Murder at the B-School Page 17

  “So, Libby,” he said, as the waiter made yet another round of dishes go away and once again made himself disappear, “we need to talk.”

  “But we have been talking, Professor Vermeer,” she said, covering up a grin with her hand. “And drinking a little bit, too.” She had turned down dessert but ordered a glass of calvados for both of them. “Apple brandy. From Normandy,” she had explained. From a tedious consulting assignment in St. Louis several years back, which featured lots of long dinners with a lonely middle manager who had nothing else to do and didn’t hesitate to chew up Vermeer’s evenings, he knew all about calvados. He remembered the morning-after headaches in particular.

  “Yeah, but we’ve been talking about everything but what we should be talking about,” he said, hearing the edge in his voice. “I think maybe you’re avoiding a couple of subjects.”

  She sat up a little straighter. The smile was gone. “Like what?”

  “Like, you wrote me a note telling me to be careful. Careful of what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Exactly.”

  “Well, narrow it down, Libby.” He started using her name deliberately, with emphasis. An old teaching technique. “Space junk falling from the sky? A bus plunge?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then, what?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But something . . . something just doesn’t seem right.” Now she was fidgeting, looking off toward the distant windows.

  “Right with what, Libby?”

  “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Maybe what wasn’t a good idea?”

  “This. Meeting with you. I’m starting to think that it might not be.”

  “Which is why you chickened out, Libby, up at the country place? And why you left the note?”

  She nodded, still not looking at him. “I just wanted . . . I just want to tell you that you’re sailing in deep waters. That you shouldn’t let your—your affection—for Eric put you in jeopardy. God, I’m finding this hard to talk about. But the point is, no one’s blaming you for anything, Wim. It just might be better if you could put some distance between yourself and all this mess. While everybody is looking elsewhere.”

  Now it was Vermeer’s turn to look off toward the windows. He didn’t know where to start. Once again he felt as if he were taking a fist to the head from a member of the MacInnes family. “My ‘affection’ for Eric, Libby? Is that the word you used?”

  “Yes. Please, Wim, it’s not a secret. I know what you meant to Eric, and vice versa.”

  “He told you? Directly? Himself?”

  “No. Of course not. He could never tell me about something like that. But I knew. And I understood.”

  He sighed. “Libby, I feel like I should have a little brochure printed up, that I can hand to every member of your family, like those mutes who used to hand out the little cards in the bus station. That way I wouldn’t have to keep giving this speech. Look at me, Libby.” She did, reluctantly. “I had no relationship with your brother,” he said, flat but firm. “Ever. In any way.”

  She watched him warily for a minute. Then she responded. “Wim, I didn’t come here to argue with you. I understand why you need to be careful. In fact, I’m encouraging you to be careful. Maybe Eric should have been more careful, too. Well, that’s definitely true. He should have been. But the family has decided that you weren’t involved in Eric’s death. So this is a good time for you to get out. Out of the line of fire.”

  He felt his fight-or-flight instinct kicking in. “One more time, Libby: Not only did I not kill your brother, I never had any sort of relationship with him—good, bad, or otherwise. Or didn’t Father William cue you into that part of his investigations? Maybe he would prefer you to think that I’m off limits to you by dint of my unnatural sexual leanings?”

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, looking increasingly miserable. “I don’t know. I don’t care about that. I don’t want to talk about my father or what he thinks or doesn’t think. I am so tired of all that. But what I do know is that you were what Eric needed, at one point in his life. Like Dave Westerling was, at another point.” She saw the look of surprise on his face. “Yes, I know that you met with him. I also know that whatever you and Eric had between the two of you was right for Eric, and that’s what matters to me. I loved him a whole lot, more than he ever knew, even though he didn’t let me into his life very much. I really shouldn’t say much more than that. Can’t say much more than that. Except that I’m worried for you.”

  He could see that her eyes were welling up. He didn’t care, particularly. The tears were for her brother, in any case, or maybe for herself.

  “Okay, one more time, Libby,” he said. He was angry, and he saw no reason not to turn up the heat. “You and your family are completely out of touch. Completely off base. You don’t have a clue, any of you. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe it’s because you communicate by proxy—by messenger, chauffeur, trainer, butler, bodyguard, and calling card—every which way except directly.”

  “Please—”

  “No, let me finish.” He could hear his voice rising, and he saw a couple of heads turning toward him. He didn’t much care. “For all your wealth and power, at the end of the day your family is some kind of pathetic cross between an English drawing-room farce and a French costume drama. You hire expensive thugs who don’t seem to protect you very well. You send out squads of gumshoes and get back bonehead information, no doubt for big bucks. You see yourselves as superior, above the fray, sophisticated, but as far as I can see, you don’t have a damn clue what is going on in each other’s heads, let alone my head.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Right. Exactly. You don’t think.” He dropped his napkin on the table in front of him. Then he stood up, deliberately pushing his chair back from the table. “Meanwhile, by not thinking, and by not seeing what’s sitting right there in front of you, you are putting me in a really deep hole. I’m talking about you personally, Libby. And right now, I don’t need your sympathy, or your broad-minded toleration of my alleged sexual orientation. I need help getting out of the hole you’ve helped put me in.”

