Murder at the B-School Read online

  “Hi, Wim, it’s your mom.” She talked in an armor-piercing voice for a few minutes about what was on her mind. Her central theme today was that other parents’ children called them, like, for example, the children of these particular parents, and the children of those nice people who lived two houses up, and who had the good job with Bell Labs, and so on, and so on, until Central Office cut her short. Vermeer punched 3. Deleted.

  “Hi, Wim, me again.” Mother resented being cut off in the middle of a thought. Sometimes when this happened, she started the thought all over again, from the beginning. This time she did not. She merely elaborated. Dutifully, pacing into the living room and back, he let the tape run until she got cut off again. Three. Deleted.

  “Yeah, hi, Vermeer.” Not expecting the deep male voice, Vermeer stopped pacing and put the phone closer to his ear. “Dan Beyer. In New York. Call me when you get in.” Then a ten-digit number. Then a click.

  Vermeer played the message again, this time with a pen in hand to pick off the phone number. He dialed it. A female voice answered by repeating the last four digits of the number—like an extension in a bank. Vermeer thought he recognized Ellie Donahue’s voice. “Hi. Wim Vermeer returning Dan Beyer’s call.”

  “Hold, please, Professor Vermeer.”

  After a few minutes, Beyer came on the line. “Hello.”

  “Returning your call, Dan.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” He didn’t sound thankful. “I have a message for you from Libby.”

  Vermeer waited. If Beyer wanted to deliver this message, he was concealing it well. “Well, fire away, Dan. What’s the message?”

  “I’ll just read it to you. She says, ‘I’ll be in Boston at the end of the week. Really need to talk with you in person. How about dinner at the Four Seasons on Friday, at eight? Let Dan know if that works for you.’”

  “Sure. Works for me, Dan. Please let her know.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Hey, Dan, tell me something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why didn’t Libby just call me herself? Why put you in the middle of it?”

  “I don’t ask her questions like that. She wants help, I help her. That’s my job.”

  “Is she there now? Can I talk to her?”

  “No.”

  “Can I talk to her before Friday, if I need to?”

  “No.”

  “What if something comes up?”

  “What’s going to come up? You don’t seem busy.”

  “Hey, Dan, out here in the real world, things tend to come up. What if I have to cancel?”

  “Simple. You call this number. You leave a message.”

  Vermeer didn’t enjoy Beyer’s tough-guy act: doling out little thuggish syllables as if they were precious stones. He decided to tweak him. “Great,” he said. “So it’s not really like going out to dinner with a beautiful young woman. It’s more like going to the dentist to get my teeth scraped. So, Dan, will someone call the day before and confirm my appointment?”

  There was a pause. “Let’s get something straight here, Vermeer.” Beyer’s voice was calm and cold. Vermeer imagined him flexing a sequence of muscle groups as he talked. “I don’t like you much. I don’t like what I’ve heard about you. I don’t like the fact that you were snooping around in Libby’s room. Looking for the bathroom, my ass. And I don’t like the idea of her going out to dinner with you—or being anywhere with you, for that matter. I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust your type.

  “I’m going along with her on this trip to Boston, to keep an eye on things. So I’m going to be in the vicinity, Vermeer. So I recommend you don’t pull any of your tricks.”

  Hanging up now would be a good idea, Vermeer knew. There was nothing to be gained by baiting the bodyguard. Nevertheless . . . “Listen, big Dan,” he replied. “I don’t do tricks. If I did, I wouldn’t do them with you in the room. But unless I’m guessing wrong, you aren’t going to be in the room on Friday night. No, sir, big Dan. You’re not an out-in-the-public-eye kind of guy. You’re an under-wraps kind of guy. You’re going to be upstairs, ordering up a cheeseburger and a side of steroids from room service, right? All by yourself, while your Miss Libby and I are downstairs, drinking expensive wine and having a nice evening together. And then, of course, there’s the rest of the evening—”

  “Fuck you.” Click.

  Hanging up, Vermeer wondered why he had gone out of his way to clatter his stick up and down the sides of the gorilla’s cage. That wasn’t like him.

  21

  BROUILLARD KNEW SHE WAS STALLING.

  What she needed to do was pick up the phone, call Vermeer in for questioning, and move things along, toward some kind of resolution.

  A quick check with Art Deming had confirmed what she already suspected: There was no way that a “false positive” could have been created on either Eric’s computer or Harvard’s server. The most likely explanation, the only likely explanation, was that Vermeer himself had sent the self-incriminating messages. Of course, as Deming had pointed out, assume the computer in his office is always on or isn’t password-protected. If somebody had access to that office, again it would be no big deal to impersonate him. And the trail, although still circumstantial, would be pretty hard to deny. Of course, if somebody then responded to the “planted” e-mail, Vermeer would have known something odd was going on. Unless the impersonator was clever and lucky enough to pick off that response before Vermeer spotted it . . .

