The Deadhouse (35 page)

"Frivolous thoughts, really, when I heard later what had been going
on down below. With Lola, I mean. I didn't hear the slightest bit of
disturbance. I think that's what will always torment me."

Lavery seemed to be sincerely troubled.

"No loud voices arguing? No screams? No sounds of a struggle?"

"Exactly what does a struggle sound like, Detective?"

Mike was stumped. There had been no furniture overturned in Lola's
apartment, no bruising to suggest a prolonged attack by her assailant.
Just a wool scarf that had been pulled too tight for too long around
her neck. It had caused her to be unable to breathe, and perhaps unable
to scream as well.

"I have this tendency, you see, to sit here at my writing table,
absorbed in my work no matter what kind of commotion is going on around
me or outside on the street. It's a trait that has served me quite well
in my career. And when I'm here at home, I've always got music playing.
Sometimes a bit too loud, but then these old buildings were really
built solid. They absorb the noise pretty well. Every now and then,"
Lavery said with a slight grin "after a particularly booming crescendo,
my friend Lola would bang on the pipes that ran up through her living
room into mine.

"But the day she died," he said, somber again, "I can't say I heard
anything at all."

"How well did you know Ms. Dakota?"

"Quite well, both professionally and socially. We were in different
disciplines, of course, but she was a bit of a maverick, as I am and
she was interested in my approach to the urban drug problem Away from
the school, we spent some time together, too."

"Did you ever date?"

"Nothing like that. But we could sit up till the middle of the
night, arguing about solutions for the homeless or the mentally ill.
There was no off switch to Lola. She was always thinking and working
and doing."

"Had you seen much of her in the days before her death?"

He took a long time to answer. "I have become so engulfed in my own
legal entanglements, unfortunately, that I've tended to push most of my
friends out of the way. I'm trying to recall the last time Lola and I
had a good, long go-at-it together."

"How about a short one? How about a sighting?"

"I know I saw her the week of Thanksgiving. I remember coming in
with a lot of groceries and stopping by to talk with her for a while on
my way upstairs. Have a drink. Then she was off to her sister's home,
and—I simply can't summon up any other time that I saw her."

Was he lying to us, or had Bart Frankel been mistaken when he told
us he had left Lola at the door because she saw Lavery going into the
building?

Chapman had nothing to lose at this point. "The day she died, like
half an hour before she was killed, did you happen to run into her,
right at the front door of the building?"

Lavery was biting the inside of his cheek, looking perplexed. "I may
have gone down to the lobby once in the afternoon to get the mail, but
after I came back from my errand that morning I'm absolutely certain I
never went back outside. Where would you have heard something like
that?"

"How do you know Bart Frankel?"

"He was in charge of her case, Ms. Cooper. He had come to the
apartment once or twice to bring Lola papers to sign. I think that's
what she told me. And to help prepare her for their plan to build the
case against her husband, Mr. Kerlovic."

"Kralovic."

"I didn't know the man. I'm not really sure what his name was. One
time, I ran into Lola with Bart Frankel at a restaurant in the
neighborhood. I guess she had come to rely on him in these last
difficult weeks."

"How come you called Bart last night and asked him to meet with you?"

Now he was growing more wary. "Well, Detective, either Bart told you
the answer to that question when he asked you to come here, or you've
pulled one over on me." He walked to his desk and picked up the
receiver, looking at a number on the piece of paper next to the phone.
"Shall I just call him and clear this up?"

Mike stood up, too. "No, but Bart did tell us he saw you walk into
this building, holding the door open for Lola, about half an hour
before she was killed."

"And
I'm
telling you that statement is not true, Mr.
Chapman." Lavery started to dial.

"We'll have to resolve this some other way, Mr. Lavery. All you're
gonna get is a machine. Or maybe one of Bart's kids. He's in the
hospital. His car ran off the road this morning on his way here to see
you."

Lavery replaced the receiver. "Was he hurt badly?"

"Probably won't make it."

The professor winced and sat down at his desk.

"You wanna explain to us why you called him to come talk to you?
Tell us what you were planning on telling him?"

He looked up at Chapman to answer. "I didn't have anything to say to
him."

"But you called him. Even his daughter can confirm that."

"I got back from my trip last night and among the messages on my
answering machine was one to call Bart Frankel. He reminded me what his
connection to Lola had been, and he left his home phone number in New
Jersey."

By the end of next week, telephone records might again resolve the
issue for us, but at the moment I did not know whether to believe him.

"Did he say what he wanted?"

I sensed that Lavery thought he had regained the upper hand His tone
was cool once more, and almost arrogant as he talked to us. "Not at
all. Just that he needed to see me. I assumed it was about Lola's case."

"He was taken off that investigation. He's—"

"And I've been out of the country, Detective. Staying at a
beach
house in the islands with no television and with newspapers that
arrived about three days after they hit the stands in Miami. So I don't
have the faintest idea what's been going on up here. Why was he taken
off the case? Would you like to bring me up-to-date?"

Mike ignored his question. "Did Lola talk to you about the
Blackwells project?"

"Of course she did. It had consumed her these past few months. We're
a relatively small faculty, Detective, compared to those at large
universities like Harvard and Yale. I'd had my enemies when I first
came over to King's, but we've generally tried to work it out among
ourselves. When I was hired, the head of the anthropology department
didn't want me working under his watch."

"Winston Shreve?"

"Precisely. But then Lola went to work on Shreve, on my behalf. I
wouldn't say he's my close friend, but he accepted me within his
division and has been rather kind to me lately, with all the troubles
I've had. And Grenier, he's in charge of the biology division. He was a
bit more anxious to have me.

