Styx & Stone (36 page)

“What would you know about it?” I asked, my ears pricked by the mention of Gigi’s name. “Was there talk of Hildy Jaspers and Luigi Lucchesi?”

“Of course,” he said, voice calmer, pushing a hand through his oiled, silvery hair. “Academics are a gossipy lot, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

I had.

“And your father played the game too, in his own way. Look what he did to me. Writing letters to my colleagues, asking for investigations . . .”

“But he was right,” I pointed out.

Emmel had to concur, though he didn’t say so. “I could tell you of all their peccadilloes,” he said. “Ruggero Ercolano and his insatiable carnal appetites, Bernard Sanger with his pandering and groveling, Hildy Jaspers and Lucchesi with their pathological flirtation . . . And Victor Chalmers and his family are the worst of all.”

“How do you mean?”

He shook his head, angry and disgusted, with me and his experience at Columbia. “Victor Chalmers, a mature professional, making an ass of himself as he chased Miss Jaspers . . . He should have been chastised publicly for such indiscretion, and with a student!”

“What about the others?” I asked.

“His wife,” offered Emmel. “The staggering alcoholic, who protects her daughter’s virtue with the fury of a tiger. Sweet little Ruth, carrying on an affair with Ruggero Ercolano under everyone’s nose. The entire department knew; I heard it from that sycophant, Roger Purdy.”

“Even Joan Little?”

“No, she’s a silly, naive woman. She suspected nothing about Ruth. No one told her about it because they all knew she was in love with Ercolano. It’s like a bad comedy.”

“Did Chalmers know about Ercolano and his daughter?”

Emmel shrugged. “That, I can’t say for sure. But he did know about his son, William,
Guglielmino
, as his father calls him.”

“
Guglielmino
?” I asked.

“Guglielmino is Italian for
Billy
,” he said. “Surely you’ve heard of
Guglielmo Tell
, the opera by Rossini? You call it
William Tell
in English.”

“Of course,” I said. “The
Lone Ranger
Theme.”

Emmel frowned, as if I had wiped my nose on his sleeve. He disapproved of my humor or breeding or both. “Guglielmino, Billy the spoiled brat, caused the biggest scandal of all, the most odious of crimes against nature and God. His rotten soul would have no compunction to kill, especially the man sleeping with his sister.”

I remembered the threatening letter Billy had sent to Bernie Sanger. “What are you saying?” I asked, thinking I knew.

“Incestuous pervert, in love with his own sister!” and he spat into his handkerchief.

I was speechless.

“They tried to smother the scandal,” he continued. “The story was that Guglielmino disappeared from that military school in Valley Forge and turned up at Wellesley, where Ruth was a student. He made a horrible scene of some kind, and Ruth left school.”

“And they sent Billy to a boarding school in New England,” I murmured, recalling Joan Little’s words.

“New England?” scoffed Emmel. “They sent him to Haiti. To a Jesuit school in Port-au-Prince, of all God-forsaken places, just to keep him away from his own sister! Why don’t you ask him, Miss Stone, about Ruggero Ercolano and your father? Why don’t you ask Guglielmino?”

“Does anyone else call him Guglielmino?” I asked, breaking Emmel’s concentration.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve never heard him called Guglielmino before. I’ve known him casually for fifteen years, and I’ve never heard it. You said his father calls him that?”

“I don’t know,” said Emmel, defensive. “I am not close with Professor Chalmers and his wretched family. What does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” I said, wondering if it did. Then returning to his tirade against the iniquity of the department: “What possible reason could Billy Chalmers have to kill my father?”

“Perhaps it was unintentional,” said Emmel. “Perhaps he only wanted to steal your father’s manuscript to discredit Ercolano.”

“That doesn’t explain the desecration of my brother’s grave and the destruction of my father’s Jewish music.”

Emmel was perplexed. “Jewish music?”

“Gershwin, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Bruckner . . .”

Emmel chuckled. “You are a paranoiac, Miss Stone. You see conspiracy and anti-Semitism everywhere. Your theory is either an innocent fallacy or calculated sophistry; Anton Bruckner was not Jewish!”

