Murder at the B-School Page 29

  “Yeah. I went to see an old friend. But he was out.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Just as well.” He shrugged. “He’ll know I was there.”

  “Oh, sit down,” she said, thumping the bed, next to her.

  He sat down.

  “I’m wondering,” she continued, “whether you’re ready to head home tomorrow. Like, on the first available flight. And if so, whether you’d like me to go with you.”

  He nodded. “Yes. And yes. To both of those.”

  “We’ll have to take your car.”

  “Sure,” he said, puzzled.

  “Well, then,” she said, standing up, still grinning. She looked as if she had something more to say. The hem of her shorts had ridden up. She tugged them down: first in front, and then in back. “Maybe I’ll check on you later. Make sure everything’s okay.”

  The second knock on his door came only a few minutes later. This time, heart now pounding again for a different reason, he knew who it was. He wondered what more she wanted to say to him. He had more that he wanted to say to her.

  But for the second time that evening, he had guessed wrong.

  Pirle pushed the long barrel of a sleek-looking pistol against Vermeer’s forehead as soon as he opened the door. The barrel got fat toward its business end: a silencer. Pirle had a long finger on his other hand positioned perpendicular against his lips: not a sound.

  Vermeer backed up, and Pirle pushed the slatted door shut behind him without taking his eyes off Vermeer, or the gun off Vermeer’s forehead. He pointed at the bed with his free hand. Vermeer sat. The comforter, he noted, was still warm from where Brouillard had been sitting.

  “I think you have something of mine.” Pirle’s voice was mechanical, with the emphases in the wrong places, like one of those pseudohuman voice-mail systems. “Three things, in fact. I want you to gather them up and come with me. I want you to bring your car keys. If you make a noise, or a sudden move, I will kill you. Happily.”

  Vermeer nodded as he felt his stomach hollowing out. He pulled open the drawer of the bedside table. He moved aside the pile of publications under which he had buried the files. A thin phone book. A Gideons Bible. A copy of El Nuevo Vieques, a local tabloid that he had picked up in the lobby specifically to help create deeper clutter in this drawer.

  “You’re forgetting your car keys. By the way, thank you for leaving the keys in the filing cabinet. I will have a talk with Mr. Rodriguez about his poor choice of allies. In war, the most dangerous strategy of all is to switch sides.”

  They walked out into the dark, Pirle trailing a few feet behind Vermeer. Of course there was no one in sight. Of course the ubiquitous Captain Brouillard was nowhere to be seen.

  “You’re driving,” Pirle said quietly. “I’m in back, with this gun pointed at the place where your spine meets your head. Turn right at the end of the driveway.”

  They retraced the coastal route that Sandy had followed. Only this time the moon was out, and, rather than impersonating a wealthy astrophysicist, Vermeer was playing himself, counting off his last minutes.

  “Left here. Up the hill. Stop when I tell you.”

  And sooner than he wanted to, Vermeer knew where they were going. The failed children’s athletic complex. Which, by the light of the half-moon, would be a terrible place to die.

  “Here. Pull over . . . Leave the keys in the ignition. Get out, and step away from the car . . . Lock your fingers on top of your head, nice and slowly.”

  Vermeer tried to recall some table-turning trick—some quick move whereby he could disarm his killer. Nothing came to mind. He noticed that en route, Pirle had removed the silencer from the gun.

  “Okay. Now we’re going to walk down this dirt road. You will keep your hands on top of your head. At the same time, you should keep your eyes on the road in front of you. The erosion has been very bad. You will break your ankle if you are not careful.”

  “Nice of you to worry for me,” Vermeer ventured to speak in a low voice. It was the first time he had spoken. He saw the dark shapes of the derelict athletic complex—two boomerangs and a box—looming at the bottom of the road.

  “Oh, not at all, Vermeer. You’ll be committing suicide down there at the bottom of the hill. A broken ankle doesn’t fit well in that picture. Although I suppose I could weave it in, if necessary. Please walk. No sudden moves.”

  They continued down the dirt road. The deep gullies were nicely profiled by the moonlight, like sinuous snakes. Vermeer stepped over them, with Pirle following in his footsteps, close enough but also far enough behind.

