The Shoulders of Giants (15 page)

“Dr Parker?” I asked, for no good reason. Even sitting down, I could tell she was tall. Her hair was short and blonde and she was probably in her mid to late thirties. Seems Susan had a yen for the older woman.

“Yes. How can I help you?”

“My name is Jake Abraham, I’m a private detective. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Susan Patterson.” I left it there for now and watched for her reaction. There was none. So I continued.

“I believe she was a student of yours”.

“Yes, I believe so”.

“You’re aware she was murdered last week?” I asked.

“Yes, I heard. Terrible business.” That’s it. No emotion visible at all. Either she was not bothered, or was trying very hard not to give anything away. I kicked into high gear.

“My investigation has revealed that Susan was having an affair with one of her professors. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Definitely something there. Thank you, Dr Aronson.

“Look, Dr Parker, I’m not interested in exposing student-staff relationships, I just want to find Susan’s murderer. To do that, I need to know everything I can about her.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help you,” she said, getting animated for the first time since I’d sat down. “I’d like you to leave now, I have a lot of work to do.”

“Fine. But I should tell you, I’ll be asking around. If you and Susan had an affair, I’ll find out. And if I do, I’ll be wondering why you lied to me and I’ll have to investigate some more. If you talk to me now, I’ll give you my word that this will go no further.”

She thought about this for a minute.

“This doesn’t get out?”

“So long as you didn’t kill her, I don’t care who you sleep with.”

Another minute passed before she answered.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Susan and I dated.”

“When was this?”

“Towards the end of last term. It began in April and was over and done with by the end of May.”

“Who ended it?”

“It was mutual,” she said. I tried not to laugh.

“Seriously. Who ended it?” I repeated.

“She got upset that we never went out to restaurants. She couldn’t understand it would jeopardize my position here. She said if I really loved her I wouldn’t worry about my position. I told her I didn’t love her. She left.”

“She was upset?”

“I imagine so. She was a teenager with an infatuation. When I was her age I had my heart broken several times a month.”

“Did she threaten to expose you?”

“God, no. She wouldn’t have done anything like that. She was fine within a couple of weeks.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“She came to see me,” she said, “to say she hoped her grade wouldn’t be affected by our relationship. I assured her it wouldn’t, and asked how she was. She said she was fine.”

“What grade did she get?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m curious whether, despite your assurances, she may still have assumed her grade had suffered. What did she get?”

“She failed my course. She was struggling already, and she had made very little effort in exam preparation.”

“Where were you last Friday night, Dr Parker?”

“I finished up here about six, then I went home.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” she said apologetically. If I wanted to follow the TV movie rules of interrogation I would have followed this up with an accusatory ‘That’s convenient,’ to which she would probably reply ‘I didn’t know I’d need an alibi.’ Truth is, most people spend a large portion of each day on their own. Doesn’t make them killers.

“What about Monday afternoon?”

“I teach all afternoon Monday. I had a lecture from two until four and then a tutorial group until five.”

“Is there any reason Susan would have ever referred to you as W?”

“I can’t think of any.“

I had no more questions, so I left her to worry whether or not she could trust me. If she really did have a lecture Monday afternoon, which was easy enough to check, she couldn’t have parked a beat-up VW in a Dearborn parking garage at 3pm. It didn’t rule out the possibility she hired someone to kill Susan, but that seemed remote. I decided not to go to the cops just yet. Instead, I went back to the secretary’s desk. Apparently my absence had not made her heart grow fonder.

“Yes? Which professor do to want to see now?” she asked, stone-faced.

“Actually, I came to see you,” I said, and flashed my biggest smile. It had no effect whatsoever, so I turned it off. No sense wasting it on an unappreciative audience. “Could you tell me what course Dr Parker teaches on Monday afternoon?”

“She has a Neuropsychology lecture at two, and a Comparative Psychology tutorial every other week at four,” she said, without looking anything up.

“How would I locate a student in this department? Could you give me her course schedule?” I asked.

“I can’t do that, I’m afraid. Security.”

“But I know she’s a Psych student. I could just wait outside the building until she comes along – you’d just be saving me some time.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. Do you know if she lives on campus?”

“How would that help?”

“Well, if she’s a resident, Campus Housing might have her details. I doubt they’d give you an address, but you could probably get a phone number.”

I thanked her and cranked up the smile again. Well, she’d earned it.

Ten minutes later I was in the Student Services Building, reading upside down from the student directory while a Housing assistant tried to decide if she should tell me where Anjali Sharma lived. After a minute or so she decided against it, but it was too late. 102B, Marie Robinson Hall. The student residence wasn’t far, but Anjali probably had lectures during the day. In any case, there was somewhere else I wanted to be.

Chapter 23

The lobby of the law offices of Harrison and Duke was constructed of equal quantities of chrome, glass, and white marble. I sat beside a chrome and glass coffee table while the receptionist phoned through to Abby Dexter’s office to let her know I was there, and had asked to see her. On the walk over, I had been going over in my head all the questions I had forgotten to ask her at her house. Freud would have said I forgot them deliberately, to give myself an excuse to see her again.

I sat in the lobby, trying to convince myself that I was there for a valid reason, when I was, in fact, fairly sure by now that Susan’s death was either Mob–related or a ‘stranger killing.’ There was no real reason to suspect that Susan knew her killer. For some of the other victims, there was some suggestion that they did. Grant Foster and Calvin Walsh, for example. The fact that the killer had mutilated the face of his last victim, Linda Kramer, may have been an indication that he had some personal connection to her. When a killer has a personal relationship with a victim, and a crime is motivated by hatred, the violence is very often concentrated on the face, because, as the criminal sees it, the face represents the person.

