by Linda Barnes
Work.
I’d taken notes on a spiral pad, like the incident-report log I’d gotten used to carrying as a cop. I slapped it down on my desk. Then I removed the blackmail note, enclosed in a plastic evidence Baggie, from the fold of my wallet. Chaney hadn’t treated it carefully, but it might be worth trying for prints. First, I’d need to take Chaney’s in order to eliminate them, and I wondered how he’d react to the request. Most black men I know have a gut distrust of cops and police techniques, but the black men I know don’t teach at Harvard.
“Can’t keep your dick in your pants, can’t keep your bucks in the bank.” According to Chaney, both demands began with the same crude sentence. He’d burned the first note, found the second shoved under his office door Monday morning, yesterday. It was written on cheap white paper, the kind that you buy in a tablet at the drugstore, and tucked into a sealed envelope.
“Can’t keep your dick in your pants, can’t keep your money in the bank. To bye back yr letter, 10/26, ‘I love how you touch me,’ ekcet, get 5 grand reddy by Friday. Hundreds, no sequence serial no.s.”
My client thought the erratic spelling significant; I thought it was most likely a put-on. The message was printed in awkward block capitals that tilted slightly to the right, as though it had been written by a right-handed person using his or her left hand. The first message had come three weeks ago, a demand for a thousand dollars. The blackmailer had upped the ante quickly. Probably the first attempt had been a feeler. I wondered what would have transpired if the victim hadn’t paid up so obediently.
I’d told Chaney I had no intention of intervening with or preventing Friday’s payoff. I told him to get the money ready, to consider the five thousand dollars history. It was Tuesday; I don’t guarantee three-day results.
At my request, Chaney had provided personal identification, including a photo ID and his Harvard faculty card. His check, drawn on a local bank, would have been good enough for me, but he didn’t want any record of the transaction. I’d walked with him to the local Fleet branch, stood behind him in line as he cashed a check, listened to the teller greet him by name. He was who he said he was.
His retainer would make a pleasant bump in my bank balance. Retrieving, repossessing, even stealing his letters back would be tricky, although not impossible. Convincing the blackmailer that he’d been to the well just the right number of times might be trickier. Once I knew who the blackmailer was.
In exchange for the retainer, I’d given Chaney a receipt, my home phone number, my cell number, and Leon Wells’s numbers, too, just in case, stressing that I needed to hear the minute the blackmailer made contact. If the blackmailer wanted to meet immediately, Chaney had orders to stall. I would need time.
Tuesday to Friday. I punched up my computer and did what Roz, she of the lackluster cleaning skills, refers to as “Googling the client.” She says it dismissively, because a Google search doesn’t reveal any of the deeper secrets she’s able to squeeze out of the Web routinely, one of the reasons I discount her shortcomings as a housekeeper. She is a Web-cracker extraordinaire, and if she stopped cleaning entirely, which she may very well already have done, I’d still keep her around for her computer expertise.
I entered my client’s name and was rewarded with a considerable number of hits. I wasn’t sure how many a Harvard prof ought to rack up, so I typed in Alan Dershowitz’s name (25,500), then Dr. Jerome Groopman’s (2,850). Both men were pretty famous, but Wilson Chaney wasn’t far behind with 2,267. The first hit was the Harvard Medical School directory, where he was listed as a professor, not with a named professorship like Groopman’s or Dershowitz’s, but not an adjunct professor or an instructor or a mere lecturer, either. He was cross-referenced to the ed school, which bore out his assertion that he held a joint appointment.
He was Dr. Chaney twice over, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an M.D. from Rutgers. He’d written articles that appeared in major medical journals, both JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and NEJM, the New England Journal of Medicine. I glanced at titles, punched up abstracts. The Web, as usual, gave more information than you could possibly absorb in a single sitting. I’d have Roz sort through the listings.
