Nemesis by Joyce Carol Oates
“And why you, Miss Blackburn? Why did the potential killer single out you? Were you close to the victim; was there any special reason for you and him to be coupled together?”
Coupled together! Maggie Blackburn was struck too by this expression and for a moment could not speak.
The detective had asked his question in a matter-of-fact, even perfunctory voice, and the question was certainly logical; yet it made Maggie strangely nervous, and she stammered slightly as she replied. “I—I don’t know. I’m afraid I—I don’t know.”
And truly she did not. She had no idea.
Next, the detective asked Maggie to tell him anything she could about Rolfe Christensen that might be helpful: what she knew of him, what her relationship with him had been, what enemies he might have had. Maggie spoke hesitantly, even shyly, in starts and stops; she shrank from saying anything critical of the dead man for it all seemed, now, beside the point. When pressed by Miles to be more specific, she said, reluctantly, “He had the reputation here of being ‘difficult.’ I didn’t know him well, I’m afraid. I don’t believe we’d ever had a single conversation in all the years I’ve been here. I … I wasn’t a member of the Christensen circle.” This was misleading and not at all what Maggie meant to say. She added vaguely, “He was a sort of mystery to me, I suppose.” But neither was this what she meant to say.
“A mystery? In what way?”
But Maggie had no idea what she meant.
So the interview, rather awkwardly, continued.
From time to time Detective Sergeant Miles offered Maggie—“Professor Margaret Blackburn, Dept. of Piano” in his notes—a measured little half-smile. He must have sensed her anxiety, and something perhaps deeper, set in opposition to him and his investigation. On her side, Maggie saw the policeman in the deceptive mode of Dr. Rayburn, an early dentist of hers back in St. Paul. Please sit still, no pain, just relax, dear, I promise no pain. But in fact there was always pain. There was only the matter of when it would come.
Then abruptly Miles was asking Maggie about Brendan Bauer: hadn’t the graduate student reported having been sexually assaulted by Rolfe Christensen some weeks ago; hadn’t he in fact come to Maggie herself? Reluctantly, wincing, Maggie admitted it was so. Then added, “I’m director of the Music Education Program. All the graduate students in the program come to me for registration and counseling.” She felt a sick sort of despair, for she saw where the detective’s questions must lead.
As Maggie should have known, Miles knew a good deal about what had happened. He knew that Brendan had come first to Maggie, that she’d counseled him to go to the Conservatory administration, and that the hearings were closed—“Kept under cover, right?”
“The hearings were private; I wasn’t a part of them. You’ll have to ask—”
“Yes,” Miles said curtly, “we will. We have. Where murder has been committed, that sort of confidentiality no longer holds.” The detective was not discourteous, but he looked at Maggie Blackburn with a measure of irony. “It might have been better if the assault had been reported to the police. Bauer has told us he was counseled not to report it.”
Maggie said quickly, her face warm, “But not by me. I told Brendan he should go to the police—to you. He should have pressed charges. He spoke of what Christensen had done to him as rape and said he was terrified he’d be killed; he may even have been tied up for part of the time—it was outrageous. It was a crime.”
“Yes,” Miles said emphatically. “It was a crime, if it happened the way he described it.”
“Certainly it happened,” Maggie said. “I saw Brendan the next day. I was the first person who saw him. He’d been beaten—battered. There was a large bruise over his left eye, he walked wincing with pain, even his glasses had been broken. At first he could hardly bring himself to tell me what Christensen had done to him—I don’t think he really told me everything. He—”
“This was back in September? September eighteenth?”
