Let's Get Criminal Read online

  LET'S GET CRIMINAL

  by Lev Raphael

  A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery

  Book 1

  ReQueered Tales • Los Angeles

  2019

  Let's Get Criminal

  by Lev Raphael

  A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery, Book 1

  Copyright © 1996 by Lev Raphael.

  Preface to 2019 edition: copyright © 2019 by Lev Raphael.

  Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.

  First American edition: 1996

  This ebook edition: ReQueered Tales, June 2019

  ReQueered Tales ebook version 1.5

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  ALSO BY LEV RAPHAEL

  THE NICK HOFFMAN NOVELS

  Let's Get Criminal (1996)

  The Edith Wharton Murders (1997)

  The Death of a Constant Love (1999)

  Little Miss Evil (2000)

  Burning Down the House (2001)

  Tropic of Murder (2004)

  Hot Rocks (2011)

  Assault with a Deadly Lie (2014)

  State University of Murder (2019)

  OTHER NOVELS

  Winter Eyes (1992)

  The German Money (2003)

  Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile (2011)

  Rosedale in Love (2011)

  Assault with a Deadly Lie (2014)

  LEV RAPHAEL

  Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in a dozen genres from memoir to mystery. His first book of short stories Dancing on Tisha B'Av won a Lambda Literary Award. He’s published hundreds of stories, essays, articles, and book reviews in a wide range of newspapers, magazines and journals. Lev has won Amelia’s Reed Smith Fiction Prize and International Quarterly’s Crossing Boundaries Prize for Innovative Prose, awarded by novelist D.M. Thomas, author of The White Hotel. His suspense novel Assault with a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award finalist.

  Lev’s fiction and essays have appeared in over 24 anthologies in the U.S. and England, and are taught at colleges and universities around the country. His fiction has been analyzed in scholarly journals, books, and conferences like MLA. Special Archives at Michigan State University's Library purchased his literary papers and updates them yearly. Lev has reviewed for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post and other papers. You can connect with him on Facebook or Twitter, his author website is www.levraphael.com, and he teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.

  Praise for Let’s Get Criminal

  “Let’s Get Criminal is a delightful romp in the wonderfully petty and backbiting world of academia. Well-drawn characters make up a delicious list of suspects and victims.”

  —Faye Kellerman, author of Justice

  “Let’s Get Criminal is a mouth-watering mystery—the characters are well-fed and well-read and there’s plenty of academic dish.”

  —Kate Clinton, comic/connoisseur

  “Reading Let’s Get Criminal is like sitting down for a good gossip with an old friend. Its instant intimacy and warmth provides clever and sheer fun.”

  —Marissa Piesman, author of Alternate Sides

  “Among the pleasures of this mystery is its detailing of the day-to-day domesticity between Nick and Stefan—and of that essential mystery that lies at the core of even our closest relationships.”

  —Katherine V. Forrest, author of Flashpoint

  * * *

  Critical Praise for Lev Raphael

  “A bright new talent in American fiction … each story is a spellbinding delight.”

  —Booklist on Dancing on Tisha B’Av

  “A writer whose work I have followed since first reading the title story of Dancing on Tisha B’Av in Men on Men 2 … Raphael writes with a vivacity that is life affirming.”

  —Michael Nava, author of The Hidden Law

  “Raphael’s book resembles a piano sonata, a piece he knows so well that his fingers breathed the music.”

  —Los Angeles Times on Winter Eyes

  LET’S GET CRIMINAL

  by Lev Raphael

  Foreword

  I began my publishing career with short stories about the Second Generation— children of Holocaust survivors—and was one of the very first American writers to tackle this complex narrative. I felt deeply about the subject because both my parents were survivors, and I was also convinced that I had something important to say about intergenerational trauma, something unique to contribute to a wider audience.

  This was of course a dark subject to write about. And one evening at dinner in New York with the editor of my first collection of stories published by St. Martin’s Press, he said, “You’ve got a great sense of humor, why not write something funny?” He mentioned The Thin Man and Bringing Up Baby as reference points, and both were movies I’d seen many times.

  Well, one of the stories in my Lambda-Award-winning first book, Dancing on Tisha B’Av, was actually comic. “Remind Me to Smile” was told in the voice of Nick Hoffman, an English professor who discovers that his partner Stefan actually helped his ex-lover secure a faculty position at their university. What’s worse, Stefan has invited this interloper to dinner, so Nick has to cook for him.

  The story was a bit of a farce, romantic around the edges, and when I read it on my first book tour, it had actually made me wonder if I was really finished writing about these characters. What if there was a book here? What if Stefan’s ex- was found dead? What if Nick became a suspect and had to investigate to clear his name? So many possibilities!

