New England White (19 page)

Art Lewin was still deep in his own maunderings as Bruce, unable to bear any more, slipped away into the shadows. He had decided: campus life was not for him.

The young economist had said there was no rational case to be made for traditional marriage, and a part of Bruce Vallely hated him for that. Bruce could have offered a perfectly rational case, although he suspected that a scholar trained in the modern way would never understand. For Bruce, the case in behalf of marriage consisted of a single beautiful word:

Grace.

CHAPTER 19

A DISTURBING COMPLAINT

(I)

B
ACK IN HIS OFFICE
for a few precious minutes before hurrying home to beat the storm, Bruce put in a call to Rick Chrebet. There were only so many remaining favors he could call in, but what he needed, he needed. For a change, Rick was at his desk, and, yes, they had interviewed Art Lewin at length before everything stopped, and, yes, they had picked up on the remark about Jamaica. Yes, they had checked it out: they had not, said Rick, quite lost all of their competence since Bruce left. And, no, he was not in anybody’s computer for anything that weekend or anytime soon: no Jamaica, no Caribbean, no air travel, no hotel, no car rental, no cruise ticket, nothing. Zant was just back from a trip to Dallas and Atlanta to make presentations for his consulting clients. On the way home he had stopped in Arkadelphia to see his uncle. The week after the murder, the economist was supposed to have gone to Los Angeles to visit another client, but had not yet made his reservations: the client’s corporate travel department had been waiting to hear from him. “First class,” said Rick, awestruck. Zant had also booked tickets, buying early to save his hosts the fare, for an April conference at the University of Chicago, where he was supposed to deliver a paper on the optimal level of adultery.

“Seriously,” said Rick.

One more thing, he added, voice dropping. Zant had recently used his E-ZPass, his digital toll card, on expressways in Massachusetts. But no hotels or motels had hosted him, and none of his Upper New England friends had seen him.

A puzzle, said Rick.

Bruce agreed. “Now, Kellen Zant did a lot of consulting work.”

“True,” said Rick.

“Do you know what he was working on when he died?” A long pause, two old colleagues sniffing each other out. “Is it a state secret, what he was doing?”

To Bruce’s surprise, his sally brought forth no answering laugh, even the mirthless one that would tell him he wasn’t being funny. Instead, the silence continued, as though Rick Chrebet was weighing sad options his old partner could not imagine. When Rick spoke, his usually dry voice dripped reluctance. “It was a robbery, Bruce. You know that, right?”

“I read the papers, but—”

“We’re not looking into his consulting work, or his private life, or anything else.” Words slow and painfully clear. “We’re looking for an armed robber who shoots his victims in the head. Period. An official statement will be out soon.”

“Suppose it wasn’t a robbery. Suppose—”

“Other avenues have been considered. They’re closed now.”

“Does that mean—”

Rick was implacable, even if amiable. “We’ve known each other a long time, Bruce. I know how your suspicious little mind works. I know you must be thinking, double-tap, back of the head, it looks like a professional hit. And you must be thinking, whatever Zant was working on, he must have scared somebody important. But you’re wrong, Bruce. Those possibilities have all been ruled out.”

Bruce considered. They had been partners forever, friends nearly as long, and knew how to send messages without ever letting on. Rick had used the passive voice. He did not say he or his people had chosen not to try the other avenues. He said they were closed—implying that someone else had done the closing. So Bruce answered, every bit as carefully, “Bear with me for a moment. Okay, it was a robbery. I accept that. I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends.”

Rick laughed, humorlessly, and it occurred to Bruce that his old partner, usually tumbling with mirth, was genuinely perplexed, even miserable. “You’re not a cop any more, Bruce. Loose ends aren’t really your department.”

“These loose ends are. It’s a university matter. I’m not…working the case.”

Again the answer was a long while coming, and Bruce wondered what invisible line he had crossed.
He must have scared somebody important
. In the outer office, somebody was shouting about a basketball game, a big upset. Rick said, “Sorry, Bruce. His work is a dead end. That’s our conclusion.”

“Who concluded it?”

Still the slowness, words dragged upward like heavy treasure buried in a tomb. “I really can’t get into those details, Bruce.”

“This really goes that high up? Is that what you’re saying?”

