Chapter 2

It was the sudden death, the murder that brought about my insomnia. I had been in a vodka-induced stupor when Ann, my wife, arrived back from shopping a little after two, and I was still relating the morning's adventure when Hilda, our five-year-old, got in from school and demanded to be taken to Tracey's. Ann walked her around the corner, made some arrangements, and came back. I turned on our $15 TV set (it had cost three times that to get a cable connexion) and watched the LA Dodgers for a while.

After dinner, I watched the Padres (they were at home, the Dodgers had been in Philadelphia, three hours earlier there) and then went to bed. But Gillespie had murdered sleep and so I tossed and listened to the breeze in the eucalyptus until three or four and then slept the sleep of the guilty until seven, when I arose, unsatisfied, unfulfilled, semisomnolent, and irritable.

I bit both Ann and Hilda and walked down to the corner for a look at the Onion (as we called it). I carefully barked my knuckles on a cleverly-concealed protuberance designed to maim the unwary prospective reader, and extracted a paper. And there I was -- or, at least, my "discovery" was -- smeared across the front page:

SCHOLAR SLAIN AT STATE
Professor found in Classroom
Stabbing Shocks Campus

The headline and subheads told it all. Skimming rapidly, I located my name, scratched my egocentrism at having made the front page (correctly spelled!) and retraced my visual steps to actually read the article. The facts were clear and obvious: Prof. C.W. Gillespie, 52, had been found stabbed in a seminar room at San Diego State University. No arrest had yet been made. The police were hard at work.

Well, it was equally obvious that the authorities -- as my favorite authors call them -- were going to get nowhere. It was time for me to doff my disguise as a mild-mannered academic and stand revealed as an ersatz, cis-Atlantic Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn or (even) Mike Hammer (the thought of all the not-quite-maidens at my feet in this last role whet my enthusiasm as I got on the bus and, hunching my shoulders under my invisible trenchcoat, attempted to work my non-existent shoulder holster into a more comfortable position, while dropping a quarter into the box and accepting a totally unnecessary transfer).

I could see it would be a tough problem.

I had no Watson, no Hastings, no Goodwin to chronicle my relentless ratiocinative efforts. And in extreme Southern California the potential candidates were sparse and unexciting. At no time, in fact, had I ever been introduced to a wounded ex-army physician in a chem lab who might share digs with me; indeed, Ann might object to my inviting such an individual into the bosom of our family. I sighed, eliciting a wild look from an elderly woman with pale green hair a few seats away. I would just have to see what the fates had in store.

" ... so I don't even know who he is -- or was," I told Jim, clutching a styrofoam cup half full of brownish acid.

"Well, I'd met him twice, maybe three times; but I didn't know him. Of course, I'd see him in the main office, or in the hall, every day ... or nearly every day. But I know people who've known him for years -- yet I don't know any of his friends, in the event he had any friends. Everyone seemed to think he was a nasty bastard. I think he insulted me at least once every time I actually spoke to him." Jim scratched his head.

I looked around the cafeteria, huge glass windows letting in more sunlight in late October than Toronto saw all year, watching the girls in summery clothing lug their trays and books and purses around.

"You know any of his students?"

"Sure. Couple of those kids in the ghastly seminar I was telling you about last week are -- uh, were -- in his Novel from Richardson to Scott. There might be others. Everybody's got everyone else's students in something. That's what's wrong with our program." Jim warmed to his second-favorite topic: the graduate program in English (his favorite topic was Chris Evert, the tennis star). "None of the kids gets a chance to specialize. The department's dumb distribution requirements are enough to drive you nuts. And the way my dear colleagues set up the prerequisites! It looks like they tried to exclude everyone!"

"Aren't they?"

"What?"

"Aren't they trying to exclude everyone? In Toronto we have guys who go out of their way to offer obscure grad courses so that no one'll register and they won't have to teach. My only problem is that I can never think of anything obscure enough. If only I were a specialist in mediaeval Latvian history or eighteenth century Albanian lyric poetry, I might get time off."

"Hmmm. Never thought of it that way. It wouldn't work here. In the State system you've got to teach, if not one thing then another. So the goal is to teach small classes, the smallest you can get away with. What Gillespie did was make it all so dull and make himself so obnoxious that no more than half a dozen or so brave souls made it past the first week or two. You should have heard some of the stories: like trying to reduce each of the females in a class to tears serially; or making personal insulting remarks about someone's behavior or dress or looks. Oh, he was a great guy!"

