Murder at the B-School Read online

  “What was the bad movie?”

  “Sabrina,” James said. “The remake, with Harrison Ford. Bad as it is, you should see it. It depicts a psychological struggle between two rich brothers, one of whom is a solid citizen and the other of whom is a lovable flake.”

  His sarcasm hung like a fog in the air, almost wanting to condense on the carpet. He was still standing on the far side of the coffee table, glaring at Brouillard, who showed nothing back to him. Elaine, seated, studying the floor, looked miserable.

  “Well, I don’t have any more questions for now,” Brouillard said brightly, snapping her notepad shut, putting the pad in her bag, and then putting her coat and bag on the glass tabletop. She leaned toward Elaine. “I couldn’t help noticing your watch. It’s quite beautiful.” She leaned forward expectantly.

  “Oh, it’s nothing special,” Elaine said, slightly embarrassed, obligingly extending her left arm. “Although the band is antique.”

  “Can I see the clasp? I have sort of a thing for antique clasps.” Which wasn’t true, of course. But by now, she had Elaine’s hand in her own. Gently she turned the sparrowlike wrist over, so that Elaine’s palm faced upward. She reached out with her other hand and gently pushed the cuff of Elaine’s sweatshirt up her arm an inch or two. And there, on her unnaturally pale forearm, were three ugly oval-shaped bruises, like slightly flattened quarters, lined up in a row: one, two, three.

  “Quite beautiful. And fragile, too. Be careful with that, Mrs. MacInnes.”

  7

  JEANNETTE BARTLETT WAS NOT WHAT BROUILLARD WAS EXPECTing. A bit on the plump side, she had shoulder-length brown hair and a round and plain face. Her upper front teeth were a little oversize, and her upper lip pulled upward, tentlike, at the center, as if it were determined to stay out of the way of those teeth. She was wearing a lavender cotton fisherman’s sweater that had begun as too big for her. Since that time, it had been stretched out at the bottom, front, and back by just the kind of nervous downward tugging that she was now unconsciously engaged in.

  For Jeannette Bartlett, Brouillard guessed, body image was a problem. Butt image appeared to be a particular problem.

  They were seated at a black oak mission-style table at the far end of the café in Shad Hall. Eric had died the day before—and only a hundred yards from here, Brouillard was thinking: one floor down and a few long rooms over.

  Bartlett had suggested the meeting place on the phone. (“My dorm room is too small and messy,” she had explained in a distracted voice.) Brouillard had been surprised at the proposed setting—it seemed a little ghoulish—but had agreed to it.

  Now she was kicking herself for not insisting on a different locale. If Bartlett was really as upset as she seemed—and if she wasn’t, Brouillard concluded, she was a hell of an actress—this was a terrible place for an interview. Aside from the proximity to the Jacuzzi, it was a fishbowl. And although the room was getting crowded, the other students were instinctively steering away from the two intense-looking women in the corner. Word was getting around.

  “I know this is very difficult for you, Jeannette,” Brouillard began, “and I do appreciate your willingness to meet with me so soon after Eric’s death.”

  “No, it’s good to be able to talk to someone,” Bartlett said with a slight catch in her voice. “It really helps. And it feels more useful than just going and crying in the counselor’s office. I want to help you catch the person who did this to Eric.”

  “Just a sec, please, Jeannette,” Brouillard said, fishing her notepad and pencil out of her shapeless canvas bag. She put the pad down on the table, opened to a clean page, and wrote BARTLETT, JEANNETTE in block capitals, clearly visible upside down from the other side of the table. She definitely wanted to control the pace and pitch of this conversation. “Okay. All set. Now.” She looked up again at Bartlett’s forlorn face. “What’s this you just said about someone ‘doing something’ to Eric? I don’t mean to sound unkind. But on the face of it, couldn’t you conclude that he just made a series of bad choices? That he took a bottle of whiskey into the whirlpool, got drunk, and drowned?”

