Bert scribbled another note. “Anything else?”
“No. Or yeah. Dishey roomed with Dan Sherbrooke at Yale. Sherbrooke’s the conference chair, and my registration packet says he’s with the university here in Salt Lake. So Sherbrooke would be in a position to help Dishey, but if I read between the lines correctly, there was no love lost between the two of them. And Dishey was in the habit of letting on to people that he was with the university, which he was not.”
“Such as to yourself?”
“Yeah, such as to suckers like myself. Go ahead, rub it in.”
Bert scratched another note, tipped his head back, and offered the ceiling a ruminant grin. “Liars. I love liars.”
“Yeah, they’re a laugh a minute.”
“Anything else?”
“There’s something going on with the commercial collectors, what or whoever they are.” I told him about the man who wouldn’t talk to me, and the frightening man I had seen in his van.
He wrote another note. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. What happened to George Dishey that you guys are so jumpy?”
Bert’s face went momentarily blank, then hardened slightly, as if he were slipping in and out of focus.
I said, “It was something gruesome, right?”
As Bert continued to stare at me, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. He stared right into me, and I saw in his eyes the quick concentration of a man grabbing for an oar as he is washed overboard. In a flat tone, he said, “It was indeed gruesome,” then looked back at his notes as if concealing a sense of personal insult and said again, “Anything else?”
“No. Uh. Well, I was thinking of heading up to the university here and seeing what I can see, but I’ve been given to understand that you turned in my car.”
Bert kept writing. “That is a fact. If you want another car, you are free to hire one, but the one you had has gotten a little too well known around here. And you may go wherever you want around this fair city, little missy, but you might as well ride down West Temple on an elephant, for all the hope you have of blending in with the crowd. For my part, I am not in the business of assigning round-the-clock protection to murder suspects. Now, if Romeo here wants to take personal leave and drive you around in a private car, that’s one thing, but as of right now, you are no longer getting free cab service from Salt Lake City’s finest.”
I stared at the top of Detective Bert’s round head as he continued to concentrate on his notes. I would have risen to his last bit of bait if the lecturing patriarch act hadn’t been so much easier to take than the grinning ghoul. “Fine,” I said. “You got my luggage around here somewhere? I can find my own way out.”
“Lover boy here will show you where your gear is. And remember, you are not yet free to leave the state of Utah.
Enjoy your visit and be sure to stay in touch,” he said, giving me one last weird, toothy grin.
I headed down the hallway. Ray fell into step behind me. I noticed that he did not pull abreast. However garden-variety obnoxious Detective Bert’s message had been to me, his message to Ray had been seething with threat. “Just show me where my bags are,” I said flatly. “I’ll get myself covered. Don’t get me wrong—I really appreciate what you’ve done for me, but I’m not interested in getting you fired.”
Ray said nothing. He led the way down a flight of stairs and up to the glassed-in watch station, where my bag waited forlornly. Before I could get to them, he picked them up.
“No,” I said. “Let me carry them. I mean it. I don’t want you getting shit on my behalf.”
Ray stared into my eyes until J met his gaze. “Detective Bert may be a lot of things, but the arbiter of good manners, he is not,” he said.
I sighed and said, “Lead the way.”
Instead of heading for the main entrance, Ray headed back through the building, out a back door, and into the employee parking area. He marched up behind a late-model four-wheel-drive sport vehicle and unlocked the back. He put my bags in it. Then he turned back to me and handed me the keys. “Be back here at four-thirty,” he said. “Please.”
“This is your truck,” I told him, too surprised to think of anything more intelligent to say.
He didn’t even nod.
“I can’t take your truck,” I said.
“Well, I can’t see you taking cabs all afternoon.”
I sagged up against the truck. “Look, I’m grateful, really, but—” I stared at my feet. Fatigue had now culminated in a headache, a real corker. My thumb throbbed. I wanted to go home, I hurt, I needed to lie down, and I could make no sense of what was happening to me. Mr. Beautiful had just offered
me the use of his personal vehicle, at probable risk of his job. People didn’t do that sort of thing for me. Or at least not people I’d met only the day before, and certainly not men as handsome as Ray was.
