Murder at the B-School Page 6

  Resting her mug on the table in front of them, she checked her watch and foofed a little puff of air straight up her face to redirect a wandering sprig of brown hair. Not satisfied with the result, she then attacked her hair with a quick rake of both hands across the top of her head, from her forehead backward, shaking her head quickly from left to right as her fingers plowed from front to back. Vermeer, out of the corner of his eye observing this ritual only a few feet away, was relieved that he was not munching on peanut M&M’s. At this distance it would have sounded like a gravel quarry at work.

  “Professor Vermeer? Captain Brouillard? Dean Bishop will see you now.”

  The tousle-haired woman, now identified exotically as a captain, stood up, collected her coffee and handbag, and walked in ahead of Vermeer. Bishop greeted them with a smile and a handshake and motioned for them to sit down in the welcoming leather chairs at the large round conference table in the center of his office. This time the table was absolutely bare.

  “Well, Captain Brouillard,” Bishop began, “it’s good to see you again, even under these circumstances. Were you introduced to Wim Vermeer? I’ve asked him to sit in with us, since he’s serving as the school’s informal representative in the MacInnes situation.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, extending her hand. Everything about her—body language, expression, inflection—conveyed the opposite.

  “This is your meeting, Captain,” the dean continued. “But of course, we’re eager to hear what you’ve learned and get some sense of how and when this is likely to get wrapped up.”

  Brouillard frowned as if debating something mentally and then removed a dog-eared notepad from her pocketbook. She turned a half-dozen pages of the pad slowly, silently reviewing the scrawled handwriting on them. She was not concerned about keeping the dean of the Harvard Business School waiting, Vermeer concluded. By all appearances, she would not be easy to stampede.

  “Unfortunately, Dean Bishop,” Brouillard finally responded, “we’re not anywhere close to having all the answers. In fact, I’m still figuring out what questions to ask. Like, for example, I need to know what kinds of security systems Eric had to get past to slip into Shad Hall undetected. What kind of pass card let him into the building? Do your systems keep a log of after-hours comings and goings? Were there alarms he had to shut down? All that kind of stuff. I assume your B and G people can help out there.”

  “Of course. I’ll have my assistant, Maude, ask them to call you. The person you want to speak with is Alonzo Rodriguez.”

  “I’ll also need access to his student records,” she said, scribbling.

  “I assume our registrar can release them to you in confidence. There may still be some privacy issues at this point. Maude can set that up, as well.”

  “I’ve already requested his phone logs. I assume that e-mails, even deleted ones, stay on your server for a certain amount of time,” she continued, still writing and not looking up. “I’ll need access to all traffic to and from his account.”

  “That’s not something I know much about,” the dean confessed. “Maude can tell you who to talk to in IT. I suggest you try starting with John Matteson, but Maude may know better.”

  “Counseling?”

  “That would be Wilkinson. Dr. Brian Wilkinson.”

  “Is there a central record of any other services that the deceased might have used at the school? Physical trainers? Masseurs? Tennis instructors? Tutors?”

  Bishop thought for a moment, seeming to phrase his response so as not to give offense. “Captain Brouillard, our students are all grown-ups, in their twenties, or in some cases their thirties, and we treat them as such. We really don’t track their activities outside the classroom.”

  “Well,” she said, glancing up from her pad to look Bishop in the eye, “that’s certainly one approach.”

  “There was alcohol involved, I understand,” Bishop said, choosing to ignore the implied criticism. “What have you learned about the alcohol level in his blood?”

  “I’m waiting for the lab results. Why do you ask?”

  “Again, I’m no expert,” the dean said mildly. “But alcohol and a hot tub in the middle of the night seems like it would be a lethal combination. One gets reckless or sleepy; one slips and falls. That could be the end of the story.”

  “That’s one scenario,” she conceded. “We’re working on a couple of scenarios. I’m not prepared to talk about them at this point. But there are a number of loose ends having to do with the deceased’s personal life.”

