City of Ghosts (A Miranda Corbie Mystery) (11 page)

DR. JOSEPH HENRY HARPER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Still not full professor. Nights too full of something else, liquid gold, magic elixir, making mediocre teachers into poets and cowards into men.

She knocked.

A voice. Still melodious, though not as mellifluous as when it was primed with Scotch.

“Come in.”

Miranda slid through the door and quickly shut it behind her. The thin, narrow-shouldered man with stretched and freckled skin sat behind an antique desk, mahogany polished from jackets with elbow patches and reams of student papers. He stared up at her, mouth slightly open, freckles fading into white, poised to scratch a comment on a page.

Greasy hair, parted on the left. Oiled, as always, to hide the flakes of dandruff. He blinked large brown eyes, as if sensory testimony were untrustworthy and indiscriminate, and carefully placed the fountain pen in a holder.

“What—what are you doing here? I told you years ago—”

“Ad infinitum et nauseam. Don’t worry, Pops. I won’t stay long.”

She threw herself in a chair, dark wood smelling of lemon oil. Opened her purse and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. Sat back and crossed her legs, holding his eyes, and rubbed the C-note between her thumb and forefinger.

“This should get you three days and a shot of B from Nielsen.”

His eyes darted back and forth between the bill and her face. “You dare come here—”

“I dared. I’m here. I called ahead and spoke to the department secretary to make sure I’d find you. I don’t have the time to hit every clip joint on Telegraph Avenue.”

They stared at each other a for a few minutes, her father’s breath uneven, light carpet of black and white stubbling his chin. Miranda’s hand started to tremble. She set the money on the desk, smoothing it out flat with her palm.

“What do you want?”

She nodded. “That’s more like it. ‘
If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly
.’”

“I see you remember your Shakespeare.”

“Surprisingly, yes. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Coleridge, Blake, Keats … I even majored in English. Not that I expect you to recall that sad little fact.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk and closed his eyes. “‘
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
…’”

“Christ, don’t you know anything but
Lear
? No wonder they haven’t made you full professor.”

He moved a stack of papers to his left, making sure the edges were neat and aligned. Sat back in the desk chair, eyes pink around the rims, thin lips pinched tight.

“You are the reason I haven’t received my promotion. You—and your life, such as it is—have cost me dearly. Such was my sacrifice, such was my shame, such was—”

She recited it singsong. “‘
O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
’”

Miranda shook her head. “Don’t talk to me about shame, old man. You’ll lose the battle. Not when you cross the Bay once or twice a year and hit me up to pay for your bar tab and a few days of dry living at Nielsen’s country clinic. Or maybe you really believe it. Maybe you need a real doctor, the kind that’ll give you a private room and a barred window. I’ve met a few. I’d be happy to introduce you.”

He opened his mouth, shut it again. Pulled a yellowed handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead. Veins mapped his nose, spit was starting to fleck his lips. Retreat, withdrawal, and the stench of fear.

Round one, thought Miranda.

She stroked the bill on the desk.

“I don’t give a damn if you use it to pay for a bender and an armful from Nielsen or buy a new
Oxford Classical Dictionary.
I just want information.”

He picked up the fountain pen. “What sort of information?”

“Answers. You used up your annual tithe back in February, so I figured a C-note would make us even. I always pay my way, remember?”

He sat up in the chair, eyes aimed at the wall of books, English, Greek, and Latin, lining the tiny office, warm smell of decaying leaves as thick as the dust on the shelves. Voice dripped with acid, last attempt to rally.

“What knowledge, pray, might I possess? Surely, I cannot have any information in common with the sordid habitués of your office, the pool room hustlers and the jaded faded women of no virtue, your sisters in sin. In fact, I fail to see the purpose of your presence here … unless it was to flaunt your filthy lucre and taunt me with my own greatest mistake. That you have achieved, certainly.”

Miranda slowly clapped her hands, not taking her eyes from his face.

“Bravo, Pops. John Barrymore by way of Henry Irving. Your eloquence is still impressive, especially for a lush. But we’re not playing Lear or Macbeth or Othello, so save it for your class, for the freshmen who don’t know the difference between a don and a drunkard. You want a hundred dollars or not?”

