Murder at the B-School Page 12

  Mr. Ralph had not seemed surprised or even particularly interested that Vermeer would be driving the Acura to New York State himself. It would be no problem, he said on the phone in his abstemious way, to get Vermeer to the Albany airport afterward. From there he could catch a flight back to Boston. Given the distances involved, however, Vermeer should plan on spending the night at the estate. “As for getting here, I’ll fax you a map and written directions,” he continued. “My understanding is that Master Eric’s car isn’t particularly well suited to winter driving. But the roads here are clear, and I believe the weather looks good for the next several days. So we will expect you the day after tomorrow—say, midafternoon—unless we hear otherwise from you.”

  Vermeer figured out the cruise control, set the Acura at a boring seventy-two, and settled down into his leather hammock. He remembered Mr. Ralph’s mixed assessment of the car three hours later, when he turned off the thruway and headed west on Route 23. This was an old two-lane state highway that soon attacked the eastern flanks of the Catskills. Although the road was bare, there were patches of dirty snow in the shady gullies of the road cuts, and—toward the tops of the mountains—bigger and cleaner white patches in the woods. No, he thought; you wouldn’t take this car, with its treadless tires, oversize engine, and racing transmission, over these mountains in a snowstorm.

  Gradually, the landscape settled down again, although the road never quite gave back the altitude it had captured over the previous twenty miles. The tourist traps and three-state views disappeared. The radio stopped playing Top 40 rock; it was now dominated by country music and white evangelicals. Pickups and SUVs now populated used-car lots. Slowly, the scrubby and overgrown fields of eastern New York gave way to working farms—mostly dairy, Vermeer guessed, judging from the occasional black-and-white herd huddled together in the corners of frozen fields, using one another as shelter against the winter wind. Now and then, a gray-sided barn, complete with vented cupola and green-copper rooster weather vane, pushed up to the very edge of the blacktop.

  The town of Middleford believed in marketing. A roadside sign on the edge of town described Middleford as A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE. In smaller letters, the sign claimed a population of 8,240. A second sign, partially obscured, pointed out that the posted speed limit was thirty. Vermeer slowed to what felt like a throbbing, rumbling standstill.

  The farms stopped and the town started. Middleford was all of about ten blocks long, perched alongside and only slightly above a fast-moving river, which in this season had fringes of thick ice along its banks. There wasn’t much traffic, and there were no parking problems. Middle-ford, Vermeer thought to himself. No doubt there was a Northford and a Southford, or maybe an Eastford and a Westford, somewhere on this river. Today, of course, there were bridges. But in its day this little river had been a formidable obstacle to commerce. There had been ferries and tolls. There had been frustrations and fatalities.

  On the far side of the river, away from the town, a single set of train tracks hugged the riverbank—the MacInnes Railroad? Up from the river and the tracks rose a small mountain, the town- facing side of which had been denuded of its trees to create a short but very steep ski run. Those who ventured down that slope, Vermeer guessed, didn’t worry much about finesse. They worried about stopping.

  Town Hall was an ornate, late-nineteenth-century affair, cream colored, with lots of heavy black trim and the date “1887” prominently displayed in black wrought-iron letters just below the peak of the roof. Two doors down, the Middleford Cinema appeared to be permanently closed. THA K YOU FO YOUR PATRONAGE, read the remaining letters on the marquee.

  The Rope Toe Café, on the far side of town, wasn’t difficult to find. Even in midafternoon in the middle of the week, the bar was the biggest draw in Middleford. A nondescript one-story structure, it was surrounded on three sides by unlined blacktop, with its fourth side backing up against the river. A large rooftop exhaust pipe toward the rear of the building, listing to one side but propped up by numerous homemade braces, emitted a plume of heavy-looking smoke. More than half the vehicles in the parking lot were pickups, many sporting multiple bruises. These were work vehicles: in their scraped-up and dented beds, they carried scraps of lumber, or locked-down tool chests, or hay bales, or cinder blocks, or portable generators. Feeling conspicuous, Vermeer parked the Acura between two of them. He locked the car—understanding that this was a silly habit of the city—and moved quickly down the long sidewalk to get out of the greasy wind.

