New England White (3 page)

Chrebet said, “You heard we found the car?”

“Saw it on the news,” said Lemaster.

“In an industrial park on Route 48. Near as we can tell, he was shot in the car—two bullets in the head—and dumped on the road, and then the shooter drove to the industrial park and left it.”

“And no suspects?”

“Not yet.” Julia was impressed at how her husband had taken charge of the conversation; but he always did. Just weeks after their move to the Landing, he had wandered into a packed meeting of the zoning board, grabbed a seat at the back of the auditorium, lone representative of what his fraternity called the darker nation, and, within an hour, was all but giving the orders.

“Was anything taken?” he asked now.

“His wallet. Keys. Maybe other things.”

“Robbery?”

“Could have been a robbery. Could have been meant to look like a robbery.”

Again Julia was on edge. She expected, from what she saw on television, that this was the moment when the detectives would ask where each of them had been between eight and ten last night. Instead, the photographs came out. Chrebet slid two from a folder. He slipped the first to Lemaster, who gave it a quick glance and passed it on to his wife, waiting for the next. Julia looked, and looked away. The gold Audi TT in which Kellen had taken such pride, for he used to say he had all the luxury of the fools who bought more expensive sports cars, except that his cost less, got better mileage, and was more reliable. The seats were of a cream-colored leather, but in the photo the passenger’s seat was black with blood.

“He was shot somewhere else and driven to Four Mile,” Chrebet said, turning a page. “He bled for a while.”

Two bullets, Julia was thinking. Surely only one was needed.

Lemaster spent longer on the second photo as the detectives asked if they had any idea, however faint, about who would do such a terrible thing.

Then the second photograph was upon her, and she understood still less the motive for sharing, unless they intended only to shock. A close-up of Kellen’s face, taken presumably at the morgue. Yes, it was he, as best she could tell from what little was left unmarked. Kellen’s eyes, usually laughing and dark brown, were tightly closed. There was no such reflex, she remembered from a seminar back in college. When one died slowly, yes, the eyes would close, as in sleep. But in the case of a sudden, violent trauma, they should have remained open. She frowned. Did coroners close eyes? Maybe the killer did it to be nice. Or maybe she remembered wrong.

No, Lemaster was saying, and Julia noticed that the photographs were back in the folder. Neither my wife nor myself would have any idea who would do such a thing, he said, lightly mocking their cadences.

Julia waited again for them to ask where the Carlyles were last night at whatever hour the thing occurred.

Instead, Chrebet asked about what the economist had been working on. Lemaster said that if they meant his scholarship, they should ask his colleagues in the department. The detectives waited. He said that he himself had no idea, and glanced at his wife, who echoed the theme. They asked what Professor Zant might have been working on besides his scholarship, and, again, the Carlyles could offer no assistance: thus pronounced Lemaster, speaking for both.

A signal passed between the detectives. Oh, yes, we almost forgot, one more thing. Would you, Mrs. Carlyle, be able to characterize for us your relationship with the decedent?

Relationship?

Weren’t you once close and personal friends?

A speechless moment, only the detectives able to make eye contact with anybody else in the room. History piled up behind her, thick and strong. She recalled a face of quite seductive jolliness, a sparkling delight focused on her alone.

Yes, we were, briefly. But that was before my marriage.

Can you tell us when you talked to him last?

As much as saying they did not believe her.

We have a busy day, gentlemen, Lemaster said, and her appreciation of him quickened, and felt like love.

They sorryed and thanked their way out the door.

CHAPTER 3

KEPLER

(I)

“C
ITY’S A POWDER KEG
,” said Boris Gibbs, with satisfaction. “Ready to blow any minute.”

Julia, who had noticed no protesters or riot police on her way in to the divinity school this morning, nodded politely, and said nothing. By the city, he meant Elm Harbor, where the university was located, and where she and Boris were having, for the moment, lunch; not the Landing, nearly half an hour distant. The Landing, of course, where they both lived, was nearly all white; and the city…wasn’t.

