Murder at the B-School Read online

  “Okay.”

  “One last topic,” she said, picking up her pencil again. “Tell me about the computer setup and e-mail system at Harvard.”

  Somewhat surprised at this shift to the mundane world of PCs and electronic housekeeping, Vermeer answered her questions as best he could. Yes, you needed a password to get onto a Harvard computer, unless you left it on all the time, which most people tended to do. In his case, he locked his office door whenever he wasn’t there, so leaving his computer on—which he tended to do—wouldn’t be an issue. No, you didn’t need another password to pick up and send your e-mail, except, of course, from remote locations, when you had to go through another ISP. Yes, people tended to tell their administrative assistants their passwords—it was hard to do business, otherwise—but for the most part, people were careful about that. Harvard discouraged people from picking passwords that were obvious, and he hadn’t done so and hadn’t told anyone other than his secretary his password. Once his succession of temps had started arriving, he hadn’t given out his password to anyone. But of course, the door was open during the day, and there were several people out there who knew his password.

  “So why all this interest in passwords and e-mail?” he asked.

  She shrugged lightly but caught his eyes and held them. “Too early to say. But when I come across Word documents and e-mail logs, it’s helpful to know what I’m looking at. Some places tend to be more careful, and some places tend to be less careful. Sounds like Harvard is on the more careful end.

  “Well,” she said, snapping her pad shut and pushing back from the table, “that’s all I’ve got for now.” She stood up. Taking her cue, he did the same. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to catch up on,” she continued, “although it’s mostly routine. Forms and follow-ups. You’re having dinner with Libby on Friday?”

  “Yeah. But hopefully not with big Dan.”

  “Good. I want to hear about that. My sense is that she was pretty close to Eric. Maybe she can shed some light on some of this stuff.”

  Again their eyes met as they shook hands, and remained locked for a few seconds beyond the handshake.

  “And, Professor Vermeer,” she added, although nothing in her tone suggested that this was an afterthought, “I think Libby’s advice is good advice. Be careful.”

  22

  LIBBY WAS SITTING AT THE BAR—MODERNIST BUT WITH SOME soft edges—when Vermeer made his way into the Four Seasons restaurant. Next to her, overwhelming his bar stool like a toad on a stubby stick, was Dan Beyer. She waved at Vermeer and then motioned for him to come and join them at the bar.

  “Hi, Miss MacInnes. Dan.”

  Libby got up, took his extended hand, and surprised him by extending her left cheek for a kiss. Beyer, who evidently found it easier to rotate his body than turn his head on his neck, watched Vermeer close the distance, with obvious disapproval. His blue blazer was too tight in the chest and shoulders—purchased in some earlier stage in his physical development program, Vermeer guessed. Beyer nodded once, like a hatchet chop, implying that he had finished sizing up the situation. Then he slid his mass off the stool and drained the bottom half of his beer glass in one long swallow.

  “So, listen, Libby, I’m heading upstairs,” he said, pointedly ignoring Vermeer. “Call me when you turn in.”

  “Dan,” she started to object. “What could possibly—”

  “No argument, please. Not under the circumstances. Call me.” He pushed past Vermeer.

  Vermeer watched her reaction, which shifted from amusement to worry to frustration, all in a few seconds. As her eyes followed Beyer’s broad back out of the room, Vermeer took the opportunity to examine her in profile. It was only the third time he had seen her, but each time she looked completely different. Tonight she wore a black cocktail dress that somehow seemed prim, even though it revealed her legs well above her knees and swept downward from her long neck toward her chest. If this was mourning garb, he decided, he liked mourning garb. She was carefully made-up, especially around her eyes. She wore splashes of gold on her right ring finger, on both wrists, and around her long neck. Her brown hair, more or less a jungle the first two times he had run into her, was now beautifully shaped, turned under at the ends to frame her face.

  Which was very, very pretty, Vermeer was surprised to find himself thinking. It was as if Libby had made a concerted effort to grow up in the past few days. Had she made this effort for him?

