Simon Said (3 page)

"The police might need more proof than some earrings and your instincts," David said. "But I'm convinced."

 

Gates walked back into the room and up to the picture. He didn't look at either man, but he studied the picture for a full five minutes. He shook his head.

Then he turned and studied Simon just as intently. "A corpse from the right time period, the right hair color and build, and identical jewelry. And we know for a fact that a young woman disappeared. It's circumstantial, but convincing. However," and he sighed, "I don't think the medical examiner can officially ID her based on what we have here."

"What will you do now?" David asked.

 

"I don't know," Gates said. "The police attorney will have to tell me if this is a case or just a break in routine for us."

 

"It was hardly a routine event for Anne Bloodworth," Simon said quietly. He turned and offered Gates his hand. "I enjoyed meeting you."

 

"Listen," Gates said. "Are you going to be in your office tomorrow? I'd like to drop by and pick your brain some more."

"Sure," Simon replied. "Just don't ask me to look at any more corpses, okay?" All three men laughed, and Simon left the room.
"That young man has a brain," Gates said.

"He has a photographic memory," David said. "He can remember anything he has ever read or jotted on a note card. But it's not just that. He's got instinct, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it."

The two of them could see Simon Shaw walking across the campus from the window in the dining room. "He'd make a good cop, then," Gates said.
Chapter Four

THE MORNING'S EVENTS HAD SHAKEN SIMON. HE FELT HOT AND unsteady. He wanted to go home and pull himself together before his afternoon class. As he walked across the campus toward the nearby neighborhood where he lived, the sun seemed unnaturally bright and the colors of late spring were so strong they made his eyes hurt.

A migraine threatened him distantly tapping at his temples and turning his stomach. He wished he had his car so he didn't have to walk the four blocks to his house.

Cameron Park was a very early suburb of Raleigh built in the 1920s. Now it was an island surrounded by Kenan College, a 1950s shopping district, and the downtown high school. Its streets, once paved with cobblestones, meandered around the hills and ravines of what had once been the Bloodworth estate. Most of the homes were of brick or clapboard, and retaining walls and chimneys were built of the stones that were upturned during construction.

If you knew where to look, signs of the age of the place were everywhere. The old trolley line had run down Hillsborough Street and ended where large stone pillars marked the entrance to the neighborhood. Most of the porches still had a square cut out of the door where a milk box could be slid in by the milkman. The old carriage house, where the residents had kept their horses and broughams, still stood, although converted into an arts center. It was a fashionable location for the type of person who enjoyed old-fashioned residential urban life and scorned the strip developments and congested traffic of the new suburbs. Simon found it similar in atmosphere to the neighborhood in Queens, New York, where his mother had been raised.

By the time Simon reached the Craftsman bungalow that was his home, he knew that something other than the overall gruesomeness of the morning was bothering him. But he decided to worry about it later and concentrate instead on pulling himself together for his afternoon class.

Simon took two prescription headache pills, got a Coke out of his refrigerator, turned on the local oldies radio station on his stereo, and climbed into his only shower, which was on the first floor, next to the kitchen. His upstairs bathroom had an ancient footed tub, which was not conducive to the kind of repair his body and soul needed right now. He turned on the water, sat down, and chugged his Coke. His water heater was probably original to the house, which was built in 1926, so the hot water only lasted through three songs. When the water became lukewarm, he turned it off, but he stayed sitting on the floor of the shower to finish his Coke. Mercifully, this radical treatment stopped the development of his headache and quelled the insistent nausea in his stomach.

Simon went upstairs to dress. He paused in front of the mirror to check for bags under his eyes, and he decided that they were not too pronounced, despite lack of sleep and the morning's events. Simon was a small man, which had never bothered him except for the irritation he suffered when looking for clothes. But being a university professor allowed him to wear anything he wanted, and since his undergraduate days, he had lived in jeans, polo shirts or turtlenecks, sneakers, and any jacket he could find to fit. Occasionally, he wore a knit tie.