“Just try to be careful,” he said, and walked away. At the door back into the building, he paused for a moment, and, just as the evening before when he’d been about to climb into his car at the curb outside George Dishey’s house, I saw his lips move silently for a moment. Then he slipped a key into the door and passed through it, snapping it shut behind him.
I snapped out of my stasis and chased after him. Tugged at the door. It was locked. I looked at the key chain in my hand. There was only one key on it, just the one for the vehicle. No house key I could match to the address on the registration papers that no doubt rested in the glove compartment, no key into the inner sanctum of the police station or into any other building to which he was privy. He was being generous, but not foolish.
I sighed again and walked back to the vehicle. It was a nice color and had the kind of metallic paint that shows dirt, but of course it was spotlessly clean. I sighted down along one side. Not a scratch or a ding, and perfectly waxed. If it had ever been off the pavement, I’d eat my hat.
I got in and thought about napping in the front seat and just waiting until he came off duty, but then I reconsidered, fired the ignition, and drove away. I was four blocks away, dialing in a nice distracting radio station, and making my first evasive turn to find out if I was being followed, when I realized another thing about Officer Thomas B. Raymond: he was not only generous and unfoolish but also unnervingly good at getting what he wanted from this little woman geologist.
FINDING A PARKING PLACE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH is an exercise in stealth. Parking is at such a premium that you must spot a pedestrian with car keys in his or her hands, follow her into a parking lot (sneering threateningly all the while at anyone else who appears to be thinking of challenging you for the spot about to be vacated), and then hover menacingly until the moment is ripe to roar triumphantly into the space. When I’d finally enjoyed my fifteen nanoseconds of parking fame, I jammed a handful of coins into the meter and headed for the building where the Department of Geology and Geophysics lurked.
The walk to the department was not as sanguine as the job of finding a parking space. In Ray’s vehicle, I had been a hunter of parking spaces rather than the hunted, a coyote rather than a mouse. Inside that metal shell, I had felt a perhaps overestimated measure of safety, almost as if Ray had lent me his personal bulletproof vest, and the job of finding a parking space had been a welcome distraction from thinking about getting shot. But outside, I felt naked, and I had hundreds of yards to travel before I met the cover of the building. I stayed off the sidewalks, walked between tall trucks as much as possible, and tried to think about the scenery.
The University of Utah covers a huge, sprawling, incredibly tidy campus high up on a relict bench cut by—no kidding—the lapping waves of that ancient inland sea. Or at least that’s what we geologists believe. We refer to the lake that cut those benches as Lake Bonneville, to distinguish it from the incredibly salty and shallow remnant that still lingers, known as Great Salt Lake.
Along with every other beginning geology student, I had been taught about Lake Bonneville in freshman geology. Imagine a body of water covering the whole northwestern third of the state, a closed drainage called the Great Basin. Imagine the water level eight hundred feet higher than it is today, an inundation that would cover Salt Lake City right up to the foothills of the Wasatch Range. Imagine waves lapping along the shoreline, slowly cutting a shallow beach ramp into everything they touch. The wave-cut benches of Lake Bonneville can be traced for miles along the foothills, now increasingly obscured by the encroachment of housing.
I gazed out across the desert basin alongside which the Mormon faithful had raised their earthly haven. Lake Bonneville’s waves had last lapped its uppermost shoreline some fifteen thousand years ago, back in the last Ice Age, when glaciers were still grinding a formerly hilly Wisconsin into a flat plain. Fifteen thousand years. Fundamentalist Christian theology owned that the earth itself was only six thousand years old, the sum of the ages described in the Bible. To what biblical catastrophe would they ascribe the appearance and near disappearance of this titanic lake? Noah’s Flood? A punitive act of a wrathful God, rather than the dazzling integrated process-and-response systematics of a God who had set in motion a set of physical laws that lavished the universe with spellbinding beauty? I smiled to myself, privately enjoying the range and variability of human beliefs. I believed that the earth was 4.5
billion years old, and the universe at least 12 billion. And what came before that?
Yes, there was the rub. Back then, an instant before that big bang that most scientists think marks the beginning of our universe, lies a question. In the power of that instant lies the awe that inspires most scientists’ true religion, because at that nexus between physics and metaphysics, everything crosses back over from scientific measurement into a question so primal and unmeasurable that it is asked not just by scientists but by every religion, culture, and tribe that has ever existed: How did the universe come into being?