  “He’s very protective of you,” he volunteered, still standing next to her. He considered sitting on the stool Beyer had just vacated. Under the circumstances, Beyer had said. Under what circumstances?

  She shook her head in a little shiver. “Yes. Even more so since Eric’s death. Everybody’s on edge.”

  The maître d’ beckoned them, and they made their way to a secluded table tucked up against a windowless wall. Tonight, it seemed, Libby wasn’t going to take advantage of one of the restaurant’s main selling points, which was a view of the Public Garden that was straight out of the nineteenth century, studded at night by faux gas streetlights. She ordered a particular bottle of French white wine, name and year, without looking at the wine list. The white-coated waiter, who knew her by name, looked pleased at the choice—expensive, presumably. He slid off toward the kitchen.

  “Miss MacInnes, I have to ask you something.”

  She looked up from her menu, seeming startled at the suggestion, and her smile looked a little forced. “We should probably order first, okay? Then let’s talk.”

  The waiter returned with the wine and an elaborate chilling stand with chromed curlicues on its four corners. Libby sniffed the cork, swirled and sniffed the wine, and then tasted it, although looking as if she was just going through the motions. The waiter took their orders, answering a question from Libby, nodding his approval at their selections, and once again backed away from the table, disappearing even before he was out of sight.

  “Cheers,” she said, raising her glass. “Although maybe that’s not the right thing to say under the circumstances.”

  There it was again. “What are the circumstances?” The wine, Vermeer decided, was excellent.

  “In what sense do you mean, Professor Vermeer?”

  “Please, call me Wim.”

  She extended her hand, smiling. “Wim. And you should call me Libby. Everyone else in the world does. Except this waiter, who probably thinks that would be bad for business.”

  He was not going to be sidetracked by her small talk. “In the sense that I don’t know why I’m having dinner with you at the Four Seasons. In the sense that when I was at your house in New York State, you told me you wanted to talk to me, and then you disappeared, but not before leaving a note telling me to be careful. Be careful about what, I don’t know. In the sense that a lot of people, including people in your family, and maybe including you, seem to have some strange ideas about me. In the sense that the Incredible Hulk who dogs your footsteps has let it be known that if I get out of line, as he sees it, he will throw himself on me and rip my head off. With pleasure. In the sense that I don’t even know why you need the Incredible Hulk shadowing you in the first place.”

  For a long minute she didn’t respond. “That’s a lot of questions,” she finally said. “All at once.” She sounded as if she was trying to be light, even frivolous, but was held back by some underlying sense of seriousness. “Some I don’t know the answers to. But I can deal with a couple of them pretty quickly, maybe going in backwards order.

  “Dan—who actually is a very sweet person, believe me, despite his occasional bad manners—was originally my physical trainer. And still is. We hired him part-time two years ago to come to the city house a couple of days a week to help me with my workouts.

  “About a year ago, I started to get anonymous threats in the mail. I didn’t take them very seriously, but the family did. The police looked into it but didn’t turn up any leads. So the family decided to hire Dan full-time, mainly so he’d be available to travel wit
h me when I went on business trips. The letters stopped coming, so that was starting to die down a little bit in the last few months. Until Eric’s death. Since then, he’s been my shadow . . . as you say.”

  “That must sort of cramp your style.”

  She blushed. “Well, actually, that sort of gets at another one of your questions.”

  “I just lost you.”

  “I wanted to have dinner with you because I wanted to talk to you. I needed to talk to you. And”—here she stammered a little, looking everywhere but at him—“I also needed a way to get out from under Dan’s watchful eye. For later in the evening, I mean.”

  He felt a little twinge of disappointment. It surprised him. “In other words, you’re going to slip the leash and spend the evening with someone else while Dan thinks you’re with me?”

  “Well, yes. To the extent that he’s thinking about it.”

  Vermeer smiled, without much pleasure. “Oh, believe me, he’s thinking about it. He’s upstairs tearing the phone books in half right now, just thinking about it. He doesn’t like me much. You may have noticed.”

