Assault with a Deadly Lie Read online

  I must have slept, because Marco was nosing my cheek the way he does when I haven’t gotten up early enough for him. He’d been woken up by the rising sun and the birdsong outside.

  I stumbled to the back door to let him out into the fenced yard and pee, standing further back than I usually did, as if to keep anyone from seeing me. There was still coffee left, and after putting out Marco’s kibble, I contentedly watched him munch away. He wasn’t a gobbler like some dogs, and seemed almost catlike in the way he took his meals. Despite everything that had happened, I felt myself grinning with enjoyment watching him. And then I remembered Vanessa telling me the local cops shot dogs during raids. Yesterday’s horrors rushed back in like some kind of alien horde in a sci-fi movie.

  That was it. I couldn’t even try to rest a bit more.

  I heard Stefan padding downstairs and heading into the kitchen. Marco trotted up to him, but when he was ignored, he settled down on his dog bed and lay there licking his chops, looking contented. If only I had his gift for letting go so easily!

  Stefan was wearing the blue velvet vintage smoking jacket and silk pajamas I’d gotten him partly as a joke when his book hit the New York Times best-seller list. They matched his eyes, but today made him look like an exiled monarch who’d seen his palace go up in flames. He didn’t answer my “Good morning,” just moved around the kitchen listlessly, picking up a Vanity Fair, moving a fruit bowl, fiddling with things as if trying to remember what their purpose was or what one even did in this room. It was a crazy comparison, but I thought of Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, high on morphine, lost to the world and lost in herself. Stefan and I had seen it twice at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, with an amazing actress playing Mary. Each time, we had sat long after the theater emptied out, too stunned to move. Mary’s last line in that play was “And I was happy—for a time.” Was that our fate? Had we been happy for a time, and now the darkness would always surround us?

  “Are you cold?” I asked him fatuously.

  Stefan nodded, but he didn’t look at me.

  “Why don’t you sit down, I’ll make breakfast.”

  “Not hungry,” he murmured. Well, I wasn’t either. But I seemed doomed to say stupid things.

  “Coffee?”

  He shrugged an okay, and I brought him coffee, but he still wouldn’t sit down.

  I waited for him to say something, but when he was silent for an unbearable ten minutes, I had to speak: “Will you tell me what happened last night?”

  Now he sat at the glass-topped table, put his mug down carefully, and just began without even clearing his throat. “They called me faggot and I don’t know what else. After I was out on the lawn, with somebody’s boot on my ass, they dragged me into that truck or tank or whatever it was.”

  “It’s an armored personnel carrier.”

  “Whatever. It felt like a tank. One of them was in front of me and one of them was behind me. Inside, there were bench seats facing each other. It was like being in Iraq or something like that, and I was the roadside bomber they had caught and were going to execute. I kept waiting for them to pull over and dump me in a ditch.” He gulped and went on. “I was handcuffed to one of the benches and I heard the cops—they were cops, right?—I heard one of them talking to somebody, and when I looked up, I could see him entering information on—on some kind of dashboard computer. Maybe it was a tablet. I’m not sure.”

  He breathed in deeply, face creased in pain.

  “My picture was up there, my driver’s license maybe? It was really cold in there. We kept driving and then pulled up somewhere, a metal door opened, very loud, and when they took me out, it was some kind of garage, I think. The same guys took me into a tiny room and sat me down. It was sterile, the fluorescent lights were blinking a little and I could see that even with my eyes shut. They left me there for hours, I think.” He swallowed hard a few times. “I felt like I’d never get out.”

  I was tempted to stop him, because the recital was filling me with despair and terror. I imagined myself there with him and it was horrible. Vanessa’s injunction came back: “Let him talk.”

  Stefan went on without any prompting. “I didn’t know if you were okay or not. What if you were dead, or injured? And I thought Marco might have run away with the front door open.”

  I winced—how come he had worried about our puppy and I hadn’t?

