New England White (17 page)

“Nelson’s on Henley Street?”

He nodded. “Off campus,” he added, as if hoping to limit Bruce’s jurisdiction. “Anyway, most of us are over the drinking age, and it shouldn’t be against the law to get a little sloshed if you don’t hurt anybody”—and if Bruce thought maybe the five of them had sampled a few illegal substances along with their beers, he was not about to say so. Or not until mentioning the possibility could bring him some advantage.

“So, anyway, after that, we went over to the hockey game. But Dartmouth was creaming us, so it got old fast. One of the guys was meeting his girlfriend at nine, so we were out on Town Street, I’d say, ah, eight-fifteen, eight-thirty, something like that. We were out on the street, trying to decide what to do next, and that was when we saw the car.” When Bruce, by design, failed to react, Nate tried again. “The gold Audi, the one Zant got killed in, parked right on the street.”

“Who said he got killed in his car?”

Nathaniel blinked, less frightened than confused. “It was on the news.”

“How did you know it was his car?”

Back to where they had started. Only, this time, Nate answered. “Because we saw him, too.”

This was new. Not quite the way Trevor Land had told, or failed to tell, the story. He wondered whether the university secretary had not known, or known and not told. Either way, it was always wrong for an interrogator to show surprise except for effect. So Bruce, not even raising his voice, said, “I’m sorry. Which ‘him’ is this?”

Nathaniel Knowland was impatient. “Zant. He walked right past us. One of the guys was an econ major and had a course with him.”

“And what was the name of your friend who recognized him?”

A shake of the head, as defiant as any child. “I told you, I’m not gonna get the guys in trouble.” He raised a forefinger, pointing toward the ceiling, a gesture eerily reminiscent of Trevor Land. “I have my ethics.”

“I understand.” Patting him on the back, straightening up, striding away across the spacious room. Sometimes Bruce had to be his own good cop and bad cop both. His voice remained gentle. “Okay. So you saw Professor Zant. What was he doing?”

“I told you. He walked past us, and got in the car.”

“Where from?”

“I don’t know. Behind us. I mean, ah, they came from the direction of the campus. We didn’t see exactly where.”

This time he could not keep the surprise from his voice. “‘They’?”

“Yes, they. If you just stop interrupting me, I’ll explain everything.” The student took a long breath. “He was with this woman. At least we think she was a woman. She could have been a small man, I guess. And, no, I don’t think any of us would recognize her if we saw her again. I mean, when they walked down the street, she was on the inside and he was on the outside, so he was kind of walking in and out of the glow of the streetlights, and she was more on the fringes. Like she was smart enough not to let anybody see her face. I can tell you she was black. Definitely black. And she was wearing a white rain slicker with a hood, so it sort of hid her face.”

“In the middle of a blizzard she was wearing a rain slicker? Not a parka? You’re sure?”

He nodded vigorously. “It was a slicker. And it was white. Kind of shiny. Made her hard to see in the snow.” He puffed out his cheeks and hugged himself as though struggling to stay warm, then continued. “So, anyway, they got in the car—he got in first, on the passenger side, and she got in the driver’s side—they got in the car and she drove away and that was it.”

Bruce pictured the image, found it all wrong, for no reason he could articulate.

Nate Knowland was still talking. “We figured, you know, he has a certain reputation. Had. So, we figured, he and this woman—I mean, there wasn’t any affection they showed or anything like that—but—”

“Let me be very clear. The car was parked on Town Street, across from the rink.”

“Uh-huh.”

The rink faced the rear entrance to Hilliman Tower, where Zant had his office. So far, at least, the story was plausible. “And you’re sure Professor Zant got in first? And the black woman in the white rain slicker was driving?”

“That’s right.” Nate Knowland was coming down from the wonderful high of terror. His elegant features had gone slack, and the eyes were moist and flat. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what we saw.”

“Of course, you were pretty drunk.”

“We had a few drinks. We weren’t drunk. And we all saw the same thing.”

“The same woman in the rain slicker.”