His eyes kept drifting to the C-note and finally rested there.

Round two.

His voice was thick, heavier, and his body seemed to shrink. “What do you want to know?”

Miranda placed both palms flat on the bill and searched his face.

“Why did my mother leave and where did she go?”

He twisted like a newborn rodent in a torn-paper nest, the starched, old-fashioned collars of his shirt beginning to wilt with perspiration.

“I told you a long time ago. She died.”

“You’re a fucking liar. She’s alive.”

He blinked at her. “I’ve answered your question. Your mother, such as she was, is dead.” He made a gesture with his hand. “‘
Dry up in her the organs of increase…’
”

She stood up and strode around the desk, standing over him until she was close enough to smell stale rye and the sickeningly sweet odor of unwashed skin.

“Listen, old man. I’ve taken all I’m ever taking from you. I’ve bought you your bottles and I’ve paid for Nielsen to keep blood in your fucking veins. I even buried Hatchett, my oh so devoted nurse. And guess what, Pops? I’m what stands between you and the goddamn gutter, another bum drowning in piss and shit and rye in front of a two-bit hooch house, mourned by no one, including the hallowed halls of hell you’ve made out of this place. Don’t lie to me. Catherine Corbie may be dead to you but she’s alive, goddamn it, and you’re going to tell me what you know.”

Panic filled his eyes, large and brown, flat with no depth. She unclenched her fists and took a few steps backward, unsteady, sinking into the wooden seat, breath hard and uneven. He lay propped in his chair, shrunken and old and so much smaller than she remembered. His eyes were unfocused, still aimed at the desk and the hundred-dollar bill.

She said it slowly. “I received a postcard from England. From a woman who says she’s my mother.”

He groped for a key in the small desk drawer and unlocked the drawer below. Lifted out a bottle of Mount Vernon straight rye whiskey, three-fifths gone. Took a long swig from the bottle, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and raised his face to hers.

“I did what I could. How do you think it felt, to be stained with illegitimacy? The Harpers are an old family, distinguished, and in a moment of fear I yielded to—to your mother—and you were the price I paid. She wouldn’t—so no choice—though, yes, I did have a choice, Daughter.”

He spat the word suddenly, spray flying across the desk. “I honored you, gave you a name you’ve since rejected, gave you a home. No orphanage, not even for the bastard girl, no, you were fed and clothed and sheltered, not left on an Attic slope like the Greeks would have done. I taught you, showed you the immortality of words, the light of poetry, the only God I’ve ever known, and still you turned, as worms always will, reverting to your natural state of indecency. Her indecency.”

He finished up the bottle in one long pull. Cradled it in his right hand, close to his chest.

“Your mother left me. Became an ‘actress,’ they said. Just another name for whore. She was dead to me then, dead and buried. Sins of the mother, sins of the daughter.” He shook his head. “‘
To keep thee from the evil woman
’ … would that I had heeded that proverb. But I was young.”

Miranda leaned forward, voice sharp. “Where did she go?”

He nodded in a rhythm, still cradling the bottle. “She took you with her. Then a note came. She had to leave the country, suddenly, quietly. Would I take you in? And you were a wee child, like the mouse Burns turned over in his plow, big dark brown eyes, more like mine than hers, and I thought—foolishly, of course—that I could mold you, save you. Make you into someone to be proud of. I tried, God knows I tried, teaching you poetry, even taking you to New York, but it did no good. You’re a crooked woman, Miranda. You are your mother’s daughter.”

She stared at him, controlling her breathing, while he rocked his chair back and forth, his face turned toward the small, dusty window.

“You never married her.” Statement, not question.

He raised an eyebrow. “There could never be a question of marriage. I wouldn’t sully the names of my ancestors by marrying an Irish whore. But I would have helped her. We could have grown a better life together.”

“‘
And I watered it in fears, night and morning with my tears.
’ I know what kind of life you grow, old man.”

“You owe me yours, inconsequential and debased as it is.”

Her voice was a rasp. “Any debt I’ve paid and repaid and I’ve got the scars to prove it. Tell me where she went and why she left!”