Simon had played baseball in high school and college; he biked to work, and he had visited the local batting cage regularly until recently. He was still in reasonably good shape, with a well-developed chest and arms and slim legs and waist.

From his Jewish mother, Simon had inherited black—almost glossy—curly hair, which he kept short, brown eyes, and a Semitic nose. From his Irish father, whose family had lived in the mountains of North Carolina for generations, he got an engaging smile, a sense of humor, and his romantic nature. He was the only child of parents who had married late but were devoted. His father had been a classics professor at Appalachian State; his mother was a public-health nurse who had met his father while working at a rural mountain clinic. His parents died when he was in college, but his father's family in Boone and his Jewish relatives in New York City fought over his vacations, deluged him with care packages, and made him feel loved, even though he was on his own after the age of twenty.

In high school, Simon's academic prowess had isolated him somewhat. Only his starting position at second base on the varsity baseball team kept him from being considered a complete nerd. In college, though, as often happens, his intelligence became a social asset, and he found himself in the midst of a large circle of friends, both men and women. As an undergraduate, he attended Duke University in Durham, his parents' alma mater, from which he graduated summa cum laude in history. For graduate school, he defected to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then he surprised everyone by accepting a teaching position at Kenan College. Simon wanted to teach undergraduates and live in North Carolina. Kenan and its environs became his home, and he had no intention of leaving, even when he developed his doctoral thesis into a best-selling book, The South Between the World Wars, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was catapulted to academic stardom two years ago.

Simon stayed on an even keel during the uproar that followed his receiving the Pulitzer. Kenan was ecstatic, issuing press releases wildly and giving him tenure several years before it was customary. He received telegrams and phone calls from people he could hardly place. His publisher flew him to New York, put him up in one of those fancy hotels where they give you a free bathrobe to use, sent him to the awards ceremony in a limousine, and threw him a huge party. He was even scheduled to appear on the
Today
show, but he was bumped when O. J. Simpson was indicted for murder. He didn't mind, though. He had a great time in the green room talking to Ray Charles, who got bumped, too, and took away a souvenir
Today
coffee mug with Charles's autograph on it.

After his brief exposure to fame, Simon returned happily to his life.

Not so his wife, Tessa, who had loved the glamour and excitement of celebrity and who complained bitterly about the boredom of their everyday existence when life returned to normal. Simon, who had never been bored a day in his life, expected her to adjust in time.

Tessa adjusted by packing her things onto a carrier on the top of her Mustang and leaving for a job as a TV production assistant on a soap opera in New York City.

Simon was devastated. They had been together since graduate school—she taught high school just a few blocks away. He liked being married. He wanted a home and a family more than most men, probably to replace the one he had lost when his parents died. He seriously underestimated Tessa's restlessness, and he probably hastened her departure by suggesting that they have a baby.

Simon would never forget standing on the sidewalk begging her not to go, then watching her drive away from him.

In retrospect, Simon realized that she hadn't chosen their life—he had. His job had brought them to Raleigh. He had bought the house in the neighborhood where he wanted to live. He had taken his parents' things out of storage—the Steinway, the Oriental rugs, the countless books that filled two walls downstairs and the third bedroom upstairs—and furnished the house. Tessa had never complained. She had seemed happy. Why had she thrown her lot in with his if it wasn't what she wanted? Charitably, Simon supposed she didn't know what she wanted until too late to avoid hurting him.

Simon walked downstairs and into the small kitchen and opened his refrigerator door. Three Cokes was not much sustenance for standing in front of a classroom all afternoon, but he was never hungry anymore. He knew he had to eat, so he took a container of cherry vanilla yogurt out of the refrigerator and sat at his kitchen table to force it down himself.

