New England White (20 page)

In the bathroom, an empty medicine cabinet. The police would have taken it all. The tiles were the same age as the house, grout missing and some of them sprung, but the surfaces gleamed. Nothing was hidden beneath. Maybe Zant just didn’t care about his surroundings, as long as they were clean.

But he flew first-class, stayed only at four-star hotels, and dressed like a Rothschild. Or a rock star.

Bruce shook his head, was about to leave the room, then returned to the dresser.

That bottom drawer drew him, the photos. No better way to get acquainted. But he would need to use his light. So he sat on the floor and slid the flashlight beneath the bed and turned it on, then sorted through the albums and pictures by the hidden beam. Family. A pre-teen Zant with an older couple, presumably the aunt and uncle who raised him. The son in California he never saw, photos at all ages. Kellen Zant receiving various awards, Kellen Zant delivering various lectures, Kellen Zant at various graduations, Kellen Zant shaking hands with various dignitaries. Something odd about all this.

Then he grasped it.

No photos of Kellen Zant with any woman his own age. Not his ex-wife, not a girlfriend at an amusement park or a cotillion or even one of those silly sets of three snaps from a machine in the drugstore that everyone above a certain age seems to own. Portraits of himself at all ages, but he was not merely the star of the show. He was the whole performance.

Bruce sat on the floor, trying to work out the reasoning. He imagined Art Lewin next to him, explaining that not preserving photos of past girlfriends was a rational means of maximizing the chances of pleasing present ones. After all, nobody wanted to wake up in a strange man’s bed and go through his things and discover mementos of ex-lovers everywhere.

Made sense.

The other possibility was that the economist’s ego was of sufficient size that it would never occur to him that there might be a grace to be found in the warm contemplation of past romances, even those that ended badly. Bruce’s pastor, Morris Young, liked to say that there was not a single person we would meet in our lives who was not both worthy of and in need of our lifelong prayers; and of whose lifelong prayers we ourselves were not both needy and worthy.

“So analyze that, Professor,” Bruce said, speaking aloud for the first time since entering the house.

He put out the light, returned the albums to their places, and stood by the window, this time looking out on the front and side of the house, because he thought he had seen another flicker. But his sharp eyes could pick out only the playful moon, teasing him with reflections from the shiny frozen snow.

(III)

B
ACK DOWNSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN
, preparing to depart, Bruce paused again. The scene was nagging at him. He took a last, quick, professional glance around the room, looking for something amiss. The polished crockery. The gleaming stainless steel. The nearly empty refrigerator. The gourmet gas range, rarely used, because Zant rarely cooked. Bruce looked again. That was it. The trays of wrinkled foil Zant had stuffed beneath the burners, to catch spills and keep the surfaces clean. The old-fashioned Southern touch, so incongruous in the modern kitchen. Even if the economist had been raised that way, why bother if you never used the burners? Why break up the clean, shiny, modern lines? Bruce stood over the range top. He lifted the burners and, one by one, the foil coverings beneath. On his third try he found it: a thick wad of paper. Why hide it under a burner, where it might accidentally be burned? Because nobody would think of looking there; and because you could burn it up yourself in two seconds if need be.

The papers were folded over twice, and Bruce, opening them gently, hunched on the kitchen floor, using the flashlight to examine his find.

First item. A carbon of a typed report by an insurance claims adjuster, an estimate of the cost of repairing a badly damaged car, dated early March 1973. The insurance company he recognized, and knew it was no longer in business. He did not know about the body shop, but its address was in Scottsville, a washed-out factory town some miles northwest of Elm Harbor, and nowhere near Tyler’s Landing. No indication of who owned the car. Only a policy number and claim number.

All right, a transfer of money from an insurance company would be the sort of evidence an economist would find useful. But what was it evidence
of
? Where on earth had Zant found it? Why was it hidden so carefully, as if nothing could be more precious?