“Yeah.”

Bruce made a note in his book, a tiny symbol only he could decode. Nate’s story was so simple and dull as to smack of invention by the witness, except for those two details.

“Do you remember anything else?”

He nodded. “She had a British accent.”

“So you overheard the conversation?”

“Only a sentence or two. But they were talking about President Carlyle.”

Another note. This, too, was well beyond Trevor Land’s oddly limited information. “What about him?”

Nate shook his head. “We didn’t hear much, I told you. But it sounded like she was trying to tell Professor Zant that he was too big for them to take him on.”

“Can you give me the exact words?”

“I think those were the words. ‘Too big for us to take him on.’ Something like that.” A nervous shrug. “That was all we heard.”

CHAPTER 17

THE DEBT

“N
OT ENOUGH
, C
HIEF,
I would think,” said Trevor Land mournfully. “A silly story by a drunken schoolboy. Not worth bothering the police about.”

“Mr. Secretary, they saw the victim the night he got shot. They saw him on the campus, where the police aren’t even looking. Not only that. They saw him with another person, something like an hour and a half before the body was found. How can it not be worth bothering the police?”

A long pause at the other end of the telephone. Bruce wondered whether the secretary was aware that his underling had omitted a detail: the tantalizing comment about Lemaster Carlyle. When Trevor Land spoke again, it was in the same sad tone. “I am not the sort, Chief Vallely, to tell a man how to do his job, especially a man of your qualification. If you think you have to go to the police, well, that would have to be your call, not mine. Delegated authority. My philosophy of management. One asks only that you consider the university’s good name. We cannot afford another scandal.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“Just indulge me one moment more, Chief Vallely, if you would. Small point. You heard the young man’s story. But so far that’s all you’ve heard. Consider.” In his mind’s eye Bruce saw that finger pointing up at the ceiling again, so like a statue. “Perhaps he was drunk and cannot remember what he saw, or perhaps his recollection is accurate. We don’t know which, or not yet.”

“It’s the job of the police to figure out which, not ours.”

“To be sure. To be sure. But, Chief Vallely, excepting your presence, of course, the police of our fine city are not notable for their discretion. Not where the university might be concerned. Most of the time, in my experience, Chief, telling the police is the same as telling the papers. They can no more keep secrets than Ulysses could resist the Sirens, and nobody to tie them to the mast, you see.” Bruce in fact did not see, but was not about to say so. “Now, Professor Zant was a highly valued member of this community, and we naturally would want to give our all to help bring his killer to justice. And that is why we are so fortunate, Chief, to be blessed by a man of your caliber. Now, what you decide to do is your own business. But may I offer a small bit of advice? From my decades, frankly, of dedicated service to the university?”

Orders, he meant. “Of course, sir.”

“Well, Chief, were it I facing the dilemma? I would perhaps prefer to firm up the case a bit before I risked the school’s reputation at the hands of the local journalists. Rock and a hard place, sort of thing, I admit, but perhaps it would be better to wait. Just until I had a little bit more information.”

Bruce waited for more, but Trevor Land was evidently waiting for him. He said, slowly and distinctly, “Mr. Secretary, are you proposing that I undertake a more thorough…investigation?”

Trevor Land’s voice seemed sleepier still. “Ah, well, Chief Vallely, I would prefer not to place so
intense
a characterization on my advice. Rather, I would propose that you should do as you and I discussed earlier. You should, I think, be about the business of tying up the loose ends. Don’t rush to judgment, that’s the thing. Get on it, say, after Thanksgiving. Patience. Diligence. Yes. So, Chief, my view? Make sure the loose ends are tied up, that you have your ducks in a row, kind of thing, and then, by all means, take what you have to the proper authorities, with my blessing.”

The director of campus safety gazed at the wedding photograph atop the credenza, Grace so beautiful and young, although she only grew more beautiful as she grew older. If only he could have a few minutes to consult her wisdom and humor. But she was dead over a year now, barely into her fifties, and he faced the secretary’s slimy cynicism armed only with his own integrity. He made no pretense—unlike a certain university president he could name—to be exceptional in that respect.