  “Such as?”

  “In a nutshell, Dean Bishop, I’m developing two pictures of the deceased that don’t fit together very well. Eric MacInnes number one is a happy playboy who almost always gets what he wants. Eric MacInnes number two is a frustrated loner who is under some kind of serious pressure, of an unspecified but possibly sexual nature.”

  She paused, staring hard at Bishop. “So I haven’t even figured out which kid died in your whirlpool yet, Dean Bishop. But I will.”

  Looking slightly sideways, Vermeer watched Bishop’s face as Brouillard talked. The dean had maintained a generally bland countenance, but it had now taken on a stoic cast, as if frozen in place. Bishop was accustomed to structuring things to his satisfaction, and this process didn’t lend itself to that. Any structuring, it seemed—any spinning or tweaking of scenarios—would be performed by a detective with a hatful of attitude.

  “Well,” Bishop said after a pause, “no one has any interest in dragging this out. Not us, not the MacInnes family, and not you. So of course we’ll do what we can to help you get your questions answered.”

  “Good. And there’s another line of inquiry that I need to follow up on. I need to understand who stands to benefit from the deceased’s death. I’m having some trouble getting a handle on the MacInnes family’s finances. And my conversation yesterday with Mr. and Mrs. MacInnes wasn’t very helpful, probably because I wasn’t able to ask the right questions. I’m a little out of my depth when it comes to the ownership of large and complicated businesses.”

  “So am I,” he said disarmingly. “How can we help with that?”

  “I understand from the MacInneses that one of your professors, Marc Pirle, is a longtime adviser to the family. I’d like to have a conversation with him.”

  “Of course,” Bishop replied, “although Professor Pirle may well decide that there are things he can’t tell you without the family’s permission.”

  “Fine,” responded Brouillard. “And as we both know, sometimes those rules get bent a little bit. Let me put it this way: The sooner I get what I need, the faster things go.”

  “Fair enough. And in that spirit, I suggest you bring Professor Vermeer along with you when you have your conversation with Professor Pirle. Professor Vermeer is an expert in finance himself, and he’s worked with Marc Pirle for a number of years, so he could prove to be very useful to you. Perhaps even beyond that one conversation, if you were so inclined.”

  Brouillard looked sideways at Vermeer. As one corner of her mouth turned down, she barely arched one eyebrow—gestures that were visible only to Vermeer. She was signaling disdain and skepticism in equal doses. “Ordinarily, Dean Bishop, I’d say no to a suggestion like that. I don’t like being bird-dogged. But since I seem to be crossing paths with Professor Vermeer anyway, and since there’s a chance that he may be able to help me understand what I’m hearing, I’ll go along with it—for the time being. The minute he gets in my way, he’s gone.”

  “Fair enough. Anything you want to add, Wim?”

  Vermeer had yet to utter a word at this meeting. He was savoring the little ironies that were washing over him. Two days ago on the verge of being out the institutional door, today he was the finance expert that most of his senior colleagues didn’t think he was. Two days ago nowhere near the middle of the institutional deal stream, he was now being called upon by the dean to help manage important relationships. Nearly anonymous for three years, he now had a first name
.

  It was flattering, but it wasn’t good news. Now, in addition to packing up jungle gyms, he had to hold hands with a hostile detective. His job hunt, more pressing with each day that came and went, was receding into the distance.

  But he had picked up on Brouillard’s reference to crossing paths with him. That meant she had remembered him from the hotel lobby, as well. Which was at least a little interesting.

  “I’m happy to help in any way I can, Jim.” It was fun, this first-name game. “Maybe Maude can help us get Marc scheduled for later today.”

  9

  BROUILLARD WAS THE FIRST TO ARRIVE AT THE CHARLES Hotel. Ten minutes early, she waited at the maître d’s stand, refusing more than once to give up her trench coat. “I’d hate to have it get stolen,” she explained. The maître d’ looked from Brouillard’s eyes to the coat and back again—more than enough to convey his sense of how absurd the notion was.