  I started re-reading old favorites like Agatha Christie. Then I moved on to reading mystery series by authors I hadn’t previously explored, including Sue Grafton, Martha Grimes, and Faye Kellerman, in order to commune with the best contemporary crime writers. The more I read, the more I felt inspired.

  While I adored the mystery genre, I’d never tried writing in it before. Frankly, I had been intimidated. Well-done mysteries are supremely artful, much more difficult to construct than most people realize. Reading many dozens of new mysteries enabled me to figure out how to build a tight plot, and I grew more confident about launching a series of my own.

  I had other ideas, too. In my short stories, I always portrayed Jewish men as sexually attractive in order to combat the cultural stereotype of Jewish men as nerds and nebbishes. That erotic charge was not going to vanish in the series, so Nick and Stefan aren’t neutered the way a lot of gay men seemed to be in popular culture back then. And in the age of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I was also determined to make Nick and Stefan’s relationship solid and central to their lives as university professors. Over the course of nine books it’s been tested by the stress of crime, by homophobia at their university, by their career ups and downs, by envious faculty and even out-of-control cops—but it’s never been in doubt.

  At the beginning, I was lucky to have the advice of Walter Mosley about growing a series character. We met while our book tours crossed in Houston and we talked about his hero Easy Rawlins and how to sustain interest over time for readers and for the author as well. That discussion confirmed my determination that Nick would not be one of those sleuths who finds a corpse and then blithely goes out to Denny’s afterwards for breakfast. I wanted the shock of murder and contact with murderers to change him over time, and it has.

  Let’s Get Criminal is where the series began in 1996 and where Nick first experiences the dark side of humanity personally—in the context of satire about academia which is his home. Thanks to this
series, I had a writer’s dream come true: I was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review more than once.

  So, welcome to Nick and Stefan’s world at the State University of Michigan in Michiganapolis, “that snake pit of academic politics,” as the Book Review put it, where “the Borgias would not feel out of place.”

  —Lev Raphael, April 2019

  For Gersh:

  “one love, one lifetime…”

  “…oddity is the natural condition of mankind.”

  —Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

  (translated by Michael Frayn)

  1

  FROM THE BEGINNING—EVEN before the beginning—Stefan had said it was none of our business. He kept saying that, but he meant it was none of my business, because I tend to be too nosey.

  Still, I thought that my new office mate, Perry Cross, had something to hide. He had just been hired as an assistant professor of Canadian literature, and everything about the situation was suspicious. For starters, given the terrible state of Michigan’s economy and the cutbacks at the State University of Michigan (SUM), where did the money come from for this brand-new position? And why was Canadian Studies suddenly so important at the university? And how come my department (English, American Studies, and Rhetoric), where Cross would be teaching, was filled with so many rumors about this guy and his job? I had not been on the hiring committee (I was too new), but people were saying the whole process had been interfered with at different points by the chair or perhaps the dean of the Humanities College. I also heard rumors that the decision to create the job in the first place and hire Cross had come from high up in the administration. There had been no talk about equal opportunity hiring, which was very strange, given that our department (EAR) was top-heavy with white Christian men. It was also strange that the strong “internal” candidate—Serena Fisch, who was already teaching in EAR—had not been seriously considered for the new position.

  And I thought it was odd that I hadn’t met Perry Cross until a week before the fall semester began. One day I came in and found some cartons stacked on the other side of my office, with a note from Claire, the department chair’s secretary, saying they belonged to Perry Cross. Well, I knew he would be sharing my office, so that was no surprise, but I would have thought he’d want to get there early to settle in.

  Then there was Perry himself. I wondered about him. I wondered about him a lot. I overheard him talking about Ann-Margret too much. It was apparently his little joke, how he’d always had the hots for her, seen all her movies, wanted to give blood when she fell in Vegas—remember, off that thirty-foot platform?—and when Perry was “free” (between marriages), she wasn’t. Of course he thought she was the best thing ever to happen to Tennessee Williams when she did Streetcar on television. I suppose it’s like being fourteen and saying, “Boy, if I had her” (fill in your own blank), and all your friends leer and shift their legs to give themselves some room. But a man in his thirties, a professor at a big mid-western state school? It just didn’t sound right—it was a cover, and the two marriages were a cover. Perry had to be gay.

  “Who cares?” Stefan asked, when I kept bringing it up.

  “Material,” I said. “It could be material for your writing. Flaubert said that all literature begins as gossip.”

  “He did not! That’s just something you’d tell your freshmen and when they’d write it down, you’d laugh and admit you made it up.”

  Stefan was right. I do have a fondness for inventing quotes, especially faced with thirty or more hands busily filling notebooks with information that is generally useless.

  My specialty is Henry James and Edith Wharton, but mostly I teach freshman composition, in the same department as Stefan and Perry Cross—though as the State University of Michigan’s writer-in-residence, Stefan is among the elite in the humanities and I’m just a foot soldier.