  Inside, though, the same grease hung in the air undisturbed. So did the ripe smell of beer spilled long ago and never quite cleaned up. A massive carved wooden bar ran almost the full length of the building, its impact doubled by a wall of mirrors behind it. The bar, Vermeer thought, was probably worth more than the building. There was a brass rail near the floor, but no stools. Several dozen men, and here and there a woman, stood in knots along the bar. Almost all were dressed in some combination of jeans, quilted vests, flannel shirts, and muddy work boots. Bud, in bottles, was the beverage of choice at the Rope Toe.

  Several patrons looked over their shoulders to check out the new arrival; not recognizing him, they went back to socializing. A dusty deer’s head mounted above the mirrors trained its glassy eyes on the far wall. On one antler hung a Yankees baseball cap.

  A piece of floor space adjacent to the bar was reserved for a heavy-looking pool table, its green felt surface, not currently in use, brightly lit by a low-hanging fluorescent fixture. Beyond that was an even larger space, empty at the moment. Vermeer guessed it might be used for dancing and, sometimes, fighting. And around the edges of the room were about a dozen sturdy-looking picnic tables, covered by red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloths. The tables came equipped with bolted-on benches. In the whole place, there wasn’t a stick of furniture that was available for throwing. The ketchup, the salt, and the pepper were served up in plastic bottles.

  At one table at the far end of the room sat a youngish-looking man in a plaid flannel shirt. He nodded and beckoned Vermeer with two fingers crooking in tandem.

  “Hi. Dave Westerling. You’ll excuse me if I don’t get all the way up,” he said, half rising and extending a hand. “Once you get parked on one of these benches, you tend to stay put.”

  “Wim Vermeer. Nice to meet you.” Vermeer sat sidesaddle on the facing bench, then swung his legs into position under the table. The goal was to avoid hooking the checked tablecloth and bringing the cluster of plastic bottles into your lap.

  “Welcome to Middleford and the Rope Toe. Rustic, sure, but the best beer in town.”

  Ironic but not nasty, Vermeer decided, scrutinizing his tablemate. Up close, Westerling looked even younger than he had first appeared—barely twenty, it seemed. He had big shoulders attached to muscled arms, light brown hair, and a wide-open face. As he folded his arms on the table, Vermeer sneaked a look at his hands. Like the trucks outside, these were country hands: callused, banged, bruised. At the moment, they were nursing a Bud.

  “I’m told that a Bud is a Bud, everywhere in the world,” Vermeer replied.

  “True. Except in Germany, where Budweiser is actually a type of beer,” Westerling said with a slight smile. “In fact, Eric told me that.”

  The bartender sidled over. He had an aggressively low hairline, which pointed down at the center, toward his eyebrows. His three-quarter-length white apron was clean except at waist level, where it rubbed against the back edge of the bar. At that latitude, there was a broad gray smudge. “What’ll it be?”

  “Bud,” said Vermeer.

  “Dave? You fixed?”

  “All set for now, Nick.” Nick nodded and withdrew.

  “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me on such short notice,” Vermeer said, not sure where to begin.

  “I should be thanking you. When you called, I realized that I really wanted to talk to somebody about Eric. He and I were close.”

  “I know.” Although he was under orders not to say how
he knew. He had a fib prepared, if necessary, but Westerling didn’t ask. “How long had you known him?”

  “Most of my life. My family used to have a dairy farm on the Delphi Turnpike—the last turnoff on the right before you get to the MacInnes place, coming from this direction. I’m sure if you looked back a few generations, you’d find that my family worked for Eric’s family. Maybe they were even indentured servants. It goes back that far, I think.”

  “So you and Eric played together as kids?”

  Westerling smiled. He began slowly shredding the label on his beer bottle. “You mean, like two kids on the same block in the suburbs? Not quite. The distances were a little too far. And the MacInneses don’t mingle much. And you don’t exactly ride your bike over to the MacInneses’ house and ask if Eric can come out to play.

