Murder at the B-School Page 28

  “The part about Rodriguez,” he said after a moment. “That part I don’t get. I don’t even know the guy, beyond waving to him on campus and saying hello, or asking someone in his office to change a fluorescent bulb in my office. I didn’t know he had ties to this place. And I have no clue how he might be involved in this mess.”

  “You’re here for Pirle.”

  He looked at her. “Take off your sunglasses. I want to see your eyes.”

  She took them off.

  “I get the sense that you’re a pretty good actress,” he said, “pretending to be people you’re not, and all. So maybe there’s no point to this. But I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me you’re not trying to stick a large one up my butt.”

  “Okay.” She held his gaze, with a hint of a smile on her face. “I am not trying to stick a large one up your butt. Not in my job description.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do,” he said grumpily. “Fine. So let’s say our deal’s back on: I help you, and you help me. Although as usual, I seem to need more help than you.”

  She nodded and, a little awkwardly, extended her right hand across her body. She closed up as much of the space that separated them as she could without falling out of her chair. This required her to lie almost on her side, facing him. He tried not to look past her hand as he shook it. He didn’t succeed. In fact, he looked all the way up her arm, and beyond. To her well-muscled arms and broad shoulders, and her protruding collarbone. And beyond. To hills and valleys accentuated by her half-turn toward him.

  “So as you were saying,” he continued a little too quickly, “Pirle. Right. I got hold of James MacInnes on the phone, and he finally told me that it was Pirle who had been concocting this story about me and Eric. So all of a sudden, it all snapped together. The evil bastard is obviously closer to that family than anyone has let on so far. He’s some kind of Dutch-uncle figure, as disgusting as that sounds, and he’s been pumping them full of lies. I can’t stand the son of a bitch anyway, as you may have guessed. My guess is that he’s been active in deep-sixing my tenure chances, which weren’t great to start with, when he should have been helping me. Then all of this slime pops out. So I decided that I would come down here and do something. Get the goods on him. Maybe break his nose. I hadn’t really gotten that far.”

  She sighed, shaking her head. She had twisted away from him again, rearranging the landscape of hills and valleys. “You should have called me.”

  “Yeah, well, it felt to me like our deal wasn’t on anymore. It felt to me like you were getting ready to haul my ass into jail. In which case I lose my opportunity to help my own cause.”

  “Not a very good plan, from what you’ve told me.”

  “It was the best I could come up with. Plus, I was pissed. Still am.”

  Unself-consciously she scratched an itch on her chest. She watched her own index finger at work. He caught himself gazing at her again. Some of the same parts of her. Jesus, he scolded himself, keep your goddamn head in the game.

  “It’s funny,” she said, looking up again. “You scoot down here chasing Pirle, and you don’t have a clue about Rodriguez. I blast down here chasing Rodriguez—and you, of course—and I don’t have a clue about Pirle. Just found out about him this afternoon, in a little conversation I had with Rodriguez. All in all, it sounds like our working relationship needs some work.”

  He pulled himself up out of his chair. “In that spirit of cooperation,” he said, “there’s something else you should know about. Wait here a sec.”

  She was sitting up, cross-legged, massaging the balls of her feet, when he returned. He dumped the contents of the Harvard envelope out on her chair in front of her shins. She picked up one of the prints. Then she put it down and picked up another. Methodically she looked at all of them, registering nothing on her face. She jingled the keys on the paper clip without much interest. “Honey pot,” she said finally, more to herself than to him.

  “Say what?”

  “Sorry. Old cop lingo. You bait the trap with some honey, lure the victim in, and then blackmail him. And it’s always a him, of course. Never a her. Guys can’t seem to keep it in their pants.” But she wasn’t really talking to him. She was elsewhere. Calculating.

  “It has to be Pirle’s place,” said Vermeer, wanting her full attention. “And those have got to be the keys to a locked filing cabinet.”

  She nodded, still distracted.

