Devil's Waltz (38 page)

“A random numbers table?”

“For random sampling. You know how it’s done, I’m sure.”

I nodded. “Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth, twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.”

“Exactly. Dawn’s table was huge — thousands of numbers. Pages and pages generated on the department’s mainframe. What a foolish waste of computer time. She was nowhere near ready to select her sample. Hadn’t even gotten her basic methodology straight.”

“What was her research topic?”

“Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That’s as specific as she’d gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks. Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable. Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she
had
been using drugs.”

“Did she show any other signs of that?”

“I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom. And sometimes she did seem agitated — almost manic. Trying to convince me — or herself — that she was making progress. But I know she wasn’t taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years — at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled.”

“Could be cocaine,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose so, but I’ve seen the same things happen to students who
weren’t
on drugs. The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.”

“How true,” I said.

She rubbed her nails, glanced over at the photos of her family. “When I found out she’d been murdered, it changed my perception of her. Up till then I’d been absolutely
furious
with her. But hearing about her death — the way she’d been found… well, I just felt sorry for her. The police told me she was dressed like some kind of punk-rocker. It made me realize she’d had an outside life she’d kept hidden from me. She was simply one of those people to whom the world of ideas would never be important.”

“Could her lack of motivation have been due to an independent income?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “She was poor. When I accepted her she begged me to get her funding, told me she couldn’t enroll without it.”

I thought of the carefree attitude about money she’d shown the Murtaughs. The brand-new car she’d died in.

“What about her family?” I said.

“I seem to remember there was a mother — an alcoholic. But the policemen said they hadn’t been able to locate anyone to claim the body. We actually took up a collection here at the school in order to bury her.”

“Sad.”

“Extremely.”

“What part of the country was she from?” I said.

“Somewhere back east. No, she wasn’t a rich girl, Dr. Delaware. Her lack of drive was due to something else.”

“How did she react to losing her fellowship?”

“She didn’t react at
all
. I’d expected some anger, tears, anything — hoped it would help clear the air and we’d reach an understanding. But she never even tried to contact me. Finally, I called
her
in, asked her how she was planning to support herself. She told me about the job at your hospital. Made it sound like something prestigious — was quite snotty, actually. Though your Mr. Huenengarth said she’d been little more than a bottle washer.”

No bottles in Ashmore’s lab. I was silent.

She looked at her watch, then over at her purse. For a moment I thought she was going to get up. But instead, she moved her chair closer and stared at me. Her eyes were hazel, hot, unmoving. An inquisitive heat. Chipmunk searching for the acorn hoard.

“Why all the questions, Doctor? What are you really after?”

“I really can’t give any details because of the confidentiality issue,” I said. “I know it doesn’t seem fair.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then: “She
was
a thief. Those textbooks in her locker had been stolen from another student. I found other things too. Another student’s sweater. A gold pen that had belonged to me. So I won’t be surprised if she
was
involved in something unsavory.”

“She may have been.”

“Something that led to her being murdered?”

“It’s possible.”

“And what’s
your
involvement with all of this, Doctor?”

“My patient’s welfare may be at stake.”

“Charles Jones’s sister?”

I nodded, surprised that Huenengarth had revealed that much.

“Is some type of child abuse suspected?” she said. “Something Dawn found out about and tried to profit from?”

Swallowing my amazement, I managed to shrug and run a finger across my lips.

She smiled. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Delaware. But Mr. Huenengarth’s visit made me very curious — all that pressure. I’ve studied health-care systems too long to believe anyone would go to that kind of effort for an average patient. So I asked my husband to make inquiries about the Jones boy. He’s a vascular surgeon, has privileges at Western Peds, though he hasn’t operated there in years. So I know who the Joneses are and the role the grandfather’s playing in the turmoil the hospital’s going through. I also know that the boy died of SIDS and another child keeps getting sick. Rumors are floating. Put that together with the fact that Dawn stole the first child’s chart and went from abject student poverty to being quite cavalier about money, add two separate visits from professionals personally looking for that chart, and one doesn’t need to be a detective.”

“I’m still impressed.”

“Are you and Mr. Huenengarth working at cross-purposes?”

“We’re not working together.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“The little girl’s.”

“Who’s paying your fee?”

“Officially, the parents.”

“Don’t you consider that a conflict of interest?”

“If it turns out to be, I won’t submit a bill.”

She studied me for several moments. “I do believe you might mean that. Now tell me this: Does possession of the disks put
me
in any danger?”

“I doubt it, but it can’t be ruled out.”

“Not a very comforting answer.”

“I don’t want to mislead you.”

“I appreciate that. I survived the Russian tanks in Budapest in ’56, and my survival instincts have been well developed ever since. What do you suspect might be the importance of the disks?”

“They may contain some kind of coded data,” I said, “imbedded in the random number table.”

“I must say I thought of the same thing — there really was no logical reason for her to have generated that table at such an early stage of her research. So I scanned it, ran a few basic programs, and no obvious algorithms jumped out. Do you have any cryptographic skills?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Neither do I, though good decoding programs do exist, so one no longer needs to be an expert. However, why don’t we take a look right now, and see if our combined wisdom produces anything. After that, I’ll hand the disks over to you and be rid of them. I’ll also be sending a letter to Huenengarth and the police, carbon-copied to my dean, stating that I passed the disks along to you and have no interest in them.”

“How about just to the police? I can give you a detective’s name.”

“No.” She walked back to the desk, picked up the designer purse and unclasped it. Removing a small key, she fit it into the lock of the top desk drawer.

“I usually don’t lock up like this,” she said. “That man made me feel as if I were back in Hungary.”

