Cold and Pure and Very Dead (30 page)

“Sinecure?”

“Sinecure:
a cushy job requiring little work. Brooke thought he was set for the rest of his life. Not only did he have his pension from all those years at Chicago, now he had this named professorship at Enfield. Money
and
status. But, whereas, in the 1950s the death of a pregnant townie might easily have been brushed aside, not so in this more equalitarian age. A revived scandal would destroy him professionally. When Katz threatened to drag Mildred Deakin back into the public limelight, Brooke must have followed him to Nelson Corners and killed him before he could talk to her, hoping the whole nightmare would end there.”

Schultz scowled. “But, then, why kill Jake Fenton?”

“Weeell,” I said. “That’s harder. Maybe it has something to do with Jake being an adopted child. A colleague told me Jake had been engaged in a search for his birth mother. It turned out he was Mildred Deakin’s child. And, who knows, maybe Ralph Brooke was his father? Maybe in the process of searching for his mother, Jake uncovered Ralph and the Stallmouth scandal, and was threatening him with exposure.”

Schultz twisted the diamond-chip ring on her left hand. She looked unconvinced.

“And then, when it seemed as if I was about to drag it all up again, Ralph—” I shivered.

She reached out and patted my hand. “You did well, Professor. You did
real
well.”

Out the diner’s wide window, a few pale pink rays were beginning to light the sky above the low eastern hills. It was well past time for me to be in bed, but there were a couple of other things Schultz wanted to bring me up to speed on.

Number one: the guns.

Of course, Forensics would determine if Brooke’s gun was the identical weapon used to kill Jake Fenton. Meanwhile, we knew it was the same caliber—a .45. Now, what a seventy-four-year-old English professor was doing strolling across a college campus after midnight packing a big Colt revolver, she couldn’t for the life of her say. As for the … er … actual shooting weapon—she meant the gun I’d fired at Ralph Brooke—she’d been on the horn with Monica Cassale about what the hell that weapon was doing in the secretary’s desk drawer anyhow. It seemed that … let’s see … did she have this right? … it seemed that there was this
fax technician
that had made some threats to Ms. Cassale after a complaint from the Enfield English office had cost him his job. Then some boyfriend—also a fax technician—had supplied Cassale with a Smith & Wesson .38 for protection. It was all pretty muddled—they’d woken Monica up when they called, and the guy was confusing things by giving advice in the background. So—did any of this make any sense to me?

It made good sense, and I told her why. Because I’d made the call for fax service, the nasty serviceman had gotten fired. Because he’d lost his job, he’d threatened Monica. Because he’d threatened Monica, Victor had
supplied her with protection in the form of a gun. Because Victor had supplied her with a gun, I … Again I shivered. Not only had I casually set into motion the chain of events that had ended in two homicides, but I’d also, just as off-handedly, initiated another sequence of events that had allowed me to apprehend the killer and save my own life. A prime example of dramatic irony if I’d ever heard one, providing what I might have called in a pedagogical context a
teachable moment
.

There was a silent interlude while Schultz sipped her herbal tea pensively, and I stared out the window. The entire eastern sky was now shot through with Easter hues, pink, yellow, white.
“Then
there’s the matter of the lieutenant,” Schultz ventured.

At the sound of her voice, I started. In my exhausted state, the sunrise had almost hypnotized me. “The lieutenant? You mean—Piotrowski?”

“Yes.” Schultz’s diction suddenly veered into the formal. “This is something I’m hesitant to speak about, Professor. But, all things considered, I think maybe—for his good and yours—I oughta tell you.”

He’s engaged
, I thought.
No. Not engaged. Married. He’s on his honeymoon. That’s why he didn’t show up tonight
. I clamped an iron expression on my face.

The little cop shot me an owlish look. “Lombardi and me, we been talking this over. But you gotta promise you’ll never tell the lieutenant I said word one about this because if he knew …” She paused and twisted her lips. “If he knew, he’d ruin me. He’d run me through the wringer and hang me out to dry. Why, he’d stomp me into the ground and use my bones for fertilizer. He’d …”

I vowed lifelong silence.
Married
, I decided,
and expecting a child
.

