New England White (25 page)

“I thought you meant, don’t tease.” She played a few awkward notes from
The Sound of Music.
“This is what you like, right? Broadway?”

Julia’s agitation grew. “Stop, Tonya, okay? Please.”

“Wait, wait, I remember. I remember. Duke Ellington played this piano.”

“Well, he did.”

Irritated, Tonya closed the cover. “You’re really particular, did you know that?”

“Runs in the family,” said Julia, probably by way of apology.

“So—is he?” On her feet, searching for her jacket. “Going to ask about you and Kellen? Is that what he’s up to?”

Julia shuddered to think what stories were being told. “Tonya, come on. There wasn’t any me and Kellen.”

“Oh, really?”

“I mean, not in years. Not since long before Lemmie.”

They were at the door. “Julia, honey?”

“Hmmm?”

“Is everything okay with you and Lemaster?”

Stunned again. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I was just wondering.”

“But why would you ask something like that?” Shivering with indignation. “Tonya, really!”

“Nothing. Forget I asked.”

She turned away.

(III)

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
. Julia was in the basement, straightening up, because the house was not quite recovered from Jeannie’s slumber party last night, celebrating the start of winter break. Under Lemaster’s regime, each of the children was responsible for the behavior of his or her own friends, a rule, he said, that got the incentives right. Jeannie’s friends, all of the paler nation, had left a considerable mess behind. Mona Veazie would have criticized their raising in her daughter’s hearing, and Julia was half tempted to do the same. She found paper plates of pizza, forbidden down here, and spills of soft drinks. DVDs and video games were scattered everywhere, many out of their packages. The state of the bathroom did not bear mentioning. She could have waited for the twice-a-week maid service, but had learned from her mother never to let a mess lie around, and the lower level was, unquestionably, a mess. Jeannie, as her drive for self-perfection grew, made an unfortunate point of playing only with the children of the well-placed families of the Landing, either those with money or those connected to the university.

Julia scrubbed and picked up and vacuumed. She stripped the futons, then walked into the guest room to do the same for the bed and fold-out sofa. The room was decorated with posters of Broadway musicals, but only those with black themes or black casts, a collection she had begun in Manhattan back when Kellen used to tease her about her show tunes. Broadway, said Kellen, was the music of white America.
There are three things you always seem to be running from,
he would say.
Your people, your past, and your God.
But here in the basement bedroom of Hunter’s Heights, surrounded by Ethel Waters and Lena Horne and Paul Robeson and Eartha Kitt and half a dozen others, Julia assured herself that he was wrong. Here were her people. Here was her past.

She wondered what Jeannie’s friends thought of the posters.

And Astrid, who always used this room.

Your people and your past.

Julia sat down hard on the bed she had just stripped.

History,
Frank Carrington had said, repeating what Kellen had told him when he bought the cheval mirror.
He said you would like it because you love history.

Was it possible—

Show tunes. Tonya had teased her, as Kellen used to, as everybody did, about her taste for Broadway show tunes. All her friends knew what she loved.

She turned to look at the poster of Lena Horne.

Jamaica, Kellen had told someone the night he died. He was going to Jamaica. Nobody had found a plane ticket or a reservation. Nobody knew what he meant. But now Julia did.

The famous title song of the musical
Jamaica.
Famous, at least, among those who knew the history of African Americans on Broadway. Lena Horne singing about the little island on the Hudson.

Lemaster, in the div school speech Kellen had mocked, calling Kepler “an island of transcendent clarity in a sea of secular confusion.”

Kepler Divinity Quadrangle, a little island…on Hudson Street.

That was Kellen’s message. A message for Julia’s ears alone. Maybe she was his Black Lady after all. The night he died, Kellen had visited the divinity school, and if he wanted nobody else to understand his message, that implied that he had hidden something there, somewhere, for Julia and Julia alone to—

“Mommy?”

Perfect Jeannie stood in the doorway.

“I was gonna help you clean up. Those other girls left such a mess down here.” Clucking her tongue, exactly like Granny Vee, who died twenty years before Jeannie was born. “Oh, you’re done.” Miming surprise. “I guess I’m too late. Oh well.”

She scampered off.