"Now, if you're spending any time with those three—Dakota, Shreve,
and Grenier—you can be sure the subject of Blackwells will come up," he
said. "That's what they've spent most of their time working on for the
better part of the year. And Lockhart. I'd say he's their fourth
Musketeer."

"Have you had anything to do with the project yourself?"

"I live in the present, Ms. Cooper. Oh, they talk to me about what
they're doing, and they ask me plenty of questions about it."

"Like what?"

"I think when Lola first found out about the drug trade in the old
penitentiary, three-quarters of a century ago, she was amazed at the
scale of the problem. But it was quite a famous scandal, and of course,
I'm familiar with the history of the drug culture in this city. So I
was able to explain to her what the drugs of choice were in those days
and how widespread the narcotics business was— even inside American
penal institutions."

"And Grenier, what was his relationship with Lola?"

"I bet you've had a hard time getting him to come to the table,
haven't you?" Lavery wasn't wrong. I was hoping that by Monday
_W
e
would have word from Sylvia Foote that the biology professor was back
and available to us.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because Thomas Grenier is a selfish son of a bitch and it would be
quite out of character if he was any use in a matter like this."

"We've been told that Grenier was actually willing to bring you into
his department, when Shreve and the others weren't all that interested
in having you in anthropology."

"That's true, Detective. But not because he had any belief in what I
was doing. He saw it as a business proposition. It put dollar signs in
front of his eyes, not mortarboards."

Both Mike and I were lost. "I never knew that money was so much of
an issue in academia," I said.

"Then I would guess that you've never met Thomas Grenier. And you
have no idea what the Internet has done to the college campus. Not in
the classroom alone, but as universities have tried to cash in on the
commercial market."

"Would you mind telling us what you mean?"

"It used to be, Ms. Cooper, that the idea of an academic making
money from his research was not acceptable at any university. I'm not
talking about
my
situation, if that's what you're thinking.
There has always been a perception that we scholars are outside the
marketplace, and we've long benefited from that. We've been giving away
our knowledge for generations. Now many of the large institutions are
looking to get a fair return on their intellectual capital. Turn it
into financial capital, like the rest of the world."

"And the Internet?"

"It's a gold mine. It provides a much larger payback, and a much
faster one, too. There's a lot of competition in the dot-com community,
and administrators everywhere are trying to foster various
opportunities to let faculty members increase their income—through the
expanded use of their research—and let the universities themselves
share in the bounty. That's the big score. I'm surprised you haven't
read about this. Front page of
The Times
a short while ago.
Grenier was a key player."

"I just do the sports page, comics, horoscope, and 'Dear Abby.' Tell
me about it."

"Columbia University has sort of led the field in this business. The
vice provost there has promoted the efforts of some of his professors
to joint-venture with Internet start-ups. They've partnered with an
on-line company to do a human nutrition study. And made money by mating
with that junk-bond character, Michael Milken, in a curriculum of
serious college courses. They've already made millions from that."

"What's the flap?"

"Well, under the old rules, Mr. Chapman, we professors owned the
rights to any books and articles that were published. The institution
itself owned the patents from our research, and we were lucky to get a
quarter of the revenue. Columbia started a new policy last year. It
allows the university to retain rights to Internet projects that are
supported by Columbia's funds or make substantial use of its labor, but
professors can get a greater share in the revenue."

"And Grenier's role?"

"A lot of these Internet companies with a significant amount of
venture capital have been sniffing around the campuses. Biology is one
of the fields in which they figure they can buy a lot of research
rather cheaply. And turn it into gold. Grenier was sort of pushed out
of the department at Columbia. Couldn't get along with some of the
favorites there. A bit too heavy-handed. He came here and is trying to
get the same kind of interest revved up on the King's College campus.

"These biotech companies are all looking for major drug studies.
Think of the return on an investment when you have some brilliant
graduate student, not costing you a dime in salary, toiling over his
laboratory test tubes all day. Guided by a professor whose income is
just a fraction of what the corporate executives make."

"What's the problem?"

"A major conflict with the new president here, Paolo Recantati. He'd
like to have firmer control over decisions on what type of research the
college should support. He's a purist. He thinks there can be terrible
fallout when the faculty or the college has a stake in the financial
result of its work."

"Did Lola and Thomas Grenier get along?"

"Until she found out that he was trying to use me. That he had not
been very candid about why he was interested in me. It turned out not
to be for the reasons he expressed to the administration."

Long-term studies of health problems connected to substance abuse,
if I remembered what Sylvia Foote had told us. Lavery chuckled. "Lola
turned on Grenier like a rattlesnake on its prey. Ready to strike in a
flash. If he said something was black, Lola said it was white. You know
what I mean, I'm sure."

"When was that?"

"Early this fall, a few months back."

"What is it he really wanted from you?"

Lavery laughed more heartily. "What do you know about Viagra,
Detective?"

"Not enough."

"Viagra's main ingredient comes from the poppy. The same seedpod
that brings you opium and heroin. It works by increasing the blood flow
directly to the penis. But it's had some disastrous side effects, as
you're probably aware. It doesn't mix well with other medications.

"So a lot of pharmaceutical companies have been searching for a
better fix, a healthier solution to an age-old problem. And nobody on
the faculty knows the poppy as well as I do, in the professional sense.
Grenier had made a deal with one of the large drug companies to lead
the research team. He simply neglected to cut me in on any of the
potential profit."

"Did you two have a falling-out?"

"We didn't come to blows with each other, but it hasn't been pretty.
I don't like being taken advantage of."

"Where did Lola stand in this?"

"With me, Detective. I can't say she has any personal regard for
Grenier."

"But they still worked together on the Blackwells business?"