Another hush on the telephone. The predicted snow was spattering the window, except that it was mostly rain. What flakes there were melted before they could stick: sort of like the official investigation. Bruce wondered why his partner had been so forthcoming at first, but slowed the flow of information once they reached the topic of Kellen’s work.

“I’m sorry,” said Rick at last, and Bruce knew better than to press. He had already asked for, and been denied, access to the Audi and to Zant’s house. If he asked too many favors, even Rick would reach a point when the word
no
might become too easy to say.

“Okay. Just one more thing.”

“Sure, Bruce,” said his golfing buddy, but the arid voice carried a note of warning.

“They say Kellen Zant was a bit of a ladies’ man. They say he particularly liked married women.”

“That’s not a question.” Impatient now, the favors plainly at an end.

“You must have interviewed some of the, ah, husbands involved.”

“And wives. What’s your point?”

“Were any of them…Did you ever focus on one of them as a suspect?”

A hiatus on the other end. Paper rustling. Voices in the background. Had Rick put the telephone down? No. He had unplugged his headset and was whispering directly into the mouthpiece. “That’s over the line, Bruce. I can’t discuss that.”

“Come on, Rick. This is me.”

“Yeah, Bruce, it’s you. Are you gonna punch me in the face if I don’t talk?”

“I never did anything like that and you know it.”

“Some of the guys you dragged in here sure thought you might.” A heavy sigh. “Matter of fact, I seem to remember that a couple of them filed civil-rights complaints.”

“What? That never happened!”

“I think it did.”

“What is this, some kind of joke?”

Although Rick was no longer on the headset, his voice was as distant and dry as before. “A couple of the complaints are in process now. Maybe they were filed after you left the force.”

“There’s rules. The department would have to give me notice.”

“Must have fallen through the cracks.”

Bruce ran a hand through his short, brushy hair, trying to get his mind around what could only be a threat. “What are you telling me, Rick? Am I under investigation?”

A beat. The voice came back, not so harsh. “I’d watch myself if I were you, that’s all I’m saying.”

(II)

B
RUCE BADE GOOD NIGHT
to the second-shift staff, just filtering in, a dispatcher and a sergeant in the building, a pair of patrol cars on the move, three officers and one administrator for a campus of several hundred acres: the agony of the balanced budget. Six more cruisers and a trio of vans were behind a wired gate, awaiting the day shift, and the day of more money. He pushed through the double glass doors and out into the parking lot. He never left the Mustang in the space reserved for him, because backing up and turning around were too difficult. With his wife passed on and his children grown, worrying about scratches in the smooth red bodywork was one way to fill the need to fret. He opened the door and smiled grimly, remembering all the years of opening the passenger side first for Grace, who declared herself utterly liberated except on the issue of…well, who gets to go first.

And thinking about Grace put an itch in his mind, something to do with Kellen Zant and his car—

He stopped. He felt watched.

Swift eyes that had known jungle darkness and desert glare ranged across the shadows that lay beyond the far end of the lot, where the university property ended. The border was marked by a sprinkling of small houses, a couple of disused factories, and, farther on, a slowly rising hill at the crest of which developers hoped to create a luxury subdivision. Sight is drawn to movement in the inkiest of nights, but Bruce, gaze impeded by the yellow gleam of the lamps that illuminated and, in theory, protected the parking lot, saw nothing.

Something.

A wisp of movement in the woods near one of the houses, a fold in the darkness like a brief thickening of the very air.

Gone.

An animal. A gust of wind. Imagination, born of stress: he knew that malady, too.

Yet Bruce Vallely was a man who would rather trust his instincts than interrogate them. If he felt watched, somebody was watching. But no amount of patient waiting was able to conjure afresh that strange twisting image in the woods.

Bruce shook his head, then stood still again, looking at his hand. He was still holding on to the wide-open door of the car. The itch in his mind was back. He thought about handing Grace in, as her people used to call it, securing her door before opening his own.

Of course.

He realized what had bothered him during his interview with Nathaniel Knowland. What had the div student told him about the night he saw Kellen Zant?

There had been a woman with him, a skinny phantom, a black woman with a British accent, wearing what might or might not have been a white rain slicker. They had climbed into Zant’s gold Audi TT on Town Street, across from the stadium.

The woman drove, Bruce remembered. And Kellen Zant got in first on the passenger side.

Bruce had pressed the young man, and he had not backed off this particular detail.