He’d written articles on the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They caught my eye, because here in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, ADHD isn’t simply a medical diagnosis; it’s a divisive political argument. More kids in Massachusetts are diagnosed with the ailment than anywhere else in the nation, and some maintain it’s a fashionable way of moving disruptive kids out of the public schools or medicating them into submission. My adopted sister, Paolina, had been ruled at risk for ADHD in the fifth grade. Turned out to be a false diagnosis.
Maybe not, I thought, glancing at the first paragraph of one of Chaney’s pieces. The diagnosis had crumbled when challenged by a Spanish-speaking community activist who was supposed to be Paolina’s advocate. Paolina had friends on Ritalin who were doing well, kids who were succeeding despite the fact that teachers had been ready to give up on them when they were unmedicated. And I wasn’t sure Paolina’s mother had done the right thing in harnessing her community to fight the diagnosis. Maybe Paolina would be in less academic trouble if Marta hadn’t interfered.
It would be interesting to learn which side of the argument Wilson Chaney came down on. Or, more likely, to learn that, as with most arguments, there were way more than two sides. What counted now was that my client was who he said he was, a published and respected professor. He was also an absolute dead end when it came to suggesting identities for the suspected blackmailer.
I glanced at the clock, amazed at the amount of time that had passed, uncomfortably aware of how quickly it was racing toward five o’clock and Leon’s arrival. I wasn’t moving quickly enough. I hadn’t done any research on the woman Chaney’d slept with. I considered calling Leon and canceling.
Give it a chance, Carlyle, I told myself. What the hell’s wrong with you? The man is a prince. He’s tall and dark; his voice is great. He’s one of the good guys.
I have a friend, a true friend, never a lover, Mooney, who insists that the only guys I fall for are crooks and confidence tricksters, outlaws every one. I vowed to hang on to Leon long enough to make Moon eat his words.
I opened my notebook and concentrated on my chicken-scratch shorthand. Chaney’s lover, Chaney’s student, Denali Brinkman, was the blackmail trigger and the obvious place to start. At first, my client, an affronted gentleman had been reluctant to speak about her, certain she would never have betrayed the secret of their affair. A curiously naïve man, my client. When I pointed out that it was a simple matter of whether he’d talked or she’d talked, he’d admitted the truth of my deduction. Then once he started talking about Denali, he’d had a hard time stopping. The details poured out while I tried to pry facts out of his rose-tinted reminiscences.
She had been a freshman in his Introductory Educational Psychology class. It was surprising that he’d gotten to know her at all, because he paid little attention to the freshman classes, the huge beginning-level crushes taught, as a rule, by graduate assistants. But he tried to give some attention to the entry-level classes.
I didn’t like her being a freshman. Her age bothered me, made me wonder where I’d draw the line. If Chaney had been a teacher at the local high school where my little sister attends classes, would I have agreed to work for him? Kids who still live with their parents—is that the line? When does innocence end and experience raise its head?
In his version, the nineteen-year-old had come on to him. But did it matter? I reminded myself that it was his version. The woman in question wasn’t around to tell her side of the tale, and few are the Harvard profs dumb enough to claim they made a play for a student.
She had been intrigued by one of his lectures and asked if she could set up an appointment to discuss it. Maybe if she’d been less attractive, he might have told her to submit her comments and questions in w
riting.
He hadn’t wanted to come up with a physical description, and he maintained that he had no photos of the young woman. When pressed, he said she was blond, average height, average weight. Maybe a little on the thin side, but he admitted her figure was good. He sounded uncomfortable, regretful, and sad.
She was unusual, he insisted, gifted. Unusually bright, unusually warm, extremely outgoing with him, but terribly reserved in class. She wasn’t like any other student or any other woman he’d ever known. She was a secret delight, and their relationship had grown intimate more quickly than he’d dared imagine possible. He resented my questions, and kept talking to avoid them. He wanted to talk about her; he just didn’t want to answer my intrusive and awkward questions—like whether she was a virgin (no), or if he had ever altered any of her class grades (certainly not—what did I think he was?), or exactly how she had died (he knew no details, didn’t want to know any). She rarely spoke about herself, but he’d gotten the impression of an unconventional upbringing, possibly from the flower-child quality of her first name. He didn’t think she’d been born in Alaska, home of Mount Denali, but knew she’d traveled a lot as a child—Europe, South America, and Asia. She was brilliant and an orphan and part American Indian, though she didn’t look it.
