What Time Devours (6 page)

Thomas liked food, though he was not what some would call a “foodie,” and not solely because he loathed the word. He had, he liked to think, an eclectic palate, and could appreciate a fast-food burger for what it was, even if he’d rather be dining on oven-roasted pork shoulder with spigarello, patty-pan squash, and chickpea barigoule at Avec on Chicago’s Randolph Street. He was not a gourmet, just an enthusiast.

He picked over a few ears of corn. Supply was apparently depleted, though whether by drought or flooding (there had been a lot of both lately) he couldn’t say. He chose a pork loin that was on special, which he would roast with rosemary and thyme from the garden, and chose a suitable beer. He had a poor palate for wine and couldn’t afford to educate it. Beer, he knew. He picked up some chicken, navy beans, and coarse sausage for a cassoulet, and chose from the fruit selection. The peaches and nectarines seemed best, so he added several of each. Then salad greens, tomatoes, pine nuts, and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil (
how can anything be EXTRA virgin?
), and he was done. And, more important than filling his shopping bags, he had rebuilt some version of normalcy.

He was home by seven and was just about done unloading the car when he caught the strobing flare of blue lights through the living room window and was on his way to the front door when the bell rang. Even though he had glimpsed the cop car, the sound made him jump.

He opened the door and found a policewoman standing with her back to him, looking casually across the street. She turned to him, pale and smileless. Lieutenant Polinski. She had a long oval face, a thin broad mouth, and a mane of unruly black hair. She was probably in her midthirties but had the eyes and complexion of an older woman.

“Good morning, Mr. Knight,” she said. “Can I come in for a moment?”

“Sure.”

“Sounds like you had an eventful evening. You okay?”

“Kind of,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

He did, though there wasn’t much to tell, and when he finished she just nodded seriously and said, “Going after him wasn’t real smart, especially if you thought he might have been the killer.”

“I know,” said Thomas. “I was just . . . Someone was sneaking around my yard. I don’t know. I was angry.”

“Still, it was a reckless thing to do.”

“That’s me.” Thomas grinned. “Mr. Reckless.”

She gave him a hard look.

“This isn’t a game, Mr. Knight. This is a murder inquiry and you could have gotten yourself into serious trouble. The kind of trouble you don’t wake up from. You hear what I’m saying? Let’s try to be a little more careful—and by that I mean smart—in the future, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Polinski gave him another look, sure he wasn’t really getting it, then shrugged.

“There are several officers going door to door to see if anyone might have seen anything. They started yesterday.”

“Oh,” said Thomas, unsure of what to say. “Right. I haven’t remembered anything else, I’m afraid. But I’m glad to have them around. After last night, I mean.”

“And you are still sure you didn’t know the woman?”

“Sure.”

“Right,” she said. She seemed unusually watchful, and Thomas wondered why the officer in charge of the investigation was talking to him, when uniforms were deemed sufficient for the shoe-leather work at his neighbors’ houses. “Does the name Daniella Blackstone mean anything to you?”

Thomas stared at her.

“The novelist? That’s who the dead woman was?”

“That’s right,” said Polinski, her gaze steady. “You knew her?”

For a moment Thomas did not know what to say.

“Only through her books,” he said.

CHAPTER 10

It wasn’t an adequate answer, he knew, and though he had been able for a moment to convince himself that it was an honest answer in a very limited sense of the word, he knew that it was also an evasion. Polinski had sensed something in his hesitation, and though she had left, he knew she’d be back. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Daniella Blackstone had died outside his house, not with his address in her pocket, not when her agent was a former student of his.

What had been strange and scary in the way dreams can be scary before you get out of them, suddenly became a good deal darker, more alarming. Because what had seemed like a series of weird but unconnected events—the dead woman, Escolme’s mad obsession, the nocturnal stalker—now felt uncannily like parts of a whole.

Escolme had set him up. He must have. He had given the woman his name. She had wanted to get some outside authority to confirm the identity of the play, someone who wouldn’t try to muscle in on her ownership of it as a way of making a name for himself as an academic, and Escolme had sent her to him. As a result she had been killed on his doorstep, and Escolme had hidden the fact that he knew she was dead, and that he had already implicated Thomas. Maybe he had hidden more than that, worse.

“Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story, doesn’t it?”
Escolme had said
. “Locked rooms and missing papers. ‘The Naval Treaty.’ ”

“ ‘Naval Treaty’ my ass,” Thomas muttered. The whole thing had been a shell game. He just had to find out why.

He called the Drake.

“I’d like to connect to a guest room,” he said. “David Escolme.”

“Can you spell that please, sir?”

Irritably, Thomas did, and waited for the ring of the room phone. What he got instead was the receptionist again.

“I’m afraid we have no one of that name staying here,” he said.

His irritation spiked, touched now with something like apprehension.

He hung up, and forced himself to stop staring at the clock.

None of this felt right. He put his coffee down, crossed the room quickly, and went out the front door.

Polisnki and the other cop were nowhere to be seen, and whatever crime scene work had started in the small hours had apparently been completed. The patch of sidewalk up the block was still taped off, but no one was there now. Thomas fished in his pocket for Polinski’s card and went back into the house.

She didn’t answer her phone, and he didn’t take the automated service up on being connected to another officer. Instead, he waited for the recording to start and said, “This is Thomas Knight from 1247 Sycamore. We spoke briefly this morning. I have something to say about the Blackstone murder. It’s probably not important, but please give me a call.”

He left his number and hung up.

It was, he knew, more backpedaling, more inadequacy. He was playing it down because he didn’t want to be involved, not because it would be somehow inconvenient to be caught up in a police investigation, but because he hated the idea that he or someone he had once taught could be responsible—however indirectly—for a woman’s death.