I stopped, hiding for a moment between two large trucks, and watched a jet rise from the airport over Great Salt Lake. The irony of man’s imitation of a bird rising over an environment all but forbidden to man rubbed oddly at my mind. The world seemed to float on a thin layer of insensitivity. Cars rolled by, airplanes flew, and birds sang, oblivious to events that were driving me with such fear. I wanted to cry.
I recalled what some Hindus believe—that the great god Shiva is slowly blinking his eyes, and that each time He opens them, a universe is created, and that each time He closes them, it is destroyed. I had always liked that image, and indeed, in this day and place, when in any instant a man might again aim a rifle at my spine, pan to follow my strides across this parking lot, and squeeze its trigger, I found comfort in the thought that there might be something as magnificently much larger than myself as Shiva.
I forced myself to let my belly relax into a deeper breath. I closed my eyes and felt the solidity of the pavement beneath my feet and the rock beneath that, felt the density of the earth hugging me to it, felt it spinning on its axis, felt it hurtling through space in its trip around the sun, felt the solar system whirling through space as part of our galaxy, felt the flight of
galaxies escaping from the site of that primal explosion we call the big bang. Always in times of greatest stress, if I contemplated the vastness of the universe, I did in some measure relax, comforted by the knowledge that I was but a small speck in creation after all, a mote in the enormity of God’s eye, a fleeting arrangement of atoms that would in due time cycle back into the earth from which I had come and be reshuffled into something else, blended back into the grace of the natural world. In my very insignificance did I find my immortality.
This day, that sense of comfort would not come. Death was too near, throwing everything out of that precious sense of proportion.
I’m not afraid of being dead,
I told myself,
but I want to go naturally, and not in the fear of the moment.
Pushing myself to start walking toward the building again, I wondered if perhaps that is why our species prefers to live to a ripe old age; we instinctively seek to exit life through the process of entropy, at peace with our universe.
I stepped back out into the open, a scared rabbit coming out of the sage. With every step I took, horrid images of what George Dishey’s corpse might look like flooded my head. George had not enjoyed the luck of his instincts. George now lay cold and empty in a morgue, grotesquely murdered.
His body must have been mutilated; otherwise, someone as cool-headed as Officer Raymond would not have been so jumpy … .
I hurried across the rest of the lot and sprinted across the last street, wondering if George had once walked this pathway himself. What had he thought about death, if he thought about it at all? Certainly, Mormons believe in an afterlife, and a pretty rich one at that. Milk and honey on the other side, not to mention nine yards of goodies no one else has even thought of. What had Nina said? We’d all be together in the Celestial Kingdom? If I could believe the waifish Nina—and my gut told me I could—George had at least told her he was a Mormon. If I could believe George, he was not. At best, that
reeked of poorly closeted existentialism, and at worst, of a Rasputin-like contempt for his fellow humans. So which was it?
I pushed open the door to the geology building, hoping I might just find a few answers there.
THE SECRETARY IN the Geology Department regarded me from behind forearms raised and twisted together like a pair of caduceus snakes. “May I help you?” she asked.
“I hope so,” I began carefully.
She inhaled noisily, exhaled, let her arms float to her side, and sat a moment with her eyes closed. After perhaps another five or six seconds, she opened them again and smiled perkily. “Desktop yoga,” she said. “Really clears the blockages I get from typing and holding the phone against my ear.”
“I see.”
“Were you looking for someone?”
“Yes. You.”
“Oh. How nice. And what might I do for you, then?” She had big clear blue eyes and short blond hair cut in a bob. She was a tall woman, about forty, and she had an extraordinary collection of farcically colored plastic dinosaurs and trolls, jauntily displayed all about her desk and on the bookshelves behind it.
“My name is Em Hansen. I’m a geologist, I’m from out of town, and I’m here for the paleontology conference up in—”
“Oh, yes, you’re the one who was staying at George Dishey’s house when he got killed.”
“Ah, yes.”
“You’re kind of a celebrity,” she said brightly.
“Wonderful.”
“Wow. You were right there just before he left his body. Lots of flux. I’ll bet that clogged your stomach meridian.”
I decided to let that one pass, moving on instead to matters that had a vocabulary a hick from Wyoming could negotiate. “Okay, you know who I am. This is good. See, I’m kind of in a jam here, trying to find out what I can about the whole situation, because the police haven’t a clue who did it, and I’m right there looking anomalous.”
