The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence (4 page)

She opened the heavy brown wood door that let on to the busy road, remembering to look into the mounted mirror for oncoming traffic. There was a blind spot at the crossing. She pushed the door open to the main villa. A grand piano was tucked off to the side of the large room. Laurent’s office was off to the left. She could hear his voice trying to calm someone.

“Hello?” she called out, so as to alert the party that someone else was in the vicinity of their conversation.

“Havilah!” He jumped up, giving her a peck on each cheek. “It’s always great to see you whatever the circumstances. You know Améline Fitts? She and Kit were quite close.”

It was just like Laurent Pierce to go on and on in his breezy manner before he realized you hadn’t said a word— if he’d realized it at all. He was an efficient man, small with a thick build, broad back, and full head of bushy blond hair despite his fifty-odd years. He looked hale and hearty with his sun-kissed skin, and even under the lamentable circumstances, contentment radiated from his eyes and warm smile.

“Hello, Améline.”

“Havilah.” Améline greeted her with a nod, and she too began prattling on. “We had just spoken yesterday about my coming to Astor for a year as a visiting professor in the institute.”

“Really?” Havilah could barely disguise her surprise.

“He said he had not had the opportunity to email the faculty with the proposition. But he was sure he could rally them to his way of thinking. What a beastly group of faculty you have there, always battling for oneupmanship.”

Havilah nearly rolled her eyes. She had met Améline on two occasions, once at Astor when the novelist and professor of English gave the annual Robert Penn Warren lecture on liberalism and Warren’s
Who Speaks for the Negro?
, and the other, when Havilah offered an address at Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. She couldn’t say she knew Fitts well; she only knew the contours of her academic life and biography from rumor and gossip. But she had caught a three-hour CSPAN interview. She remembered thinking that the Princeton professor had an affected way of talking, like she had read too many Austen novels, like she was born and bred in Bath. Her use of the word “beastly” for some reason jogged that memory.

She thought then of Kit. Of just how close the two academics were and if Améline’s cupid’s bow pucker had something to do with Kit’s offer of a visiting position. Améline, like Kit, seemed entrepreneurial and self-fashioned almost from whole cloth. She was from Idaho, and after she had written her first novel to warm reviews, she promptly dropped her middle name, Rae, and got rid of Emily as well; “Emily Rae” became Améline. And she insisted everyone enunciate it in French.

As Havilah chose to interpret the gossip from the academic chattering classes, and to her credit, at least from Havilah’s perspective, Améline Fitts wasn’t the gatekeeper variety academic; she was merely a striver. She didn’t care to block anyone else’s coming up; she only wanted others to move swiftly out of the path she had been making. Fitts was an academic pugilist. Her faculty colleagues at Princeton regaled others at various yearly academic meetings with tales of Améline’s antics.

At a reception hosted by the Ethics and Global Democracy Forum at Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace, one notable professor of politics had carried on loudly within Havilah’s earshot. He claimed a good friend’s office in the creative writing program was directly across from Améline’s, and that on afternoons in the minutes before faculty meetings, you could hear the Dirty South ditty by rappers Mystical and Ludacris, “Move Bitch, Get out the way, Get out the way,” blaring. A dirty martini in his hand and rumpled suit on his person from the long international flight, he’d sneered that for the Tinkerbell-sized Fitts the tetchy meetings were like fight nights, and she believed she was “Iron Mike” Tyson, Evander “Real Deal” Holyfield, or better still, that proper Brit boxer, Lennox “The Lion” Lewis. For well-oiled Professor Rumpled Suit, Améline’s feistyness was a mark of her unrefined class breeding. Good book reviews and public intellectual bonafides be damned, it was clear to Havilah that he felt Améline Fitts belonged anywhere but in the halls of the peerless Princeton University.

Améline though was also right about the contentious temperament of the Warren Institute faculty. Havilah wanted to imagine that they were no more persnickety than other faculty. But to refer to Havilah’s colleagues as “beastly” was certainly not the way Améline should have gone about trying to endear herself to one of those “beastly” faculty members.
What had Kit been telling her?
Havilah began to feel somewhat protective of her faculty colleagues. She began to take an inventory of the institute’s nine-member faculty, including herself and Kit.

