Burning Down the House Read online

  BURNING DOWN

  THE HOUSE

  A NICK HOFFMAN MYSTERY

  Lev Raphael

  Copyright © 2012 Lev Raphael as Trustee of the Lev Raphael Trust All rights reserved.

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

  Other Nick Hoffman Titles

  LET'S GET CRIMINAL

  THE EDITH WHARTON MURDERS

  THE DEATH OF A CONSTANT LOVER

  LITTLE MISS EVIL

  TROPIC OF MURDER

  HOT ROCKS

  Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to

  live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house we

  built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the

  disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its

  darker night despair, and wants to die in a

  catastrophe that will set back life to its beginning

  and leave nothing of our house save its blackened

  foundations.

  —REBECCA WEST ,

  BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

  1

  “YOU bought a gun?”

  My department at the State University of Michigan at

  Michiganapolis was not a place where they made mountains out of molehills—they made volcanoes, and you never knew when the next eruption was due.

  But despite that combustibility, I was shocked by Juno Dromgoole’s announcement when she had me over for dinner on a mild early December night. And so I asked her again, twice.

  “You bought a gun? You really bought a gun?”

  Juno nodded and set down her wineglass. “Of course I

  did. Teaching here is too dangerous. How else can I protect myself?”

  Having shared this news, Juno calmly took another sip of Kenwood zinfandel.

  While I may have been shocked, I wasn’t going to stop eating when the food was so good. I finished the last of an outrageous salad of watercress, Belgian endive, toasted walnuts, Gorgonzola, and roasted pears in port with a touch of balsamic vinegar. The vinaigrette was first-press olive oil, Dijon mustard, and red wine.

  “That was terrific,” I said, for the third or possibly fourth time. Juno shrugged as if it were merely Lean Cuisine.

  Finished, I couldn’t help but return to her surprising confession. “Juno, don’t you think getting a gun is—”

  “What?” she snapped. “Extreme? No, it isn’t. Not when they mow down professors left and right here.”

  Of course she was exaggerating, but even though the

  State University of Michigan at Michiganapolis wasn’t quite Bosnia or even the Alamo, Juno definitely had a point. The faculty at SUM had suffered heavier-than-usual attrition in the past few years through murder, and there really was no way of knowing who was going to become the next dead

  academic.

  How bad was it? Well, if SUM were the Dow Jones

  index, brokers would be talking about a “market correction.”

  “Why not take a self-defense class?”

  “I’ve done those, I train at the gym, I swim, I’m in

  perfect shape, and I’m a mean bitch, but I’m no match for a killer.”

  That silenced me, especially since I had been attacked here at SUM myself a few years before, and might have been killed. Flashing on the incident made me suddenly feel ashamed that I had taken no steps in response to being endangered, while Juno had. Was I jealous, I wondered, of Juno’s strength and determination?

  With the Kenwood done, we moved on to a Montbazillac

  as luscious as the curves of Juno’s thighs and breasts, which I was trying not to stare at while she cleared the table. I wasn’t entirely successful, but then I don’t think anyone— straight, gay, or Republican—could avoid staring at Juno. She was just too magnetic.

  Boisterous and sexy, fortyish Juno combined Tina

  Turner’s hair, legs, and attitude with Frank Sinatra’s temper and foul mouth. A powerful swimmer, she was muscular and ripe, with the kind of coolly brutal voluptuousness you find in some of the nudes Tamara de Lempicka painted in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Her body was molded that night by black leggings and a hip-length turtleneck cinched by a 1950s-style superwide leopard-print belt. In that phrase waiters like, her outfit was “finished with” Audrey Hepburn flats. She looked good enough to eat, and there would be plenty of leftovers. But would she leave me with heartburn? That was the question.

  I wondered if she really noticed my attention and perhaps liked posing for it, or did she simply, beautifully take it for granted that all men, even those who lived with other men, admired her or at least took a second look?

  “Stay where you are,” she insisted when I offered to

  help. “You’re my guest.” Juno reset the kitchen table and continued cleaning up, moving around the kitchen with exaggerated nonchalance—James Bond rather than James

  Beard—as if the meal were potentially dangerous. I suppose it was, calorically, though in all my travels to France with my partner Stefan, even in the Dordogne (home of foie gras), I’d never seen the kind of fat people you ran into all the time in Michiganapolis, especially if you shopped for food late at night. I guess in France, overweight citizens are under a Ministry of Tourism curfew so as not to alarm visitors.

  Like the rest of Juno’s small house, the kitchen was a perfect backdrop for her extravagance of manner and style.

  Juno’s home actually reminded me of Vivian Sherwood’s boudoir in The Big Sleep—a seductively chilly layering of ivory on white on chrome. The living room, in fact, was “self-striped”: glossy ivory stripes over the same tone in flat paint. When I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking of one of those puzzling, almost blank canvases at MoMA I’d assumed as a kid growing up in New York had to be a joke. Juno herself was an updated version of a Raymond Chandler bombshell, the kind of woman who could “make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”

  I suppose there must have been some lingering

  skepticism as well as surprise on my face, because when she sat back opposite me, she asked a bit truculently, “Shall I show you my Glock?”