  “Which I think has something to do with your visit to my bedroom, while you were down in the city. Thanks for delivering that stuff, by the way.” So if she objected to his effort at sleuthing, she wasn’t letting on.

  “You’re welcome, of course,” he said. He decided that at this point, honesty—at least a limited, modified kind of honesty—was the best policy. “And I admit to doing a little snooping down in New York. But you know, I get paid to think about interesting things. And by any definition, your family is pretty interesting. And by the way, I didn’t know it was your room. It’s just that your door was the only one that wasn’t sealed up tight.”

  She shrugged. “More security. That’s a recent development, too. I’m surprised nobody had remembered to pull the door shut. I imagine Ellie Donahue bit the poor cleaning lady’s head off the next time she saw her. But in any case, Wim, I don’t give a damn one way or the other if you were in my room. In fact, I’m a little disappointed. In the sense that it wasn’t your obsession with me that drove you in there.” She was trying to introduce a note of flirtatiousness. It wasn’t working.

  “Well, even if I was obsessed,” he said, “I wouldn’t tell you. Because you might tell Dan, who would then kill me.” He saw her wince. “Sorry. No more jokes about getting dead. So . . .”

  Briefly, he drew a blank, trying to think of an alternative topic of conversation. The image of Detective Brouillard, with her pad and pencil and air of purposefulness, popped into his head. “You, uhm, mentioned business trips,” he finally said, “and you clearly have some sort of high-powered workstation in your bedroom. And someone said you’re a nurse, and when I first met you, you were preparing to give your father some sort of shot. All of which leads me to ask, exactly what do you do for a living?”

  Now it was her turn to laugh, briefly. “For a living, Wim? For a living, I do nothing. I breathe. I call the family office every now and then and plead for an unscheduled funds transfer. Which they always give me.”

  “That pays the bills, I guess. But it doesn’t sound rewarding, otherwise.”

  “No, it isn’t. It tends to make you feel useless. Which eventually got to be a problem for me—feeling useless, I mean—so I decided to go into nursing.”

  “Why not business?” He was honestly puzzled. “I don’t know you well, but you seem to be every bit as smart as your brothers.”

  “Oh, well, thanks a lot—as smart as my brilliant brothers?” She sounded genuinely offended. “And I’ll just assume you weren’t implying that nursing was somehow less important, or worthwhile, or interesting, than business. But to answer your question, my parents, who control the family business, would never let their only daughter get involved. Never, ever.”

  Their appetizers arrived. Vermeer waited until the waiter had retreated again. “Why not?” he persisted. “Why Eric and James, but not you? Good old-fashioned chauvinism?”

  “Well, as you say, we’re an interesting family. And it may be a little hard for you to understand, but my parents think dynastically. Is that a word? Dynastically. They think about how my marriage will help or hurt the intergenerational processes of empire building and wealth transfer. And as they see it, having me be in business would take me out of the right circles—the social register circles. Or worse, I might run off with the custodian or the elevator operator or whoever.”

  When it was clear that she wasn’t going to say more on the subject, Vermeer pushed a little harder. “Sorry, Libby, but I still don’t get it. How does something like nursing fit into that worldview? Not to be obnoxious, but blood and shit and bedpans? With all those resistant bacteria growing overhead in the hospital’s HVAC system? Wouldn’t you be better off in a nice little corner office somewhere, wearing a power suit, with your legendary last name on the door?”

  She shook her head. “As my parents see it, nursing is okay—for these last awkward years before marriage—because it’s God’s work. The Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton thing. And the truth is, my parents don’t have a clue as to what a nurse really does: blood and shit and bedpans, as you say so colorfully. They don’t have any idea how dangerous hospitals are. If they did, they’d be horrified.”

  “On the other hand, it’s got to be convenient for your father to have someone he trusts on hand to give him his shots.”

  “No, actually, he barely tolerates that,” she said. “The truth is that my giving him the occasional insulin injection mostly just confuses him and my mother. Because I have a skill that they don’t have. A skill that’s very important to him, and which he can’t pay me for. Very confusing all around. So I don’t make a big deal of that one.”