After she left, Tessa had not responded to any of his attempts to contact her. When one of his cousins spotted her in Macy's, she simply said that she thought it was best that way. Best for her, maybe. When Simon realized how complete his loss was, he took an emotional nosedive. He was barely able to finish the semester's work. His troubled condition was so obvious that his friends worried about him aloud and everyone else talked about him behind his back. The chair of the history department, Walker Jones, came into his office one day shortly before the semester ended and gave him a kind but firm ultimatum: Get help or take a leave of absence.

First, Simon looked through the Yellow Pages under the listings for psychiatrists and psychotherapists. But he couldn't tell the good ones from the quacks. He hung out with a pretty balanced crowd, so no one he knew had any recommendations for him. In desperation, he went to his regular doctor.

"You have the common cold of mental illness," Dr. Wade Ferrell told him. "And you have company. About a third of all Americans, to be exact. You're depressed, and you have good reason to be. But unlike the common cold, we have a cure. You don't have to lie on a sofa for three years like Proust did until it goes away by itself. There's just one thing."

"What?" Simon had asked, wondering what could possibly be left about his private life that the man didn't already know.

 

"You haven't minimized your symptoms in any way?" Ferrell asked. "Have you thought at all about killing yourself ?"

Simon was aghast, and it must have shown on his face.
"Good," the doctor said. "If you had said yes, I would have put you in my car, run by your house for your toothbrush, and taken you to a very safe place until the antidepressants kicked in. As it is, I think you can go home."

Ferrell wrote three prescriptions and tore them off his pad." 'Better living through chemistry,' " he said, handing them to Simon. "But remember, these are not 'happy pills.' They're not going to change the fact that your wife left you. But you will be able to function."

Later, Simon stood outside his neighborhood pharmacy and inspected the little bottles of pills that would restore some part of his life to him. If Proust had had these, he wondered, would he have written Remembrance of Things Past when he got off that couch? But Simon decided to abandon existential musings for the time being and opt for feeling better. So he took his pills, and he did feel better—sort of.

As Simon inspected the last lump of cherry vanilla yogurt at the bottom of its container, he contemplated loss and thought about Anne Bloodworth. Did she have any notion that she was about to die and forfeit all the joys and sorrows of another fifty or so years of life? She had been shot in the back of the head, so the odds were that she had no inkling that she was going to die, and thus no opportunity to say good-bye, even to herself.

Simon walked out of the house and went over to his black Thunderbird. He had bought it when he was flush with royalties from the paperback edition of his book. Driving around town with the air conditioner on high and Paul Simon on the stereo was about the only activity that gave him any pleasure these days, so he figured the car was a worthwhile investment from a psychological standpoint. He got in the car, started the engine, shifted, slipped Graceland comfortably into its accustomed slot, and drove off toward campus, reveling in percussion all the way.

WHEN SIMON GOT back home from his class Thursday evening, he found a message from Sergeant Gates on his answering machine, asking if he could come to see him. So Simon arrived earlier than usual at the office the next morning. Judy Smith looked up at him in surprise when he walked into the departmental office to check his mail.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"I'm glad to see you, too," Simon replied.

"You know I didn't mean it that way. Besides, I was going to call you. Dr. Jones has called a departmental meeting for eleven o'clock."

"No kidding," Simon said. A departmental meeting during summer school was very unusual. For one thing, most of the faculty weren't in town. They vanished to the beach, mountains, abroad, or to a research site from early May, when the second semester ended, to the middle of August.

The faculty took turns teaching four courses, two in each summer session, every year. This year Simon was teaching North Carolina History, Alex Andrus was teaching The Civil War, Vera Thayer was teaching European Imperialism and Colonialism, and Marcus Clegg was offering his controversial History of Science.

"Got any idea what it's all about?" Simon asked.
"No," she replied. "But Dr. Walker and Alex were in crisis mode yesterday afternoon." "What do you mean?" Simon asked.

"They spent two hours in Dr. Jones's office, and when they came out, both of them looked furious. Dr. Jones asked me to call all the faculty I could reach and tell them that there would be a departmental meeting this morning."