Deep Pockets (3 page)

“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.

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 diminished 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.

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 hyper-activity 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.