  “I didn’t know what was going on, Nick, why I was there, and what they wanted, they never said. All I kept thinking was that I wished I had a gun.”

  “What?”

  For the first time that morning, his eyes met mine and he looked crazed, possessed, like a warrior leading troops into a hopeless battle.

  “You wanted a gun?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I would have shot every motherfucker in sight.”

  Stefan’s an introvert, gets angry only rarely, and when he does, it can be explosive. But I’d never heard him like this. He was almost growling. In that moment, I realized not having bought a gun a few years ago might have been one of the wisest decisions of my life.

  “Did they hurt you?” I managed to ask.

  He grimaced. “You mean did they put electrodes on my balls or waterboard me? No. But I was strip-searched.”

  “You were—?”

  He nodded and looked away. “All I had on was pajama pants. But they took them off anyway and they made me bend over, and they lifted my—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “They lifted my balls and looked underneath. I won’t tell you what they said. I’ll never tell anyone what they said. But if I could kill them right now, I would, and I’d die happy. Every single one of them, a bullet to the brain.”

  I wanted to say something to talk him down from the ledge he was on, but I knew Vanessa was right in urging me to just shut up and listen.

  “They strip-searched me,” he said again, coldly, as if observing the scene from a tremendous distance. And then he shrugged, helplessly. I felt his silence now was an invitation.

  Picturing what had happened to Stefan, I felt bombarded by every scene of police brutality I’d ever watched on TV or in the movies. “How many of them?” I asked.

  He squinted. “At least two. They kept poking me with a gun or a baton or something and—” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. In Michiganapolis.”

  Stefan’s parents were Holocaust survivors who’d hidden their Jewishness and pretended to be Catholic when he was growing up, then revealed that he was actually Jewish when he was a teenager. I wasn’t really sure how much they’d told him about their war years when the secret was finally out, but I was certain the unspoken trauma they’d passed on to him in all the years before that had just been re-triggered by the SWAT team. I despise the American habit of comparing everyone you don’t like to Nazis, but it was impossible to escape thinking like that this morning.

  The doorbell rang and Stefan jerked back in his chair as if he’d been punched in the chest. I froze, but Marco woke up and trotted off to see who was there and I had to follow. “It can’t be them, it can’t be them,” I kept repeating softly as I made my way into the foyer, ready to grab Marco if there was trouble.

  I didn’t have to.

  Vanessa bounded in, looking even more glamorous than yesterday, this time in an orange and black checkered pants suit and ropes of amber beads around her neck. “I brought you donuts,” she said. “Tim Horton’s. Even if you’re not hungry, these are no ordinary donuts.”

  I followed her into the kitchen where she greeted Stefan as casually as if she’d been invited. She set her iPhone down on the island and quickly found a plate for the donuts, set them out on the table. Stefan actually took one. I guess nobody ever said no to Vanessa. Marco certainly liked her. Or the donuts. He sat there glancing from one to the other.

  “You look amazing,” I heard myself saying. It was inappropriate, but I was punch drunk, I suppose. “Do you ever sleep?”

  “Me? Never. Kidding! Of course I sleep. Wh
en I need to. I also swim, stay hydrated, and my sister is a model, so I know makeup secrets of the gods.”

  She whirled around to Stefan. “You guys have to stick together now. What happened last night can drive any couple apart.” She cocked her head. “Tragedy does that to people. I’ve seen it too often, especially when the cops are involved.”

  “I want to sue those bastards,” I said.

  She smiled. “For what? Protecting the Homeland? Are you unpatriotic or something?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My guess is that they would end up claiming the whole thing was connected to national security. That’s the best way out of a tight corner—it trumps everything and they can say or do whatever they want to. Don’t you know what kind of country we live in now? Stefan could have wound up in some secret base abroad if somebody had pushed the right buttons.”

  “You mean there’s nothing we can do about it?”

  “Nope. He wasn’t hurt, and the damage to your property is minimal, I assume?”

  “There wasn’t any.”

