’t right and wrong? Steal their skateboard, stereo, or spouse, and suddenly they believe in moral absolutes.

I’m no church boy, but the Christians have it right on this one. When you deal every day with crimes against people, you can’t stomach all this waffling on right and wrong. As I listened to the lectures, it struck me as odd how much money people are willing to pay to be taught ethics by people who don’t believe in ethics. It ticks me off that all of us are paying the price for raising a generation that doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong

But what would I know? I’m no college graduate. I’m just a working stiff, trying to keep the next person from being mugged or raped or murdered by people who—guess what—don’t believe in moral absolutes.

Jake called me about football at my place that night. He assured me that many philosophy teachers these days believe in moral absolutes, and Palatine was a throwback to moral relativism. Well, okay, but do universities offer students their money back when the philosophies they learned there ruin their lives … and other people’s?

The professor’s lectures were as heavy on ego as they were light on morals. After the fourth video, I was surprised someone hadn’t killed him years ago. And dumped him and his smart-aleck philosophy-quoting answering machine into the Willamette River.

For the third and final time I absolutely ruled out suicide. Could a gun, in a recoil back on the finger, fire a second time? Maybe. Could a man put a noose around his neck and put a gun to his chest? Sure. But after watching Palatine’s lectures, I decided I’d never seen a man with less self-loathing. If he killed himself, he’d have done it the easiest way, mourning humanity’s loss of himself.

After leaving the PSU library and entering the real world, I pulled up the collar of my trench coat, pulled down my wool fedora, and leaned into the icy rain to my car eighty feet away. I thought of my cousin Harvey in San Diego. Maybe I should move there. If I did, I’d stay away from Harvey. But the weather sounded great.

I went to the old brownstone for lunch and worked through the afternoon. Sarge knows I work well at home, so he gives me a long leash. I changed into sweatpants and sweatshirt, sat down at the kitchen table, threw away the mail, heated Nalley chili, smothered it in cheddar cheese and chopped onion, and sat back with a box of Ritz crackers, thinking step by step through the crime.

After getting a second glass of milk, I found myself staring at the message on my fridge: “Examine the evidence. Then follow wherever it leads.”

Monday night football, usually at Jake’s, was at the brownstone tonight. I scanned the house, put in some elbow grease, and ten minutes later the place was spotless.

Clarence came at five thirty to show me a draft of his next article. I told him to strike a couple of sentences that said too much.

“You’ll notice my VCR clock isn’t blinking,” I said nonchalantly.

“It’s three hours fast,” he said.

“It was made on the East Coast.”

Jake joined us, the pizza arrived, and one of those great kickers named Jason set a football on the tee.

During halftime my cell rang.

“No kidding? You’re sure?” I hung up, staring at nothing.

“What?” Jake asked.

“The Franklin Terrace apartments.”

“What happened?” Clarence asked.

“Our binocular-gazing hamster-loving Mr. Paul Frederick … the guy who told us the man at the professor’s door might’ve been wearing a stocking cap and looking for his lost dog?”

“How could I forget him?”

“They say he had an accident thirty minutes ago. He fell off his second-story deck. He’s dead.”