The Raven and the Nightingale Page 17

  As a tall female trooper with a blond crewcut led the still speechless Jane to the patrol car idling by the front steps, the appalled silence that had fallen on my colleagues turned instantly to a babble of horrified speculation. Schultz took advantage of the distraction to address me sotto voce. “Professor Pelletier, the lieutenant is going to want to talk to you sometime this afternoon, when we’re finished questioning Ms. Birdwort. Where will he find you?”

  “Tell him to call me at home.” As upset as I was about Jane’s apprehension, I was also profoundly puzzled. This whole scenario didn’t sit right with me. I needed to think about it away from the buzz and hum of the Enfield College scandal machine.

  The sun was shining in a bright blue sky, but it was exceedingly cold. Walking down the Dickinson Hall steps, I tied the soft chenille scarf Amanda had given me last Christmas. As I flipped the ends of the long scarf over my shoulder, I caught a furtive movement out of the corner of my eye. Whirling, I saw nothing but movement: the campus was alive with movement. A group of lanky basketball players passed me, analyzing with fluid gestures the specifics of Enfield’s most recent loss. I caught the words, afraid to take the pressure shot. Two young women in jeans and pastel ski jackets paused and eyed the players. One whispered in the other’s ear, and both snickered, pivoted, and followed the players. A college grounds-keeper in a dark blue work jacket chopped rhythmically at the frozen snow edging the walkway with his shovel. My colleague Ned Hilton muttered to himself as he crunched past me, bent under a bulging backpack. It sounded to me as if he were saying: emerging pattern of heterosexist erotic predation.

  What furtive movement? I pondered. There are students all over the place. No one’s trying to hide anything. But, nonetheless, I felt uneasy—as if someone had been waiting specifically for me to emerge from the heavy double doors. I thought of Jane Birdwort lurking in the darkness, waiting for Elliot Corbin to exit through these very same doors. In spite of the sun and the brilliant blue sky, a shadow seemed to overhang the glittering campus.

  When I opened the door to Lieutenant Piotrowski at three-fifteen that afternoon, Emmylou was singing about looking for the water from a deeper well, and my home was redolent of cinnamon and cloves. I was baking molasses cookies. The anxiety kindling in my overburdened mind demanded the kind of psychopharmaceutical relief that could be obtained only in the kitchen, and I’d stopped at the supermarket on the way home to stock up on illegal substances: butter, sugar, molasses, eggs. The orderly steps of cookie baking had freed my mind to meander. Then—suddenly—I was struck by just exactly what had so puzzled me about the scene enacted in the English Department office that morning. It was the performance aspect of it, the oh-so-very-subtle theatricality—uniformed officers, patrol cars—the fact that Jane had been taken into custody in such a public arena in front of such a large and enthralled audience. What was Piotrowski up to? After all, the police could just as easily have waited until Jane returned to her own office and picked her up there with far less fuss and feathers. That they hadn’t nagged at me. In six years with my New York state trooper ex-boyfriend Tony, I’d picked up a bit about criminal investigation, and maybe some of it had stuck.

  In his near-twenty years on the force, Tony had engaged in very few gun battles or lights-and-sirens chases. For him, a good part of the energy of police work went into the mind games he and his partners played with suspects in order to get at the truths it was in the suspects’ best interests to conceal from the police. His daily adventures consisted of improvisational scenarios played out with the “bad guys”—as he persisted in calling them in spite of my horrified PC protests. Little impromptu dramas—fragmented, ephemeral, quasi-fictive performances—designed to pull a suspect in, mislead him if necessary, and seduce him into being indiscreet. Maybe the little drama in the English Department office this morning had been staged along those lines. Maybe Piotrowski had been attempting to dupe someone into complacency.

  Piotrowski wiped his slushy boots thoroughly on the worn doormat. His expression was part standard-issue cop deadpan and part anticipation—he’d obviously smelled the cookies. I relieved him of his jacket and hung it over the back of a straight chair. “I’m going to do us both a big favor, Lieutenant, and not rush to the outraged conclusion that you’ve brought in Jane Birdwort simply on the basis of one ancient photograph.” I fussed with coffee and milk, then handed him the steaming cup.

