The Horse You Came in On (23 page)

Jury told him to go ahead. “I'll talk to Vlasic and Muldare if he's around and come back and collect you before I go to Professor Lamb's office. That should give you plenty of time. Sit at a table near the door.”

Wiggins was ever so grateful and took himself off.

Alejandro Vlasic, despite his name, looked neither Central American nor Central European. He was pure American, and one who had gone to some trouble to lay on a veneer of Britese, both in looks and in voice. Standing at the door to Vlasic's office, Jury could easily hear the voice as it addressed students both entering and leaving. Vlasic smoked a pipe
(rather obviously, Jury thought), wore green corduroy with elbow patches, and kept his hair just long enough to make him look careless of the attentions of barbers and slightly Bohemian.

Jury finally had to intrude upon his conversation with a student who looked as though he probably had a motorcycle, if not a whole gang, waiting outside.

Professor Vlasic was not at all put out by the visit; indeed, he even appeared to enjoy the attention of a Scotland Yard CID man. Like Ellen, he taught creative writing and American literature. Unlike Ellen, who was a successful novelist with two commercially viable books and one literary prize-winner, Vlasic was a poet with only one thin volume to his credit.
Unleavened Crises
was its name. Jury knew this because he assumed that with three copies rather artfully arranged on different surfaces around the room (desk, bookshelf, coffee table), it could only be Vlasic's. The book had a brown cover, gold title to simulate leather tooling, rough-cut paper, gold edging—pretty, and pretty pretentious, Jury thought. Beneath the desk, he saw, there were a couple of boxes filled with small brown books; by turning his head slightly sideways, Jury made out that they were more of the same.

Vlasic's office was like Vlasic: studied. A length of walnut shelving completely covered one long wall and made its way round to the other, where it finally had to give way to the couch, the cretonne-covered easy chair, the coffee table. It was a smallish room, stuffed with furniture, masses of flowers in slender vases, and curtains at the window. No beat-up pine; no government-issue gray metal filing cabinets, either. No, everything here seemed home-away-from-homish and top-of-the-line.

Before Jury could state his business, Vlasic—thesis director, poet, and self-styled Poe expert—started dropping names: Edward Albee, John (“Jack”) Barth, Doris Grumbach, among others. The “others,” however, included no poets, although Jury was quite sure Johns Hopkins had poets whose fame was equal to that of its novelists and dramatists. The name dropping posed a problem, though: on the one hand, this professor would like to think of himself as one with this high-profile literary scene; on the other, his name was pretty low down on the list.

In the middle of this star-studded Milky Way of names, Jury dropped Beverly Brown's.

“Very sad,” said Professor Vlasic. “Tragic. She was a brilliant girl.” He sighed and turned his head so that the light from the window struck his high forehead and hawklike nose. Jury assumed that his right profile was the one he preferred. With the chin tilted that bare fraction of an inch, Vlasic might have been striking a Byronic pose. Too bad he didn't have Byron's face to strike it with.

“You were Beverly Brown's thesis advisor?”

“Yes. She was a superior student. I had sometimes to restrain her imagination, though; my own notion of Poe's—”

Jury didn't want him off on his own notions. “Any idea why someone would kill her, Professor Vlasic?”

“Absolutely none. It's unthinkable.”

“Somebody thought of it.”

Vlasic winced, as if the comment had been in poor taste.

“You liked her yourself, didn't you?”

“Why, of course. Why wouldn't I?” Vlasic bridled.

“Going back to her doctoral thesis—what did you think of this Poe story?”

“
Suspect
story, Superintendent.
Suspect
.”

“You think it's a forgery?”

Vlasic decided to fence-sit. “Well, a good deal about it might be thought authentic. The Poe vocabulary was there.”

“I don't understand.”

“Poe tends to repeat words and phrases over and over in his work. It's like an actor having stock monologues to entertain his audience with, you know. If you sift through his work, you find much of the same language—‘impenetrable gloom,' that sort of thing.”

“She wanted to use the story as the basis for her Ph.D. dissertation, I understand.”

“We hadn't agreed upon that.”