“Yes. He didn’t want to report the assault to the Conservatory at first, but I encouraged him, and so he did, and after that it was out of my hands and, as I’ve said, private. I think for a while Brendan had intended to go to the police but he was dissuaded by the administration. By the school’s attorney.” Maggie spoke rapidly, impassioned. “I can’t blame the administration for hoping to avoid unfavorable publicity, but I do blame them for putting their own interests above those of one of their students. Brendan Bauer was too trusting; he seems to have trusted everyone! I gather you’ve spoken with him, Mr. Miles? Then you know how sensitive he is, how young, a shy, innocent, delicate sort of person.…”
Miles appeared to be agreeing with Maggie, at least in theory. But he said, “Brendan Bauer is a name a number of your colleagues have suggested as someone who might have had a strong motive to kill Christensen. It seems to us fairly reasonable. He has denied it, and no one has accused him, and there isn’t as yet any evidence to link him with the poisoning, but the motive is certainly there. In fact, we know that Bauer made threats to kill Christensen in front of witnesses.”
Maggie Blackburn stared at the detective as if neither hearing nor comprehending.
She said, “I’d thought—wasn’t the person who bought the chocolates a woman? In the newspaper—”
Miles said guardedly, “The description we have is of a woman, yes. But it’s a description that could also fit a man—a man in disguise. The sales clerk stressed that. And there are other details that aren’t incongruous with Bauer.… And even if the person who bought the chocolates were someone other than Bauer, Bauer could still have prepared them for mailing. He might have had help. He’s the one with the obvious motive.”
Half pleadingly Maggie said, “Oh, but there may be many people, countless people, with motives.… I’m sure my colleagues have told you, Mr. Miles, that Rolfe Christensen was a much disliked man.”
“But Bauer is actually on record, on tape in fact, as saying he’d have liked to kill Christensen, only a few weeks ago. The tape we heard reveals him as quite emotional.” Miles paused, regarding Maggie with his encouraging little smile. “But he seems not to have said such things in your hearing, Miss Blackburn?”
“I … I don’t remember.”
“Threats against Christensen, remarks like that? ‘I’m sorry I didn’t kill him when I had the chance’?”
Maggie shook her head adamantly. “I would remember if he had, and I don’t remember.”
“Others seem to remember.”
Again Maggie shook her head, perplexed and despairing.
Miles said patiently, “You appear to be very protective of this student, Miss Blackburn. Do you know him well? Can you attest to his character? He’s new to Forest Park, isn’t he?”
“I think I am a fairly good judge of character,” Maggie said. “I … I believe that I am.”
“But he is new to Forest Park, isn’t he? An ex-seminary student from St. Louis, who had been advised to quit because of emotional problems?”
“‘Emotional problems’? I hadn’t heard that.” Maggie pressed her fingertips against her eyes. She said almost desperately, “This is so cruel! Such a nightmare! First, a student is savagely victimized by the very man he’d come two thousand miles to study with—then he’s victimized, in another way, by the school in which he has enrolled—and his rapist is rewarded. And now through no fault of his own he is being victimized by—”
“This young man Bauer isn’t being ‘victimized’ by police, Miss Blackburn, I assure you. We’ve talked to him. He could have engaged a lawyer, but he declined—he isn’t under arrest—we’ve asked him not to leave the area without notifying us, that’s all. As I said, no one has accused him—none of your colleagues has seriously suggested he might have committed the poisoning—and so far there isn’t any evidence linking him with the crime.”
Maggie shook her head slowly. Her thoughts were racing, but to no purpose.
Miles persisted. “You are convinced that Baue
“Of course I’m convinced,” Maggie said. Her voice was surprisingly shrill in her own ears. “In fact, there is no one in Forest Park less likely to have killed Rolfe Christensen than Brendan Bauer.”
No sooner had she uttered these extravagant words than Maggie wondered why she’d done so; such dramatic hyperbole was more in the style of Portia MacLeod than of Maggie Blackburn.
Miles said, smiling, “Yes? Really?”
He asked Maggie several more questions before at last closing his notepad and preparing to leave. On his feet, he seemed less imposing; he was scarcely Maggie’s height: a small, compact man with an air of equanimity. He wore a suit of an ordinary fit, neither inexpensive nor expensive. His skin was rough, slightly pitted, perhaps by acne scars. Afterward, thinking over the interview and not at all happy with her performance, Maggie would recall Detective Sergeant David Miles’s practiced, professional ease; the lack of surprise he’d shown when, with no warning, Maggie had begun speaking recklessly. Why did I say such things? Why did I become so emotional?
