The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (28 page)

“So you think he was getting off on his garters and girdle and his bra and really getting into his groove and then—”

“There was also,” Alfred added with a sense of theater, “the issue of electrodes.”

“Electrodes!” I brayed, afraid I'd laugh. “What for? What on earth for?” I was afraid I could guess.

No one will stop me my pretty you done shit on me I told you web and I told you web and woof move hoof

When I got impatient and started to make conversational moves toward wrapping things up, Alfred said almost punitively, “There's going to be an investigation tomorrow. They want us all here by ten. In our offices.”

“But it's not one of my usual days,” I objected. Then I realized I was sounding silly. “The police?”

“I'm not sure if it's the state police or the FBI or school authorities. I was just told by Wilma—” the new department secretary, an extremely attractive off-hours basketball player who, sadly, is a lesbian—“to be in my office at ten. She asked me to call you.” Wilma has a short reddish-blonde haircut.

“So we're all suspects?” I asked.

“I imagine. Yes. We would be, wouldn't we?”

It turned out next day that Bert, the victim, our boss, wasn't quite the fag we'd imagined. He'd had not one but two ménages with women, with two children by each woman, neither of them his wife. It's too much to go into, but he'd been hired in the eighties precisely because he was gay and the then-president had heard at a dinner party in New York about Queer Studies and that there was a homosexual alumnus willing to put up five million to hire Bert Hawkins, whose novel,
Sad Gays
, he'd read as a lonely teenager. It had helped him to “come out,” as queers say, as if we were supposed to see their sinking into depravity as—well, no matter.

The only problem is that about the time Bert came on board at Wilford he'd inconveniently
stopped
being gay and taken up with a woman
and
, two years later, a second, concurrent woman. Of course he had to hide his heterosexual households; that's why he hired all those bored hustlers for faculty samba parties; one of his two wives found them in the Philadelphia Yellow Pages shamelessly listed under Escorts.

I'll shove your quatrains filthy stinking holes both of them

Since it was a question of a possible interstate crime, the FBI interrogated each one of us. I told them right away that I thought it was one of the hustlers, that I was sure it was murder, not autostrangulation or anything fun like that. I said that another suspect, in my opinion, was Corbin, my officemate. One of his nine poems, I pointed out, was about transvestism with an undercurrent of hysteria and that his collection, if he ever finished it, was going to be called
Dressing Up.

When the investigator asked me where I'd been at the time of the death (he obviously didn't want to commit himself to saying murder or suicide), I said I'd been in Boro Park eating tuna out of a can and watching reruns of
Friends
with one of my two roommates. She had her own reasons to confirm the story.

The whole thing upset me so much that I invited Wilma out to lunch to the one honest place in town that had good ol' burgers and wasn't ethnic. She put an arm around my waist as we left the building, out of a shared sense of sisterhood in the face of our departmental shock rather than any dykey funny business. By the end of the meal, during which she'd recounted three of her affairs (all involving the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and sordid pickup trucks), her abandoned phys-ed career (bad knees), and a few laughs at the expense of our colleagues (“Not one of them understands the blackboard function on our PCs!”), we were ready to face the rather sour music emanating from our building. Even without my iPod I could hear the deafening strains of Cecilia Bartoli. “In furore lustissimae irae,” she was shrieking, so loud I couldn't hear Wilma, who'd become entirely too cozy, though I could see by her pretty wet teeth and shaking diaphragm that she was laughing.

The rich gay donor, I learned, was outraged that
his
professor, Ol' Bert, had been not only straight but bigamous! He was demanding a refund from the school, if you can imagine such a thing, and the current president, an astrophysicist by trade, was definitely not up to speed.

The FBI let it be known that they were carefully and scientifically

goddamn rich bitch you think your shitty little porn fuck take that in the crapper I'll make you a porn you won't forget too bad your fuckin' memory is leaking out of one end while your shit dribbles out the

accumulating the evidence and soon they'd have a definitive answer to many questions.

Edgar, the deaf closeted playwright, was named acting interim chair of creative writing. His protégé Corbin was suddenly much in evidence. There was talk of extending his contract, and his garage band was asked to perform during the annual talent night on campus. They were called Ill Met by Starlight.

Edgar pretended that he disliked “administration” of any sort but he demanded (and got) course relief; starting next fall he'd be down from four courses a year to just one. As for his duties as chair, he threw them all at Wilma, who seldom leaves the office before ten at night. He couldn't do anything. Poor Wilma had to crank out everything: budgets, teaching schedules, room assignments, year-end summaries of departmental activities and achievements, lists of students selected to write “creative theses” (sixty pages of doggerel or three or four lame, confused stories warmed over from sophomore or junior year), lists of students awarded prizes or given summer traveling fellowships (so they can go back to Shaker Heights or Indian Hill and track down their shallow, expensive “roots”—dyed blonde, no doubt).

The second murder was of Corbin. In
our
office, of all places, the one Corbin and I share with the strangely elusive Adam. I received a call from our resident poetess Emily. I'd almost never heard her voice before and I was astonished she knew how to work a phone. “Hello, Manuela?”

“Yes?”

“This is Emily. Emily from school?”

“Yes,” I laughed warmly. “ I know which—”

She interrupted in her tiny voice: “It seems Corbin has been killed.”

“So they got him too,” I said—the words just shot out of me.

“Yes?” Emily asked in her tentative nearly inaudible voice. At last she concluded, “Yes.”

“How was it … done?” I asked. “And when?” I didn't want to lament too much in a tacky Latino way, but then again I feared I might be underdoing it.

“I don't know if I can—I have to get off … ”

The instrument went dead. After a few moments I called Edgar on his mobile. I explained to him that Emily had hung up on me.

