Murder at the B-School Read online

  The beleaguered star and his phalanx of protectors, waiting only as long as absolutely necessary, dived sideways and into the empty elevator, with the muscle fending off the girls behind them. The polished brass door closed again. Several uniformed hotel functionaries, absent during the decisive phases of the battle, now materialized and herded the flushed teenagers back outside. Quiet descended once again on the Four Seasons.

  “Mr. Vermeer? I am Mr. Ralph. You can come upstairs now.”

  It was the funereal man from the elevator, left behind in the silence. Despite his height—at least six two, Vermeer guessed—Mr. Ralph was remarkably insubstantial. He seemed to have only two dimensions: up-and-down and sideways. Vermeer couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him, but Mr. Ralph seemed not to expect small talk. They rode up to the ninth floor in silence.

  Mr. Ralph tapped discreetly on the door of room 903. When it opened, he stood to one side and signaled with two spare flicks of his hand, as if he were sweeping a dead moth off a table, that Vermeer should enter.

  Vermeer walked down a longish hallway and turned a corner into a nicely appointed living area with a spectacular view of the Public Garden. An elderly man was rising to greet him, stiffly at first, but with gathering momentum. An elegant-looking woman remained on the couch where the two had been sitting. The remains of a light breakfast sat on a coffee table in front of the sofa.

  “I’m William MacInnes,” he said in a deep and slightly overloud voice. “This is my wife, Elizabeth. You are Professor Vermeer from the Harvard Business School. Please take a seat.” He lowered himself back onto the sofa and motioned Vermeer toward a chair.

  “Thank you.” Vermeer, although amused by the old man’s peremptory tone, was careful not to smile. MacInnes looked about seventy: balding, with a generous fringe of white hair at ear level. His eyebrows had grown luxuriantly out of control. He wore a blue blazer and gray slacks. His tie matched the handkerchief that emerged in a folded point from his coat pocket.

  “Perhaps you should tell us why you are here.” William MacInnes’s tone, although not unfriendly, had an edge. There appeared to be plenty of wrong answers to his question.

  “Certainly,” said Vermeer. He slid a business card across the coffee table, dodging the breakfast tray. MacInnes took no notice. “Dean Bishop asked me to convey in person our condolences for your loss. He hopes to meet with you at the school sometime soon, at your convenience. We all knew Eric and admired him very much. I taught him last year, as you may know. And Dean Bishop also asked me to volunteer my services in case you need any help while you’re in town.”

  MacInnes listened intently to this explanation, as if probing for hidden meanings. Elizabeth MacInnes, meanwhile, looked disinterested, distantly studying something on the wall behind Vermeer. She was the most beautiful old woman Vermeer had ever seen. Her hair, mostly gray, still had luster, and the blue of her eyes seemed only slightly diluted. Vermeer was no expert, but he guessed that her gray wool suit—perfectly tailored, with subtle black embroidery around the pockets—cost more than his secondhand Volvo. She continued to stare fixedly. It was not clear that she was even aware of his presence.

  “We are in town to claim the body of our son,” William MacInnes said. “That’s a difficult task, but I don’t think it is one that you can help much with.”

  “Of course you’re right,” Vermeer agreed. “But sometimes a local contact can make things easier. We have good friends in the city government, as well as at the university. If anything comes up—like red tape to be cut, logistics to be solved, or whatever—we want to make all of our resources available to you.”

  “In retrospect,” MacInnes replied coolly, “it’s too bad that those resources weren’t made available to Eric when they might have helped.”

  The harshness of the comment seemed to retrieve Elizabeth MacInnes from her trance. She turned regally, from the waist, toward her husband. “That was uncalled for, William,” she declared in a quiet tone that did not invite debate. The old man snorted but didn’t otherwise respond.

  For the first time she looked directly at Vermeer. “I appreciate your taking the time to visit us. Eric said you were his favorite teacher last year, although I remember that finance was far from his favorite subject.”

