“Subject is a well-developed white male, approximately one hundred sixty pounds in weight . . .”
Before long, I was growing impatient with all the tiresome jargon. “Skip to the cause of death.”
“. . . immediate cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head with cerebral contusion, subarachnoid and subdural hemorrhage . . .”
“Which means that he died from a skull fracture,” I said irritably. “Why doesn’t it just say that?”
“Localized injuries, including laceration above the right orbital cavity, suggest decedent struck with a heavy metal object between eighteen and twenty-two centimeters in diameter. Blood samples taken from fireplace poker found at scene will be tested to confirm . . .”
Several pages and much hemming and hawing later, the report moved on to postmortem injuries.
“Severing of the genitalia produced massive bleeding in situ, approximately 1300 c.m. based on recovered samples. Using regression analysis it was determined that the interval between time of death and the removal of the decedent’s penis and testes was no longer than thirty minutes based on the formula established by Spencer-Fleming: amount of postmortem bleeding (cm = .9571 × time since death (h) + 626.659 . . .”
“There,” Hallie said. “That’s what I was saying before about timing.”
I nodded, thinking. As a rule, when the body dies, the heart stops pumping blood to the arteries, so that injuries inflicted on a corpse produce little bleeding. The ME’s report indicated that enough blood was found where Westlake fell to suggest his genitals were removed within a short time after his death. The conclusion seemed solid, but I was still mindful of Brad’s remark to his wife about the body being moved. And there was something else I wanted to know.
“Hallie, see if says anything in there about lividity.”
“Remind me again what that is.”
“It’s a medical term that comes from the Latin word for black and blue. After the heart stops beating, gravity forces blood to settle into the lowest areas of the body, producing patches of purplish discoloration under the skin, except for places where the body was in contact with a hard surface, where the skin remains white, or blanched. Eventually the blanching becomes fixed. It’s one way a coroner can tell if a body’s been moved postmortem.”
“All right,” Hallie said. “But everyone knows Westlake’s body was moved after his death. Why would it be significant?”
“I don’t know. But Brad evidently thought it was, so humor me.”
“OK, I’m looking.” Hallie flipped silently through a few pages. “Here we go,” she said at last.
“Livor mortis blanching most noticeable in the decedent’s buttocks, at the backs of the calves, and to a much lesser extent, along the shoulder blades . . .”
As would be expected if Westlake’s corpse had been removed from his house shortly after death and then spent the night on its back in the university quad. There didn’t seem to be anything there, either. What on earth had caught Brad’s eye?
Just then, a log collapsed in the fireplace with a muted crash.
“Do you want me to put another one on?” I asked, half stirring from my place on the sofa.
“No, I’ll get it,” Hallie said.
As she stood and moved past me around the coffee table, a piece of her robe slipped and grazed my leg. On top of the alcohol I’d consumed, the thought of what her movement may have exposed—and that I couldn’t see—sent blood rushing into my groin. I felt my penis begin to stiffen and . . .
“That’s it!” I almost shouted, sitting up straight and groping for a pillow.
“What is?” Hallie said, turning around from the fire.
I hastily plopped the pillow over my midsection. “That’s what Brad meant about the body being moved!”
“At the risk of being boringly repetitive, so what?
My erection had subsided almost as quickly as it had started, so I stood and moved into the center of the room. “Here, I’ll show you. Come over here and hit me on the head with something. Preferably not a fireplace tool.”
“Are you sure? It sounds like you could use some sense knocked into you.”
I glared at her. “Use my cane. It’s over by the door.”
When Hallie returned, I asked her to stand a foot or two away from me. “Now, pretend to smash me over the head with the handle right here.” I pointed at my temple above the right eyebrow. Hallie complied—using, I thought, a little more force than was strictly necessary—and I mimicked staggering back. I got down to the carpet and assumed more or less the same position I had occupied on the sofa minutes earlier, stretched out with my feet in front of me and my back on the floor. To add even more verisimilitude, I lolled my head to one side like a dead man.
Hallie started to giggle. “Don’t tell me I’m now supposed to go and fetch a carving knife from the kitchen.”
“I’m not that insane.”
Her giggling degenerated into full-blown mirth. “Hell, I know this isn’t supposed to be funny, but you look so . . . authentic.”
“Probably the glassy-eyed stare. Now, let’s assume I’ve been lying here dead for several hours. Based on what I told you about gravity, where would you expect the blood in my body to settle?”
“Here, beneath your shoulders. And here,” she said, nudging my buttock with a toe. “On both sides. And here too, under your calves. Except it wouldn’t, because they’re all touching the floor. So they’d be white in appearance, not purple.”
“That’s right. Now go back and read what it says in the ME’s report.”
She did:
“Livor mortis blanching most noticeable in the decedent’s buttocks, at the backs of the calves, and to a much lesser extent, along the shoulder blades . . .”
“. . . ‘to a much lesser extent along the shoulder blades,’” I repeated after her. “Now, looking at me right now, why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know,” Hallie said thoughtfully. “They should all look the same.”
