The Death of a Constant Lover Read online

  The Death of

  a Constant Lover

  A Nick Hoffman Mystery

  Lev Raphael

  Copyright © 1999 Lev Raphael.

  Cover Design by Sue Trowbridge ([email protected])

  eBook edition by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  “NICK HOFFMAN MOWS DOWN INTELLECTUAL PRETENDERS WITH SCATHING WIT.”

  ~ The New York Times Book Review

  “A WITTY AND DEVASTATING BACKSTAGE VIEW OF COLLEGE LIFE.”

  ~ San Diego Star-Tribune

  “DARKLY AMUSING…THIS IS SNEAKY, SUBVERSIVE FUN.”

  ~ Publishers Weekly

  “ELEGANTLY SKEWERS IVORY-TOWER PRETENSIONS, PETTY POLITICS, INCOMPETENCIES, AND HYPOCRISIES…A DELIGHT FOR CONFIRMED AND NEW FANS ALIKE.”

  ~ Booklist

  “SURPRISING AND DEEPLY FELT…RAPHAEL'S STRONGEST WORK YET.”

  ~ Kirkus Reviews

  “A STYLISH MYSTERY WITH AN INTIMATE LOOK AT THE JUNGLE OF ACADEMIA…WITTY, IMPECCABLY WRITTEN.”

  ~ The Mystery Review

  The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.

  —Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go to Carole and Mike Steinberg for their hospitality north of Northport, where I did important work on this book. Howard Anderson of Michigan State University helpfully explained various academic procedures, giving me models I could work with in developing what happens to Nick. Information on Québecois expressions was supplied by Wendy Thomas, Luc Pesant, and René Jolicoeur of the Canadian Heritage Information Network, and by Bob Newland of Fanfare Books in Stratford, Ontario. Yohannes Mochtar supplied some helpful facts about Indonesia, but any mistakes here are my own, and Lucille is not a relative of his, fictionally or otherwise.

  THE DEATH OF

  A CONSTANT LOVER

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for...

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  HalfTitle Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  It was Stefan’s idea that I eat lunch now and then by the Administration Building bridge—despite the murder.

  Well, actually, it was because of the murder.

  Two years ago, the body of my officemate Perry Cross had turned up in the Michigan River, snagged on some rocks right near the bridge. It wasn’t a diving accident.

  At the part of the shallow river where they had found Cross’s body, artfully scattered boulders created a tiny rapids, and ducks gathered year-round to be fed by children and their parents. The sloping lawns on either side of the river were always full of contented-looking students when the weather was even remotely warm enough: reading, tanning, eating, dreaming. An inviting terrace lined with benches stretched along the south bank, down three wide granite steps from the walk paralleling the river.

  All kinds of things showed up in the Michigan River: notebooks, beer cans, sneakers, condoms. But there’d never been a body before.

  And even after two years, Cross’s murder was still very much alive at SUM’s verdant Michiganapolis campus. You could often see students stopped on the wide bridge with its rounded steel rails, pointing down to where they thought Cross’s body had been found. Some leaned far over the rail as if pretending to plunge to a battered, wet death. It was ghoulish playacting that got uglier when they shrieked or laughed and made loud jokes or choking noises, then staggered away from the rail crying, “Help! Help!”

  The murder hadn’t done my career at the State University of Michigan any good, even though I wasn’t the killer. Since I’d been involved in a scandalous death, I was perceived as having brought shades of Hard Copy to the hallowed halls of SUM, which meant bad publicity for my college, my department, and me. I knew I would have trouble getting tenure next year with that kind of baggage; as they say in politics, I was tainted. Even worse, I hadn’t written a new book since I’d gotten to SUM four years earlier, so I wasn’t considered productive enough.

  But that wasn’t my only problem. In some kind of weird delayed reaction to the murder, I had found myself dreaming about Cross’s death more and more, and over the last two years I’d increasingly avoided the bridge and that general part of campus. I took roundabout detours that ate up my time.

  When he found out, Stefan was immediately concerned.

  “Nick, you can’t be terrorized by the past.”

  “Are you kidding? Gibbon said that history was basically a list of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. Sounds scary to me!”

  He ignored that. “Go have lunch there—make it a regular thing.”

  I gulped. “Lunch? Why stop with lunch? How about breakfast at the Michiganapolis morgue?”

  “It’ll start with your staying away from the bridge, then you’ll want to avoid your office, and then—”

  “Wait a minute,” I snapped. “Avoiding your office is what half the professors around here do, and you know it. That’s not a sign of trauma, it’s a sign of laziness. They hate their students and don’t want to talk to them! There’s no way that could ever happen to me.”

  Stefan relented a little. And since he looks like a stockier, shorter version of Ben Cross, who played the Jewish runner in Chariots of Fire, Stefan’s relenting face is really something.

  But I didn’t let it distract me. “Come on—are you really afraid that I’ll turn into Miss Havisham, withered and covered with dust, and go up in flames, just because I won’t cross the Administration Building Bridge, or even come to it?”

  Wisely, Stefan didn’t answer. He did what quiet people do so well: He listened. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s annoying. Right then I was annoyed.