  “Of course not.” He sank into the black recliner, right at home in my tag sale–furnished living room. But he watched me as cautiously over the rim of the mug as if I were a suspicious package abandoned on an airport seat.

  I slid a plate of still-warm cookies over the coffee table in his direction. “Why the look, Piotrowski?”

  “What look?”

  “That look on your face, the one that says, What’s this woman up to?”

  He smiled ruefully. “It’s just that I know your feelings about this case, Doctor: You don’t figure Ms. Birdwort committed this homicide. So—I don’t get it. I don’t understand why you’re not going ballistic about us holding her for questioning. You’re usually, ah, up-front with your feelings.”

  “You’re right, I don’t think Jane Birdwort murdered Elliot. I know she didn’t do it. I was with her when she found out about Elliot’s death. I’m the one who told her. She couldn’t possibly have feigned that reaction. No one could.”

  “Oh, so now you’re a forensic psychologist?”

  That wasn’t worth a response. “So, yeah, you’re right: I have a couple of questions for you, Lieutenant. First, what are you doing here?”

  He bit into a cookie and munched it. “What’s your second question?”

  It was like grappling with an eel, the man was so slippery. “What I don’t understand, Piotrowski—really don’t understand—is why you chose to apprehend Jane in a public place, at a time when such a large number of faculty members were present.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Dr Pelletier, you’re too smart.”

  “Am I?” I countered.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll answer your first question. I’m here because you been working with us on this case, and I figured it would be only courteous to let you know what transpired to lead us to take Ms. Birdwort in.”

  Transpired? Courteous? “Right.”

  He gave me his trademark slit-eyed look—he knew damn well I wasn’t buying it—and then went on. “First, having found evidence of the suspect’s marriage to Professor Corbin, we placed her in the category of persons who might of had a motive to harm him.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But, that in itself wasn’t enough for us to pick her up. Another thing that interested us was how well she fit the killer profile.”

  “Killer profile?”

  “Personal involvement. Furious strength.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Not only had she once been married to the victim, she also had a long history of emotional instability and a grudge against Corbin—he ended their relationship in 1973 by having her committed, against her will, to a psychiatric hospital. She was there for eight months.”

  “Jeez!”

  “In addition to which, the … ah … bizarre images in many of her poems suggest a propensity toward violence—”

  “Piotrowski, they’re metaphors! A metaphor is not meant to be taken literally. It’s a figurative—” I flashed on a powerful image from one of the poems I’d heard Jane read: a woman cruising the streets in high red boots. Hadn’t the poem said something about a stiletto?

  “I know what a metaphor is, Dr. Pelletier. Let me finish. All of these things together, plus the fact that Ms. Birdwort has no alibi for the day in question, led us to request a warrant to search her home—”

  “Oh—”

  “So—we found the murder weapon. It’s a very substantial knife—with traces of blood still on it; it is not a metaphor.”

  “The murder weapon! At Jane’s house? My God! Are you sure?” I bit my tongue to keep from asking whether the knife w
as a stiletto. That was a metaphor.

  “Of course we’re sure. What d’ya think? I want to look like a fool in court?”

  “Sorry. Where was it—the … the murder weapon?”

  “Behind a row of books on the top shelf in her study. The knife is congruent with the victim’s wound; the blood is human. So far the evidence leads in the direction of Ms. Birdwort’s guilt.”

  It certainly seemed like a solid case. Was I wrong about Jane? But I couldn’t forget her stupefied expression when I’d informed her of Elliot’s murder: The gray eyes that had gone so flat with shock could not possibly have been the eyes of a killer. Could they? And why would she have kept the knife she’d used to kill someone? She was not a stupid woman. I thought for a moment before I responded. “The knife could have been planted there, you know.” His brown gaze remained impenetrable. “Lieutenant, I am not convinced that Jane killed Elliot.” Then I paused, chewing my upper lip. “And you know what? I don’t think you are either.”