“Uh-huh. Unless this isn’t how I landed after you struck me. Let’s do it one more time.”
We repeated the experiment. Only this time, instead of falling to the floor, I reached over and found the wall next to the fireplace and, placing my back to it, slid to the floor in a seated position, like a drunken marionette with my legs splayed out before me. “Where is the blood going to pool now?”
“In your . . .” Hallie stopped. I’d never known her to be shy about naming body parts, but that part of my anatomy was clearly a dicey subject—for both of us.
“That’s right,” I said, patting my fly innocuously. “So if you came upon my corpse and opened me up, uh, . . . here, a lot of blood might escape my body, even if it was more than half an hour after my death. That’s why it’s important that the body was moved. Because it was moved and everybody knew it from the beginning, nobody paid any attention to where the discoloration was strongest.”
Hallie caught on quickly. “And, therefore, nobody ever thought to ask what position Westlake’s body was in before it was moved. But if you’re right about this, he could have been dead for longer than the ME thought and that means—”
I filled in the rest. “—Rachel might not be the real killer after all.”
TWENTY-THREE
It was well past midnight when we finally finished scouring the case file and Hallie was busy laying out a plan of attack.
“We need to find out anyone, besides Rachel, who might have wanted to see Westlake dead.”
“That won’t be easy,” I said. “We’re probably talking dozens.”
“True. But most murder victims are killed by someone close to them. The problem will be getting past the gates of the ivory tower. When it’s a scandal like this, institutions always close ranks. I can picture the administration breathing a huge sigh of relief when the police arrested Rachel. They’re not going to welcome us showing up on campus and trying to reopen the case.” She let out a sigh. “I’ll have to call
around to my partners tomorrow. One of them has to have donated to the alumni fund this year—enough of a contribution to get us past the door. I give every year too, but not the pots of gold that would earn us an entrée.”
I hesitated before volunteering that I might know a faster way in.
“OK, let’s have it.”
I explained about Candace and the faculty party in December, leaving out my unfortunate encounter with the drunken head of campus counseling and whose bed I’d ended up in that night.
Hallie wasn’t fooled in the slightest.
“This Candace is your neighbor?”
“A little more than that,” I said, opting for a modest degree of candor.
Hallie let a long minute pass. When she spoke again, it was with strained stoicism. “I guess I couldn’t have expected anything else. I mean, I was the one who—”
I had an overpowering urge to jump across the several feet that separated us and . . . well, ravage her wouldn’t be putting it too strongly. But something I couldn’t explain held me back.
“Once you offered to clear the air,” I said. “About us. There’s nothing I want more. But after we’re done with this mess. After we’ve done what we can for Rachel.”
Hallie indicated her assent by reaching over and taking my hand. It burned like a bonfire in mine and almost caused me to chuck my good intentions. I took a deep breath. “I can’t let you drive me home tonight, but would it be OK if I slept here—on the couch?”
It was the most gentlemanly thing I had ever done.
And one I would later earnestly come to regret.
The next morning found us on our way to Hyde Park after a brief stop at my place for a change of clothing and a phone call to Candace. Candace, bless her generous heart, had been happy to be of assistance, and we were on our way to meet with Erik Blum, the head of the Sociology Department I’d met at the party, who agreed to grant us an interview in between classes and meetings.
Despite the low mercury reading, the sun was shining like polished steel as we sped down a post–rush hour Lake Shore Drive. While she steered us in her vintage MG, Hallie kept up a running commentary on the scenery, a habit left over from her childhood, when she’d been inseparable from her brother Geraldo, twelve months her senior and blind since birth. In those days, they’d traveled all over the city together, not because Gerry needed the help but because, being so close in age, they were almost like twins. Gerry’s nickname for her was Nancy Drew, and it had stuck with her into adulthood. As a trial lawyer, she was renowned for leaving no investigative stone unturned, a reputation that only underscored her chagrin at having dropped the ball—as she kept saying—on the Lazarus case.
I squinted in the glare as we passed (according to Hallie) an icicle-clad Field Museum, the spaceship addition ballooning from the top of Soldier Field, and the windswept lakeshore below McCormick Place, bare of anything but prairie grass and scrub oaks peeking from the snow. We exited near the flattened dome of the Museum of Science and Industry and drove west to the Midway Plaisance, once envisioned by Frederick Law Olmstead as a grand, Venetian-style canal and now essentially a huge, dry moat dividing Hyde Park from its destitute neighbors to the south.
Hallie had attended the law school, and she gave me a brief history of the university while we parked and made our way from the car to the social-sciences building. Founded in 1890 by the American Baptist Foundation, it was originally bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller on land donated by Marshall Field. The school was nonsectarian and coeducational from the start, a rarity at the time that quickly attracted free-thinking academics from all over the country. Rockefeller had opened his wallet wide, and the university’s first buildings copied the architecture of Oxford almost stone for stone, with more towers, cloisters, tunnels, and arches than you could shake a slide rule at. Hallie described it all in magical detail as we went up and down slippery steps, through shadowy arcades, and across quadrangles so quiet you could practically hear the minds at work in the adjoining classrooms.
