At 4:00 p.m., a detective from the New Haven Police Department walked into the German department to ask a few questions. Mainly he was interested in reconstructing the professor’s last day. Ariane told him about the scheduled faculty meeting and gave him a list of the professors who had attended the meeting, plus their phone numbers. She told him that many had immediately left for a conference in Berlin, and gave him the hotel’s phone number, too.
Ariane asked the detective if he knew what had happened. He said the investigation was just beginning. The coroner, he told her, was working on the body to discover important details about the fatal injuries. In the detective’s opinion, a mugger had murdered Werner Hopfgartner, knifing him during the struggle. During their search of the area, the police had found Hopfgartner’s wallet in a trash can, minus any money or credit cards. It looked like a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Before leaving, the detective asked the secretaries why Werner Hopfgartner was walking the dangerous streets of New Haven in the middle of the night. Wasn’t that odd? The professor, Ariane explained, had this long-standing habit of walking home, even in the worst weather. Hiking the paths of the Wienerwald, they called it around the office. Many other professors also walked home, but they lived only about a mile away. The detective thanked her, and said he might be back for more information.
In his apartment, Helmut paced nervously after coming home from work that night. He opened the cabinets underneath the sink to reassure himself that no traces remained from the night before. His reality had to be reality itself. He had to remember what he had actually done, not what he wished he had done. As soon as his eyes did not gaze upon what he affirmed in his head, doubt would seep into his mind. Was blood smeared in some remote corner of his apartment? Had the credit cards not been buried deep enough? Perhaps his clothing hadn’t burned completely and could be traced back to him. What thousands of possibilities! Helmut imagined. He tried to calm himself. He sat down and drank a cup of Red Zinger.
How could he absolutely be certain he had done everything right? He had to retrace his steps. It would be preposterous—suicidal—to return to the scene of the crime. It was too late to correct anything there. But what if he had missed some detail afterwards? Should he assume the mental picture of what he had done that night was correct? He had to check reality with real-time sight. His mind would certainly fool him. It had uncannily possessed him before, when he had found himself in the shadows of Whitney about to do what he could not do. And yet, the deed had still been done.
Helmut picked up the leather jacket. He examined it inch by inch under the light of his desk lamp, holding a wet paper napkin in case he discovered a speck of blood. But the leather was absolutely clean. Helmut stared at the napkin. The bloodied napkins from the night before were still at the bottom of the waste-basket! How many more of these mistakes were strewn behind him like arrows pointed at his back? He lifted the plastic garbage bag out, removed every bit of junk mail with his name on it, and tied up the bag tightly. Helmut dumped his own garbage in a trash can in the alley, and disposed of the garbage bag with the bloodied napkins about two blocks away, in a Dumpster behind the Belnord Apartments.
He walked down Pearl Street and bought a submarine sandwich. He wasn’t going to sit in his room and worry. Outside, he could replay the places and events of the previous night. He might uncover more mistakes. The whole episode had been a ghastly mistake! he thought. But if he discovered a small, important blunder and couldn’t fix it, at least he might anticipate how to respond to it if somebody else discovered it too. When he got home he would also clean his apartment from top to bottom. Then he’d bike to Ariane’s for their twelve days of Christmas vacation together. His apartment would be immaculate; every corner and crevice would be scrubbed clean. Yes, he was probably okay. He was probably safe.
He had one last errand to do. Had anyone noticed the rings around his eyes? No one had said anything. He thought about poor Jonathan Atwater. Helmut had never intended to cause him so much pain. How could Jonathan not have seen the evil in the old man? Certainly Frau Hopfgartner had known about it. This must’ve been how she had kept her husband shackled to her side.
Up ahead, Helmut saw the cavernous darkness underneath the I-91 overpass on Humphrey Street. On the slope rising from the road up to the overpass, he focused on a cardboard box with ‘Whirlpool’ printed on its side. The box walls jiggled; something had moved inside it. Not a soul was on Humphrey or State Street. Traffic on I-91 droned overhead.
