Hangman's Root (18 page)

"Do you know how long Harwick taught at UTS A?"

She pulled a beanbag ashtray toward her, its metallic tray already half full of stale butts. "Three or four years, I guess." She tapped off the ash. "Castle recruited him. He thought his animal research was hot stuff."

I made a couple of notes. "So Harwick was doing animal research when he was first hired?" Maybe his ten-year-old crime had to do with animal abuse. That might tie him and Amy together. I frowned. No, that didn't make sense. Ten years ago. Amy wasn't more than fourteen or fifteen.

"Some, but it was pretty small-time." Dottie blew a stream of smoke from her nose. "Castle might dream big, but the department didn't have the facilities or the money to support a real animal research program. That kind of thing soaks up money like a sponge. You've got to reel in the big grants to keep it alive." She gave a short, bitter laugh. "But of course, when the new complex

MO Sudan Wittig Albert

is built, Castle will be two-thirds there. All he'll need are two or three good researchers to bring in the grants."

"Will he have the money to hire them?"

Dottie raised one shoulder, let it fall. "Five senior people are retiring in the next three years. And there's Harwick's salary, too, of course. That'll give Castle a nice bundle of salary money to wheel and deal with. He ought to be able to buy anybody he wants." She laughed again. "A real shell game, huh? Build the lab, hire the big guns, and watch while the big guns knock down the big grants. Them that has, gets. That's the way it works."

What Dottie was saying about the grant business was revealing, but her bitterness toward Castle was pulling us off the mark. "What kind of animals was Harwick using ten years ago?" I asked, still trying to pin down any possibility that he might have been guilty of animal abuse.

"Rats. He and Castle teamed up to test the toxicity of cosmetic products. It was a pretty small project, compared to what Harwick was into recently."

"Was there anything questionable about their work? In terms of the use of animals, I mean."

She made a quick motion with her head. "Only if you question the LD 50 test."

"LD 50?"

"It's a methodology used to establish degrees of toxicity, to protect users of a product from poisoning. The researcher administers the drug or chemical or cosmetic to all the test animals, in increasing dosages. The LD 50 standard is reached when half of them die. Harwick and Castle went through quite a few white rats back in those days."

"Is that a common procedure?"

"Too common. The trouble with it is that the extrapolation of research results from rodents to humans is highly unreliable. What kills rats may or may not injure people. Furthermore, there's a

great response variability among animals, depending on sex, age, weight, and stress level. And even if you have good data and you can reliably extrapolate it, you can't apply the information to most human poisonings because you usually don't know how much or even what kind of substance the victim has ingested." She glanced up at me with a wicked glint in her eyes. "So don't eat your lipstick. The fact that it only killed half the rats doesn't mean it won't kill you."

"I don't wear lipstick," I said hastily. "At least, not very often. What happened to that project?"

"Harwick and Castle were working for some company in San Antonio. Harwick brought the money with him."

"Meaning?"

Dottie was patient. "Meaning that when CTSU hired him, Harwick moved his research funding with him. That's one reason why the university was glad to hire him. His grant paid part of his salary."

I jotted a note. "Ten years is a long time. I don't suppose you'd remember the name of the company that was funding him?"

She shook her head. "The records are probably around someplace, though. It was a small company, but as I remember it, there were a couple of big names on the board. Come to think of it, that's how Castle got the chairmanship."

"Oh yeah?" I was intrigued. "How'd that work?"

She cocked her head to one side. "The president of the company promised the president of CTSU that they'd fund a lab and put money into ongoing research. There was a string attached, of course. Two strings, actually. One was that the research would be their research. The other was that Castle would be appointed chair. I suppose they wanted him because they knew that his ambitions were in line with their goals."

My jaw dropped. Deals like the one Dottie was describing

came down every day in the real world, but somehow I'd thought that academics were above trading on influence. "Does that sort of thing happen often?"

"What do you think?" Dottie's grin was bleak. "University types aren't really any holier than thou. The difference is that our dirty deals don't usually make it into the media. In fact, I probably wouldn't have found out about Castle's quid pro quo if Beulah Bracewell hadn't told me. She was the department secretary back then. Castle didn't like her, so when he was appointed chairman he got the dean to transfer her. She went to Personnel, and Castle hired Cynthia Leeds."

"Did you tell people what you found out? About how Castle got his chairmanship, I mean."

"Sure, I did. I raised a stink. But I'm a woman, and I'd just gotten tenure. My say wasn't worth much with the senior professors, and they were the only ones who could have gotten in his way." Her shoulders were eloquent. "They were all pretty busy, anyway, trying to figure out how to put the make on Castle to get what they wanted."

"And all this happened about the time Harwick was hired?"

"Yeah. But Castle's big idea got shot down not long after that." She smiled in wry appreciation of a cosmic joke. "He'd only been in the job a few days when the company that rigged his appointment was bought up by Revlon—that's a name I do remember And Revlon was already tied into an animal research program at some other university—Perm State, maybe. Yeah, I think that's where it was. Anyway, Harwick's funding dried up like Mineral Wells in August. Castle's lab evaporated along with it."

"And they've spent the last eight or nine years trying to get it back?"

"Right. Castle's positioned Harwick for every possible grant." Her mouth was skeptical. "Although if you ask me, Harwick was a pretty poor excuse for a researcher—not nearly the

hotshot Castle thought he was. Both of them busted their butts to get the Regents to include an animal lab in the new building. But you know about that." She stabbed out her cigarette with quick, jerky motions. "And now Harwick's dead, and Castle's got what he wants."

I was fascinated, but unenlightened. None of this seemed to have a bearing on Harwick's death. "How about Harwick's personal life?"

