He walked back to his desk after ushering Shreve out. "How come
everyone figures right off the bat that you're so couth and cultured,
and they all make me out to be such a frigging Philippine?"
"Philistine?"
"Philistine. Whatever. I know more about the Crusaders and the sack
of Zara than that egghead anthropologist will figure out in six
lifetimes.
"And what he was also too stupid to know was that I generously
provided them with these coffee cups so that he could leave me just a
little bit of saliva on the rim, in order for Bob Thaler to tell me all
the unique things in his double helix that make him such a special
guy." Mike was holding Shreve's container in the air, spinning it
around in his hand. "Put his initials on the bottom, Coop, and stick it
in this paper bag. Attila can take them down to the lab when we're
done."
Pleased with his coup, he went back into the waiting area and
returned with Paolo Recantati. The timid-looking historian was still
clutching his cup, so Mike refilled it from the hot plate in the squad
room and gave me a thumbs-up.
"Sit down and relax, sir. Might not be as bad as you think."
"I can't imagine it can get much worse, Mr. Chapman. I left
Princeton to come into this nest of vipers. Whatever for? I'm an
academic, you understand. Never really been involved in administrative
work. The last thing I needed to end my first semester here was a
murdered colleague. It's the coldest day of the year and I'm sweating
as though it were the middle of July."
It always interested me how people close to murder victims put their
own woes ahead of concerns about the deceased. Somehow, I expected each
of these interviews to begin with some expression of solicitude about
the departed soul of the late Lola Dakota.
"Had you known Ms. Dakota very long?"
"I didn't meet her until I came to the college in September. She
has—had, I guess—a wonderful reputation in her field, and I was well
aware of her scholarship in twentieth-century New York City government
affairs long before we met. I was counting on her to continue to be one
of our more productive faculty members. She didn't disappoint in that
regard. Lola's next book was scheduled for publication in the spring,
with a small university press. And she had already placed several
articles about Blackwells, both in academic and commercial journals."
"Published
and
perished? These times are cruel."
Chapman's humor wasn't for everyone. I made a note to try to get a
manuscript of Dakota's forthcoming work. Perhaps there was something in
her research that would relate to the investigation. "Was she ever
accused of plagiarism, or stealing another professor's intellectual
property?"
"I think everyone would agree that Lola was an original. That wasn't
one of her problems."
"What were they, Mr. Recantati? What were her problems?"
He stammered a bit. "Well—well, certainly, you could start with the
marriage. With that crazy husband of hers. That was an issue for all of
us at the college."
"How do you mean?"
"Lola brought the marriage to campus with her every day. I don't
mean physically, of course. But she was always terrified that Ivan
would appear at school, following an argument or after a meeting with
their matrimonial attorneys. She was just as frightened for her
students and for us as she was about herself. Talked about it to Sylvia
and to me quite often. Afraid that Ivan would show up—or worse still,
send some hired gun to the school who would kill anyone that got in the
way when he targeted Lola. Thank goodness she was alone when it
happened."
I winced at the man's selfishness. What must her last moments have
been like? Confronted by her killer at the portal of her own home. Had
he been in the apartment with her? Had he waited outside, knowing she
planned to go somewhere? Or was it a chance encounter with a stranger,
and were Chapman and I wasting our time talking to her cronies while a
rapist or robber—an opportunist—was at large in the neighborhood?
Recantati rubbed his forefinger back and forth across his lower lip.
"That sounds kind of cold, doesn't it?" His speech halted again. "And,
and I—uh—we're just assuming she was alone when she was killed, I
guess. Do you know anything else about it yet? How she died, I mean?"
Mike ignored the questions. He wanted answers to his own first.
"You're a historian, right? Give us your background before getting to
King's."
"My credentials? I did my undergraduate work at Princeton. Master's
and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. I'd been in charge of the
history department at Princeton, until I came here to take the position
as acting president while the search committee is finding someone for
the permanent position. I'm, uh—I'll be fifty years old in March. I
live just outside of Princeton, although King's has given me an
apartment on campus while I'm here."