Helmut walked up the slope to the cardboard box. He realized he didn’t know the old Cajun’s name. “Hey, New Orleans!” Helmut yelled. The old man stuck his head out of the refrigerator box. He said hello politely enough, but he still sounded wary. Helmut said he had been there to warm himself by the barrel fire the night before.
“I brought you something to eat. If you want it.”
“Shit, yeah,” the old man grumbled.
Helmut held out the submarine sandwich in a paper bag. In the darkness, a hand took the bag from his grasp. The fingers felt rough and gnarled, like an old claw. Helmut heard paper rustle. He asked how he had been. No answer. Helmut was about to leave when he heard a grunt and the paper bag being folded and fussed with.
“You a Yalie?”
Helmut said he wasn’t. He just worked for Yale.
“Good. ‘Cause Yalies turn my stomach. Been over here trying to tell me what to do. Think they own you just ‘cause they feed you.”
Helmut said he didn’t care what New Orleans did. He wasn’t a politician.
“Liberals and conservatives,” the old man snorted. “They’re all a bunch of bastards. Wished the Man would just end it all and burn every living sucker in Hades.”
Helmut asked him what the Yalies had done to him.
“Shit, don’t get me started down that road. Won’t get a good night’s sleep, I’ll be so agitated. They come up here every so often, pushing a needle in my face. What the hell! Don’t do drugs. Just whiskey goddamnit. Want to be left alone. One of ‘em gave me a condom. Wish I had a use for it. Ain’t had me a woman in years. Damn Yale bastards. Don’t know the first thing about you. Don’t know the first thing about shit. Ain’t the worst of it. I’ll tell you a story, young man.
“Used to be living by Whalley Avenue. Near the Holiday Inn. Had my own place in an alley. Shared it with a friend of mine. We were good buddies even though he was a Yankee from Boston. Didn’t mind him at all. We shared food and whiskey and beer and didn’t bother each other at all. If he found something good, he told me. Did the same. But the damn best part was nobody messed with us. Warehouse chief knew we were sleeping in the alley, but he didn’t care. Said hello and even gave us new boxes every couple months, with flaps and steel wiring on the outside, long as we didn’t cause any trouble. And we never did. Even told him when two kids had been scoping out the place. No trouble at all. It was nice.”
Helmut said it sounded like a good place.
“Didn’t stay that way,” the old vagrant said. “No sir. Was them Yale bastards that ruined it for Hoagie and me.
“Hoag and me used to go to the soup kitchen at the church on Broadway. Their meat once gave me the runs, so I didn’t eat it. Didn’t much like anything but the bread and the fish soup and the apples. Good ol’ Hoag used to eat everything on his plate. He had a steel bucket for a stomach. He liked going there. Went with him only when I was too hungry to sleep. Had other ways of getting food. Yale’s just a food machine if you know where to look. Hoag and me went to the church. It’d been getting warm for a while and I hadn’t been for a couple of weeks. Hoag kept yammering about a kid at the soup kitchen. Kid wanted to study ol’ Hoag and he acted like the kid had asked him to move in with him. Hoagie was a surefire sap and as soon as anyone was kind to him he’d get all stupid.”
Helmut asked what kind of study the student wanted to do on his friend.
“Damned if I know. All Yale ever does is study us, or feel big for feeling sorry for us. Don’t need that shit. Kept being told the North’s more enlightened than goddamn Dixie. Poor black folks supposedly had it better up here. Shit if they do. Been here over ten years now, up to Boston and down to New York City. Know what I’ve seen? Mama-suck. They treat you like Mama-suck. Like you know nothing about nothing. Like a man can’t or won’t do for himself. They expect you to be a little nothing shit so they can be big. Sorry feelings never did it for me. Just a different way of putting you down ‘cause you’re a nigger. That’s all it is. Damn Hoagie fell for it and look where it got him.”