"He didn't have one. Not much of one, anyway. No family that I know of. No girlfriends to speak of, either, although he dated one of the secretaries in Education for a while—^Vannie Paige." I started to write a note but Dottie shook her head. "Don't bother. That was four, maybe five years ago. Vannie married the assistant football coach last year. I don't think it broke Miles' heart."

"What about men friends?"

Dottie gave me a shrewd look. "If you're thinking he was gay, maybe. He kind of had that look, don't you think?"

"What do you think?"

She propped her chin on her hand. "Well, if he was, he stayed in the closet. When he first bought the house, right after he got hired, some guy used to stop by every few weeks. But that didn't last long. I remember him because the first time or two he had this beautiful greyhound with him."

I started clutching at straws. "Did Harwick travel? Did he have any addictions? Any hobbies?"

"Sometimes in the summer he'd close up the house and take off a few weeks. Addictions, I don't think so, if you mean was he a boozer or a druggie. Hobbies, ditto." She paused. "No, wait a sec. It wasn't exactly a hobby, but he was involved at one point with some sort of furniture-making enterprise. Up around Wim-berley somewhere."

Ah-ha. "Did it involve a man by the name of Max Wilde?"

"That was it. Wilde made furniture that Miles liked. He had several pieces, and for a while he may have been involved financially. But I got the impression that Miles and Wilde got into some kind of hassle about it."

I made a couple of notes, then looked up. "A few more questions. One, do you know who might have phoned the department last week, threatening to bomb the place if Harwick didn't close down his project? And two, do you have any idea who leaked Harwick's research protocol to the campus newspaper?"

She shook her head. "No, on both counts, if you mean do I know, specifically. The animal rights people were obviously behind the bomb threat. But the protocol leak puzzled me, too. All I can think of is that somehow a copy got into the hands of somebody who had something against Harwick, and who couldn't pass up the opportunity to get even. That could be just about anybody in the department." She looked alarmed. "The police don't think it was me, do they?"

"If they do, I haven't heard about it." I closed my notebook. "One more thing. If I wanted to get a look at an employee's personnel record, would Beulah Brace well be in a position to help?"

"Sure," Dottie said. "That woman knows everything that goes on at CTSU, and she's got an opinion about three-quarters of it. Are you going to ask her about Miles' records?"

"Yes. And Kevin Scott's, as well." The department couldn't be the only place where staff addresses were kept. "You remember Kevin," I added. "The nervous young man who took care of Harwick's animals."

Dottie frowned. "You think he has something to do with this?"

"I don't know, but I want to talk to him." I put the notebook in my purse. "Something else. Do you remember a piece of white nylon rope in your garage?"

Dottie looked blank. "Rope? Not offhand. I remember re-

cently looking for rope to tie cages together, and having to settle for wire. Why?"

"Just asking," I said. I pushed my chair back. "Let me know if you think of anything else. Oh, by the way, we learned about Wilde last night. Ruby's in Wimberley right now, playing Nancy Drew."

Dottie leaned forward, her face serious. "I'm grateful to both of you. It's nice to have friends at a time like this." Then she sat back quickly, as if she were half ashamed of having given in to a sentimental female impulse. "If Miles didn't kill himself, have you got any idea who murdered him.^"

I thought of the blackmail letter and Kevin—and Amy. "Hey," I said. "You're supposed to leave the detecting to Ruby and me. Didn't Justine Wyzinski tell you to think positive?" That's what I would have told her, if she were my client.

"Yeah, she did, but I'm not very good at it." She pushed back her chair and stood up as Janette came into the room. "How're the cats and the guinea pigs?"

I got up too. "On the increase," I said. "You now have one hundred and ten guinea pigs and seven new kittens."

"A hundred and ten/?/^j"?" Janette echoed, incredulous. From her look, I could see that she thought Dottie ought to be permanently incarcerated, probably in the psycho ward at the hospital.

''Guinea pigs," I said. "They're like big white rats." Janette recoiled.

"I'm glad Beetle had her kittens," Dottie said. "I'm only sorry I wasn't there to help." She looked at me. "Make sure Ariella gets her shot." Her half-smile was wistful, yearning. "Tell her to be patient. I'll be home as quick as I can."

"It had better be soon^' I said. "Somebody needs to separate the boy guinea pigs from the girl guinea pigs."

It was noon. I went home and found three messages on the answering machine. Laurel was back and available if I needed her. Leatha, my mother, would love to hear from me when I had a spare moment and if I didn't Fd be hearing from her (no surprise). McQuaid reported that the English prof was willing to come down to eighteen months on the Meadow Brook lease. There was no word from Amy, also no surprise.

I phoned McQuaid at his office. "Eighteen months, huh?"

"That seems pretty reasonable," he said. "And I'm running out of leads. That house may be the only one around that's big enough for us."

"But it has five bedrooms," I objected. And a tower with a window seat, and wild turkeys, and space for a big herb garden. I closed my eyes and saw the yellow desert marigolds and huisache daisies splashed along the rock wall.

"The place across from the middle school is still available." He was serious.

I shuddered. "Do you want to look at Meadow Brook again?"

"Do you?" he countered.

We were a couple of wary teenagers, dancing the do-you-don't-you two-step. "Well, maybe. If you do."

McQuaid chuckled. "Pick you up at seven. Wear walking

shoes, and we'll take a hike along the creek." He paused. "Aren't you the least bit excited?"

"To tell the truth," I confessed, "I'm scared." It wasn't just the eighteen-month lease, either. It was actually living—day to day, moment to moment—with McQuaid and Brian and (oh, God) Howard Cosell. Suddenly five bedrooms didn't seem like enough. Maybe ten would do it. Or fifty.

"Yeah," he said, sober. "Me, too. The thing with Sally was bad. I'd hate to go through that again." There was a pause. "But I guess that's the chance we take. No pain, no gain."