by Linda Barnes
The extent of my Harvard connection: I used to park illegally behind the ed school before they put in the raised-arm sentry system. I figured he didn’t need to know that, so I simply shook my head.
“Good. Excellent. Next, I need to know about confidentiality. I’ve never consulted a private investigator before, and I need to know to what degree I can be frank about my requirements.”
“I’m a private citizen, not an officer of the court. If I’m working for an attorney, then his privileges can extend to cover me, as well.”
I wasn’t sure what this guy did for a living, but whatever it was, it paid. His understated clothes were expensive, his hands well kept, the fingernails manicured. His hands were ringless and very pale, the palms paler than my own. I’ve been going out with an African-American, an FBI agent temporarily on assignment in Boston, and the paleness of Leon’s palms was nowhere near as pronounced.
My stalker bit his lip. “Therefore you could be compelled to testify in a court of law.”
“Yes.”
“Damn.” He worried his lips some more and seemed at a loss as to how to continue. He had faint lines at the corners of his drooping eyes. I upped my age estimate, placing him at forty to forty-five.
“Are you ready to tell me your name?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
A clatter of dishes and silverware penetrated the soundproofing, reminding me that people were finishing up lunch not fifteen feet away.
I said, “Prospective clients often consult me about hypothetical matters. Or they might talk about something that’s happened to a friend.”
“I have a friend,” he said, seizing on the pretext and leaning forward eagerly, “who is being blackmailed. He is— He doesn’t know what to do.”
“Maybe your ‘friend’ should have made an appointment to see me.”
He bit his lip. “I was— I should have— I didn’t mean to alarm you.”
“You didn’t. About the blackmail, I hate to say it, but sometimes the easiest option is the expensive one. Pay up.”
“You don’t understand. My friend has paid. He thought it was over, but … it’s more than that. … It’s the threat. I find— My friend finds he can no longer live with the constant threat of exposure.”
I don’t know what I’d expected—police harrassment, a missing friend, an unfaithful wife—but blackmail took me by surprise. It’s an unusual complaint these days. Blackmail isn’t what it used to be because secrets aren’t what they used to be. What with confessional TV, and talk-radio jocks hosting gay cross-dressers and their second wives, and Internet chat rooms devoted to perversion, it takes a certain type of deed to provoke blackmail, and, more importantly, a certain type of person to attract it.
“Tell me more about your friend,” I said.
“He is in a position of trust.”
“Working with money?”
“Working with young people.”
“Very young people, or people the age you might encounter at Harvard?”
The mention of Harvard was enough to make his hands clench. “Do you know how few tenured faculty positions exist? Tenured positions at fine universities?”
“I can see where your friend might wish to keep his job.”
“He does, believe me. He does.”
The man probably looked familiar because I’d seen him in Harvard Yard, hurrying from class to the Faculty Club. A Harvard professor. Not one of the famous ones, not a local celebrity like Skip Gates. Still, the quality of my propective clientele was on the rise.
“Was your friend’s action illegal?” I asked.
“What action?”
“I assume your friend is being blackmailed for a reason.”
A fine sheen of sweat was visible on the man’s forehead, and I wondered if he was going to balk at detailing his imaginary friend’s offense.
“No, not illegal. I— My friend, upon consideration, would call it immoral, although considerations of morality—I don’t know. Times changed, didn’t they? The rules changed, somewhere along the line. Sex was—is—always about power, but we … we deluded ourselves, told ourselves how irresistible we were, told ourselves the same old bullshit stories. I deluded myself. I thought of myself as a man, not some powerful godlike professor.”
I didn’t interrupt, but I didn’t like the way the conversation was going.
“She was of age, and, in fact, she initiated the, er, contact.” He looked me directly in the eye. “I should say the affair, the relationship. What the hell do you call it without sounding like a fool or a cad? Understand that my friend is not proud of his behavior.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your friend, is he the master of house?”
“No.”
“Is he some whoop-de-do professor of ethics?”
“No.”
“What I hear, his behavior is absolutely normal, par for the course, unexceptional.” I was understating the case; from what I’d heard, Harvard profs could sleep with assorted students of both sexes, not to mention barnyard animals, pay for prostitutes, call it research, and get away with a polite slap on the wrist if caught with their pants around their ankles.
“Times have changed,” he said. “And my own particular circumstances make me vulnerable.”
“Tell me about them. Beginning with your name.”
“Please try to understand. I find myself unable to concentrate, unable to contemplate the future. I had everything, but I didn’t know I had it, and now that I could lose it, I find myself behaving irrationally.”
Irrational was right. A Harvard professor chasing an ex-cop through the Square.
“I find myself making foolish promises, going to church more often than I have since I was a child, begging forgiveness of some supreme being I’m not even certain I believe in. I feel out of control, in a way I can only compare to a mental illness. Excuse me. This is beside the point.”
“The point being …”
“Leonard Wells mentioned you.”
Aha. Leonard Wells is the FBI agent I’m dating. When I met him, he was calling himself Lee and I was pretending to be Carla, both of us working undercover on the Dig. “You asked Leon for help?”
