Murder at the B-School Read online

  “None of your clocks sound.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That clock in the corner didn’t sound the nine hour. The clock in the dining room didn’t ring, either. And I don’t recall the clocks in the hallways making any noise, either.”

  “Very good, Professor. Very good.” MacInnes nodded his great silver-and-gray head approvingly. “The clocks that didn’t strike. Like the dog that failed to bark in the Conan Doyle story. Very observant. Well, they’ve been rigged not to sound. You can imagine the din, every quarter hour. And the ruckus at noon and midnight.”

  “But it wasn’t really that, was it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Based on personal experience—his family had a houseful of striking clocks when he was a boy—Vermeer felt he was on firm ground. He also felt it was time to stake out some territory. “No, I’d say that someone in your house suffers from insomnia. Someone can’t stand to hear those sleepless quarter hours slipping by, hour after hour. Someone with the power to wave his wand and make all these heirlooms go mute. You, for example.”

  The old man waved his cigar hand impatiently. “We’re not here to discuss my sleeping habits.”

  “Nor my sex life. I hope.”

  “Fair enough. So let me get to my point, Professor Vermeer. As you say, there is a police investigation under way. I’m told that Captain Brouillard is both competent and tenacious. That’s good. I’m guessing that your role, whether you know it or not, is to make this investigation go away. That’s not good. So I want to change your incentives.

  “I have no idea if Eric was murdered,” he went on. “If he drowned in a drunken stupor after some illicit tryst in a building where he had no business being, well, that’s for our God to pass His judgment on.

  “But if he was murdered, there’s some chance that was a purposeful blow against this family. Or against its enterprises.

  “Which is entirely unacceptable.

  “Which is why I am offering a reward of one million dollars for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Eric’s murderer—if, indeed, he had one.

  “And believe me, Professor Vermeer, if it were legal to offer a bounty for a head on a plate, I would just as happily do that. In either case: one million dollars.”

  18

  BREAKFAST, FORTUNATELY, WAS NOT A GROUP AFFAIR. MR. Ralph, who evidently rose and set with the sun, was hovering in the front hall when Vermeer came down the grand stairway shortly after the clocks failed to strike 8:00.

  “You slept well, I trust?”

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. Ralph.” There was no one within earshot. “That is, once I stopped worrying about the fact that until very recently, my host suspected me of seducing his son.”

  “Ah, well, I would know nothing about that.” His face was pleasant stone. “Do come into the kitchen for some breakfast. I should warn you that it’s rather informal.”

  “That will be a relief.”

  The kitchen, as full of sunlight as the rest of the house was gloomy, was a living museum of cooking paraphernalia. There was what appeared to be a functioning, or at least scrupulously maintained, oak ice chest. Next to it was a Norge refrigerator, at least a half century old, with a compressor on top. It was definitely in use. And next in line was a sleek new Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer combination. An enormous gas stove, with a dozen burners and some other elements that Vermeer didn’t recognize, squatted as a massive island in the middle of the room. A brightly polished copper exhaust hood extended all the way above the island, just out of forehead-bashing range.

  Mrs. Talley and Patrique nursed coffee mugs at an enamel-topped table in a sunlit corner. They floated away from the table the moment they saw Vermeer enter. Despite his protests, they refused to sit down again.

  “So what can we get you to eat?” At this time of day, Mrs. Talley wore a white uniform under her white apron.

  “Uhm, let’s see. How about toast, orange juice, and black coffee? If that’s not too much of a bother.”

  “Not at all, not at all. Although it doesn’t sound like enough. It’ll be just a moment.” She bustled off.

  Vermeer looked around. In the instant that he had been placing his order, both Mr. Ralph and Patrique had disappeared, Cheshire cat-like. He wondered if the MacInnes staff practiced their appearances and disappearances.

  “Mr. Ralph asked me to tell you that he has booked you onto a noon flight from Albany to Boston,” Mrs. Talley called from across the room. “He suggests that you plan on leaving here no later than nine. Patrique has volunteered to drive you.”