Schultz leaned over toward me, her gray eyes wide
with sincerity. “Since we’re talking personal here, all right if I call you Karen?”

“Sure … Felicity.”
No. Not one child. Twins
.

“Karen, we think, Lombardi and me, we think Charlie Piotrowski, big and tough as he is, is scared stiff.” Her gaze was searching. “God, I hope I’m doing the right thing here!”

“Scared? Piotrowski?”

“Terrified.”

“Of
what?”
I was utterly baffled.

She gnawed her lower lip. “Of—you.”

“Me?” A mouselike squeak.

With her spoon Schultz dipped the drowned tea bag up and down in her mug. “Not that he’s ever said anything about it, you understand. But I got eyes in my head. And that poor man has got such a thing for you.”

“Piotrowski? He hates me!” I blurted out. “He’s been so damned—”

She shrugged. “Like I said, he’s terrified. His wife walked out on him, oh, five–six years ago. He took it real hard. The only woman I’ve ever seen him look at since was some social worker from down in Springfield. But that didn’t work out—she couldn’t take the heat of being with a cop. It’s just as well, anyhow, she …” The sergeant let it trail off. An entire chapter of Piotrowski’s life would remain prudently unspoken. “And then
you
, and you’re way out of his league, a professor and everything—”

“Bullshit!”

“Well, he’s
gotta
be thinking that.”

“Bullshit! Bullshit about a professor being ‘out of his league.’ Nobody’s out of Piotrowski’s league, for Chrissake! And bullshit about his having a … 
thing
 … for me, anyhow. The whole damn thing is bullshit! I’m sorry, Schul—ah—Felicity, but you are dead wrong
here. Charlie Piotrowski thinks I’m a pretentious, condescending, effete-intellectual snob. And, look,” I cinched my argument, “I almost get killed, and he doesn’t even show up!”

Schultz passed a stubby-fingered hand through her short hair. Suddenly she looked very tired. “Karen, the lieutenant’s father had a stroke yesterday afternoon. Piotrowski’s been in the hospital with him ever since. He doesn’t know anything about the incident with you and Brooke ’cause I didn’t call him—and I’m gonna catch hell for that. But if he did know, you’d better goddamned believe he’d a been there.”

“Bullshit!” I slammed the empty coffee mug down on the table. Hard. The handle broke off in my fist. I stared at the curved piece of white ceramic, stupidly tried to fit it back on the mug, then laid it carefully on the edge of the table. At last I glanced up at Felicity Schultz and gave her a level look. “And besides, Sergeant, I’ve lived with a cop. It’s no kind of life. I’ll never do it again.”

“Umm. Too bad,” she said. “A couple of nice people. And both lonely.”

“Lonely! I’m not—”

“Lombardi and me think—”

But I didn’t want to hear it. Felicity Schultz was in love, she was in the mood to be romantic, and she was oversentimentalizing everything. I was out of the booth in a half second, shrugging into my denim jacket, bolting for the door.

F
or two and a half weeks
I stayed away from campus. National headlines about the Case of the Killer Professor were bad enough, but they would die down soon, and until then I could simply avoid reading the newspapers. The local publicity was what I dreaded—that, and the titillated glances, the prurient questions, the horrified commiserations I was bound to encounter at the college. And to tell the truth, it was almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning. Not only had my life been threatened at gunpoint, not only had I been forced to shoot an elderly man, but I’d also, damn it, alienated the one man who intrigued me in the slightest—and he was the one man the Professor Priss who operates my left brain insisted I’d be better off having nothing to do with.
With
whom
you’d be better off having nothing to do
, she corrected me. I sighed: she was right,
with whom
.

Somehow the world had turned a dull, flat, disembodied gray. I had no love life; the crimes had all been solved; I wasn’t teaching; I’d had my major scholarly project yanked out from under me: What was there to get out of bed for? Every time I turned my eyes from the suddenly all-engrossing television set, I could see Ralph Waldo Emerson Brooke’s big gun pointing directly at me; I could feel the jolt in my shoulder when I’d pulled the trigger of Monica’s .38; I could hear the thud as the
elderly man fell—the thump of his body, the crack as his head hit the hardwood floor.

