Little Miss Evil Read online

  LITTLE MISS EVIL

  A NICK HOFFMAN MYSTERY

  Lev Raphael

  Copyright © 2000 Lev Raphael.

  Cover Design by Sue Trowbridge ([email protected]) eBook edition by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  “The perfect book to take away for a weekend in the country…a genuinely funny modern comedy of manners.”

  — The Washington Post

  “The Borgias would not be bored at the State University of Michigan, that snake pit of academic politics.”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “Do yourself a favor. Curl up with a box of assorted chocolates and ‘Little Miss Evil.’ Indulge!”

  — TIKKUN

  “A joy throughout, thanks to heroes with brains, heart, and nerves to spare.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

  “Full of wisecracks, wit and pithy observations…I love this series!”

  — Murder Ink

  “Lev Raphael’s writing is rich and satisfying, with subtle, densely textured characterizations and witty takes on life in general and the academic world in particular.”

  — I Love a Mystery

  in memory of my mother

  Lalka Klackzo

  who inspired my love of mysteries

  It is the bright day that brings forth the adder

  And that craves wary walking.

  JULIUS CAESAR, ACT I, SCENE 2

  1

  DO you think we spend too much time on food?” I asked.

  Stefan turned from the cutting board where he had just finished dicing leeks and shallots for a potato lasagna with wild mushrooms and a celery herb sauce. He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  I put down the glass of Délixir de Noix, the delicious walnut aperitif my cousin Sharon had sent us as a souvenir from her recent trip to the Dordogne, where walnut oil and walnuts were so integral a part of the cuisine that there was even a walnut museum. Or so she claimed.

  “Well, we talk about it, we read food magazines,

  restaurant reviews, sometimes even plan vacations around where we’re going to eat. Think about how we do Stratford.”

  We went to that Ontario town’s renowned Shakespeare festival every summer and always ate at its best and most expensive restaurant, The Church. “And just look at all this —!” I waved around the kitchen we’d had remodeled over the summer with gray-blue granite countertops and backsplashes; antiqued, glass-doored cabinetry; and appliance garages that reduced the clutter.

  “Are you saying you’re sorry we changed the kitchen?”

  “No—that’s not my point.” I jabbed an Émile Zola finger at our three shelves of cookbooks and wine books, alphabetized by country (the former) and region (the latter).

  Our favorites in each category were frayed and stained. “Look at all that stuff!”

  “Okay.” Stefan nodded, the knife in his hand motionless.

  Stefan occasionally preferred knives over the Cuisinart, whose noise he found distracting. “And?”

  “Well, maybe we should eat more simply.”

  To celebrate the fading of summer, and to steel ourselves for the beginning of the State University of Michigan’s fall semester which cruelly started before Labor Day, we were making a leisurely dinner course by course that Sunday night before the first week of classes. A half hour ago, we had begun with chilled Cavaillon melon halves filled with port, sitting on comfortable bar stools at the new granite-topped kitchen island.

  “Eat more simply—” Stefan repeated, glancing around us as if he were a king surveying his palace before fleeing the gunfire of a military coup. Then he smiled, and I could tell I was going to feel busted. Like many long-standing couples, Stefan and I didn’t so much read each other’s minds as read between the lines of what the other one was saying (sometimes there was a little subtext, sometimes there was a whole opera).

  “Nick, you’ve been reading too many of those Janet Evanovich books,” he said.

  I had to grin. “Got it in one.”

  Stefan had been sampling the books I was considering teaching in my upcoming course in mystery fiction at the State University of Michigan, and he had some definite opinions of his own. Comic mysteries just weren’t his thing.

  He said, “You need to straighten yourself out—read some Dennis Lehane.”

  “That could work.”

  “And if I ever come home and find you eating peanut butter out of a jar or chomping down on cold pizza or handfuls of corn flakes, I’m not going to think you’re simplifying your life, I’m going to assume you’ve got a new kind of Alzheimer’s.”