  “Bullshit.” Bartlett didn’t swear easily. The expletive fell, rather than rolled, off her tongue.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I knew Eric. He would never have killed himself. He was one of the happiest, funniest, sweetest people I’ve ever met. And besides that, he didn’t drink.”

  “Maybe he fell off the wagon. It happens all the time. Believe me.”

  “No, Captain,” Bartlett said forlornly. “You don’t understand. He wasn’t on or off the wagon. He just never drank, period. He gave it up a couple of years ago, the way some people give up smoking. He didn’t like the taste, didn’t like having his mind get dulled. And he said it makes you fat. He was terrified about getting fat. He worked out all the time. He simply wouldn’t go drinking in the whirlpool at midnight. Never.”

  “Let’s back up a bit. How long had you two known each other?”

  “About a year and a half. Since we got here two falls ago.”

  “And how long had you been going out together?”

  Bartlett hesitated, sucking on her upper lip. “Well, I don’t know exactly what you mean by that. I guess—do you mean, like, officially ‘dating’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we were spending time together since the first week of classes, and we just spent more and more time together, I guess, after that.”

  “Were you lovers?”

  Bartlett blushed. “Do you need to know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “We were very affectionate, including physically. But we weren’t sleeping together, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Forgive me, but can I ask why not? It may be relevant.”

  Bartlett didn’t answer, intent on studying the tabletop. Putting her pencil down, Brouillard pressed the point, although gently. “A case of principle? Other people in the mix? Whatever you say is okay with me.”

  When Bartlett finally looked up, her expression included equal parts of pride and defensiveness. “There was no one else for either of us. I was raised a Catholic, but I wasn’t saving myself for marriage or anything. But you need to understand that Eric was a gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He came from a very unusual family. He had a very strong sense of values. Not religious values, exactly, but, like, more a sense of what was fair. What was right. I always felt that if he didn’t want to rush things, well, that was perfectly all right with me. Or even a relief. It wasn’t an issue, really. We were both getting what we needed from each other.”

  “What were you expecting from the relationship, over the long run? Like, what did you think was going to happen when you graduated this spring?”

  “I think he was going to ask me to marry him,” Bartlett said, her voice thickening. She furtively eased a tear out of the corner of her left eye by sliding her left forefinger up the side of her nose. Another tear came right up behind the first. It slid down her cheek unhindered. “And I was going to say yes.”

  “I talked to James and Elaine MacInnes this morning. They told me that the four of you had dinner on Friday night.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How was Eric’s mood? During dinner, after dinner?”

  “He was fine. Normal. I think he was making an extra effort to tease his brother. Maybe you noticed that James is, uhm, a little bit stiff. Eric loved poking at him, getting him going. Some of that was going on. Maybe a little more than usual.”

  “And you had a headache?”

  “It felt like the beginnings of a migraine, which I sometimes get. But that was an excuse, mostly. I mostly wanted to get out of there and get some sleep. I don’t really like socializing with them that much. Poor Elaine has to hop around James like a little bird, whispering and peeping. I don’t like to watch it.”

  “Uh-huh. I saw some of that. Funny, James referred to you and Eric as lovebirds.”

  “Well, for sure
, he wouldn’t know.” Now a tear began wending its way down her other cheek.

  “How do you get along with the rest of the family?”

  “Have you met them?”

  “No.”

  “Well, as they say, there’s a first time for everything. They’re a unique bunch. I went out to their place in New York State for a weekend once. Which is definitely something you should do, once, if you get the chance. I haven’t been back since. I think that’s been okay on both ends.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, I’m not very comfortable with the concept of servants, and they’ve got a ton of them. As for the MacInneses, they were like most families with sons—like, ‘nobody is good enough for our little boy,’ except maybe more so. Maybe there was a hint of the gold-digger thing in the air.” She shrugged heavily. “I don’t know. Maybe I was being too sensitive. Usually it’s the mom who’s on guard; in their case it was the dad. Or seemed to be. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t even notice that I was there. But I don’t think they were all that eager to welcome me into the clan.”

