Murder at the B-School Read online

  Yes, he had been angry enough with Libby for not telling him what he needed to know. But to some extent, the scene in the restaurant had been for show. He needed her to come back to him on his own terms—not as a representative of the family, but as an ally. As someone who could help him out of the dense forest he was finding himself in. A low-percentage play, but a play all the same.

  He forced himself to push the topic out of his mind. No sense in ruining the weekend before it started. Dressed in his boxers, he made his way into the small kitchen and turned on the coffeemaker. Through the kitchen window, over the sink, he had a view of the Neponset River as it twisted its way through the former Baker Chocolate complex. Today the river was shrunken and subdued—a dark, slow-moving mass. Plates of ice hung like hoopskirts off the boulders in midstream. In a month or two a hard warm rain would fall, and all the snow and ice upstream for miles would melt at once, and this little stream would rage and roar and tumble all over itself for a week or two. Then it would get lazy and surly again, and in the summer months it would smell bad.

  Vermeer had wound up in this odd place by accident. He was new to town. A friend of a friend was moving out. The price was right. And he was a sucker for old industrial sites, and this was surely one of those—the first chocolate mill in America, located alongside the Neponset because at this particular point the river narrowed and dropped rapidly, offering free waterpower opportunities to the first capitalist who could front the money for the necessary dams, spillways, and waterwheels.

  The manufacturing facilities huddled around the river had been upgraded and expanded over a century and a half by the clever and aggressive Baker company, which knew as much about marketing as it knew about chocolate. Then the inevitable had happened: General Foods bought the company and, after struggling for a while to work horizontally in a group of vertical buildings, gave up and moved the whole operation to Delaware. The mills were left to the pigeons and the vandals. But very slowly, during the next three decades, most of the little collection of six-story redbrick factories alongside the river had been converted into residential units.

  Vermeer quickly discovered that no one else from the Harvard Business School lived here or, as far as he could tell, anywhere near here. He had surveyed the home addresses in the faculty phone book. It turned out that, like other well-to-do professional types, most of his Harvard colleagues favored the western suburbs—the “Ws,” as they were known, short for Wellesley, Weston, and Wayland. A smaller group were Route 2-ers, coming in from the northwest, from towns like Lincoln, Concord, Carlisle, Lexington, and Belmont. “A crappier commute,” one colleague had told him, “but enough Revolutionary cachet to make up for it.” One or two brave souls came into Boston from the north, dealing with the mess of the harbor tunnels mainly because they had boats moored on Marblehead Neck or Nahant.

  But if you believed that time is money—as did most people who sold hours, as did most of his Harvard colleagues—then you looked for the easiest route to Harvard and to Logan Airport. So you looked for and paid through the nose for a house in the “Ws.” Next time, if there was a next time, he would know better.

  With a final purgative hiss, the coffeemaker announced that it was done. Vermeer took his favorite mug out of the dishwasher—favorite mainly because it had an oversize handle, easy to hang on to, large enough to keep the rest of the hot mug spaced well away from his knuckles, which was a good thing if you wound up forgetting about your coffee and reheating it in the microwave two or three times.

  Upstairs, someone dropped something heavy. Vermeer had no idea who, or what. He didn’t know much about his neighbors. There was something about the massive old walls of this place that encouraged people to stay mostly separate—that and the fact that the developers had been stingy when it came to public spaces.

  And finally, the tenants in this particular building were an odd hodgepodge. As far as he could tell, some were there for roughly the same reasons as he was. Others, poorer families, most without fathers in evidence, took advantage of the subsidized units that the city had required the developer to include. Some were divorced fathers (and even a few mothers) from nearby Milton who had to leave the broken home but couldn’t or didn’t want to get too far away from it. A few were artists, drawn by high ceilings and oversize windows. So when two people bumped into each other here, odds were that they didn’t have a lot in common.

