Murder at the B-School Read online

  “Watching you drop that old film noir line on him: ‘Not planning on fleeing the country anytime soon, are we?’ He looked like you’d pulled your gun on him.”

  “Oh, just standard operating procedure. I want to know where my sources are, especially if they seem like the globe-trotting type. And the department doesn’t like getting bills for overseas calls.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you weren’t busting his chops.”

  Brouillard smiled slightly as she asked a passing waiter for the check and a refill on her coffee. “Pass.”

  “Lunch is on me, by the way,” Vermeer said. “Or more accurately, on Dean Bishop.”

  “Yeah, okay,” she replied distantly, all at once again preoccupied. For a long minute she looked over Vermeer’s shoulder, at a point somewhere out in the windswept brick courtyard. When the check arrived, Vermeer handed the waiter a credit card. Brouillard, mug in hand, now staring in an unfocused way at the wall behind him, somewhere near where it joined the ceiling, didn’t seem to notice the transaction. He decided to wait her out.

  “Okay, time to talk some turkey,” she said finally. She looked around to confirm that she couldn’t be overheard. Even then, she lowered her voice slightly. “I told your dean that I wouldn’t put up with being babysat. There are good reasons for that. This is a formal police investigation. It’s not a sandbox for civilians. And furthermore, it’s my investigation. Nobody else’s.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Let me finish. I don’t want you underfoot. I don’t want you running back to your boss every five minutes telling him what I’m up to. That is unacceptable.

  “On the other hand, I can see ways that you could be helpful to this investigation. You have good access at your school. You have at least some access to the MacInnes family, at least as long as they need you to run errands for them. And you seem to know enough about high finance and voting blocs and so on to fill in some of the blanks for me. Not that I couldn’t get there myself sooner or later, but you could probably get me there a lot faster.”

  “Probably.”

  “Don’t interrupt. So here’s the deal: I tell you what I need to know, and you either get me the info or you tell me how to get it. If something that doesn’t make sense to me makes sense to you, you explain it to me.

  “I also tell you what you need to know, and nothing more. I give you enough so that you can reassure your boss that I’m moving as quickly as possible—which I am—and that I’m not out to drag anybody through the mud. Which I’m not.

  “And finally, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, you and I have no deal. You’re doing your job, whatever the hell that is, and I’m doing mine. If you claim this conversation took place, I will call you a liar. And believe me, they’ll take my word over yours.”

  “I believe you.”

  “So, do we have a deal?”

  11

  ALONZO RODRIGUEZ WAS LATE.

  Brouillard sat alone in a conference room adjacent to Dean Bishop’s office, fiddling with her Swiss Army wristwatch—a surprisingly nice and useful gift from an otherwise forgettable boyfriend. With nothing else to do, she looked at the framed prints on the white wall closest to her. After a minute of study, she realized that they were different architectural schemes for the campus. Judging from the fussy lettering and some dead-giveaway details—the occasional old roaring-twenties-type car penciled onto an imaginary street—she guessed that they dated back to the Depression or earlier. Most of the designs showed a quiet little country road hugging the riverbank—no resemblance to today’s impassable traffic canyon alongside the Charles.

  She spotted the winning design. To her eye, it was no better than most of the others, and nowhere near as interesting as one or two of them. But then, she didn’t pretend to be an architect.

  She would give him five more minutes. Then she would go back to her office and invite him to visit her there. When that happened, experience suggested, he would wish he had not blown off this first appointment.

  There was a tentative knock on the white wooden door, which then swung open. “Excuse me,” the voice arrived before the face. “Sorry to be late, but we had a small emergency. Burst water pipe. The cold.” Rodriguez pushed the door shut behind him, then came forward to offer his hand. “Alonzo Rodriguez. But please call me Al.” He spoke with a very slight Spanish accent.

  “Captain Barbara Brouillard, BPD. Please sit down.”