“No, but he mentioned a connection to an investigator, and I thought of it as a possibility, a place to begin. I was taken aback when—”
“What?”
“I assumed you would be a black woman. When I followed you, I … I suppose I was trying to decide whether it made a difference.”
“Does it?”
“Doesn’t it always?”
His tone held me. It wasn’t bitter, more flat and certain. Matter-of-fact. I let his words fade. It didn’t seem there was anything I could say in response.
“Leon trusts you,” he said. “Could you find out who this blackmailer is? I need to find out who’s doing this to … to my friend.”
“Then what? You planning to go to the police and have your blackmailer arrested?”
“Of course not. I’ll talk to him, to her. I’ll explain myself. Surely there must be some way I can stop this person from ruining my life.”
“As a rule, blackmailers aren’t big on chitchat.”
“I’m an academic, a talker by profession. I’m a very persuasive man. Don’t you think so?”
I almost smiled. I found his earnestness and naïvet’ touching, and I wondered how he’d come to know Leon. “You’re telling me you have no idea who the blackmailer is?”
“I don’t. I— My friend was discretion itself. He told no one; he never met the woman on campus.”
“‘Told,’ ‘met.’ Is there a reason you’re speaking in the past tense?”
“The affair is over.”
“Because of the blackmail.”
“It ended before the blackmail began.”
“If your friend was discretion itself, we have to assume that the woman—his student?”
“His student. Yes, but she seemed so much older, so mature for her years, so intriguin
g. I can’t explain or excuse—” He studied his hands and adjusted his posture in the rickety chair. “My friend could never explain his infatuation satisfactorily to me.”
“If I took on the investigation, I’d start with the woman. Would she be doing this, as a kind of revenge? Was it a bad breakup?”
He raised a hand to his mouth, rubbed his lips. For a moment, I thought he might refuse to answer, change the subject.
“The woman in question is dead,” he said carefully.
“Dead,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“How?”
He moistened his lips with his tongue and swallowed. “A fire. She was killed in a fire.”
“An accident? What kind of fire? What happened?”
“I was out of town, at a conference. I don’t really— I have tried to avoid the details of the disaster.” He closed his eyes, his face a mask. “Understand that my friend had ended the affair with Den—with the woman over a month before her death.”
He waited for me to say something. I waited for him. It’s a trick I learned when I was a cop: Don’t be eager to fill the silence. You learn more by listening than by talking.
Inside the room, the stillness was absolute. Outside, the clatter of dishes was interrupted by the hum of the espresso machine.
“Perhaps you would not be interested in representing my friend after all,” he said.
“Look, if the girl is dead, all you have to do is deny the story. Unless there are photographs.”
“There are no photos. I was careful about—”
“Then why did you pay?”
“There are—were—letters. Tell me, are you interested in the case? If you don’t agree to— I feel I’ve left my friend open to a new situation, a new peril. …”
“I’m not a blackmailer.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that. Trusting people is not easy for me, and trusting a white person with this … It makes me uneasy to the depths of my soul. I’m not some showcase professor. I don’t have a named chair or a university designation, not yet anyway, but I am a Harvard professor, and if this gets out, my whole life, my career, everything I’ve worked for is held by a perilous thread. God, I wish he could have held off, that this complication could have held off for another six months, another year—”
“The blackmailer’s been in touch again.”
“How did you know?”
“You wouldn’t be talking to me if he hadn’t been.”
He nodded and stared into his lap. “I thought it was a one-shot deal, that it would be over.”
“What does he want this time?”
“He’s offering to sell me another letter.”
“How many did you write?”
“I don’t— No more than ten.”
“E-mails or actual letters?”
“Letters. Handwritten. I know, it seems old-fashioned, stupid somehow. I never— I believed she had destroyed them.”
“Does he want the same amount?”
“More. Five times what he asked before.”
The blackmailer is a quick learner, I thought. And a greedy son of a bitch. A phone rang in the hallway, three times, five times, six.
I said, “You—your friend has a couple of options.”
“What are they?”
“I already mentioned one: paying up. If you do, you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t kid yourself that it’s one more time and you’re out of the woods.”
“There must be something I—he can do.”
“I would suggest your pal tell all to his department chair and anyone else at the university with power over him, his wife, as well, if he has one.”
“His wife would not be understanding.”
“Limit it to people at the university, then. Tell them that he has a regrettable incident in his past that he would like to confess, in the hope that it will inspire members of the faculty to err in other ways and not his own.”
“Hah,” he said. “Understand that this was an undergraduate with whom my friend had an affair, and a white girl at that. My department chair would have my friend’s head on a plate.”
“No love lost.”
“None.”
“Could he be the blackmailer?”
“Frankly, I can’t imagine it.”
“Well, then, you could hire me to retrieve your indiscreet letters. Technically, it wouldn’t be stealing. Letters belong to the recipient. In the event of the recipient’s death, the sender has as strong a claim as anyone. I might be able to bargain with the blackmailer, convince him he ought to take what he’s gotten so far and leave well enough alone.”