  He foraged briefly in the refrigerator, not finding much. Briefly he thought about running across the street to the all-too-convenient Dunkin’ Donuts, where he could be foolish (bagel), reckless (muffin), or self-destructive (doughnut). But he decided on virtue instead, remembering a baguette in the bread drawer that probably wasn’t too hard to consume. He squeezed the paper bag, then dumped the loaf on a breadboard. Edible if toasted.

  It was then, unbidden—probably the result of sawing the small loaf of bread in half, much as he had done at one point last night in the restaurant with Libby—that all the sickening twists of his predicament came flooding back into his mind, and into the pit of his stomach. He was in trouble. Serious trouble. Maybe he had guessed wrong. Maybe he should have accepted the few crumbs she had offered him and tried for more help, more information, more hope, the next time.

  On the other hand, maybe she hadn’t planned on a next time. Maybe she had said her piece and written him off.

  His appetite vanished as his anxiety level rose. Would it ever have been possible to take her advice? Was there a point, somewhere earlier in this dark dream, when he could have told the oblique Dean Bishop, the obtuse MacInneses, and the rumpled detective with her tap-tap-tapping pencil, to just go and fuck themselves? Or was the trap already sprung weeks or months ago? Where was the evil emanating from, and why had it chosen to wrap itself around him?

  His stomach clenched. This time, he knew, it wouldn’t be possible simply to push it all to the back of his mind. He would have to go to the gym and run himself into an endorphin-soaked approximation of calm. And, he thought, looking down at the forgotten French bread in his left hand, better to do that before breakfast.

  By an accident of commercial geography, the gym was just about the same distance away from his apartment as Dunkin’ Donuts, in the opposite direction. Head north for grease and damnation, or head south for redemption—and, of course, damage to the knees over the long run. The gym, populated mostly by tough-looking weight lifters from the Boston side of the river, was an unassuming little operation, lovable mainly for its proximity. There were no squash courts and never would be. A year’s membership cost him less than a month of parking at Harvard.

  He put on his version of a workout outfit, which tended to be shabbier and more low-tech than most of the others he saw out in the streets, but which worked well in the unpretentious shop around the corner. His shoes were the exception: He was a sucker for good running shoes. (He had a closet full of nearly new running shoes that had been obsoleted by some new alleged technical breakthrough.) This shoe fetish was something he had picked up from a consulting client years earlier: “Forget fancy women. Forget traveling. Forget the house on the Cape. The only thing worth blowing a lot of money on is good shoes and a hot car.”

  Well, at least he had the shoes.

  A cold wind hit him as he stepped out the front door, onto the redbrick sidewalk. A nice Boston touch, when they kept the weeds down, which wasn’t often enough. He pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, tugging once on the strings to clench it tight around his face for the short jog to the gym, then stretched his leg muscles just enough to get him to the gym, where he would go through a longer stretching routine.

  “Hey, bud.”

  Just as he pushed off in the direction of the gym, he became aware of a presence off to his left—a burly figure that had moved with surprising quickness out of a doorway just up ahead of him, and was saying something to him as it was enveloping him. A panhandler? Vermeer wondered. Brown overcoat, big hat with a brim bent down and concealing his features. What the b
earlike figure was saying in a gravel-coated voice was, as Vermeer’s mind sized up and caught up with the situation, Hey, bud. Panhandlers weren’t all that common in this neighborhood, and they weren’t usually out on the sidewalks on an icy-cold Saturday morning. Vermeer thought, Well, at least I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about, since I’m not carrying any money.

  He slowed to explain that.

  He didn’t get the opportunity.

  An ungloved fist flashed out from underneath the brown coat and caught Vermeer exactly in the middle of his chest, completely knocking the wind out of him. The first punch rocked him back on his heels, setting him up for the second blow, which smashed into him again in exactly the same spot, midtorso. Vermeer’s knees folded beneath him. Around the pain and fear, he thought, gasping, Someone who knows his work.

  Before he could sag all the way to the ground, the punching bear closed the gap between them, hugging Vermeer and propping him upright. Why? Why? Because the bear is steering him toward a car parked at the curb, idling, with the rear right passenger door slightly ajar. To anyone who happened to be watching, maybe it would look as if the jogger were having some sort of problem—the flashing jackhammer punches having been invisible from most angles—and the bear, a Good Samaritan, was giving him a lift.

