by Jane Haddam
“What coincidence was that?”
“One of the extern sisters at Our Lady of Mount Carmel walked into the Hardscrabble Road precinct station with the hat and the old guy who’d tried to file the report the first time,” Benedetti said. “Just before you walked into this office, I got on the phone to everybody in creation and started the wheels rolling. There was a death at Our Lady of Mount Carmel that night; we’re trying to find out what happened to the body. I want to send Marbury and Giametti out to the monastery—do you know about that, it’s nuns, but it’s still called a monastery?”
“You can get that from EWTN and Mother Angelica.”
“Right. Okay. Anyway, here we are. We have the hat, and granted there are a lot of watch hats and a lot of them are red, the coincidences are piling up beyond what seems sensible. What scares me, what I really can’t get out of my brain, is that this might be my fault. I thought I was being clever. I got Sherman Markey killed.”
“Do you really think that’s likely?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “It’s that kind of thing. I don’t know Drew Harrigan well enough to know what he’d go for, and I don’t know who his accomplice is at all. I haven’t got a clue as to what’s likely in this case. I just know I’ve got a hat, and no Markey, and that when Harrigan walks out of rehab, I want to be standing there personally with the handcuffs. There’s celebrity free ride for you. I got an experiment for you to do sometime. Go find some black kid off the street, up for possession for the first time. Offer to pay his way to some fancy total immersion rehab place. See if you get anywhere with the judge.”
“Who was the judge?”
“Bruce Williamson.” “Oh, God.” “Exactly. I’m going to get you a car, take you over to see the guys, okay? It’s better that than have you wasting time looking for taxis when it’s nearly lunch hour. They said you didn’t drive.”
Gregor didn’t drive, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to go into at length, so he just stood up, got his coat, and got moving.
2
A few moments later, sitting in the back of a plain black unmarked sedan—where did they find the cars they bought for police departments and city governments?—Gregor Demarkian found himself turning Drew Harrigan’s book over and over in his hands. He didn’t like the man’s face. It was too round, too smooth, too well taken care of, too smug, although he didn’t like to make judgments like that about photographs. You couldn’t tell if somebody was smug or not from a photograph, just as you couldn’t really tell if a defendant was remorseful by the fact that he didn’t show any emotion while he was in the courtroom. Gregor hated people who came up with entire screenplays’ worth of motivation and character development from a few quick glimpses of a person under extreme emotional distress. Not everybody cries when told that the person they love most is dead. Some people can’t break down in public, and wait to do it until they’re alone. Not everybody looks guilty and haunted when he feels guilty and haunted. Some people go numb with guilt and look like they’re made of stone. This was why Gregor had never really been happy with the idea of trial by jury. It was made worse by the fact that attorneys deliberately attempted to seat the least educated and least literate jurors they could find, on the assumption that the stupid are more easily influenced than the bright, and not by facts and evidence.
Gregor opened the book at random. The paragraphs were short. There was a lot of white space at the top and the bottom and the margins. Obviously, Drew Harrigan didn’t expect his average reader to have a doctorate in literature from Yale.
You know what really gets me about liberals? Liberals never met a criminal they didn’t like. Doesn’t matter what he’s done. Doesn’t matter that he’s just slaughtered thirty people in a bank he’s been robbing. Doesn’t matter he’s spent his entire life ripping people off and beating people up and being good for nothing, you arrest him and some liberal will come running to say it’s all society’s fault. You know whose fault that is? Yours. It’s your fault if this piece of scum kills thirty people in a bank. You get up every morning. You go to work. You put in your time. You pay your bills. You stay out of trouble. And it’s your fault, this guy tried to rob a bank, and instead of putting him in jail we should give him an income twice as much as what you’ve got and send him to therapy to talk about his childhood.
Gregor sucked in air. That was—what? Trite. The sort of thing that had been around for twenty years or more. He wondered if Drew Harrigan’s audience was young enough not to realize that Harrigan was just repeating things that had been said a hundred times before by a hundred other people. It was disturbing to think they might be older, and looking to hear the same things they’d been hearing for as long as they could remember. Gregor flipped through a few more pages.
All this year’s field of Democratic presidential candidates is pretty pathetic, but the winner of the National Loser Party Award for Biggest Loser in the Bunch has to be John Kerry. I mean, come on, people. It’s not enough that Democrats are traitors to America in fact, that any one of them would rather be living in Moscow, Russia, than Moscow, Idaho, they’re going to go for a guy who looks so French he could be Brigitte Bardot’s evil twin?
Gregor blinked. John Kerry looked French? John Kerry looked so New England, he could have been Cotton Mather’s evil twin. And wouldn’t somebody like Drew Harrigan think Brigitte Bardot, who was a big activist in the animal rights movement, evil enough on her own, so that if she had an evil twin, he’d have to be good?
His head was swimming. He’d left home this morning expecting to do nothing more than spend an hour with John Jackman and get a promise of another morgue check. He’d been muddled and depressed, thinking about Bennis, thinking about himself. He’d wanted something to take his mind off the narcissistic and uncontrollable.
He wasn’t sure he’d meant something like this.
