It seemed unlikely that official inquiries would get anywhere, but I knew a few people at Yale, including Martin Dawson, an old friend who was now chair of Singer’s former department. I thought of talking to him by phone but decided against it. As Karen had taught me, a personal touch would be better. And New Haven was just two and a half hours away.
I confirmed by email that Martin would be available tomorrow for lunch. And maybe I’d also pay a surprise visit to the mystery woman, Sally Lipton.
17
I took I-95 down to New Haven. Not the fastest route, but the final portion was along the coast, and I always enjoyed the sight and smell of the ocean. When I got to Old Saybrook, about thirty miles from my destination, I pulled off the highway and found an oceanside café where I stopped for coffee and a homemade donut on the patio. I always preferred honey dip, but they had some raspberry jellies that looked really good. I considered the matter carefully and was forced to settle on one of each. I wasn’t sure what my schedule would be like once I got to Yale, so I figured that I might as well enjoy what was turning out to be a bright, sunny day, still warm enough to sit outdoors.
I planned to start by talking to Martin Dawson. I’d known Martin since graduate school, and he was a good guy. More important, as chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, he’d have access to whatever personnel files pertained to Singer’s departure. His email response had been enthusiastic when I proposed a visit, and I didn’t think he’d be reluctant to share what he knew. Or could find out.
Martin’s office was on the twelfth floor of the Kline Biology Tower, a sixteen-story building that was easy to find because it was the tallest on campus. I identified myself as an old friend of Martin’s to an administrative assistant in the outer office and said that Martin was expecting me. She looked at me dubiously and said she wasn’t aware of an appointment and would have to check with Professor Dawson. She knocked on his door and went into Martin’s office, only to be followed moments later by Martin himself, bursting through the door and grabbing my hand with his characteristic exuberance.
“Brad, how good to see you! It’s been what, at least two years now? Let’s go get some lunch and catch up.”
We took the elevator down and walked a few blocks to a deli on Chapel Street. There were a handful of tables outside, two of them still empty because it wasn’t quite noon, and we grabbed one.
“Great place,” Martin said. “Best Reubens in the world. So how are you doing in the never-ending struggle to be department chair and still run your lab?”
“Probably about as well as you are,” I said.
We exchanged jokes about the life of a chair, which we both agreed was not anything that we’d been prepared for, by either education or experience. The waitress came by with menus, but Martin waved them away. “We don’t need those. I’ll have a Reuben. You too. Right, Brad?”
I laughed. “Of course. Couldn’t pass up the world’s best.”
“So how about research, Brad? Can you still get anything done in your lab?”
“Actually, I’ve gotten lucky with one of my students.” I told him about the work Laurie was doing with Josh as the waitress brought our sandwiches.
“Fabulous,” he said. “Our students can be our saviors. And this in the middle of one of your students having been murdered just a few weeks ago. That must be horrible for you to deal with.”
I fell serious. “It is. There’s no way to describe it. Things are sort of back to normal in the department, but there’s a pall hanging over everyone. And the police are still working on the case.”
“I’m so sorry. But eat, eat. Don’t let your sandwich get cold.”
I took a big bite. It really was good. “You’re right, best in the world.”
“Good, enjoy. But tell me, to what do I owe this visit? You and I are both too busy for simple pleasures.”
“You’re right—I do have an ulterior motive. What can you tell me about Mike Singer? In particular, about the circumstances of his leaving here to join our department at BTI?”
He raised his eyebrows. “And you’re curious because . . .? Is he being some sort of problem for you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “I had occasion to look through his file and was struck that there’s nothing in it from anyone at Yale. No recommendations, no documentation of counteroffers during his recruitment, nothing. It made me wonder if he left here under some sort of a cloud.”
Martin leaned back and rubbed his chin. A gesture that I knew meant he was thinking. “He left several years before I became chair, so I don’t know the details. I do remember that my colleagues and I were surprised. He went on leave, and then he never came back, moving to your place instead. I had assumed he was working with somebody in your department during his leave and decided to stay.”
“No, he wasn’t with us before he joined the department full time. Do you have his file in your office? Maybe there’s more information in there.”
“Sorry, I only have the files of active members of the department. Since Singer’s gone, all of his stuff would be archived in the college storage.”
“Can I get in to take a look at it?”
“Only with permission from the dean. Why is this so important? He was here, and now he’s gone. Lots of faculty members move between institutions.”
“Look, can you keep this confidential?” He nodded, and I continued. “Our auditors are questioning expenses associated with some of his grants, involving consulting fees paid to a woman in your chemistry department. It made me want to check his connections back here, and I’m flummoxed by the absence of history in his file. I’d like to find out what went on before he joined us, especially to see if there are any problems or connections with the woman from his years here.”
Martin turned pale as I talked. “You don’t think he’s associated with your murder case, do you?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. Just some financial irregularities—but enough that I need to look into it.”