  And now, at closer range, Vermeer could see under the brim of the hat. Could see the contorted face of Dan Beyer—contorted with rage more than exertion. A face of fury, but also of calculation and determination. The balled fists were now clamps, one on either side of his body, steering him as if on an assembly line, raw material heading down the chute for processing. Vermeer knew, absolutely, that he should not get into this car, but no part of his body was responding to his brain . . .

  Then, from yet another direction, over Beyer’s shoulder, came another voice. A female voice, out of place. Flat but intrusive. “Hey. Hey! What’s going on here?”

  Beyer snarled, just loud enough to be heard, keeping his face concealed, “Back off, lady, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “I don’t think so, Dan,” the voice said, with command in it.

  Barbara Brouillard, now close enough to the action to do business, used her left hand to extend her badge a few feet from Beyer’s face, and her right hand to pull a service revolver out from under her own droopy coat. Smoothly rather than quickly. “Boston Police. I say you back off. Dan Beyer, right? Well, Dan, I’m an excellent shot from four feet out, plus, I have two officers within thirty feet of your back. Which would be hard to miss in any case, but they’re also good shots. So I say you let the professor down nice and easy, and you keep your hands up nice and high, and nobody gets killed. Meaning you.”

  Even around the searing pain in his chest and the bright lights behind his sagging eyelids, Vermeer could feel Beyer calculating the odds. Could sense that Beyer was deciding whether to simply snap his neck and wait for the hail of bullets to follow. The clamps tightened.

  “Now, Dan.”

  Then the clamps relaxed. Vermeer slumped to the ground, watching the dirty snow rush up toward his face, wondering if he would slip under the parked car and somehow die that way. He managed to topple away from the curb.

  “Hands where I can see them.” He heard Brouillard’s cold voice. “Only slow movements. Good. Hands behind your back. Face the car. Good. Now, why don’t you bend over and rest that chin right up on the roof of the car. Very good, Dan.”

  Brouillard snapped on the handcuffs with some difficulty—Beyer’s wrists were half again as thick as the average suspect’s. On her signal, two uniformed officers stepped forward. They had disbelief on their young faces. Each now reached for one of Beyer’s protruding elbows.

  “Read him his rights,” she said, her voice still hard-edged, “then put him in the black-and-white and keep an eye on him. Meanwhile, call in another unit to come and babysit this car until headquarters can get a team down here to go over it inch by inch.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t leave until the babysitters show up, and tell them not to leave until after this car is scoured, clean. It’s obviously a rental, and I’m not expecting a lot, but that’s no excuse for being sloppy. This one goes completely by the book. And tell them when they’re done, get it towed to Pier 41, and make sure it’s locked up nice and tight. Hertz is out of luck on this one for the time being.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you can take Mr. Potato Head here downtown and book him for assault. For starters. Give him his one call. Don’t let him talk to anybody else. Keep him under wraps until I get back.”

  They nodded, still wide-eyed.

  “So go. I’ll tend to the professor.”

  Vermeer groaned, curbside.

  “Who seems to be coming back to life, just a little bit.”

  25

  BROUILLARD STUDIED THE STILL-GASPING FIGURE ON THE BRICK sidewalk, calculating how best to get him to his feet. “Not used to taking punches, are we?” Despite the gibe, her voice was not unkind. “He popped you a couple of good ones, that’s for sure. One, two. Pop, pop.” She squatted alongside him.

  “I think,” she continued in a calming voice, but still with that note of command in it, “that we need to get you back inside so you can count your ribs. Can you stand up?”

  He got to his knees and looked sideways at her. He tried to answer but wound up coughing and wincing, and then coughing and wincing again.