  I was indeed experiencing a Stephanie Plum overdose, or side effect. Enjoying Evanovich’s first few light mysteries, I’d been struck by how different hapless Stephanie’s eating habits were from mine, and I was oddly, perhaps morbidly, fascinated. That drew me along in her series as much as the comic misadventures. It wasn’t that I wanted her life (and in New Jersey!), but it intrigued me that she was so lackadaisical about food unless her mother was cooking. I wondered what it would feel like, and was almost a little ashamed of our devotion to eating well.

  Stefan said, “Cooking isn’t something I ever want to simplify. I need to spend time in the kitchen just like I need to spend time at the gym. It helps me relax.”

  That was unassailable. Stefan had to be able to unhook from obsessing about his fading career as a novelist. He may have started out well, over a decade ago, in a welter of good reviews, but literary fiction was as enticing a prospect these days as a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective to Jesse Helms.

  General sales were “trending down,” as his agent put it, and Stefan’s were leading the way. He had, in fact, reached the low point of his career.

  Stefan’s agent had been unable to sell his latest novel after his longtime publisher (which had been bought by a German conglomerate) dropped him from its list; his previous book hadn’t gone into paperback; and his sales had been so weak that his last book was remaindered within a year of publication—a dismal first for him.

  He’d been so upset about the book’s failure that when a late review came in from the tiny Gaylord Gazette up in northern Michigan, he’d exploded at its many factual inaccuracies—and worse. “This reviewer named Una Vole— can you believe that name?—criticizes my style, says that ‘access of affection’ is wrong. It’s not wrong. It means onrush or surge.”

  I remembered having proofread the novel, as I always did with his books, and suggested those last two choices precisely because less well-read people might think the word was a typo for excess. But Stefan had refused, insisting the rhythm of the sentence would change. Stefan had written a witty, angry, insulting letter to the reviewer, which I read on his computer screen and suggested he delete, using a line I’d used before: “Do you want to be known as a fine writer or a maniac?” He wavered, and I added, “You’ll piss this nobody little reviewer off by pointing out her mistake, so what will it get you?” He backed off, muttering, and I felt relieved to have saved him from embarrassing himself.

  “I love cooking. I need to relax,” Stefan said in the kitchen, turning away and wielding the knife with savage efficiency. I didn’t have trouble imagining who he might be picturing under the blade.

  Aggravating Stefan’s profound sense of shame over his career slide was the very disturbing presence of a brand-new member of the department: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Camille Cypriani, whom one critic called “a cross between Anita Brookner and Judith Krantz” for her literate but sexy best-sellers about lonely women in Paris and other glamorous cities. Over the summer, sixtyish Cypriani, who had been living in Boston, had been given a newly created endowed chair of women’s literature in the English, American Studies, and Rhetoric Department (EAR) at the kind of salary only administrators make: $175,000.

  Her surprise entrance into the department had thrust Stefan from his position as the most important writer—not that it had meant much lately. EAR’s writing program was in chaos because two of its stalwarts, the husband-and-wife team Auburn and Mavis Kinderhoek, had been mostly either sick or on leave in the years we’d been at SUM. They were bitter and combative, so that was good for Stefan, but bad for students who couldn’t depend on getting the writing workshops they wanted, when they wanted.

  As the foremost Edith Wharton bibliographer, I would never face the same kind of pressure Stefan was under. The Olympians in the tiny field of Wharton studies, Cynthia Griffin Wolff and R. W. B. Lewis, were charming and supportive, but even if they hadn’t been, no one could really supplant me because my work was invaluable and significant.

  In addition to the summer timing, there were other anomalies about Camille’s position. Her endowment was anonymous and surprising in its specifications. For her first year, Cypriani didn’t even have to teach or work with students; all she was required to do was host an occasional “literary luncheon” with writing students and faculty, and do one reading for the public. The whole situation was humiliating for Stefan because he wasn’t consulted about the choice—everything connected to the position went through the provost’s office. And Stefan not only felt dwarfed by Cypriani’s reputation and her salary, but she had snubbed him in the past and continued to do so whenever they happened to meet on campus or in town.

