“Ex-wife,” said Denton. “Estranged wife actually. But at least she left me a place to sit, right?” He motioned toward the sofa. “Please, have a seat. I’ll grab a chair for myself.”
He retrieved a low barstool from beside the kitchen counter, positioned it just inside the living room, sat with his bare feet on the top rung. Then he noticed how awkwardly DeMarco was sitting, his feet spread wide to avoid the newspaper.
Denton hopped down off the barstool. “Christ, I’m sorry,” he said and scooped up the newspapers, tossed them into an empty corner. “I live like a fucking bachelor, you know? Can’t seem to bring myself to get this place organized.”
“You and your wife trying to work things out?” DeMarco asked.
“Who the fuck knows? I mean, she wants us to date, you know? So we date. But all she ever wants to do is to haul out all the old baggage. Sorta makes me wonder why we even try.”
DeMarco nodded, said nothing.
Denton grinned. “I do miss the piano though. And she doesn’t even play! She just took it to piss me off.”
DeMarco smiled and said nothing. He already knew that Denton was uncomfortable with silences.
“Anyway, about Tom,” Denton said. “I mean what a fucking shock. The whole university is reeling over it. You guys have any idea where he is? Why he’d do such a thing?”
DeMarco said, “I stopped by your office the other day but you weren’t in yet. I talked to a student who was there waiting for you. Thin. Pretty. Strawberry-blond hair?”
“Heather Ramsey,” Denton said. He waited but couldn’t tolerate the pause for long. “Good student. Very bright.” He shuffled his bare feet on the barstool’s rung. “So uh…I guess you wanted to ask me some things about Tom?”
“I’m just hoping to figure him out,” DeMarco said. “Get a feeling for who he is.”
“He’s my fucking hero,” said Denton. “I mean not now, not after what he did, but… He was my sanctuary, I’ll tell you that. I don’t know how I’m going to survive without him around anymore.”
“Your sanctuary.”
“Yeah, it’s like… I guess you have to know what academia is really like. Inside the ivy tower, you know? It’s filled with pettiness like you wouldn’t believe. Fucking careerists who care more about office space than ideas. Anal, dysthymic…completely dysfunctional outside of the classroom, you know?”
“Except for Thomas Huston.”
“We are the only published writers in the department, did you know that? In an English department of seventeen people. Two creative writers. It’s fucking pathetic.”
“There’s a Professor…Conescu?” DeMarco said.
“He’s a dickhead.”
“How so?”
“In every way so. He is the epitome of academic paranoia. Thinks the whole department is out to get him just because he’s Romanian. Because he has an accent. Because his gypsy grandfather was hanged at Buchenwald. Or so he claims anyway.”
“And are you?”
“Am I…?”
“You and Professor Huston. Were you out to get him?”
“We were out to get rid of him, yes. But only because he’s fucking incompetent. He’s a blight on the entire department.”
“And that’s why he was denied tenure?”
“He never should have been hired in the first place. He should be in a padded room somewhere.”
DeMarco smiled. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notepad, looked at what was written there, put it away again. “So it was you and Dr. Huston who led the vote against him.”
“He’s not a doctor.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tom. He doesn’t have a PhD.”
“But you do.”
“MFA, UC San Diego. PhD, University of Denver.”
DeMarco nodded.
“I mean, that has never mattered to me. The guy’s written two bestsellers.”
“I thought it was four books,” DeMarco said.
“Right, four, same as me. But only two of them, the last two, had significant sales. The first one barely sold at all. It’s my favorite though. For some reason I’ve always liked it the best.”
“You’ve written four books too?”
“It’s poetry, of course. Small presses. Not for the masses.”
DeMarco nodded. He remembered what Huston had written. It’s easy to read between the lines once you get the hang of it.
“So this Conescu,” DeMarco said. “Would he be capable, in your opinion? Of what happened to the Huston family?”
“Are you saying Tom didn’t do it?”
“I’m asking which of the two would be more capable.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the poet said. “More capable? There’s no question. Not in my mind anyway. I mean Tom isn’t perfect… He has his shortcomings, sure, just like everybody else. But something like that? Wiping out the whole family? I just can’t fathom it.”
“What shortcomings?”
“Department wise mostly. He just wasn’t terribly concerned about the business of the department. If it wasn’t his family, his students, or his own writing, he had to be nudged, you know?”
DeMarco thought, His own writing?
“So you think Conescu might have been involved somehow?”
DeMarco smiled. “We don’t know.”
“But you think it’s a possibility?”