September eased into October. Maples and sumacs flaunted their annual reds and golds, but not even the flamboyant foliage and the prospect of a brisk autumn walk could entice me out of the house. When I remembered to eat, I ate stale bread and canned soup. Phone messages from everyone but Amanda went unanswered. Word got out that I was not in the best of shape. One Wednesday afternoon Sophia, Earlene, and Jill showed up unannounced with little Eloise and a tea party—ham sandwiches, scones, and a big pot of Ceylon tea. It was almost worth turning off Oprah Winfrey for.

When the phone rang late that Friday afternoon, the last voice I expected to hear was Charlie Piotrowski’s. Since our acrimonious trip to the Columbia County jail three weeks earlier, I’d had no word from the lieutenant, and expected none. Felicity Schultz had handled all paperwork related to the shooting of Ralph Brooke and his subsequent arrest for the murders of Martin Katz and Jake Fenton. Something had occurred to render her once more as stiff and formal in her dealings with me as when we’d first met. No more girls together: I was
Professor
again, and she was
Sergeant
. Most likely Piotrowski had raked her over the coals for not immediately notifying him about Brooke’s shooting. Also, I knew she must have regretted her impulsive late-night confidences. In any case, Trooper Lombardi made no further appearances, nor was any reference made to him, and neither of us breathed a word about the lieutenant.

But here, at 4:39 on an October Friday, was Piotrowski’s abrupt bass on the telephone. I could hear his deep voice loud and clear over Oprah’s alto tones.
“Doctor? We need to talk. Meet me at Bud’s in a half hour.”
He hung up.

I half-considered not going: nobody orders me around, etc. etc. But if I didn’t show up at Bud’s Diner, Piotrowski would surely materialize at my front door within the hour, and the last thing my Professor-Priss rational self wanted was that big cop in my house. I clicked off the television, took a hard plastic brush to my less-than-pristine hair, climbed into a clean pair of jeans, donned a leather jacket against the autumn chill. Then I glanced at myself in the oval mirror by the front door and grimaced: long, lifeless hair, eyes puffy and shadowed, pallid skin. A touch of makeup, perhaps? But, no, I didn’t have time. I fired up the Subaru for the first time in days and drove the ten minutes to the diner located on a country highway outside Greenfield, next to an abandoned gas station with a green shingled roof extending out over old-fashioned pumps.

T
he first time
I’d met Piotrowski, as obnoxious as I’d found this overbearing police lieutenant in every other way, I’d nonetheless admired the sharply indented bow of his upper lip, the deep, full curve of the lower. Now, seated in his customary back booth facing the door, he pursed those nice lips disapprovingly when he saw me enter the small diner. “There you are,” he said, glancing ostentatiously at his watch as I slid into the seat across from his. Then he did a quick double take. “You don’t look so hot, Doctor.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant.” I gave him the chill, professorial stare, the one guaranteed to drop impertinent undergraduates trembling to their knees. “What’s up?”

A dull red suffused his complexion. “Not that I mean to say you look
bad.”

“Did you get me all the way out here just to insult
me, Lieutenant?” I can’t tolerate feeling as vulnerable as this big lug of a man made me feel.

His eyes went blank for five seconds as he processed my jibe. Then he sighed, and raised a hand to the waitress. It was a large, strong hand, not aristocratic in any way, but the mere gesture was elegant. “Of course not, Doctor. We’ve had another communication from Mrs. Finch and I thought you’d want to see it. Two coffees,” he told the heavyset redhead who showed up to take our order, and turned back to me. “I dropped by your office earlier, but Ms. Cassale said you haven’t been there for a while.” It was half an indicative locution, half interrogative.
I hadn’t been there; why hadn’t I been there?
I could confide in him if I felt so inclined.

But I didn’t. “The letter?” I queried.

He slid two faxed sheets across the table. The first was a copy of an envelope addressed to Lieutenant Paula Syverson and posted in Nelson Corners. The second wasn’t really a letter. It was just a brief note:
Get that professor out here and I’ll tell you what really happened to Lorraine Lapierre
. I glanced up at Piotrowski. “Milly Finch has been released, of course?”