  “Oh, Wim, please—” Now a tear had escaped, rolling down her cheek.

  “I really don’t want to hear it,” he snapped. He wasn’t playing a part now; now he was fighting for his skin. If she wasn’t with him, she was against him. “You call me when you’re ready to help. And call direct. Don’t insert Lurch in the middle.”

  She sagged. And with that, he got up and stalked out of the restaurant. Passing all those tables, he found it easy to ignore the disapproving looks directed at him by the burghers at the nearby tables. (He made that pretty girl cry!) But he found it surprisingly hard to push out of his mind the memory of her miserable, lonely, pretty face, slumped into her hands, eyes covered with the flats of her palms.

  That was going to be hell on her makeup, he concluded.

  23

  OTHER THAN THE PRESENCE OF THE EMBARRASSED FACES around her, avoiding her eyes, she saw no reason not to stay and finish her brandy. And then another. So she did.

  She got unsteadily to her feet. The waiter appeared, wrapping strong fingers around her elbow. “Shall we put the charges on your room as usual, Miss MacInnes?”

  “Yes. Do. Please.” She heard herself putting one word in front of the other. Now she would have to put one foot in front of the other. “And of course please add twenty percent. Room . . .”

  But here she had a problem. She couldn’t summon up the room number to the front of her brain. Twelfth floor, she knew—somehow she always remembered the floor number easily—turn right off the elevator, right again, and then all the way to the end. On the left. She also remembered the geography of hotel corridors. Her brain just worked that way. White plastic card in her purse, with no room number on it, of course. For her safety.

  “Don’t worry, Miss MacInnes. We’ll just send the tab over to the front
desk. Do you need any assistance getting back upstairs? I could go get the concierge and ask him to—”

  “I’m fine. No. I’m fine.” She shook his hand off her elbow. Not wanting to be rude. But definitely not wanting right now to be in physical contact with anyone, either.

  Weaving across the familiar lobby, over the garish carpet that she only took note of when she was “tipsy,” as she called it in her head, she reflected on the fact that the waiter, whose name she could never quite remember, had simply assumed that she was heading upstairs. As opposed to out to the theater, or the symphony, or something else that would be interesting and glamorous. Why wouldn’t she be doing something like that?

  But of course, he would have realized that she wasn’t carrying a coat.

  Which was more than Vermeer had noticed. Bastard. She was only trying to help. To hell with him, if he wouldn’t take her help. But of course, I didn’t take help from the waiter, who was just trying to be helpful . . .

  There was the elevator. Up button. Going up? Time’s up. Things are looking up. Not really: more like, the jig is up. This was one reason why she liked getting tipsy: Things seemed to snap together mysteriously. Patterns popped up where you hadn’t seen them before, as if they had been set free somehow. Set free by the wine and the calvados. The French apple brandy that she recently realized that they stocked here just for her. From her side of the bar, she had watched the level in the bottle. It didn’t seem to go down much between her visits.

  She pressed the round 12 button and watched it turn orange. Reassuring. She half expected something twelve to happen. But of course, it didn’t. She was not drunk, for heaven’s sake.

  The elevator invited her out. She accepted. And turned right and walked down the long, long hallway. She drifted past an odd little half-circle table, under the gilded mirror adorned with the beautiful fresh flowers. She could smell them. She chose not to look in the mirror. She wished she knew more about flowers, so that she could ask him if he had noticed the wonderful azaleas in the hall. Except she knew, of course, that they were not azaleas. Still moving slowly, she looked back over her left shoulder to admire them once more and bumped hard into a door frame that somehow slid up and caught her by her right shoulder.

  Him.

  Ouch. That was her shoulder weighing in. Lower down, though, down through her churning middle, she felt mostly anxiety. Him. He didn’t like it when she got tipsy. He said she was remote, less responsive, less there. And of course, he was right. And it didn’t make a lot of sense to travel all this way just to not be there.

  She hated being lonely. One way not to be lonely was to be with him. Another way not to be lonely was to be with the wine, and the brandy. And sometimes she liked to be with them all: with him and the wine and the brandy.

  She and Eric disagreed about how not to be lonely. Used to disagree. Eric was dead. There: There was what she had started calling in her mind her Eric pain, which lodged just above her stomach. Tonight it seemed to ride up above her anxiety, like a cruel rider on an ugly horse. She missed Eric dearly. More than she would ever have imagined.

  Now she was at her door, fumbling with her purse, fishing for the white plastic card. Twelve-twelve was what the door was called. She hoped the waiter had figured that out. But this was a good hotel; they always figured things out.

  In some places, you stuck the white plastic card straight in, like a knife between two ribs. (She had seen those ribs on her surgical rotation.) Other places, you plunged it down like a little guillotine. This—she worked it out—was the straight-in kind, which she liked better, because they generally seemed to work better. Or maybe that was just her imagination. Maybe it was just more like a key was supposed to be. The welcome clud noise, that you could feel in your bones if your hand was on the handle, and the little green light.