  Jeez, Brouillard said to herself, wrinkling her nose, why am I fighting so hard to avoid reaching the obvious conclusion? Why didn’t she just go to the DA with the evidence she already had, which was strong enough to pull some warrants and build the case against Vermeer? The answer was, she decided, that she had a feeling about this case—a feeling that things were more complicated than they seemed. And this didn’t fit together well with her sense that Vermeer, although now in the thick of things, was not particularly complicated. Smart, yes. A good talker. Seemingly interested in helping with the investigation in his limited ways. But not especially complicated.

  Or maybe he was deep. Maybe he was one of those disturbed characters—cunning, detail oriented—who hangs around the fringes of an investigation, chumming it up with the police and eventually making a surprisingly on-target observation about a crime of his own commission, pushing the cops a little closer, but not too close, to the truth. She didn’t have much experience with those types, and she wasn’t sure she’d recognize one if it came her way. Once, on a rotation with Arson, she had sat in on an interrogation of a fire starter who had miraculously pulled people out of two different burning buildings. He must have calculated that it would be seen as a coincidence. It wasn’t.

  She looked around the station house. The tired old building, with its aged fluorescent light fixtures on long stems, its tan paint peeling in large leaf-size sheets off shiny damp walls, and its grubby brown linoleum floor with underlayment starting to poke through in high-traffic areas, didn’t provide much motivation. And although there were lots of blue suits in evidence out in the public areas of the building, she was the only plainclothes in today so far. Most of the empty desks around her looked far messier than hers. They were all behind in their paperwork; she was not. She was tempted to give in to the headache that had come back behind her left eyeball, turn off the gray metal lamp on her desk, whose low buzzing she only heard when she was grumpy—like now, for example—and go home to bed.

  Instead, she shook two caplets out of the oversize bottle of Advil in her top drawer. She washed them down with the lukewarm remains of her coffee. Then she reached for the phone.

  The desk sergeant led Vermeer to Brouillard’s desk. She got up as she saw them approaching. “Thanks, Jack,” she said. Then, turning to Vermeer: “Thanks for coming in. Let’s find someplace to talk.”

  After picking up a pad and pencil, she steered him around some cubicles and then down a hallway that was just a little too narrow for two-way traffic. The gall
ery of black-and-white prints of long-dead officers on both walls heightened the claustrophobic effect. As usual, Vermeer noted, walking behind her, this Captain Brouillard wore resolutely baggy clothes that gave little clue to her shape. From behind, under a gray cotton sweater, her shoulders looked a little squarer than he remembered. The hint of a waistline, introducing black pants that dropped almost directly to the floor. She could be anywhere from well rounded to not much rounded, he concluded. Her brown hair, grabbed down low on her shoulder blades by a black elastic, looked as if it had been taken hostage.

  “This’ll do,” she said, opening a door and flicking on a light switch. A brown plastic sign with white routed-out letters identified this room as Interrogation A.

  “Am I being interrogated?” It didn’t come out as lightly as he had intended. He followed her inside.

  “No,” she said, sitting down and waving him toward a second chair on the other side of a battered conference table. “Believe me, you’ll know when you’re being interrogated.”

  He scanned the featureless walls. “Isn’t there supposed to be a one-way mirror somewhere in here?”

  “That’s another room. For a different kind of conversation. Let’s hope you don’t see the inside of that one.” She wrote a few words on her pad, drew a line under it, and looked up. “So tell me about your visit to the MacInnes house. Starting with Downhill Dave. Give me all the details, even little odds and ends that you might not think are important.”

  Starting with his odd encounter with Dave Westerling, Vermeer recounted his trip to upstate New York and continued through to Beyer’s recent call and his grudging conveyance of Libby’s request for a meeting. He could see no pattern to when she took notes and when she didn’t. Several times she put a hand up—hold it—and scribbled at length. Two or three times she stopped him and probed for what appeared to be irrelevant details. She seemed most interested in William MacInnes’s suggestion that Vermeer might have “enemies,” as yet unidentified.

  “You buy that idea? About enemies?” she interrupted.

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not really’?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I give students bad grades when they deserve them. Some of my colleagues don’t, from what I can tell. There are a few former girlfriends out there who might still be angry with me. But more likely, they’ve forgotten all about me. Sometimes I don’t call my mother back.”

  She sighed. “I’m serious here. You should be, too. How about money? Done anybody any serious damage financially? Stand between anybody and a big pot of money?”

  “No to both questions. In fact, in terms of investments gone bad, I tend to be the victim rather than the bad guy. I don’t think I’m in line to inherit anything much. I have some investments, some good and some bad. A good life insurance policy with some cash value.”

  “Who’s the beneficiary?”

  “The Boston Public Library.”

  “You took out a life insurance policy to benefit the BPL?” She thought he was joking, and was prepared to scold him again.

  “No, no,” he said quickly, heading off the lecture. “I took out a policy to benefit my wife and kids, when they showed up in my life. They just haven’t showed up yet. Meanwhile, I believe in public libraries. But to be serious, as you say, I don’t see any connection between my finances and the MacInneses.”

  “Did you happen to bring Libby’s note with you?”

  “In fact, I did.” Handing it over to her, he was glad to have avoided yet another of her disapproving looks.