  No diplomat could have intervened more skillfully. Vermeer found it difficult to believe that Eric would have paid him such a compliment, but on the other hand, how else would Eric’s mother know who her son’s finance instructor was?

  “Professors aren’t supposed to have favorite students, Mrs. MacInnes,” he said, allowing a small smile to creep onto his face. “But I will confess that Eric made a very strong impression on everyone in the classroom, including me.”

  “I’m afraid I know exactly what you mean, Professor Vermeer,” she replied, nodding. “It’s entirely irrelevant, but perhaps you can tell me something I’ve been curious about since Eric first mentioned your name. Are you descended from the seventeenth-century Dutch painter?”

  “Yes, directly, but you have to go back a lot of generations to get to him.”

  “Oh, not that far, surely,” she said. “But how wonderful. You must be very proud.”

  William MacInnes cleared his throat noisily. “Perhaps there is something you could take care of for us, Professor Vermeer. We’re only in town long enough to talk to the necessary bureaucrats and bring Eric home for burial. It would be helpful if you could arrange to have his personal effects packed up and shipped back to our family home in New York State. I suppose his car should go there, as well.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” MacInnes continued, “you can dispose of the clothes and linens and so forth, but I’d like to retrieve any books, papers, and family memorabilia he might have had in his possession. Which I’m sure will have to wait until after the officials finish poking around in there. And I’m told he had some sort of elaborate exercise rig in his apartment that our daughter might have some use for. We should probably get that packed up and sent down to the city. Mr. Ralph can give you the addresses.”

  Breaking down a dead former student’s Nautilus rig was not how Vermeer had envisioned spending the waning days of his academic career. And where would brother James be in all this? Plodding toward the finish line?

  Aloud, though, Vermeer was all high service: “Any way we can help, Mr. MacInnes.”

  The conversation was over. As Vermeer rose to leave, there was a knock on the door. Mr. Ralph slid down the hallway and opened the door, now just out of Vermeer’s line of sight. “Okay, Father,” a female voice announced. “Time for your shot.”

  A young woman turned the corner and bounded into the living room at a clip that nearly put her into Vermeer’s arms. “Oh! Sorry,” she exclaimed, braking and backing up two steps. “I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

  She was compact, a little below average height. A bright purple warm-up suit hugged a trim physique. Her wavy light brown hair was pulled back in a tangled ponytail, more or less held in place by a purple scrunchy. Her face was pretty, in an unformed kind of way. Over her left shoulder was slung a small canvas tote bag with “Catskill Regional VNA” and a stylized stethoscope silk-screened on its side.

  “Good morning, Libby,” said Elizabeth MacInnes. “This is Professor Vermeer. Professor Vermeer, our daughter, Elizabeth, who lets us call her Libby to minimize confusion.”

  “Hi,” the younger woman said, briefly accepting Vermeer’s hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you from my brothers. Especially Eric.”

  He hadn’t known there was a sister. “I’m glad to meet you. Although I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances. All of us at the school share in your loss.”

  She looked down at her running shoes, then back up at Vermeer. “I’m going to miss Eric so much,” she said. Now, at this distance, he could see the color of her eyes—deep brown—and also could see that they were red-rimmed and puffy. “He was one of my favorite people in the whole world.”

  An awk
ward moment of silence ensued, finally broken by the rumbling voice of William MacInnes. “The professor was just leaving, Libby,” he said, “and now we have our little business to attend to.”

  He swiveled his large head toward Vermeer. “If you need anything else from us, Professor Vermeer,” he said in a tone that didn’t invite response, “please get in touch with Mr. Ralph.”

  5

  SO WHOSE ARBITRAGE ARE WE ARGUING WITH THIS WEEK? Rhondell’s or Schwartz’s?”

  Marc Pirle, senior professor of finance, clearly enjoyed tweaking his junior colleague. For his part, Vermeer was more than a little surprised that Pirle was conversant with these two obscure quarter-century-old methodologies for balancing pension-plan portfolios with the portfolios of individual plan shareholders—two models that Vermeer had in fact been attempting to improve upon in his stalled research. Up to now, Pirle had not shown any particular interest in, or familiarity with, Vermeer’s work.

