The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  "Published and perished? These times are cruel."

  Chapman's humor wasn't for everyone. I made a note to try to get a manuscript of Dakota's forthcoming work. Perhaps there was something in her research that would relate to the investigation. "Was she ever accused of plagiarism, or stealing another professor's intellectual property?"

  "I think everyone would agree that Lola was an original. That wasn't one of her problems."

  "What were they, Mr. Recantati? What were her problems?"

  He stammered a bit. "Well-well, certainly, you could start with the marriage. With that crazy husband of hers. That was an issue for all of us at the college."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Lola brought the marriage to campus with her every day. I don't mean physically, of course. But she was always terrified that Ivan would appear at school, following an argument or after a meeting with their matrimonial attorneys. She was just as frightened for her students and for us as she was about herself. Talked about it to Sylvia and to me quite often. Afraid that Ivan would show up-or worse still, send some hired gun to the school who would kill anyone that got in the way when he targeted Lola. Thank goodness she was alone when it happened."

  I winced at the man's selfishness. What must her last moments have been like? Confronted by her killer at the portal of her own home. Had he been in the apartment with her? Had he waited outside, knowing she planned to go somewhere? Or was it a chance encounter with a stranger, and were Chapman and I wasting our time talking to her cronies while a rapist or robber-an opportunist-was at large in the neighborhood?

  Recantati rubbed his forefinger back and forth across his lower lip. "That sounds kind of cold, doesn't it?" His speech halted again. "And, and I-uh-we're just assuming she was alone when she was killed, I guess. Do you know anything else about it yet? How she died, I mean?"

  Mike ignored the questions. He wanted answers to his own first. "You're a historian, right? Give us your background before getting to King's."

  "My credentials? I did my undergraduate work at Princeton. Master's and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. I'd been in charge of the history department at Princeton, until I came here to take the position as acting president while the search committee is finding someone for the permanent position. I'm, uh-I'll be fifty years old in March. I live just outside of Princeton, although King's has given me an apartment on campus while I'm here."

  "Married?"

  "Yes. My wife teaches math at a private school near our home. We've got four young-"

  "She know anything about your relationship-your sexual relationship-with Lola?"

  Recantati rubbed his lip furiously now. "I didn't-we didn't have any such thing."

  He had hesitated a few moments too many to be credible. I had the sense that he was trying to figure out whether there was anyone who could possibly know the truth before he had to commit himself to an honest answer.

  "That's not what your colleagues tell me."

  "What, Shreve? I suppose he told you that he and Lola were just friends, also. That's a laugh. Do you have any idea what it's like in a closed community like a small college? You have dinner at the faculty club with someone who's not in your department and therefore you must be in bed with her. A student stays fifteen minutes too long in your office, and you're making a pass at her. If it's a male student, you must not be out of the closet yet.

  "I'll help with your investigation in any way that I can, but I won't sit here and be insulted."

  Chapman leaned back and opened his desk drawer. He placed a box of Q-Tips on top of the blotter and pointed to it. "How about giving me a buccal swab, Professor?"

  "What? I've never been in a station house before. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your language, your question."

  "I didn't learn the word from J. Edgar Hoover. It's science, not police lingo." Mike slowly drew open the sliding lid from the box and removed one of the cotton-tipped wooden applicators. "That's buccal-from the Latin bucca. Your mouth, in the old country.

  "If you'd be kind enough to just run this down the inside of your cheek, then Cooper's heartthrobs, those serologists over at the lab who solve all her rape cases and make her look so damn good, they'll tell me if it matches any of the DNA we found on things in Ms. Dakota's little apartment."

  "B-but you need blood, surely, or s-s-s-"

  He couldn't bring himself to say the word "semen."

  "I need a buccal swab, is all. The same little bit of spit that's kind of frothing on your lips, sir."

  Recantati repeated his nervous habit of stroking his mouth. He stood up. "This is not what I came in here to discuss with you today. You can't make me do that."

  "I got a four-year-old nephew who says that to me, too. Stamps his foot at the same time. You should add that touch, for more emphasis. / can't make you do it, today, is a fact. But watch out for blondie, here. She's hell with a grand jury."

  "If I can be useful with serious information that might actually help your investigation, please call me. I'll be in Princeton until the beginning of next week." He walked to the exit before either of us could see him out.

  Chapman smiled, picking up Recantati's relinquished coffee container and marking it with the professor's initials on the bottom. "Got him anyway."

  "Well, you may have won a minor skirmish, but in my book you lost the war. Whether he's sleeping with her or not may play a role in this, but you gave up the opportunity to ask all the other questions about things I wanted to know." I tossed my pad onto the desktop.

  "Look, we get these cups down to Thaler's office before three o'clock and he promised to run them for us over the holiday. By the weekend, we'll know whether or not any of these academic marvels were anywhere they shouldn't have been. I didn't mean to play with him, but it was irresistible, once he started to squirm."

  "But that could be something as simple as having had a fling with Lola and being mortified that his wife will find out. Now we don't even know why she was after him for money and whether he had a hand in her project."