Kellen Zant, the great ladies’ man, not only allowed the stranger to drive his car, but did not hold her door before seeing to his own.

Slipping behind the wheel of the Mustang and starting the engine, Bruce felt twin theses forming. One possibility was that Kellen was too distracted, or too angry, to be polite. This struck him as unlikely. Politesse was not choice but training. Either the habit of opening doors first for the ladies was so ingrained that it survived one’s moments of passion, or it was not. Very well, in the generation that had spawned Nathaniel Knowland, or the generation looming just a few years beyond it, such pleasantries meant nothing, or might even be taken as insults. But Professor Kellen Zant was of a different time.

All of which led Bruce, as he steered past the cemetery toward Royal Road and, beyond it, North Elm and home, to his second possibility: namely, that Kellen Zant got in first because his companion told him to.

And why would he do what she commanded?

Well, that would depend. But one fact of which both police officers and, say, Secret Service agents are agonizingly aware is that, unlike most coats and jackets, a loose, voluminous rain slicker is an excellent place to conceal a hand holding a gun.

CHAPTER 20

AN EVENING VISIT

(I)

S
UNDAY NIGHT
.

Kellen Zant’s blocky, modern house was surrounded by trees, set back from the road on three-quarters of an acre in Hobby Hill, one of the priciest, and oldest, neighborhoods in Elm Harbor. The house was “cold,” in the jargon, meaning that the police teams had been in and out so often that there was not a shred of untainted, or unlocated, evidence left inside. But Bruce Vallely was not sitting in his Mustang on a side street around the corner because he was searching for the critical clue that would solve the case. He was there because he wanted to get a better sense of who this man was, or had been; and spending an hour or so wandering a house, studying furniture or the arrangement of food in the kitchen or the selection of prints and photographs for the walls, was his favorite way to get inside the heads of those no longer around to answer his questions. The tricky part was that he had no official standing, and his liaison at the police department had turned down flat his request to go inside. There was no owner to ask. Kellen Zant had left no will, and his estate would be tied up for months if not years. So Bruce made an old-fashioned sort of plan.

He would break in.

He reasoned that the alarm would be off, with nobody either to pay the bill or to set the code, and that the neighbors would not consider it strange to see a man, even a black man, playing with the front door—well, the back—because so many evidence techs must have gone through the place that by now local residents must surely have decided to shut the curtains and ignore the noise.

And there was something else.

Bruce had spoken to a man whose home backed on Zant’s yard, a retired classicist named Bischoff, who insisted that he had seen two people enter the house, via the back door, the night Kellen Zant was killed. And what was interesting was that he swore they had gone in at a quarter past eight precisely, the same time that Nathaniel Knowland had spotted the economist on Town Street, outside the stadium. Bischoff was certain because he had been up in the bathroom taking his medication, according to his rigid schedule. He even pulled out his time chart to show it to Bruce, then drew an analogy to something in Ovid that Bruce had never heard of, to say nothing of read. Thinking it over, Bruce supposed it was possible that Nate Knowland had the time wrong by a few minutes, or, possibly, Zant had left earlier than young Knowland thought, and he and his female companion had hurried up to Hobby Hill, a drive of only five or six minutes. But why would they have snuck around to the back door, arriving, as Bischoff insisted they had, not from the driveway but through the trees? Bruce had asked the classicist whether he had shared his story with the police, and he said yes, and produced the business card the officer had given him—Janey Wei, whom Bruce knew, a rising star in the department—adding that she had promised to get back to him, but never had.

So now Bruce had his car parked in line with the trees through which, said Bischoff, the intruders had come. The intruders who entered the house after Kellen Zant left but before he was dead—because, once he was dead, the police might show at any minute—but who could have made the decision only if they knew he would not be interrupting them. To emerge from the woods at the spot the retired professor had indicated, they had to have crossed another lawn. There were several to choose from, and Bruce doubted that anybody had seen anything. But the decision entailed a certain risk, and he wondered what they could have wanted so badly that they would chance getting caught.

He climbed out of the Mustang, lock-picking tools in his pocket, and walked along Hobby Road, where massive, brooding Victorians competed with massive, brooding brick Colonials for the prize of most dourly expensive home in the city. Not many black residents out here. If he remembered correctly, other than Zant there was only one, a single woman who was a partner in a local law firm. How did they manage out among the white folks, these lone pioneers? He could not guess and decided not to care. The job. Focus on the job. It was night, just past eight, for he wanted to see the street the way it was when the intruders made their sally into the house. Lights were on in almost every house. Family rooms or dining rooms looked out on the lawns. How on earth had the visitors slipped by, especially on a snowy night, when movement would show against the backdrop of solid white?