Of course, Miles was a policeman. A member of the general species to which Maggie’s father had once belonged. Evoking emotion in others, they took care not to betray it in themselves, for that was hardly to their advantage.
When, in parting, they shook hands—shaking hands was a ritual Maggie Blackburn took care to cultivate in her dealings with men; she knew it a ritual men took seriously—Maggie made an effort to soften the effect of her strong opinions. She smiled apologetically. She reiterated her certainty that Brendan was wholly unconnected with the poisoning; that she hoped police would not trouble him further, since he’d gone through such a wretched period these past few months. In fact she’d been worried, for a while, that he might be despondent, even suicidal; fortunately he’d gone to a psychotherapist on campus. She said pleadingly, “Brendan isn’t the type for any kind of violence, though. I know. I know he isn’t. I’d swear to it, Mr. Miles—he simply isn’t the type.”
Detective Miles, leaving, said, not sarcastically, or even ironically, but merely as a statement of fact, as if it were a matter Maggie Blackburn ought to know, “Poison is the weapon of choice, Miss Blackburn, for exactly that type of personality: the kind that can’t bear violence.”
Maggie had been planning to spend part of the holidays in Key West with a friend, a pianist and teacher, and the friend’s businessman husband, both of whom she had known in graduate school in Boston; but, as the date of her flight approached, she decided she could not leave Forest Park with so much undecided, the police investigation unresolved, and Brendan Bauer, the sole suspect, alone and friendless.
14
“It’s an honor, yes. An honor I had not expected.”
So Nicholas Reickmann, choosing his words carefully, his expression grave, spoke of having been named Rolfe Christensen’s literary executor: the overseer of the composer’s voluminous files, both in his home and in his Conservatory office, containing thousands of pages of notes, drafts of compositions, manuscripts, journals, letters both personal and professional (letters written to Christensen and carbon copies of letters written by Christensen, the earliest dating back to 1944), tapes of musical performances of Christensen’s work, photographs, reviews, articles on Christensen, tapes of conversations with distinguished people (Christensen talking to Stravinsky, Britten, Pablo Casals, numerous others), and tapes of interviews (Christensen being interviewed, for instance, by National Public Radio, virtually every year since 1971). There were perhaps forty cartons of such materials, Nicholas said—apart from the files, which Christensen had kept religiously up to date. There were bureau, desk, and kitchen drawers stuffed with memorabilia; there were papers, including program notes, stuffed into books on shelves; there was even, apparently, a special archive kept by the composer in a safety deposit box in a Bridgeport bank, which Nicholas had not yet seen. Most of these materials, which constituted Rolfe Christensen’s literary estate, Nicholas Reickmann had not had the opportunity, by the time of his death in mid-January 1989, to examine.
Among the younger instructors at the Forest Park Conservatory, Nicholas Reickmann, swarthy-skinned, dark-haired, unfailingly self-dramatizing, was one of the most admired and emulated, by students at least; and yet, in the community, the most controversial. He was “Nicholas Reickmann” in public, “Nicky R.” in private. (In the hastily drawn-up document dated November 15, 1988, in which, in effect, Rolfe Christensen repudiated his old friend Bill Queller and named Nicholas Reickmann his literary executor in Queller’s place, Reickmann was referred to somewhat flirtatiously as “Nicky Reickmann” and “Nicky R.”) He was an accomplished clarinetist and played for the Forest Park Woodwind Quintet and for the Conservatory Orchestra and the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, and he shared with that instrument a certain enigmatic tone: to some observers his manner was coolly and impeccably stylized and impenetrable; to others it was direct, intimate, seductive. He had no single lover but it was rumored he had lovers; he was careful not to encourage disciples among the young; he accepted social invitations—he was, of course, extremely popular—but rarely reciprocated except to send, now and then, enormous bouquets of flowers to his hostess friends (like Portia MacLeod, who was very fond of him). His older colleagues tended to distrust him; his contemporaries were drawn to him yet frequently rebuffed, not by actual words, or even gestures, but by the young man’s calm cool studied façade. “It’s complained of you, Nicky, that you are inaccessible,” Rolfe Christensen once observed, and Nicholas Reickmann said happily, “Oh, yes!”
