Murder at the B-School Read online

“What I understand, Dean Bishop, is that the information I asked for a week ago—pretty basic, straightforward stuff, as far as I’m concerned—still isn’t available, and now it won’t be available anytime soon.

  “Let’s assume,” she continued, “that Eric MacInnes was indeed murdered in your hot tub, Dean Bishop. Statistically speaking, the chances of us finding out who did it go down dramatically with every day that goes by. Now your guy Weiskopf comes in, and starts from scratch. Without laying eyes on this guy, I’m willing to bet that he doesn’t know the half of what Rodriguez knows about your building security systems. So we’ve actually lost a lot of ground. And I have to say, it’s kind of odd that when I put a little heat on Rodriguez to help me do my job, he leaves town.”

  “Are you implying,” Bishop interjected, “that Alonzo Rodriguez is a suspect in your investigations? I find that hard to believe.”

  “If he were, Dean Bishop, I wouldn’t tell you about it.”

  “I see no reason for us to be rude to each other, Captain.”

  “Oh, actually, I see lots of reasons. The dead kid in your pool, for example. The dead kid’s dead sister in one of my hotels. A lot of nasty newspaper headlines and TV segments. Have you seen today’s Herald?”

  “No. As I said, I’m in Chicago, and—”

  She picked up the paper. “Okay. Picture this. Front page: MACINNES MURDERS LINKED. That’s the big type. And then in smaller type: THE B-SCHOOL CONNECTION. Nice picture of your library, with the bell tower. You just can’t buy this kind of publicity.”

  “Well, that’s another thing—”

  “And last but not least,” she went on, “I have an angry mayor breathing down my neck. I know you’ve had some dealings with Tommy Pavone, Dean Bishop. I understand that you and he get along pretty well. But I bet you’ve never seen him really angry. That ain’t a pretty sight, as they say.”

  It was a risky ploy. For all she knew, Pavone and Bishop talked regularly on back channels, and her bluster would misfire. But Bishop responded in a conciliatory tone. “Well, Captain, neither of us wants an angry mayor. And thank you for reading those headlines to me, because they reminded me of the other reason why I wanted to speak with you.”

  “Which is?”

  “I wanted to let you know that the university strongly encouraged me to put Wim Vermeer on an indefinite paid leave, which I’ve reluctantly agreed to. He’s been relieved of his responsibilities, pending the outcome of your investigations.” He paused. It sounded as if he expected her to clap her hands or click her heels. She didn’t. “So I just wanted to let you know that in light of recent developments, it was a mistake for me to involve him in the first place, and I do apologize if I’ve compromised your investigation in any way. Of course, I had no way of knowing that he would become a suspect himself.”

  “Is he?”

  A pause. “Isn’t he?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, he’s like everybody else: innocent until proven guilty. Maybe you acted a little too quickly. But I’m sure you followed procedures. Or at least I hope you did.”

  “Of course,” replied Bishop. “Our counsel has been advising us all the way. In fact, it would be fair to say he has taken control of the process. So I can assure you that there won’t be any procedural mistakes.”

  She sighed loudly, putting her throat into it. “Dean Bishop, to tell you the truth, I think that your people have made lots of mistakes, all along the line, and it doesn’t sound like you’ve stopped yet. Tell your guy Weiskopf that as far as the police are concerned, he’s already a week late with the answers to my questions. And those answers are getting later by the minute.

  “Meanwhile”—she gambled again—“I’ll brief the mayor.”

  34

  SO WHERE WAS VERMEER?

  Brouillard had tried the obvious places. Judging from Dean Bishop’s revelations, she assumed Vermeer wasn’t at his Harvard office. The messages on both his home machine and cell phone were similar and vague: I’ll be away for a couple of days. Leave a message. I’ll call you back.

  Away where?

  On an impulse, she drove down to Dorchester and the chocolate factory. He didn’t answer his buzzer. The mailman arrived and, having unlocked and swung the large mailbox unit away from the wall, stuffed little packets of mail secured with rubber bands into the various slots. He noticed her watching him.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “Captain Brouillard, BPD.” She flashed her badge. He looked mildly interested. “Just wondering if Vermeer in four-D had put a hold on his mail.”