  “I’m hoping that it will soon be the other way around,” Vermeer responded. Even to his own ears it sounded lame. “I’m hoping that the Rhondells and Schwartzes of this world will decide that they need to start arguing with my arbitrage.”

  Pirle laughed out loud. “Well, don’t hold out for a call from them personally. My understanding is that neither of those two gentlemen is any longer of this world.”

  He was fiftyish, graying, and slightly overweight, turned out in an extremely expensive and well tailored suit. (A wrinkle, Vermeer decided, would be an impossibility.) His silver hair was combed back, displaying an unnaturally low hairline. The tan on his expansive forehead, though, appeared to be natural, hinting that Pirle had regular access to sunlight in warm climates. And Vermeer knew this to be true: Pirle maintained a villa on an island in the Caribbean, where he sometimes entertained guests who controlled either money or ideas.

  His office was more or less the same size as Vermeer’s, but it somehow conveyed bigness in a way that Vermeer’s didn’t. The wood grains on the cabinetry seemed to match just a little better. The paperweight and knickknack collection on various surfaces bespoke Pirle’s lofty position as a consultant to the rich and powerful.

  Finance, Vermeer knew, was a good field, perhaps the best field, in which to establish oneself as an expert. In an economic downturn, the enterprise could always cut back on marketing, lay off production workers, pay less attention to human resource management. But enterprises rarely cut corners when it came to finance—or when it came to the finance professors whom they retained as consultants.

  Pirle, it was rumored, did cut the occasional corner. He was by all accounts a brilliant financial strategist. His particular interest and talent was in gaining access to capital markets for privately held firms—a skill that not only got him published in the right journals but also made him wealthy.

  And there were the hints, too, that Pirle sometimes steered his clients down paths that skirted illegality. This greatly offended his faculty colleagues and, over the years, had located him well outside the generally straitlaced Business School mainstream. But there was never any concrete offense that anyone could point to, nothing much that could ever be said above a whisper, and so nothing had come of the rumors. Belgian by birth, fluent in French and Spanish as well as English, childless and long since divorced, Pirle now floated between Europe and the U.S. when he wasn’t teaching, successfully tracking and inhaling the sweet fragrances of power.

  He was said to be a ladies’ man. This last thought was one that Vermeer, at that moment focusing on a prominent mole on Pirle’s neck, found revolting.

  “Jim Bishop tells me you’re looking after the MacInnes clan,” Pirle continued. “That must be an unpleasant task in this particular week.”

  Pirle was rumored to be one of the more influential members of the Appointments Committee, which would soon be passing judgment on Vermeer. It would have been wise, Vermeer now acknowledged, to have cultivated Pirle over the past few years, but he had never quite had the stomach for it. Pirle had taken to stopping by Vermeer’s office frequently in the past several months, ostensibly to advise his younger colleague on the procedural ins and outs of the tenure process. More likely, Vermeer suspected, Pirle wanted to make sure that when Vermeer fell off the promotion cliff, he fell cleanly and completely.

  “Yes, it is,” Vermeer admitted. “I met them this morning, and they weren’t particularly happy to make my acquaintance.”

  “Under the circumstances, I can certainly see why. A terrible tragedy, no doubt being laid at our doorstep by the family. Even if not on the conscious level.” Pirle was famous for enjoying the sound of his own voice. In the café in Spangler Hall, Vermeer had occasionally overheard students doing withering Professor Pirle imitations. “Very sad. But let us get to the business at hand. What do you need from me?”

  “I’m not really sure. Dean Bishop told me to touch base with you and get your perspective on the family.”

  “Perhaps you should have talked with me before meeting with them. I suspect that might have been more helpful.”

  “I’m sure. But I got the sense that when they called, one jumped. So I jumped. Plus, your office couldn’t tell me exactly when you might be available.”