  “So obviously,” he continued, annoyed, “I’m supposed to go there and rummage in those files until I find what I’m supposed to find. Whatever that is.”

  She shook her head slowly, side to side. “No. Too easy. And also too hard.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Now she focused on him. “Look, Wim. This smells bad. This crap came from one of two people: your pal Pirle or my pal Rodriguez. If it’s your pal, it’s a trap. And if it’s my pal, and if it’s not a trap, you’ve got five minutes tops to get in there and get back out before the cops arrive. I’ve seen the jail here. You don’t want to be spending time there.”

  He had turned sideways on his chair, facing her. He rubbed his temples. “Sorry, partner. Gotta do it. I need evidence to nail the bastard, if only to get the MacInneses off my case. If you somehow get the cops interested in what he’s doing up there, and he gets wind of it, he might torch the whole thing, files and all. Then we’re back to his word against mine. And so far, I lose that matchup.” He looked at her. “Tell me that you’ve got something—anything—that gets me off the hook, so far.”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay, then. I wait until he goes into town for dinner tonight, which, I’m told by my talkative local real estate agent, he does every night when he’s here; and I go in and rummage. And get out in a hurry.”

  “Five minutes. Or less.”

  “Less.”

  “Let me make something as clear as I can,” she said, packing up the photos and keys as she talked, then handing them back to him. “I want no part of this. In fact, I haven’t heard a word you’ve said for the last five minutes or so. If I had, I’d have to call my friend Agente Montoya and tell him what you had in mind.”

  “Well, please don’t.”

  She waited, then asked, “You’ve seen the place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And if you had just robbed the place, and you had set off the alarm and you knew for certain that the cops were on their way, would you go down the front side or the back side of the hill?”

  “The back side,” he said. “More choices.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. The sun had sunk behind the hills at their backs and was lighting up the tops of the cloud columns in bright pinks and golds. Over on his side of the island, Vermeer thought, Pirle was enjoying a spectacular sunset. Getting on his evening clothes.

  “Hey,” she said. “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t like loose ends.”

  “Okay. What’s the loose end?”

  “Who’s Inspector Javert?”

  He had to admit it: Risky as it almost certainly was, he liked this strange woman. “The relentless policeman in Victor Hugo’s book Les Misérables,” he explained. “The noble hero, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving children, and the coldhearted Javert hunts him down and sticks him in a stinking French prison to rot forever.”

  She nodded, taking this in. “There’s nothing like a good cop,” she finally said. “I guess I’m gonna have to read that book.”

  39

  IT WAS A STUPID PLAN, HE ACKNOWLEDGED TO HIMSELF. ALL THE stupider because he had rented a car at the last minute, with his own credit card, in a hurry. The kid at the rental agency—a glorified shack on the western edge of town, that looked like it hadn’t seen any business that day—would have no trouble remembering his face.

  It was dusk. Parking the car a few hundred feet below the crest of
the hill, on the back side, he slowly walked the rest of the way up, as if out for a casual evening stroll. He jingled the file cabinet keys in his pocket as he walked. He reeked of mosquito repellent. His long-sleeved shirt and long pants made him a little conspicuous, which was bad. But they concealed his pale skin from the moonlight, which was good.

  He found his hiding place—in a copse of tall bushes across the street and slightly downhill—and waited. He thought of the distances he had traveled before and during this haunted part of his life, and wondered what he might have done differently. The image of Barbara Brouillard, in her blue suit and shades and floppy sun hat, and calling him Wim, kept coming to mind.

  A car door slamming, then a set of headlights. Then the steel gate rolling open, almost silent, except for the whir of the motor, until it hit its stop point with a loud clang. A car glided out, bigger than most on this island, with a dark, unidentifiable figure behind the wheel, on the far side of the vehicle. The car disappeared down the dark, steep road to Isabel Segunda. The gate rolled back into place, clanging shut again.

  Time to move.