  I watched Stefan work. He looked a lot like Ben Cross in Chariots of Fire, only shorter and more muscular, and right now he could have been one of that rash of new-wave hunky chefs displaying his good looks on the cover of a cookbook, laying himself out like a buffet.

 
“You like cooking and eating, too,” he said quietly. “You even like the grocery shopping. It makes sense. It’s soothing.

  How else could you deal with working in a department of psychopaths?”

  “I’ve never called them that.”

  “You’ve called them everything but.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Is sociopaths better?”

  “Maybe.” More accurately, though, you could describe my colleagues in EAR as The Planet of the Apes on a really bad hair day. And every year there I seemed to be living through another cheesy sequel.

  People tell you that academia isn’t the real world, but what could be more real than envy, hypocrisy, back-stabbing, overblown rhetoric, cruelty, obsession with reputation, and the steady shredding of other people’s dignity? The only things missing are real weapons and real money—but you wouldn’t know that from the ferocity of faculty squabbles.

  Unaware of this cross between Chernobyl and

  Chinatown before getting my Ph.D., I had become one of its denizens because I loved teaching—but heading into my fifth year at the State University of Michigan in Michiganapolis (SUM), I wondered if I’d make it through another five after this one, even if I were to get tenure. Stefan had it already and was set for life in a position that was prestigious—writer-in-residence—even if out in the publishing world his name had turned to bookstore poison. I, on the other hand, was a composition professor. That made me in the academic world only a lost figure in the great army of academics and just a step or two above temporary instructors and graduate assistants—disposable, replaceable, hardly worth anyone’s notice.

  Let’s put it this way: if composition professors had been the ones holding off the Persians, nobody would ever have heard of Thermopylae.

  Ironically, though, given our interests, Stefan had become less successful since we had moved to

  Michiganapolis from western Massachusetts and from a series of temporary positions, and in a way you could say that I’d become more so. I was one of the most popular professors at the State University of Michigan in Michiganapolis, but for all the wrong reasons: scandal and murder.

  Three years of murder, in fact. First my office mate, then people at an Edith Wharton conference I’d organized, and later students I’d known. While my record of murdered acquaintances wasn’t as bad as Jessica Fletcher’s, it was still deeply troubling to me. This notoriety was not exactly the way I’d hoped to make my mark. I was, after all, a bibliographer, and what could be further from that kind of dogged, scrupulous, nitpicky research than murder? Postal workers, victims of horrific abuse, and followers of racist creeds might go berserk, but when’s the last time you heard a reporter talk about index cards and photocopying in the context of serial killing?

  And even though my background did help prepare me for trying to figure out what was going on in each instance, nobody in my department seemed to appreciate the connection between bibliography and sleuthing—or give me points for my investigations. Like someone in a witness protection program, our university prized order and normality over everything else.

  So my colleagues, my department chair, and the SUM

  administration squirmed because I’d been involved in so much bad publicity for the university.

  But SUM students were loving it.

  After my third “episode” the previous spring semester, students had started crowding my regular office hours, clamoring for appointments when they couldn’t make those, and just showing up at odd times in the hope of seeing me. It doesn’t sound dramatic to anyone who hasn’t been a teacher at the college level. But the truth is that except for sycophants, students typically avoid office hours for fear of saying something stupid to their professors—with no place to hide!

  —or because they dislike the class and can’t bear any extra exposure to its “content provider,” as professors were supposed to be called according to some idiotic new university decree.

  This flow of students to my office was matched by the students signing up for my classes, each of which had been overenrolled in preregistration, leaving me in the unpleasant and unusual position of having to tell students they couldn’t add me to their schedules. The mystery class I was scheduled to teach the following spring semester had been filled to capacity within minutes of opening for registration, and EAR

  had received a stream of complaints from students demanding that I teach another section.