  “Not unless the hold is scheduled to start tomorrow or later. Because he’s got some stuff here today.”

  An elderly lady banged on the glass outer door, motioning that she needed help getting it open. Brouillard pulled and held it open, and the woman, not pausing to thank Brouillard for her help, pushed a two-wheeled wire grocery cart into the lobby ahead of her, wielding it like an icebreaker. The lobby was now a little too crowded. She plowed past Brouillard, evidently determined to collect her mail. “What seems to be the holdup here?” She was addressing the mailman.

  “I’m with the police, ma’am,” Brouillard said to the old woman’s back. “I’m looking for someone. A tenant here, Wim Vermeer. Maybe you know him.”

  “I don’t know anybody,” the old woman snapped impatiently over her shoulder. “Why would I know somebody? The building superintendent knows everybody. You want to find somebody, you talk to the building superintendent. Everybody knows that. Back outside, down the driveway, last door on the left. Did my check come?”

  Down the driveway, last door on the left—if she hadn’t been looking for it, she would have missed it. The door was below ground level, a few granite-slab steps down from the road surface. An undersize bronze plaque in need of some polishing identified the superintendent’s door. It didn’t look as if the superintendent wanted to be found. She pushed the doorbell and didn’t hear anything. She knocked. No answer.

  “No vacancies, lady. Full up.”

  The voice came from behind her. She turned to see a large man emerging from a matching door, also below ground level, across the driveway. A slow-moving, mean-looking slug of a guy with an unfortunate knot of greasy black hair on the middle of his mostly bald head. Nothing about him looked quite finished. It looked as if his creator had lost faith in this particular project midway through and moved on to something more promising.

  “I’m not looking for an apartment,” she said, mentally squaring herself up. “Boston police. I’m trying to find one of your tenants.”

  He looked at her badge. “Oh, yeah? I had an uncle on the force. Just retired after, I dunno, maybe thirty-five years. Moved to Florida. Bought himself a condo on Vero Beach for ten grand maybe twenty-five years ago. Now he lives down there for free; collects a fat fuckin’ pension. You couldn’t touch the goddamn place today for twenty times that. Lucky motherfucker. Always got all the breaks.”

  Brouillard didn’t have a lot of patience with this type: purposefully foulmouthed to throw the little lady off balance. Her former auto mechanic had the same bad habits. She whipped out her pad and pencil. “What’s your name?”

  “Uhm, Castle. Joe Castle.”

  “Your uncle put in thirty-five years with the police department?”

  “Yep. He—”

  “Then listen to me, Joe Castle, he earned everything that’s coming to him.” Before Joe Castle had time to string together his next string of “fucks” and “goddamns,” she switched gears. “Look, I’m here on official police business. We can do it here, or we can go downtown. Makes no difference to me.”

  He snapped to attention. Behind every bully is a coward.

  “I’m trying to find Wim Vermeer,” she continued. “You know him?”

  “The perfessor? Sure I know him. What’d he do? He kill somebody? I shoulda known. He sure as fuck took off outa here in a hurry.”

  “When was that?”

  “Yesterday. Came down, told
me to look out for any packages he got and take his newspapers in. Then he was gone.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “Nah. Outta state, I think he said.”

  “Did you do it yet?”

  He looked puzzled. “Do what yet?”

  “Look out for packages. Take his newspapers in.”

  “Nah. No hurry. He’s outta state, right? Plus, didn’t you say he killed somebody? So maybe the guy ain’t coming back, ever. In which case, maybe you and I could do business. Maybe even have some fun. If you’re lookin’ for a place, that is.” He made an odd fat face, as if he were in pain. Then she realized that he was trying to leer at her. Her former auto mechanic had this bad habit, too.

  “Castle, are you aware that propositioning a law-enforcement agent is a federal offense? Could involve a civil-rights rap?” Complete bullshit, but it had its desired effect. His eyes widened, and his eyebrows shot up comically.

  “Hey, lady, I—”

  “So we have a bad situation here, right? But let’s deal. You let me accompany you when you take the newspapers up there, and in the process, you help me confirm that Professor Vermeer isn’t in any trouble up there. And I forget about this bad situation.”