  “So, no, I didn’t play with him like normal kids play. They had a cook named Ellie—a real nice old Irish lady, big as a boat—who believed in the curative powers of unpasteurized milk. Sounds quaint today, with all the hoopla about mad cows and salmonella and hoof-and-mouth. But she’d bring a five-gallon tin over to our milking parlor and sweet-talk my dad into selling some milk to her, fresh from the holding tank, before the company truck came to take it away. Looking back, I suppose she paid good cash money for that milk, since my dad was always glad to see her coming. To a farmer in these parts, cash money is gold.

  “Anyway. Sometimes she’d bring along this little pudgy kid. He’d hide behind her skirts and refuse to make eye contact with anybody. That was Eric. Eventually, somebody decided that Eric needed some exposure to kids his own age. They would send a car for me. A big old black Lincoln. God, I remember scrubbing myself with a bristle brush on the days when I knew that car was coming, trying to get the smell of cow shit off of me.”

  “What was it like, going over there? Did you have fun once you got there?”

  “I never had so much fun in my life,” Westerling replied. The pleasure of the recollection shone from his eyes. “You haven’t seen the place yet? Well, when you do, imagine seeing it through the eyes of an eight-year-old. It was like Disneyland and The Addams Family, all rolled into one.

  “The four of us—Eric, James, Libby, and me—we’d go exploring in the attics of the mansion. Sometimes, if we thought we wouldn’t get caught, we’d ride bikes in the ballroom, scuffing up the floor something terrible, leaving black skid marks. Or we’d play in the carriage house. Which, by the way, was still full of antique carriages last time I looked, probably worth a fortune all by themselves. In the summer we’d swim or go fishing in the lake, which they used to stock with trout each spring—and still do, for all I know. In the winter we’d ride their Flexible Flyer sleds down their driveway, which seemed to go downhill forever. And of course there’d be a truck idling at the gatehouse, waiting to pick us up.

  “And sooner or later, some servant would show up with a tray of goodies. Hot chocolate in the winter, lemonade in the summer. Fresh-baked cookies. Ladyfingers, with a little crust of sugar on top. Have you ever had a fresh-baked ladyfinger?” He smiled at the memory. “So yes, Professor Vermeer, I loved going over to Eric’s house. It was our very own theme park, right here in Middleford. And kids like me never got to go to theme parks.”

  “Did you go to school with him?”

  “No way. The MacInnes kids all had tutors when they were young. Then, one by one, they went off to boarding schools—first Eric, then James, then Libby. Meanwhile, I was getting on the big yellow school bus every day and heading off to the local elementary school. Then the regional schools. I lost touch with Eric for a couple of years in there, somewhere during middle school.

  “We hooked up again a few years ago. By then, of course, things were very different between us. He wasn’t the pudgy, shy kid anymore. He had slimmed down, shaped up, seen the world. Drunk Budweiser in Berlin, and so on. Meanwhile, I was still the hick from the small town.”

  “But you still had enough in common? Despite the changes?”

  Now a guarded look came into Westerling’s eyes. “Well, for sure, we had plenty of memories. And I think as Eric started to understand his, uhm, unusual place in the world, he tended to circle back to the few people who knew him and loved him for himself, way back when. Before the money and the power meant so much. And it didn’t take him long to circle back to me. Because there weren’t very many of us, frankly. Poor little rich kid, in a sense. So he taught me things. I reminded him of things. Maybe I taught him things.”

  The small red and silver shreds of the beer bottle’s label were piling up in a small mound below his fingers. Vermeer wasn’t sure where to go next. A random image of Barbara Brouillard, scribbling on one of her ever-present notepads, came into his mind. “Did you ever meet his girlfriend?”

  “Girlfriend?” Westerling’s face was blank.

  “Jeannette Bartlett. His classmate from Harvard.”

  “Oh. Well, sure, I know Jeannette.” He put a little extra emphasis on her name. “She came out here once with him. And we had dinner together a couple of times when I visited Eric in Boston.”

  “I had the impression that they might be planning to get married, after business school.”