  “Like I said, Doctor, sometimes you’re just too smart.” He fell silent for a half-minute, as if he were considering his words. “Look, here’s what I wanta say—just between us, right?—you might wanta keep your eyes open around that English Department. See if Ms. Birdwort’s … ah … apprehension jogs anything loose, if ya get my drift, shakes anyone’s tree. Don’t take any risks, but just … pay attention. And if anything looks … weird, ya know … inconsistent in some way, let me know right away.”

  “Tha-a-a-t’s why the scene in the department office, then? Instead of a nice quiet talk—say in her office or at her home? I knew something was fishy about that! You were trying to shake the trees in case Jane isn’t guilty.”

  He shrugged and reached for another cookie. “Well, I gotta admit, I’d like us to be wrong on this one. We talked to Ms. Birdwort for a long time today—and then we had to release her. For now.”

  Whew! I wasn’t certain why I cared so much. Maybe it was because of Jane’s poetry. Her work voiced such a strong woman’s spirit. It would be wrong for Jane to be silenced before she’d finished writing whatever was in her to write. Too many women poets had been prematurely stifled, either by death or by social circumstances. I thought of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—and Emmeline Foster. We’d lost a lot. I didn’t want that to happen again.

  Piotrowski took a third molasses cookie. “Ms. Birdwort may be a little nuts, but she just doesn’t … well … The whole thing just doesn’t smell right. But I hafta tell ya—the evidence is damn solid—” He chomped; half the cookie vanished.

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Well—no. That’s the sticking point. The handle was wiped clean after the blade was folded over. It was one a them big Swiss Army knives—”

  A chill frosted my spine. “Monica!” I blurted.

  “What?” Like a bird dog on a hot trail, he became hyperalert, cookie paused halfway to his lips, eyes focused and still.

  “Monica’s missing Swiss Army knife!”

  “Ms. Cassale?… Hmm.” The lieutenant stuffed the remainder of the cookie in his mouth, plopped his mug down on the side table, sat abruptly upright, and, still chewing, reached in his suit jacket pocket for his notebook. “Tell me about it, Dr. Pelletier. Tell me all about it.”

  I got to Smith’s Bookshop just as the store was closing. The sidewalk trees in downtown Enfield were twisted with white fairy lights, the lampposts swagged in green pine garlands so almost-natural I almost thought they were almost-real. At five-thirty on a December evening, dinnertime shoppers rushed into Enright’s Market for last-minute fresh pasta and homemade pesto sauce. Two students taking a break from college food-service meals slipped into Scalzo’s for sausage wedges just like the kind their mothers used to buy. As I was about to turn into Smith’s, a tall woman in a bulky, lined jean jacket pushed through the doors of Bread and Roses with a dozen baguettes in a brown paper bag. It was Harriet Person. She brushed past me without acknowledgment or apology. Gorgonzola, she muttered as I stepped back to let her by. Gorgonzola. Gorgonzola.

  Smith’s was a hardwood-floor and pressed-tin-ceiling bookstore, small, with narrow aisles, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. Aside from Amber Nichols, browsing through the Biography section, I was the only last-minute customer, and the elderly owner, Whit Meyers, jangled his keys, clearly anxious to close. Jane Birdwort’s new volume of poetry—the one she’d read from at the public library—was featured in the Local Authors section by the front counter, and I snagged a copy. While Whit rang up the sale, I flipped through pages until I found the poem that had so gripped my imagination at Jane’s library reading. “Doing Violence.” Now, after Elliot’s death, the poem’s title resonated gratingly. Was Jane’s usurpation of the language of violence merely a powerful metaphoric tool? Or did it reflect a decades-long desire for personal revenge?

  19.