  “That’s it, then. I’ve seen houses that were torn apart, every damned dish and vase and glass and picture frame and ashtray broken, paper files shredded, beds and chairs and couches ripped open. I told you before, you’re lucky.” Then she added, “And Stefan was released quickly. If the DEA had been involved, they could have held him for days without food or water. Not on purpose. By accident. They sometimes forget they have suspects.”

  I didn’t even want to imagine that. “But isn’t there some way to find out how this mess started?”

  “I told you, I have contacts on the force. I’m asking some questions, maybe I’ll come up with something, but don’t hold your breath, guys.”

  Stefan was silent through all of our conversation. He’d broken a donut into pieces on the table and was eating them one at a time, carefully.

  “You’re a sleuth, aren’t you?” Vanessa asked, folding her arms and looking a little stern.

  “No, I’m a professor. I’m a bibliographer.”

  “Bullshit. I know who you are. I know you’ve solved some murders in the past. Get out your gear and start sleuthing.”

  “And when we find who did it?” Stefan said. “I will kill him.”

  Vanessa turned, planted both hands on the table and leaned into his face. “No way, José.” Casual phrase, tough attitude: She could have been Maggie Thatcher declaring war on Argentina. “You will want to kill whoever set you up. I don’t blame you. I’d feel the same way. But you are not going to do it. I’ve defended guilty clients and defended innocent ones and I much prefer the ones who don’t keep me up at night, worrying about what kind of person I am.”

  4

  Stefan had actually begun to munch on a second donut when Vanessa said, “I need to warn you about something.”

  I started laughing. She and Stefan both gawked at me as if they were afraid I was succumbing to hysteria.

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “That just made me think of that movie—you know which one!—where Isabella Rossellini gives people a potion for eternal youth and then right after they drink it, she says, ‘And now, a warning.’”

  They both looked blank, but I kept going, even though I couldn’t remember the movie’s name. “And I think Meryl Streep or someone like that shouts ‘Now a warning?’”

  No recognition whatsoever from either of them, so I backtracked and prompted Vanessa: “Okay, what do you want to warn us about?”

  She sat down at the table, which I took to be a bad sign. Crossing her long legs, she said, “Well, you were lucky that the raid took place at night, because it apparently didn’t get into the paper—I checked—but it could show up tomorrow. And there’s a good chance it’ll be on local TV news tonight. So you could be facing a media shit storm. Whatever you do, do not talk to any reporters. Check your caller ID, and just smile and keep going if you’re out at the mall or wherever and someone tries to ask you questions. Don’t even say ‘No comment.’ That sounds guilty.”

  “But we’re not guilty,” Stefan muttered. “We haven’t done anything. We’re victims.”

  Vanessa sighed. “It’s a juicy story. I could write it myself.”

  Me too. So many sensationalistic angles. Start with us being a gay couple—for some people that was story enough. Or faculty members suspected of nefarious activities. Then there was “Prominent Writer—Does He Have a Secret Life?” Or “College Town Scene of Raid.” And “Terrorists in the Midwest?” On and on and on.

  Stefan surprisingly kept munching on his donut, but I couldn’t imagine eating anything right then. Marco edged closer to the table, gazing up at Stefan’s hand as intently as if he were willing a piece of the donut to fall to the floor. He wagged his tail a few times hopefully, even though we did not feed him table scraps.

  “Will it blow over?” I asked Vanesa.

  “Possibly,” she said.

  The landline rang over by the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and we all stared at it. Even Marco. I got up and grabbed it because I was closest, and brought the receiver reluctantly to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Dean Bullerschmidt. I want to see both of you in my office in one hour.” He hung up. Typical. He hadn’t even asked—or cared—which one of us had answered. The dean was what my mother would have called “an ugly customer.” Pig-eyed and pig-headed, as fat as New Jersey’s Chris Christie, he had barely half that governor’s charm. He was power-mad, had never risen to provost or president, and exacted revenge for this failure on the faculty who crossed him in any way, real or imaginary. He’d been known to drive even male professors from his office in tears.