  The lunch crowd looked extremely well heeled. Except for a few conspicuous tourists, one actually wearing a belly pack, people conversed quietly. In the parts of Boston that Brouillard most often frequented—Back Bay, the South End, the student ghettos along Commonwealth Avenue and Huntington Avenue—the professional lunch bunch also dressed the part but mostly played at thinking big thoughts and cutting big deals. She suspected that here at the Charles, strategically positioned on the Business School and Kennedy School side of Harvard Square, there was less smoke and more fire. At the Charles, business really was getting done.

  Professor Marc Pirle had suggested the place and time for the meeting, once the dean’s secretary had succeeded in tracking him down. Brouillard had found it odd that a professor would be somewhere other than his office or a classroom at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and that no one was particularly surprised by his unexplained absence. Her watchdog, Vermeer, had shrugged it off while Maude made her series of calls. “He obviously doesn’t have a class this morning,” Vermeer had said. “He’s probably got a consulting gig downtown, or maybe somewhere out on Route 128. He’ll beg off of lunch with his client, rush over here to meet with us, and then hurry back out and spend the rest of the day there.”

  “For money?” Brouillard asked.

  Vermeer laughed. “Absolutely for money. In his case, big money.”

  “How big?”

  “Let’s see. It would depend in part on who the client was. Let’s have him teach a case in the morning and then follow up with some small group work and then a couple of one-on-ones with the honchos in the afternoon. I’d guess at least ten thousand.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me!” Brouillard blurted out, astonished, then instantly regretting the lapse. In her business, it paid to act surprised when you weren’t and unsurprised when you were. It did no good to look small-town in front of watchdogs and other strangers.

  She saw Vermeer striding into the restaurant before he spotted her. In his slightly saggy gray suit and yellow paisley power tie, he looked as if he could fit in here when he needed to. But there was something a little off kilter in his walk and his posture that suggested that he might feel more at home at Eddie’s Kitchen, the cholesterol shop a half block away where that guy on the Cambridge force had taken her on a date. (The date hadn’t gone well.) Vermeer had a roundish but not unattractive face. His shoulders were a little rounded and unathletic-looking, but he looked like he kept himself up. His blond hair, falling into his eyes, wasn’t long, but it was starting to curl around the fringes. Brouillard speculated that he had to get frequent haircuts in order to fit in at the Harvard Business School. From the looks of it, he didn’t like haircuts.

  “Hi,” he said, coming up alongside her. “Let me guess. Pirle isn’t here yet.”

  “No sign of him.”

  “Well, let’s claim his table before someone else does.”

  The maître d’ led them to Pirle’s table (but only after asking if they wouldn’t rather wait at the bar for the “third party”). They both ordered coffee. It came in thick white mugs with oversize handles. Sipping the dark brew, Brouillard instantly forgave the restaurant for its fake-Vermonty decor. Coffee like this, in mugs made for holding, made up for a lot of sins.

  “Nice place,” she said. “I especially like the chickens roasting on an open fire.” She pointed at a slowly turning rotisserie next to the grill, where several chefs in spotless white aprons barely avoided colliding with one another as they prepared meals. Three birds, stretched out and impaled on a horizontal stake, were achieving a nice golden brown.

  “Ducks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Those are ducks roasting on an open fire.”

  Now that she looked more closely, she had to agree that they weren’t chickens. “Okay,” she conceded. “Make way for ducklings. Maybe you should be a detective.”

  Vermeer laughed. “I’ve eaten here before. They’re on the menu. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure. I’m not promising to answer.”

  “How did Eric die?”

  Brouillard frowned. “Maybe you should tell me first exactly what your role is in all this,” she said.

  “I would if I could,” Vermeer said. “I’m mostly making it up as I go along.”

  “Well, if you want to get me talking, you need to give me a little more than that.”