“May I ask a question?”

“By all means, Chief. Please.”

“Suppose that I agree to do as you…suggest. And suppose a moment comes, fairly soon, maybe, when I believe that I have all my ducks in a row, and you don’t.”

“Pardon me, but I did not get the question, Chief Vallely.”

Bruce preferred arguing face-to-face, where he could use his size to advantage, even against his titular superiors; but, aided by Grace’s glowing visage underneath the window, he was willing to tangle over the telephone. He had survived the vicious internecine warfare of the police department and, long ago, the vicious actual warfare of the Central American jungle; he could trade insincere, wordy threats with the likes of Trevor Land any day of the week.

So he rushed in where angels might fear to tread.

“Sir, as you know, the charter under which my department operates has as one of its cardinal rules that any evidence we uncover of a felony must be turned over, at once, to the police or the other responsible authorities.” A beat to let this sink in. “Maybe I can hold off a few days, but, sooner or later, I’m going to have all the loose ends tied up. Suppose, at that point, you and I disagree about what step to take next. Whose view wins?”

The answer, although surely prepared in advance, was a very long time coming, as if the secretary wanted Bruce to imagine that he was just now working through the options.

“Ah, I see your concern. Yes. But remember, Chief Vallely, it is fully up to you to choose what to do. My small suggestions are only that, suggestions. Naturally, I would consider it unlikely in the extreme that we would face such a disagreement. But if the time came when we did…well, let us reserve judgment, kind of thing. Cross that bridge when we come to it instead of burning it in advance, if you get my meaning.”

“I think I do.”

“Excellent, Chief Vallely, excellent. And, you know, Chief, when all of this is over, no scandal, the university protected, and justice served—when it is all over, Chief Vallely, remember, please, that you will have in me a friend and supporter for life, and I am not without a certain influence in affairs. And you yourself will be taken care of. That I can assure you.”

Bruce decided that enough was enough. “Meaning what exactly?”

The secretary, an old hand, correctly judged his underling’s mood. “I’m sure I meant no offense, Chief Vallely. I was suggesting nothing untoward.”

“May I ask what you were suggesting?”

“Only that you’re family, Chief. And that I think you will find me a useful person to have in your debt.” A laugh, because they both knew that he had gone too far, that he could easily, at this very moment, make an enemy of his subordinate.

Bruce asked the secretary to hold on.

He laid the telephone on the sagging desk and swiveled toward the window with its hideous view of empty buses. He remembered a strange conversation with his former partner, Rick Chrebet. The two men had met for a drink Monday night, and Bruce had steeled himself for some joshing, because the city and state cops thought the campus police had a soft life. Instead, a bitter Rick Chrebet had told him that higher-ups in the department had already decided that Zant’s murder was a robbery, maybe a carjacking gone awry. They were pressing the investigators to endorse the same theory. Rick thought he could hold them off for a week, maybe even two, but eventually he would have to cave. When Bruce expressed surprise—the man had been dead only three days!—Rick had smiled, downed another beer, and told him that the decision was coming down from the top, not up from the ranks. He would say no more.

It occurred to Bruce now, lifting the phone once more, that he might be able to succeed where his old team had failed, and put the university that had so tortured his parents into his debt. He could say no to Trevor Land and keep his job until retirement. He could say yes, for the wrong reason—personal ambition, for instance. Or for the right reason—getting into position to collect what was due.

“I’ll be happy to help,” he said to the secretary, not sure why his every instinct for survival was screaming at him to answer the other way.

CHAPTER 18

THE ORIGINAL THINKER

(I)

“G
IVE ME A MINUTE HERE
,” said Arthur Lewin, pacing his vast but spartan office in the economics department. He had another outpost in the math building and a third at one of the endless interdisciplinary programs every university spawns. He was thirty-two years old, but on the campus already a legend. “I mean, this is, you know, a little weird. Weird, but exciting, too.” It was Tuesday, December 2, five days after Thanksgiving, and Bruce, as ordered, was continuing to tie up loose ends.