  “See that little pile of debris, in the middle of the road?” Pirle posed the question in a jaunty voice, now sounding very pleased with himself. “That’s what’s left after the happy locals, God bless them, set off their fireworks on one of their innumerable Latin holidays. And when we get down below, I’ll show you where some people have set up an impromptu target range. Perfectly safe—there’s no one within an eighth of a mile that you could possibly hit with a stray bullet.

  “But what does all this mean for you? It means that the neighbors up on the hills—those lights you see up there—are totally accustomed to loud noises down in this ugly little valley. They don’t even hear them anymore. They certainly don’t call the authorities about them.”

  Vermeer very much wanted to slap the mosquito buzzing near his left ear but didn’t want to get shot. “It doesn’t make sense, Pirle. I mean, so far, you’ve made all the right moves, setting me up to take the fall. But me killing myself down here—that doesn’t ring true.” Maybe aiming for Pirle’s ego might forestall his death. There was certainly plenty of ego to target.

  “Ah, suicide,” Pirle said, drawing out the syllables, practically crooning. “Does it ever really make sense? It runs counter to our every instinct of self-preservation, does it not? Ultimately, the gulf between the person who destroys himself, and the people he abandons by that act, is unbridgeable. And ultimately, the abandoned—the left behind—comfort themselves by saying, ‘Of course, he was crazy. We’re in no danger of going that route.’ They look for ways to distance themselves from what appears to be madness.”

  There was something in the slow, sick, musical way that he pronounced that one word, “madness,” that shredded Vermeer’s last vestige of hope. Pirle was completely out of his mind.

  “And that’s why we, the abandoned, place so much emphasis on the suicide note,” his tormentor continued. “We want evidence that the self-destroyer is different from us—mad. Which, of course, you’ve been kind enough to provide. It’s here in my pocket. Would you like me to recite it?”

  Vermeer had no idea what this was about. He didn’t respond.

  “It’s short,” Pirle continued, now thoroughly captivated by his own recital. “I’ve committed it to memory, in part because it conveys such . . . exquisite, utter despair.” Now a sort of exultation rose in Pirle’s voice. “It reads, in its entirety, ‘Make it all go away.’ Followed by an exclamation point. And then, of course, by your signature. My guess is that the authorities will conclude that as the noose was closing around your neck, you decided to flee the country. They will discover that you checked in with my Delores, who steered you this way. No doubt you saw me as a trusted counselor, or perhaps an intermediary who could arrange for your surrender to the authorities. But somehow, you never got that far. Sadly, I never even laid eyes on you during your desperate hours here. Too soon, you lost all hope, and you killed yourself in this forlorn place. They won’t find your fingerprints in my house, because I will tell them not to bother. A common burglary, a camera and some other valuables taken. Obviously a crime unrelated to your unhappy end on this island.”

  Make it all go away! Suddenly, Vermeer realized why that sounded familiar. It was the stupid note he had put in his out-box, on top of that pile of memos and junk mail, in an effort to spur Sam the temp into action. His knees weakened, and his sphincter twitched. He was going to die. Pirle was going to get
away with it.

  “I’m surprised that the MacInnes kids allowed themselves to be blackmailed by you,” Vermeer said, still trying to buy time, now trying to rally himself, as they neared the bottom of the hill. Now the abandoned buildings had transformed themselves into dark monoliths—an evil concrete Stonehenge. The jungle foliage on both sides of the untraveled concrete road had closed in, encroaching on half its width. “I’m surprised that they didn’t just go to the cops. Or tell their parents, and have you taken care of in some other way.”

  Pirle snorted. “Not likely. Like most offspring of the superrich, they were paralyzed by their privileges. Eric concluded, I think correctly, that the disclosure of his homosexual exploits would get him run right out of his inheritance. They are a very old-fashioned bunch, very American, in that way. In fact, it was only when Eric finally became willing to throw it all away—running off to California, or whatever he had in mind—that other steps became necessary.”

  “You knocked him out in the Jacuzzi?”