  “Hey—it was a complete shock for me, okay?” I said. “Corpses have no place on our campus. This isn’t Rwanda—this is Michiganapolis.”

  He shrugged. “Et in Arcadia Ego.”

  “Latin? Isn’t it bad enough you quote stuff at me in French, and that your accent is perfect?” I was very touchy about my French, since my parents were Belgian Jews, and they hadn’t succeeded in raising me fully bilingual. To me, that would have meant being able to argue as well in French as in English, to gobble angrily way down in my throat the way my father did, those rare times he lost his temper.

  Patiently, Stefan said, “Et in Arcadia Ego means death is in paradise, too.”

  “Jeez, Stefan, I know what it means—I saw Brideshead Revisited, remember that was me sitting next to you in the living room? Hey,” I said, suddenly distracted. “Now we know why Lady Marchmain looked so miserable and pinched in that series. Claire Bloom was living with Philip Roth then! That would give anyone a case of the grims.”

  Stefan’s grin faded after a moment, and it was my turn to relent “Okay, I won’t put it off. I’ll go have lunch at the Bridge of Death. And don’t look at me like that! It’s what students are calling the bridge. I didn’t make that up.”

  Stefan was right, but it bothered me that he wasn’t nearly as shaken by the murder as I was, even though I understood why. Stefan’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and his glimpses of the horror they’d endured outweighed any tragedy that could enter our lives. My cousin Sharon, who lives in New York, had put it well: “Nick, Stefan exp
ects the world to be horrible, but you have a comic vision of life. Murders don’t fit.” That was it exactly. I couldn’t figure out how to make sense of the killing that had erupted so close to me, so I had avoided dealing with it, or tried to, by avoiding the bridge.

  But that wasn’t an option anymore, with Stefan herding me back to reality like the tireless sheepdog he could be.

  I figured I could try eating lunch at the terrace by the bridge at least once every few weeks, when the weather permitted. You know, become my own Pavlov’s dog by associating food with the bridge, though nobody would have to clean up after me. Stefan was right. How else was I going to overcome my phobia about what had once been my favorite spot on SUM’s idyllic campus?

  Unlike Stefan, who’d taken longer to appreciate SUM, I’d fallen in love at once with its spectacular, lush 6,000-acre campus, justly famous for its gardens, trees, and landscaping. No building on campus is over six stories, so the nineteenth-century Romanesque sandstone halls with turrets forming the original campus aren’t overwhelmed or even mocked by the brooding, columned granite piles of the 1920s or the brick boxes of the 1950s with decorative turquoise panels above and below the windows.

  And no matter how different the buildings, they’re intimately connected in an appealing, inviting whole by the curving roads and walks twining through the vast array of trees, many of them a century old: glorious weeping willows, maples, oaks, blue spruce, and Scotch pine. There are also lush flowering cherries, apples, dogwoods, hawthorns, magnolias, and redbuds. In addition, the horticulture department maintains acres of lilac and forsythia, countless courtyard gardens, and dazzling ornamental beds of tulips, hyacinths, iris, gladioli, petunias.

  At the center of campus, the ill-fated bridge is one of several wide concrete spans crossing the meandering, shallow Michigan River to connect the northern and southern parts of the university’s gigantic Michiganapolis campus. The northern section, where SUM’s oldest buildings crowd together, abuts one of the city’s main shopping areas, the Mile. That street of shops and bars cordons off the campus from faculty and student neighborhoods farther north.

  In the much larger southern part of SUM’s campus, newer buildings are spread farther apart as if dropped by an absent-minded giant, and separated by vast parking lots, fields, and experimental farms. SUM was founded in the mid-nineteenth century as an agricultural college of several small buildings (including my department’s crumbling home, Parker Hall), mushrooming in the 1920s and again in the Eisenhower years to become one of the nation’s largest schools. It currently housed close to 50,000 students, or “customers,” as our idiotic new president liked to say and I suppose we were lucky he hadn’t instituted drive-through classes yet.

  Thousands of students crossed the bridge every day, many of them at lunchtime, but despite the crowds, I did not feel safe on my return, though I was trying to. There I was on the first warm day of spring in my fourth year at SUM, clutching my lunch in one hand in an SUM bookstore crimson-and-gray plastic bag, making my way from Parker Hall, trying not to feel flushed or nervous. I couldn’t help wishing Stefan were there to remind me that my avoidance of the bridge didn’t make sense. But since there were other things I preferred not to think about that day, going to the bridge was better than hiding under our bed at home.

  And it was blessedly warm and sunny. Michiganapolis is one of the cloudiest cities in the country—because of its position between two Great Lakes, I think. So what might be picturesque winters with snow and crackling fires are often spoiled by the endless weeks of dense gray sky. It had been a typically dismal winter here, with layers and layers of cloud cover.

  But spring was early and especially warm. Dangerously warm, longtime residents were saying knowingly. I didn’t pay attention to their dire parentheses about the greenhouse effect. I was determined to enjoy the color, the warmth, the freedom.

