Murder at the B-School Read online

  “The MacInneses were granted the land by Charles the Second in the 1660s,” Pirle continued. “Normally taciturn, they will tell you this story in excruciating detail if you bring up the subject. The grant once comprised what is now most of two full counties, spanning a large piece of central New York state. Much of the land was sold off or set aside as nature conservancies long ago, but the family has held the lake and the surrounding acreage for more than three centuries.

  “They have never chosen to behave as if they were residents of the small towns that had the effrontery to become incorporated around them. I doubt that they have any contact with the local population beyond the obligatory. I’ve been told that there used to be two manor homes on the property, one on each side of the lake, but the family tore one of them down as a protest against a proposed increase in local real estate taxes. They will recite that story with some urgency, as if it were something that happened yesterday. In fact, it occurred more than a half century ago. In any case . . .”

  Pirle apparently was preparing to wind up his impromptu lecture. Over the course of his monologue, Vermeer noted, Pirle’s soft accent had thickened a bit, reinforcing the European formality of his speech.

  “I repeat that last story to you, Mr. Vermeer, to make two points. The first is that this is not a family to be trifled with. And the second is that young Eric’s death will be viewed as part of a bigger picture that most people, probably including yourself, will not comprehend easily. Many other bright and charming young MacInneses have died before their time, and this family can tell you when, where, and how, going back several centuries to rude episodes in the Scottish highlands. Eric’s unscheduled departure is a tragedy, but it is certainly not a calamity. Assuming James stays healthy and procreates, the continuity of the bloodline is assured. The family will go on; its business will go on.

  “And that is what this family believes is important.”

  6

  BROUILLARD FOUND HERSELF AT HER SECOND HARVARD HOUS-ING complex in two days. This time it was Peabody Terrace, a tired-looking clump of buildings alongside Memorial Drive, just across the Charles River from the Business School. From the upper floors of the Peabody Terrace high-rises, you could look across the Charles River to the Business School campus.

  And if you did, Brouillard thought to herself, you would also be looking up the social and economic ladders of life. The footbridge over the river—spruced up a decade or two earlier for a visit from Prince Charles that somehow had never come off, and now reassuming its mantle of spalled concrete and general seediness—did little to close the gap between the two worlds. And although Brouillard was now officially off her own turf, a Boston cop in Cambridge, she felt much more at home here than at Soldiers Field Park. Here the winter grit was never swept off the sidewalks. Instead, it was tracked in large quantities into a drab and uninviting outer lobby, where it mixed with crusts from the salt that people’s boots had dragged in.

  How did the old joke go? “What’s Cambridge without Harvard and MIT? Summahville.” Some Somerville natives took offense at this putdown of their small and crowded city on the other side of Cambridge. Brouillard did not, because it was simply true. Cambridge was a city like any other in eastern Massachusetts—worn out, scrappy, hidebound, intensely political—except for its peculiar academic overlay.

  The town-and-gown tensions that waxed and waned over the decades led to some moments of low comedy. Once, not long ago, as a Cambridge cop had told her with obvious pride, the homegrown mayor took offense at some Harvard insult, real or imagined, and renamed Boylston Street “John F. Kennedy Street.” Because the street passed through the Harvard campus, this arbitrary executive act forced Harvard to reprint untold reams of letterhead, envelopes, campus maps, and business cards. The mayor was quite pleased with himself.

  Brouillard pushed the buzzer for apartment 11B—“MacInnes”—and awaited the metallic response.

  “Yes?” A female voice, presumably Elaine MacInnes.

  “Captain Brouillard, Boston police. I have an appointment with James MacInnes.”

  “I’ll buzz you in. Wait by the elevators, and I’ll come get you.”

  Brouillard leaned on the glass door when the buzzer sounded, stepped inside, and walked over to the elevators. A few long minutes later, one of the elevators shuddered to a halt, the doors opened, wobbling a bit from front to back, and a painfully thin young woman stepped out.

  “Hi. I’m Elaine MacInnes.” She extended a frail right hand limply, palm almost horizontal, as if she wore a ring that expected to be kissed. On the other hand she wore the narrowest of gold wedding bands and what looked to be a very expensive watch. “Welcome. Please come up.” Out of the corner of her eye, Brouillard thought she saw a discoloration—a mole? A bruise?—where the arm of her right sleeve had ridden up slightly.

  Riding up in the elevator, the two women exchanged a few small-talk sentences while Brouillard, mostly from force of habit, scrutinized James MacInnes’s wife. Five six and barely north of a hundred pounds, Brouillard guessed, looking through the young woman’s designer sweats. Her unnatural thinness shoved out her cheekbones and made her deep-set hazel eyes even more prominent than they would have been if they were used to surveying a normal diet. Her blond-frosted brunette hair was gathered in several places, up high and then again down low, in a way that was calculated to look casual. She spoke breathlessly, finding her voice high up in her throat, reinforcing her ethereal appearance—something like the taped phone conversations of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that Brouillard had once heard on the radio. She looked as if she might blow away in a light wind. Or worse: She looked as though, if her shoes fell off, she might just float away.

