Deep Pockets (2 page)

I flipped on the overhead light and blinked in the harsh glare. “You want coffee?”

He gave his surroundings a careful once-over. “Actually, no. You?”

“I don’t know your name.”

He gazed around the small room as if searching for a hidden video cam. “Can we leave it like that for a while?”

“A short while.”

I lowered myself into a folding chair and he did the same, both of us avoiding the enforced intimacy of the sprung sofa. The room was so tiny that our knees almost touched. His face was narrow, his forehead high, his nose broad. He had angular cheekbones and a strong chin. If you could wipe some of the worry off his face, he’d be better than good-looking, I thought. He smelled of spicy aftershave, and his tailor hadn’t allowed room for a shoulder holster. I’d deliberately brushed against him in the narrow hallway to ensure that he wasn’t carrying in a clip at his waist.

“Something I can do for you?” I asked.

He took a deep breath, the kind a man might take before plunging over a cliff into an icy lake. “Before I say anything, please tell me about your ties to Harvard.”

My eyebrows rose. “You’ve been tailing the wrong person.”

“Seriously, you don’t have
any
?”

More than one local newspaper columnist has snidely referred to Harvard as “WGU,” the “world’s greatest university.” Some tourists seem to think Harvard and Cambridge are interchangeable, one and the same, with MIT tossed in as a bonus. The students certainly think they own the place, and the Harvard Corporation actually does own a considerable chunk of the city to which I pay property taxes. Redbrick buildings and ivy-covered walls line both narrow streets and major thoroughfares. A constant influx of students keeps stores humming, rents astronomical, and foreign-language bookstores in business.

“I walk on their sidewalks. I cross the quadrangle, so I guess I walk on their grass, too. I’ve used a book or two from Widener, but I swear I returned them.”

“You didn’t go there?”

I’d worked nights as a cabbie to afford downscale UMass Boston. “Nope.”

“What about your house? Harvard owns property all over that area.”

Bastard knew where I lived
. He must have picked me up there this morning. I didn’t like that. I’d seen him for the first time at the post office.

“Not
my
property,” I said.

“Ever do any work for them? Ever take a class there?”

I run a one-person private-eye outfit, and I doubt Harvard has taken notice, even though I’m perched in their backyard. I don’t have a sign on my front door. The neighbors would never approve of such a thing, some of them having graduated from the hallowed halls of the WGU.

The extent of my Harvard connection: I used to park illegally behind the ed school before they put in the raised-arm sentry system. I figured he didn’t need to know that, so I simply shook my head.

“Good. Excellent. Next, I need to know about confidentiality. I’ve never consulted a private investigator before, and I need to know to what degree I can be frank about my requirements.”

“I’m a private citizen, not an officer of the court. If I’m working for an attorney, then his privileges can extend to cover me, as well.”

I wasn’t sure what this guy did for a living, but whatever it was, it paid. His understated clothes were expensive, his hands well kept, the fingernails manicured. His hands were ringless and very pale, the palms paler than my own. I’ve been going out with an African-American, an FBI agent temporarily on assignment in Boston, and the paleness of Leon’s palms was nowhere near as pronounced.

My stalker bit his lip. “Therefore you could be compelled to testify in a court of law.”

“Yes.”

“Damn.” He worried his lips some more and seemed at a loss as to how to continue. He had faint lines at the corners of his drooping eyes. I upped my age estimate, placing him at forty to forty-five.

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

A clatter of dishes and silverware penetrated the soundproofing, reminding me that people were finishing up lunch not fifteen feet away.

I said, “Prospective clients often consult me about hypothetical matters. Or they might talk about something that’s happened to a friend.”

“I have a friend,” he said, seizing on the pretext and leaning forward eagerly, “who is being blackmailed. He is — He doesn’t know what to do.”

“Maybe your ‘friend’ should have made an appointment to see me.”

He bit his lip. “I was — I should have — I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

“You didn’t. About the blackmail, I hate to say it, but sometimes the easiest option is the expensive one. Pay up.”