  “Yes. A blow to the base of the skull. And held him under, of course. He was surprisingly weak. Actually, the hardest part of it all was persuading him to join me in a few convivial rounds, poolside, before the real excitement began.”

  “But James—James doesn’t strike me as weak.”

  “James? He is both dense and weak. He made the mistake of signing a prenuptial agreement that punished him severely in the case of infidelity. As for ‘weak,’ I believe his fall from grace came on his third visit here, when his silly wife, Elaine, decided to stay behind in Boston.

  “And of course, Libby never grasped anything, poor child. Except toward the end, of course, when she started telling me that we had to warn you about this mysterious danger you were in.”

  “But why did you need me? Why throw a noose around my neck?”

  “At first,” Pirle said in an affable tone, as if he were chatting with a neighbor over the backyard fence, “you were just an insurance policy, one of two corollary plans that I would set in motion in the event that Eric’s death attracted undue attention. I saw it as painting two alternative scenes at once. You, of course, played the prominent role in the first. I began filling in lots of small, pointillist details for the police to unearth.

  “And of course, Libby was front and center in the second picture. Those clues implicated Libby in Eric’s death, just in case I needed Libby to commit suicide. The little needle hole in Eric’s arm was my favorite.” He chuckled. “Suppose someone wanted to inject alcohol directly into the arm of an unconscious young man, poolside? Who else in the neighborhood has a bag full of hypodermics lying around? But I also enjoyed using Libby’s considerable computer skills against her. She would show me a trick, and I’d wait a decent interval and then use it. Implicating her, or perhaps you, as the spirit moved me.”

  Too cute, Vermeer remembered Brouillard saying. But her gut wasn’t going to save him now.

  “As far as I know,” Pirle was saying, “the police haven’t even stumbled across most of those clues yet. Perhaps your suicide will prompt them to look a little harder. Your friend, the female detective, seems tenacious, and even a little bit bright. Maybe she’ll keep digging. If she does, she’ll find you everywhere. More likely, though, they will simply close the case.”

  “So what happens to the MacInnes businesses?” Vermeer couldn’t have cared less, but he desperately wanted Pirle to keep bragging. “James controls them, and you control James?”

  “Yes, assuming the plan to set up voting and nonvoting classes of stock moves forward, and that James winds up holding most of the voting stock. In which case, my influence is immediate. Or if William puts this all on hold—which, of course, he will ask me about, and I will advise against—then my influence will be somewhat attenuated for a few years. Unless something happens to William, of course, which is always possible. After all, he is old and tired.”

  They had reached a flat, open area in front of one of the derelict grandstands—probably intended as a soccer field but now broken up by clumps of small bushes and littered with a random collection of junk, dumped here before the road got too rutted to drive on. Now, evidently confident that the difficult work was behind him, Pirle played the twisted tour guide, pointing out the assortment of objects that people used for their target practice: a huge wooden wire spool with pictures of local politicians taped on it, a row of tin cans perched on a two-by-four spanning two packing crates, a bulls-eye painted on a propped-up piece of plywood, a lidless washing machine peppered with buckshot holes. Vermeer hung his head: the picture of defeat. He watched for an opening, but Pirle kept his eyes on him.

  “I still don’t get why,” Vermeer persisted, trying to keep Pirle talking. “You can’t need the money. Why take all this risk?”

  “First of all,” Pirle sniffed, “entrepreneurship consists of taking the risk out of a venture, well before you actually take the plunge. And I’m quite good at that. At this moment, for example, I’d say you were at far greater risk than I. Wouldn’t you agree?

  “And second, why climb Mt. Everest? Because it was there, as George Leigh Mallory supposedly said. Well, I look at this massive old fortune, burdened with all of its anachronisms and deadwood, and I see an enormous opportunity. The opportunity to become one of the most important business figures of the twenty-first century, perhaps, even if my full contributions may never be known. Which will depend in part on whether James keeps his health. He is rather tightly strung, as you may have noticed. But you’re absolutely right, Vermeer: Unlike you, I don’t need the money. I just love the challenge. But enough small talk, I think. You need to die now.”

  He raised the gun and closed half the distance between himself and Vermeer. “Put your hands behind you and open your mouth.”

