Murder at the B-School Read online

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations and public figures are mentioned, but all other characters and events described in the book are totally imaginary.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2004

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50729-5

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  About the Author

  To Mary Cobb, who was the first person

  to think this story might be interesting

  Acknowledgments

  I want to acknowledge the contributions of a number of people to this book.

  First, of course, is my agent, Helen Rees, who overcame her prejudice against works of fiction and agreed to represent me on this venture.

  Next is my old pal Bob Rodat, who charged me up at a critical juncture.

  Next is the late Sara Ann Freed, my first editor at Mysterious Press, who took a chance on an unfinished manuscript and an unproven mystery writer—thereby breaking her own two cardinal rules, as she told me one day. I was very lucky to have had the benefit of her help. Godspeed, Sara Ann.

  Next is Colin Fox, who picked up where Sara Ann left off. Thanks, Colin. I know I presented some unusual challenges.

  Next is my wife, Ann, and the entire Bryan clan, who passed the manuscript around and came back with encouragement and good ideas.

  And last are all my friends at the B-School: good people at a great institution.

  1

  SOMETHING LIKE A BUZZING FLY GRADUALLY COMING INTO HIS consciousness: It took Patrolman Mattola a few minutes to pin down exactly what was irritating him about the death scene.

  It was the noise of the shower. Or actually, just a piece of that noise. Some trick of the water rushing out, and air rushing in to replace it, creating a high-pitched whine like a liquid drill, boring into those little delicate ear bones he remembered only in a hazy kind of way from the anatomy course he had taken a few years back, when he was working toward a master’s degree on the Quinn Bill—the great, sacred gravy train for Massachusetts police officers—and, of course, the raise that came with the advanced degree. Tympany bones, or some such.

  Plus, it was wasteful. Mattola was a frugal man. The thought of the Quabbin Reservoir, out in the drowned hinterlands of western Massachusetts, slowly being drained by this unplugged hole rubbed his nerves raw. He was tempted, very tempted, to reach behind the half-closed shower curtain and snap the water off.

  But Mattola knew better. If the prints showed that someone other than the dead kid had turned it on, the dusting crew would have earned their keep on this particular assignment. Finding some Boston Police prints on the knob couldn’t help.

  And as corpse-sitting details went, this wasn’t such a bad one.

  Indoors; no gawkers. No flies. No smells, other than the thick industrial perfume of chlorine in the wet air. In fact, if you had to be called in too early on a Monday morning to babysit a stiff, this was the duty you’d pick. The kid was floating facedown in the whirlpool, naked, suspended at forty-five degrees in a limp, looming bird-of-prey pose. The whirlpool’s circle of underwater seats had caught his toes. That, and maybe some foul bubble trapped inside the corpse, prevented the body from sinking any farther.

  As far as Mattola could see—and no one had invited him to get up close—there was very little damage on the kid. Some black-and-blue marks just below the bottom of his hair, where his neck met his shoulders. No blood in or around the pool. No debris. Just a forlorn bottle of Maker’s Mark on the tiled edge of the pool, with that signature cork sitting next to the bottle, red plastic melted down its sides in a pretty good approximation of wax, extending a last mute invitation. Mattola remembered peeling the plastic off one such cork and nibbling on it—perhaps actually eating it, come to think of it—back in his drinking days.

  He sighed, just audibly: Now, there was a bottle of good juice bound for a bad end.

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Nothing’s been touched?”

  “No, ma’am. Just as they found him.”

  Mattola, a shy man, not normally an ogler of women, allowed himself a few furtive once-overs of Captain Barbara Brouillard, known throughout the Boston Police Department as “Ms. Biz”—not necessarily a flattering nickname. First female to make detective. Credited with several high-profile busts, ranging from low-life shenanigans over in East Boston to some genuinely slick white- collar stings. Rumored to make up her own rules from time to time.

  To Mattola’s jaded eyes, she was nothing special. A pile of tangled brown curls, stacked carelessly on top of and behind her head. A blunt, businesslike nose and deep-set eyes, wrinkled at the corners, which looked as if they had seen through way too many people. Probably on the skinny side, although it was hard to tell with all the layers of clothes she was wearing to fend off the Boston winter. A local, Mattola reflected, and we locals naturally look like lumps of dough six or seven months a year, squirreling away whatever heat we come across. Brouillard hadn’t even taken off her heavy trench coat, despite the warm and damp atmosphere.

  This room was designed to be naked in. Idly Mattola imagined everyone in the increasingly cramped whirlpool room—the dusters, the photographers, Brouillard, himself—nude, going about their business, sweating slightly in the damp air. He didn’t get much mileage out of it.

  “All right,” Captain Brouillard said crisply, breaking into Mattola’s low-voltage reveries. “We have our water shots. Let’s get our friend out for some close-ups. And, gentlemen, I want him coming out of the water hole nice and clean—no bruises, please.”