His color returned as he frowned and then nodded. “All right, I’ll try to help you. What are you doing for dinner tonight?”
“I don’t know. Probably just grab some takeout after I get home and eat in my condo. Why?”
“Let me invite you to stay in New Haven tonight and have dinner with me. We can go to the original Pepe’s pizza, an exceptional treat for a Bostonian. Check yourself into a hotel and meet me there at seven. I’ll arrange an interesting field trip for you afterward.”
I found a hotel and called my downstairs neighbor to make overnight arrangements for Rosie. Then, with the afternoon free, I decided to pay Sally Lipton a visit. Googling her in preparation for the meeting revealed an odd history. She had come to Yale as an assistant professor fifteen years ago. Tenure track, meaning that after seven years, she’d be evaluated for promotion to a tenured position. If the tenure evaluation was successful, she’d be promoted to associate and then full professor. If she was denied tenure, she’d have to leave. But now her rank was listed as research professor, which meant she wasn’t tenured and was only allowed to stay on a temporary basis as long as she could bring in grants to support her own salary.
The whole thing didn’t make sense. Yale, like most major universities, had a firm up-or-out tenure policy. When the time for tenure evaluation came, the candidate was either granted tenure or forced to leave the university. Staying on in a second-tier, nontenured position was not an option. Yet that seemed to be exactly what Sally Lipton was doing.
I found her office on the third floor of the Chemistry Research Building. The door was slightly ajar, so I knocked and was greeted by a terse, “Yes, come in.”
The woman behind the desk looked older than her age, which I figured to be early forties from her academic record. She peered at me through heavy, black-framed glasses, set on a narrow face beneath close-cropped, graying brown hair. “What do you want?”
I introduced myself and took one of the chair
s across from her desk. “If you have a minute, I’d like to talk to you about your work with Mike Singer. As you know, he’s a member of my department, and I’ve noticed your collaboration with him on some of his grants. I’m visiting Yale today and found myself with some free time this afternoon, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to stop by and meet you.”
“Yes, I know Singer. I do a little consulting for him. What’s to talk about?”
“I’m just curious. How long have the two of you worked together?”
“We met shortly after I came here as a new assistant professor, maybe fifteen years ago. We did some things together when I first got my lab set up, published a couple of joint papers.”
“And you continued consulting on his projects after he left,” I said. “His departure must have been a blow to you and your colleagues in chemistry. What made him move to my place?”
She swiveled her chair around to look at me face on. “What makes anyone move? A better offer, I guess. I really don’t know the details.” She looked pointedly at her watch. “Is there anything else I can do for you? If not, I have to prepare for my class in an hour.”
She turned back to her computer before I even had a chance to get up.
The original Pepe’s was on Wooster Street, about a mile from my hotel. Martin was waiting when I got there and eagerly pointed out the original coal-fired oven as we were shown to our table. We ordered two medium pizzas—a pepperoni and Pepe’s specialty, a white clam—along with a pitcher of Sam Adams. The beer came immediately, the pizzas soon after, and Martin tucked in as if lunch was no more than a distant memory. I did my best to keep up.
When I saw Martin look longingly at the last piece of white clam, I threw in the towel.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m stuffed.”
He gave an exaggerated shrug. “If I must. Can’t waste Pepe’s specialty. Best pizza in the world, right?”
I poured myself a fresh glass from our pitcher of Sam Adams. “That’s what you said about our sandwiches at lunch too. Is all the food in New Haven the best in the world? You know Pepe’s recently opened a place in Boston, right?”
He gave me a self-satisfied smile. “Everywhere I go is the best, absolutely. And the Boston place can’t hold a candle to this. Been here since 1925. The best—”
I held up my hands in the universal gesture of surrender. “Okay, the best in the world. I won’t argue. But other than enjoying your company and the eats, this trip hasn’t been very productive. You said you had something interesting planned after dinner?”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a key ring, and jangled it at me. “I do. And it’s after nine, so we can get going any time now.” He finished his pizza, took a look at the check, and put cash down on the table. “No records of tonight’s adventure left behind.”
We drove to campus, and Martin parked in the biology building lot. “Figured we’d park in my usual place and then walk over to our destination,” he explained.
The administration building was a large brick building about two blocks away. In contrast to the biology building, which still had several lighted windows at nine thirty, the administration building was completely dark.
“Good,” Martin said. “Our administrators are solid nine-to-fivers.”
He took out the keychain and unlocked the front door. “A loan from a friend of mine in the dean’s office. I told her I needed to check an old file and didn’t have time to get over here during normal business hours.”
“I take it that it’s not legit for us to be here?”
“It’s not, but I don’t think we’ll be bothered.” He led the way down a staircase to the basement. Then he used another borrowed key, and we entered a cavernous room filled with rows and rows of filing cabinets.
“Voilà,” he said. “Welcome to the Yale faculty mausoleum.”