  “Perfect.” At this point Vermeer was not eager to spend any more time than absolutely necessary at Castle MacInnes. And if two hours in a car was the price of an exit visa, Patrique seemed like the most affable of the bunch.

  “Mr. and Mrs. MacInnes send their regards,” she continued, reappearing with his coffee and juice, “and also their regrets that they won’t be able to see you off this morning.”

  “Sleeping in?”

  “Oh, goodness, no,” she said. She seemed astonished at the notion. She offered no further explanation. On her next trip back to the table, she carried a plate of toast and a tray of jams, jellies, and two kinds of butter. And a small white envelope with precise-looking handwriting on it.

  “Oh, and before she went out, Miss Libby asked me to give this to you.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Talley.” He dropped the envelope casually on the table and picked up a knife. “I would call this a perfect breakfast.”

  “Well, thank you, sir.”

  “Will Libby be back this morning? She told me last night that she wanted to talk.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  The envelope had his name written on the front. He turned it over. On the back flap was the “M,” this time embossed. Sealed.

  He used a spare butter knife—heavy, lots of tooling—to open it. Inside was a single sheet of notepaper, folded in half. He unfolded the note. He scrolled past yet another embossed “M” to the four words on the page.

  “Please be careful,” it read, in the same studied handwriting. “Libby.”

  19

  ART DEMING HAD BEEN ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, CAPTAIN BARBARA Brouillard noted silently and grumpily. Reviewing several months’ worth of e-mail, matching up incoming and outgoing messages, was a crappy job. A drudge job.

  Especially because she wasn’t learning anything. She already knew that Eric MacInnes was a very bright, superficial, and overprivileged young snot. Almost two thousand e-mails later, coming and going, she knew exactly the same thing, although now there was a lot more embroidery around the edges.

  Maybe the kid had had it drummed into him: Don’t commit anything important to writing. It was a lesson that she herself had certainly learned, in a very different context. And Eric MacInnes probably had far more to hide than she did.

  She got up from the Formica-covered table in her tiny kitchen, rubbing her temples. She had taken the pile of work home, on the theory that it would go faster without the distractions of the office. It wasn’t going fast.

  Rummaging in the refrigerator, she wound up digging deep into the fruit drawer. Time to go to market. Thank God for Granny Smiths, down there at the bottom of the drawer with the last shriveling lemon, dependably immortal.

  Her tiny apartment, referred to by unembarrassed real estate agents as a “one-bedroom,” looked out over an alley off Commonwealth Avenue in the student ghettos of Brighton.

  The previous tenant, a nursing student living alone, had been burglarized. To Brouillard’s eye, this should have come as no surprise. The fire escape outside the third-story window went all the way to the ground, in the alley, where no one would be keeping an eye on it after dark. The nursing student was the third tenant in a row to be burglarized and to move out in a hurry.

  Brouillard had moved in happily, celebrating the artificially low rent. On her third night here, while she was dozing off in the dark in her oversize wingback chair with
the ottoman—a technique she had discovered for relaxing after a bad day at the office—there was a light scuttling on the fire escape. She came wide awake instantly. Then there was some probing of the first of the three windows that opened out onto the fire escape. Then the second. And finally, the third, which soon gave way to the burglar’s determined nudging and poking.

  Up went the sash, slowly and quietly, until it stopped at about two feet, where Brouillard had nailed in some homemade stops. So that there would be enough of an opening to squeeze through, but it wouldn’t be easy. She heard a whispered “Shit.”

  Into the dark living room came a foot, toes pointed upward. Then a second foot. She waited until half a torso, topped by a gaudy silver-plated belt buckle, was inside. A hand gripped the windowsill on either side of the torso.

  “Police. Freeze.”

  The torso froze.

  “Okay. Now. Bring the rest of you in through the window, nice and slow. But keep both hands just like they are, right there on the bottom of that window where I can see them. But before you do, listen carefully, and tell me what you hear.”