  On my way over to the bridge I ran into Betty and Bill Malatesta, the two brightest and friendliest graduate students in my department, English, American Studies, and Rhetoric (EAR). For as long as I’d been there, they had both been publishing articles, presenting conference papers, making themselves the stars of the Ph.D. program. They were cheerful, sexy, and attractive—a sort of intellectual Bogey and Bacall.

  Today, as usual, they were dressed in funky black.

  “Great day for strolling!” they chirped, almost in unison. Then Bill, who loved lightbulb jokes, asked me, “How many SUM administrators does it take to change a lightbulb?”

  I shrugged.

  “None! Because first they have to form a committee and write a report about reinventing the university that goes to another committee where nothing happens.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “How many women’s studies majors? None, because they’re suing the bulb for sexual harassment.”

  Before I could groan, he rushed on: “How many football coaches? None! Their strategy is defensive—make the bulb come to you!”

  I laughed now, but the hilarity stopped when Bill said seriously, “I want to talk to you about one of the new TAs in the department. I’ll come by during your office hours.”

  And without telling me who he was talking about, they said good-bye and moved on. What was that all about? Though tempted, I couldn’t stand there all day wondering, so I continued toward the bridge.

  I saw our college’s dean, cruel-eyed Magnus Bullerschmidt, make his stately way across campus. He was tremendously fat, and the weight made him seem like a turbaned despot in a 1940s movie, ordering casual mayhem from his peacock throne.

  As I walked farther along, I kept my eyes down, hoping trouble wouldn’t find me, but suddenly I saw a grotesque flash of red. Blood red.

  Getting closer to the bridge, I could see an open cardboard box of Holy Bibles with improbably garish and cheap-looking leatherette red covers. In the whirling dense crowd of students, those covers were like a fiery distress call—or a warning.

  “They’re back,” I thought wearily. The preachers were back. I stopped where I was.

  Every spring, SUM was hit by a blight of these thin and fevered preachers, who passed out Bibles at most of the campus crossroads and bridges, occasionally bursting into tirades as if they were singing waiters at a religious restaurant. The preachers were as dreary and startling as the enormous, strident crows that had become as common a spring sight on campus as the squirrels and raccoons.

  Today the lurid box by the bridge was guarded by a meager-fleshed young man in a crumpled blue suit, his forehead a flaming relief map of pimples that made the red binding an even more unfortunate choice. As students and faculty passed, he stabbed Bibles at them with the spring of a malevolent troll. Though the day was cool, he looked hot and sweaty—fired up by his mission, no doubt. He must have been expecting some kind of martyrdom, since people like him were often heckled on campus, and sometimes threatened. Maybe he’d even been reading the letters in the student newspaper, where the presence of preachers on campus was attacked or defended in the kind of intemperate language the paper loved because it generated controversy.

  The preachers descending on campus were strange and geeky clones: all of them in plain, unattractive suits and haircuts that made them look like rejects from the Lawrence Welk Show, each one with false thunder in his voice. Doling out their Holy Bibles, they sometimes hectored students to “Save yourself!” as if Michiganapolis were as steeped in moral degradation and evil as New York, Los Angeles—or Ann Arbor. Whenever I walked past them, I had an image of myself as trapped in some weird kind of carnival with barkers offering salvation instead of rides or teddy bears.

  I didn’t understand why they were even allowed on campus, but I guessed that university officials simply wanted to avoid an argument with the local religious right.

  I stood and watched the action. Most students crossing by today’s preacher on the Administration Building bridge bent away from him or darted past his outstretched hand, but some seemed pathetically eager to receive an
y kind of gift, and he blessed all of those. I could imagine their loneliness or confusion. Many students at SUM came from Michigan towns barely half the size of the university and felt hopelessly overwhelmed and disconnected (which was probably why the administration cut counseling services every year).

  Two EAR colleagues passed me, locked in conversation: boring Carter Savery and grim, miserable Iris Bell. I’d never seen them together before—what could they possibly have in common? Iris was perpetually complaining about being under-recognized in EAR, and Carter was as blandly self-satisfied as Jabba the Hutt. Neither of them paid me any attention in the department.

  I let them get a good distance ahead of me before I finally approached the bridge. I veered away from the young man and his box so that I wouldn’t get a bloody-looking Bible thrust at me. And so that I wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed by saying “No, thanks” or something equally inadequate to the occasion. When people ring my doorbell at home to share what they claim is the word of God, that’s different: I always tell them I’m offended by their invasion of my privacy. It satisfies me to leave them nonplussed. But here at the bridge—an open, public place—I felt constrained. And I was a faculty member—my nutty outbursts were supposed to be saved for departmental meetings.

  Safely across, I took a seat on the edge of one of the wide steps of the terrace that was just west of the bridge. I wasn’t teaching today, and it was dress-down Friday anyway, so I had jeans on and didn’t have to worry about getting dirty.

  The preachers gave me the creeps; they made me feel that we here at the university were nothing more than a bunch of campers huddled over a dwindling fire, trying to pretend the hungry wolves weren’t just beyond the edge of light.