  “We decided to live over here, rather than Soldiers Field Park,” Elaine MacInnes was saying, “because it seemed like a good idea to get a little distance from the place.” She nodded her head in the general direction of the Business School. “Also because it just seemed a little more, uhm, real here, if you know what I mean.”

  The conversation trailed off as they made their way down to the far end of a surprisingly dim hallway. MacInnes opened the door to apartment 11B and motioned for Brouillard to step inside. “Jim,” she called out, “your detective is here.”

  It was a friendly enough living room, Brouillard noted to herself: decorated expensively but not ostentatiously. The workhorses of graduate-school existence—cinder blocks and planks, assemble-it-yourself Ikea furniture—were nowhere to be seen. And the rugs looked to be real Persians—perhaps the only ones in this entire housing complex, Brouillard thought. (Working alongside Customs on the docks, Brouillard had learned to tell a good rug from a bad one, even without turning it over.) Brouillard guessed that interior decorating was how the wife of James MacInnes expressed herself.

  Across the room, James MacInnes himself was slowly climbing out of a black leather lounge chair that looked too comfortable to leave behind. “Hardly my detective, Elaine,” he said. Unlike his wife, he spoke from down in his chest. On his first few steps toward Brouillard, he rolled his shoulders and bent his neck left and right, moving like an overmuscled batter approaching the plate.

  “Hi. I’m James MacInnes.”

  MacInnes was just over six feet tall, brown-eyed, with a free-hanging helmet of light brown hair. Once in motion, he appeared to be fit and agile. His handshake was just right: short and to the point.

  “I’m Captain Brouillard. We spoke on the phone. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me.”

  “You’re welcome. Although I don’t have much to tell you about Eric’s death. You probably know a lot more than I do at this point.”

  He waved Brouillard toward the couch and, almost imperceptibly, indicated with a nod to his wife that she should sit in the overstuffed armchair to Brouillard’s left. He sat in a less comfortable-looking chair opposite Elaine and perched a sock-covered foot on the edge of the glass coffee table. Good housekeeping, Brouillard thought, when you can walk around your house and your
white socks stay white.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Brouillard began. “I know this is a difficult time for both of you, and I’ll try to keep this brief. But it’s important to talk to people as soon as possible after an incident like this, while their memories are still fresh.”

  “We’re ready. Fire away.” It was clear that James intended to speak for both himself and Elaine.

  “Okay. When did you last see Eric or talk to him?”

  “We had dinner on Friday night with him and his girlfriend.”

  “How would you characterize his mood?”

  “Normal Eric,” James replied. “But normal for Eric is not normal for most of us. He’s—” He caught himself. “I guess I have to learn to start talking about Eric in the past tense. He was a charming, funny guy. A showboater. I loved Eric. My wife loved Eric. Everybody loved Eric. Among other things, he was a fabulous mimic. Well read, despite his limited attention span. A great conversationalist. The first guy you’d invite to your party, if you were a smart hostess. He was an insurance policy for a social event. Never a dull moment. Guaranteed.”

  “Excuse me for asking,” Brouillard said, “but it sounds like maybe you didn’t approve of this—what did you call it?—showboating.”

  “Eric and I are very different kinds of people.”

  “How so?”

  “It hardly matters now, I’d say,” James replied. “But what the hell. My family always called us the tortoise and the hare. No secret: I’m the tortoise.”

  “But the tortoise wins the race, right?”

  “In the fairy tale, yes. I’m not so sure about real life. It seems to me that people like my late brother, God rest his soul, get by on a song and a smile. Without ever actually doing much work or committing themselves to much of anything. Well, that’s just not the way I am. I worry more about the content than the packaging.

  “And by the way, just so you don’t send a report into some filing cabinet about how disloyal I am to my dead brother, I’m not telling you anything I didn’t tell Eric lots of times. Or discuss with my whole family, for that matter. We talk about this kind of thing all the time. We are very self-conscious on the subject of responsibility. Comes with the territory.”

  “You mentioned Eric’s girlfriend. What is her name, and where can I find her?”

  “Jeannette Bartlett. She’s in Eric’s section. I don’t know her number offhand. I’m sure the school can tell you where to find her.”

  “How would you describe their relationship?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think she should describe her own relationship.”

  Brouillard turned toward Elaine MacInnes. “Okay. How would you describe the relationship between Eric and Jeannette Bartlett?”

  Elaine looked surprised to be called upon to speak. “Well, uhm, I’d say very affectionate,” she chirped. “They’d been going out since last spring. They enjoyed each other’s company.”

  “Was there any indication of trouble between them? Any evidence that they’d had a falling out recently?”

  “Oh, please,” James broke in. “Are you suggesting that my brother’s girlfriend dragged him into the men’s locker room at midnight and drowned him in the pool? That’s a little far-fetched.”

  “No, Mr. MacInnes, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking questions, which you have volunteered to answer. But we can always continue this at some other time. Downtown, if you want.”

  “Frankly, I’d prefer to get this over with as soon as possible.”

  “Good. Then I’ll ask again: Did Eric and Jeannette seem to be getting along all right, or not?”