Second item. A yellowing police report from Tyler’s Landing, addressed to the first selectman, date and signature both torn off. A summary of recent activity, perhaps as part of the budgeting process. Several sentences were underlined:

The numerous reports of Negroes driving through town in recent weeks may be well-founded. Officers stopped one Negro near the Town Green last month. His identification said he was an Air Force general, and he reported that he was just passing through. Another the same night turned out to be a congressional staffer. Possibly some of our more “liberal” townspeople have been entertaining them.

“And hello to you, too,” muttered Bruce, who could not for the life of him understand why black people moved to the suburbs.

Third item. A small page torn from what must have been a notebook or journal, the jagged writing overlarge and smeary, a man’s hand, picking up in the middle of one sentence, and ending in the middle of another:

…but according to Deputy Nacchio, none of her friends reported seeing her that night. Deputy Nacchio also reported that around nine that night she knocked on the door of one of her teachers, a Mrs. Spicer, and asked to use the telephone. That report was later…

Perfectly unenlightening. He supposed he would have to find out who exactly Deputy Nacchio was, or had been, for the paper was old and crumbling.

All right. He had to know more about what Kellen Zant was up to when he died. Talking to Art Lewin had not yielded enough.

Bruce refolded the police statement and the insurance report, slipping them along with the journal entry into his notebook. The foil he wrinkled afresh and replaced beneath the burners, hoping to leave no sign. Still he hesitated. Yes, he had found what everyone else had overlooked, but still the back of his mind tickled. He had the sense that his attention was gliding past the obvious. In his mind he worked backward through the house. A police report, a diary entry, and an insurance claim, hidden from prying eyes. A drawer-full of photos of Kellen Zant by himself. A spare bedroom yielding signs of recent female occupancy. A study crammed with books and the usual academic ego wall. Furniture far less grand than what the economist could afford. A confusing jumble, although Bruce already knew he did not much like the man who had created it.

“Time to go,” he said aloud, and had a hand on the knob of the kitchen door when he realized what else he had missed.

He returned to the study, to the display of photos on the wall. There. Kellen Zant in formal attire, at a reception of some sort, smiling as he received a plaque from Bill Clinton. Lemaster and Julia Carlyle stood in the front row, applauding.

Okay, so what?

Bruce skimmed along and found another. A newspaper shot of Kellen Zant jogging to raise money for AIDS awareness. And there, also running, separated by no more than two or three other participants, was Julia Carlyle.

And another: Kellen Zant, in casual dress, at a cocktail party, laughing at a joke being told by Johnnie Cochran. The several faces laughing beside his belonged to Spike Lee, Skip Gates, Charles Ogletree…and Julia Carlyle.

Yet another: Kellen Zant delivering a lecture at a church full of upturned, expectant black faces, on the occasion of some major civil-rights anniversary. And there, in the front row, beaming up at him, was Julia Carlyle.

When his survey was done, he counted seventeen photographs displayed in the study, and Julia had edged her way into fully eight of them. Here was the economist’s secret shrine, disguised from the clever eye of casual lovers, and professional searchers, too. No other woman seriously in evidence. Zant had selected for his wall no shots that included close-ups of women unless they could be cropped to give prominence to Julia.

And not only that.

Bruce was ready to bet that the Scandinavian furniture that Kellen Zant lacked the heart to junk dated from their days together. Perhaps he had left it in storage during his brief foray to Palo Alto, and briefer marriage, but, on returning east, he had uncrated it again. The economist turned out to be hiding a sentimental streak of frightening size. Bruce had no idea whether the feelings were reciprocated, but one thing was clear: Art Lewin was wrong.

Two decades after their breakup, Kellen Zant had been obsessed with his ex-lover Julia Carlyle.

CHAPTER 21

THE ANSWER

(I)

“H
OW HAVE YOU BEEN
, Julia?”

“Good. Good.”

Bruce Vallely nodded solemnly as he sat across the table from her in the smoky tavern on Route 48. Gray winter New England light drib-bled in through cheaply tinted windows. It was half past two. Only a handful of customers. Julia had warned him that she would have only a few minutes: she wanted to be home before the first school bus arrived at three. She was determined to squeeze their conversation into as small a temporal space as possible, and, had Bruce not been Grace’s husband—or widower now—and had Grace not been a Sister Lady, Julia likely would have refused to see him at all. Service as first lady of the university had a few perks after all.