Of course, Nicholas dressed beautifully and expensively; he owned, he confessed, more than two hundred neckties—“and each a work of art.” He collected novelty wristwatches, oversized rings, hand-tooled leather boots. If at times his clothes looked slapdash, even jarring, if now and then they had the thrown-together appearance of an ensemble of mismatched instruments, this was precisely the look Nicholas Reickmann strove to achieve, the look currently fashionable on West Broadway, SoHo. Nicholas had very dark eyes set wide in his face, and an olive-dark skin, a full sensuous mouth, features that seemed to some observers as Arabic, exotic—though in fact he had been born, in 1956, in Westchester County, New York; his severely styled hair with its maroon-red-synthetic sheen lifted from his forehead in quills that appeared waxed, and he wore a tiny diamond in his left earlobe, sparkling as a tear. Like many flamboyantly handsome men he exerted himself in gestures or mannerisms of simple kindness; so gifted by nature (and by art: Nicholas was a superb musician) he had no need for vanity but believed it his obligation to spread himself about, however impersonally, multitiered as a wedding cake. Thus to attractive young women like Maggie Blackburn, Nicholas behaved no differently than he behaved, for instance, to elderly women or to most men. Maggie was not immune to the young man’s charismatic charm and would have been somewhat overwhelmed by him—except of course she knew better—when Nicholas Reickmann sought her out, clasped her hand, stared into her eyes, and said breathlessly, “Maggie, dear, where have you been? I’ve been missing you!” It was no less a performance than his clarinet playing, and no less practiced.
As local legend had it, the first time Rolfe Christensen heard Nicholas Reickmann play his clarinet, in a scintillating Mozart quintet for clarinet and strings performed at the Conservatory, he’d had to shut his eyes hard to concentrate on the music—otherwise, he said, he’d have been too “actively aroused.”
Christensen told of his uncomfortable experience in bawdy, comical, anecdotal terms, crude in some ears but rather endearing in others. When, as Christensen surely intended it, the anecdote was repeated to Nicholas, the young clarinetist had been both deeply embarrassed and excited. But he’d said, his cheeks tinged with scarlet, “Doesn’t he know that lacks finesse!”
For weeks during Nicholas Reickmann’s first year at the Conservatory, Rolfe Christensen had pursued him openly—as well as clan
Nicholas was, however, for all his provocative behavior, a truly congenial young man. He had a horror of making enemies—the very antithesis, in fact, of Rolfe Christensen, who was given to say that it was enemies, not friends, who kept him on his toes—and tried very hard not to stir displeasure or disapproval in others. After the astounding revelation that he, and not Bill Queller, was to be Rolfe Christensen’s executor—a role and a burden Nicholas Reickmann, in secret, did not at all covet—he went immediately to the older man, whose much-abraded affection for Christensen had endured for more than twenty years, and said, with genuine regret, “Bill, I can’t explain it, I won’t try, but I’m damned sorry. Will you—can you—forgive me?” and Bill Queller sniffed and cast a cold, hurt eye on young Nicky R., and said with dignity, “Oh, of course I’ll forgive you—but never him.”
The men remained friends. In a time in which, in certain melancholy circles, the ravages of AIDS had depleted their population of friends, acquaintances, admirable and irreplaceable contemporaries, neither Nicholas Reickmann nor Bill Queller could afford to cast each other off. Nicholas assured Bill that Rolfe Christensen would certainly have changed his mind and tossed out that hastily concocted document, for he was a man of mercurial moods and far too thin-skinned for his own good. “You criticized him for what he’d done to the Bauer boy,” Nicholas said, “and he felt you betrayed him. You know how he needed constant unflagging support from his friends.”