"Married?"
"Yes. My wife teaches math at a private school near our home. We've
got four young—"
"She know anything about your relationship—your sexual
relationship—with Lola?"
Recantati rubbed his lip furiously now. "I didn't—we didn't have any
such thing."
He had hesitated a few moments too many to be credible. I had the
sense that he was trying to figure out whether there was anyone who
could possibly know the truth before he had to commit himself to an
honest answer.
"That's not what your colleagues tell me."
"What, Shreve? I suppose he told you that he and Lola were just
friends, also. That's a laugh. Do you have any idea what it's like in a
closed community like a small college? You have dinner at the faculty
club with someone who's not in your department and therefore you must
be in bed with her. A student stays fifteen minutes too long in your
office, and you're making a pass at her. If it's a male student, you
must not be out of the closet yet.
"I'll help with your investigation in any way that I can, but I
won't sit here and be insulted."
Chapman leaned back and opened his desk drawer. He placed a box of
Q-Tips on top of the blotter and pointed to it. "How about giving me a
buccal swab, Professor?"
"What? I've never been in a station house before. I'm afraid I'm not
familiar with your language, your question."
"I didn't learn the word from J. Edgar Hoover. It's science, not
police lingo." Mike slowly drew open the sliding lid from the box and
removed one of the cotton-tipped wooden applicators. "That's
buccal—from the Latin
bucca.
Your mouth, in the old country.
"If you'd be kind enough to just run this down the inside of your
cheek, then Cooper's heartthrobs, those serologists over at the lab who
solve all her rape cases and make her look so damn good, they'll tell
me if it matches any of the DNA we found on things in Ms. Dakota's
little apartment."
"B-but you need blood, surely, or s-s-s—"
He couldn't bring himself to say the word "semen."
"I need a buccal swab, is all. The same little bit of spit that's
kind of frothing on your lips, sir."
Recantati repeated his nervous habit of stroking his mouth. He stood
up. "This is not what I came in here to discuss with you today. You
can't make me do that."
"I got a four-year-old nephew who says that to me, too. Stamps his
foot at the same time. You should add that touch, for more emphasis. /
can't make you do it, today, is a fact. But watch out for blondie,
here. She's hell with a grand jury."
"If I can be useful with serious information that might actually
help your investigation, please call me. I'll be in Princeton until the
beginning of next week." He walked to the exit before either of us
could see him out.
Chapman smiled, picking up Recantati's relinquished coffee container
and marking it with the professor's initials on the bottom. "Got him
anyway."
"Well, you may have won a minor skirmish, but in my book you lost
the war. Whether he's sleeping with her or not may play a role in this,
but you gave up the opportunity to ask all the other questions about
things I wanted to know." I tossed my pad onto the desktop.
"Look, we get these cups down to Thaler's office before three
o'clock and he promised to run them for us over the holiday. By the
weekend, we'll know whether or not any of these academic marvels were
anywhere they shouldn't have been. I didn't mean to play with him, but
it was irresistible, once he started to squirm."
"But that could be something as simple as having had a fling with
Lola and being mortified that his wife will find out. Now we don't even
know why she was after him for money and whether he had a hand in her
project."
"You can go at him again more gently next week. I'll have other
things to do. Let's get Ma Kettle in here." He bagged the empty
container, separate from the one he took from Shreve, and walked to the
door to bring in Sylvia Foote.
Stooped and sour-faced, Foote shuffled in behind Chapman with a slim
briefcase in one hand. He led her to the broken chair and steadied it
for her as she sat. "Coffee?" he asked.
"I don't drink it."
"There's one in every crowd," Mike mumbled as he resumed his seat.
"What did you do to my president?" Sylvia glared at me. "He left in
a huff. Wouldn't even tell me why."
"I think he's just rattled by all this going on during his tenure."