  “Okay, so maybe you don’t try to talk just yet,” she said, suppressing a smile. She had seen enough of what she was looking for: alertness, eyes focusing, good color, no blood with the cough, no signs of shock. She reached for the inside of his arm, above his wrist. His hand closed around her wrist. Mountaineering-style. She leaned back and pulled gently, and he leaned into her effort. “Shallow breaths only for the time being, Professor. And meanwhile, maybe what we do is, we just get you up halfway, like so, and then you crouch up on that leg, and then you crouch up halfway on that one—hey, those are some wowza sneakers, big fella—and you put this arm over my shoulder. And then we both stand up at once. Right. Very good.”

  With her right arm around his waist, and his left arm over her shoulder, they shuffled their way back through the front door of his apartment building to the locked inner door. She looked at him and, with her eyebrows, asked for the key. He pointed with an extended toe at the corner of the large rubber mat.

  She propped him up against the wall, retrieved the key, and brought it back, shaking her head. “Oh, jeez, the old key-under-the-mat trick. No points for either originality or smarts, Professor, although I guess you know your own neighborhood.” She opened the locked inner door and peeled Vermeer off the wall, and they made their way to the elevator.

  She deposited him on the couch, stepped back, and assessed the situation again: color still good, minor shakes, voice returning, some healthy signs of embarrassment. She brought him a glass of orange juice—easily accessible sugars—and sat down in a chair opposite him. He nodded, thanking her, wincing again as he stretched to take the glass. She calculated whether, if he passed out and pitched forward, she could reach him before he hit the coffee table between them. She decided she could, just barely, but her odds would get a lot better if she perched up on the forward edge of her seat. So she perched.

  “So let’s see what we have in the way of reading material here.” She picked up two wordy-looking magazines and a tabloid-shaped newspaper from one of the wobbly piles on the coffee table. No, not a newspaper: the New York Review of Books. “The Journal of Finance. The Macrame—no, Ma-cro-economic—Quarterly. None of which looks all that gripping. Beach reading for bachelor professor types?”

  He didn’t respond. He was pushing on his ribs, one by one, carefully taking a semideep breath for each rib as he climbed the rib ladder up his torso.

  She looked at the address label. Then she laughed out loud. “Wilmer? Wim is short for Wilmer? Your real name is Wilmer?”

  Vermeer stopped poking himself, looked
up, and sighed. “Yes. Wilmer.” He spoke economically but in a voice that was now close to normal. “You don’t like that name?”

  “Sorry.” She laughed again. “It’s just such a dorky sort of name. What were your parents thinking of? I mean, I can see Wilhelm, or maybe even Wilbur. But Wilmer—that’s a terrible thing to lay on a kid.”

  “It’s a family name,” he said, gingerly twisting his upper body from side to side, still partly focused on his self-examination. “It got shortened to Wim pretty quick, and I never thought about it much. Except for you, no one’s had such a good laugh out of it since junior high school, I don’t think.”

  She could see he was annoyed, but she was not going to let it go. For one thing, she wanted to work him out of his self-absorbed state. And also, it was a dorky name, which deserved some abuse. “I mean,” she persisted, “I’m trying to think of one cool person whose name was Wilmer. And I can’t think of a one. There was the guy who owned the talking horse on TV, Mr. Ed, but I’m pretty sure his name was—”

  “Wilbur. An architect. Cool guy. Wrong name.”

  “Right. And what’s the name of the little fat guy with the speech defect who chases Bugs Bunny around?”

  “Elmer. Fudd.”

  “Right.” She grinned, enjoying herself, continuing to drag words out of him. “So I can’t even think of any Wilmers, let alone cool ones.”

  “Well,” said Vermeer, rising to the bait in spite of himself, “you have a very nice city in Texas named Wilmer. Southeast of Dallas.”

  “Cities don’t count.”

  “Lots of law firms with Wilmers in them.”

  “Last names, though, right? Last names don’t count, either.”

  “Okay,” he replied after a moment. “Here’s one that’s right up your personal alley. Remember the little hood who trailed Sydney Greenstreet around in The Maltese Falcon? The one that Humphrey Bogart proposes to hand over to the police to tie up all the loose ends? Wilmer. No last name. Played by a character actor named Elisha Cook Jr.”