In this case I wasn’t so sure. It could easily be something the killer was doing to throw the police off. I decided that, after I had completed one final interview concerning Susan, I would focus my attention completely on looking for a link between Calvin Walsh and Grant Foster.

As I waited to see Abby Dexter, I felt nervous. The questions I had thought up on the way over seemed inane, and I wondered if the reason for my being there would be as transparent to her as it now seemed to me. My stomach did a somersault as she stepped into the lobby and smiled at me. She had hardly been out of my mind since the previous night, and by now her face seemed familiar to me. Yet somehow still fresh and exciting.

“Mr Abraham.” she said, offering her hand.

“It’s Jake, remember?” I replied, as I took her hand in mine and shook it. I made sure not to hold it too long, and hoped she did not feel the sweat on my palm.

“And you must call me Abby. Shall we go through to my office?”

I nodded and followed her out of the lobby, leaving chrome and marble for warmer, more traditional, wood-paneled, surroundings. As she walked ahead of me, I watched her. The navy blue suit of the previous evening had been replaced by a similarly elegant ensemble in a color I can only describe as Autumnal. It hovered between rich brown and red, and where the skirt stopped, her calves took over, curving gently into perfectly co-ordinated shoes. Her perfume was the same as I remembered, and it triggered a picture in my mind of her living room, with fire blazing.

We rode the elevator to the 16th floor, both observing the etiquette of remaining completely silent and not making eye contact by pretending to read the guidelines on how many people the elevator could safely carry.

Abby’s office was large, and well lit from a window behind her desk, which offered a marvelous view over the lake. The remaining walls were lined with books, and I had no doubt she had read them all at one time or another.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“Sure, thanks.” Although I hate coffee, for some reason, I couldn’t say no.

“Decaf?”

“Caf is fine.”

“I assume you have some more questions about Susan.” she said, pouring the coffee. She handed me my cup, which I took with great enthusiasm.

“That’s right, I do. I apologize to put you to this trouble, I really should have made sure I asked you everything last night.” I was stalling, trying to come up with a question important enough to warrant my visit.

“It’s really no trouble at all. I’m glad to see you again.” She smiled. My heart leapt. “I saw the papers this morning. Has there been any progress in the case?”

“We have a little more forensic evidence now, and we’re expecting a profile from the FBI this afternoon.” I hoped that sounded like I was working closely alongside the Feds. Special Agent Abraham. Just a matter of time.

“Really? An old boyfriend of mine works for the FBI.”

“Boyfriend? But I thought you were...” I know. I can’t believe I said it either. I didn’t think. I felt my face go six shades of red. Abby smiled.

“You thought I was gay.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“That’s okay,” she said, almost laughing by now. Laughing at me. “It’s no secret. I also like men.”

I practiced my best poker face, managed not to say ‘woohoo’, and desperately hoped she couldn’t read minds. I coughed, embarrassedly, and suggested we move on.

“When we talked before, it was mainly about your relationship with Susan. I’d like to ask you a little more about Susan herself, and any other acquaintances of hers.”

“What would you like to know?”

I took out my notebook and read over my notes from the last time we had spoken.

“You said that when you broke up, Susan was having trouble with the situation with her father, and you couldn’t be there for her. Do you know who she went to for support? Did she have any close friends she could talk to about it?”

“I don’t think so. Mary, my niece, was probably her best friend at high school, but when they graduated Mary went to study law at Harvard. Susan was a bit of a loner. She didn’t make friends easily and didn’t open up until she really felt comfortable with them. That’s what made it so much harder when I wasn’t able to spend enough time with her. We were no longer together when she started at UIC, so I wouldn’t know beyond that.”

While she answered, I took a sip of my coffee. It was foul. I forced it down.

“Do you know of anyone Susan might have referred to as W?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Do you know if Susan’s father ever talked to her about his work?”

“Not that I know of. Do you think it could be connected to him? Maybe someone he put away?...” As she continued talking, a few strands of hair fell across her forehead and over her eyes. She brushed them away and shook her head slightly. I watched her every movement with fascination and when she turned back to me, I looked into her eyes and got lost in them. I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to what she had been saying, and with great effort, I tuned back in. “...I mean I know he claims he was set up, but what if it’s true, and someone really was out to get him. Maybe him losing his career and respect wasn’t enough for them. Maybe he had to lose his daughter as well.”

“It’s possible, but to be honest, from everything we’ve seen up to now, it’s really beginning to look like Susan was killed by someone she didn’t know. She was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse,” she said. “So, if you think that Susan was killed by someone she didn’t know, why do you want to know more about her? How will that help you find the killer?”

“Good question. It may not, but there’s a chance that I’m wrong, and she did know him. The more I find out about her, the more likely I am to come across something pointing that way. Plus, I feel like I have a certain obligation to her father to check these avenues as thoroughly as possible before moving on to something else.”

She nodded, approvingly. She was giving me her undivided attention, and I got the sense that she understood and actually cared about what I was saying.

“You don’t strike me as a typical private detective.” She said, evaluating me.

“Well, perhaps that’s an advantage.” I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by that, but fortunately, she didn’t ask me.

“How long have you been doing it?”

“I worked in a larger firm for three years, but I only recently set up on my own. This is my first solo case”

“Hell of a first case.”

I smiled. We sat and looked at each other in silence. I spoke first.

“Well, I guess that’s about everything.” I said, wondering if it was rude to leave the rest of my coffee. “You have my card if you think of anything that might help.”

“Yes I do, and you should take one of mine. And this,” said Abby, writing on the back of the card, “is my home number. In case you need me for anything else. Anything I can do to help.”

She was smiling again, and the dimples were back in her cheeks. I stood and took her card, and my fingers brushed against hers.

“I’ll see myself out. Thanks again for your time.”