CHAPTER 26

PERSONA GRATA

(I)

B
RUCE
V
ALLELY WAS UNHAPPY
. He was busily preparing next year’s preliminary budget for submission to the provost. The tricky part was that he had received, just last week, a memorandum informing him that his department was facing a budget cut of 2.5 percent, part of the university-wide effort to trim operating costs in the wake of declining investment income. Yet his instructions were explicit: he was to find the cuts without laying off any officers, postponing “vital” equipment acquisitions, or weakening “net campus security.” Maybe Penn and Teller could work this trick, but Bruce himself had no idea how to do it. Still, he was the boss and this was the job, so he sat in his drafty office with a yellow pad on his desk, testing various permutations of numbers, none of which added up.

He glanced out the window at the fleet of university buses in the lot, painted in the school colors. Several were caked in snow. Christmas was coming in a week and a half, and Grace would not be there to make it special.

First time ever.

He shook off the mood and bent to his yellow pad once more, playing with numbers on the calculator to figure out how to meet the provost’s impossible demands. He had an image, albeit dim and distant, of how state legislators and members of Congress must struggle to put together a budget in an era of limited resources. Never again, Bruce promised himself, would he assume that politicians had an easy job. The media, along with ordinary voters, gave them a terrible time, but the truth was, they were asked to achieve the impossible; and, occasionally, did.

His mind was not on his work. Not this part of his work.

His mind was on the case.

Earlier this week, enlisting a friend from Temple Baptist, where he and Grace used to worship and he occasionally still did, he had found the source of the jars from Kellen Zant’s guest room: makeup products manufactured by a small black-owned firm in Detroit, sold only by one beauty shop in the city, where, as it happened, Julia Carlyle was a regular.

All right, another black woman could have bought it and left it in the guest room. The trouble was, Kellen didn’t date black women. He dated white women.

Except for Julia.

Yet Bruce could not imagine Julia Carlyle sneaking in and out of Kellen’s house on Hobby Hill, and not just because she would almost certainly have been seen. More to the point, she just did not strike him as the type. Such behavior would seem, in her Clannishness, beneath her.

Another black woman? With a British accent?

Very strange, and getting stranger.

Bruce forced his attention back to the budget. He was still fiddling with figures when the receptionist buzzed to say that Rick Chrebet was on the phone.

“We better meet,” Rick said.

(II)

“I
T’S NOT PERSONAL
,” said Rick Chrebet.

“That’s a relief.”

“Seriously, Bruce. It has nothing to do with you.”

The thaw was memory. The weather had turned wintry again. Bruce Vallely shoved his famous hands deeper into the pockets of his overcoat, wishing for his parka. The two men were descending the towpath that bordered the fetid Harbor Canal. Reeds four feet high separated the frozen mud from the water. On their right, up the slope from the path, ran Deepwater Street, where, ten or twelve feet above their heads, cars scuttled past, seeking a shortcut to avoid rush-hour traffic. In theory, the land abutting the canal was a park. In theory.

In practice, it was simply raw, and deserted.

The department wits used to say that God put together Rick Chrebet with the little that was left after he made Bruce, for Rick was—everyone in the squad room could recite the litany—shorter, thinner, slower, cooler, and paler than his partner. Back when the two were rookies together, twenty-odd years ago, one might also have said that Rick Chrebet was blonder, but the decades had sprinkled both heads equally with a salty gray. Now Bruce had retired and Rick, just passed over for captain, was on the verge of doing the same, except that he enjoyed the work.

For a few minutes, there was no sound but the tread of feet over snow: one pair heavy, one pair light, one pair heavy, one pair light, the rhythm as steady and predictable as an old friendship.

Finally, Bruce said, “If it’s not personal, what’s going on? There’s no investigation of anything but a robbery. Everything else has stopped.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“It’s robbery? That’s the final verdict?”

Rick had been carrying a long stick. Now he tossed it into the reeds, disturbing whatever lived there, because there were ugly flurries in every direction. “I told you this was coming.”

Bruce raised his face to the battered afternoon sky. A bright smudge suggested that the sun still lived out there somewhere. “Nobody will talk to me all of a sudden.”

“I’m talking to you.” It occurred to Bruce that his former partner was very angry. “Never mind. I know exactly what you mean.”

“So—what’s going on?”

His partner eyed him. “Why are you so interested in this? You’re retired.”

