Murder at the B-School Page 31

  “I’m not hearing yes, and I’m not hearing no,” she said in a tight voice, her eyes boring into him. “I’m hearing you talk about taxes.”

  He put her hand back in her own lap and stood up. “Okay,” he said, “now I’m going to look in some other direction while I talk. I might even get up and look out the window.” He stood up and took a few steps toward the windows.

  “Can’t see anything,” her voice said, behind him. He thought he heard warmth in it. “Blinds are drawn.”

  “Despite getting shot, endowed, and celebrated,” he said, studying the rattan blinds, “you haven’t lost any of your detecting skills.”

  “No. I don’t lose those.”

  “Well,” he said, taking the plunge, “have you detected the fact that I’m very fond of you?”

  Silence.

  “Now I’m not hearing a yes, and I’m not hearing a no,” he said. He cleared his throat. He suddenly remembered the guard on the far side of the room and wondered, What is he making of this little scene?

  “Anyway. When I saw you get shot and fall to the ground down there at that godforsaken place—dead, for all I knew—I felt like I had lost something that I didn’t even know I wanted to hold on to. Maybe like that missing painting over there. By my great-great-whatever. And then when that strange little guy, Montoya, told me you were going to make it, I felt like whatever I had lost had come back to me. And so I was going to make it, too.”

  Still silence.

  He studied the blinds again. “So in response to your proposal, Captain Brouillard, I have to ask a question. If we were to go into this wacky business together, would that mean we couldn’t ever be more than business associates? At Harvard, we’d tell you that it’s not a good idea to mix business with pleasure. So does that mean that I’d have to turn off whatever is churning me up pretty good at this particular moment, and just think of you as someone on whom I want to take out a good key-man policy?”

  He wanted to go further. He didn’t want to risk going further. Any silence at this point would have been too long. This one was very too long.

  Then he felt one hand, flat, square on the middle of his back, not moving. He felt that hand and willed the nerves between his shoulder blades to tell him more. They didn’t. It could be an affectionate hand. Or it could be a calming hand.

  It could be a hand that would have gone elsewhere, had its brother in the cast not limited its range. Or it could be a hand that had gone exactly where it had wanted to go, and now wanted to go no further.

  Finally, he heard her voice.

  “Well, you’re not hearing yes, Wim, and you’re not hearing no.”

  She came alongside him, and they laughed together.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JEFFREY L. CRUIKSHANK is the author or coauthor of numerous books of interest to practicing managers and readers of history. He has written histories of the Harvard Business School, Cummins, New England Electric, Herman Miller, Perdue Farms, and others. He cowrote The Real Estate Game (with William J. Poorvu), Moving Mountains (with General William G. Pagonis), Do Lunch or Be Lunch (with Howard H. Stevenson), and Breaking the Impasse (with Lawrence E. Susskind).

  He is currently working on a biography of advertising legend Albert Lasker and a history of the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point.