He then called five different home-security companies and inquired about installation costs. He had never had an alarm system before, had never seen the need. Suddenly he wanted one, and soon.

CHAPTER 11

He was fractionally late getting to school, and his students were restless. He did his best to marshal his thoughts and their attention, but he couldn’t focus and found himself relying on the very teacher’s book that he usually referred to—rather pompously—as the “Antidote to Learning.”
Okay, now that we’ve worked out some answers of our own, let us consult the Antidote to Learning . . .
At the end of his first class he apologized for his distraction and promised the students to be his usual self the following day. They nodded solemnly and exchanged significant looks.

Sometimes Thomas wished that there were a national exam that would test the kids’ capacity to get to the heart of secrets and mysteries involving the faculty. They’d all ace it.

At lunchtime he checked his phone for messages. There were three, two of them from alarm companies asking for details of his home and whether it was “prewired” for a security system. Thomas wasn’t sure what that meant but called them back and said it probably wasn’t. That would raise the costs, they said. He told them that was okay and set up an appointment for both companies to come by over the weekend.

The third message was from Polinski requesting that he call her back. He did so and, this time, got her on the first ring.

“This is Thomas Knight,” he said.

“You have some information for me,” she said, businesslike.

“I’m not really sure,” said Thomas. “It’s pretty flimsy. More of an odd coincidence really . . .”

“Go ahead,” she said.

He told her everything: Escolme’s call, their meeting at the Drake, his panic at the lost Shakespeare play, and his claim that it had belonged to the novelist who had been killed at Thomas’s window. There was a momentary silence when he finished, and Thomas waited, half expecting a polite thanks and tacit dismissal.

“Can you spell that name for me? Escolme?”

He did so, and there was another pause.

“A lost Shakespeare play?” she said. “Does that seem likely to you?”

“Not really, no,” said Thomas. “I don’t know that much about it.”

“Seems like he thinks otherwise,” she said. “Anything else?”

“I think that’s everything.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said Polinski, and then she was gone.

In the teachers’ lounge, he unfolded his
Tribune
and stared at it. Periodically he turned the pages, looking vaguely for anything about the murder. His eye snagged on a single word in the headline for a small story in the Living section: SHAKESPEARE.

His unease seemed to surge, then stilled as he focused. Seconds later, he relaxed. It was nothing. Apparently the National Shakespeare Conference was taking place right here in Chicago. Eight hundred or more Shakespeare professors from all over the world gathering to lecture and debate. Thomas grinned bleakly. He had attended this conference when it came to Boston in his graduate school days, and he had found it by turns impressive, daunting, and absurd.

It was nonsense, of course, to think that the conference was in any way relevant to what had just happened. It would have been arranged months, even years before. Thomas hadn’t been a part of that world for more than a decade, had not, in fact, ever really been a part of it since he had abandoned his doctoral dissertation before it was a quarter complete. Yet, as an English teacher, he had never been able to let go of Shakespeare completely, though sometimes he felt as if it were Shakespeare who would not let go of him. Now the conference was arcing back into his city, into his life, and Thomas couldn’t help feeling that it was significant. Somehow.

He looked up, frowning, and decided. He would leave school as early as his classes would permit and head over to the conference. He looked back to the paper to see where the meeting was being held and caught his breath.

The conference was at the Drake.

CHAPTER 12

Thomas arrived at the hotel having heard from neither the police nor Escolme, but he had barely thought about either since lunch. The idea of attending the Shakespeare conference had filled him with an excited curiosity. There would surely be people he knew there, by name if not by face, though the latter wasn’t out of the question. There would be the dinosaurs still plugging away at scholarship everyone else had abandoned thirty years ago, the hotshot theory heads with their jargon, the Bardolators (often stray actors) and those who treated them as unthinking fans. More to the point, he would be immersed again in all that old energy, the crackle of intelligent debate, the thrill of discovery, but also the nitpicking and bluster, the intellectual outrageousness and pedantry, the stupefying political correctness worn like zealotry, and the oppressive careerism, everyone poised like vultures for someone to say something unutterably stupid. It would be like dropping in on his own funeral.

And being glad to be dead
, he thought with a grim smile.

If that was what being out of academia meant, perhaps so.

The Drake felt different this time, and though he had no clear idea what he hoped to discover there, Thomas entered confidently, as if he belonged. One of the ballrooms had been given over to the book exhibit, another to registration. He made for the latter.

A couple of dozen academics were lining up at three alphabetized tables, picking up conference programs and name tags. He needed one or the other to be able to come and go as he felt. He approached the nearest table and made a study of the letters—P-Z, in this case—as if unsure what his name came under, resting his hand casually on one of the clear plastic name tags. He palmed it and made a beeline for the nearest bathroom.

In one of the stalls, he filled his name in on a piece of notepaper and slid it into the plastic sleeve, then walked purposefully back to the reception area, chose the A-K table, and sidled up to the front, looking apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the harried graduate student at the front. “I seem to have mislaid my program. Do you mind if . . . ?”

“Help yourself,” said the girl, gesturing to the pile of parchment-colored booklets.

Thomas walked away, thumbing through the program to see what session he might catch before the day ended and feeling pleased with himself.

“Knight? Thomas Knight?”

Thomas turned quickly. Standing a few paces away was a man in his sixties with a face like a bloodhound and large wet eyes. He had a laptop case slung over his shoulder and he was dressed in professorial mode—a heather-colored tweed suit—that might have been de rigueur fifty years earlier. He was a large man, rounded off at the corners but otherwise quite square, with linebacker shoulders despite his silvered hair. He was looking shrewdly at Thomas with something like disbelief. Thomas knew him at once.

“Professor Dagenhart,” he said, smothering the sense of panic that he had been so quickly found out, but glad that it was Dagenhart. “How are you?”