Wendy Hornsby: The Hanging

“He’s with me.” I glanced at the clock-ten minutes until the end of the class period. “We’re coming right over. We need a powwow.”

I dismissed my class early and hit speed dial again.

“You calling the bastard? Gonna burn Holloway’s fat ass?”

“I’m calling my Uncle Max.”

“Max?” He furrowed his brow. “Why?”

“Sly, my friend.” I brushed the same strand of hair out of his eyes again. “Whether you sue the bastard or kill him, you’re going to need a good lawyer.”

“How about a bowl of pho ?”

“It’s a little early in the day for soup, Lew,” I said, checking my watch. It was just half past ten.

“There’s a pretty decent Vietnamese place over in the Village. Looks like the rain has stopped for a while; I saw some patches of blue sky up there. Sly has things well in hand here, and he seems to have calmed down. I thought it might be a good time to take a break. Stretch our legs, get something warm to eat.”

“Off campus?” I said.

“Yes.” He dropped his head nearer mine and said, pointedly, “Off campus.”

I glanced across the student gallery to make sure that Sly was busy with the engineering students who were helping him assemble the infrastructure for his award-winning sculpture over an eighteen-foot frame. The completed piece would be wheeled over to the administration building where it would be lifted off the frame and hung in the well of the lobby’s grand stairway.

Lew had calmly reassured Sly that Park Holloway had no authority to remove the work, not in a year, not ever. But once Sly was occupied with his work crew, Lew had called the chair of the Academic Senate, History professor Kate Tejeda, and explained why she needed to schedule a meeting right away with Park Holloway. The unveiling ceremony was only a week away and he wanted to make sure there would be no bumps in Sly’s road.

“Maggie?” I turned toward Sly when he called my name. “What do you think?”

I looked at the piece taking form in the center of the gallery.

“It’s amazing,” I said, though so far it was little more than a network of steel cables. “Lew and I are going to get something to eat in the Village. I know you can’t get away right now. Can we bring you something?”

Of course we could; he was nineteen. If the Italian place was open, he’d accept a pizza. If not, a couple of burgers from the diner across from it would do. Until lunch.

I stopped by my faculty office to grab a coat and an umbrella in case it began to rain again, and we set out to walk the four blocks to the Village. There was a brisk, chilly wind. I buttoned up my coat and tried to keep up with Lew’s long stride as we walked through the upscale neighborhood that circled the college. Trees along the street were already in full bloom, like clouds of white and pale pink. Wind gusts swirled fallen blossom petals around our ankles; it was lovely to be out.

Lew Kaufman was about six and a half feet tall, very thin, still on the shady side of fifty but already stoop-shouldered and nearly bald. The hair he had left was pulled into an untidy brown ponytail and tenuously secured with a strip of rawhide. His clothes-jeans, a well-washed Nirvana T-shirt and green high-top Keds-were stained with various art media: paint, ink, charcoal, clay. Like many people who live a life of the mind, he seemed to be oblivious to his outer wrappings. My dad had taught physics at a big public university, so the academic disregard for physical appearances was fully familiar. I found Lew, in a geeky way, to be quite attractive.

We did not speak until we were off campus. Once we were clear, I turned and looked up at him.

“So? Can Park Holloway do what he said?”

“What, take down Sly’s piece in a year?” Hands thrust in deep pockets, focus somewhere in the distance, he shook his head. “Doubtful. Kate Tejeda agreed with me that Park has no authority to do a damn thing to Sly’s piece. But just to dot all the i ’s, Kate and Joan Givens-you met her yet, director of the Foundation?-have asked for a meeting. They’ll explain the tenets of shared governance and the principles of the Magna Carta-not even the king is above the law-and it will all be settled by the end of their meeting.”

“What he told Sly just seemed so…out of left field,” I said. “Any idea what it was about?”

“Muscle flexing.” He looked down at me. “But that’s about normal where Park Holloway is concerned. Maggie, the man is a complete fish out of water trying to run a college campus. None of us can figure out what the hell he’s doing here.”

“Have you heard any ugly scuttlebutt about him?” I asked. “Any rumors about why he left Congress? Or why he came here?”

“You mean like mistresses or naked-photo tweeting, that sort of thing?”

“Any sort of thing.”

“Nope.”

“When he announced that he wouldn’t run for Congress again, he said he wanted to go home and spend more time with his family,” I said.

“Yeah? How often is that excuse a euphemism for ‘I’m in deep shit and I need to get the hell out before it all hits the fan’?”

Lew cocked his head, smiled wickedly. “Besides, his parents are gone, his kids are grown, his wife had already left him, and his home is way up north in the San Joaquin Valley.”

I held up my hands, but offered, “He has a heavy-duty academic degree. Maybe guiding a college is something he’s always wanted to do.”

“Uh-huh.” Lew’s narrow-eyed expression was full of skepticism. “He has a Ph.D. in Chinese Economic Policy from Harvard with a post-doc from the London School of Economics. If that’s what he wanted, wouldn’t you expect him to show up at some elite private college or, even more likely, a big research university? If not there, then a think tank or a major international corporation. So, I ask you, why would a high-power politician-there was talk of him running for governor-bury himself at a two-year community college out in the far fringes of suburbia?”

I chuckled, mulling over what he said. “It’s a mystery.”

“It is that.”

He slipped a hand into the crook of my elbow, a companionable gesture. “That’s not the only mystery around campus.”

“No?”

He shook his head, grinning at me. “Inquiring minds also wonder why a high-power filmmaker like one Maggie MacGowen is teaching lower-division film production at that same community college.”

I put the toe of my boot under a clump of blossoms and watched them scatter to the wind.

“No mystery there,” I said. “Kate Tejeda is an old friend-she was my college roommate. When I told Kate my network series was cancelled, she talked me into signing a one-semester contract to teach here.” I looked up at him. “Something different to do for a little while.”

He looked down at me through narrowed eyes. “Kate told me she was your high-school roommate.”

“That, too,” I said. “Our parents parked us at the same convent school. And then we both went off to Berkeley.”

He smiled wryly. “I can’t imagine either you or Kate in a convent school.”

“Neither could we,” I said. “But we weren’t consulted. Anyway, teaching here gives me an excuse to check in on Sly from time to time and to hang out with Kate more often. The commute’s good.” I pointed up toward the Santa Monica Mountains that rose like a wall on the western edge of the Conejo Valley. “I live right up there in the canyons.”

“It’s just that…” He hesitated, watched a flight of birds migrating overhead rather than looking at me. “You’ve done some really big public exposés. Some folks speculate that you’re here undercover, spying on Park for a film. Or doing undercover work for Kate’s husband-he is chief of police in Anacapa.”