“How’s Vanessa been holding up? I heard about what happened. I’m so sorry.”

“She’s doing better, thanks.”

“And the rest of the family?”

“Everybody’s fine,” said Julia, bewildered. So far, the “urgent” meeting, in this odd venue, had been idle chitchat. She could not tell whether he was circling toward a destination or whether they had somehow passed it. In the meanwhile, she could not seem to stop uttering banalities; nor, for that matter, could he. She glanced around, hoping not to see anyone who knew her, because the meeting felt strangely like an assignation. Julia remembered—and supposed Bruce must, too—the night the two of them first met, in the days before she set up housekeeping with Lemaster, when a younger and somehow rawer Bruce Vallely, along with another officer, answered a call to her little student apartment in an Elm Harbor walk-up after a burglary, and she flirted with him without troubling to check his left hand for the wedding band that he wore even now, a year after Grace’s passing. Bruce was offended and did not try to hide it, turning cool and businesslike and in a great hurry to depart. Years later, she learned to appreciate that reaction, although at the time it wounded and embarrassed her.

“And your husband? How has he settled in?”

Julia was surprised at her own nervous giggle, a holdover from her biracial childhood in Hanover, when giggling had been a form of self-protection, enamoring her to blacks and whites alike.

“Lemaster? He’s going strong as always.” She remembered that Bruce technically worked for her husband, and decided to remind them both. “He loves the job. Loves it. I guess he kind of hit the ground running.”

Bruce smiled. “He’s had a few controversies already. So I’d say he’s settled in nicely.”

“Yes, he has,” she said, mystified.

“He’s an exceptional man,” said Bruce, his solemn tone suggesting that she jot this down in case it was on the exam. “You’re fortunate to have each other.”

“Oh, well, thanks. And Grace…was wonderful, too.”

A thin smile. Julia had the sense that she had said the wrong thing but was not sure why. Mona and Granny Vee had not really trained her to the etiquette of talking about a dead friend, least of all to said friend’s husband.

“Yes, she was,” said Bruce, tonelessly.

“She was lucky to have you,” she heard herself saying, and blushed.

“I was blessed to have her.”

To this there was nothing to say, so Julia said nothing. At the next table somebody was telling a ribald story very loud, but Julia caught only snatches. Her uneasiness grew. They were conspicuous, she decided, leaning in close at a corner table, the only black couple—ah, people—in the room. Mona had raised her to value reputation above most things. She wished he would get to the point and release her.

Bruce, either unaware of her growing distress or unconcerned, nevertheless had his answer ready, as though this was the point he had waited the past ten minutes for her to make. “Grace was a wise woman, Julia. Well, you know that. She was nervous when I took this job. She appreciated the extra income, but another part of her wanted to head to South Carolina. Maybe I should have done what she wanted.” Bruce voiced this sentiment without rancor or self-contempt. He was a plain-spoken man, accustomed to a linear way of thinking, merely stating facts: around the campus, a rarity.

“She always supported you, Bruce. Whatever you chose to do.”

“I know that, but thank you. And she used to tell me, if I was going to do it, then do it well. I’ve tried to follow her advice.” He nodded and, leaning forward, folded his enormous hands on the table to show her that they were approaching the nub of the matter. “Julia, listen. Let me explain my position here. I am the director of campus safety. I am deputized, I have powers of arrest, just as my people do. But I lack the authority, except within certain very narrow limits, to investigate. The university police are a crime-preventing force but not a crime-solving force. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Julia, more mystified than ever. He seemed to be resuming an argument the beginning of which she had missed.

“Our charter makes that very clear. If we come across evidence that warrants serious criminal investigation, we turn it over to the city or state police.”

“Okay.”