Girl sounded like some fairy-tale princess to me. Too good to be true. Typical Harvard material, no doubt.
“Tell me about her friends,” I’d said.
As far as he was concerned, she’d had no contact with anyone but him. She barely spoke to other students in class. She arrived and departed alone. They had never gone to a party, never socialized with another couple.
“She held herself aloof?”
“You make her sound snotty. She wasn’t like that. She was different. She was most comfortable on the river.”
“The river?”
“She was a rower. I didn’t know the river at all. She showed me things about the river I would never have seen without her.”
“It’s not exactly private, the river.” His admission of Charles River field trips seemed to nullify his protestations of discretion.
“Not the river here. I mean, she took me rowing nearby, as far as the Watertown dam, but that’s as far upstream as you can go in a racing scull. She was a kayaker, too, and she took me where the Charles is—well, I never knew, but it’s winding and it changes. Up in Waltham, in Newton—it was like we were a million miles from the Northeast, in a different country.”
“Where did you have sex? Did you take her to your house?”
“Never.”
“Your office?”
They had done it in his office and in a locked classroom, as well as in a Somerville motor court and a small Cambridge inn. She was a goddess, all the good things that had ever happened, and I was wickedly undermining her goodness with suggestions that she’d spilled the beans about her married lover.
I blew out a breath and considered his impassioned defense of Denali Brinkman, his refusal to discuss her demise. She was dead, elevated to the dream-lover status Sam Gianelli had achieved while still alive. She was flawless, rowing tirelessly on the river at twilight, bathed in a Technicolor glow, forever young.
I snapped my notebook shut. I had a place to start. Harvard freshmen live on campus, and one of the few facts that Chaney had retained was the name of the dormitory in which Denali had lived. Phillips House was within easy walking distance.
The doorbell rang, and damned if my wristwatch didn’t agree with the wall clock: 5:35. Leon. I’d been so deeply into the memory of Chaney’s words and actions that I’d forgotten, and what would a professor with a background in psychology say about that?
I put my eye to the peephole, a habit of mine. Leon Wells rocked on the stoop, moving almost imperceptibly on the balls of his feet in a way that would have identified him as a cop even if I didn’t know he’d been one before his ascent, or descent, to the FBI. Leon is six two, handsome, the color of mahogany. His head is shaved and oiled, and his smile reveals even white teeth. He’s part American Indian, like Chaney’s girlfriend, but he shows it, with a hawklike nose and jutting cheekbones. He waited with an air of alert stillness, as though he’d be ready for anything that popped out from behind my door.
I wanted to ask about his friendship with Wilson Chaney, but I couldn’t. I unlocked the door, which takes awhile. Two good standard locks, plus the dead bolt. Neighborhood’s popular with thieves as well as Harvard grads.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Come in, get yourself a drink. I have to change.”
“You look fine.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
I helped him locate a Rolling Rock, grabbed a package off the dining room table, and scooted upstairs. I’d bought black bikini underwear at the Gap. Why bother getting new stuff if you’re not going to wear it?
CHAPTER 4
Leon left the house just before 6:30 A.M. I didn’t give him the early-morning boot because of concern about gossipy neighbors. If I’d been concerned about the neighbors, I’d have made him sneak out while it was pitch-dark, 6:30 being way too late to escape the righteous bunch of early-morning joggers who live nearby. Leon left early because sometimes my little sister drops by before school starts to have a cup of coffee, pick up a change of clothes, or grab a textbook. She doesn’t live with me full-time, but she sleeps here two nights a week when her mom works late. On those two nights, I never entertain gentlemen callers, and she never finds a man here in the morning. You might think my behavior hypocritical, and that’s the point; she would think it vastly hypocritical that I, an unmarried woman, sleep with my boyfriend and yet strongly discourage her from sleeping with hers. She wouldn’t see the difference, but I do. I’m over thirty and she’s under sixteen, and that’s the biggest difference in the world.