“You don’t understand. My friend
has
paid. He thought it was over, but… it’s more than that…. It’s the threat. I find — My friend finds he can no longer live with the constant threat of exposure.”

I don’t know what I’d expected — police harrassment, a missing friend, an unfaithful wife — but blackmail took me by surprise. It’s an unusual complaint these days. Blackmail isn’t what it used to be because secrets aren’t what they used to be. What with confessional TV, and talk-radio jocks hosting gay cross-dressers and their second wives, and Internet chat rooms devoted to perversion, it takes a certain type of deed to provoke blackmail, and, more importantly, a certain type of person to attract it.

“Tell me more about your friend,” I said.

“He is in a position of trust.”

“Working with money?”

“Working with young people.”

“Very young people, or people the age you might encounter at Harvard?”

The mention of Harvard was enough to make his hands clench. “Do you know how few tenured faculty positions exist? Tenured positions at fine universities?”

“I can see where your friend might wish to keep his job.”

“He does, believe me. He does.”

The man probably looked familiar because I’d seen him in Harvard Yard, hurrying from class to the Faculty Club. A Harvard professor. Not one of the famous ones, not a local celebrity like Skip Gates. Still, the quality of my propective clientele was on the rise.

“Was your friend’s action illegal?” I asked.

“What action?”

“I assume your friend is being blackmailed for a reason.”

A fine sheen of sweat was visible on the man’s forehead, and I wondered if he was going to balk at detailing his imaginary friend’s offense.

“No, not illegal. I — My friend, upon consideration, would call it immoral, although considerations of morality — I don’t know. Times changed, didn’t they? The rules changed, somewhere along the line. Sex was — is — always about power, but we… we deluded ourselves, told ourselves how irresistible we were, told ourselves the same old bullshit stories. I deluded myself. I thought of myself as a man, not some powerful godlike professor.”

I didn’t interrupt, but I didn’t like the way the conversation was going.

“She was of age, and, in fact, she initiated the, er, contact.” He looked me directly in the eye. “I should say the affair, the relationship. What the hell do you call it without sounding like a fool or a cad? Understand that my friend is not proud of his behavior.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your friend, is he the master of house?”

“No.”

“Is he some whoop-de-do professor of ethics?”

“No.”

“What I hear, his behavior is absolutely normal, par for the course, unexceptional.” I was understating the case; from what I’d heard, Harvard profs could sleep with assorted students of both sexes, not to mention barnyard animals, pay for prostitutes, call it research, and get away with a polite slap on the wrist if caught with their pants around their ankles.

“Times have changed,” he said. “And my own particular circumstances make me vulnerable.”

“Tell me about them. Beginning with your name.”

“Please try to understand. I find myself unable to concentrate, unable to contemplate the future. I had everything, but I didn’t know I had it, and now that I could lose it, I find myself behaving irrationally.”

Irrational was right. A Harvard professor chasing an ex-cop through the Square.

“I find myself making foolish promises, going to church more often than I have since I was a child, begging forgiveness of some supreme being I’m not even certain I believe in. I feel out of control, in a way I can only compare to a mental illness. Excuse me. This is beside the point.”

“The point being…”

“Leonard Wells mentioned you.”

Aha
. Leonard Wells is the FBI agent I’m dating. When I met him, he was calling himself Lee and I was pretending to be Carla, both of us working undercover on the Dig. “You asked Leon for help?”

“No, but he mentioned a connection to an investigator, and I thought of it as a possibility, a place to begin. I was taken aback when—”

“What?”

“I assumed you would be a black woman. When I followed you, I… I suppose I was trying to decide whether it made a difference.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it always?”

His tone held me. It wasn’t bitter, more flat and certain. Matter-of-fact. I let his words fade. It didn’t seem there was anything I could say in response.

“Leon trusts you,” he said. “Could you find out who this blackmailer is? I need to find out who’s doing this to… to my friend.”

“Then what? You planning to go to the police and have your blackmailer arrested?”