  He sat down after carefully placing his coat over the back of the chair. As he did so, Brouillard sized him up. Dark gold skin, black hair, and slightly oversize ears. He wore a standard-issue white- collar crew boss’s uniform: khaki pants, white shirt, plain tie, unscuffed work boots. His black winter jacket and black cap, which he was now taking off hurriedly, both sported nice-looking “Harvard Buildings & Grounds” logos. Brouillard guessed he was an up-through-the-ranks guy. If so, she gave him credit for that. Up-through-the-ranks couldn’t be easy at a place like Harvard.

  “The dean’s secretary said you wanted to talk to me,” he said, looking concerned. “I don’t know how I can help you, but I’ll try.”

  “Good.” Brouillard wasted a few seconds going through her preliminaries slowly: pad out on desk, pencil poised, and so on. Then she looked hard at him. “Well, Al, here’s the situation. I really do expect that you can help me, because this is right up your alley. You’ve heard about Eric MacInnes?”

  He nodded, his eyes widening slightly. “The boy who died.”

  “Exactly. So this is a police investigation. I need to ask you to keep this conversation confidential. Okay?”

  “Sure. Yes.” Anxiety mounted on his face. “But is this—am I . . . ?”

  “Are you in trouble? No. This is just a conversation between you and me. I don’t want to talk about you. I want to talk about your buildings.”

  “So it’s okay? To talk to you?”

  Sighing inwardly, she wondered if detectives fifty years ago, before people watched all those cop shows on TV, had to answer these kinds of questions. She doubted it. “This is just a conversation like any other conversation. Entirely voluntary. You want to stop at any time, you stop.”

  He nodded, eyes still wide.

  “Good,” she continued. “So let’s start with security at Shad Hall. All I know so far is that during business hours the front door is open, but you need a pass card to get through the inner doors.”

  “Correct. Your student ID. Or if you forget it, sometimes you can get the front-desk people to buzz you in. If they recognize you.”

  “Other doors?”

  “Yes. Mainly for emergency exit. The maintenance crew and deliveries come through the back. Mostly during the early morning. Never at night.”

  “So no other doors are ever open?”

  “They are not supposed to be.”

  “The building closes at—what?—ten p.m.? What happens after hours?”

  “It’s, uhm, eleven p.m., I think,” Rodriguez said, obviously reluctant to contradict her. “After that, no one is supposed to be in the building. The front door lock is on a timer—once it locks, you can get out but not in. The staff people do a sweep of the building to move the stragglers out, set the alarm with the keypad, and go out the front door. That’s about it.”

  Brouillard took notes. As always, she liked the scratching noise of the pencil working its way across the paper. It made her feel as though she was making progress. “And how do they open up in the morning?”

  “Well, just about the same thing in reverse. The custodians get there at around four a.m., swipe a pass card to open the back door, hit the keypad to turn off the alarm, and go to work. The door locks behind them. By six the front desk is manned, and the front door automatically unlocks.”

  “One alarm for the whole building?”

  “One perimeter alarm, yes.”

  “Motion detectors?”

  “No. We decided against it. Too much air exchange, pushing the drapes and potted plants aro
und, sending in false alarms. Plus, there’s nothing much to steal in a gym.”

  “Uh-huh. How about the tunnel system?”

  “More or less the same thing. The tunnel access to Shad comes out in the building lobby. That door locks and unlocks on the same timer as the front door.”

  “Al,” she said, jotting notes, “I have to say, you do know a lot about the security systems in your buildings.”

  “Not all of them as much as this one,” he said, deflecting the compliment. “I was, uhm, involved in its design. When the building was built. We had lots of discussions. The architects told us that the real experts are the people who actually work in the building, and that our opinions counted. It’s a management theory.”

  She nodded. Her pencil on the pad made a scritch, scritch sound, like mice in the walls. “Okay, got it. So unless the deceased managed to hide out in the building during operating hours, which I take it you don’t think is very likely, then he had to have a pass card that opened the back door. And he had to know the code to turn off the perimeter alarm. Any way his student ID could have gotten him in? Any way he could have gotten extra privileges coded into it, or something like that? Obviously, Al, I don’t know what I’m talking about, here.”

