Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

“We’re serious, Dr. M. We worry about you. You trust too many people,” says Ed as he leaves. “We’ll do our best to keep checking on you.” She assures them that she will be careful and smiles as she waves for the waitress, thinking how sweet they are and how much more she likes them than her administrators.

Millicent Margrave thinks of herself as M and prefers to be called such. “Just call me M,” she will say with a toss of her head. “That’s the letter M, not Em as in Emily.” She takes a certain delicious pleasure in identifying herself with James Bond’s runner M. She loves the Bond novels, but thinks him something of a fuck-up.

She is an avid reader, too intelligent to ever subscribe to dialectic of any sort. She is in fact far too intellectually curious to do well in an insecure provincial university. That she is there at all is the result of circumstance. Chet, her first husband, finished his degree while she was pregnant and hadn’t yet finished hers, and he managed to get hired at what was then semi-affectionately called Tumbleweed Tech.

The young campus was legendary for its faculty suicides. The acting dean who hired her ex in the ’60s after a telephone interview had driven around and around the campus, then five buildings in the middle of the desert, for weeks, psychologically unable to get out of the car, eventually shooting himself in it in front of Grant Hall the week before their arrival. Chet’s contract rather bizarrely noted that he was a replacement for Mary Ledger. Mary had finished herself off with sleeping pills and booze the previous semester. A new hire, a Shakespeare scholar, killed himself before arriving on campus, which she and Chet giggled was very efficient of him.

Before the first year was out, Chet had fled academe for the neon lights and run off with a change girl from the Silver Slipper, leaving M behind to cope. Desperate, the Political Science department offered to let her fill out his contract. Equally desperate, she agreed. Marco, named after Marco Polo, was born and she settled into a routine of classes, diapers, and finishing her dissertation. As soon as she finished her doctorate, the department offered her a contract at eighty percent of what Chet had been making. She took it, and she’s been there ever since.

Marco was two when M met Les Margrave, the pit boss. He seemed rather Humphrey Bogarty — she’d always liked Bogart, who always seemed to know what he was doing, Casablanca and all that — and two months later married him. Much to the surprise of what she called the M watchers, the marriage, both years of it, was a success. That she retained his name is a mark of that. Little Humphrey was born two months prematurely out of shock when Les was the innocent victim of a shooting in a convenience store robbery.

Grover, the black activist, was her next husband. Their marriage might have worked, she often thought, if he hadn’t attempted to step into Les’s shoes. They tried to make a go of it for three years. Lena was born, a beauty from her first breath, and M and Grover decided to call it quits before their fights ruined the children.

This succession of marriages served to alienate the self-righteous among her colleagues, who certainly outnumbered her friends. “They’re afraid you are having a good time,” Galen used to tell her.

An angular Canadian with a sharp wit and a vast store of knowledge, Galen had been her mainstay after she and Grover split. Her colleagues had been horrified when she married someone from the gaming profession. “She might as well have married a black,” they whispered, the ’50s not far behind them. But she was socially finished when she married Grover, their professed liberalism not extending to their peers. She’d have been finished at the university, too, if she hadn’t pushed for tenure when Les was killed. Galen had shamed them into it. It cost him the chair when the vultures gathered after she married Grover, but he had never reproached her.

Galen was gay and, of necessity, in the closet, so the two of them entered happily into a conspiracy in which they pretended to be lovers, a conspiracy which protected both. Her kids liked him and the affair gave the vultures something to be liberal about. Truth be told, it would have been difficult for anyone observing their intimate laughter to tell that they were friends not lovers.

Leaving Bagel Nosh, M heads for her detested office. On the ground floor facing the quad, its huge windows make her feel vulnerable. Outside her door lurks Danny, the new kid in the department. She doesn’t much like him. He moves oddly, halfway between a slither and a skulk, head tilted to one side. He seems to exist in black-and-white rather than in color. His students bitch about his classes and she thinks he probably isn’t very bright.

“I hope you’re being careful, you know, because of the murders,” he half whispers confidentially.

“Don’t tell me you think I’m in danger.”

“Well, you do fit the pattern. I mean, you are a middle-aged woman and you are pretty well-known for your writing,” he throws out, sidling to the door. She wonders if he’s trying to freak her out or if maybe he’s the murderer. After he leaves, she heads toward the mailroom.

“M, my dear.” It’s Raph, the drunken poet and one of her favorite cohorts on campus, calling from the depths of his cluttered office. He looks like the corrupt cherub that he is, dark curls falling around a baby face just beginning to blur from his excesses.

“What brings you this bright morning to this pustule on the ass of academe? This carbuncle on the posterior of education?” In rare form this morning, his voice rises, “This horripulation on the butt of phrontistery. This ingrown hair in the fanny of the athenaeum. This excoriation in the seat of learning,” he ends with a flourish.

She drops a kiss on his curls. “You’re cute. What’s phrontistry?”

“A disparaging synonym for the educational establishment,” he responds, the laughter leaving his face.

“What’s wrong, Raph?”

“The Little Colonel has stabbed me with his julep stick, hoisted me with his own petard, a chicken bone I believe. In other words, my darling M, he has put me on notice that my performance is unsatisfactory, that I should have published at least another chapbook by now, and I am on my way out.” Raph, née Raphael Waters, looks ready to cry.

“Why that miserable little fucker!”

The Little Colonel is their nickname for their mutual dean, Ned Chauven. Ferret-faced, stubby, arrogant, ignorant, and bigoted, he got his job through Vegas juice, the liquid that greases this city and elevates those who have it to positions for which they are unfit. He married the sister of a regent, and, to no one’s surprise, was lifted from relative obscurity to the deanship after the death of good old Dean Longacre. He has been a worse tyrant than anyone could have imagined, applying a brutal form of publish-or-perish to those he dislikes. Truth be told, while Raph is a popular teacher, he has written very little in the past few years, maintaining that grading freshmen essays depleted his creativity and he shouldn’t be required to publish.

“It’s okay, Raph, We’ll fight. He can’t get away with it.” For a moment, her fighting spirit emerges. “Why did he do it?”

“Do you want the real reason or the good one?”

“Both.”

“Darla Port.”

“Darla Port! The blond twit who used to be the Colonel’s bimbo? No!” she gasped.

“Believe it, my dear M. She’s finished an MFA in creative writing somewhere and had a book of poems published in some obscure place. It’s called ImPort , would you believe, with all the revolting connotations that conjures up; ergo, he’s letting me go for affirmative-action reasons. I’m being replaced by an ugly blonde! She’s the only ugly bimbo I ever knew.”