Free Trip Wire by Charlotte Carter

his pedigree. Not many top Yale scholars wound up on the teaching roster of a small-potatoes institution like Debs College. The regents must’ve licked their chops when he accepted the post. Another reason he still had his job: In a time when so many of the younger profs were defecting to our side of the student-teacher divide, he was one of a handful of holdouts.
    He was a good man of good conscience, but he was more or less apolitical, or maybe
suprapolitical
was a better word for him. You didn’t find him at the Vietnam teach-ins, but he never failed to send in food and coffee to the forces occupying whatever official’s office. He didn’t picket, but he was always good for fifty bucks when the bail-raising committee knocked at his door.
    He didn’t knock points off your grade for poor attendance, either. Nor did he sleep with his students. What he did do, regularly, was smoke dope with them—with one of them anyway. Me.
    Owen, a well-to-do white Southerner raised at arm’s length by a patrician father and succored by a plump, live-in Negro nanny; classically educated and classically handsome; not as old as Nat but a good twelve years older than I; languid; traveled; easy in his body.
    Me, a black Northerner; jumpy and seldom at rest; defensive; odd-looking; born into poverty in the prototype urban slum; never been much of anywhere; bitter about what I didn’t get; in the dark about so much of my past—all those family secrets—feeling haunted by it anyway.
    But intense and unlikely friendships are a major theme in my life. Owen and I had been friends since I landed in his freshman comp class.
    I heard footsteps—faint, Owen in those dumb Fred Astaire slippers of his—but yes, he was coming closer and closer to the front door. He was holding a newspaper when he opened up, his eyeglasses buried up in his hair.
    There was no fooling me, though. He hadn’t been reading the paper; he’d been asleep in his chair, nodding after a couple or four vodkas.
    “I’ve been trying to catch up with you for days,” he said. “Where have you been?”
    “I’ve got to pee, Owen. Bad.”
    “Come on in.”
    There was never anything to eat at Owen’s. Useless in a kitchen—that was one of the many things we had in common. Lipton tea was about the best he could do. I sat in the divine wreckage of his living room with the warm cup in my palms, filling him in on all that had happened, and apologizing for not being in contact sooner.
    “None of it makes any fucking sense,” I said at the end of the narrative. “I don’t know what to do now.”
    “Pick up the telephone. Make your peace with Detective Klaus. Tell him what you saw this afternoon.”
    “I can’t do that yet. Not until I know what the deal is with Barry and Dan. I rat on Barry and the police catch up with him and Dan. You know what Chicago cops are like. They could go in with guns blazing, no questions asked. Can you imagine how awful I’d feel? How guilty?”
    “How awful would you feel if they had something to do with the murders and you let them escape?”
    “That isn’t possible.”
    “How do you know that? Leave it to the police. Please.”
    “That’s the trouble, though. The police. Something isn’t right. It’s not right the way they’re fixed on Dan as a suspect. And it’s not right they haven’t located him. Any more than it’s right that Barry would be the one to stick his neck out by hiding Dan. I don’t know, Owen. I don’t feel good about telling them before I talk it over with Taylor and Beth and Cliff.”
    “Your loyalty to your roommates is admirable. But you’re not a detective. Go home to your aunt and uncle where you can commence to mourn like anyone who’s just lost a close friend.”
    “I’m loyal to Wilton. I’m not going to let go until I find out what happened. After that, there’ll be lots of time for me to mourn.”
    “You’ve already started, my friend,” he said. Then he got up to make himself a drink.
    I