“Is that so?”

“Well, you see, Bruce—do you mind if I call you Bruce?—it’s just, I don’t think I’ve ever been interviewed by the cops. Well, you know, if you don’t count, like, college.”

Bruce Vallely remained seated on the far side of the round table stacked high with papers and reprints that served Arthur Lewin in lieu of a desk. Two casement windows were set into the narrow wall, and two computers—a laptop and a desktop—were on a table just below. On the desktop, numbers seemed to be crunching. The laptop displayed what looked to be the draft of a scholarly article, thick with equations, although the window actually in use contained a game that Bruce did not immediately recognize—something to do with placing colorful counters on squares that shifted. Art Lewin, playing against the machine, seemed to be winning. Near the computers stood a single lonely photograph in an antique gilt frame, a pair of girls with Arthur Lewin’s eager gray eyes. No other family snaps in evidence.

“Were you in trouble in college?” Bruce asked.

“Isn’t everybody?”

“I don’t know if everybody is. I just wondered if you were.”

Art Lewin kept on grinning. He wore jeans and scuffed boots and a raggedy brown sweater, and his reddish hair was thick and uncombed. He did not look to have shaved in days. His face was soft and pudgy, as though he had never lost his baby fat. His gray eyes were friendly and excited behind tiny lenses. He possessed the delighted optimism of a personal trainer, and the dressing habits of an exhausted student at exam time. He was an associate professor of economics and, according to a couple of people Bruce had asked, might be the greatest genius in the field since Kenneth Arrow. Not that Bruce knew, or much cared, who Kenneth Arrow was. His field of interest was narrower: he cared about Kellen Zant, and this man, by every account, was Kellen’s best friend.

Maybe his only friend.

Zant, some years older, had been Art Lewin’s teacher, his guide through graduate school, and his mentor in the department. Most people Bruce had talked to seemed to think mentee had long ago surpassed mentor.

Professor Lewin said, “Believe it or not, it’s true. Just about everybody does get into trouble in college. Well, not everybody. But a majority of males are in some kind of trouble with the law before they turn thirty. Listen. There are plenty of data on this. Do you want to know what proportion of young men have been arrested? This isn’t a racial thing, by the way. You read all those reports about one-quarter of the black men in Washington having been in the criminal-justice system or something, right? That’s a crock. The numbers are all skewy. They have to be a lot higher. Listen. In the general population? All males? The proportion of all males who have been arrested is on the order of one-third to one-half, maybe a little higher, depending on how far back you go—what age you measure—and what you consider an arrest.”

“I consider it an arrest when I put the cuffs on.”

“Right. Right. But consider this.” The economist paid him no attention. The office contained no file cabinets, but one wall was a whiteboard. Art Lewin leaped across to it as though spoiling for a fight and began sketching with a pair of colored markers. He drew a vertical line, and a horizontal line stretching right from its base. Bruce recognized the axes of a graph. The professor drew a squiggly line and labeled it
f(x).
“This function is, say, the probability of arrest, by age, right? See how it slopes? It’s nonexistent for babies—we’re just doing males, okay?—and it gets higher in the early teens, and then—boom—here—we have a maximum, in the late teens, early twenties; and then it declines in a fairly regular fashion here. Above thirty, it’s real low. Fifty, nobody gets arrested. All this is well known, right? Now. This curve—this is tricky—this represents the population according to age. We’re aging fast. We know what that means, I assume. Answer: crime is going to go down. Has to. Inevitable. Because it’s all the young men”—tapping the board with his marker—“who are the criminals. Follow the same cohorts as they get older, they stop doing whatever they were doing. No more crimes. Well, okay, not zero, but an arbitrarily small number.”

“Because they’re in prison.”

“Very funny. Good one. But no. No. Why do they commit fewer crimes? Answer: because they’re older. Now we can—”

“Professor Lewin, please. Please. We can have the lecture later.”

“I know, I know. See, here’s the thing. Look. See the multiple intersections? Know what that means?”