“I know that,” I said, nodding my head. “But I was interested to know if you did.”

Emmel scowled at me. “I offer you this advice, Miss Stone,” he said, his tone salty with antipathy. “Stop playing games about Anton Bruckner and ask yourself who, besides me, had the opportunity to kill your father and Ruggero Ercolano? When you find a link between the two men, your murderer will present himself.” He paused. “Or herself.”

I tramped through the slush onto Lexington, over Thirty-Fourth Street, and down Fifth until I arrived at my father’s apartment building. I was soaked, my clothes wet to the skin, and I was cold. My meeting with Bruchner, né Gustav Emmel, had not worked out as I had hoped. Yes, he’d confessed to his phony identity—a Nazi, of all things—but I wasn’t after a deportation.

I thought about Gustav Emmel as Rodney shifted the elevator into motion. He had denied any involvement in the attempt on my father and the killing of Ercolano. Yet he had admitted to what might even qualify as war crimes. He had certainly told me enough to have him shipped off to Italy on an airliner to a whole lot of explaining. Yet he denied the crimes in the Italian Department.

The elevator lurched to a stop, and Rodney opened the door. “You get yourself dried off, Miss Eleonora,” he said. “You ought to carry an umbrella on days like this.”

“Everyone’s giving me advice today,” I answered, stepping into the hall. “Why do you suppose I keep on ignoring it?”

“You do all right, Miss Eleonora. Just keep on like you’re going. You’ll figure it out.”

I let myself into the apartment a little after three, doubting I would ever figure it out, showered, and changed into some dry clothes, a black turtleneck and stirrup pants. I heated some coffee then went to the study to review my notes. Franco Saettano and Gustav Emmel had parceled out some valuable advice to me that morning, as had my father, once I’d opened my ears to hear it. Now I needed to apply that collective wisdom in a systematic fashion. I pulled a pencil and a clean sheet of my father’s stationery from his desk drawer and drew a vertical line down the center of the page. Above the columns, I wrote Abraham Stone and Ruggero Ercolano, respectively. Then I listed all the players from the Italian Department down the left-hand margin, and began noting possible motives and opportunity. I lit a cigarette by rote to help me think.

I eliminated the two victims right off the bat. My father had no reason to hurt Ercolano, and, indeed, was comatose at Saint Vincent’s when Ercolano died. I believed the two attacks were linked, due to the attempt to frame Ercolano with my father’s manuscript. The implications were clear: the person who mailed the book wanted to discredit Ercolano, for whatever reason, and had obviously stolen it from my father’s study. The botched frame-up disqualified Ercolano from my short list of suspects.

Franco Saettano’s age and frail condition, not to mention his noble standing and comportment, eliminated him from consideration.

Having crossed out the most unlikely, I proceeded to those I felt had opportunity, if not motive. Joan Little loved Ruggero Ercolano enough to humiliate herself for his sake. She had access to his apartment—a key she used when she cleaned—and I doubted he would have been shy about bathing in her presence. But she had no known dislike for my father, no reason to kill him. There was my father’s key, however: the one he kept at the office, locked in Miss Little’s key box. Although the box was accessible to almost anyone in the department, she, better than anyone, knew that my father kept his house keys there.

I moved on to the petulant pair: Roger Purdy and Anthony Petronella. They were bitter enough to hate my father, Roger for his B, Petronella for what he perceived was the deliberate sabotage of his career. What I couldn’t see, however, was any strong antipathy for Ruggero Ercolano, or any possible scenario of how they might have gained access to the dead man’s apartment. Finally, their frank avowals of hatred for my father inclined me to believe in their innocence; wouldn’t they turn down the vitriol if they had tried to kill him?