“Of course not. I’ll talk to him, to her. I’ll explain myself. Surely there must be some way I can stop this person from ruining my life.”

“As a rule, blackmailers aren’t big on chitchat.”

“I’m an academic, a talker by profession. I’m a very persuasive man. Don’t you think so?”

I almost smiled. I found his earnestness and naïveté touching, and I wondered how he’d come to know Leon. “You’re telling me you have no idea who the blackmailer is?”

“I don’t. I — My friend was discretion itself. He told no one; he never met the woman on campus.”

“ ‘Told,’ ‘met.’ Is there a reason you’re speaking in the past tense?”

“The affair is over.”

“Because of the blackmail.”

“It ended before the blackmail began.”

“If your friend was discretion itself, we have to assume that the woman — his student?”

“His student. Yes, but she seemed so much older, so mature for her years, so intriguing. I can’t explain or excuse—” He studied his hands and adjusted his posture in the rickety chair. “My friend could never explain his infatuation satisfactorily to me.”

“If I took on the investigation, I’d start with the woman. Would she be doing this, as a kind of revenge? Was it a bad breakup?”

He raised a hand to his mouth, rubbed his lips. For a moment, I thought he might refuse to answer, change the subject.

“The woman in question is dead,” he said carefully.

“Dead,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“How?”

He moistened his lips with his tongue and swallowed. “A fire. She was killed in a fire.”

“An accident? What kind of fire? What happened?”

“I was out of town, at a conference. I don’t really — I have tried to avoid the details of the disaster.” He closed his eyes, his face a mask. “Understand that my friend had ended the affair with Den — with the woman over a month before her death.”

He waited for me to say something. I waited for him. It’s a trick I learned when I was a cop: Don’t be eager to fill the silence. You learn more by listening than by talking.

Inside the room, the stillness was absolute. Outside, the clatter of dishes was interrupted by the hum of the espresso machine.

“Perhaps you would not be interested in representing my friend after all,” he said.

“Look, if the girl is dead, all you have to do is deny the story. Unless there are photographs.”

“There are no photos. I was careful about—”

“Then why did you pay?”

“There are — were — letters. Tell me, are you interested in the case? If you don’t agree to — I feel I’ve left my friend open to a new situation, a new peril….”

“I’m not a blackmailer.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that. Trusting people is not easy for me, and trusting a white person with this… It makes me uneasy to the depths of my soul. I’m not some showcase professor. I don’t have a named chair or a university designation, not yet anyway, but I am a Harvard professor, and if this gets out, my whole life, my career, everything I’ve worked for is held by a perilous thread. God, I wish he could have held off, that this complication could have held off for another six months, another year—”

“The blackmailer’s been in touch again.”

“How did you know?”

“You wouldn’t be talking to me if he hadn’t been.”

He nodded and stared into his lap. “I thought it was a one-shot deal, that it would be over.”

“What does he want this time?”

“He’s offering to sell me another letter.”

“How many did you write?”

“I don’t — No more than ten.”

“E-mails or actual letters?”

“Letters. Handwritten. I know, it seems old-fashioned, stupid somehow. I never — I believed she had destroyed them.”

“Does he want the same amount?”

“More. Five times what he asked before.”

The blackmailer is a quick learner, I thought. And a greedy son of a bitch. A phone rang in the hallway, three times, five times, six.

I said, “You — your friend has a couple of options.”

“What are they?”

“I already mentioned one: paying up. If you do, you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t kid yourself that it’s one more time and you’re out of the woods.”

“There must be something I — he can do.”

“I would suggest your pal tell all to his department chair and anyone else at the university with power over him, his wife, as well, if he has one.”

“His wife would not be understanding.”

“Limit it to people at the university, then. Tell them that he has a regrettable incident in his past that he would like to confess, in the hope that it will inspire members of the faculty to err in other ways and not his own.”

“Hah,” he said. “Understand that this was an undergraduate with whom my friend had an affair, and a white girl at that. My department chair would have my friend’s head on a plate.”