“I’ve been listening to that radio guy, Kwame whatsisname. All right, he’s a little bit over the top, but he has a ton of listeners, Julia. A ton of listeners. They hang on his every word, and, believe me, he’s riling them up.” He seemed to hope something would happen. A lot of white liberals were like that these days, waiting desperately for African America to reawaken and lead the Left out of the wilderness. But Boris Gibbs was no liberal. He owned no politics anyone could discern, and few emotions apart from a stormy self-satisfaction. He lived to slice up events, or ideas, or egos. Pressed, he would concede the sinfulness of the desire to flay others. It was, he often said, the thorn in his flesh. He seemed delighted to have one.

“I believe you, Boris.”

“That black professor the campus cops beat up a couple of years ago. Remember? The unarmed kid who got shot in the car chase. Plus all the ordinary bullshit of everyday life. This business with Kellen is the last straw, you mark my words. The racism your people have to face these days is depressing.”

Your people.
She liked that one, almost as much as calling murder
this business with Kellen.
She said, evenly, “I read the papers, Boris. It was armed robbery, not a hate crime.”

Boris shook his head at her naïveté and took a huge and ugly bite of his huge and ugly burger. He was, by his own reckoning, a huge and ugly man, with a bloated pink face and twisted, unhappy features that bespoke a life of misery, but he was one of the happiest people she knew: he always said what was on his mind, and so avoided the stress of holding back. They were deputy deans together at Kepler Quadrangle, the popular name for the div school, even though Boris, something of a campus historian, would rush to tell you that Kepler was the building, not the school. When not busily carping, Boris taught a bit and mainly managed the div school’s budget, at which task he was a wiz, but the dean wisely kept him out of public view.

“At least that’s what the police say,” he smirked.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, you’re a grown-up, Julia. You get to decide for yourself what to believe.”

Julia swallowed the sharp retort that sprang to her throat. It was Tuesday, and she was tired of speculation about Kellen Zant. But the campus could speak of little else. Not many Ivies see a professor shot dead, and never one as popular as Kellen. The college paper had managed to mention six times in two days that the president had found the body of what the articles kept calling his “occasional adversary.” Not even Kepler was immune. Little Iris Feynman, the third deputy dean in their underpaid administrative triumvirate—she managed “external affairs,” meaning relationships with the university, the few alumni who had money to give, and any reporter who might accidentally wander in while looking for, say, the business school—had been in Julia’s office earlier today to report a rumor that a disgruntled graduate student had done it. But the smart money—according to old Clay Maxwell, the New Testament specialist, whom Julia had encountered when she went to the drafty faculty lounge to fill her coffee mug with the vile brew that was all Kepler could afford—the smart money was on a jealous husband.

Julia said, “Can we please get back to the budget?” Because that was the subject of her lunch with Boris at one of the many undistinguished cafés near the div school. Claire Alvarez, their dean, under orders from the provost, had requested proposals for a 5 percent trim, and, like Scrooge, wanted their memos by Christmas. Everyone at Kepler knew bad news was coming. A cluster of students sat in a nearby booth, eyeing the two deans uneasily, worrying which of their favorite programs would go under the ax. Far more campus energy was spent nowadays placing blame than fixing problems, and it was plain where the blame would fall. Julia carried the portfolios of dean of students and acting dean of admissions—the budget no longer called for separate posts—and collected a single half-time salary for the two full-time jobs. She had prepared, unhappily, three proposals to reduce her chunk of the budget: one that would turn the foreign students against her, one that would outrage the women, and a third that would persuade the minorities that she was an Oreo cookie—dark on the outside, white on the inside—which was what they used to call her in college.