Jim waved his now-empty cup in the air and looked around. "See that guy over by the candy machine?" I swiveled, stared and nodded. "He was in one of Gillespie's courses a year ago. I heard that one day he just had it, tore into the guy and dropped the course."

I stared more interestedly now. The student was tall, clean-shaven, cleanly-dressed, and now walking towards us, seemingly bent on achieving sunshine and air.

"Could you say hello to him?"

"Why?"

"I'd like to meet him."

Jim looked up and waved in a vague way, calling "Phil."

Phil changed vectors by a few degrees and came over. "Phil, this is Professor Diver from Toronto." Jim waved at me even more vaguely. "He's the guy who found Gillespie yesterday. I was telling him you'd been in one of his classes."

"Bet your sweet ass I was. But not for long. I read him for the cocksucker he was and got the hell out before the last add/drop date." He smiled beatifically. "I don't take any courses with shitheads like him. I'd shake the hand of the smartass who knifed him." He paused, weighing the effect of his speech. I remained wrapped in my still-invisible trenchcoat.

"I take it you didn't like him."

"Man, as they say in rhetoric, 'that's litotes.' No body liked him. Every grad student in English would contribute to the defense fund for the assassin. I hated the sonofabitch and I was only in his class for a couple of weeks. You ought to talk to some of the guys who really had to sweat it out with him. Majors in the novel. Or in the eighteenth century. Talk to Terri or Nan. They'll give you an earful. Gotta split now. Bye." Phil vanished through the doors before I finished processing what he'd said. I looked a Jim, who was grinning.

"He always talks like that. I think he once drove up to Venice and heard Ginsberg or someone read a poem while nude in a bathtub and never recovered. But he's a bright guy and a sharp student."

"Ginsberg never read nude in a bathtub. But I get the idea. So that's the brief capsule sentiment about the late Professor Gillespie. Who are Terri and Nan?"

"Nan's in my class in a little while. I'm not sure which one Terri is. Do you care?"

"That's a toughie, but I think I do. I've got a proprietary interest in Gillespie; I do want to know more about him."

"Don't get too engrossed, Burt. It's none of your business."

"'Every man's death diminishes me... '"

"Bullshit!"

"OK. I'm just nosy and self-indulgent."

"Nan's in my 11 o'clock. Why don't you meet us in my office at noon?" Jim levered himself up, grabbed his folder of notes and walked off.

I sat still for a moment or two and left.

On several occasions Holmes remarked on Watson's versions of the adventures. But the Master did keep a scrapbook. So I felt justified as I walked into the current newspapers room of the Love Library and rounded up an LA Times and a San Francisco Chronicle. I'd already seen the Union. The Times story looked as though AP had just picked up the stuff from the Union and sent it out over the wire. I couldn't even find the story in the Chronicle at first. But I finally did: three paragraphs on page nine, and no mention of me at all. A blatant insult. The Times had me all right: but I was "Berton Driver, a Canadian professor." Tant pis.

I Xeroxed both articles carefully and went back outside into the sunshine. While waiting for noon to roll around, I thought of my friends in Toronto, trudging around Hart House Circle through the cold, wet leaves.

Later on, looking back at noon and lunch and the early afternoon, I wasn't certain what I had accomplished. Most likely nothing. But at least I hadn't read any Jens Peter Jacobsen, nor anything about him.

Nan had turned out to be a big surprise.

I'm not sure what I had expected, though I know I've always thought of Nan as "Bert's twin sister" from The Bobbsey Twins. I just wasn't prepared for an exceptionally voluptuous chicana in a form-fitting dress from Saks Fifth Avenue with nothing on under it. "Nan," it turned out, was short for Fernanda. And she seemed to be both alert and intelligent. My grad students in Toronto rarely looked or dressed like this.

Jim introduced us and informed me that Nan was intending to do her Master's thesis on Peacock (not the gaudy-tailed bird, but an early nineteenth century humorous novelist) and so couldn't avoid Gillespie, who had cornered the English novelists up to the Brontes, so far as San Diego State was concerned. These formalities out of the way. he suggested that we go off for lunch, and off we went -- this time to the "faculty rooms," which were fairly jammed, anyway.

I mumbled chitchat to Nan as we walked, gazing fondly (yet hopelessly) at her decolletage. Each of us choosing the least unsavory items from the display, I offered to pay (and, amazingly, was allowed to get away with it), and we seated ourselves outside at an unstable table.

As Nan delicately browsed her way through a blend of cottage cheese and alfalfa sprouts, I played my opening gambit.