  Despite my curiosity, I demurred. “Michigan’s my

  home,” I said, thinking briefly of our getaway cottage up north, “but I was born in New York, remember? I’m not really comfortable with handguns—or the idea of hunting for anything more than a parking space.” As I said it, I had the uneasy sensation of being a character in a Woody Allen film.

  “But Nick, really, you can’t imagine,” Juno said, with lambent eyes, “how powerful it would make you feel just to touch it.”

  Though I remembered John Lennon singing about

  happiness being a warm gun, I was pretty sure I didn’t want Juno handling even an unloaded firearm around me (it would be unloaded, wouldn’t it?). After all, pistol-whipping didn’t involve bullets, and Juno was the kind of woman who would be combustible even in a coma. I’d seen her enraged before, and it was like a sequence from Twister.

  Anyway, it wasn’t her gun I wanted to touch.

  The phone rang, and Juno checked her watch and

  cursed. “Same time every time,” she said, moving to the counter. She picked up the receiver, listened, and slammed the phone down.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Crank calls. Somebody muffled, a man, I think, saying, ‘Get out!’”

  “Get out of what?”

  Juno shrugged.

  “Can the police trace the calls?”

  “They have. It’s no help. Public phones—all in town.”

  “So that’s why you bought a gun,
” I said.

  “That—and everything else.”

  We sat there in silence for a while, I suppose both

  contemplating the bizarreness of being a professor and fearing for your life on a college campus.

  “Are you being stalked?”

  “Not exactly. Not yet.”

  “Wow.”

  Having been the recipient of crank phone calls and other harassment, I felt more than empathy. I dreaded what might be in store for Juno. Before I could ask who she thought might be angry at her, she said, “Excuse me,” and slipped from the room. I wondered if she were going to check on her gun—a natural enough response to a threat. Who could be hassling her on the phone? An ex-lover? A rival of some kind?

  Juno was so over-the-top, I could imagine her igniting cinematic-size passions like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida.

  I didn’t mind her being gone for a moment; I welcomed the interruption. Being this close to Juno for so long was as overwhelming as I had guessed it might be, but I hadn’t refused her invitation to dinner. I was torn: attracted to her, and puzzled.

  My trouble about Juno had begun a few months earlier

  when she and I wound up swimming together near campus at Michiganapolis’s premiere health club—daringly called The Club—and she had seemed to flirt with me in the pool when we stopped to stand and talk at the shallow end. Juno had looked incredibly sexy squeezed into a gold mesh one-piece with matching swim cap, her deep cleavage glowing with promise in the shattered light of the pool.

  Surveying her physical bounty, I had responded with my own surprising mutiny, feeling a hot burst of excited shame as if I were a teenager again, trembling and tumescent. Whether she had inflamed me deliberately or not by teasing, I was exhilarated and scared by being attracted to a woman for the first time in my life since I’d come out to my cousin Sharon at fifteen. It had never really happened before, and I was shocked by the intensity, the suddenness, and my sense of vulnerability and exposure there in the pool.

  Sharon, my ultimate confidante, had met Juno on a visit from New York earlier that fall, and when I told her what happened, she said she thought Juno would be a bit daunting for a first-timer. “Work your way up to Juno,” she had joked.

  But she’d also quizzed me seriously more than once. “Are you sure you want to have sex with her? It’s not just idle curiosity? Are you sure this isn’t happening because I’ve been sick?”

  I couldn’t at that point absolutely rule out Sharon’s upcoming surgery for an acoustic neuroma being at the root of my confusion, but I told her I didn’t think it was.

  “Well, sweetie,” she’d said after a pause, “you don’t have to do anything about Juno, really. Maybe you can even enjoy it a little. You know, accept that your sexuality is fluid right now?”

  “Fluid? It’s always been solid as a rock.” I had suddenly felt possessed by the Spirit of Bad Puns. And “fluid sexuality”

  was as dismal a prospect as overturning the cliché of straight men suddenly realizing they were gay in midlife. I did not want to be a trendsetter. I was a bibliographer, for God’s sake. My job was to be humble and helpful, not create scandal.

  But whatever I felt for Juno and whatever it meant, there was the whole question of whether Juno was really flirting with me, or just playing some strange private game. Because what had passed between us was more than idle dishing—at least I thought so. Unless I was totally off base.

  “Yes,” Juno said, striding back into the kitchen, “I have a gun, and I know how to use it. I didn’t come all the way from Winnipeg to become a fucking American crime statistic. You should see me at the firing range. I’m a natural. Nobody’s taking me out!” Juno rattled on about her shooting skills.

  I tried to shake the image of her in the pool and stay with the conversation. It wasn’t easy. I had not exactly been alone with her before—the pool didn’t count—and up close, she was even more remarkable, her heart-shaped face incredibly alluring.

  “Maybe you’re on the right track,” I said. “But it’s

  probably not enough for professors to start carrying weapons.