  “Oh, like two lovebirds,” James said with overdone sarcasm. “Just this past Friday, in fact, they cooed and pecked all the way through dinner.”

  “Oh, James,” Elaine quickly interjected, her thin eyebrows jumping. “Let’s just answer her questions.” She turned again toward Brouillard. “We used to have dinner together on Friday nights a lot. Maybe two or three times a month. Otherwise we didn’t see them much together. My own sense is that Jeannette loved Eric deeply. Maybe more than the other way around.”

  “And this past Friday night?”

  “Things seemed perfectly normal between them. Jeannette mentioned at one point that she felt a headache coming on—sometimes she had migraines—and they left a little earlier than usual. I assumed it was because of the headache. But that was it. Nothing else unusual.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. MacInnes. That’s helpful. Now I have to be a little more direct. Were they lovers?”

  Elaine blushed slightly and crossed her arms in front of her modest chest. James made a small snorting noise. “I never asked them,” he said.

  “But you assumed so?”

  “They’re grown-ups. Sure.”

  “And to your knowledge, did Eric have any other romantic interests? Anyone else, past or present, who might still be playing a role in his life?”

  “I wasn’t his babysitter,” James said. “If there was anybody else, he wasn’t talking to me about it. But I assume not. I assume he would have told me, if there was.”

  “What about you, Elaine? Anything to add?”

  “No, not really. I think James is right. The MacInneses know one another pretty well, too. Better than the average family. But it’s possible that James’s and Eric’s parents would know more than we do about Eric’s . . . love life. They are very interested in having grandchildren. We hear about that subject a lot, so I assume that Eric must have, too.”

  “Did Eric have other close friends? People he hung out with?”

  “No,” said James. “Eric felt he was different from other people at the school.”

  “Different in what way?”

  “In many of the same ways that I am,” James replied a little slowly, as if he were talking to a child. “Our background. Our prospects. Our responsibilities, as I’ve implied.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brouillard said blandly, scribbling notes with a distracted look on her face. “Just a few more questions. James, I wonder if you know who stands to benefit financially from Eric’s death.”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did he have a will?”

  “I hope so. I assume so. Our family has ready access to good legal advice. Although I’ll admit that I didn’t write my will until I got married, and Eric was obviously a freer spirit than I am.”

  “I know your family is very well-to-do. Was Eric personally wealthy? Are you and your sister personally wealthy?”

  “Yes and no,” James responded, drumming on his watch face with his right middle and index fingers. “Eric, Libby, and I have had enough money given to us, on a prearranged schedule, so that we’re more than comfortable. And we certainly stand to inherit substantial assets from our parents, although I have no idea how much. For tax purposes, much of the family’s wealth is tied up in trusts, of course. But day to day, money is not an issue.”

  “How are in-laws handled? Are they cut in?”

  “Is that your business?”

  “Either now or later, yes.”

  “God, this is unpleasant,” James growled. “Okay. My wife signed a prenuptial agreement that limits her involvement in the family’s financial affairs. This sort of thing has gone on for several generations at least. It would apply to anybody Libby might marry, or anybody Eric might have married.”

  “And how did you feel about that, Elaine?”

  Elaine exhaled audibly through pursed lips, halfway puffing out her cheeks. For the first time, she didn’t look at James. “I objected to it.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it implied a lack of trust. I thought it cast doubt on my feelings for James.”

  With that, James again rose up out of his chair, and stood with his fists planted on his hips. “I think this has really gone far enough,” he said, his face flushing with anger. Brouillard was glad the coffee table sat between them. “I think this is just gossiping,
” he continued, “and I hate gossip. Do you have any more questions that might be relevant to Eric’s death? If not, I’ll ask you to leave.”

  “Just one more,” Brouillard said. “Where were you Sunday night between, say, nine p.m. and dawn?”

  Although the untrained eye might have missed it, James’s bravado took a hit. His shoulders sagged just a little. Now he looked as if he wished he were sitting down again. “Excuse me,” he replied, “did you just ask me for my alibi?”

  “Not exactly,” Brouillard said blandly. “I asked where you were late Sunday night and early Monday morning.”

  “What does that have to do with my brother drowning in a hot tub?”

  “Well, I’d say ‘nothing,’ unless you tell me otherwise. All we know is that Eric was someplace he shouldn’t have been, and that something happened that shouldn’t have happened. We’re trying to figure out what and why.” She made a little show of poising her pencil expectantly, just above her notepad.

  “When do you read me my rights?”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t happen until we arrested you for committing a crime. And we don’t even have a crime. As far as we know.”

  “Oh, all right, then,” James said. “We were here. I studied all afternoon that day; then we had dinner. Then we cleaned up, watched part of a bad movie, and then I studied again, and then we went to bed. This morning the phone started to ring. Yours was the fourth call, I think, after the school, my parents, and my sister. Not a lot of people have this number. Unlisted.”

  “So neither of you went out?”

  “I didn’t. Elaine went up to the Square right after dinner. We had run out of coffee. After that, we were both in.”

  Brouillard glanced at Elaine. “That’s right,” Elaine confirmed in her vanishing voice.