So I rushed Leon out the door, and of course she didn’t show. I thought about going back to bed but then got up and went to play volleyball instead.
Three mornings, a week you’ll find me on the court at the Cambridge Y, spiking the ball for the Lady Y-Birds, an assortment of academics, cops, firefighters, and one mild-mannered accountant. Wednesday morning, we started slow and droopy, found our rhythm a game and a half into the match, and whipped the Waltham Y team in a close third game. I’ve been getting back into volleyball slowly after taking time off to recuperate from a bullet wound in my left thigh. I’m still wary of diving for the ball the way I used to, but for a while, with the score stuck at 12-12 in the final game, I forgot about pain and played tough.
I celebrated the victory with a cold shower in a grim gray-curtained cubicle. The Y is not to be mistaken for some fancy health-club spa.
Chaney would call as soon as the blackmailer got in touch. I could have waited until then, but waiting has never been my strong suit, and identifying the perp didn’t have to wait till money changed hands. I decided against my usual stop at the Central Square Dunkin’ Donuts and turned toward Harvard Square instead, moving into a crush of pedestrian traffic that flowed far more smoothly than its automotive equivalent. Small shops line both sides of the street as far as Putnam Circle, where the stores on the right give way to red Harvard brick. I took a gentle left onto Mount Auburn, another left at Plympton, passing ethnic restaurants, stores with hand-carved furniture, used shops selling secondhand books, and caf’s, taking pleasure in the old houses, the one-of-a-kind shops, the absence of Taco Bells.
Phillips is one of the so-called River Houses, although you can’t actually see the Charles because other Harvard houses, notably Lowell and Winthrop, block the view. One of the smaller houses, Phillips isn’t one of the original seven built when the house system began, but it was constructed to imitiate the originals in style, with a hidden open court, carved pediments, and elaborate entry arches, designed to look like buildings at Cambridge and Oxford.
I tried side entries just for the hell of it but found them locked. I already knew the main entrance would be locked. All the Harvard Houses us
ed to stay open during the day, but the tourists would come and use the bathrooms, since Harvard Square has almost no public toilets. When dormitory theft went up, the doors got locked, and the tourists went without. Occasionally, especially when I’m driving a cab late at night, I’ll lurk in the vicinity and wait for some careless undergrad to charge in the door. I say hello and exchange small talk, cruise past the guard as though I were the entering student’s buddy, get to use a decent bathroom. The guards in the front lobbies are supposed to make you sign in, but really they’re more like concierges, giving directions, offering advice. I always get in.
Knowing the vulnerability of house security, I didn’t ring the bell and ask to speak to the master or the senior tutor. I simply waited for a student to fling the door wide, then entered on her coattails, taking advantage of the fact that I don’t look like a mass murderer. Part of me felt like scolding the cheerful student, a slim blond sprite, one of the golden children who invade the Square each year for the sole purpose of making the rest of the population feel old and jaded.
A tasteful printed directory listed both a female and male master, with suite numbers for each. The senior tutor was female, ditto the resident adviser. I tucked names and numbers away in my memory and started exploring corridors, entering the sorts of rooms where tea gets poured from silver pots and overstuffed furniture is tastefully arrayed on worn Oriental rugs. The scent of lemony wood polish blended with the smell of potpourri. The interior spoke of solemn tradition, a certain level of comfort, the expectation of continued success.
It sure didn’t smell like the Police Academy. Didn’t have the aroma of my alma mater, either. UMass Boston has its campus on Boston Harbor, and the redbrick and concrete-block buildings are cheap and earnest, like the daughters and sons of the working-class immigrants who make up the population.