The bespectacled Manning Cate was a bird-faced Southern cultural historian who was beginning a book on the New South and the politics of white Southern liberals. As a full professor with tenure, he could never lose his job unless he committed some unspeakable crime. He was at the top of the professorial food chain where the ranks ran from beginning, untenured assistant professor to tenured associate professor after six to eight years to the final rank of full, tenured professor— which could take all of one’s career. Manning Cate had yet to receive the coveted endowed professorship, the pinnacle of academic achievement that conveyed excellence and standing to all in the know and was typically signaled on one’s business card, email signature block, and the university’s website. He had written a tepidly received but widely reviewed biography of Robert Penn Warren. Such was the scowl that seemed permanently affixed to Cate’s face that he looked as if the sourest lime was his breath mint of choice.

When he learned Kit had been named head of the Warren Institute, he was beyond nonplussed. He also resented the fact that Kit was often called upon more frequently by newspapers, scholarly societies and the like whenever anything having to do with Warren was up for feting. Kit was more T. S. Eliot with his many reinventions of the self than Robert Penn Warren. But he did grow up in Elkton, a county or so away from Warren’s hometown of Guthrie, Kentucky.

Cate, she knew, thought Kit was a snit. But then again Cate didn’t think much of anyone besides himself, Warren (whom he sought to imitate right down to his ill-fitting, worn-out-of-season, seersucker suits and deck shoes), and his wife Sela, who actually preferred Jim Beam— the bourbon— to Cate himself. At least that was what he’d said when Havilah caught him in a moment of weakness at a faculty party after he’d consumed too many Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonades.

Besides Havilah, Tayden Smith was the only other black faculty member of the institute. A sociologist by training, the Jamaican-descended Smith was an incurable braggart and an inveterate womanizer. Of students. Though in this latter peccadillo, he had the decency to draw some boundaries. He only preyed on consenting graduating seniors and graduate students. Havilah always wondered what the predictably younger women saw in Smith. His small hands did not inspire, to her mind, sexual confidence. Not to mention he was balding in a way that resembled a patchwork quilt.

But Smith had rattled the profession and the Bush White House five years earlier with a 600-page book on poverty and responsibility. In it he parsed crime rates, educational attainment, and joblessness between and among blacks— African-Americans, West Indians, and Africans— to the delight of conservatives.

Because of one particularly nasty encounter on the lecture circuit that had been televised live, he had recently begun to hedge his anti-African-American rhetoric. He was generally a canny judge of his audience. He had a pitch-perfect West Indian lilt that he often amplified to telegraph his non-African-Americanness. But at one conference, he took to the podium and deployed his inflected English at the very moment he launched into a discussion about increasing African-American joblessness and poverty as cultural versus structural. The conference, though, was on immigration and poverty, and the conservatives present were dyed-in-the-wool xenophobes. During the Q & A, they peppered Smith with derisive questions about black immigrants taking low-level jobs from native-born blacks. At the first break, Smith hightailed it out of the forum, huffing and puffing from seeming annoyance and overexertion— his breakneck flight from the room required traversing the lengthy auditorium and hallway to the pressroom. Vowing to the CSPAN interviewer live on camera, between gasps for air, that he would never again attend any of the organization’s events; his name never appeared on the organization’s invited guests roster, and he cancelled his lifetime membership.

Tristan Kadel, the only other female member of the institute, who was white, was a pioneer in the field of international human rights. Her non-confrontational style translated into her flip-flopping on just about every issue that she had initially consented to support. She was also supremely whiny and always managed to feel deeply aggrieved and aggressed whenever she was confronted about her shortcomings, which then usually resulted in her running to the nearest dean’s office for a good long session of “woe is me.” In thinking about Tristan and the possibility of an alliance, Havilah usually concluded the outlandish ponderance with the phrase, “I just can’t.”

No wonder Kit had come to depend on her
. Havilah screwed her face up. Cate and Smith rarely agreed on anything except to keep the number of women and minorities to exactly two of each. Cate, because he believed that diversity initiatives and affirmative action had lowered the quality of the faculty, and Smith, because he wanted to be the O.M.N.I.C., the Only Male Negro in Charge.