  Most people complain about teaching basic writing courses, but I’m quite good at it. I can help my students revise their work without trying to make them sound like me, and I often connect and help kids see their writing differently, help them discover how to grow, how to find and develop their own voice. I know I sound like one of those Reach Out and Touch Someone ads, but that’s how I feel when it works.

  It certainly didn’t hurt that I also loved living in mid-Michigan and just being at SUM. The university is in the state capital, Michiganapolis, an overgrown but unpretentiously pretty college town full of clean and pleasant streets, well-kept homes, nothing very ostentatious or even very old; the gracefulness is of recent vintage, but with all the unassuming charm that I think of as typically mid-western. Even the golden-domed capitol building and the government offices seem somewhat unobtrusive because they’re clustered at the opposite edge of town from the university, walling off the ragged manufacturing suburbs farther west.

  While there may be nicer college towns in the country, there can’t be a more beautiful college campus. Walking onto the enormous campus from town, which stretches along SUM’s northern border, you feel like you’re entering a wonderland. Whether the buildings are 1920s hulking pillared limestone, 1950s red brick with turquoise panels under the windows, or 1870s Romanesque sandstone, everything is in scale, with few buildings taller than the trees. It’s all bound together by the curving roads and walks, lush flowering trees like cherries, apples, dogwoods, hawthorns, magnolias, redbuds; magnificent old weeping willows, maples, oaks, blue spruce, scotch pine; what seem like acres of lilac and forsythia; gloriously colorful courtyard gardens; brilliant ornamental beds of tulips, hyacinths, irises, gladioli, petunias. The campus is scrupulously maintained and tended, and the loving care the landscaping gets makes you feel you’re on a private estate.

  Heading south away from town and past the river that cuts the campus in half, the trees thin out, buildings get more modern and more spread apart as you encounter wider lawns and greenhouses, and then miles of fields and farmland, stretching off to the horizon, reminding you that the school was originally an agricultural college. Even the sky seems more open over the southern end of campus.

  Stefan and I were new to SUM. My cousin Sharon, who’s as close as a sister, had asked me if Stefan would be comfortable living so close to his father, who had just retired from teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, an hour away. It was a good question, and just like her. But since Stefan’s father rarely called, and Stefan never did, there wasn’t much of a problem. The hour’s drive guaranteed that there would be no casual dropping in. So there was nothing to keep Stefan from enjoying SUM as much as I did. He had finally come to like teaching, but he didn’t like me rhapsodizing too much about my classes and how happy I was in Michiganapolis.

  And Stefan did not want to hear me theorize about Perry Cross, or anyone. He may observe people more than I do, but he keeps what he sees for his novels. I’m the one who loves to speculate aloud, to make up stories about couples at other tables in restaurants, to latch onto phrases I’ve overheard at parties and tantalize myself with what they might mean. It should be no surprise that my favorite movie is Rear Window.

  “Stop worrying about Perry Cross,” Stefan said.

  I pushed. “Why doesn’t he come out?”

  “It’s not a good time for that.”

  Well, Stefan stopped me there. In Michigan, the AIDS epidemic still was a bit unreal and exotic, like the hole in the ozone layer—newsworthy, but distant. Yet it colored coverage of gay issues or problems. Like when three arrests had been recently made on campus, for sexual misconduct in a men’s room at the Union. They were all university employees. Their case had been lurching from one grim headline to another all over the Midwest, generating ugly letters in all the local papers. People wrote tirades about the Devil and sin, filth, sickness, evil and all the rest, as if the defendants were Jews in the Dark Ages. I was astonished by the violent rhetoric of people who interlaced their threats with talk of Christian charity and love—creepy! I found it most depressing when letters like that appeared i
n the student newspaper. If that’s how bigoted and unfeeling these kids were now, what would they be like out of school, working, voting, trying to make the world over in their image? And for every student who wrote that kind of letter, how many silently cheered when it was printed? How many of those people were in my classes, hating not just gays but Jews and blacks and women?

  As if the arrests and the scandal weren’t enough, the outspoken head of the gay students’ union had been harassed. It started with threatening letters and crank phone calls at his dorm. One night, the tires of his Escort were punctured and the windshield bashed in when his car was parked on campus near the Union building. The bumper sticker that read “Homophobia Is a Social Disease” had been smeared with dog shit. There had also been a number of openly gay and lesbian students mugged or threatened and chased, usually late at night, when shadows and darkness took over the enormous campus, mocking the feeble lampposts strung along the meandering concrete paths between buildings and along the river. Faculty members who had complained to the president about the “climate” on campus had not been reassured by his vague statement calling for “reestablishing harmony at SUM.”

  Given the current climate on campus, it was hard for me to disagree with Stefan.

  “Okay,” I said. “So it’s a bad time to come out. But why doesn’t Perry come out to me?”