  He was searching in his memory for something, and it looked like hard work. “You got a—what?—a warrant?”

  “Nope. But I’ve got you.”

  They went through the front door, and he gathered up the only copies of the Times and the Journal in the lobby. Then he took her up to the fourth floor on the elevator, staying as far away from her as possible in the small cab. Their elbows touched accidentally at one point. That made him flinch.

  “So here we are,” he mumbled, turning the lock of 4-D. “The perfessor’s house.” He let her go in first and then dropped the papers carelessly on the floor. They spread out on impact, like a deck of cards dropped from several inches above a table.

  She had no idea what she was looking for, and she couldn’t go fishing. She had already put herself on thin ice. A judge might possibly agree that she had reason to worry that something might have happened to Vermeer. Probable cause. But no judge would smile on her turning the place upside down.

  “You check the bedroom and the bath,” she said in her command voice. “Remember: You’re just checking to make sure he’s not in trouble. Look in the closets and under the bed. Look in the tub. Meanwhile, I’ll check these rooms.” He grunted, irritated, and shambled off. He had been thinking, easy boff. Now, somehow, he was taking orders from the easy boff.

  Okay, Wim, she said to herself, just give me one clue and I’ll find you. But give it to me quick before your pal Joe Castle comes back.

  Nothing on the kitchen counters. No new food in the fridge since the last time she was here. Just like my fridge, she noted ruefully. Two messages on the answering machine—both hers, unless in the interim he had listened to hers and someone else had called in. No time to check that out. She considered stealing the tape and decided against it.

  On the coffee table, the same pile of professor-type magazines.

  But something new: a world atlas.

  Open to a map of the Caribbean.

  With a pencil lying on top.

  And there, off the eastern end of Puerto Rico, a long skinny island running east-west, called “Vieques.” Circled lightly in pencil.

  It took the phone companies an hour or two to fax Vermeer’s phone records to her office. The landlines showed nothing interesting, to or from Vermeer’s apartment. The cell phone records, though, put another puzzle piece on the table. Vermeer had made a number of calls to area code 787: the Vieques area code. He had called a Realtor twice—houseshopping?—and a guesthouse called the Rising Moon Inn. The Realtor was in a town called Isabel Segunda. The guesthouse was in somewhere called Esperanza. She checked the guidebook that she had grabbed at a bookstore on her way back into town. There: basically, the only two towns on the island of Vieques.

  AmEx called back next. Yes, there was recent activity on his card: He had purchased a round-trip ticket to San Juan, and a connecting round-trip flight to Aeropuerto Antonio Rivera Rodriguez. U.S. Airways, then a puddle jumper.

  U.S. Airways faxed his itinerary: out at dawn this morning, due to return three days from now. A full-fare ticket, which meant he could change his return whenever. Yes, their records showed that Mr. Vermeer had checked in at Logan this morning. The puddle-jumper airline had substantially more trouble pulling up the records, and the person who answered the phone did not speak much English. But sí, passenger Vermeer had flown to Aeropuerto Rodriguez this morning. Rodriguez. She knew it was a common enough Spanish surname. Interesting, all the same.

  She reviewed her scribbled notes and the various faxes that had come in. Thank you for not paying cash, Wim. But cash was what you used to conceal your route of flight. Maybe Wim Vermeer didn’t think he was guilty of anything. Or maybe he was guilty as hell, and panicked and wasn’t thinking straight.

  Or maybe he was about to make a mistake and make himself guilty of something for the first time. She dialed upstairs.

  “Chief?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Brouillard. I need your okay to follow a lead out of town.”

  The chief groaned. “Who, where, and why?” The chief didn’t even like long-distance phone calls. He sure as hell wasn’t going to like anything about a midwinter junket to a Caribbean island.

  “It’s Vermeer, the guy I told you about in the MacInnes cases. The B-School prof who had the ties to the dead boy, and was the last to see the girl alive, and was jumped on the sidewalk outside his house earlier this week. He’s flown. Taken off for a remote island somewhere off Puerto Rico.” She tried to make it sound as bad as possible without actually pointing the finger at Wim. And at some point in here, she noted to herself, she had started thinking about Vermeer as “Wim.”