Bruce knew better than to trot out the “loose ends” explanation this time. “I’m under some pressure here, Rick. My employers want to make sure every ‘t’ is crossed, every ‘i’ is dotted, so on. You know how it is.”

But Rick Chrebet was not saying whether he knew how it was or not. “Look, Bruce. This is very hush-hush. And people aren’t very happy about it.” A pause. “I hear Ben Church threatened to resign. And Janey Wei threw a hissy fit.”

Bruce tried to picture little Janey losing her temper, couldn’t.

“What were they so mad about? What happened?”

“Look. We follow orders, okay? From higher authority. Let’s put it that way. Now, a couple of days after the murder, the cops out in the Landing were running in circles, but Ben and Janey had a couple of leads. They were making a nice case. They—well, never mind the details. The point is, they were making progress, right?”

Their walk had carried them to the muddy edge of the water meadow. Tall grasses seemed weedy and offending.

“So—another day goes by, and Janey and Ben develop a little more information, and they have an interview they want to do. Not a suspect or anything, but a lead. Somebody who might point them in the right direction. They want to interview this individual, but it turns out to be a little bit sensitive, for…well, reasons. They have to get certain permissions. They see the people they have to ask for permission—this is where your higher authority comes back in, right?—and then they wait and wait, and maybe two days later, three, an order comes down. No interview. No speculation, not to anybody. Then, a couple of weeks later, no investigation either. No more work. Call it an armed robbery, close the case, and turn over all the notes, all the files, sealed and signed. Want to know why?”

“Yes.”

“So do we. Janey and Ben especially. All we know is, the state’s attorney herself made the call. One rumor said it was the feds. Another said she was worried about next year’s election with this case hanging over her head. Anyway, higher authority tells everybody on the force to stand down. From now on, we only look for people who might have wanted to steal his wallet and his keys. And that’s the end of that.”

“And Ben and Janey…”

“Hey, Janey’s got little kids now, so does Ben, even if he never sees them since the divorce. Mortgages. Retirement to save for. I mean, Bruce, look. Okay, it’s a little high-handed, but robbery does make sense. Maybe it even
was
a robbery. People will accept that verdict. They’ll skin us alive for not finding the perpetrator, but they’ll believe the motive.”

They were near the end of the towpath. A rusty bicycle barred the way, the brackish water dark and unwelcoming where, when Bruce was a boy, he and his older brother used to launch their canoe. Even the floating ice looked polluted.

Bruce said, “Theresa Pappas—the state’s attorney—she’s a good friend of the Carlyles, isn’t she?”

Rick shrugged. “One thing I learned in this investigation is, except for Kellen Zant, just about everybody is Lemaster Carlyle’s pal. Oh, some people are a little bit intimidated by him, because he knows pretty much all the movers and shakers. But, either way, nobody wants to say a word against—” He stopped, and clapped his old partner on the back. His face was pinched. “Bruce, look. That’s not why I wanted to talk. Whether we’re ordered to call Zant’s murder a robbery or something else isn’t your problem.”

“Then why?”

“Because—just between you and me and the wall?—you’re not exactly what we’d call persona grata these days, if that’s the phrase.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve had some problems. Evidence vanishing from custody. Even Zant’s cell phone, believe it or not. So Mrs. Pappas has put a hard lid on. The order isn’t just that nobody’s supposed to talk. It’s very specific.” Rick’s buggy eyes were pained but determined. “One person we are specifically not allowed to talk to is a certain Bruce Vallely, director of campus safety.”

Sheets of ice floated on the old canal. On the other side, in the section of town known as Outer Elm, patient developers had dredged the area nearest the shore and built condos, shopping malls, playgrounds, a boardwalk. All white, by happy coincidence, an ethnically cleansed paradise in the middle of the city, and quite reasonably priced: mostly third-generation immigrant families.

“Seriously?”

“Actually, Bruce, it’s worse than that.”

“Worse how?”

Rick Chrebet still had his hands deep in his pockets. His breath described pale arcs in the frigid air. “They know you’ve been running some kind of private investigation, Bruce. They know you were in Zant’s house. I’m not in Mrs. Pappas’s confidence—not on something like this—but the word is, they’re considering a case against you for obstruction.”