  Rodriguez looked a little more uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “I can’t say that’s not possible. It shouldn’t be possible. But I don’t know much about that coding technology. Which is changing pretty fast, as I understand it. So what I know is probably out of date.”

  She nodded. “And, of course, he could have gotten a hold of one of those special custodian’s pass cards for the back door.”

  “I don’t see how such a card wouldn’t be missed. There are only a few, and they’re assigned to specific people.”

  “Coded to those individuals?”

  “Yes. Or at least distinguishable—you know, like ‘number one,’ ‘number two,’ or whatever. We know who’s got number one, and so on.”

  “Same thing with the keypad codes? Or does everyone use the same one?”

  Again he hesitated. “Uhm, well, before I tell you something that might be inaccurate, Captain, I’d like to check that out. I think we have a system that lets us know who opened the building on a given morning. But that kind of system is only as good as you are willing to maintain it. You know what I mean? Sometimes, people get lazy. Or careless. Maybe more than one person winds up using the same code.”

  “And do you recode on some regular basis?”

  “Sorry, but I don’t know that. I should know that.”

  “Actually, Al, as I said, I’m impressed how much you do know about this building.” As she changed her tone, she watched his eyes. He was wary. “And I understand that you’ve got a lot on your plate. You’ve got how many buildings here to look after?”

  Back on familiar turf, he spoke more confidently. He probably even gave tours to visiting buildings and grounds dignitaries. “Depends on what you’re counting as a building, and what you’re counting as ours. Just shy of thirty. Plus the grounds, and a lot of the operations, too.”

  “Like I said, a full plate.” She put her pad and paper away, pushed back her chair, and made moves toward gathering up her coat and bag. As she rose to her feet, Rodriguez rose along with her. He started putting on his coat, reaching for his hat, obviously eager to get out of this white room.

  “Even so, Al,” she said. He stopped in midsleeve. She thought of freeze tag—did kids still play freeze tag? “I need you to put me at the top of your list. You’ve seen the papers, right?” She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of this morning’s Herald. A BAD BUSINESS, blared the huge headline. The accompanying story was painfully thin, since she wasn’t releasing much—yet.

  “I have seen them, yes.”

  “The point is, Al, a kid died in your building the other night. He wasn’t supposed to be there. In your building. He shouldn’t have been able to get into your building, Al.

  “So obviously, Al, somebody screwed up. And chances are, that somebody works for you. So now you have to go find the right people, and ask them the right questions, and come back, and tell me, what happened?”

  12

  MY DEAN’S PEOPLE MOVE QUICKLY, VERMEER THOUGHT TO himself as the truck approached Brooklyn, when the task is clear and the incentives are strong.

  The ride down from Boston had been uneventful. Paleologos Trucking had seemed surprised at the idea of a passenger traveling in the nearly empty moving van, along with the small load of boxes and partially disassembled workout equipment. The driver, Leon, spoke heavily accented English—somewhere from central Europe, Vermeer guessed—and doled it out only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, he chewed on his droopy mustache and listened to recordings of what sounded like gypsy music on a boom box that he kept on the bench seat next to him. On the few occasions that Vermeer tried to engage him in conversation, Leon nodded and turned up the boom box.

  As Leon worked, the gearbox made scary grinding noises. Either this truck had serious mechanical problems, or Leon didn’t know much about standard transmissions. Or both.

  Vermeer had agreed to the nondeal that Brouillard had proposed. The detective would continue to follow up on threads in the Boston area. Vermeer, meanwhile, would use the excuse of returning Eric’s belongings to the MacInnes family houses in Brooklyn and upstate New York. At those two locales, he would once again convey the school’s deep regrets—and, without being obvious about it, pursue some of the questions that were on Brouillard’s mind.

  He had no illusions. If Brouillard had thought there were promising leads to be pursued out of state, she would have done it herself. Based on her comments about babysitters being close to her investigations, she was happy enough just to get him out of town.