SEVEN
1
Alison Standish felt that if the university was attempting to conduct its investigation into her teaching in a way that did not leave it open to charges of responding to Drew Harrigan’s programs, it was doing a very bad job. As a matter of fact, as of this morning, it was doing a very bad job of investigating, and as the days went by it only seemed to be getting worse. In the first place, there was the secrecy. The investigation was secret in a way that would make a grand jury fan salivate. Nobody involved in it was allowed to tell anybody else what they had told the committee, nor what anybody else had told the committee, not even a lawyer. Alison was sure that couldn’t be legal. For another thing, nobody was allowed to confront the witnesses, not even Alison herself. If a former student came forward to say that he had had to sit through a lecture praising Marxism in Alison’s class, Alison couldn’t ask him about it, and couldn’t even know who he was. It was like an interrogation from the Holy and Roman Inquisition—not the Spanish one, which came later, but the one the Vatican ran in Rome, which had called Thomas Aquinas down for questioning and forced him to take the long trip by horse that killed him. Alison didn’t expect to die. She didn’t even expect to have her classes suspended. She was beginning to think she needed to find somebody outside the situation to help her, and stop assuming that the university was the community of scholars it had been set up to be in the Middle Ages.
Hell, that one hadn’t even worked in the Middle Ages.
She sat at her desk and looked, without reading, at the document in front of her. She wasn’t reading it because she’d already read it, about four times, since she’d first picked it up in her mailbox an hour ago. These were supposed to be her office hours, but it didn’t matter. Students almost never came, and none had come today. She was free to obsess as long as she wanted to about this piece off… this piece of…She didn’t know what it was a piece of. She didn’t know how to respond to it. It didn’t matter that she knew it was untrue, and that Roger Hollman, the dean, must also know it was untrue. The idea was obviously to act as if it were true, and worse, to presume the t
ruth of it unless the falsity was proved. Who was it who said you couldn’t prove a negative? Somebody from the Middle Ages, probably. Alison was having a hard time remembering the Middle Ages at the moment. What she was remembering, for no reason at all, was her marriage. That had all been so long ago it might as well have happened to somebody else, but there you were. She had been married, to a professor of history at Temple who had eventually moved on first to New York University and then to Tufts. She had had a child, named Simon, who had died at the age of seven after many long years with leukemia. There was a time there, just for a moment, when she might have been somebody else than who she was: David’s wife, Simon’s mother, a woman who “kept her hand in” by reading other people’s books on scholastic theology and the art of the icon but otherwise had nothing to do with this at all. She didn’t know if she would have been happier if her life had turned out that way. She did know she would have been happier if Simon had lived. It occurred to her that she had gone past the time when having another child was feasible, and maybe she shouldn’t have left it so late.
That’s ridiculous, she thought. She didn’t want another child. If she’d ever had one, she would have been scared to death of it. She would have examined it for symptoms of leukemia daily, and then examined it some more, home medical encyclopedia in hand, hoping to cover all the fatal illnesses possible in children, miserable because she’d know that she could never cover them all. It was odd the way people turned out. It was odder what they wanted in times of crisis.
The thing was, even though the proceedings were secret, the testimony was only secret up to a point. She didn’t receive names, or dates, or the time periods when a student may have been in her classes, but she did receive the accusations themselves. Up to now, most of them had been trivial and embarrassing. Someone had complained that she showed far too much approval of feudalism, because it implied that she opposed “the legitimate aspirations of poor people and people of color.” Someone had complained that she called on men with their hands raised more often than she called on women—who could possibly know if that was true or not? Had there been a student in one of her classes counting the other students who were called on to speak and writing it all down in a notebook in preparation for a time like now? That wasn’t the kind of thing the university would take seriously, and it wasn’t the kind of thing Drew Harrigan had been complaining of. This, however, was:
The entire thrust of Professor Standish’s course in Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages was to insult Christian students and call them evil and stupid. She spent some time in almost every class talking about how the Middle Ages proved that Christians should not be in charge of governments and Christianity would also produce tyranny and torture if it got any power. She compared the situation in the Middle Ages to the political work of the Religious Right now, saying that the Religious Right was the same as the witchburners and Inquisitionists who had killed hundreds of people for their beliefs in the twelfth century. She referred to the President of the United States as somebody who thought he was on a Crusade. When students protested her bias, she told them they either agreed with her or were too stupid to see the parallels.
There was more, but the more there was, the more ridiculous it got. At one point, the writer complained that Alison did not “respect” his belief that witches were real and consorted with Satan, but tried to push her “secular humanism” on him and every other student in the class. As if she were supposed to just nod and make encouraging noises when students claimed to see ghosts or experience levitation. Maybe she was. Maybe that was what the New University was all about. Hammered by the left and the right, they weren’t supposed to teach any longer, and they surely weren’t supposed to uphold the traditions of high literacy and the Western Enlightenment. Civilization as they knew it was over. Everything really was political now.
I’m going insane, Alison told herself. Then she picked up the two-page “testimony,” held it carefully with the thumb and index finger of her right hand, as if it were contaminated, and got up to go down the hall to the chairman’s office. Alison knew better than to start with Roger Hollman. He had a secretary who could keep her out. She’d start with Chris McCall, and he could deal with it.