The risk was enormous, sneaking across a lawn at so early an hour of the evening, when one parent arriving home late, one teenager putting out the trash, one dog making a ruckus, would spell disaster.

Then he spotted a possibility.

On the corner, one of the largest homes was under renovation, and looked as if it had been for some time. True, the lot did not back on Kellen Zant’s, but once Bruce slipped behind it he found that the tree line that connected the back of all the properties along the street was sufficiently thick that one could, with a modicum of caution, move under cover from one lot to the next until reaching a path to the economist’s house. Bruce did exactly this, and, even moving slowly to avoid unnecessary noise, he took no more than two or three minutes to do it, not least because the path was already marked, at least to his experienced jungle eye: marked by bent twigs and broken branches, to show the passage of humans, first inward, to enter the house, and then, when they were finished, outward again, on a slightly different course, blazing a fresh trail.

The classicist, Bischoff, had seen what he said he saw.

Bruce checked his tools. Trevor Land would be astonished at Bruce’s enterprise, but this was the only way he knew to pursue the case. He did not expect to find evidence of who had committed the crime. He sought only evidence of who Kellen Zant had been. He would be in and out of the house swiftly and undetected, and Trevor Land would never have to know.

(II)

H
E CROSSED THE BACK LAWN
by moonlight, having learned long ago that nature almost always provides enough illumination if you just let your eyes get used to it. An indentation in the heaping snow was a swimming pool, covered for the season. The walls of the house were vertical wood siding, painted gray, with casement windows. Thirty or forty years ago, when the place was new, the design must have been the latest thing. It took no more than ninety seconds to pick the lock, and he was right, the alarm had been shut off, not even set to a “watch” function that might have beeped to signal the door opening and recorded the intrusion in some computer out in Kansas or Karachi. He did not flick on a light. He stood in the kitchen, adjusting to the richer darkness indoors. Glowing smears in the shadows were the fluorescent fingerprint powders so beloved of today’s investigators. Bruce still preferred the traditional basic black, perhaps because of the seriousness it connoted.

The kitchen was stainless steel and did not get much use. Dishes and cookware were the latest thing, and gleaming. Cookbooks had unbent spines. Zant liked to put on a show but did not like to cook, and, evidently, rarely had anyone cook for him. Beneath each sparkling-clean gas burner was a tray made of wrinkled aluminum foil, presumably a habit the economist had brought with him from the South, hardly ever seen these days. In the nearly empty refrigerator he found another: the open box of baking soda to absorb odors. A spill on the shelf told him that the police had searched inside the package, and perhaps taken some powder as a sample. The police, or the other intruders: the ones who dropped in before the police. Why the powder? What were they looking for?

Worry about it later.

Bruce moved out into the hallway. Living and dining rooms were furnished with a strange mix of new heavy pieces and sleek Scandinavian designs that had been in fashion twenty years ago. Zant could afford to change with the times but obviously had not wanted to. Yet, from what Bruce had learned, the economist was hardly wedded to the old ways. Perhaps he had chosen not to buy new tables and chairs because he lacked the time to invest; or, more likely, because by preserving the furniture he was preserving something else.

The question was what.

He continued through the first floor. Everywhere there were books. They had been taken down and put back, by a sloppier hand than Kellen Zant’s, for the professor liked everything clear and neatly organized. No doubt the police had done some searching, but what really impressed Bruce was that whoever had entered the night Zant was shot had also done their search with care, leaving few traces, not wanting subsequent, more official investigators to come across a wrecked house that might lead to a more extended official investigation.

First tentative conclusion: those first, unofficial searchers had been professionals.

Second: they had known or guessed that, in the absence of serious clues to indicate a break-in, the search for the killer would be closed down.

Bruce found the economist’s study, and, on the walls, the expected collection of degrees and awards and photographs. Lots and lots of photographs: plainly a man in love with his own image. The filing cabinets had been rifled, and he was willing to bet that everything that dwelt even remotely on Zant’s finances was gone. He saw no checkbook or Rolodex or address book, his usual tools for reconstructing a life, and supposed they were tagged and sealed in the police evidence room. In the old days, Bruce would have had bank and telephone records to examine, but not as unofficial investigator and official lackey to Trevor Land.