“That's our girl,” Edgar said. “There will be a double sestina by noon tomorrow with only
red
as one of the six end words to suggest the whole bloody massacre.”

He explained that Corbin had been found this morning castrated, his face smeared with mascara and his rectum wedged wide open by an orange traffic cone. One of his transvestite poems was pinned to his chest, directly into the flesh.

“This must be especially horrible for you, Edgar,” I said.

“Why do you—well, yes. It is. I've had a—well, I've had a sort of breakdown. I don't think I can really go on. I think Don and I—” Don was his partner, the one who puts up cherries in booze—“are going to go somewhere. I've canceled my classes. I can't—” and here he began to sob.

When he finally pulled himself together he said he was going to hang up and call back. Before he could, I received a second call from Emily. With no prologue she announced, “The worst thing is that the FBI is going to commandeer our students' computers and read their
stories
. And ours, too. Our stories and our
poems
!”

“That's not the worst thing,” I said in gentle reproach.

“No,” she murmured.

“The worst thing,” I prated on, “is that poor Corbin was castrated and reamed with an orange—” But Emily had hung up a second time.

No sooner had I replaced the receiver than it rang again.

Edgar: “I was wondering if you'd be willing to fill in as chair for the rest of the semester.”

Me: “Me?”

Edgar: “It's only five weeks more. I know it would be … strange since you're not tenured but, remember, as soon as that book is finished—”

Me: “You mean my collection,
Border People
?” I'd just made up the name a second ago.

Edgar (momentarily delighted): “Oh, is that the title? Is it about—”

Me: “Mexicans. Mexican-Americans.”

Edgar: “The committee will be very heartened by this news. How far away … ?”

Me: “I have just one new story to write, ‘Big River Wall.'”

Edgar: “Big … oh! Rio Grande. And the wall is very—”

I knew he wanted to say “topical” but he contented himself with “relevant.”

Me: “Yes.”

Edgar: “Do you think you'd be willing to run the department?”

I knew that he was too lazy ever to take up the reins again once I'd replaced him and that no one on the permanent staff—Emily? Arthur?—would ever step forward.

Me: “I might be willing to consider it if someone would nominate me for the Woolcraft Award. With something like that backing me up, I might have the necessary
heft
to direct a program as distinguished as ours.”

Edgar hinted that this award for best teacher was already in the works and that, come June, I might be happily surprised. I asked if there might not be course relief and a salary override if my directorship “dribbled on.” He said, in his best mimsy-woolsy academic manner, “This too may come to pass.”

I immediately called my mother and interviewed her long distance for two hours about all the worst excesses of American immigration officials against what in my mind I called “wetbacks.” My mother was thrilled to help me. I knew I'd need this material for a last long story, “Big River Wall,” the capstone to
Border People
. I'd have to rework lots of the earlier stories, changing blonde gym teachers into suffering Chicanos. Of course it would be the expected indictment of whites.

A week later, Edgar and Don were on a Mediterranean cruise on the
Napoleon Bonaparte
and I'd moved into Bert's office. Wilma helped me make it cozy. We had Bert's sicko homo books boxed and put into storage, his rotting green carpet replaced by a tasteful new beige one, and his gloomy Shakespeare prints stored to make room for my newly bought Mexican Day of the Dead dolls, which my mother had just FedExed. I'd never liked Mexi kitsch but I'd decided to play up the wetback connection till the day I got tenure—then out it would all go.

Wilma and I had lunch every day. She thought she had me in her pocket as her new boss and took advantage of the situation by drinking two margaritas in my so-called honor. I was alarmed by her effrontery. I was trying hard to work on my stories but I couldn't concentrate, and bits of unassigned dialogue or monologue kept slipping in, grotesque and inappropriate to say the least.

One day, after Wilma had come back to my office with me and was sprawling provocatively and a bit tipsily on the daybed, she said, “I guess you hate men as much as I do.” She even had the nerve to let one hand dawdle between her legs; fortunately she was wearing slacks.

“Hate men? Why do you say that?”

“Well,” she said, “don't we see a certain … oh, forget it.”

“A certain what?” I prompted.

“A certain pattern in the … events of the—forget it.”

“Yes,” I said, standing up. “I think we should forget it.” I held the door open for her. She took it badly and waltzed out impertinently, saying, “I've got more on you than you—forget it.”

filthy bitch forget everything if your memory spills out of your dirty little mouth and cunt bitch or bloodies your mouth

We didn't speak for three days (two of those were weekend days), but then on Monday she said she'd like to have lunch. I said I couldn't do lunch but that I'd be willing to have a late dinner with her in my office. I tried all afternoon to work on my stories, but a loud disturbing voice began to dictate what I should do next, and it had nothing to do with the Rio Grande. In fact the language seemed to be Italian—and the voice was Cecilia's, something about lust and anger.

A NOTE ON THE EDITORS

S.J. Rozan, a native New Yorker, is the author of twelve novels. Her work has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity awards for Best Novel and the Edgar for Best Short Story.
Bronx Noir
, a short-story collection S.J. edited, was given the NAIBA Notable Book of the Year award. She's served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and is ex-president of the Private Eye Writers of America. In January 2003 she was an invited speaker at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The 2005 Left Coast Crime convention in El Paso, Texas, made her its Guest of Honor. A former architect in a practice that focused on police stations, firehouses, and zoos, S.J. Rozan lives in lower Manhattan.

Jonathan Santlofer is the author of five novels as well as a highly respected artist whose work has been written about and reviewed in the
New York Times
,
Art in America
,
Artforum
, and
Arts
, and appears in many public, private, and corporate collections. He serves on the board of Yaddo, one of the oldest artist communities in the country. Santlofer lives and works in New York City.