Sliding open a left-hand file drawer, she looked down into it. Frowned. Stuck her arm in, moved it around, pulled it out empty.

“Gone,” she said, looking up. “How interesting.”

The two of us went up to the department office and Janos asked Merilee to get Dawn Herbert’s student file. Five-by-eight index card.

“This is all of it?” she said, frowning.

“We recycle all the old paper now, Dr. Janos, remember?”

“Ah, yes. How politically correct…” Janos and I read the card:
DE
-
ENROLLED
stamped at the top in red. Four typed lines under that:

H
ERBERT,
D
.
K
.
P
ROG:
P
H.
D
.,
B
IO-
S
T.
D
.
O
.
B
.: 12/13/63
POB
:
P
OUGHKEEPSIE,
N
.
Y
.
A
.
B
.,
M
ATH,
P
OUGHKEEPSIE
C
OLL.

“Not much,” I said.

Janos gave a cold smile and handed the card back to Merilee. “I’ve got a seminar, Dr. Delaware, if you’ll please excuse me.”

She left the office.

Merilee stood there holding the card, looking as if she’d been an unwilling witness to a marital spat.

“Have a nice day,” she said, then turned her back on me.

I sat in the car and tried to untangle the knots the Jones family had tied in my head.

Grandpa Chuck, doing something to the hospital.

Chip and/or Cindy doing something to their kids.

Ashmore and/or Herbert learning about some or all of it. Ashmore’s data confiscated by Huenengarth. Herbert’s data stolen by Huenengarth. Herbert probably murdered by a man who looked like Huenengarth.

The blackmail scenario obvious even to a casual observer like Janos.

But if Ashmore and Herbert had both been up to something, why had she been the first to die?

And why had Huenengarth waited so long after her death to search for her disks, when he’d moved in on Ashmore’s computers the day after the toxicologist’s murder?

Unless he’d only
learned
about Herbert’s data after reading Ashmore’s files.

I stayed with that for a while and came up with a possible chronology:

Herbert the first to suspect a tie-in between Chad Jones’s death and Cassie’s illnesses — student leading the teacher, because the teacher couldn’t care less about patients.

She pulled Chad’s chart, confirmed her suspicions, recorded her findings — encoded as random numbers — on the university computer, printed out a floppy disk, stashed it in her graduate locker, and put the squeeze on the Jones family.

But not before making a duplicate record and filing it in one of Ashmore’s computers,
without
Ashmore’s knowledge.

Two months after her murder, Ashmore found the file and tried to use it too.

Greedy, despite his million-dollar grant.

I thought of the Ferris Dixon money. Way too much for what Ashmore claimed to be doing with it. Why had the largesse of a chemical foundation extended to a man who criticized chemical chemical companies? A foundation no one seemed to know much about, supposedly dedicated to life-science research, but its only other grantee was an
economist
.

The elusive Professor Zimberg… the sound-alike secretaries at his office and Ferris Dixon.

Some kind of game…

The waltz.

Maybe Ashmore and Herbert had worked
different
angles.

He, leaning on Chuck Jones because he’d latched on to a financial scam. She, trying to milk Chip and Cindy on the child-abuse secret.

Two blackmailers operating out of one lab?

I worked with it a while longer.

Money and death, dollars and science.

I couldn’t get it to mesh.

The parking meter’s red
VIOLATION
flag popped up like toast. I looked at my watch. Just after noon. Over two hours until my appointment with Cassie and mommy.

In the meantime, why not a visit with daddy?

I used a pay phone in the administration building to call West Valley Community College and get directions.

Forty-five-minute drive, if traffic was thin. Leaving the campus and heading north, I turned west on Sunset and got onto the 405. At the interchange I transferred to the Ventura Freeway, drove toward the western end of the Valley, and got off at Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

The northward cruise took me through a commercial cross-section: upscale shopping plazas still pretending trickle-down economics was working, shabby storefront businesses that had never believed it in the first place, insta-bilt strip malls without any ideological underpinnings.

Up above Nordhoff, the street turned residential and I was treated to a lean stretch of budget-box apartments and motor courts, condo complexes plastered with happy-talk banners. A few citrus groves and U-pick farms had resisted progress. Essences of manure, petroleum, and lemon leaves mingled, not quite masking the burnt-supper smell of simmering dust.

I drove to the Santa Susanna Pass, but the road was closed for no apparent reason and blockaded by Cal-Trans barriers. I kept going to the end of Topanga, where a jumble of freeway overpasses butted up against the mountains. Off to the right a group of sleek women cantered on beautiful horses. Some of the riders wore fox-hunting garb; all looked content.

I found the 118 on-ramp within the concrete pretzel, traveled west for a few miles, and got off on a brand-new exit marked
COLLEGE ROAD
. West Valley C.C. was a half-mile up — the only thing in sight.

Nothing at all like the campus I’d just left. This one was announced by a huge, near-empty parking lot. Beyond that, a series of one-story prefab bungalows and trailers were distributed gracelessly over a ten-acre patch-work of concrete and dirt. The landscaping was tentative, unsuccessful in places. A sprinkling of students walked on plain-wrap concrete pathways.

I got out and made my way to the nearest trailer. The midday sun cast a tinfoil glare over the Valley and I had to squint. Most of the students were walking alone. Very little conversation filtered through the heat.

After a series of false starts, I managed to locate someone who could tell me where Sociology was. Bungalows 3A through 3F.

The departmental office was in 3A. The departmental secretary was blond and thin and looked just out of high school. She seemed put-upon when I asked her where Professor Jones’s office was, but said, “Two buildings up, in Three-C.”