Hunting for Hemingway Read online

  "That's on my to-do list. One thing David told me was that the manuscripts were sent to him at City College."

  "Sent to him? That's how he got them? I was going to ask if you knew how he had possession." "

  I know. It sounds like something out of a bad novel, but I believed him when he told me the story." I recounted everything David had told me.

  "You're going to have to try to find out more about the packaging they came in. Get me something original-anything-and I'll try to help you. The more you find out, the more likely you'll get yourself off the prime suspect list," he said softly. "I heard about that on the news, too.

  "Hold it a second," Tom said as he stepped over to another desk to answer his phone.

  While I waited, the bell tinkled and a woman customer entered. She was attractive, about five foot four and in her mid-thirties, wearing a pink silk kurti tunic that looked handmade. Tom grinned and beckoned her in. She waved to him and began to browse, obviously at home in the bookshop.

  I quickly gathered up the scattered pages of the Hemingway stories and returned them to my briefcase. As I admired her embellished blouse, she narrowed her eyes and stared at me.

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to stare. I was admiring your tunic."

  "Oh, I bought it on a recent trip to India," she smiled. "But don't I know you?"

  "I don't think so. I'm DD McGil."

  "Got it.-I saw your picture in today's Trib. I've got a kind of photographic memory for faces."

  Tom, his conversation finished, walked over. "So, do you two know each other? DD, this is Debra Yates from the Newberry Library. Debra, this is DD McGil, erstwhile academic currently working the insurance fraud beat."

  Debra said, "She's the one who found the body. I read all about it.

  "Debra's here to pick up The Real Wizard of Oz, by Rebecca Loncraine. You'd love it DD." He selected a book from a pile on the corner of one of his tables and wrapped it neatly in brown paper.

  "It's all about Frank Baum's widow, Maud. She kept getting loads of fan mail from children for her husband. She couldn't bring herself to tell them he was dead, so instead, she wrote back, posing as him and forging his name. So many letters came, she made a rubber stamp of his signature and carried on the pretense for thirty years."

  "That was sweet, don't you think?" Debra said, paying for the book but keeping an eye on me still.

  "It was, but today his wife would have a barrage of lawyers telling her she couldn't do that."

  Debra Yates nodded and gave me a look I could not decipher as she took the book from Tom and he walked her to the door.

  "That wasn't a big sale, but it was a satisfying one," he said, closing the door. "Last time she bought a very expensive book."

  "And complained about the price?"

  "No. For once I didn't have to persuade someone to pay full price. She said, and I quote, `The quality lasts long after the sting of the price is forgotten."'

  "So she's your best customer, I take it. Is this getting serious?"

  "Don't kid me where book sales are concerned, DD. Anyway, your love life is tumultuous enough for both of us. I'm exhausted just being an observer. Can you stay for dinner? This time we'll do the Casablanca for Mexican."

  Last time we'd gone to Furio's. They'd gouged us eight bucks apiece for a glass of Chianti-Rush Street prices. We'd vowed to boycott them.

  "Thanks but I'm headed over to City College. I want to see what I can find out from that Hemingway professor." I waved good-bye and wished him bon appetit.

  SIXTEEN

  If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons.

  If you become popular it is always because of

  the worst aspects of your work.

  -ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  TOM HADN'T BEEN ABLE to help directly, but he'd confirmed my next move to visit City College. I headed northwest on the Kennedy toward O'Hare Airport, named after Butch O'Hare, a WW II naval aviator hero who was also the son of Al Capone's attorney. Chicago's infamous history is still around, although the City Fathers would like to blot it away.

  Rush hour starts early in Chicago but the reversable express lanes were open outbound so I got to the college campus without much delay. The campus was on the northwestern edge of Chicago on land that used to be Dunning Mental Hospital. People still talked about some of Dunning's inmates like Wolfman, who would scale the eight-foot picket fence when there was a full moon, run over to Mt. Olive Cemetery, and bay like a wolf. And there was the woman who tried to scale the fence but impaled herself on one of the spearhead fence pickets. After Dunning closed, the buildings came down and the new campus opened in the 90s-a six-story glass and chrome building surrounded by acres of asphalt and a kidney shaped retention pond. No hallowed ivy-covered walls in sight on this campus.