  After looking up and down the deserted road, he slipped between the gatepost and a high bush, then up the almost grown-over gravel drive. Small lights defined a path up to the front door. He skirted the walkway and also ducked around the well-lighted pool.

  He had never broken into a home before, other than his own. But he had seen it on TV often enough: the shielded fist through the glass, the hand reaching in to throw the dead bolt, the door easing open. First, though, he circled the perimeter, getting his bearings on the rambling house, slinking along the ocean-facing deck, feeling scared and foolish, looking in every window he could reach. It was now too dark to see much of anything, but this room, with the floor-to-ceiling bookcases—this was the one he would bet on.

  He circled back around to the front door.

  Halfway up the hill on the town side road, on a switchback that had been cut into the side of the hill, she ran through her relaxation exercises to slow her heart. Breathe in through nose. Breathe out through mouth. In through nose. Out through mouth.

  Her car was parked in the exact middle of the narrowest strait on the tiny road, with blind curves above and below her. The uphill side of the road was demarcated by a deep drainage gully, which gave way to a sharply rising jungle. The ocean side was more or less a cliff, dropping off abruptly to the next tier of houses, fifty feet down below.

  She was looking westward, toward town. Her car was about to break down. She was assuming, for no particular reason other than force of habit, that they would come with their lights spinning.

  Just like on TV: He smashed a protected hand through a pane of frosted glass alongside the lock. After the glass skittering on the floor, no more sounds—but he wasn’t listening. He was fumbling for the lock, finding it, pushing the door open, stepping inside.

  There: a low, steady whine. A panel to his left flashing red. Five minutes and counting down.

  He walked quickly through the dark house, trying to keep his bearings straight. Left, left, then right, somewhere down here. Here.

  Looking westward back down into the valley, she saw the blue lights, two hills over, coming her way. Coming as fast as the undersize, sinuous roads permitted. She turned the car on and opened the hood. It was still hot from the climb up the hill. Wedging an oversize screwdriver between the snaking, articulated water hose and the engine block, she put her weight on the end of the screwdriver, shielding her face just in case. She was new at this.

  The O-clamp that held the decaying end of the hose let go gratefully. There was no eruption. Just a gentle burbling, like a thick soup. An acrid smell as the first thimblefuls of antifreeze danced out of the radiator, fizzed and bounced across the hot metal surface, and hit the dusty road. Then more. Then a good old-fashioned boilover, and then a pretty bad burning smell.

  She replaced the screwdriver under the car’s front seat.

  He was thinking of her caution: too easy. Was it a trap? There wasn’t time to worry about it—either it was or it wasn’t. Four minutes. Less than four minutes. The whine of the alarm was inaudible in this part of the house, but it still lingered in his ears.

  The study had file cabinets—lots of file cabinets lining pieces of three walls, in and around the built-in bookcases. Too many. They were labeled. Too dark.

  Taking a breath, he walked over to the door and felt for the light switch. What’s the worst that could happen? A neighbor calls the police? They’re already on their way.

  He flipped it on.

  He pulled the keys out of his pocket. They were different; he had checked. So unless he got lucky, there were twice as many file cabinets: two keys per cabinet.

  The labels on the cabinet were laser printed: A over here, B next to it. Z presumably all the way over in that corner. He didn’t need Z. He needed M. Which should be somewhere over here in the middle. Here. The top four in this column of five.

  Key teeth down, he reminded himself, shoving in first one key in the top drawer of this set, then the other. No. No. Down one drawer: one key, then the other. No. No. Down another drawer: first one key, then the other. No. He checked his watch. Three minutes. Minus, say, a minute for actually getting out of here and down the road.

  No.

  Last M drawer. The first key turned. The little lock popped out a half inch, expectantly. Now or never, he thought, sliding open the file cabinet. He wondered what secrets that second key would have revealed.