“The budget?” Boris laughed. “They’re cutting it again.” Gesticulating with one hand, holding his burger with the other. Outside, the sky had gone the color of fresh slate. Julia was Yankee enough to read the signals: more snow was on the way. Besides, the Weather Channel said so. She watched Boris waving his burger, which, piled with every condiment known to man, was leaking. Messy sauces dripped everywhere. Other diners turned away. The waitress swung by the table to mop up the worst, and to bring him another Dr Pepper. He ignored her, as always, but he was a known big tipper. He licked mustard from thick fingers. Two wives had divorced Boris Gibbs. It was easy to see why. “They’ll always cut our budget. It’s because we’re not scientists or capitalists, Julia. We don’t splice genes or write software. We don’t build huge fortunes. We do God, so we’re not important.”

“I’m a scientist,” she said, forcing a grin, and it was true: her undergraduate degree was in biology, and she had taught middle-school science for years.

Boris raised notched brows like devil’s wings. His eyes bulged, but they always did. He grabbed the filthy napkin to wipe his mouth, a simple act he managed to make slurpy and loud. Sometimes Julia suspected that the whole
I’m-so-ugly-and-disgusting
thing was an act, designed less to keep the world at bay than to render intriguing what would otherwise bore. Unlike Julia, Boris also taught a class every semester, and was among the students’ favorites, even though his subject was systematic theology, a bear of a course, a rite of passage that left future pastors trembling. Julia and Boris were not quite friends, but she found his obstinate rudeness a source of endless fascination, the same way, as an undergraduate, she had been fascinated by a species of beetle that ate its siblings.

“Well, fine. If you’re a scientist, add this up. If it was a robbery, how come they left the car? That Audi must be worth something, right? Right?” In the classroom, he bludgeoned his students much the same way:
Are you talking about Christology or soteriology? Well? Do you even know the difference?
“And how come they drove him out to the suburbs? Well? Why didn’t they just dump him in the city? It’s not like anybody would notice.” Boris sat back, very content with his argument, and immediately ruined the effect by spilling his soda.

“I don’t know, Boris,” said Julia, as if she had not spent hours puzzling over the same questions. “I haven’t thought about it. It was an unpleasant moment, and I’d kind of like to put it behind me instead of everybody asking all the time.” A long intake of breath. “Now, can you please look at these numbers I worked out? Because I think I’ve found a way to keep both of my assistants.” For Boris wanted her to lay off her full-timer and keep her half-timer: the last thing Julia intended to do, given that her full-timer was the only black secretary in Kepler.

“Tell you something else. Your friend Kellen? The story is, he was having this hot-and-heavy affair with some married woman.” His eyes were greedy. “I wonder who.”

“Kellen had nothing but affairs.” Her cheeks grew warm. “He liked life to change around him. Nothing excited him except the future and its…possibilities. He used to say he never wanted to do anything twice.” Julia winced, and made herself stop. How on earth had she allowed her fellow dean to lead her down this path? Kellen had been talking about sex when he made the remark a lifetime ago—sex, as it happened, with her. “Boris, please, if you look at my proposals—”

“Already looked. They’re garbage. You’re trying too hard to be nice. Face facts, Julia. Somebody’s going to wind up hating you, right? Right. So the only way you exercise any autonomy at all is by choosing who.” The waitress, who knew Boris’s proclivities, had brought a third Dr Pepper without being asked. He downed half in one dribbling gulp. “Anyway, this married woman? I hear she’s pretty prominent around town. Or her husband is.”

“What are you trying to say, Boris?”

He ignored her indignation. Wiping his fingers on the tatters of his napkin, he hunched closer, increasing the likelihood that he would sputter on her. “So, are you going down to New Orleans or whatever for the funeral?”

“Arkadelphia. And yes.” Wondering why she was blushing afresh.

“How about our esteemed president? Showing the flag, delivering a eulogy, weeping crocodile tears?”

“Lemaster has too much work.”

“Too bad.” A furry grin. “Want some company?”

“Have some, thanks.” Now in an even greater hurry to escape him.

“Well, good. You have fun, if that’s what one does at funerals. How are the kids taking it?”