  "You can go at him again more gently next week. I'll have other things to do. Let's get Ma Kettle in here." He bagged the empty container, separate from the one he took from Shreve, and walked to the door to bring in Sylvia Foote.

  Stooped and sour-faced, Foote shuffled in behind Chapman with a slim briefcase in one hand. He led her to the broken chair and steadied it for her as she sat. "Coffee?" he asked.

  "I don't drink it."

  "There's one in every crowd," Mike mumbled as he resumed his seat.

  "What did you do to my president?" Sylvia glared at me. "He left in a huff. Wouldn't even tell me why."

  "I think he's just rattled by all this going on during his tenure."

  "I'm beginning to think my faculty shouldn't be talking to you without legal representation."

  If Sylvia was looking for a signal from me that none of her employees was going to come under our microscope, I wasn't willing to give it. She realized that by my silence.

  "In that case, Alex, I'll have Justin Feldman get in touch with you."

  That would mean trouble for us. A friend and a brilliant litigator, Justin would brook none of Mike's tactics. They had clashed in the past. He'd be cordial but tough, and we'd be likely to lose direct access to the entire King's College academic staff.

  "Why would you bring in the big guns? Coop tells me you're the legal eagle." He smiled at her. "Save those administrators some money. Feldman's hourly rates are sky-high."

  "There could obviously be a conflict of interest between the college and some of the individual employees you'll be talking with. I'm sure we could get him to do this pro bono. Justin's a Columbia man-college and law school."

  "Boola book."

  "That's the wrong-"

  "I know that, Ms. Foote. But the only academic tunes I know the lyrics to are that one and 'Be True to Your School.'" He sang her a few bars of the Beach Boys classic while she opened her briefcase and put her glasses on, then he sett
led in with his notepad.

  "Let's see how far we get without resorting to outside counsel, Sylvia, shall we?" I tried to keep the beginning of this conversation on course. "Why don't you tell me what concerns you have, and then we'll ask you for the things we need."

  She looked over her shoulder as though Paolo Recantati would reappear at any moment.

  "I didn't think it's my business to tell you what's been going on with the grant money that's been disappearing from the college, but Recantati's in charge and he has directed me to be candid with you about it."

  Foote fidgeted with her papers, having mistakenly made the assumption that the subject she was about to disclose was what had rattled the acting president and caused him to storm out. "He's not responsible for this, Alex, I can assure you. We've been trying to look into this ourselves since the federal investigation started in the spring.

  "Why the missing cash from the anthropology department would have anything to do with Lola Dakota's death is beyond me, but I did come prepared to discuss it with you this morning."

  15

  Neither Shreve nor Recantati had mentioned any financial improprieties at the college. Mike and I were both thinking of Lola's shoe boxes and whether this would be a connection to the unexplained cash.

  "Have either of you heard of Dr. Lavery? Claude Lavery?"

  Neither one of us answered.

  "He was thought to be a trailblazing anthropologist. We hired him away from John Jay." John Jay was New York City's college of criminal justice. "The administration convinced me, at the time, that it was quite a coup for us.

  "Lavery's expertise was urban drug use." She extracted several clippings from her leather case. One of them was a John Jay alumni magazine, several years old, featuring a cover photo of Lavery and heralding an article on his inner-city work. He sported a colorful dashiki, unkempt dreadlocks, and a tangled beard. He was holding a crack pipe in his hand.

  "I'm upping my contribution to the Jebbies this year. The closest this guy could get to the faculty of a Jesuit college like Ford-ham would be the service entrance."

  Foote narrowed her eyes and examined Mike more closely. If she thought he was crossing the limits of political correctness, she hadn't seen anything yet.

  "What came with Dr. Lavery to King's College was a grant of three million dollars, courtesy of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That's a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. It made him even more attractive to us than his resume.

  "The first problem we faced was where to put him. Winston Shreve was running the anthropology department and, quite frankly, didn't want a thing to do with Lavery's study. Shreve is a classicist, really. He has very little experience with modern urban culture and certainly not this kind of thing. He wanted us to put Lavery in the sciences, or with sociology."

  "Anybody want him?"

  "Actually, yes. There was a bit of competition to get him. Professor Grenier runs the biology department and was very interested in carving a position out for Lavery because of the potential for health-related studies of drug use. Long-term physical problems of heroin addicts, everything from HIV infection to dental deterioration. It fit nicely with their premed courses, overlapped with the chemistry curriculum, and linked them more tightly to the social sciences.

  "And poli sci wanted him as well. Lola staged quite a campaign to convince us. She thought it was a wonderful basis to study the city, everything from the criminal justice reaction to the drug issue, the competition for funding between prison facilities and treatment programs, and the political response to substance abuse in society."

  "What was your solution?"

  "It was one of the few battles that Winston Shreve has lost here. Dr. Lavery calls himself an anthropologist, and that's the department in which we saw fit to place him. Much like the Black-wells Island project-"

  "Is Lavery involved in that?"