  “Taught to restrain,

  in cold Decorum’s school,

  The step, the smile,

  to glance and dance by rule …”

  —FRANCES SARGENT OSGOOD

  THAT NIGHT I TOOK JANE’S book to bed and read “Doing Violence.” The literary critic in me understood that these were the words of a poet musing on the situation of the modern artist. The midnight reader found it far more sinister than that.

  Night and day to cruise

  the streets in my high red boots

  screwing all the sullen gang,

  cigarette hanging from my lip,

  like another fang, this is the silent me.

  This one knows death,

  reads the paper, thrives on rape.

  But she is apocryphal …

  Jane’s images gave me the creeps—just as they were meant to. But the lieutenant had asked for my help, and if these unsettling verses could yield any clues to the mystery of Elliot’s death, I was the one qualified to find them.

  … Folks, this is a vicious century.

  The horrendous possibility lurks in the corridor,

  picking its teeth and whistling.

  Are you prepared?

  In the night wind, the house gave a sudden, loud, ominous creak. I half leapt out of bed, then caught myself with an embarrassed giggle. The old house always creaked in the night wind. I turned back to Jane’s poem.

  The plump matron in the pink Sunday dress

  is ogling the Picassos. If she could see

  what I see, she would come out of here in pieces.

  Like me, she would come out of here with one eye.

  Blue-lipped. A hag.

  Had I locked the doors? All of them? And the windows too? I jumped up and padded into the kitchen in my thick wool socks. Back door double-locked? Windows? In the living room a muted thump made me stiffen with apprehension, as logs shifted and fell in the woodstove. A flame flared up briefly behind the glass. Front door locked? Deadbolt engaged? Amanda had made me purchase the deadbolt when she’d started reading up on Criminal Science as a possible career choice. I’d always felt perfectly safe way out here in the country—until my daughter started entertaining me with serial-killer stories. Let’s see now? Living room windows? Locked solid. I padded through the bathroom, the study, Amanda’s room. No one was going to get in this house tonight without a battering ram.

  Somehow that didn’t make me feel any safer. The kind of terrors Jane wrote about don’t need a battering ram.

  Back under the covers I picked up the book again.

  The other one, she is afraid.

  She pours her coffee in a glass,

  she shakes it, studies it, gives it to me to test.

  She takes no risks, sipping slowly, sitting with her back

  to no doors. But never mind. She is not safe.

  She still has dreams. Around her she gathers

  her scraps of comfort. Mozart and Donne. The green trees

  that grow tall and strong. That live for years and years.

  The re-occurring sun. White wine in an amber glass.

  Peace. Solitude.

  Pe
ace? Solitude? Mozart and Donne? This was more like it. The fist around my heart unclenched. I began to breathe evenly. My eyelids grew heavy. I forced them open again so I could finish the poem.

  Oh? I see. Forget peace and solitude. Forget sleep.

  But never mind. Here I come again

  with my stiletto

  heels, my third breast,

  the snake that coils on my own split tongue.

  She is not safe. Her face splinters and turns

  green. There is a small lump in her neck.

  Already her feet hurt.

  Where will they take her now? Dancing?

  These red and vicious shoes?

  And the police hadn’t locked this woman up? I slapped the book shut. Sweet dreams, I whispered to myself, and turned out the light. I lay awake in the dark for a long time. I’d been wrong: A Ph.D. in English is not the credential required to determine innocence or guilt.

  The Blue Dolphin was quiet when I met Sophia there after a frantic early-morning phone call. The diner’s breakfast rush was over, and the smell of chili wafting from the kitchen foretold a hearty meal for the lunchtime crowd. Shiny metallic holiday swags in red, green, and gold decorated the laminated walls of the diner, and Alvin and the Chipmunks sang “Jingle Bells,” accompanied sotto voce by the pink-uniformed waitress who showed up instantly with a pot of coffee. Jingle Bells? I thought. Christmas is almost here. I’ve got to get started on my shopping.

  Sophia had chosen a booth in the back, and was writing intently on a yellow pad when I joined her. The instant I rounded the curved end of the chrome-trimmed counter, the pad vanished into the backpack sitting next to her on the red vinyl bench.