“You stick out like a sore thumb,” she observed, staring pointedly at my bandaged hand.
“Ah, yes.”
“I read a lot of detective novels.” She picked up a paperback from her desk. “I read them in off times, like when there’s nothing for me to do here. Like today. Everybody’s up at the conference, you know. I mean Dan Sherbrooke, our paleontology guy. Margie Chan’s here, but she’s teaching a class, and she’s not a paleontologist anyway. And there’s—”
“Actually, I was hoping you could tell me something about George Dishey.”
The secretary blinked her big blue eyes. “Like what?”
“Oh, anything. Like what the beef was between him and Dan Sherbrooke.”
“Oh! Oh, you mean fun stuff like that. That’s easy. Dan and George used to be roommates, you know, only they didn’t wind up friends. Rivals, more like.” The secretary popped the cap off a plastic water bottle shaped like a polar bear and took a swig. “Gotta stay hydrated. So yeah, they were rivals big-time. They’re famous for it. I mean, if it was a private fight I’d stay out of it, because it’s really not my business to talk about department people to total strangers like yourself—bad karma, you know, and a good way to get fired—but this fight is, like,
legendary.
I mean, they could make a
movie
about it.”
I made myself at home, leaning one hip up against a counter laden with university catalogs and special program brochures. “What form did this rivalry take?”
“Oh, they were like always trying to top each other with their big dinosaur finds, stuff like that.”
“They hated each other bad as Cope and Marsh,” said someone behind me.
Now, there was an image. In the early years of paleontology, in an age when wealthy gentleman paleontologists had lounged in the laboratory and sent assistants out into the desert’s heat to dynamite fossils out of the rock for them, Cope—a man of overweening ego—had made the mistake of bragging over his finds to his rival Marsh—a man of overweening competitiveness. Cope had been a Quaker, a man who believed in the truth so slavishly that he had been incapable of lying or of perceiving a liar. But Marsh’s conscience had been built on different lines. He was a crafty old shit who bought off Cope’s field operatives, stealing Cope’s finds right out from under him. Cope took the competition past the grave, willing his skull to science, so that the volume of his brain could be posthumously measured against Marsh’s. Marsh had laughed at him even there, eschewing this final challenge, but Cope’s skull has remained in a museum collection as a type specimen of the human species.
I spun around to see who had spoken. A little man with a badly trimmed mustache stood behind me. He wore army-surplus lace-up boots and had a sagging gut that pushed a plain polyester shirt out over a cheap metal belt buckle that read TRUCKER.
The phone on the secretary’s desk rang and she said, “Oh! Gotta go!” and answered it, leaving me to talk to the man with the mustache.
“I’m Lew,” he said.
“Em Hansen.”
“I know. I been listening.” He cocked his head to one side, appraising me. “You want to know what the dirt was between
Sherbrooke and Dishey? Come with me. All it’ll cost you is whatever dirt you can tell me.”
I scurried after him down the hallway, casting a quick wave to the department secretary, who was now cheerfully informing the caller that she was sure he could retake the course he’d bombed the previous semester if he really insisted, but that of course he’d have to pay for it again. Lew led me on a merry trot along a hallway, down two flights of stairs, out across a parking lot, and down across a broad tree-lined green toward a large building that announced itself as the Utah Museum of Natural History.
As I hurried along behind Lew, I tried to figure out who he was. He had the look and smell of a department fixture, one of those guys who’s been around so long that he’s ossified in place and no one can figure out how to fire him. His posture was both arrogant and sunken, giving him that air of absolute security cut crosswise with a hangdog sense of fatalistic depression, but the huge wad of keys swinging from the metal clip on his belt argued against professorship.
“Do you teach here?” I asked, diplomatically shooting high.
“Me? No, they don’t pay me well enough for that kind of stuff:”
“Department tech?”
“You got it. I’m the guy that keeps the big dogs in line.”
I smiled, certain I had found the perfect informant. There is nothing like a long-suffering underling to call it like he sees it. Information is power, and all that. I had only to watch for gratuitous fabrications, divide the dirt left over by two, and adjust a little for redeeming qualities he would fail to perceive in others.