“Now, within those limits, I would like, if I could, to ask you a couple of questions about Kellen Zant.”

Probably the sudden change in room light and temperature was her imagination, Julia told herself. The coincidence of the sun’s choosing just this moment to drift behind a cloud and the wind’s selecting the same instant to rattle the windows would be too great.

“What kind of questions?”

Bruce smiled to say she needn’t worry. “Nothing complicated. I’m just tidying up a few loose ends. But I realized I never met the man. Maybe you could help me out a little, tell me what he was like.”

“I thought the case was closed. It was a robbery. That’s what it says in the papers.”

“As I said, I’m really just tidying loose ends.”

“Can’t you just talk to the police? Get their reports?”

“Let’s just say the reports are inaccessible. Reports from the Landing, reports from the Elm Harbor police, reports from the state police. I have their conclusions, a couple of memos, three or four pages each. But that’s all I can get. No raw interviews. No investigators’ notes. Only the conclusions.”

The scientist in her followed the equation. “Usually you’d get more?”

“Usually.” Another beat. “They give me what they’re required to give me, but usually I can get more, either as a courtesy or through a back channel.”

“So what’s different about Kellen Zant?”

He puffed out a lot of air, evidently deciding whether to shed the final veil. The fire exit smacked open, somebody having leaned on the crash bar. Two heads peeked in, students from the high school looking for an after-school drink, immediately made Bruce for a cop and Julia for a teacher, former professions but close enough, and vanished again. “The truth is, I don’t know what’s different. I want to find out.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

Bruce sighed, stretched his long legs, looked around the room. The swinging stainless-steel door to the kitchen opened. He seemed to sense the act a split second before it occurred. A middle-aged woman of the paler nation, dressed in a pink uniform, emerged with napkins in a brown paper wrapper and began to refill the holders on the tables, preparing for the evening rush. She watched the two of them incuriously, then returned to her work. Evidently satisfied, Bruce shifted his gaze back to Julia.

“For some reason, Julia, they seem to have been ordered to keep away from me.”

“Seriously?”

He nodded, not at all put out. “I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s some sort of bureaucratic snafu. I don’t know. But, in the meantime, I have to do a lot of work to catch up. And, to start with, I’d like to know more about Kellen Zant and his work.”

“You should interview his friends.” Her voice sounded too brittle to her own ears, but the cat-and-mouse game he seemed to be playing suddenly disturbed her. Where was he taking this?

“He didn’t have a lot of friends, Julia. Colleagues, sure, and I’ve talked to them. But not friends. As a matter of fact, some people told me that you might be his best friend.”

Her world rocked, as she remembered running into Kellen that final time at the mall up in Norport, and their argument—

“I hardly knew him these last few years,” she said.

“Really.” A statement.

“Yes, really.”

“The night he got shot, he told someone that he was on his way to Jamaica. But nobody can find a hotel or airline or cruise ticket in his name.” She sensed that the sudden roughness of affect was a stratagem, intended to shock and so to get her talking. “I think it was a code. A message of some kind. Jamaica stood for something else.”

“I have no idea,” Julia said, a shade too quickly, and felt again that peculiarly sleepy sensation she used to get when Kellen would come on to her. Jamaica. Jamaica. She nibbled her lip. “No idea,” she repeated, trying for an innocent, Marian-the-Librarian quality.

“There’s some question about what he was working on when he died,” Bruce said after a moment. “You seem to be the only one he would have trusted with his secrets.”

“Me?”

“Everybody says so.”

“Well, everybody’s wrong.” She tried another diversion, even as it occurred to her that many a successful interrogation probably consists entirely of subjects’ trying to throw you off the scent. “A lawyer looked me up. Tice, Anthony Tice. He said he was working with Kellen. Maybe he’d know.”

Bruce stared. Julia stared back. Someone dropped a dish and somebody else laughed, but Julia never turned. Facing down Mona all these years had taught her a thing or two about avoiding the seduction of being first to break a silence.