  “Let’s go back to Friday night. Eric dropped you off at your dorm room, and—”

  “Yeah.”

  “And when did you see him again?”

  “Oh, God,” Bartlett said miserably. She slumped back in her chair and raked the fingers of both hands backward through her hair. “I never did. The next morning I went skiing with my girlfriends in Vermont. I came back late on Sunday night. I expected to see Eric on Monday.”

  “No contact during the weekend?”

  “He called me on Saturday at the condo where we were staying, and left a message on the machine. Nothing unusual. He teased me about my Vermont headache remedy.”

  “You erased the message?”

  “Yeah.” Her lips were pursed together, evidently to stop their trembling. “A condo. You wouldn’t leave a personal message lying around. Now I wish I had it.”

  “Jeannette, do you have any idea what Eric might have been doing in this building in the middle of the night?”

  “Oh, God,” she said again, mournfully. “I do. Yes. But I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had a pass card.”

  “He had a key to this building?”

  “One of those plastic card thingies. Yes.”

  “Not something that students are supposed to have?”

  “No.”

  “What about the alarm system?”

  “That, too. He knew how to shut it off. I’m sure he paid somebody something to get all this stuff. That was something he would have done without thinking twice. But I never wanted to know about that.”

  “Why go to all that trouble just to get in here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bartlett said, guilt now sweeping across her face and mixing with the grief there. “God. It all seems so dumb now. But Eric really liked to be able to get into the Jacuzzi at all hours. He even got me to go in once, in the middle of the night. But I didn’t like it. It was like a tomb, except hot. Dark and hot.” She shuddered. “He thought it was exciting. A ‘guilty pleasure,’ he called it. I think he liked the breaking-the-rules part as much as he liked sitting in that whirlpool. Maybe more. I told him I hated it. I never went back. But I know he did. He used to joke about ‘getting in hot water.’ His code phrase for coming over here in the middle of the night. Oh, shit. Now my damn nose is running.”

  Brouillard already had a tissue at hand. She passed it across the table. “Did he tend toward a particular night of the week?”

  “Sundays. Sundays only, I think. His way of starting the new week off right.”

  “Was it just you, or did he take other people with him?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think he would have taken other people. That would have been too risky. He could have gotten thrown out of school if he had gotten caught.”

  Brouillard pondered these odd revelations for a moment. “Jeannette,” she finally continued, “now I have to ask you a really tough question. You’ve been very helpful, and I don’t want to make this any harder for you than it needs to be. But I want to show you something.”

  She pulled a photocopy out of her bag. “This is a copy of something we found in Eric’s room yesterday morning. What do you make of it?”

  She handed Bartlett the scrap of writing:

  This is now that was then. I live in this winter that you have conjured up and coldly it infuraites me. What scent eminates from a love that can’t be satisfied? Your scent. Our scent. Whatever we build together falls down collapsed flat. We are those inflatable structures, a tennis bubble, crushed under the snow. I wish we were there. I wish you were dead and sometimes I think you are.

  Bartlett’s face turned gray as her eyes leaped left and right across the lines with increasing speed. “Oh, God. Oh, God. This is . . . Excuse me. I think . . . I think I’m going to be sick.”

  And then she climbed to her feet, both hands over her mouth, and lurched unsteadily from the room. As she left, her heavy oak chair, put in play by her abrupt departure, teetered on its rear legs for an instant, thudded backward onto the carpeted floor, bounced once, and came to rest.

  Now the room was absolutely still, except around its farthest reaches. Dust motes rose slowly in a column of sunlight that perversely had begun to spotlight the center of Brouillard’s table. The detective was aware of dozens of pairs of eyes in the room flitting back and forth: from her to the upturned chair and back again. After a few long seconds, an embarrassed-looking young man with oversize red ears glided over like an undertaker. “Let me get that,” he offered, without looking at Brouillard. Fluidly he righted the chair with one pass of an arm and then slid back over to his own table.