  The closest parking space was marked "Faculty Only." I pulled in quickly, locked the car, and headed for the main entrance.

  I'd stayed away from the academic world since Frank's death and the ensuing row his colleagues had made over my seventeenthcentury research. I'd made too many enemies and suffered too much pain. I forced aside the memories and opened the door.

  The building's overheated halls exuded an odor like ripe gym clothes. It didn't take a detective to deduce that their air-conditioning system wasn't working during one of the worst heat waves of the summer.

  The administration office was locked. I wandered the labyrinthine corridors searching for David's office and finally located the English department on the fifth floor. Anyone who looked like faculty was busy meeting with students or talking on the phone. I spotted a woman alone in a small office and knocked on the open door labeled "Ms. Jeffers / Mr. Cord."

  She looked up from her paperwork. "Yes?"

  "Are you Mrs. Jeffers?"

  "That's Ms. Jeffers," she said in a deep voice. "And I certainly am.

  She was a large woman with short reddish hair and a light complexion with no makeup except for her too-red lipstick. She wore ill-fitting jeans and a dress shirt, and her accent was East Coast.

  "I'm DD McGil, a friend of David Barnes. I was wondering if you could spare a few minutes to talk to me."

  "I've already spent a lot of time with those idiot cops."

  "David and I were in grad school together. I'm the one who found his body."

  "Oh, yes. I remember your name from this morning's paper." She got up, offered me a chair next to her desk, and shuffled a messy stack of papers. "Here, let me get rid of these."

  "Sorry to interrupt"

  She smiled thinly. "It's good for my sanity to have a break from these ignoble quizzes. You can't imagine how bad it's gotten. Kids today don't read the classics. They can't tell you if Shakespeare wrote in the same century as Walt Whitman or Walt Disney. The only thing they retain in their little gray brain cells are sports and entertainment factoids. All the dirty little boys care about is getting into the girls' clean little pants, and all the girls think about is..." She sighed, her expression somber.

  I remembered a recent survey of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, in which only 32 percent could place the American Civil War in the correct half century. I pointed at the quizzes. "My sympathies. I'm afraid I'd end up strangling the little brats."

  "So, you wanted to talk about David." Her tight brown eyes assessed me as she fidgeted with a pair of granny glasses. "How did you come to find his body?"

  "I was on the phone with him when he was shot, and I raced over to his apartment. David and I hadn't kept in touch for a lot of years. I found out only two days ago that he was in Chicago. Now I'd like to know something about what his life was like lately."

  Ms. Jeffers' face softened. "Seems like we all made good friends in school, then lost touch after we got out into the real world."

  We were in a tiny cubicle containing two desks and two chairs. The stuffy air and her White Linen perfume were making me claustrophobic.

  "Are you okay?" she asked, touching my arm.

  "It's so hot. I feel like the
walls are pressing in."

  "It is a bit cramped," she said.

  "What's wrong with the air-conditioning?" I asked. "This building isn't all that old."

  She laughed. "Before they built this campus, we used to be in makeshift trailers, so even without the air conditioning, it's a lot better than it used to be back then. By the way, my first name is Dorothy. Want a Coke?"

  I declined. She quickly returned with a regular Coke. "I always load up with extra sugar for that blast I need to deal with the students," she remarked, then paused.

  "Poor David," she said finally. "I feel so bad. Beth always felt that he was the brightest of us all. He certainly stood out."

  "He was like that in grad school," I agreed, wondering if this was the same Beth who had been quoted in the paper.

  "He wasn't just quick, he was truly intelligent. What's more, he was witty. And he chased anything in skirts. His biggest sin was he was never tactful. The rest of the department have settled in as lifers, but David had the talent and the drive to do whatever he wanted"

  "Lifers?"