Helmut asked New Orleans what happened to Hoag.
“Done arrested him and beat the crap out of him. Hoag and me went to one of them castles at Yale. Kid wanted to do an interview with ol’ Hoag and he asked me to come with him ‘cause he didn’t really know Yale. Like an idiot, I went. Went up to where the kid told us to meet him. Went and waited in a corner where no one would see us, inside the gates and next to bicycles rusted up and mangled. We’d see other Yalies, eating and laughing and carrying on. But no kid. Waited and waited ‘til it was dark and I got tired and told Hoag I wasn’t about to wait anymore. Hoagie said he’d take a look around.
“I waited for Hoag. Took a leak and thought I could still get myself some scraps from the Dumpster behind the big white castle next to the cemetery. Fucking Hoag. I was getting real pissed at him. Then I saw the police. Saw students running and yelling. Somebody crying. Couldn’t see much ‘cause it was dark. But I heard ‘em drag out Hoagie. Heard him screaming that he was looking for somebody, that he hadn’t touched her. ‘Interview! Ain’t been interviewed, you Christ-fuck!’ Damned if I didn’t hear them kids laughing at Hoagie. I got the hell out of there. The next day Ralphie The Snake asked me what party Hoag and I had been to. Told him I didn’t know what he was yammering about. Told me he had found old Hoag by the railroad tracks next to the coliseum. Moaning and in pretty bad shape. I went looking for him. Never found him. Never came back to the warehouse, either. And after some bastards broke into it, manager said I had to get out of the alley. Said he was taking too much heat about it. Said he was sorry. I didn’t mind his I’m-sorry. I knew he was.”
Helmut tried to make out the old man in the shadows. He told New Orleans about his father’s death in Germany, about how much he missed him although he had never really known him. Helmut told him about his mother in New Mexico, and about how he didn’t like New Haven and wanted to leave it soon. New Orleans said he didn’t blame him. What was Helmut waiting for?
“No need to wait to be happy if your family wants you,” New Orleans said. His family had run him out of Louisiana. His brother-in-law and his uncle, the preacher, wanted to kill him for philandering and propagating his seed and slapping his woman.
“Leave before your heart’s dead as wood,” the old man continued. “This town’s a deathtrap.”
“I will. But certain things are keeping me here.”
“What kind of things? A woman?”
“Yes, my girlfriend.”
“Is it love?” New Orleans asked. “‘Cause if it’s love, might be worth staying until you can take her with you.”
“I don’t know what love is.”
New Orleans chortled and coughed so loudly Helmut thought the old man would choke. Then he gurgled and made a sound like a muffled backfire, and a big ball of phlegm splashed onto the hard ground.
After New Orleans settled down, he told Helmut he was most likely in love.
“Love’s the kind of thing you know you don’t have when you don’t have it. But when you have it, well, you won’t admit it. It’s that kind of powerful thing, love is. When you have it, it has you. That’s the best, but most terrifyin’ part,” New Orleans said. Before he met his wife, he had also been in love. He still remembered this woman’s face, the softness of her skin, the way she would twirl herself around him like a whirlwind. New Orleans said he couldn’t tell him what love was, but only that he once had it, and he had lost it, and lost her, because he had been afraid of it, afraid it would somehow emasculate him. And he had been dead wrong. Since this time, he had been trying to find again “a kind of living on earth in complete glory.” But he never found it with his wife. Nor with any other woman. Not in Louisiana. Certainly not in New Haven. And probably not ever again. So if he had found love, the best thing was to grab hold of her and ignore the witless part of his manhood. Helmut might not ever get a second chance.
The old man thanked him for the sandwich and the company, and Helmut said goodbye to his Father Confessor. Helmut walked home, thinking about New Orleans asleep in his Whirlpool box. How do you sleep in a Whirlpool box? How do you sleep when you’re hungry? How do you sleep when you’re haunted by what you have done?