No matter. He would make do.

The desktop was arranged to make space for a computer, but none was present: presumably the detectives had borrowed it to analyze the hard drive. Not plausible, however, that it would be the only one. A man like Kellen Zant would also carry a sleek notebook computer. Art Lewin had two or three. Bruce made a note in his old-fashioned leather-bound notebook to inquire whether one was found. About to leave the room, Bruce noticed a thick sheaf of pages still on the printer, perhaps the last work the economist had produced, probably in draft form. A yellow light was flashing, presumably because the device was no longer connected to a computer. If the pages had been left by both the police and the intruders, they likely possessed no evidentiary significance, but he was a methodical man and so lifted them anyway, flipping through, pausing here and there. Three separate academic papers in progress, from what he could tell, none thin. He examined the first—jointly authored, he noticed, with Art Lewin.

…but, because the relatively successful liberation of women has made marriage less economically necessary for women, and thus less attractive to them, one would predict that fewer women would marry, or, among those who do marry, that fewer would remain married. The data bear out both predictions….

Revolted at the reduction of matrimony to analysis of data, Bruce shuddered. Then he collected himself—what else would one analyze?—and flipped farther through the packet.

…of course either the first-price auction or the all-pay auction will yield the same long-run convergence if players adopt strategies enabling them to learn from the results of previous plays. This is true whether or not the bidders’ preferences are convex. If however the players participate in only a single iteration of the auction, the benefits to the auctioneer are likely to be greater under…

This time Bruce almost smiled in the musty darkness of the study. Academics had so many ways of saying “Bow down before my brilliance.” That article, too, he put aside. The next one gave him pause.

…but no trace of Gina’s body was found for days thereafter. Although to this day the evidence points to young DeShaun, for years ever after rumors circulated through the town like winter wind….

Bruce frowned. Odd that Kellen Zant should be looking into this old case. And the words hardly sounded like Kellen Zant’s academic prose. They sounded…adolescent. He flipped back to the title page and understood. Instinct, instinct. Already guilty of breaking and entering, Bruce reasoned that theft of a twelve-page paper was a lesser offense, especially a paper not authored by Zant. He slipped the pages into his pocket.

A last look around the study. Why had the police taken the computer? General principles, or did they have a particular goal they had yet to share with the university? Or might it have been whoever broke in the night Zant died? Bruce shook his head. For a moment the ego wall caught his attention, a peculiarity he could not quite name—

He stopped, peering out into the yard. He thought he had seen a light, a brief flicker, like a signal, but although he waited and waited by the window, there was no repetition.

He went upstairs.

Three bedrooms, none particularly spacious or modern. One looked unused, another had a distinctly feminine cast, with dead flowers in a vase—the only flowers he had seen in the house, so Zant was no fan—and, atop the dresser, a scattering of powders and creams. The drawers were empty. The closet was empty. Had a woman been staying here? If so, had she cleared out her things before or after the murder? And why leave the cosmetics? Because they’re messy if you’re in a hurry. So either she was in the house after the murder, clandestinely, or, if before, she left in a rush. The police had asked themselves the same questions: fingerprint powder glowed brightly in the darkness. Bruce made another note in the book. Flipping back, he made tick marks next to two lines in his interview with Arthur Lewin, Professor Zant’s protégé.

Instinct. He took two of the jars, one an exotic and, to look at it, expensive moisturizer, the other a foundation powder with a silhouette of Africa on the label. He stuffed both into plastic bags he had brought along and slipped them into his pocket. Maybe the substances would be traceable, and, in the unlikely event that the detectives returned, a couple of missing vials might not be noticed.

Finally, he tackled the master bedroom.

More Scandinavian furniture, including a dresser so battered that one corner was supported by a dusty economics textbook. But Zant had money. The twin closets were jammed with enough fancy duds to clothe half of Hollywood on Oscar night. The top dresser drawer held racks for tie clips and cuff links, but the container was empty. Odd. In the next two drawers, underwear, socks, pajamas, sweaters, athletic togs, everything pressed so perfectly his eyes ached. In the bottom drawer, family albums, snapshots, old report cards, a meaningless jumble.