  She laughed through her nose. "We'll be here till we're carried out on slabs. But not David. He simply never took teaching seriously, and that charming irreverence allowed him to get away with not giving a damn what anybody else thought."

  "Who was he closest to in the department?" I asked.

  "He and Martin Sweeney collaborated on the Hemingway presentations." She snorted. "David called them `dog and phony' shows."

  I bit my lip. If she knew I'd seen the show, maybe she wouldn't tell me her version.

  "They called it `The Real Hemingway,"' she continued. "David contended people didn't want to read Hemingway, they just wanted to hear about his sex life and his sporting adventures. Unfortunately for Western civilization, he was right. He encouraged Martin to grow a beard and dress and act like Hemingway, and the gimmick was a success. So much so, these days Martin hardly ever comes out of character anymore. Tells everyone to call him Papa."

  "Do you think he'd talk to me?"

  "He likes talking about Hemingway, but he's been badly hurt by David's death. Earlier today he told me he felt he couldn't go on alone with the rest of the program tour they'd planned."

  "Did you hear that David found the lost Hemingway manuscripts?" I asked.

  "Oh, we all heard about it, but it's hard to believe," she said. "Personally, I think there was something funny going on. I'm in Women's Studies myself, and I haven't had to read Hemingway since high school. Understandably, I'm not a fan of his. All that macho crap, and of course he didn't have a clue about women."

  I didn't agree with her. I liked Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises. But I kept my own counsel.

  "I suppose in other circles this find would be significant, and David would have been famous," she said.

  "But why wouldn't he have openly announced such an astounding discovery to the faculty?" I asked.

  She laughed out loud. "You must never have worked for a bureaucracy. This administration will continue to fight him for the manuscripts even though he's dead."

  "Do you think the manuscripts are authentic?" I asked. "And if David and Martin were such good colleagues, why would Martin disagree with David about the manuscripts being genuine?"

  "We all wonder that. Ask him yourself. He's taking over David's classes for the remainder of the term, so he'll be around."

  I hadn't told Dorothy Jeffers I was with the insurance company, and I didn't want to, so I changed the subject.

  "Do you suppose that after the auction and after the news broke, David would have stayed here to teach?"

  "Who knows? Beth thought so."

  "Did everybody in the department get along well with David?"

  "That's what the police were asking us all day yesterday. You're sure you're not with them?"

  "No. I told you I'm just trying to find out about David."

  "Well," she paused. "He didn't get along with Big Bill. You did know they charged David with sexual harassment?" she asked.

  I nodded.

  "But do you know how they handled it? The cops barged into his ten o'clock class one morning, handcuffed him in front of his students, and dragged him out to a police car. Can you imagine?"

  The David I knew would have gone ballistic. No wonder he hadn't mentioned anything to me about it the other night.

  "Sounds horrible," I said. "Why couldn't they have waited? Do you believe he did it?"

  "I'm sure that David was guilty of sexual harassment at some time. Most men are. And David behaved sometimes just like his idol, Papa Hemingway. However, with David, it was the women who always seemed to flock to him.

  "None of us in the department believed the student," she continued thoughtfully, rubbing the string of tiny pearls around her neck. "She is a girl who can't do enough to attract male attention. But once she made a complaint, the administration had to follow through."

  "Do you think David would have won the harassment suit?"

  She rose and circled the two small desks. "Beth led the fight for him. We all tried our best to back David, but the administration didn't care what we said. As if I'd go out of my way to defend anyone I thought might be guilty. The administration organized a witch hunt against David, and he decided to fight back. I think that's why he ran for department chair. Beth persuaded him, and I backed him. Have you met our current chair, Bill Butler?"

  "No."

  "Everybody calls him Big Bill." She snorted. "Frankly, he's embarrassing. He dresses and acts like a cowboy who's just arrived in the bigs." "

  I take it he's not very good?"