He straightened up in the chair and for the first time his lips turned upward in a ghost of a smile.

“I imagine she returned to Ireland. As for reasons why, they were vague, but I remember holding the distinct impression that she had killed a man.”

Ten

Miranda froze in position, weight thrust forward on her hands, tense and rigid on his desk.

Rick had been right. Her mother the killer, fleeing from justice, fleeing San Francisco.

Abandoning Miranda.

She fell back in the chair and fumbled with her purse. Took out a Chesterfield, lit it with a shaking hand.

Round three went to her father.

She inhaled deeply, pushed a stream of smoke out the side of her mouth. A small, prim smile, more a grimace, caught at the edges of his lips as he watched her.

“There are reasons to kill a man. Was it self-defense?”

He folded his arms against his chest and around the empty bottle of rye. Shrugged. “I have no idea. She was frightened of the law, as the ignorant often are. Not possessing an understanding or appreciation of legality or justice, I assume her people felt the animal urge to run and smuggled her out of the country.”

“Ever hear from her?”

“She had some sort of relations in San Francisco to whom she owed her escape, as I said, but I was never contacted by anyone, before or afterward.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

He raised both eyebrows. “I’ve always sought to protect you, Miranda. To better you. Knowing your mother was a murderess would have diminished any small chance you had at a decent life. As it was, I needn’t have been so particular.”

Protection. No fucking protection from his friends, the stoolies and the drinkers, the respectable teachers from the primary schools, bare legs too long for the thin dress, little girl too old to be bounced on a lap, men with funny shudders and wet spots on their trousers, fingers exploring places they didn’t belong …

She inhaled the Chesterfield, watching the ember burn. Counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, like she had when she was eight or nine, and he’d take off his belt after a long night at Clancey’s, Hatchett holding the strap in reserve.

She stood up suddenly and shoved the bill forward on the desk with two fingers. “Here. If you kept anything in writing from my mother—or anything at all—send it to me. Postage due or COD. Not that I expect you to have saved any records of your ‘greatest failure.’”

Miranda crossed to the door, hand on the doorknob, and hesitated. Turned around for a moment. He’d picked up the C-note and was holding it in one hand, face lost in alcoholic dreams.

“One more thing, ‘
poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man. Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
’ Remember that the next time you teach
Lear.
”

She shut the door behind her softly and lay against the wall in the hallway, breath shallow, eyes closed.

*   *   *

Classes were letting out, and Miranda sandwiched herself between a glass case with woodcut illustrations from
Leaves of Grass
and the door of another office. She propped herself up with the wall, fighting to keep her stomach from heaving.

O Captain! My Captain, our fearful trip is done …

The old man still knew how to defend his thesis. Hyperbole-cloak, metaphor-mask, armed with irony, teeth and fang, teeth and fang, step right up, ladies and gents, it’s the academic arena … thumbs up or thumbs down, the gladiator won’t fall on her sword …

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won …

But what he’d told her sounded like truth, a faded memory, sepia-toned, photograph edges ragged and worn. Her mother, Catherine Corbie, the woman whose name she borrowed for her own, a dim figure backlit with the aureole of childhood and the song of an Irish harp, dark eyes, dark hair, swallowed up by dark deeds … Catherine Corbie had killed a man.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking …

And left. Left Miranda.

Left Miranda to the ministrations of Professor Harper and his Hatchett woman, old before her time, old before time itself. Old woman wreathed in cruelty, wrinkled by indifference, her only life spark ignited by punishing the little girl who looked at her with eyes too old and too young …

I see the sleeping babe, nestling the breast of its mother …

Goddamn Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric but no Song of Myself.

Miranda took a deep breath, hands on knees, and pushed herself upright.

Pimply-faced kids rushed by in a hurry, clutching armfuls of books, while tall blond boys in letter sweaters flirted with girls in full skirts and smooth hair, voices low and modulated. Conversation about varsity and junior varsity, what Professor Englehart would assign for tonight, and whether Delta Sigma Phi was really going to hold a dance with Kappa Kappa Gamma.