  Even before the semester had started, the students surged expectantly to my new office in crumbling Parker Hall as if it were a tiny theme park: Murder World. And, frankly, my own brush with death and all the wild stories about me in Michigan and national media guaranteed that I could have cleaned up if I’d opened a souvenir stand, or at least sold a few postcards and snow globes.

  I mused over all this during our quiet dinner as we poured glass after glass of Bergerac Sec in the kitchen, listening to Cesaria Evora’s soulful Miss Perfumado album and mourning the coming change in the rhythm of our days.

  Were we spoiled by having the summer off from teaching?

  Yes, and most people worked harder jobs, though I doubt that anyone but other academics had such bizarre colleagues, which balanced it all out.

  The windows were open on a surprisingly cool August evening, and we could hear the hissing of summer lawns, kids riding bikes, and the harmless hum of a postwar neighborhood of tree-lined streets and unostentatious well-landscaped homes north of SUM’s sprawling, verdant campus.

  After the lasagna, Stefan and I took half a pot of Kona, along with a plate of hazelnut cream cheese brownies, out to the sun room and watched the sky stripe itself in blue and black. Biting into my second brownie, I thought that Stephanie Plum had no idea what she was missing.

  But while I was feeling replete, Stefan clearly wasn’t thinking about our wonderful meal anymore. The magic and focus of preparation, the whole Zen way he had of cooking and serving, had evaporated. I could tell by the supernally quiet way he sat looking out at the backyard, where the gazebo seemed to glow as darkness poured down around it.

  When you live with an introvert, you get to realize there are many kinds of silences.

  “Camille,” I said.

  He nodded. “Camille.”

  I may have admired her writing somewhat (not that I would dare tell Stefan), but in just a few chance meetings, I’d come to loathe Camille for the contemptuous way she treated Stefan and almost everyone else she had contact with. She had instantly become the most powerful member of the department, enjoyed showing it off, and even had the office to do it in. I suppose only in academia can somebody’s office assignment become so controversial—and the semester hadn’t even started.

  The neglected—but at least nominally honored—Grace Jurevicius Memorial Library on Parker Hall’s second floor had been dismantled and turned into Cypriani’s office. This library had for twenty years housed the extensive collection of criticism, American fiction, and Michigania willed to EAR by a beloved and benign former chair from a less contentious era at SUM. It had been disbanded, the sign removed, and the books boxed and supposedly sent off to SUM’s Special Collections in clear violation of both Jurevicius’s will and department tradition. This was reason enough for most EAR faculty to resent Cypriani: not only was her office huge and blessed with a gorgeous view of SUM’s old central campus, but almost everyone in EAR felt that she and her adherents had committed an act of desecration. I’d never met Grace Jurevicius, but it struck even me as ugly and insensitive. And typical.

  “So what’s next?” I’d asked in the EAR main office.

  “Burning all the books from the Jurevicius Library at Homecoming?” The line shot through the department as quickly as a fake political rumor on the Internet, and faculty members who had still barely noticed me even after four years stopped me to tell me they applauded my stand. I hadn’t made a stand, just a joke, but in the superheated atmosphere of Parker Hall, who knew the difference?

  I’d been especially praised by tiny Iris Bell and that cipher Carter Savery, two of the many downtrodden professors in EAR, who made a habit of outrage and were so incensed at Cypriani’s hiring that they’d broadcast threats about filing a grievance. These sansculottes—who were on my tenure review committee—were former members of the old Rhetoric Department, which had been abolished well over a decade ago. Its quarrelsome and underqualified faculty had been amalgamated with English and American Studies, creating a bifurcated department whose split had never been healed. They were stuck teaching the EAR faculty’s least popular course, composition, and because of departmental prejudice, their own abrasive personalities, and a generally poor publishing record, they were at the bottom of their rank in salary.