  She scanned it briefly, holding it at the corners and along the edges, then placed it delicately back on the table. “Can I hang on to this for a while?”

  “Sure. You can keep it, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I’ll get it back to you. Do you think she wrote it?”

  “Well, I assume so. Sure. Although I haven’t had any reason to see her handwriting before. Mrs. Talley certainly seemed to think it was from Libby.”

  He waited for her to follow up on that line of questioning. She didn’t. Instead, she put her pencil down, tipped her chair back on two legs, and locked her hands together behind her head. Then she made a strange face: eyes nearly closed, nose wrinkled upward, as if there were a really bad odor in the air.

  After what seemed like a long few minutes, she brought her front chair legs back down to earth, picked up her pencil once again, and looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, Professor Vermeer, I’ve got to point out something kind of obvious here. There’s this funny subplot that’s going on underneath all of this stuff: your conversation with Westerling, old man MacInnes’s suspicions, and so on. Everybody seems to be convinced that you and Eric had some sort of thing going on.”

  He felt his color rising. “Yeah. You noticed that, too. I’m getting kind of tired of it.”

  “So it’s not true?”

  “Captain Brouillard, all I can say is, my tastes don’t run that way. And even if they did, I hope I’d have the common sense and professionalism—or at least the self-control—to stay the hell away from my students.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d hope so, too. But there is this thing on the table, and it’s coming from more than one direction. You could be lying to me, of course—”

  “I’m not,” he interrupted coldly.

  “Okay, so you’re not. Then there are only a few other explanations. One is that Eric misread some signals coming from you and made more of your relationship than was really there.”

  He realized that his jaw was clenched. He took a deep breath, returning her steady gaze. “Well, he would have needed to do some serious misreading,” he finally replied. “Look: I had absolutely no contact with him outside the classroom. Period. I don’t remember him ever coming to my office, and I’m sure I would remember that. No phone, no e-mails, no love letters, no nothing. I haven’t communicated with him since the last day of class last year, when I’m pretty sure I shook hands with him. And also with about ninety other people, too, on their way out the door. I think I’ve seen him around campus three or four times since then. We might have waved at each other. Maybe we said hello. Otherwise, nothing. Full stop. Period. End.”

  “Yeah,” she said speculatively, “I was just thinking that. Seems kind of like an abrupt shutdown of your relationship. Haven’t we already established that he was one of your favorite students, and you were his favorite professor?”

  “Uh-huh, we have. Absolutely. And we’ve also established that I was James’s favorite, too. So how active is his fantasy life?”

  She shrugged. “I would say, not way active, based on my meetings with him so far.” Then she went back to what Vermeer recognized as her standard expression: a mix of skepticism, worry, and contemplation. It suited her.

  “One other explanation,” she continued, pursuing her former line of thinking, “is that someone is setting you up. Which seems kind of far-fetched to me. And from what you’ve told me, there’s nobody out there with reason enough to set up that kind of elaborate frame job. And at least based on what you’ve told me, there’s nothing that ties you to these people, beyond the classroom link.”

  “Nothing. Look, Captain Brouillard, the truth is, I feel like there is some kind of net being thrown over me. I’m starting to think that William MacInnes is right about the enemies. Even if you don’t believe it.”

  She said nothing, simply looking straight at him, bouncing her eraser off her pad.

  “And frankly,” he continued, “if you don’t believe me, and you think I’m some sort of cold-blooded killer, I don’t see why I should help you truss me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Maybe I should go get a lawyer and refuse to have any more friendly little chats with you.”

  “Fair enough.” She nodded, impassive. “But believe me, Professor, if and when you get to be a suspect, I’ll be damn sure to tell you about it. At that point you get Mirandized, and you sit in the other little room—the one with the one-way mirror—and I have a colleague in the
room, and also one behind the mirror, and the tape rolls. And at that point, I’ll be insisting that you have a lawyer. And if it comes to that, you’ll need a real good lawyer, Professor Vermeer, because I almost never bring the wrong person into that little room.

  “Meanwhile,” she continued in the same flat voice, “I can promise you that for the time being, it won’t hurt you to continue to be helpful. Which you have been, by the way, and I appreciate it. Sure, if I decide you’re a suspect, we’ll have to play by a different set of rules. But obviously, nothing you’ve told me up to that point could be used against you. Nothing you’ve said today, for example. All off limits.”

  She registered and acknowledged the expression on his face: confusion, skepticism, a touch of fear. “Look, Professor Vermeer. The way I see it, you don’t have a lot of choices. If there is some sort of conspiracy being played out here, you’re going to need me to help figure it out. Trust me: I’m way better at this than you are.”

  Feeling a little bruised, he saw no particular reason to trust her. But a dubious ally looked better than none at all. “Okay. For the time being.”

  “Good choice, Professor Vermeer. Believe me.”

  He tried to lighten the mood. “First name’s Wim, by the way. Feel free.”

  “Thanks, but I find that formality—titles and last names—is very useful in situations like this. Keeps everybody focused on the stakes of the game. Which in your case are very high.”