“Why would you hesitate?” Jury smiled. “I'd think that it would make a
sensational
thesis.”

“But that's the point, isn't it? We want scholarship, don't we, not sensationalism.”

“I wasn't meaning the word to be pejorative.”

But Vlasic was listening to himself, not to Jury. “And the question of authenticity . . .” He buried his chin in his chest, chewed on the stem end of his pipe. “She wouldn't give over the whole of what she had for inspection. Just a fragment. That in itself is suspicious.”

“Maybe she was afraid someone would nick it.”

“Yet she gave it over to one of her other professors for safekeeping.”

It was the “other” that bothered Vlasic, Jury imagined. Patrick Muldare's words came back to him. “Perhaps she trusted Ellen Taylor.”

Vlasic was surprised. “You know her?”

Jury nodded.

“Just had a cup of coffee with Ellen this afternoon. A few of my students were there. You know, it's quite impossible to engage Ellen
in any sort of scholarly discourse. I don't like to speak ill of my colleagues—”

Um-hmm, thought Jury.

“—but Ellen Taylor isn't the most responsible one amongst them, either in her teaching or in her scholarship.” Vlasic knocked out ash and settled in. “Ellen and I both teach writing, as you know, but our methods are different as night and day.” Now he had out a pipe cleaner. “I spend half of the semester on methodology. Two weeks of
straight lectures
on structure
alone;
another two on the deconstruction of the poetic symbol—”

Jury raised his eyebrows.

“You'll pardon me if I don't try to explain that concept?” Here, Vlasic actually looked him up and down, as if he were deciding whether to give Jury a nickel. “I refuse,
refuse,
to let them put one word on paper for eight weeks. Not
one word
. That's an ironclad rule of my teaching.”

“They might be doing it in secret.”

Vlasic waved this suggestion away. “Now, Ellen Taylor doesn't believe in anything but a pencil and a piece of paper. Ellen does not
teach;
Ellen had them writing from day one. Ellen has—”

“Ellen has done rather well for herself.”

“I don't know what you know about semiotics, Superintendent—”

“Precious little.” Jury had plucked the brown book from the desk.

“Ellen's trouble is, she believes in
words—
”

“Given her job, I'm not surprised.”

“—and the trouble with readers is just that: they try to find the matrix, the clues to meaning. Deconstruction is the only viable—”

“This yours?” Jury interrupted by flagging Vlasic down with
Unleavened Crises
.

Vlasic looked extremely pleased. “You know what they say: ‘The novelist bows when the poet passes.' ” He stuffed the pipe back in his mouth and aimed a flame-throwing lighter at it.

“Yes,” said Jury, noncommittally. “Tell me, do you know a man named Patrick Muldare? He teaches here, doesn't he?”

“Ha! A dilettante if ever there was one. The only reason he's permitted to teach here is because he's given the university a considerable amount of money.” Vlasic pulled a catalog from his row of books, flipped through it, and handed it to Jury. “Can you imagine? A course in
football?
”

Jury took the catalog, read the title, smiled. “Entertaining. Where can I get one of these?” He held up the catalog.

“Keep it, keep it.”

His eye on the two cartons of books under the desk, Jury asked,
“Would it be too much of an imposition to ask for one of
your
books, Dr. Vlasic?”

“No, no—delighted.” He pulled one from a box.

“Autographed?”

Vlasic signed the flyleaf with a huge flourish, as if his arm were unwinding: “VLASIC.”

“I'm ever so grateful, thank you,” said Jury humbly. “You know, whether that Poe manuscript is genuine or not isn't precisely the point in terms of its value to Beverly Brown. Or anyone in a similar position,” he added.

“I don't follow you.”

“Well, it would be valuable to any
scholar
. Even if it's not the real thing, a dissertation could be written taking it apart, breaking it down, and so forth. Disproving it would be nearly as much of a plum as proving it.” Jury picked up
Unleavened Crises
again, leafed through it. “I mean, say, for someone who might want to write a book exposing the fraud. Be a leg up for a career, wouldn't it?”

Vlasic made no comment.

“Beverly, Beverly, Bever—ummmm.”