At last Bruce dropped his eyes to his notebook, less a concession than a change of plans. Whatever avenue he had intended to pursue in the conversation, he was about to take a detour. Before he opened his mouth, however, Julia threw in another twist. Feeling deliciously mischievous, she added, “Oh, and there’s a woman named Mary Mallard, in Washington. She said she was a friend of his. You could talk to her.”

“The writer?”

“That’s what she says.” Julia hesitated, then pressed on. “Bruce? Do they know anything about Boris Gibbs?”

“Hit-and-run,” he said, still writing. “Why?”

“I just…I knew him. We worked together.” And he had something to tell me, just like Kellen did.

“I know that,” said Bruce, and then, without looking up, struck back. “The other thing, Julia, is that I would like to talk to Vanessa.”

Again Julia’s world rocked. First Chrebet, now his ex-partner. “Vanessa? Why? About what?”

“About Kellen Zant.”

Julia was already shaking her head. “Come on, Bruce. Vanessa doesn’t know anything about Kellen Zant. Why would you want to talk to her?” A shudder. “I won’t have her upset, Bruce. Not about this, not about anything. She sees her therapist two days a week.”

“I thought you said she’s okay.” Spoken swiftly, like a cross-examiner.

“She will be, if the rest of you will just leave her alone.”

He pondered. It struck Julia that he was genuinely concerned, but perhaps she was simply projecting. When he spoke, he chose his words cautiously, like a rock-climber who knows that one wrong selection means a long way down. “It isn’t my intention to upset her, Julia. But there are a few details I’d like to check. Remember, Kellen Zant was a member of the faculty, so his murder does come, technically, within my mandate to protect the campus.” She felt his urgency lashing at her but kept her face stone. “And, besides,” he said, “it’s important that I talk to Vanessa. There’s information I can’t get anywhere else.”

“What kind of information?”

“For one thing, why a copy of her eleventh-grade term paper was sitting on his printer.”

(II)

I
N HIS TIME,
Bruce Vallely had seen plenty of witnesses fighting not to squirm or shift their gazes, trying to project a confident innocence quite different from what they felt. He saw it in Julia Carlyle now, any number of small nuances by which the body indicated nervousness, even fear. From the moment he had spotted Vanessa’s name on the title page, he had suspected that he had struck pay dirt that the other searchers had missed, and now he was certain of it. He watched Julia now, cornered and uncertain. Bruce did not much care for her, or any of the growing number of well-to-do black parents who vanished with their offspring into lily-white suburbs at their first opportunity, but he thought he understood her: she was dragging her children toward her own childhood. She was a mother, she was protective, and her fear, he knew, would only make her all the fiercer in battle.

So he had to assuage it.

He said, “Nobody suspects Vanessa of anything. Nobody thinks she was involved in any way. I want to make that clear.” But her eyes said he had not made it clear enough. “This is my problem, Julia. I can’t do my job unless I can figure out what Kellen Zant was working on. Now, you tell me you don’t know. Let’s take that as true. His friends and colleagues don’t know. And yet there are people out there trying to find out, which suggests that whatever he was working on mattered to somebody.” Bruce had to restrain the urge to quote Rick:
He must have scared somebody important.
“Now I discover that he had a copy of your daughter’s term paper. And it wasn’t a photocopy from a library or somewhere. It was printed from his computer, Julia. I don’t see how that’s possible unless she e-mailed it to him or gave him a disk. That means she knew him. Not only knew him, but was in close enough touch with him to—”

Julia interrupted, so sweetly that Bruce knew the sugar was fake. “How do you happen to know what was on his printer?”

“I saw it.”

“Oh, really? Does your unofficial tidying up of loose ends include breaking into the private homes of the faculty?”

Bruce was too old a hand to take umbrage. “Maybe it was his office printer, Julia. I’m intrigued that you would think it was his house.”

She glared.

“Please understand, Julia. I’m not trying to hurt Vanessa or your family. But I have to know why she gave him her term paper.”

Without warning, Julia leaped to her feet. “I’m sorry, Bruce. It’s late. I have to get home for the kids.”