  “Oh, come on, Barbara,” the chief said, sounding pained. He had been a decent cop in his day. Now he was playing out the string. In that, he had the mayor’s tacit approval, since nobody wanted any turmoil in the department with an election coming up. “You told the guy to hunker down somewhere, right? So now he’s hunkering down. He’s just being smart. Taking your advice.”

  “He doesn’t take my advice. And there’s more.” She told him about Rodriguez taking off a day earlier, bound for the same island. “This can’t be a coincidence, Chief. We’re talking about a dirt island in the middle of nowhere. The two of them—Vermeer and Rodriguez—have got to be connected in some way. I’ve got to go after them.”

  “Damn it, Captain,” he barked, but she heard the resignation creeping into his voice, “this is the kind of stuff that the newspapers have a field day with. You know what they do with this kind of stuff: ‘Top Cop on Fun-in-Sun Junket.’ And you know they’ve got their eyes on you. You’re investigating the hottest cases in town. Maybe in the country.”

  “Did you get my e-mail about the mayor?”

  “Oh, yes. Goddamn it.”

  She knew she had him. “Tell you what, Chief: I’ll put the ticket on my own credit card. If it’s a nothing, it’s a nothing, and I won’t put in for reimbursement. If it’s a something, the department can pay me back. All I need is your okay for an unscheduled vacation. A week. I’ve got it coming to me.”

  “Goddamn it and shit, Barbara, I know you have a vacation coming to you—more than one, I bet—but it’s gonna look like a damned strange time to be taking it. Okay, okay. Take it. But be careful down there.”

  “You know I will, Chief.”

  “No, specifically, what I mean is, be careful you don’t get photographed in your goddamn little floral-pattern bikini sucking down a blue drink full of crushed ice with a little umbrella in it. ‘Cop Swizzles while Case Fizzles’—that, I don’t want to see in the Herald.”

  She laughed. Then, she wondered if she still owned a bathing suit.

  35

  VERMEER WONDERED HOW LONG IT TOOK A SCREW TO BACK ITself out of the
side panels of a two-prop, six-seater Cessna in response to the twin engines’ intense vibrations. Several screws near his left elbow were already missing. A couple more had made their way halfway out. Figure the plane was at least thirty years old. Had it taken thirty years? Or did someone maybe tighten up these screws every few weeks, or months, or years?

  And was someone paying more attention to the screws that held the outside of the plane together? These were the kinds of calculations that Vermeer tended to make in small, old airplanes.

  He had the middle bench all to himself. He and the two passengers in front of him had been stuffed in through a small hatch on the right side of the plane, under the wing. Then that door was closed, and the two passengers on the rear bench were stuffed in through a second hatch on the left side of the plane. On his way in, looking down, he noticed that the threshold of the hatch was made of oak. He had never seen any kind of wood on an airplane before.

  This was one of those planes where they asked you how much you weighed and then assigned you a seat. The cast-bronze sign over his head gave him some more material to calculate with. “Maximum floor loading intensity not greater than 120 lb/ft2,” it began. It continued with a series of maximum allowables, from just behind the pilots to the back of the plane. “Area from rear of pilot’s seat to front wing spar frame 1000 lbs max,” read the first.

  There were four such areas blocked out, with a grand allowable total of 2,940 pounds. This crowd, Vermeer guessed, didn’t add up to much more than half that. The Spanish-speaking couple on the front bench might tip the scales at three fifty, but no more. He assumed that he himself was still under two hundred pounds, although he hadn’t checked recently. And the two kids in the backseat, who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, with flushed faces that looked more lustful than sunburned, couldn’t add up to more than three hundred pounds total. So even if the engines were old and tired, Vermeer calculated, they ought to be able to move this crowd from here to there.

  The plane narrowed toward its nose. As a result, the two white-shirted, epauletted pilots didn’t fit shoulder to shoulder. They seemed to love their work, though—something that Vermeer always looked for in people who held his life in their hands. Before takeoff, they joked in both Spanish and English about the little plane, the noise, and the relatively short hop over to Vieques. Once airborne, shouting above the engines, they provided a running commentary—in Spanish; Vermeer couldn’t follow it.