“Please, Professor Lewin. That’s enough. Arthur!”

The economist pivoted slowly, innocent gray eyes, for a moment, not in the room. Then he was back, but sullen, a child genius in the act of showing off, cut short by a callow grown-up. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be interested.”

Bruce did not want to give offense. “It’s fascinating, Professor. Really. And perhaps another time you can explain it to me in detail.”

“I did a paper on it. I have a copy”—he delved into a stack on a shelf behind his desk, neatly labeled
REPRINTS OF PUBLISHED
, and pulled out an article of eight or ten pages—“which you can read at your leisure. Then we can talk some more, okay?”

“Sure.”

“A lot of the data on this topic are just wrong. I proved it.”

“I believe you.”

A sheepish smile. “I know I babble. I love my work, Bruce. I just love it.”

Bruce smiled back. Smiles cost nothing. “I can see that.”

“You know, Bruce, back in the forties and fifties—we’re talking about the postwar years, when America stood alone, unchallenged, all that silliness?—the mathematicians thought they could draw the right function and solve every social problem. Even crime. I’m talking about economists who did math.”

“And now?”

“Now, I would say, mathematical treatments still dominate. You have to know your theory, but the profession—and I would say properly so—is getting more and more interested in applied mathematics again. A lot of us think it’s time to march out and save the world. I know you think I’m exaggerating, but, okay, listen for a minute.” Both hands waving now, fingers pointing in all directions, the man’s energy amazing, like a third person in the room. “Listen. What is economics, really? The dismal science? No. Answer: it’s the study of the distribution of goods and services subject to constraint. Well, what isn’t subject to constraint? Answer: nothing. Military strategy, political campaigns, eggs, even sex. Everything is subject to constraint, Bruce. So, in a way, economics is a kind of summary of everything that matters in human existence. We really do hold in our hands the tools to save the world. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Is that what Kellen Zant thought?”

Arthur Lewin’s manic energy began to flag. He did not move from the whiteboard, it was plain that he had no intention of sitting, but his narrow shoulders sagged slightly, and he nodded his grizzled chin twice, as though conceding the intrusion of reality.

“Yeah. Kellen. What a bummer.”

“Can we talk about him for a minute?”

“About Kellen? Listen. Don’t get the wrong idea about him, Bruce. It’s not true what people say. He wasn’t in it just for the money. He always said economists could make the world better, if we would just turn our attention to the right problems.”

Bruce said gently, “That wasn’t exactly what I wanted to talk about.”

“No? What, then?”

“Well, for one thing, we could talk about who’d want to kill him.”

The grin returned, but without the earlier glee that told you how much Arthur Lewin loved his work. This time, he was merely acknowledging an absurdity. “Well, I guess you could say I would.”

(II)

T
HEY WERE WALKING
across the main campus, because Art Lewin had decided he wanted to be on the move to talk about this, and he was the kind of man who did pretty much what he wanted: a fully grown Nathaniel Knowland, only with a lot more charm. Slushy dark snow swished underfoot. Bruce reminded himself that Art Lewin was a rising star. His recent predecessor as director of campus safety lost his job because of scandal, and the scandal was worse because he had not properly managed his relationships with the faculty.

“Let me tell you something about Kellen’s work. I don’t mean Zant-Feldman—”

“Excuse me, Professor. Others have also mentioned Zant-Feldman, but nobody has yet told me exactly what it is.”

Art Lewin smiled again, and Bruce smiled back, impressed that the young man had not, as so many professors would have, rolled his eyes. It occurred to the onetime detective that loving a subject was a true advantage in a teacher: if you enjoy talking about your field, you will never treat a question, or a questioner, as dumb.