  There were no lights on inside as she pushed the heavy door out of the way, stepped sideways, and let it swing shut. Hard. For her safety. No lights was unusual. Usually he liked to start with the lights on and turn them off one by one. He was old-fashioned that way. He was old-fashioned in lots of ways.

  She headed straight for the bathroom, suddenly feeling an overwhelming, urgent need to pee. Bathroom light on to get oriented. Rush the clothes out of the way. Sit. Release.

  Now with no urgency but with a stronger awareness of her anxiety, she stood up, reassembled her clothes, washed her hands mechanically. One thing that you learned in the hospital if you never learned it before was that the germs find you.

  She jumped, startled, although she should have expected to see that face in that mirror, which was always there and which always ran the whole length of the wall. Where else would it be? And so where else would her face be?

  She looked at that face, that silly face, trying to salvage what she could of her eye makeup. Was she old-fashioned? Sometimes she thought so. Most of the time, though, she thought she was unfashioned. Unshaped. Not well formed. She wondered, for what might have been the thousandth time, what anyone would see in someone who was as unformed as she was. Informed but unformed. She was that. That was all she was.

  She glided halfway out of the bathroom. Glid. If it went “slide, slid,” it should go “glide, glid.” But it didn’t.

  “Turn off the light.”

  Again she started. Somehow she had forgotten about him. The bathroom light, he meant. She had forgotten that she had turned it on. She stopped, slid her hand down the wall until she found the toggle switches. Pushed one and made things much brighter. Not what he wanted. Then rocked both back in the opposite direction. Bringing the darkness back and making it hard for her to find her way into the room. The front room, the one with the glass-covered table over there somewhere, and the low coffee table somewhere over there. She wished she had looked around the corner and made a map for herself before turning the lights out again.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  This in barely more than a whisper. This was all new, all of it. Maybe on another night she would have been more interested in novelty, in departures, in experimentation. Not tonight. She wanted warmth. Quiet. Reassurance. These were things that he sometimes brought to her. But mostly not.

  She reached for the clasp on her necklace.

  “No. Leave the jewelry on.”

  She wondered idly, as she moved her fingers down only a bit to the zipper on her dress, if there was any chance she was going to allow herself to be sick. Sometimes when she got tipsy, and then she got queasy, the easiest thing was to be sick, to get it over with. Usually she did that later. After her stomach had cleared. She was not bulimic, for heaven’s sake. Also, it was better that he be asleep when she allowed that to happen.

  Dimly she could see his outline framed in the chair by the window. The only light came from a crack between the heavy drapes. The light, such as it was, fell only on her. Not on him.

  She fished up behind her back from below, found the zipper, pulled it the rest of the way down. Down to the small of her back. Which he had once said was the most interesting part of her. Offended, she was, at first. But then she forgave him when he insisted that he was complimenting her.

  Her dress fell to the rug silently. Somehow, she knew she wasn’t supposed to pick it up, tidy up, as she went along. This was different.

  And the same with taking off her panty hose. She looked toward the couch, wishing that she could perch there, steady herself. She wished they, the two of them, could glide into the other room, the bedroom, and find the bed in the dark, and get under the covers, and enjoy the smell and the feel of the starched white sheets, and maybe enjoy each other, although she wasn’t feeling particularly there. He would know right away; he would be angry about that. Angry in the bed that she hadn’t even sat on since checking in, because she knew he liked the bed to be unrumpled. She wobbled as she freed her feet, like shucking corn, regaining her balance on her cornstalky legs. He motioned her closer. With his index finger he beckoned for the hose. She couldn’t see his features. He looked
blurry, somehow. The dark. The wine and the brandy.

  She was very detached now, now that she was taking off the last scraps of her clothes. It was a little too cold to be naked. Her nipples sprouted: a last wall of defense. She was far from comfortable. She now believed that yes, she would be sick, and maybe soon. He was silent, and she wasn’t really here for the most part. For the most part she was back in another, less complicated part of her life. Back when she felt as though she knew what was coming next. When people didn’t surprise her.

  “You first,” he whispered, pointing.

  She went into the bedroom, too aware of his eyes on her back. Interesting, he had called it. The small of her back. Here there was a little more light. The curtains were open a little wider. She was too aware of her jewelry on her naked body. She wondered if she looked foolish. She was proud of her body, yes, but all the same, she so often felt foolish. Did some people not feel as foolish as she did so much of the time?

  “Lie down on the bed, Libby.”

  The sheets were turned down on a broad diagonal. She lay down, wondering if, hoping that, he had remembered to take the chocolates off the pillows. Housekeeping gave her extra chocolates, wrapped in gold and silver foils. Occasionally they wound up getting lost in the bed and getting rolled on and heated up, squashed under knees and elbows and rolled on again, until finally their wrappers gave way and made a terrible, embarrassing mess. The first time, she had made a point of telling Housekeeping that there was a chocolate stain on the sheets.

  Housekeeping didn’t care.

  “I’m sorry, Libby.” That was all he said. She felt gloved hands around her neck. That was new.

  Too late, she panicked.

  24

  VERMEER WAS SURPRISED, WHEN HE WOKE UP, TO DISCOVER that he was still annoyed. From what he could remember, his dreams had been grumbly and cranky, too.