Bernie Sanger was my father’s protégé, the star student of an internationally renowned scholar. It would be suicide, at such an immature point in his career, for Bernie to kill off his mentor. Perhaps later in life, an academic psychopath might feel it necessary to kill the “father” in order to assume his mantle and surpass him, but Bernie Sanger hadn’t even finished his dissertation. And he struck me as balanced and normal besides. As far as Ercolano was concerned, I wasn’t aware of any malevolence Bernie may have felt toward him, nor could I imagine how he would have gotten inside the bachelor’s lair while Ercolano was sudsing it up in the tub.

The Chalmers clan posed a quadruple threat. Victor, the patriarch and intrepid chairman of the Italian Department, had reason to begrudge Ruggero Ercolano, assuming he knew of the affair between the playboy and his daughter. He may well have resented my father’s standing for chairman, but Dad had withdrawn his candidacy. I couldn’t imagine an invertebrate like Victor Chalmers taking any decisive action, let alone assault with intent to kill, but he could have easily known about the key in Miss Little’s not-so-secret box.

His wife, Helen, seemed capable of almost anything when it came to protecting her family. She had railed against Bernie Sanger and his kind for wanting to soil Ruth and her kind. Might her maternal instincts have pushed her to toss an electric radio into Ercolano’s bath, just to settle the score? Possible, in theory. Her poorly disguised animosity toward my father may have been prompted by his aborted challenge to her husband’s leadership, but I still had no explanation of how she would have gained entry to either victim’s apartment.

Sweet little Ruthie, the precocious intellectual. She was polite, sophisticated, and well educated, a girl with a bright future and a dead lover. She had access to Ercolano’s apartment; indeed, she was there the night he died, and, if she was to be believed, she’d let herself in, as Ercolano was already dead in the water. Her motive could have been the same as Joan Little’s, and like her rival, she had no known enmity for my father. The fact that she’d alerted her own father to her lover’s death made me believe she hadn’t killed him.

Then there was Billy the Kid, Guglielmino (something about that name was itching the back of my brain), who’d stashed the most scandalous skeleton in the family’s closet. Smitten by his own sister, Billy was guilty of God-knows-what transgressions. His twisted passions had boiled over once before, prompting his exile to purgatory in Haiti. I thought him capable of wanting Ercolano dead, but I couldn’t say if he had the guts for murder. He barely knew my father, and even if Victor Chalmers grumbled at the dinner table about his colleagues, as my father did, I couldn’t imagine a motive emerging between forkfuls of potatoes, peas, and Salisbury steak.

Gustav Emmel was the only person with motive to kill both men: my father for his relentless investigation, and Ercolano for having learned the details of it. What he lacked, however, was the opportunity to get at the two men in their homes. I wasn’t ruling out some kind of burglary, surreptitious entry, or even a knock on the door, but for the moment I had nothing more than motive.

And Hildy Jaspers. She had visited Dad’s apartment before my arrival on the scene, apparently in the role of decorator. But I had also heard rumors that, in addition to her other trophies, she had carried on with the venerable Professor Stone. In her favor, however, was my incredulity of any such behavior on my father’s part. I could not say the same for Ruggero Ercolano. If the talk was to be believed, Ercolano would have humped a department store mannequin in a display window. A real-life splendor like Hildy would have pumped the hormones out through his ears.

Finally, there was Gigi Lucchesi. I had left his name for last for reasons of my own. I felt a tinge of shame at having been less than tenacious in pursuing the irregularities of his case. Why hadn’t I asked him about the rumors linking him to Hildy Jaspers? And what about the Barnard undergraduate incident? Did Gigi know of my father’s intentions to mar his record? And he had been in my father’s apartment on more than one occasion, even before I met him. I knew why I hadn’t pursued these questions: because I didn’t want to hear the wrong answers. When you’re aching with desire, you don’t want to lose that touch of warm flesh, the delicious draw of intimacy. You’ll do anything to squeeze one more moment of the delirium out of his pores. That’s what I wanted. One more night in his bed, or my bed, or my father’s bed, ignorant in my bliss or blissful in my ignorance. But the questions I was about to ask myself put the exquisite delight in jeopardy. I inhaled deeply on my cigarette, trying to feel the sting in my lungs. Nothing. I was too nervous to feel anything physical. I resumed the intellectual exercise.