  Westerling pushed some stray label bits back toward the main pile. “Well, that would have surprised me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wouldn’t have guessed Eric to be the marrying type. James, yeah. Libby, for sure. Not Eric.”

  Again, Vermeer wasn’t sure where to go next. He decided to push a little harder. “I have to ask you a tough question. Back in Boston there’s some sense that Eric may have been very unhappy during the last couple of months. The police seem to think that he may have killed himself, or at least put himself in harm’s way.”

  Westerling exhaled slowly, through pursed lips, making his cheeks puff out briefly. “Well, if that’s what they’re thinking, I’d say that they’re way off base.”

  “You think he was reasonably happy?”

  “I don’t think he had ever been happier, at least since he was a kid.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “I am sure of that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he told me, in so many words,” Westerling said a little curtly. “As recently as a week or two ago. We talked on the phone. He had come to terms with a lot of things, starting with himself. He felt he had paid his dues. He had lived up to everyone’s expectations of him. He was prepared to take control of his life, live it on his own terms. He talked about moving to California, starting over. He even asked me if I wanted to go along.”

  “And you said no?”

  “I said no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t real. Although of course Eric wouldn’t have thought in these terms. Trust funds are portable. My life isn’t.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Westerling sighed. “Okay. You really want to know? Two years ago my father had a bad stroke. A real bad stroke. He’s in a local nursing home, more or less paralyzed. We sold the farm, but the proceeds weren’t enough to keep his bills paid and support my mother at the same time. I’m their only child. So I’m needed to stay here and keep an eye on things. And chip in when I can. End of story.”

  “What do you do here? What’s your job, I mean?”

  “I work at the Agway. This time of year, I sell bags of feed to those guys at the bar. In planting season, I sell them seeds. In growing season, I deliver liquid fertilizer to them, and sometimes even apply it if they ask me to. I do some contract pesticide work when something gets out of control. I moonlight a lot.

  “And just so you understand,” Westerling continued in a flat tone, “I count my blessings, in part because my crappy job comes with health insurance. It’s one of the few jobs around here that does. And I count my blessings because my boss is clever enough to let me duck out for a few hours on a slow February afternoon to talk to some professor from out of town who I describe as being in tight with th
e legendary MacInnes family. Which might somehow be good for business, although he can’t quite figure out how.”

  Nick approached the table again. He looked disapprovingly at Westerling’s scrap pile and then at Vermeer’s bottle, which Vermeer had barely touched. Without even slowing down, he swung a wide arc back to where the customers were drinking—and paying.

  This time, Vermeer didn’t attempt to break the silence.

  “You know,” Westerling finally said, looking sideways out the window, “you’re not at all what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I guess I expected a little more . . . insight. Sorry. But I thought you and Eric were close at one point.”

  “I was his favorite teacher last year. At least according to his mother.”

  “I thought you were closer than that.”

  Now it was Vermeer’s turn to be baffled. “Did Eric tell you that?”

  “No. Eric was never comfortable talking in those terms.”

  “So who did? Who was?”

  “Does it matter, Professor Vermeer? If it’s not true, it’s not true. And I could tell the minute you walked through that door that it wasn’t true. So why don’t we just let it go at that?”

  17

  THE MATCHED GRANITE OBELISKS, EIGHT FEET TALL AND MORE than two feet across, with pointed caps, were more than up to the task of supporting the pair of massive iron gates that spanned the driveway leading to the MacInnes estate.

  The gates were painted in high-gloss black. When closed, as they were now, they defined a classic bell curve: low toward the edges and tracing a steep curve up to the peak, where they met. In the dead center of each gate was a large gilded “M.”

  It reminded Vermeer of a high-end cemetery.

  The slate-roofed gatehouse to the right of the driveway, which straddled a heavy fence, was unattended. Vermeer sat behind the wheel of Eric’s Acura, waiting for something to happen.

  Nothing happened.

  There didn’t seem to be a doorbell. He decided that he wasn’t getting out into the bitter afternoon wind any sooner than he had to. He honked once, politely. Nothing happened. But no particular rush: The car had a powerful heater and bun warmers.