  She cocked her automatic, which she had kept at her side for just this eventuality. A quavering voice, youngish, came through the window: “A gun. A gun being cocked.”

  “Right. So you’re ready to do what I say. Come on in.”

  A quaking body, topped by a head in a ski mask, squeezed its way in feetfirst, knocking over a potted plant on the way. The clay pot shattered on the window seat. The body flinched.

  Now she turned on the light next to her. It was very bright. “Don’t worry about the plant,” she said. “Keep sliding in. And keep those hands right out in the open. Like you’re doing the limbo.” She doubted if her intruder knew what the limbo was, but she liked the analogy.

  Body and masked head were now totally inside the room. His heels touched the floor, and the small of his rigid back was arched against the edge of the window seat. He looked like a kid sliding feetfirst down a slide. Except for the mask, of course, and the fact that there was no slide. Brouillard guessed that the edge of the window seat was now digging deeply into the kidneys of her visitor. There might well be some clay shards wedged in there, too.

  “Very good. Now. Right hand stays right where it is, and left hand moves to the head and takes off the mask.”

  He did as he was told. Off came the mask. He was twentyish, of mixed backgrounds: a little of this, a little of that. He was shaking visibly. Gold post in his left ear. A gold tooth. Prominent mole on his cheek.

  “Excellent. Now. Whole body stays very still while you pose for a picture.” Keeping the .38 trained on him with her right hand, she reached for the Polaroid camera standing at the ready on the side table. Flash. Out rolled a white square. Flash. Out rolled another white square. They fell on the floor as she put the camera back down.

  “Okay. Now you’re going to tell me your name. Don’t even risk making me think you’re lying, because I’ll shoot you. Home invasion. Self-defense.”

  He was twitching now—a combination of fear and muscle fatigue. “William L. Busby, ma’am! Don’t shoot me!”

  “You pretty sure that’s your name?”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am!”

  The telltale response, inscribed so deeply into every young soldier’s and sailor’s brain that it reemerged under stress, like hives, forever after. “Which branch of the service were you with?”

  “Army, ma’am!”

  “What part of town you from, Private Busby?”

  “JP, ma’am!”

  “Jamaica Plain. So you’re pretty far from home. You’re the same guy that did the last three jobs here, too?”

  “No, ma’am! Al Dunphy, he done the others. He’s doing time at Cedar Junction. He told me about it. His idea. Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Well, maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. But for now, I want you to reach up as high as you can on my window with your left hand, spread your fingers, and push those fingers against the glass. Roll ’em from left to right, like you’re taking your own fingerprints. Which you are. Nice and slow. No smearing. Very good. Now the right hand. By the way, didn’t Al tell you to wear gloves?”

  Rolling his fingers, he didn’t answer. He was shaking violently.

  “Okay, Private Busby. Here’s the deal. I have two nice pictures of you here, and a full set of prints.” No matter that the Polaroids didn’t actually reveal very much. “I’m going to take one of these pictures to the police station where I work, and put it up on the bulletin board. And I’m going to send the other one over to my friends at District 12, in JP, and they’ll put it up on their bulletin board. And I’m going to run your prints against the government’s central file, and I’m going to check whether your name is really William L. Busby. But that won’t matter a whole hell of a lot, because everybody will know that the guy in the picture with the gold tooth and the nasty mole on his left cheek tried to rob a Boston police detective. Get it?”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am!”

  “And one more thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “I want you to tell all of your friends—every one of them—to stay clear of the thirteen-hundred block of Commonwealth Avenue. If there’s even a whiff of trouble around here, William L. Busby, I’m going to hunt you down like the flea-bitten dog that you are. You got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “And meanwhile, you’re going to hope that nothing bad happens to me personally, right? With your picture hanging up in two station houses?”

  “No, ma’am! I mean, yes, ma’am!”

  “Okay. So go on; get the hell out of here.”

  She hadn’t heard from William L. Busby since. In fact, her impression was that her whole neighborhood had quieted down a bit since that encounter.