  They came roaring up the hill in low gear, engine screaming for mercy and blue lights spinning. She stood on the downhill side of her car, waving; her arms crossed and opened in front of her body, as if she were dancing a bad upper-body-only Charleston, even before they turned the blind corner. The doorless Jeep burst into view, nearly slamming into her before the brakes grabbed hold and put the front of the police car into a lurching, gravel-spraying nose dive. A furious cloud of dust billowed forward, turning the twin headlight beams into roiling horizontal pillars and enveloping them.

  Frantically they were shouting at her in Spanish. The driver stepped halfway out of the Jeep, putting one foot into the middle of the road and waving back at her, but in his case from left to right with both arms, exaggerated: Out of the road! Out of the road!

  She pointed over her shoulders with both hands, keeping her eye on the agente in the road. “Agua,” she shouted, and pointed. “Agua.”

  The driver, and now his partner, jumped out of opposite sides of the Jeep. They sprinted past her, ignoring her. One slammed her hood shut. The other climbed into the driver’s seat of her car. Now the first came back and roughly shoved her out of the way. In the direction of the cliff edge. While the second released the parking brake, pushed in the clutch, and rolled her car backward almost noiselessly, gravel crunching under her tires, as he cut the wheel sharply. Perpendicular, she noted approvingly, remembering just how deep that drainage ditch was; he was putting himself in no danger of a rollover.

  The back end of her car dropped off the edge of the world. There was one loud metal shriek from underneath the car as her headlights shot up into the sky at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Then they ran back past her. One hissed something under his breath as he passed; it didn’t sound friendly. They took off again in another spray of gravel, pushing back up toward the six-thousand-rpm level as they rounded the blind turn uphill from her, out of sight.

  He was on the floor, legs stretched out in front of him, and a pile of folders between his knees. He had grabbed a sequence of three folders out of the drawer. Thank God this Pirle was a compulsive prick: “MacInnes, Elizabeth.” “MacInnes, Eric.” “MacInnes, James.”

  He already knew, more or less, what was in them. He hesitated for a precious second, wondering whether, by looking at the photos, he would somehow be complicit—an accomplice of Pirle’s—in a soiled spiritual way.

  Fuck that, he decided. He needed the goods, and he was out of time. Yes, there was Libb
y, in what looked like sexual distress, with what looked like the saggy backside of the slimy prick himself. He recoiled. Not a folder to linger over.

  Eric, entwined with his faceless male lover—but male, without a doubt.

  James. With the same woman in the pictures that Brouillard had called “honey pot.” Local talent.

  He scooped them up, stashing them under his arm. And looked at his watch. Out of time. If she was right, they were already here, racing up the driveway, maybe with guns drawn. He shoved the file drawer shut and pushed the lock back in. Pirle wouldn’t be fooled for long. He would find these files missing. He would retrieve the negatives for “MacInnes, James,” and whistle up some new prints. He wouldn’t bother with “MacInnes, Elizabeth” or “MacInnes, Eric.” Because their voting stock now rested with James.

  Because they were dead.

  He flipped off the light, for no obvious reason, and started sprinting for the front door. He didn’t feel vindicated or exonerated.

  He felt nauseated.

  40

  THE FIRST KNOCK ON HIS DOOR CAME A HALF HOUR AFTER HE got back. Vermeer’s heart hadn’t yet stopped pounding. Now his stomach flopped. He was struck once again at how dumb his plan had been. And continued to be. What if the owner of the stolen property was outside his door, and angry? Did he have a plan for that?

  No. He didn’t.

  He grunted. “Yeah?”

  “Wim.” It was her voice. Low but not urgent.

  He opened the door. She was smiling as if she had won the high school spelling bee. Why?

  “So. Invite me in.”

  “Do come in.”

  “You went out.” She was wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt and shorts. And open-toed shoes with no heels. Her hair was dripping from its ends, fresh from the shower. She looked around for a place to sit. The best place was the edge of the bed. She perched primly, straight-backed, crossing her legs at the ankle. He was still standing by the door.