  "He's ambitious, and he's clever. He jumps into bed with the administration on every issue-larger class size, more paperwork, standardized testing-you know the kind of crap that sells out the faculty a millimeter at a time. There's constant tension around here. Believe me, this college could teach the Borgias a thing or two. Suffice it to say Big Bill's agenda and that of the faculty don't intersect anywhere."

  "What did you and Beth think of David's chances of winning?" Dorothy Jeffers had mentioned Beth three or four times with shining eyes, and I wanted to learn something about her, too.

  "I don't know what Beth thought. You'll have to ask her. I thought his chances were good. He would have been a tough chairman who kept the department on point. But the sexual harassment suit really hurt him. Surprisingly, a few of the younger women on the faculty turned against him and backed Big Bill. Most of the rest of us remained loyal, including Beth. I don't understand these young women at all. They're so stupid to let themselves be conned by Big Bill. Anybody with a brain can see he's a fake."

  She sighed loudly. "Personally, I was hoping David might collect a bundle from this place for harassing him. Now that he's gone, we're stuck with the buffoon," she added bitterly.

  "You mentioned Beth several times. Is that the Beth Moyers who was quoted in today's paper?"

  "Yes. She and David were ... good friends."

  "Do you mean to imply they were lovers?"

  "I didn't say that."

  Dorothy Jeffers had become agitated, and I welcomed the sudden interruption of noise in the hallway.

  Dorothy went to the door and opened it. In the hallway, a big man wearing a tan suit and cowboy boots had his arm around a pretty young girl. She was sobbing.

  "You mustn't blame yourself," the big man said softly, trying to calm her. "It's not your fault."

  "Can I do anything to help?" Dorothy offered. "Would you like a glass of water?"

  Cowboy boots looked away from the girl, seeing us for the first time. His hair was caught in a long pony tail, and he wore one of those universally unattractive silver tipped string ties. He shifted uncomfortably while the girl continued to sob on his shoulder.

  "No. Everything'll be fine, thanks, Dotty," he drawled and quickly shepherded the girl down the corridor.

  Ms. Jeffers stiffened when he called her Dotty.

  "Was that ...?" I asked.

  "Our ersat
z chairman."

  "He's hard to miss," I admitted.

  "I told you he's a fake, and I meant it." She leaned toward me and whispered, "I investigated. First of all, he isn't even from The Lone Star state. Probably never even been there. He was born in Brooklyn, top of his class at C.U.N.Y. He makes up the accent and the outfit as he goes along."

  "Why the charade?" I asked, wondering how to get back to the subject of David and Beth without wearing out my welcome.

  "Good question," she said. "He adopted the persona to ensure he would stand out in the crowd. And as soon as he transformed himself into Big Bill, his career skyrocketed. It's perverse. Personally, I think he's a little mad"

  I remembered the Harvard University grad who'd masqueraded as a street person to help organize one of Chicago's political wards. Maybe it was more common than we suspected. "Who was the girl?" I asked.

  "She's Debbie Majors, the student who filed the harassment charges against David. Wonder what that was all about?"

  "You wonder what what was all about?" asked a strident voice directly behind us.

  "Oh, Bette," Dorothy Jeffers said, turning. "You startled me. This is Miss McGil, an old friend of David's."

  "Hello. I'm Bette Abramawitz," she said loudly, shaking my hand like she was pumping iron. "We were sorry about David." She turned to Dorothy. "I was looking for Beth."

  "Beth? Everybody's looking for her today. But I haven't seen her." Dorothy turned to me. "Bette's in Administration. She wanted David to drop out of the race for chairman. Didn't you, Bette?"

  "Why go over it now? He's gone, and it's done. But I won't deny I tried to discourage him. Those charges of harassment stick, even if you're innocent. And with David, who could believe he was completely innocent?" She took a tissue from her purse and wiped perspiration from her brow.

  "He wasn't going to drop out, though," she continued, dropping the tissue into a wastebasket adjacent to Dorothy's desk. "He called me last week and said he'd found out about Big Bill not being from Texas, and he was going to make it public."