  On the other hand, he saw no reason not to take her up on her offer. Aside from his job search, there was nothing particularly pressing on his plate. He guessed that the MacInnes family would rather deal with him than with a Boston detective. And, he admitted to himself, he found Barbara Brouillard an interesting challenge. She seemed to stay a full step ahead of him—and most other people—without particularly exerting herself.

  Dean Bishop, for his part, approved of the plan, although with his accustomed tone of calm and reserve. “Very good,” he had said on the phone. “Take whatever time you need. We’re covering your classes. Keep me posted.”

  Now, as the moving van left the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and made its way down clogged and double-parked Prospect Street, Vermeer was struck by the absurdity of today’s mission. Mr. Ralph, the ghostly family factotum, had warmed up slightly on the phone. (Everything was relative, of course; Mr. Ralph started at below the freezing point of salt water.) Although he was cooperative in giving Vermeer directions to both locations, he had made it clear that no family members would be “in residence” at the city home. Yes, he had confirmed, Miss Libby maintained her principal residence there, and therefore it made sense to move Mr. Eric’s fitness equipment there. But at the moment, Miss Libby was in seclusion upstate with the family.

  A small domestic staff managed the city residence. Ellie Donahue, Mr. Ralph had said, ran the household. Her assistant, Dan Beyer, was most qualified to decide where to put the fitness equipment: His primary responsibility was security, but he also doubled as Miss Libby’s personal trainer. Vermeer thought he detected a hint of disapproval of Dan Beyer somewhere in Mr. Ralph’s voice. Vermeer also guessed that Mr. Ralph was paid not to have opinions.

  As they made their way slowly through Brooklyn, the Manhattan skyline rolled out from between local buildings and then disappeared again. It was an enormous, dense, piled formation of concrete and stone, and it never failed to impress Vermeer. Nothing in his life experience—growing up in a small Midwestern town, attending school and graduate school in the Ivies, and even spending time in Boston’s tallest buildings—permitted him to become jaded toward New York. Sometimes, on business trips to the city, he slotted in a few covert extra hours jus
t to amble around the canyons of Manhattan.

  With a final scream of gears, the truck came to a halt outside a four-story building. “Tree, four, tree Atvater,” Leon announced. He opened the door and slid out of the cab.

  Like all the other buildings on the street, 343 Atwater featured an oversize front staircase bordered by ornate black handrails, leading up to a massive door that was elevated a half level above the street. Tucked in well below street level, on either side of the stairwell, were small windows covered by heavy iron grates. A well-tended plot of ivy, punctuated by flagstones leading to an armored doorway under the stairs, sat between the house and the street. Unlike most of its neighbors, which were constructed out of pinkish-brown sandstone, the facade of the MacInnes residence gleamed in what appeared to be white marble.

  The heavy front door swung open almost as soon as Vermeer rang the bell. The doorway then filled up with one of the most dramatically muscled men Vermeer had ever seen in real life.

  “Professor Vermeer? I’m Dan Beyer. Welcome to Brooklyn.” He extended a large hand and then applied a handshake of bone-crushing force.

  A second and third look at Dan Beyer still revealed mostly muscles. Even his jaw sported extra muscles, flexing back by his ears and neck and running in ropes down into his sculpted neck, making him look as if he could bite lampposts in half. Oblivious to the cold February wind blowing down the street, he wore only a form-fitting T-shirt, warm-up pants, and running shoes. His very light, yellow-blond hair was closely cropped on all sides, although it was long enough on top to stand upright above his forehead like a well-cultivated hedge. He spoke in a flat, high-in-the-nose voice that Vermeer associated with Buffalo and the vast, boring expanses of western New York state. He looked twenty but could have been pushing thirty.

  “Sorry that we’re a little late. We seemed to be trying to stay well below the speed limit, especially on the larger highways.”

  “Not a problem.” Beyer did not appear to be amused.