Deep Pockets (4 page)

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 writing.

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?

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 cafés, 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 used 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.

By following an indistinct murmur, I located a cluster of students sitting in a room, watching daytime TV, some rerun of the latest reality show. I apologized for interrupting and mentioned that I was looking for a friend of Denali. I didn’t mention Denali’s last name. I mean, how many Denalis could there be?

My question brought silence, then a giggle as one of the kids, who hadn’t tuned out of the show, reacted to a limp TV gag. There were four of them, two and two. A dark-haired girl stretched her long legs across a deep red velvet sofa. A stringy boy sat on the floor near her bare feet. Another girl was prone on the rug, knees elevated, a pillow under her head, a notebook resting on her flat belly. The boy in the armchair looked older, but mainly because he was trying to, cultivating a goatee and wearing gold round-rimmed glasses. His sweater had baggy elbows. He was the first to speak.

“You mean the dead girl?”

“Yeah, I’m looking for her roommate. She told me, but I can’t remember the name. Karen, or something like that, maybe.” I was making it up as I went along. According to Chaney, Denali had rarely talked about herself and had never mentioned the existence of a roommate.

“There’s nobody named Karen here,” the prone girl on the rug said, and an off note in her carefully controlled voice told me she might know the roommate’s real name.

“Well, Denali was, like, never here, either,” chimed the couch girl. “I didn’t even know she lived in Phillips till—”

The boy in the armchair broke in. “Who wants to know?”

“Just me.”

“You a reporter? You want our reaction to ‘Grisly Death in the Ivy League’?” He used his fingers to float quotation marks in the air, his voice to punch up the capital letters.

“No.”

He yanked a tiny cell phone from his pocket, hit buttons. I wasn’t sure how many buttons he’d need to summon the Harvard cops.

“Miranda, this is Gregor in the Coolidge Room. A woman’s here, asking about Denali…. No, I don’t know how she got in.”

Miranda Gironde was the name of the resident adviser. I’d wanted to meet her later, if not sooner.

“Gregor,” I said, “you got it wrong. I’m asking about Denali’s roommate. And I’m not a reporter.”

“You’re interrupting our show.”

I wanted to smack his self-satisfied face.
Our show
, like they put it on the tube just for them. They were all studiously ignoring me, except for the girl on the floor, who stared with veiled interest. Again, I wondered whether she might have something to say. I shot her a questioning glance and she quickly looked down, affirming the hunch.

“Jeannie, let’s meet tomorrow at eleven and go over the notes,” Gregor said, noting the interaction.

“Can’t. I’ve got an eleven o’clock at McKay,” said the girl on the floor.

“Always supposing you’re taking the damn notes.” Gregor caught my eye. “You are interrupting an important group project. Close the door on your way out.”

I left it deliberately ajar, which was childish, then paced the hall, hunting for other kids to interrogate. No one was in a small sitting room, or in a bigger room with a massive desk, a chandelier, and heavy drapes. I was back in the hallway again when I heard a door slam and light, quick tread on the stairs. Miranda — I assumed it was the resident adviser — was hurrying, a towel wrapped around just-shampooed hair. She leaned over the railing, quickly identified me as the outsider, and made her approach. She was flushed, maybe thirty pounds over-weight, with a round face, tan skin, dark eyes, and dimples.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but all questions about Miss Brinkman are to be addressed to the dean.”

Her severity, I thought, was forced. The lines in her face seemed naturally cheerful; a dimple threatened to display itself on her left cheek.

“Gregor misunderstood. It’s not Miss Brinkman I’m interested in at all; I’m interested in finding her roommate.”