Owen Lamb talked like that. Proper names seemed to call up magical incantations, soughing off into mantra.

He sat in his office at Johns Hopkins, surrounded by tiers of books, shelved and unshelved, some on his desk, most on the floor, engulfing his small frame. Professor Lamb had a short torso, and his red suspenders made it appear even shorter, as if they were yanking his waist up to mid-chest. His skin was fine and white, almost translucent, like old rice paper, and delicately webbed.

“An awful thing—yes, awful.” He shook his head, scratched at his earlobe absently. “Have they found out anything yet?”

“Detective Pryce is still investigating the death. Did you know her very well?”

Lamb seemed to find this amusing. “I don't know
anyone
very well. I keep pretty much to the books. Beverly did some work for me. She was a pleasant girl, extremely bright. Extremely.” He frowned, turning this assessment over. Then he leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “As far as this alleged Poe manuscript is concerned, though, I consider it highly unlikely she could have written it.”

“You think it's genuine?”

“I didn't say that. Hell, no, I don't think it's genuine. Whole thing smacks of forgery, doesn't it? Hard enough to forge his signature, much less an entire story.”

Jury frowned. “But you're contradicting yourself, Professor Lamb.”

“Hmph! I am, I suppose. I simply mean, it seems utterly impossible.”

“I'm not that familiar with the works of Poe, but it does have a kind of Poe-esque ring to it.”

“Oh, but he'd be fairly simple to imitate in substance, wouldn't he? I mean, as writers go? Let me tell you something about forgery, gentlemen: it's not the substance, no, it's the style. Difference between a forged and genuine document is nearly always with the form. Beginning with the handwriting.”

“What about that?”

“Inconclusive. But I'll tell you something.” He stopped, he smiled, as if taking pleasure in a rather good trick. “Whoever wrote that script has awareness of an important concept: that writing has a certain rhythm, and the rhythm is nearly always destroyed by an amateur because an amateur depends upon visual input. That way, you get the kind of hesitating script that breaks the wave formation.”

Wiggins looked confused. “Could you explain that a bit, sir?”

“Sure, but first let me say, I'm not really that expert when it comes to handwriting. The reason I know anything at all is because, being a genealogist, I get a lot of documents in here to study, and I've seen quite a few forgeries. To really be conversant with handwriting, you have to understand anatomy: bone structure, complex of small bones of the hand and wrist. You have to know about ball-and-socket joints, about wrist pivot, that sort of thing. But going back to the wave formation thing—line movement, line quality, is very important. What you see almost all of the time is the natural, meaning smooth, uninterrupted flow of curves. Now, the more slowly the pen moves, the more disturbance you get in line quality. Try it yourself; just slow down your handwriting and you get the tremor, the hesitancy, the slight stutter. Letters are not discretely formed, see. That's the way we formed them when we were small and just learning how to write. But now that we can write, our writing sets up a definite rhythm. The rhythm results in wave formation. Then there's ‘monitoring'—something you can see in a forged document or signature. You can easily write your name with your eyes closed, correct? Not, though, if you're forging a signature. You ‘monitor' the letters—you look back and forth, back and forth.” Owen Lamb gave a self-deprecating little shrug. “However, someone a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than I will have to pass judgment on that document. As I said, my field of expertise extends more to documents trumped up by some charlatan selling aristocratic pedigree to some damned fool who wants to be related to Napoleon. Signatures, I suppose I'm pretty good on, but—” he stopped and shrugged—“occasionally, I get some bona fides that aren't totally out in orbit.” He stopped again, frowning slightly. “I did a while ago, actually, from your country.”

“There was a signature on that manuscript,” said Wiggins.

“I must admit, it passed my cursory tests. That Poe signature appeared more as a pattern than as a string of letters, and it's the string of letters you see in a forged signature. I didn't detect the usual pauses, pen lifts, that sort of thing. But it won't pass an expert's scrutiny, I'm sure.” He laughed. “You don't think a bunch of crusty old experts are going to let
her get away with such an outlandish attempt? A mere
schoolgirl
putting it over on the academic community!”