Chris’s office was an office like any other. The door was open when he was willing to see students, but Alison knew he was there even when the door was shut, working away on his latest paper on Icons of Individualism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture. The door was shut. She turned the knob and walked right in.
“What the hell?” Chris said.
Alison closed the door behind her. “I would have knocked, but you’d have pretended you weren’t here. We have to talk.”
Chris was an athletic, middle-aged man with a ponytail, an atavism, really, a throwback to the days when middle-aged men actually believed they looked younger if they never saw a barber. Alison threw the “testimony” down on his desk and sat down herself.
“Look at that.”
Chris didn’t. He just looked uncomfortable. “I have looked at it. They sent me a copy.”
“Well?”
“How do I know?” Chris said. “It’s important to give the students a safe place to express their opinions. That’s what the investigating committee is doing. It’s important to hear them out and respect—”
“—Respect what, Chris? Whoever this is thinks witches are real. Not Wiccan-practicing modern witches, but the kind that ride on broomsticks and have sex with Satan.”
“Yes, well. Evangelical students, the ones who take the Bible literally.”
“What, Chris? They’re supposed to come here and never get that idea challenged? Should we shut down the entire Religious Studies Department? We might as well shut down History, Archeology, Geology, and Biology while we’re at it.”
“That’s not the point,” Chris said. “The point is whether you called this student stupid for being a Christian believer. I mean, for God’s sake, Alison. You know what it’s been like around here since the water buffalo mess. We can barely breathe in the direction of conservative students without the administration having a complete fit.”
“The kid in the water buffalo case wasn’t a conservative student,” Alison said, “and the trouble we had over it was over the secrecy of the proceedings, which is what is going on here. This is like a Star Chamber, Chris. It’s absurd. At the very least, I have the right to due process, to be able to confront the witnesses against me, to advice of counsel—”
“—Due process doesn’t apply to university committees,” Chris said quickly. “They aren’t adversary proceedings. You don’t have enemies you have to protect yourself against.”
“No? Did what’s his name in the water buffalo incident have enemies he had to protect himself against?”
“That went wrong,” Chris said. “It got out of hand.”
“This is about to.”
Chris licked his lips. Alison didn’t think she’d ever realized, before, how soft and weak and self-protective he was, and yet she should have. She’d known him for years. She had a sudden vision of that alternative lifetime again—Simon alive, herself as a housewife in suburban Boston—and then snapped herself back to the present. She was angry. She had been afraid, but now she was angry.
“Let’s not go into how I feel about being investigated because an idiot like Drew Harrigan made charges against me on a radio program targeted to the kind of illiterate asshole who never made it past high school, if that,” she said. “Let’s just go with what we’ve got. I came to you instead of Roger because you were easier to get to. You’d better go tell Roger if you know what’s good for you.”
“Roger isn’t going to just drop the investigation,” Chris said. “He couldn’t. He’s got a responsibility—”
“When I leave this office, I’m going to hire a lawyer,” Alison said. “There’s a woman in town I went to college with. She’s an attorney who works on high-profile media cases. She’ll know one locally
who’ll suit my purposes. I’m going to hire a lawyer, and I’m going to give a press conference. And I swear to God, I’ll make the water buffalo case look like a day at the beach in comparison.”
“If you go to an outside source, the committee can suspend you from teaching.”
“Let them try it.” Alison leaned forward and took the two-page “testimony” off Chris’s desk. “The first thing we’re going to look into is this. Because you know what, Chris?”
“You can’t blame a student for having an opinion.”
“No, I can’t. But I can blame a nonstudent for claiming he was a student. Or she. Because my classes are small. The one mentioned, Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages, never has more than ten people in it. Don’t you think I would have noticed if a student in my class believed in the devil or any of the rest of this nonsense?”
“If you really were that dismissive, the student may not have felt it was safe to speak up. He might have kept it all inside.”
“Bullshit,” Alison said. “Go talk to Roger, Chris. I’ve had enough.”
It was one of those times when what Alison really wanted was to see Chris’s face after she’d left the room, but even the medieval necromancers had never figured out how to manage that one.
It was too bad.
2
Kate Daniel couldn’t decide how she felt about the call she’d just had from Alison Standish. She would have liked to say bemused, but she’d never been sure what the word “bemused” meant. It was a little like finding out that her ex-husband was representing Drew Harrigan in a case in which they might have to have something to do with each other. It wasn’t that she minded hearing from people in her past, exactly. It was that she didn’t know how to respond to them. She had the feeling they all remembered the Kate Daniel who had always been called Katherine. She thought they’d expect to see her in A-line skirts from Villager and matching crew-necked sweaters and a circle pin. She couldn’t really remember what she’d worn in college, or as Neil Elliot Savage’s wife. What she remembered most of the time was being afraid. She was afraid of the girls she went to school with. She was afraid of Neil. She was afraid of herself. God only knew how she’d gotten the guts to get herself to law school, or out of her marriage, but here she was, and she didn’t want to go back.