  “As for my ‘perspective,’ as you put it,” Pirle continued, ignoring Vermeer’s veiled criticism, “I’ve worked with them for a number of years, as I’m sure the dean told you. As a result, I have multiple perspectives on the MacInnes clan.”

  “Such as?”

  “I know something about them as a family, and as individuals. I know a good deal more about their businesses. But for obvious reasons, I am not able or inclined to divulge anything that they may have told me in confidence. And frankly, it seems to me that specifics about their many enterprises would have no bearing on whatever task it is that our good dean has asked you to carry out. In my opinion, if young Eric has managed to drown himself in the bathtub, we all of us will have to deal with that sordid reality and move on.”

  Vermeer felt impatience welling up: a small geyser in his chest. He suppressed it. “All right, then. Tell me about them as a family and as individuals.”

  “Well,” Pirle began with an unwarming smile, “the first thing you should know is that I love working with this family. They live beautifully. Unlike most wealthy Americans, they are not afraid of their resources. And they understand that wealth is nothing if it does not leverage the future. They apply that lever with considerable relish.”

  “Who is your principal point of contact?”

  Pirle looked as if he resented the interruption, and paused pointedly. “I’ve worked with William, the patriarch, for nearly a decade,” he continued. “He is far from brilliant, but he is broad-gauged and determined. He rules his realm quite effectively. I think it’s fair to say that he is quite worried about what will happen when he dies. That will not happen soon, I think, although he has a moderate case of diabetes, for which he receives treatment.”

  This time Vermeer chose not to interrupt, so Pirle, free to embroider, continued with his recitation. “His wife, Elizabeth, is a remote and somewhat regal figure, in my limited experience of her. She plays no formal role in the family enterprises, although I suspect that she exerts a conservative influence that can be quite powerful. There have been times when William has reversed himself quite abruptly and inexplicably. Since he is not given to whimsy, my theory has been that these are the cases in which Mrs. MacInnes has asserted herself.

  “I gather you know the boys as well as I do, or perhaps better. They have not yet played any serious role in any of the family’s businesses. You should understand, by the way, that I and others who advise the family are grateful for that fact. I don’t think the death of Eric, bright and charming as he was, can be construed as a commercial setback. The father had more or less faced up to the fact of Eric’s irrelevance. If I had been pressed, I would have predicted Eric’s death by dissipation on a Greek island perhaps twenty years hence. Excuse me, did I say something offensive
?”

  Vermeer realized that his distaste for Pirle was showing up on his face. “No. Maybe a little cold.”

  “Maybe so. But I prefer not to engage in family fictions. On beyond Eric, we have James, of course, for whom I hold out some hope. He is duller than Eric, although perhaps the equal of his father. He has traditionally been more willing than Eric to shoulder some of his family responsibilities, however ineptly. For that I give him credit.

  “And last and least there is the sister, Libby, whom you have not met?”

  “This morning. But only in passing.”

  “Another unknown, although totally unlike her mother. My sense is that young Libby is extravagant in her affections, and that her affections run in many directions at once. She has not thrown herself at me, which may put me in the minority of eligible males. I believe she suffers from being a female in a quite traditional family. She pretends to be duller than her brothers but may well be the smartest of this somewhat limited brood. To her I give credit for plunging into a tedious and plebeian profession—nursing—and sticking with it. I believe she is active in her professional circles, whatever those might be. And I have seen her administer insulin to her father when the visiting nurse was unavailable. Having met him, you will appreciate the challenge of sticking needles into the veins of Paterfamilias. Oh, yes, and she is some sort of feminist, as well.”

  The MacInnes family, Pirle continued to explain with increasing self-importance, now split its time between two residences: a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights—one of only two remaining single-family houses in the borough’s only good neighborhood—and an estate in upstate New York, where much of the family’s business was now headquartered. (In the age of the modem, the century-old suite of walnut-paneled midtown Manhattan offices had become an anachronism; it had been sold off a few years earlier.) The upstate residence, according to Pirle, was the “stuff of fiction”: three thousand acres, a private lake, and a rambling baronial home perched atop a cliff overlooking the water.