  "Not that I know. But it's a similar situation in that Lavery created a multidisciplinary approach to his issue, so the other departments could each get a piece of his very large and quite delicious pie. Money for everyone."

  "What's the problem, Sylvia?"

  "A complaint was initiated by the government a few months ago. Not in your office, but with the feds. Southern District of New York. It seems that a substantial sum of the money he was awarded is missing and unaccounted for.

  "The grant came with a discretionary fund. It made one hundred thousand dollars available annually for Lavery to use as he saw fit. Related to the research, of course." She was thumbing through documents that appeared to be spreadsheets and accounting records.

  "Lavery claims that he purchased computer equipment and office supplies and gave cash to student interns who researched short-term matters for him. There don't seem to be records to support him, but most academics wouldn't be surprised by that."

  "What's the theory?"

  Sylvia Foote studied a point on the floor between her shoes and Mike's desk. "Drugs, Detective. Sort of everyone's worst fear about this grant from the outset. That the cash was being used to buy drugs-illegal street drugs-to keep his worker bees happy. Perhaps to use for his own pleasure. The investigation is still ongoing."

  "But how-?"

  "Claude Lavery is a unique character. Kind of a Pied Piper in a college setting. Smart and creative, but gave the impression of being the anti-academic at the same time. He has a very laid-back style, and early on, right out of the London School of Economics Lavery would venture into the bleakest parts of the city. Central Harlem, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Washington Heights. He bonded with street characters, the kind who would never let outsiders into their world. That's why his research was unique.

  "He wrote about phenomena that made him the darling of scholars in urban studies-both the hard government types and the more 'touchy-feely' sociologists. And then, all the major newspapers picked up his theories as though they were gospel."

  "Like what?"

  Foote pulled a copy of a Washington Post front-page story from her briefcase. "Citing data from Lavery's studies, the story backs his claim that it was the federal government's strict interdiction policies about marijuana back in the seventies and eighties that created the market for international cocaine trafficking to fill the void.

  "The students were wildly enthusiastic whenever they came under his spell. They would walk into a neighborhood with Claude-the kind of place these middle-class kids wouldn't dare to go on their own-and find that he had established this wonderful rapport with the locals. That led him, and them, to the addicts and, finally, to the dealers."

  "You thought maybe by bringing this guy to the college he was gonna be hanging around on Sesame Street? What's the surprise here?"

  "Frankly, Detective, you're right. That's why some of my colleagues aren't the least bit shocked. They expected no less. I presume," she said with great resignation, "that some of them are the people who sparked this formal complaint. Caribbean vacations to study island sources and native drug use, major foundations pouring money in on top of the government grant-things quite likely to make other serious academics a bit envious. And then you have the real distress. What if Claude Lavery was literally putting money into the hands of these students to enable them to buy drugs themselves?"

  I wondered if this could be the story that had reached David Fillian in state prison. Perhaps Lavery was the professor Dr. Hop-pins was referring to when she stopped me in the courtroom to tell me the news that Fillian was trying to barter for an early release. Was Lavery the person selling drugs to students?

  "The kid who hanged himself the other day-any connection to Lavery?"

  "Not that we can tell. Julian Gariano was more involved with what they call designer drugs-speed, Ecstasy, some cocaine. Claude's work was primarily with street drugs, but as you know, those lines have been increasingly blurred the last few years. They had certainly met, and Julian was in one of Lavery's classes. No one puts them together outside the lecture hall."

&nbs
p; "The missing girl?"

  "No link at all."

  "Lola Dakota. Connect those dots for me."

  Sylvia looked at her files. "As soon as the federal allegation was filed, we suspended Lavery. Quite frankly, we were trying to mount a case to revoke his tenure, which is not an easy thing to do. Professor Dakota led the opposition to the administration. Backed Claude with all her strength. Even turned Winston Shreve around and had him barking at us to wait and see, allow Claude the presumption of innocence."

  "Why?"

  "Well, we don't know exactly why. She claimed it was strictly for professional reasons. He bucked the system, just as she did. If anyone admired his unorthodox techniques, it would have been a maverick like Lola.

  "Then, there's a more malevolent view. Some people were worried that there was something more in it for Lola. Money, to be exact. That she had been using some of Claude Lavery's funds for her own purposes."

  "For drugs?"

  Sylvia Foote frowned. "No one's ever made that claim. There's not even the hint of a rumor that Lola would have anything to do with drugs. Nor would she tolerate that in her students. But her own projects were quite costly to run. And she was dreadfully competitive. If she could buy an edge for herself, there are those on our faculty who are convinced she would have done it." "Do you believe it?"

  "Lola was a thorn in my side. Constantly. If someone could create trouble for my staff any day of the week, it would be Lola, pushing the envelope every time. I didn't like her alliance with Lavery, and the reason for it is still a mystery to me. She wasn't a particularly materialistic person, and I don't understand what she would have wanted with the money. But the fact remains that a substantial sum has vanished, and before you saw that story in the headlines or heard it from your federal counterparts, Paolo thought I ought to tell you that it was under investigation."