  She sat back down at the table, crunching on the tart green apple. She had finished the worst of her homework: reconstructing multiple electronic dialogues between Eric and his e-mail correspondents. Art Deming, of course, had summarized the chitchat accurately. Nothing strange, nothing obviously missing. Of all the people in his world, Eric seemed closest to “downhilldave13740,” the guy that Vermeer had been assigned to check out. Then came sister Libby. In distant third place came alleged girlfriend Jeannette Bartlett, now of the Charles River.

  In none of his notes did Eric aim for dramatic effect or reveal any particular emotion. He was often funny, sometimes very funny. He even made Brouillard laugh out loud more than once. This was a feat, given her deepening headache. But he didn’t come across as tormented, or even particularly thoughtful. No deep grooves in the ice, as her hockey-playing brother used to put it.

  The second task of the afternoon, which had now turned into evening, was to compare the e-mail logs from Eric’s machine with those that Harvard’s central tech-support group had finally coughed up. Getting Harvard officialdom to go along with her request hadn’t been easy. She had had to go up the BPD ladder several rungs, eventually threatening to involve the mayor. Even then, getting the Harvard mainframe to generate the data turned out to be a troublesome process.

  But now, two days later, she had the lists. Under the heel of her left hand was what Eric’s computer remembered about his e-mail activity: dates and times, to and from addresses, and subjects. And in her right hand, once she had discarded the remains of the Granny Smith, was what the server remembered about that activity.

  The two lists were supposed to be the same. And no doubt, she grumbled, they were the same. The fact that Brouillard was even bothering with this step was overkill. Her colleagues, the Dick Davidsons and Buzzy Silvers of the world, would think she was nuts. Maybe they were right. Maybe she did need to get a life.

  Arbitrarily she started six months back. This cut the task in half. (At her request, Harvard had provided a year’s worth of data, making a matched bookend for Deming’s work.) She folded both lists in half vertically so she could put the columns of tiny type as close together as possible. She sighed out l
oud: The formats were slightly different. That meant that she couldn’t just look at the last line on each page to see if they tracked. It meant she had to go more or less line by line. She got out a long ruler and started with Eric’s outbox.

  An hour and a half later, eyes almost completely blurred over, she blinked in astonishment. She backed up a few lines and retraced her footsteps. She was now in December, two months ago. According to Eric’s computer, there was no activity on the nights of the twelfth and nineteenth. And according to Harvard, Eric had sent out a small blizzard of e-mails. Just before and just after midnight. No “subject” included.

  All to the same address: [email protected].

  She put the out-box logs to one side and picked up the in-box logs. She went to December 12. Nothing on Eric’s machine. But according to Harvard, Eric had received one e-mail.

  From [email protected]. No entry in the subject line.

  Now that she knew what she was looking for, it was easy. Except for the occasional bit of spam, these messages, to and from, were the only ones with no subject listed.

  Same thing on the nineteenth.

  Same thing once in the first week of January. She grabbed her neglected checkbook from under a pile of bills and squinted at the tiny calendar. All Sunday nights. All late at night.

  Same thing last Sunday night—the night Eric MacInnes died. Two messages to [email protected]. And one back. From [email protected].

  And then nothing more.

  20

  THE DIAL TONE STUTTERED AGGRESSIVELY IN VERMEER’S EAR. Verizon—or whatever his phone company was currently called—had messages for him. He punched in his code. “You have three messages.”

  As Central Office (or whatever it was called now) queued them up for delivery, he looked at the dark landscape outside his kitchen window. He wished he had gotten home earlier, early enough to go for a quick run, sweat out his extended stay at the Albany airport, and shower away the residues of aristocracy and airports. A nice enough little airport, Albany, with some interesting historical exhibits that demonstrated that Albany—or at least the broader metro area—was once important. Like woeful Schenectady, up the road, which Vermeer had once visited on business. But after the third mysterious hour of ground delay, and full of the fizzy guilt associated with a twenty-ouncer of a local brew (a “big boy,” in Albany), Vermeer had been more than ready to leave Albany behind.