  He smiled. “Okay. As far as I can tell, the dean wants to try to salvage whatever remains of the relationship between the school and the MacInnes family. He settled on me to serve as his representative mainly because I’ve taught both Eric and James. If that was his notion, it turns out to be a good one. Mrs. MacInnes told me that I was Eric’s favorite first-year teacher.”

  “What did you talk about with the parents?”

  “Almost nothing. What you’d expect, under the circumstances. I told them that we’d help them in any way we could. The old man complained that we should have taken better care of Eric, which is probably true. Mrs. MacInnes seemed a little dreamy and disconnected—”

  “Sedatives,” Brouillard interjected, as if she had been called upon in class.

  Vermeer blinked, then continued. “Right. Sedatives. But anyway, she got focused enough to make it clear that she knew who I was. Then the old man asked me to box up and ship Eric’s personal effects to various mansions after the police—you guys—are finished poking around. And finally, the daughter, Libby, showed up to give him a shot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “An insulin shot. Pirle explained this to me. The father is diabetic, and she’s a nurse. When she’s around and his regular nurse isn’t, she gives him his shots.”

  “Anything else you learned that I should know?”

  “Don’t think so. Let’s face it: I was mostly ornamental. I am mostly ornamental.”

  She paused to sip her coffee. “And do you do this sort of thing regularly?”

  “No,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of students die on us.”

  Brouillard nodded. “Okay, Professor. I’ll be sure to speak more precisely from now on. Does the dean call on you for lots of troubleshooting help? I assume he has a team of cronies that runs the place. You’re one of them? You’re in the loop?”

  “No. Not even close. But yes, he has his close advisers on the faculty, and I’m sure that if one of them had taught both of the boys, I wouldn’t be involved.”

  “Would you rather not be involved?”

  Vermeer looked up from his coffee cup. There was a wisp of a smile on his face. “Pass,” he said.

  Brouillard nodded. She didn’t know a lot of college professors, but the ones she had run into loved to hear themselves talk. Maybe this one didn’t.

  “And now,” Vermeer said, “I think you owe me an answer to my question.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” she replied coolly. “Investigations are confidential.”

  “I answer a whole string of your questions, and you don’t answer one of mine?”

  Again she nodded. “Welcome to police work.” After a long sip on her
coffee, she spoke again. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s use the Dirtball Theoretical.”

  “Does it give me my answer?”

  “Of course not. The Dirtball Theoretical is a way of talking around a subject. A trick I learned from a dirtball lawyer. He’d be in court, and he’d go down a particular line of questioning, implying more and more terrible things, until the opposing counsel finally objected. He’d make a show of looking like a bad boy, and then he’d go down exactly that same road all over again, only this time saying that everything was ‘theoretical.’ Same questions, same answers, same impact on the jury. He got away with it more often than he didn’t.

  “So.” Brouillard paused. “The Dirtball Theoretical. When you find a body floating in water—or not floating—you ask whether the victim had water in his lungs. Let’s assume it’s a he. Then you ask whether it’s the right kind of water. Say he drowns in a Jacuzzi. You want to make sure that it’s Jacuzzi water, right?

  “Okay. So assume it’s Jacuzzi water. Then you want to figure out if anything else was going on. Any bumps or bruises? Let’s say, using the Dirtball Theoretical, that there’s evidence of a severe blow to the back of the head, say, just about where the head and neck come together. Well, then you want to know what might have caused this blow. A two-by-four? The edge of the Jacuzzi? Sometimes the answer’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not. When the victim spends some time soaking in water after the blow, it’s harder. Let’s assume inconclusive.

  “And meanwhile, you look at toxicology—drugs and alcohol. Assume they’re there. Or more specifically, assume alcohol is there. How did it get there? If there’s a half-empty bottle of something nearby, do the blood alcohol levels correspond to having consumed that much of whatever it is? If they’re high, but maybe not high enough, was someone else sharing the bottle? Or maybe we didn’t start with a full bottle.