“This is no time to split up,” I said.
“They’re watching you, Henry. But they’re not worried about my loyalties. You’re my diversion.”
“Why are you doing this, Aaron?”
“I won’t be an instrument of crime,” he said. “I either have to clear my client of this murder or urge him to turn himself in. That’s my obligation.”
“Then our interests are different,” I said, “because I want justice for my friend.”
He nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Henry. Wait for my call.”
“You have to give me something, Aaron. Something to go on.”
“All right,” he said. “Robert Paris inherited his wife’s estate after she was killed in a car accident. She had a will but she died intestate.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“If you can make sense of it,” he said, “you’ll know who killed Hugh Paris.”
I heard the tremor in his voice and I was frightened for both of us.
I was sitting on the patio of the student union at the university having left Gold’s office an hour earlier. I had come to find Katherine Paris. I stared out across the empty expanse of grass and pavement. Misty light hung from the branches of the trees. A white-jacketed busboy cleared away my breakfast dishes.
School had not yet started for the undergraduates so there was none of their noise and traffic to shatter the stillness. I was thinking about Hugh. The same money that raised this school was responsible for his death. The money was everything and nothing, something that overwhelmed him and which, perhaps, could only be contained by the institution. It had not done Hugh any good, but was merely the background noise against which he played out his unhappiness.
I got up and walked across the plaza to the bookstore. It was a two-story beige box with a red tile roof, a far cry from the excesses of the Old Quad. But then, as the campus moved away from the Old Quad the architecture became purely utilitarian as conspicuous displays of wealth, whether personal or institutional, went out of style. I entered the store and stopped one of the blue-frocked salesclerks, asking where the poetry books were shelved. I was directed to the back wall of the second floor. The poetry books covered a dozen long shelves and it took me a minute to figure out that they were arranged alphabetically.
There had been a brief time in college when I wrote poetry. It was, like most sophomore verse, conceived in the loins rather than the mind. It was a notch better than most such verse, perhaps, but it was no loss to literature when I stopped writing. My brush with poetry, however, left me with a permanent respect for those who wrote it well. Seeing familiar names again, Auden, Frost, Richard Wilbur, took me back to sunny autumn afternoons when I sat in my dorm room writing lame couplets.
Katherine Paris had published a half-dozen slender volumes over the past twenty years and one thick book of collected poems. Each book was adorned with the same photograph I had seen at Hugh’s house and beneath it was the same paragraph of biographical information. She was born in Boston, graduated from Radcliffe, took a master’s degree from Columbia and currently divided her time between Boston and San Francisco. Her work had won the National Book Award and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She had been translated into twelve languages — they were listed — and had once been mentioned by T.S. Eliot who found her work elliptical. Nothing about a crazy husband and a homosexual son; apparently, that information was private.
I struggled with about a dozen of her poems before I saw Eliot’s point. Her work was indeed elliptical, she left out everything that was essential, including logic and meaning. Her words neither described nor observed things. They were just words scattered across the page. This was braininess of the highest order, the verbal equivalent of the white canvas passed off as a painting; so abstract that to have expected some sense from it would have insulted the artist. As my attention wandered from the poems, it seemed to me that I was being watched. I closed the book and looked around. The boy standing next to me quickly directed his attention to his feet.
He wore a baggy pair of khaki shorts rolled up at the bottom over a long sinewy pair of legs. He had on a white sweatshirt with a red paisley bandana tied around his neck and a small button with the lambda — the symbol of gay liberation — on it. He had a round cherubic face, short hair of an indeterminate dark color. He looked about twenty. He raised his eyes at me and I realized that I was being cruised, not spied on.
“Hello,” I said, pleasantly.
Pointing at the book in my hand he said, “I took a creative writing course from her last quarter.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “My name is Danny.”
“Henry,” I said. “Did you like the course?”
“Actually,” he confided, pushing his hair with slender fingers, “she’s a good poet but a very neurotic woman.”
“Don’t the two go together?”
“No,” he said, “I reject the notion of the doomed artist. I mean, look at Stevens, he sold insurance and Williams was a doctor.”
“Sorry,” I said, “It’s been a long time since I read poetry. Who are Stevens and Williams?”
He looked slightly shocked. “Wallace Stevens? William Carlos Williams?” I shook my head. Looking at me intently he said, “Aren’t you a student? A grad student maybe?” “I’m a lawyer and my interest in Katherine Paris is professional, not literary.”
“A lawyer,” he repeated as though describing a virus. “Don’t lawyers wear suits when they’re working?” I was wearing a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt.
“Not on house calls,” I replied. “Where can I find Mrs. Paris?”
“Third floor, English department in the Old Quad. I’ll walk you there if you like, okay?”
“Sure, just let me pay for the book.”
Between the bookstores and the Old Quad I learned quite a bit about Danny’s tastes in poetry, his life and his plans as well as receiving a couple of gently veiled passes. I steered the conversation around to Katherine Paris.
“She had this great lady persona,” he was saying, “but don’t cross her.”
“You did?”
“Anyone with any integrity does sooner or later. Her opinions are set in stone.”
“Not writ in water?”
“That’s Shelley. That was pretty good. Anyway, she doesn’t let you forget who has the power.” We had reached the English department. He smiled at me, sunnily. “What do you want with her anyway?”
“Her son was killed on campus a couple of days ago. He was a friend of mine. I want to ask her some questions.”
“You mean the guy that they found in the creek?” I nodded. “That’s too bad. Was he a good friend?”
I reached out and touched the button on his chest. “We were good friends.”
His look said, “And here I’ve been cruising you.” Aloud, he said, “You must think I’m a real jerk.”
“How could you have known?” I asked, reasonably. “And thanks for the help.’’ We shook hands, he a little awkwardly and I remembered how rare the gesture was among students. “The poem with the phrase writ in water, that was about Keats, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Shelley wrote it when Keats died. He called it ‘Adonais.’” He started to say something else, thought better of it, smiled again and walked away. I watched him go and then turned and climbed up the stairs to the third floor.
Katherine Paris did not look like a woman anyone ever called mother. Her small feet were encased in gold slippers and she wore a flowing white caftan that obliterated any sign of a body beneath it. The string of blue beads around her neck was probably lapis lazuli. It was the only jewelry she wore. Her face had the false glow of a drinker but none of a drinker’s soft alcoholic bloat. It was a hard angular face I saw as I entered her office; deeply wrinkled, deeply intelligent. She instructed me to sit down. I sat. She continued writing.
The walls of the office were bare. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon light and the only source of light was her desk lamp. She worked at an elegant writing table whose spindly legs hardly seemed able to bear the weight of the books piled on top. At length, she looked up at me from beneath half-glasses evidently surprised to find that I was still there.