  “Bullerschmidt wants to see us,” I told Stefan.

  “Fuck.”

  Vanessa raised an eyebrow and I explained who he was, and why we dreaded even random encounters with him. She frowned and then seemed to work it out: “Sounds like someone on the inside—a cop, I mean—contacted this dean of yours to make trouble for you, or how else would he know so soon? Boys, you must really have pissed somebody off, big-time.”

  Her iPhone chirped, she jumped up to check the number, let the call go to voicemail, thumbed a quick text and said, “Gotta go. This could be a lead.”

  I followed her to the door and thanked her again for last night, for rescuing us.

  “I did what I always do,” she said nonchalantly. “First rule, defuse the situation and let them know they can’t steamroll you. I mean all of us. The cops, the prosecutors, and lots of judges hate defense attorneys more than they hate criminals and suspects. They think what we do is immoral—they think we’re worse than the bad guys. I stood up for you, but I also stood up for the criminal justice system, which they keep trying to smash.”

  When I let her out, I was wary about returning to the kitchen. What was I supposed to say? How were Stefan and I supposed to conduct our everyday lives from now on? I’d never been through anything this traumatic, but Marco came trotting up to me, and I realized he would be part of the solution. Whatever had happened, he still needed to be fed, walked, let out into the yard, groomed, cared for, loved. There was no reason for him to suffer in any way because we had. Maybe the quotidian would be the light at the end of this miserable tunnel.

  I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen, and sat by Stefan. Marco poked his snout in the direction of the donuts, snuffling in every stray molecule he could.

  “We should get dressed,” Stefan observed. He looked funereal.

  We cleaned up, showered and put on academic drag: blazers and ties. We gave Marco his command: “Time to guard the house,” and he trooped off into the living room to curl up in his dog bed near the fireplace.

  “I’ll drive,” I said. Getting into my Lexus, I didn’t just feel like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office, but like a felon. And if I could have somehow driven out of our garage invisibly, I would have. As we pulled down the driveway and onto our quiet suburban-looking street, a sense of
exposure and shame constricted my breathing so sharply that Stefan reached over, grabbed my arm and said, “It’ll be okay. What can he do to us?” I think he meant compared to what had already happened.

  I drove off, saying, “He can make us feel like mice he’s going to feed to his snake, that’s what he can do.” Bullerschmidt excelled at intimidation; in that, he was a perfect administrator at a university top-heavy with these arbiters of policy who earned lavish six-figure salaries. The university was supposed to be a seat of learning and a place for collegiality, but it had become something very different during Michigan’s hard times. It was now more like an empire, ruled by despots who doled out favors here or there, and were more interested in prestige and fund-raising than education. As for faculty, we were meant to keep quiet no matter what outrage we saw committed.

  SUM’s six-thousand-acre campus is amazingly green and gorgeous in spring and summer, but none of that touched me as we drove to the faculty parking lot closest to the dean’s office. He was housed in one of the oldest buildings: appropriately enough, a granite and sandstone Gothic Revival mini-castle bristling with turrets. But thanks to the current campus craze for remodeling, his office suite on the top floor was weirdly contemporary. It looked more like a high-tech kitchen than anything else: everything was white marble or brushed stainless steel. There was a plaque indicating which alumni had financed the extreme makeover, but I didn’t bother reading it on the way in. This was all part of an effort across campus to have offices and buildings subsidized by donations, since state funding had collapsed as part of the overall budget. Anything could be branded now by anyone, as long as their check cleared.

  Things were so bad that if the administration could have sold SUM to China, the sale would have gone through. They could even have kept the same initials, SUM, and just made it Sino University of Michigan.

  Bullerschmidt’s secretary, Mrs. Inkpen, generally neutral in clothes and attitude, didn’t even look up at us from her brushed steel desk, as if we were tainted. Her attitude was as frigid as the air conditioning kept the office.