  As their appetizers were cleared and their entrées arrived, Vermeer thought again of her computer array, her Stealth bomber desk, and the Gold Star award on her shelf. “Well, I’m confused, too,” he said. “You’re a nurse who works with high-end computers with high-speed Internet connections, and takes business trips, and wins awards from grateful groups. What kind of nurse is that?”

  “Well, well, you are a snoop, Wim.” But her smile was warm and her tone friendly. “Okay. I did my hospital time on the pediatric intensive care unit at Mercy, in New York. Emergency care for kids in the Big Apple. Blood, shit, bedpans, and then some. It was very heady and gratifying for a few months. Then it got worse and worse every day. For every little kid we managed to save, two or three others died. I finally realized that I really couldn’t stand it.

  “So then I went to the other end of the spectrum. I moved upstate to the country house, joined the Catskill Regional VNA, and started making home visits. Which, out in the boondocks, involves a ton of driving. Depending on the season, either through two feet of snow or behind a very slow-moving hay rig.

  “Technically, I’m still affiliated with the visiting nurses, working the occasional weekend or holiday when they’re short-staffed. But that’s gotten tough, too, because thanks to the health care mess, the local hospitals are pushing people out before they’re well enough to go home. So that’s a huge responsibility. And I’ve started worrying more about liability. If I ever made a serious mistake, someone would be very likely to go after me. So in that way, at least, I guess I am a target. I guess I do need a little protection.”

  “There’s always liability insurance.”

  “Well, to be blunt, Wim, you shouldn’t think of me as a normal person. You have to assume that some different rules apply.” She said it not boastfully but matter-of-factly, as if she were describing her hair color.

  “So how do the computers tie in?”

  “I’m getting to that. A couple of years ago, when I was working at Mercy, I started doing a lot of online research after hours, trying to get a handle on some of the tougher cases that we were dealing with. And two things really struck me. First, there was a ton of stuff out there, focusing on every terrible disease or injury under the sun. Lots of bad stuf
f, but also some really good stuff. And second, all of this stuff was completely disorganized. No clear hierarchies of information. No obvious way to separate the wheat from the chaff—the good, refereed stuff from the junk. A big goulash, chock-full of bad stuff and good stuff.

  “So I started up an online conversation with some nurses who shared my interests. That turned into an interest group, which turned into a Web site, which turned into a 501(c)3. The INRR: the Internet Nursing Research Registry. I fund it myself, although the truth is that it takes a lot more time than money. And now, all of a sudden, I’m starting to get a stream of unsolicited donations, and some calls from interested foundations. Go figure. You don’t need money, and you don’t ask for it, and potential donors start to seek you out.

  “The business trips are basically about me going to medical conventions—confabs for doctors and nurses—and talking up the INRR and figuring out how we can be more helpful to people in practice, on the front lines. I’ve also been invited to talk at hospitals, and at colleges with nursing programs, and even at some medical schools. All of which gets me up to Boston a lot.”

  “Which is a really good thing for your mysterious friend, whom you’re hooking up with later tonight. And of whom your family doesn’t approve, I’m guessing.”

  She blushed again. “Wouldn’t approve of, if they knew about him, no. So that will have to stay our little secret, Wim. Yours and mine. Please.”

  “Of course. But I’m jealous.”

  They made small talk while they finished their dinners. Vermeer noted that Libby was putting away the wine at a steady clip. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on her, aside from bumping up her vivaciousness a bit and turning the tips of her ears red. Once or twice she put her hand on his, across the table, and let it linger there. The gesture was warm and sisterly, in a patrician sort of way, although a casual observer might have seen it differently.

  And there were observers. At several tables around them, well-heeled people were sneaking glances at them. Over by the bar, a lone diner in his fifties surveyed the restaurant occasionally, and his wandering gaze seem to alight on Libby whenever possible. Vermeer didn’t blame him.