It was completely dark, and we used the flashlights on our phones to read the labels on the filing cabinet drawers. They were carefully alphabetized, and we found a drawer labeled Silver-Snodgrass toward the back of the room. Mike Singer’s file was right where it should be. So far, so good.
But suddenly the lights came on, and a voice from the front of the room called out, “Hello. Who’s there?”
I was paralyzed, but Martin moved quickly. “Duck down out of sight and stay put,” he whispered in my ear. “I’ll handle this. Then you get back to your hotel afterward.”
I crouched down as Martin went out into the aisle. “Hello, what’s up? I’m just looking for an old file,” he said.
He moved out of my line of sight, and I heard the interloper walk over toward him.
“Security. Do you have some identification?”
“Of course. I’m Professor Dawson, chair of the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.”
There was a pause, during which I assumed the security guy checked Martin’s ID. “Okay. Do you have authorization to be in here? I was doing rounds and saw a light.”
Martin was unfazed. “Yes, Mary Cartwright in the dean’s office lent me her keys. As I said, I just had to do a quick check of an old personnel file. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Here, let’s go, and I’ll buy you a beer for your trouble.”
I peeked around the corner to see Martin take something out of his wallet and hand it to the guard. No doubt it was worth more than a beer.
The guard started to say, “I can’t accept—”
But Martin put his arm around the guard’s shoulders and cut him off. “What are you talking about? Just a friendly beer. Who could object to that?”
I could almost hear the guard smile. “Well, okay. Thank you, Professor. If you’re finished, can I show you out?”
“Sure,” Martin said. “I’m all set.”
I heard them walk away. Then the lights went out, and the door closed. Martin seemed to have successfully talked and bribed his way out of it. The old Martin charm had been his forte since graduate school.
I waited a few minutes and then turned my attention back to Singer’s file. The papers in it were chronologically arranged, so I went to the back, looking for correspondence about his departure. What I found was a nondisclosure agreement binding the signatories to confidentiality concerning the circumstances of Singer’s resignation from the university.
It was signed by Mike Singer and four other people, including a couple whose names I recognized. One of them made my heart beat faster.
Sally Lipton.
18
I got lost twice on the way back to my hotel. Partly because of my usual bad sense of direction and partly because my mind was focused on Singer’s nondisclosure agreement. It was after eleven when I made it back to my room and looked at a text from Martin.
Trust you made it back okay. Hope you found what you needed.
I didn’t want to tell him what I’d found. No sense involving him any more than necessary. So I just sent a quick reply. Yes, back in hotel now. Interesting venture, thanks! Owe you dinner next time you’re in Boston.
He must have been waiting to hear from me. His response was immediate. And as usual, centered on food. You’re welcome. Any decent restaurants there?
I laughed out loud in a release of the evening’s tension. Mixed in with relief that Martin wasn’t going to press me for more information. Take you to the original Regina’s pizza in the North End. Put it up against your Pepe’s for the world’s best any day! Wanna bet the amount you bribed the security guard?
I could almost hear the snort of derision in his response. Hah! You’re on. See you soon.
I needed to get some sleep before the drive back to Boston tomorrow. But I couldn’t do it yet. I was too blown away by the discovery that Singer’s departure from Yale was veiled in secrecy. With Sally Lipton somehow involved.
There could, of course, be several reasons for a nondisclosure agreement. Singer was a highflier, and Yale might have bent over backward to keep him from leaving. If so, they may very well have made him an offer that was
so rich they wouldn’t want other faculty members to know about it. That would explain an agreement between Singer and the Yale administrators who had signed on. But why Sally Lipton?
Alternatively, Singer had left Yale under a cloud. Perhaps involving the same kind of financial shenanigans that he might be implicated in at BTI. If so, Lipton’s signature implied that she was involved. Both then and now.
In addition to Singer and Sally Lipton, the agreement was signed by the dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the president of Yale University. As well as by someone named Martha Daniels, who didn’t have an official title.
I knew the former dean, Kenneth Emerson. He was now president of my own university, having moved to the top position at BTI a year or so after Singer joined us. In fact, if I remembered correctly, Singer had been a member of the search committee that had selected Emerson for the top job, suggesting that whatever had happened to Singer at Yale hadn’t bothered Emerson. Interesting, but it wasn’t going to help me find out anything more. Emerson would hardly break a nondisclosure agreement to talk to me about it. Nor would the Yale president.
Seeing Sally Lipton’s name on the agreement told me a lot. It meant there was a tie between her and Singer going way back and including some involvement in—or at least knowledge of—the details of his departure from Yale. But based on my interaction with her this afternoon, it wasn’t something she was going to talk to me about.
So that left one other possibility to look into. The other unidentified signatory, Martha Daniels. I revved up my laptop and searched for her in PubMed. I came up with two published papers from ten years ago, about the time Singer left Yale. The footnotes indicated that Martha Daniels had been a graduate student in chemistry. Neither Singer nor Sally Lipton was a coauthor on either of the papers, so neither appeared to have been directly involved with her work.
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