  What we really need at SUM is a squadron of armed guards.

  To protect the faculty.”

  “Bad idea. It would never work, because anybody could turn them,” she said, as if Cold War spies were being discussed. She joined me at the table and took up her wineglass.

  “Well, you know how Michigan’s full of militia and

  conspiracy theory types? People are saying the murders over the last few years are part of some insane plan.”

  Juno frowned. “A plan?”

  “Yes—the administration’s trying to speed up what’s

  happening at universities across the country: replacing tenured faculty with lower-paid temporaries. You know, kill some professors, terrorize the rest into early retirement.”

  “That is insane. The idea that it’s real, I mean.”

  I nodded. “But at least nobody’s saying the dead faculty are being kept alive in crypts under the Administration Building —with Amelia Earhart and Bobby Kennedy. Personally, I don’t think SUM’s upper administrators are organized and efficient enough to mount a terror campaign against the faculty. Even sub rosa. And what’s the point? They don’t need to kill anyone off. They’re fully capable of tormenting and alienating us without any stratagems. It’s second nature.

  The lunacy here is atmospheric and institutional, not agenda-driven.”

  “True enough.”

  “But even if we don’t believe it, Juno, lots of people do.

  They’re insisting there has to be some kind of design to the killings. Even my mailman is obsessed. He’s turned into one of those crusty peasants in horror movies, you know, the kind who limps along and makes all these dark observations just before the monster bursts loose.”

  She grinned, intrigued. “What does he say?”

  “Oh, his favorite dire warning is, ‘There’s bad blood over there.’”

  Juno laughed. “I think septicemia would be the clinical term.”

  She was right.

  “I don’t know why people mock academia and say it’s

  an ivory tower, that it’s not like the real world. It’s as real as any other closed environment, isn’t it? Boiling over with jealousy, spite, cruelty, coldness, and hypocrisy. Passions here can become as crazed as any Mediterranean vendetta.

  And that’s over minor issues—so it’s no wonder that major contention can lead to murder.”

  “Given all that,” she said, “I don’t see why you haven’t bought yourself a gun and learned how to shoot it. With your track record, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of cause to use one.” She rose and started laying out the ingredients for our main course: foie gras seared in butter.

  I had unfortunately been involved in each of the recent murders, all of which had some connection to our Department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric (EAR). This made me popular with thrill-seeking students who expected my composition classes to turn into crime scenes, and unpopular with administrators, who blamed me for the university’s bad PR. If there’s anything a university hates more than a losing season or its football players getting involved in a gambling or date rape scandal, it’s murder.

  While nobody was calling me the Perilous Professor or saying I had a doctorate in death, I suspected that wasn’t far off, along with a cheesy Lifetime channel movie version of my story— SUM: State University of Murder—and a position on the advisory board of the Jack Kevorkian Institute.

  “Honestly, Nick, I really am surprised that you of all people don’t have a gun,” Juno observed, turning from the sink, French-manicured hands on her hips as if she were about to berate me. “After all the trouble you’ve gotten into over the last few years.”

  “A gun wouldn’t have helped me stay out of trouble.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, maybe.” I sighed. “But a gun sure won’t get me tenure.” Perhaps nothing
could now, despite my good student evaluations and two forthcoming books that I had edited. Not only was I underpublished and disliked by many of my

  colleagues and by the administration, but my tenure committee was in need of major reconstitution, thanks to a campus murder just at the beginning of the semester. If I wasn’t exactly doomed or even suffering under an intermediate-level curse, too much had gone wrong over the past few years for it all to work out in my favor. I sometimes felt so cynical about the academic environment that I wondered if I would want tenure after I got it, anyway. Wasn’t that the dilemma in Remembrance of Things Past? When Marcel finally gets to kiss Albertine, it’s a letdown.

  Juno was one of the few women I knew who could

  moue without looking childish, and she did a great job of it just then in response to my gloom. “Nick, your chances of tenure can only be enhanced if they know you’re armed and dangerous. And think how good it would make you feel—how satisfied and complete!”

  I’d heard lots of self-help advice in my time—but this had to be the most original: Get thee to a rifle range!

  “Are you going to tell everyone at EAR you have a

  Glock?”

  She frowned. “Why not? It’s legal, and what’s the point if people don’t know? How would that be a deterrent? How would that make me safer?”

  Did guns make people safer?

  “Nick, really, think about getting a gun. It’ll change your life.”

  That wasn’t the best argument for anything at the

  moment. I wasn’t looking for change. I wanted stability. Fat chance. Here I was, lusting after a woman who might be interested in lusting back, after I’d been living with a man I loved for fifteen years. It did not make sense.

  What was going on with me? Was it Juno being so unlike the rest of the geeks, freaks, and ghouls who were my colleagues? Though Juno was a professor of Canadian

  literature, there wasn’t much that was professorial about her, aside from her dedication to teaching. Moving in a perpetual nimbus of chic perfume, she was devoted to leopard-print clothes and accessories (before they became popular), and completely unafraid of expressing her opinion. All of that was profoundly anomalous in our generally craven EAR