“They’re fine,” she said, not sure whether she was lying. Should she talk about her eldest, Preston, off at grad school, who never called home if he could avoid it? About Vanessa, whose troubles could fill a book? Or Aaron, her ninth-grader, who had fled to Exeter to escape the tension in the house since his older sister’s arrest? And what about Jeannie, more determined than ever to prove herself the household’s perfect little princess? She felt all four of them drifting away from her, and the pain of loss twisted her mind in sadder directions. “They didn’t really know him,” she said, a bit faintly. “Or not very well.”

He was already on to another subject. “Oh, listen, I’ll tell you another thing I heard about your friend Kellen. A few people out in the Landing were pretty angry with him.”

Boris lived just a mile from Hunter’s Heights and loved to spread gossip, some of it true. Julia was intrigued, finally, in spite of herself. “Angry at Kellen? People in the Landing? What did Kellen have to do with the Landing?”

“No idea, but, whatever it was, it sure got a lot of people’s backs up.”

“Well, no disrespect, but I don’t see how on earth Kellen could have been doing anything in the Landing without me knowing about it. He would have told me—” Julia stopped, confused by her own words. Her colleague’s mocking eyes told her that he had spotted her error, but would preserve his teasing for a fitter time. “I mean, I would have heard about it. We all would.”

“Unless he didn’t want you to know,” said her fellow dean, and took another messy chomp on his burger.

(II)

B
Y
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, two days before her lunch with Boris, the gossip-flies had already begun buzzing everywhere. No screen or spray ever suffices to keep them out. Stop answering the telephone and they arrive as television bulletins. Shut off the set and they pop up online as headlines. Get off the computer and the phone rings: in this case sugary Tonya Montez, chief Sister Lady of Harbor County, bearing the breathless news that she was listening to one of the inner-city talk radio stations a little while ago, on the way home from morning worship at Temple Baptist
(Yes, by the way, I’m also more faithful than you!),
and heard the host, Kwame Kennerly, proclaim that the murder of Kellen Zant proved once and for all that it was open season on the men of the African diaspora. She did not often agree with Kwame, said Tonya, which was a lie, but he was right about this one. Julia tried to get a word in, but nothing slows a Ladybug in full flutter. You wait and see, said Tonya. There’s gonna be more.

More what? asked Julia, perhaps missing the point.

Next came Donna Newman, whom Julia—shopping with Jeannie—encountered later Sunday, at the deli counter of the Stop Shop on Route 48. Donna, who ran half the social clubs in the Landing—the Caucasian Squawk Circle, Lemaster called them—had heard that “this Zant” was seen in town the night he died.

“Of course he was,” said Julia.

“I mean
before
you found him.” A glance up and down the aisle. “They say he was with a
woman,
” said Donna, ominously, but he always was.

Then, on Monday, it was Tessa Kenner on the telephone, Julia’s roommate at Dartmouth, whom she hardly ever heard from, still less saw, other than on television, where Tessa read the news for two hours five nights a week on one of the cable networks, not because she had been Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth and a star in law school but because she possessed the principal qualification producers sought: blond hair. But Tessa had saved her life twice in the bad old days, and Julia was never quite able to hold against her what Lemaster insisted was a hopeless waste of talent.

Tessa, as it happened, did more asking of questions than spreading of gossip, and Julia, despite the warm space her old roommate occupied in her heart, danced around the answers. They agreed that Julia should call when next in Washington, and Tessa would call if she ever passed through Elm Harbor, although nobody ever did. Then Tessa, before hanging up, asked the worst question of all.

“And the two of you were over, right? I mean, like, really over?”

“Of course.”

“There wasn’t, like, any hint of any little thing?” A professional chuckle, as if laughing was a subject she had studied. “No juicy tidbit?”

“Is that why you called, Tessa? To ask about me and Kellen?”

“I’m not working on a story,” she said hotly, denying an accusation Julia had not made. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

“I’m fine,” Julia lied, wondering what tales Tessa might be spreading through the higher echelons of broadcast journalism; and whether her past would come back to bite her after all.