  By the stylish clock on the wall—skinny hands, no numbers—a full five minutes passed before Bartlett returned. She reentered the café flanked by two other women who kept their fingertips very close to her elbows. They glared pointedly at Brouillard—there was a lot of that going on recently—and melted away just before they delivered Bartlett to the table.

  Brouillard smiled sympathetically and gestured toward the empty chair. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not so good.” As Bartlett sat down, she pushed the offending photocopy toward Brouillard with her forearm. She avoided making eye contact with it. “Sorry.”

  “My fault,” Brouillard said. The detective was blessed, or cursed, with an acute sense of smell. She detected the acrid smell of vomit, seeming to roll off Bartlett in pulses. “I didn’t know how rough that would be for you. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. Listen, Captain Brouillard,” Bartlett said, now leaning forward with an unexpected gray-metal flash in her eye. “Eric didn’t write that horrible thing. All that note does is prove what I tried to tell you in the first place. Eric was killed. And that wasn’t enough. Now some person who’s very sick is trying to cover his tracks.”

  “Why are you so sure that Eric didn’t write it?”

  “Because it has nothing to do with him. Or us. That’s not what our lives were about. I already told you, we were happy. Plus, it’s terribly written. It’s full of cheap sentiments. Words that are spelled wrong. Eric would never have produced something like that. Never.”

  “Jeannette, is it possible that Eric was struggling with trying to tell you something? That he was having trouble expressing something painful?”

  “Eric didn’t have trouble when it came to expressing himself. He was proud of his ability to express himself, and had good reason to be. And we didn’t have any painful things between us. We talked to each other, all the time. We never wrote each other notes. We didn’t have to.”

  “Okay,” Brouillard said, “let’s assume he was writing the note to someone else. Was there anybody else in his life who might have been making him feel this way, giving him this kind of trouble?”

  “Oh, God,” Bartlett said again, but this time in a forlorn, plaintive kind of way. “
Don’t you see? There was nobody else. That’s the whole point. I was Eric’s only friend in the whole world. He was rich and smart and good-looking, and he was the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”

  She shook her head as her eyes welled up again. “So now you tell me, Captain,” she said just before her voice broke. “Why would anybody want to kill such a lonely person?”

  8

  THE NEXT MORNING, VERMEER WAS ONCE AGAIN WAITING IN the sitting area outside Dean Bishop’s office. The summons from the corner office had been on his voice mail when he arrived. One of the dean’s highly polished secretaries, a young woman named Maude with plucked and perpetually startled eyebrows, brought him coffee and then retreated back behind the mahogany ramparts.

  Waiting to be called in to Bishop’s inner sanctum, he weighed the pros and cons of dipping into the M&M bowl just down the hall. He was still drowsy, and his mental dialogue was proceeding a little too slowly. Was eight a.m. too early for M&M’s? Probably. Did M&M’s go well with coffee? Possibly. But if he didn’t finish them before the meeting started, what would he do with the remaining half handful? Toss them into his computer bag? If he slipped them into his pants pocket, how long would they have to heat up against his thigh before real trouble began?

  The glass door to the outer hallway opened and in walked a vaguely familiar-looking woman. “Rumpled” was the first word that popped into Vermeer’s head, although on balance, her clothes were probably less wrinkled than his own. It was the world-weary look around her eyes that projected dishevelment, Vermeer decided. She nodded once to Vermeer in the short interval between when a secretary took her trench coat and when she returned with a mug of coffee. Then the woman sat down in a chair at right angles to Vermeer’s, cradling her coffee with both hands and ignoring Vermeer.

  An image popped into his head: the elevator woman. The purposeful- looking woman who had skirted the mob of teenagers at the Four Seasons, with the insubstantial Mr. Ralph following in her slipstream. Up close, it was an interesting face. The look of weariness gave her some appealing depth. Her clothes were resolutely baggy, discouraging any further scrutiny.