"I'm beginning to think my faculty shouldn't be talking to you
without legal representation."
If Sylvia was looking for a signal from me that none of her
employees was going to come under our microscope, I wasn't willing to
give it. She realized that by my silence.
"In that case, Alex, I'll have Justin Feldman get in touch with you."
That would mean trouble for us. A friend and a brilliant litigator,
Justin would brook none of Mike's tactics. They had clashed in the
past. He'd be cordial but tough, and we'd be likely to lose direct
access to the entire King's College academic staff.
"Why would you bring in the big guns? Coop tells me you're the legal
eagle." He smiled at her. "Save those administrators some money.
Feldman's hourly rates are sky-high."
"There could obviously be a conflict of interest between the college
and some of the individual employees you'll be talking with. I'm sure
we could get him to do this pro bono. Justin's a Columbia man—college
and law school."
"Boola book."
"That's the wrong—"
"I know that, Ms. Foote. But the only academic tunes I know the
lyrics to are that one and 'Be True to Your School.'" He sang her a few
bars of the Beach Boys classic while she opened her briefcase and put
her glasses on, then he settled in with his notepad.
"Let's see how far we get without resorting to outside counsel,
Sylvia, shall we?" I tried to keep the beginning of this conversation
on course. "Why don't you tell me what concerns you have, and then
we'll ask you for the things we need."
She looked over her shoulder as though Paolo Recantati would
reappear at any moment.
"I didn't think it's my business to tell you what's been going on
with the grant money that's been disappearing from the college, but
Recantati's in charge and he has directed me to be candid with you
about it."
Foote fidgeted with her papers, having mistakenly made the
assumption that the subject she was about to disclose was what had
rattled the acting president and caused him to storm out. "He's not
responsible for this, Alex, I can assure you. We've been trying to look
into this ourselves since the federal investigation started in the
spring.
"Why the missing cash from the anthropology department would have
anything to do with Lola Dakota's death is beyond me, but I did come
prepared to discuss it with you this morning."
15
Neither Shreve nor Recantati had mentioned any financial
improprieties at the college. Mike and I were both thinking of Lola's
shoe boxes and whether this would be a connection to the unexplained
cash.
"Have either of you heard of Dr. Lavery? Claude Lavery?"
Neither one of us answered.
"He was thought to be a trailblazing anthropologist. We hired him
away from John Jay." John Jay was New York City's college of criminal
justice. "The administration convinced me, at the time, that it was
quite a coup for us.
"Lavery's expertise was urban drug use." She extracted several
clippings from her leather case. One of them was a John Jay alumni
magazine, several years old, featuring a cover photo of Lavery and
heralding an article on his inner-city work. He sported a colorful
dashiki, unkempt dreadlocks, and a tangled beard. He was holding a
crack pipe in his hand.
"I'm upping my contribution to the Jebbies this year. The closest
this guy could get to the faculty of a Jesuit college like Ford-ham
would be the service entrance."
Foote narrowed her eyes and examined Mike more closely. If she
thought he was crossing the limits of political correctness, she hadn't
seen anything yet.
"What came with Dr. Lavery to King's College was a grant of three
million dollars, courtesy of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
That's a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. It made
him even more attractive to us than his resume.
"The first problem we faced was where to put him. Winston Shreve was
running the anthropology department and, quite frankly, didn't want a
thing to do with Lavery's study. Shreve is a classicist, really. He has
very little experience with modern urban culture and certainly not this
kind of thing. He wanted us to put Lavery in the sciences, or with
sociology."
"Anybody want him?"
"Actually, yes. There was a bit of competition to get him. Professor
Grenier runs the biology department and was very interested in carving
a position out for Lavery because of the potential for health-related
studies of drug use. Long-term physical problems of heroin addicts,
everything from HIV infection to dental deterioration. It fit nicely
with their premed courses, overlapped with the chemistry curriculum,
and linked them more tightly to the social sciences.