“Was it fun going to school here?” I asked Hallie.
Hallie laughed. “Fun is not an approved term in the U of C lexicon.”
“There’s the scavenger hunt,” I pointed out. “That must be entertaining—at least when dead bodies aren’t involved.”
“Oh, there are extracurricular activities, and plenty of good-natured competition among students. But most of the playtime is very true to the school’s lofty reputation. Like Scav. Has anyone ever told you how it works?”
I said no and she explained.
“Well, it’s always scheduled so that Judgment Day—the last day of the contest—falls on Mother’s Day. The Wednesday before, a list is released, sometimes running to thirty pages or more, of things the students have to find, design, collect, eat, wear, or do, with point values assigned to each one. The teams, usually associated with one of the residential houses, compete to earn the most points, with a group of judges composed of volunteers being the arbiters of how well they’ve succeeded. Some of the items in the past have caused a bit of a stir. Like the year the list included building a nuclear reactor.”
“Did a team actually do that?”
“Yes. But they missed out on the bonus points for making it edible. Usually it’s something simpler, like constructing a laser from ordinary household appliances. Or building an honest-to-God time machine. And then there’s all the traditional stuff, like breaking into the Bulls’ locker room and stealing a jock strap. Or fashioning an entire wardrobe from Scotch Tape. It’s the ultimate nerd challenge.”
“And all this happens over three or four days?”
“Yes, with most of the team members running all over the campus day and night.”
And therefore a swell time to commit murder if you wanted to maintain a low profile.
At last we arrived at Blum’s office, in a far-flung corner of a third floor, where a dour-sounding assistant showed us in.
I introduced us, and Blum invited us to sit down. With Hallie to act as my guide, I had only a folding cane with me, which I made a show of collapsing and placing in my lap to remind him how we had met before.
“Yes, I remember you. Aren’t you the fellow that ass Peter Crow—”
“Let’s not talk about it,” I butt in quickly.
“Very well, though I don’t suppose he apologized for it. I got to know Crow quite well, back in the early nineties when I was heading up Magdalen House. You may know that all of our residence halls are divided into multiyear houses, in the fashion of the Oxford colleges. Crow acted as one of the residential advisors. Could hardly be bothered with his duties, but I suppose he needed the free living quarters. Married then, with a toddler and getting his PhD in psychology. Silly discipline,” he added, apparently forgetting it was also mine.
“Yes, well, my colleague and I are here to—”
Blum went on as though I didn’t exist. “With all that responsibility—for the students, of course, as well as a young family—you’d think he wouldn’t have time for campus politics. But there he was, at the head of every rally, front and center with a bullhorn, decrying the treatment of blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans—excuse me, Indigenous Peoples—anyone at all so long as they didn’t belong to the white middle class. Are you by any chance an alum?”
“I’m not,” I said. “But Ms. Sanchez here attended the law school.”
“Well, then, perhaps she’ll remember the occupation of the administration building in ninety-one. The Vietnam War was long over by then, but a group headed by Crow got it in their heads that the university was unacceptably tied to the military-industrial complex. You’re probably aware that it was Fermi’s work on this very campus that led to the development of the atomic bomb and . . .”
I let him go on another three minutes before interrupting. “Excuse me. But we were led to believe your time was short.”
“Quite right. I have an appointment with a PhD candidate in twenty minutes. What was it you wanted to see me abo
ut?” he asked, making no secret of his boredom.
I decided not to beat about the bush. “We’re doing some further looking into Gunther Westlake’s death. New evidence has come to light suggesting his wife may be innocent.”
“Really!” Blum exclaimed. “Why that’s terrible! Simply terrible!”
“For who—Ms. Lazarus or the university?”
Blum rushed to cover his mistake. “Well, I meant terrible in the sense of a miscarriage of justice, of course. What new evidence?” he demanded suspiciously.
I kept it vague. “Evidence of a possible other killer. We’re here to find out whether Westlake had any enemies among your colleagues.”
“A murderer on the faculty? That’s preposterous. I’m ending this conversation at once. And notifying university counsel of your inquiries.”
Hallie spoke up then. “Do that and there will be a deposition subpoena on your doorstep faster that you can say Herbert Marcuse. You’ll have to answer all our questions then—under oath. Or we can have an informal chat right now. Dr. Angelotti and I aren’t interested in creating unnecessary publicity for my alma mater. Or hastily accusing anyone. There’s been enough of that already.”
She was bluffing. With Lazarus already convicted, Hallie had no standing to seek a subpoena. And she was treading on thin ice as soon as Blum mentioned the school’s lawyers. But the threat was enough to make Blum reconsider his stance.
“Can I have your word that anything I say will be off the record?”
“No you cannot,” Hallie said. “But if you’re right and no one here had anything to do with Westlake’s murder, you have nothing to lose by being honest with us.”
“Oh, all right,” Blum said dismissively. “But it’s still absurd to think you’ll find anything here. The university hasn’t spawned a murderer in all its hundred-year history.”
“Two actually,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
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