“It’s a formula for valuing securities, especially stock options, except, unlike, say, Black-Scholes, it’s backward-looking. What I mean is, it’s a way of answering the question, ‘In light of what we now know, what was the value of this particular option when it was awarded ten years ago?’ It’s actually a really clever measure of stochastic volatility, using the differential of—well, never mind. Okay. See, Kellen was in grad school at Dartmouth when he figured it out. Then this guy Feldman at Columbia helped him refine it, when Kellen spent a couple of years there as a post-doc? And, you know, Bruce, it’s not true what they say, that Kellen couldn’t have finished it himself. That’s just racism, okay? But I guess you know all about that, right? So, anyway, the thing is, Zant-Feldman got Kellen lots of consulting work. Okay?”

Bruce found himself no wiser. “Okay.”

“But lately he wasn’t just doing Zant-Feldman any more. He was trying to use some more sophisticated tools, to build futures markets on events? Try to see if experts could predict what will happen next year or in ten years in, say, commodities markets? Because, you know, this idea that the mass of people might know best is very hot right now. It’s an old idea in economics. It’s how markets work. Chaos theory touches on it, too. You’ve seen some of the literature? A lot of it gets into the popular press these days.” He made
popular
sound like an obscenity.

“I’m afraid I’ve missed it.”

A dubious nod. This was not, Bruce saw at once, Art Lewin’s thing. “Like, say, suppose you want to know how many jelly beans are in a jar? It turns out that the best thing to do is ask lots and lots of people and then average their answers. Even if none of the answers is close, chances are the average will be. The more people who guess, the better the answer. Because the net cognitive errors balance each other out, right? Or—you want to guess the outcome of an election. Should you ask people who they’re going to vote for? Answer: No. That’s media silliness. No. You get a better prediction if you ask people who they think is going to win. If you put together, say, an electronic market, and let people buy and sell futures contracts on the election? Turns out you’ll usually get pretty close to the actual percentage of the vote. Pretty cool, huh?”

Again Bruce called him gently to heel, persuaded that, if not stopped, Art Lewin would go on like this all afternoon. “Professor, this is all very interesting, and someday when we both have more time, I’d be happy to hear the details. But, for now, I’d like to be a little more concrete.”

“Concrete?” the economist echoed, with a revulsive shudder, as if to signal that what really mattered were the great abstractions. “Concrete how?”

“Like, say, to talk about Kellen Zant. Not the work. The man.”

“The man was his work. You can’t understand him if you don’t understand his work.”

“I’m not trying to understand him just now, Professor. I’m trying to understand exactly what happened to him.” He rushed to press his advantage while Art Lewin was still thinking this over. “Why don’t we start with the last time you saw him?”

“The last time I saw Kellen—I told this to the police—was the day he died. Friday. We were playing chess in my office, same as we did every Friday. Blitz. Five minutes a side. That way we could squeeze in enough games to have a realistic—” The economist stopped, the child in him erecting a defense against accusations not yet lodged. “Look, Bruce, it was just our way to have fun, okay? Some people play football, some people get drunk. No, wait, I do get drunk, that’s not a good example. But some people—I don’t know—fly kites or something.”

“What time was this? When he came by your office?”

“Oh, probably four. That’s what time it usually was. I mean, you know, I didn’t look at my watch or anything. But I would guess four.”

“Who won more games? On Friday, before he died?” Allowing a light touch, but just that, of impatience to show.

“Oh, well, I won more
games,
” said the economist, as if Bruce was missing the point. “But they don’t count. Kellen was distracted. His mind wasn’t on chess. And, besides, we didn’t really finish. Usually we played until about ten. Sent out for Chinese food, talked about work, played chess. But on Friday we stopped early.” Standing before a huge snowbank, he turned and held up a hand, forestalling an objection not yet offered. “Wait, Bruce. Wait. I want to make something clear here, okay? It’s not true what they say about Kellen. He was brilliant. As brilliant as I am. He didn’t just do his consulting work. He did care about scholarship. He wasn’t lazy. That’s just racism talking. He was working on this book about games, and it was serious for him. He had plenty of projects to keep him busy.”

“I’m sure he did,” said Bruce after a moment’s evaluation and mental filing. The sky glowered, but he had the sense that neither dark nor cold would slow Art Lewin in full excited academic stride.