The other four members were assistant professors. And by institute decree, those professors had no formal voting rights in tenure and promotion decisions, or on any other institute business deemed confidential, or otherwise of importance, until they became full professors. They were reduced to oily sidling up to the most cantankerous of the full professors— Smith and Cate— who they assumed carried the biggest sticks in the Warren Institute. Jean-Louis Pineau, a mediocre scholar and wisp of a man whose field of research was anthropology with a focus on contemporary Africa, was one of those assistant professors. While his fellow assistant professor colleagues had worn out the knees of their trousers from an inordinate amount of obsequiousness and fawning over Cate and Smith, his lips seemed crazy-glued to their rear ends.

Havilah directed a strained smile in Améline’s direction, but she smirked inwardly. Despite her affectations and self-promotion, Havilah was very sure that the riotous Améline would have undeniably brought a certain cachet to the academic unit. She also had to give her cool points for style. Améline’s blond hair was styled in a fierce, layered, shoulder-length bob. She wore an exquisite, large blue sapphire ring; otherwise she was all in white save for her yellow sandals. Forget Moss Lipow eyewear. Améline had sunglasses with her own initials, AF, in blue-toned crystals to match the ring.

“Laurent, may I speak with you?” She didn’t want to be rude; but Havilah desperately needed to speak with him privately.

Améline’s lip turned up slightly. She was glaring up at Havilah with an unmistakable “Oh no you didn’t, heifer” look. Just beneath Améline’s finely crafted demeanor, the hood and the trailer park did a nimble two-step.

“Of course. And before I forget, your father called for you. And Charles and Lucian.” Laurent winked when he mentioned that last name.

Lucian was Havilah’s ex-paramour and the Dean of Astor’s Law School. She frowned. She had decided to come to France for a year to get away from Lucian, who wanted a wife but no children. Charles, as in Charles Chastain, was the Astor’s president.

“Where are you staying, Havilah? Perhaps we can have a drink? I’d really love to speak with you on a number of matters,” Améline pressed.

Havilah noted Améline’s change of course. Kit had barely been dead twenty-four hours and Améline was already dry-eyed and fast at work on that job offer. It was that alone that made Havilah strike her from her list of murderers.

“Perhaps some other time? I’m really not in the mood for shop talk.”

She couldn’t muster diplomacy now.
Not now. Not today. Not until I get a handle on this thing. Poor Kit.

IV

The novelist was visibly taken aback by Havilah’s directness regarding her ulterior job motives. She uprighted herself slowly in the chair, where she looked like a feline in repose, and rose to go. Améline’s Louboutins, impractical for hilly and cobblestoned Provence, clacked loudly on the villa’s terra cotta floors. Once Havilah heard the heavy wood door click to a close, she threw herself down in the chair Améline had vacated. She was exhausted.

“An irrepressible woman, isn’t she?” Laurent offered genuinely.

“I don’t know.” She cocked her head sideways. “She is what she is, right? Have the police had a run at her yet?”

“Briefly. They’ve interrogated us all. You’d think we had all colluded to do Kit in. I’m so sorry about Kit. It’s so horrible. And to think it happened here. It will be all over
The Chronicle of Higher Education
and
The New York Times
. He was so much the public intellectual.”

Havilah launched right in. “Laurent, why was Kit staying at the foundation instead of at a hotel? It’s usually not open to fellows during the summer months.” She placed both hands in her lap, casually studying the clear nail polish on her fingers. She wanted to appear at ease rather than prodding.

“You sound like those French coppers, Havilah! Kit and Améline were both fellows this year and among those scholars we invited back to participate in the Knowlton Centennial ceremony; we bent the rules and allowed them to stay on if they wished. You were welcomed to stay here as well, per the foundation’s invitation if you recall.” She figured he wanted to add “Miss Thing”, since she had gone all
Law and Order
on him, but instead he continued, “Of course in the Académie now and not across the street at the dreadful crime scene. The other members of the board and the one remaining invited speaker will be staying here as well. We can usually accommodate up to thirteen.”