“You said you thought a blackmailer wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“Put it like this: Everyone has something to lose. You could hire me to find out how to blackmail your blackmailer.”
A slow-spreading smile widened his mouth and brightened his eyes. It wiped the creases off his forehead and took years off his age. “I like that. My friend would— I like the idea of that, the symmetry. You would find something in his life to hold over his head.”
“I charge by the hour, plus expenses. I usually get a retainer and you’d need to sign a contract.”
“But—”
“It wouldn’t have to specify details, but I’d need to know your name.”
He opened his mouth and sucked in a shallow breath. His hands were clenched so hard, his knuckles stood out like shards of white bone. “I think I—I need to think it over.”
I got to my feet. “You’re not ready.” My action moved him off the dime.
“I am ready. Damn it, the situation is intolerable.” He stood, too, and stared into my eyes like he was memorizing their color and shape, trying to see behind them into my mind.
After five seconds that felt like five minutes, he extended his right hand. “My name is Wilson Chaney, Professor Wilson Chaney.”
Considering what I knew about him, I could have discovered his name in no time, but I didn’t tell him that. I accepted his declaration as a leap of faith and shook his hand.
Don’t get me wrong: Profs who boff students are not perched at the top of my favorites list. But I doubted this guy’s livelihood was imperiled due to an amorous misstep. My demon curiosity had been aroused, rather than allayed, by his tale.
CHAPTER 3
I dumped parcels from my backpack, piling them on the dining room table with a sigh of satisfaction. It wasn’t often I returned from a shopping trip with substantially more cash than the amount with which I’d set forth. I liked the feeling.
“Anybody home?”
The house was cool and quiet, an oasis of dark wood and drawn shades. I went into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and yanked the pop top on a Pepsi. Dishes were stacked in the sink, no one had recycled the bulging bags of soda cans on the countertop in recent history, and the table was crusted with muck, but I wasn’t about to let it spoil the day. I had a new case. The prospect of interesting, lucrative work gave the grimy kitchen a haze of cleanliness. I wouldn’t even try to roust Roz, the third-floor tenant, who’s supposed to do the majority of scut work in exchange for reduced rent; I wouldn’t so much as tack a scathing note to the bulletin board on the refrigerator door. She’d get around to the kitchen when she felt like it, and that was good enough for me.
I toted the Pepsi into the living room, which doubles as my office. If I ran Chaney’s blackmailer to ground in record time and earned a fat bonus, I’d make it a point to replace my old rolltop desk, the one destroyed in the fire, and finally bid farewell to the door and filing cabinet setup, which was too utilitarian for even my Spartan taste.
A red light flashed on the message machine. I pressed the button and Leonard Wells’s voice rumbled like distant thunder.
“Hey, babe, finishing up on something and should be out of here by five, if you can believe it. I’ll drop by and we can go for dinner, catch a flick, or maybe something else. See ya.”
My pleasure in his deep voice di
minished as I listened. I hadn’t been going out with Leon for much more than a month, but I’d known him long enough to realize that he wouldn’t call back to confirm. He’d show up on my doorstep, ready to go. His assumption that I’d drop everything whenever he got time to play was starting to unsettle me. Sam had never assumed I’d tailor my hours to his.
I sank into my chair and cursed. I’d made it through most of a week without thinking about Sam Gianelli, but there he was again, my off-again, on-again lover. We’d been a sporadic couple for more years than I could reasonably justify. We’d split for good just as Leon came on the scene.
I’d met Sam when I was nineteen and foolish. I’d thought he’d wait for me, but he’d married someone else, and then I did, too. Neither marriage lasted, and I guess I’d always assumed that Sam and I would eventually wind up together.
Now I considered the possibility that Sam’s lack of availability had been its own reward. Maybe I’d turned him into some kind of dream lover, the unattainable male. Maybe one of his attractions had been that he rarely encroached on my space. Maybe the fact that he was unavailable had become the ultimate attraction. Maybe I’d gotten stuck in a goddamn solitary rut, content to work twenty-four/seven when I had a case, drive a cab or play guitar when I didn’t. The only social engagement I currently tried to keep was my three-day-a-week volleyball commitment, and that was with women.
I consider myself way too young to rule men out of my life. I hope I’ll always consider myself too young. But Leon needed to inquire rather than assume. He was no dream lover, no one I couldn’t have. He’d made it obvious: He was interested. When he had free time, he wanted to spend it with me.
So what the hell was I so busy for—what had I planned to do tonight that would interfere with dinner or a movie or the sexual tangle that Leon meant when he said “or maybe something else” with that furry rumble in his throat? Well, I’d planned to get a head start on the Chaney case, do the initial paperwork, some preliminary research, start asking questions. Maybe I should call Leon back and ask if we could just screw instead, take less time, and let me get my work done.
I swallowed and wondered why I resented the time and effort it took to start a new relationship. Was it because I wasn’t finished with the old one yet? I wasn’t sure how to keep Gianelli out of my thoughts, even when I was with Leon.