  “Fuck you, you evil old Continental windbag.”

  Pirle laughed without lowering the gun. “Prefer to shoot yourself in the heart? Harder to do cleanly. Sometimes there’s a lot of bleeding and thrashing and pain. Maybe you would prefer to shoot yourself in the side of the head?”

  Now out of options and out of time, Vermeer prepared to throw himself on Pirle, maybe somehow ducking under the gun barrel, throwing up his forearm to try to dislodge the weapon, preparing for the bullet’s impact—

  “Freeze. Police.”

  But Pirle didn’t freeze in response to the female voice. Instead, he slid around to Vermeer’s right, placing Vermeer between himself and the voice in the darkness.

  “Well, well,” Pirle said in a voice loud enough to be heard in the shadows. “I do believe Captain Brouillard has decided to join us. Amazing. I was just talking about how resourceful you were, and here you are. Step out where I can see you, please. Immediately. Or I will go back to the task of shooting your friend in the head.”

  Even in the dim moonlight, Vermeer could see her sidestepping out from behind the corner of the grandstand, thirty feet away. She was in a defensive crouch, arms straight out in front of her, aimed at them. “Drop it, Pirle. It’s over. You shoot him, I shoot you.”

  Pirle chuckled, and it was as cold and dark a sound as Vermeer had ever heard. “Oh, really, Captain,” he replied. “You should have done better than that. Frankly, I don’t believe you have a gun. In any case, I’m an excellent shot, and I have a clear shot, and you don’t.”

  The gun exploded next to Vermeer’s right ear. The bullet appeared to catch Brouillard somewhere in her torso, forcing a grunt out of her, spinning her around in a half circle and knocking her to the ground. She lay on her back, motionless.

  “Don’t worry, Vermeer,” Pirle said icily. “If she’s not dead already, you will finish her off shortly. After you’re dead, of course.” He walked back around so that he was facing Vermeer. “So, now would be an excellent time for you to charge at me in fury. I need some close-up powder burns on your clothes for the self-inflicted wound. You were fond of her, weren’t you? Don’t you wish you could have saved her? Or saved yourself? Do something, Vermeer!”

>   The rage came welling up from some depth somewhere inside him, some place he had never touched before. A roar began to take shape in his throat. His vision constricted down to a narrow functional tunnel: from here to there. Almost on their own, for the second time, his leg muscles tensed to spring . . .

  Then came a flash and an explosion from somewhere toward the other end of the grandstand. And now it was Pirle who was grunting, turning sideways and collapsing heavily, twitching and shuddering as the gun fell from his hand no more than eighteen inches from Vermeer’s feet.

  “Señor Vermeer,” came an accented voice. “Agente Montoya, of the Vieques Police. It would be most helpful if you could place your hands back on your head—sí, gracias—and use your left foot to push the pistol out of Professor Pirle’s reach. No kicking the gun, please. Just push it gently with your toe. Don’t get between him and me, just to be safe. Of course I will shoot him again if he moves. Although it is my belief that he is either too smart or too dead to move. Good. Now step back again. Thank you.”

  As Vermeer sleepwalked his way through these little tasks, he heard the purposeful voice speaking again, quietly, this time in Spanish, and then the crackling metallic response of a walkie-talkie. Then a smallish round figure, dressed in black and barely visible in the dim moonlight, emerged from the nearby bushes. He approached Vermeer and Pirle deliberately, pistol in hand. He put his foot on Pirle’s gun, eyes flicking from Vermeer to the motionless form on the ground and back to Vermeer. Then, kneeling, his own pistol still at the ready, he put two fingers on Pirle’s neck. He appeared to relax slightly. “I also am a good shot,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “May I go help my friend, please?” Vermeer didn’t recognize his own voice. His knees began to knock.

  “Not quite yet, please. I first want to make sure that there are no more guns in the area. Turn around so that I can make sure that you are not carrying one. No. Thank you. I think there are not any more guns. In fact, I think your friend is a very brave woman. But please remain here for a moment. You may take your hands off your head. And please don’t attempt to run away or any other foolish thing. You would not get far. And I do not think you have any reason to run away.”