  Mattola caught the eye of his partner, Joe Linehan. Linehan looked heavenward almost imperceptibly and then bent down to untie his shoes. Mattola, grumbling sourly, did the same. There were only two ways to get the meat out of the marsh: the sloppy way and the careful way. The careful way meant you had to get into the marsh with the meat.

  Together, shoes and socks off, pant legs and shirtsleeves rolled up, the two uniformed policemen, who were well into the out-of-shape phase of life, eased themselves down the steps, knee-deep into the surprisingly hot water. A good detail gone bad, sighed Mattola. This was the sort of thing that led to strained lower backs and, sooner or later, to self-righteous stories in the newspapers about deadbeat cops abusing the city’s generous disability policies. They rolled the body over,
hand over hand—just another log in the water, although nicely warmed by the water. Nice face, peach-fuzz body hair, modest endowments. Mattola reached under the corpse’s armpits and maneuvered the dead weight slowly around so that its feet docked in Linehan’s hands. Silently, with purposeful nods and jerks of the head left and right, the two policemen alley-ooped their way up the Jacuzzi’s too-tall and slippery steps: one, pause, two. Water first streamed and then trickled off the body. Its face stared up, vacant and openmouthed, as if it had lost its train of thought in midsentence.

  Gently, gently. But then, as they were easing it down onto the tiled floor, Mattola lost his grip under the right armpit, and the last four inches to the floor closed up instantly. The corpse’s head bumped once, silently, and expelled a small gush of water from its mouth as it settled down for its last photographs, ever.

  Mattola looked up into Brouillard’s weary-looking eyes at precisely that moment. She glided her head left-right, left-right, just perceptibly, as if it rode on ball bearings. It registered every bit of her disapproval of the world’s clumsiness.

  Or more specifically, of his clumsiness.

  2

  WIM VERMEER RECEIVED LARGE VOLUMES OF E-MAIL AT HIS Baker Library office. Anyone monitoring this flow might have mistaken Vermeer for an important person.

  But he wasn’t. The e-mail was mostly academic spam: broadcast junk from professional societies, job hunters, publishers of dubious reputation, TIAA-CREF, credit unions, and so on.

  The truth was, Vermeer was fairly insignificant. He was in his third year as an assistant professor of finance at the Harvard Business School. Three years earlier, brand-new to the campus, he had heard a colleague talking through gritted teeth about his job prospects. “That old tenure train won’t be stopping at my station,” his colleague had said. At the time, Vermeer had resolved that when his own time came, whatever his fate, he wouldn’t impose it on the people around him. But now he was sorely tempted. He knew it was time to get comfortable with the notion of watching the tenure express roar right through the station, leaving him on the platform. Unemployed. And in the rarefied world of high-end business academics, maybe even tainted: If Harvard didn’t think he was worth hanging on to, why should we snap him up?

  The hard fact was, he wasn’t quite good enough. A very good but not great teacher. But he was improving slowly in that department. His student ratings had crept up, semester by semester.

  No, it was his research that would doom him. Looking back, aiming to become the world’s leading authority on the financing of corporate defined-benefit plans was a bad, bad bet, like becoming an expert in carburetors just as fuel injectors were becoming standard equipment in Detroit. Yes, some of the blame for that could be laid at the feet of his thesis adviser, who should have known better. (In retrospect, he should have picked a more mainstream character to guide his work.) Beyond that, though, the hard, simple fact remained: He wasn’t good enough. Even a played-out mine gave up gems to a skilled prospector. He wasn’t finding any gems.

  A well-intentioned senior member of the faculty had tried to offer him comfort a few weeks back. “The fact is,” the old fellow had said, a little wistfully, “you’re exactly the kind of fellow we used to hire. The kind of fellow who used to do very well here.”

  Voice mail was less common. Occasionally, a friend from grad school, now safely ensconced in some second-tier college in the Midwest, would drop an acerbic gibe in his box: Come on out where the land is flat and your chances are better. Or his teaching-group head would phone in, asking for a clarification of some arcane aspect of Vermeer’s recent classroom work. Early in his time at the school, back in the days of unbridled optimism, back when he was still lashing himself to his desk twelve hours per day, six days a week, it would have been difficult even to deposit such a message, because Vermeer would have jumped to pick up the phone whenever his secretary wasn’t there.

  Now he was far less interested in racking up the hours and showing good citizenship skills. And at the same time, fewer people were much inclined to call. That invisible but dense cloud, the cloud of failure, was settling down around his shoulders, he knew, and even once-friendly colleagues on the faculty were trying to open up a little distance between themselves and him. The tenured knew that he’d be gone soon and, except for bonds of affection, really wasn’t worth investing any more time in. The untenured—roughly, people his age and younger—clearly feared contagion. Whatever you’ve got, Wim, we sure don’t want it.

  Pushing the overhanging shelf of blond hair out of his eyes, he sifted through the pile of junk in his in-box. Further clarifications of various Harvard benefits, for which he qualified. But not for much longer. The new Lands’ End catalog, carefully crafted to disguise that company’s acquisition by Sears. What was Thoreau’s famous line? Beware of enterprises that require new clothes. At least he had a closet full of clothes. If he kept an eye on his weight, he thought, reflexively patting his still trim waistline, it might be years before he became noticeably shabby.

  Picking up the entire pile, he put a rubber band around its middle, like a belt. Then he took a half sheet of his letterhead, on which he scrawled, “Make it all go away!” Then he signed the note with a flourish, slipped it under the rubber band, and dumped the whole package into his out-box. Closure, of a sort.

  The phone churbled electronically: once, twice. Vermeer wondered only briefly if the temp outside his office had already gone home—5:25, his watch read—and picked up the handset midway through the third blurp.

  “Vermeer here.”

  “Oh, hello, Wim,” said the receiver. “I’m glad to catch you in.”

  “Uh-huh. Who’s this?”

  “Sorry. Jim Bishop.”

  “Oh. Hello, Dean Bishop.”

  “Got a minute to come over and chat?”

  “Sure.”

  Walking across Peterson Park to Morgan Hall, the seat of power, Vermeer tried to recall the speech he had rehearsed for the next time he had a private session with the dean of the Harvard Business School. He had never worked all the way through this oration, brave and self-exculpatory, because he didn’t really think he’d ever get a chance to deliver it. Now the summons had come.

  But it was still too early in the year for the Bad News: How can we help you make plans for the future, Wim? And the coup de grâce wouldn’t come from Bishop, anyway. It would come from some senior functionary in the Finance area. Someone with gray hair and a brow deeply furrowed with concern. Probably Pirle, Vermeer thought, wincing and pulling his jacket a little more tightly around his chest.

  So what was on Bishop’s mind?

  Whatever it was, it was not likely to be uncomplicated, because Bishop was rarely uncomplicated. Balding, angular, highly cerebral, and thoroughly understated, the dean of the Harvard Business School remained an enigma even to his closest advisers on the faculty, and even after many years in the post. (Vermeer, of course, only knew this from snatches of conversations overheard in the Faculty Club or in the hallways of Morgan Hall.) Rumor had it that Harvard’s president had named Bishop to the deanship a decade ago because he had wanted someone more or less controllable on the Business School side of the Charles River. It hadn’t worked. The president, mistaking subtlety for docility, had wound up with a subordinate who was a grand master at the game of intra-university politics. What Bishop wanted from the university, he almost always got, although it was hard to see him getting it. What the university wanted from Bishop, it almost never got.

  Closer to home, Bishop ran his school in similarly oblique ways. Under his seemingly mild gaze, things somehow happened, almost always producing an outcome that he ultimately declared to be satisfactory. “Very good,” he would say in a tone that implied that the news he was receiving was unexpected but relatively unimportant. (Neither was true.) But if you tried to trace a particular outcome back to Bishop’s hand, you would be frustrated. In most cases, it seemed, his agents didn’t even know they were his agents.

&nb
sp; Ordinarily, the faculty might have rebelled against this kind of leadership by prewiring—a style that certainly wasn’t advocated in the classrooms of Aldrich Hall. Two factors worked in Bishop’s favor, however. The first was that he never took credit for anything. The faculty appreciated hearing, in his quiet tones and full paragraphs, that they were fully responsible for all good things that happened at the school. And the second was that, in fact, good things kept happening at the school. Faculty salaries were among the highest at Harvard. Money for research flowed in a steady stream. Teaching loads stayed reasonably low, and the quality of the students stayed unnaturally high. Creature comforts were well looked after.

  Seen against this benign backdrop, did it matter if Dean Bishop chose to do business in impenetrable ways?

  The dean’s secretaries were still at work. One of the two consequences of tending to the power brokers, Vermeer noted: inhumane hours. The other was the notably stricter dress code that prevailed in the dean’s office. Up in the higher reaches of Baker and Morgan, you’d be hard-pressed to find lipstick and hose. In Dean Bishop’s lair, though, one dressed for success or one moved on.

  “The dean asked that you go right on in, Professor Vermeer,” said the more highly polished of the two youngish women who sat behind a modernist mahogany barricade. Vermeer took a detour past the barricade to the large bowl of M&M’s that sat on an out-of-the-way side table. He was not a regular visitor to these parts, but he knew about the M&M’s. This was how people boosted their blood-sugar levels before venturing into the Den of Inscrutability.

  “Hello, Wim,” said the dean, waving toward an empty chair on the near side of his huge circular table. Vermeer returned the greeting and sat down. Neat stacks of work were arranged around the perimeter of the table, facing outward, like numbers on a great clock face. “You’ll excuse me for not getting up. I played squash this morning with one of our younger colleagues, and I have spent the day getting stiffer and stiffer.”