by Mark Cohen
“Thanks.”
We kicked it around for forty-five minutes, and I explained what little I had learned about fractal geometry. Fractal image compression, medical imaging, and all that. “Sounds like there’s money in it,” he said.
“There is,” I said. “And I’m guessing that’s why these people are dead.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m no math whiz—never went past high school—but if you’re willing to tackle that angle, I’ll help you any way I can.” I finished my sandwich and told him there was one favor he could do for me.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Call the homicide cop in Boston. He wouldn’t share any information with me, but he’ll probably share it with you.”
“Probably,” he agreed. He finished his pickle, then lit yet another cigarette. The smoke annoyed me—it’s one of my pet peeves—but I kept my feelings to myself.
“Tell me about Fontaine’s student assistant,” I said.
“Ronald Bartels. An aspiring math nerd.”
“Mind if I talk to him?”
“No. I interviewed him twice, but that was before the other two turned up dead. He’s the one told me about the girl in Portland.”
“I’d like to know more about Fontaine’s research. Maybe he can shed some light on it.”
“Knock yourself out,” he said. I paid for lunch, and he gave me directions to Bartels’s room. “You’d better hurry,” he said, “most of these kids will be leaving town by the end of the week.”
It was early afternoon and a festival atmosphere permeated the campus. Loud music and plenty of coeds in colorful bikinis soaking up the sun. I caught myself looking more than once and reminded myself I was old enough to have a daughter in college. It didn’t stop me from looking.
Bartels lived in Douglas Hall, a dormitory named after William O. Douglas. A plaque indicated the former Supreme Court justice had attended the school, but the building’s cornerstone told me it had been constructed a year before his death. His untimely demise had probably deprived the college of an opportunity to name the building after a wealthy alum in return for a generous donation.
The dorm itself was clean, quiet, and utterly unremarkable. When I’d been in college, you couldn’t walk through a dorm without smelling dope, stepping in beer, or seeing Farrah Fawcett. Now pot is out of fashion, the drinking age is twenty-one, and Farrah is over fifty. Times change.
I found Bartels’s room and knocked, but there was no answer. I knocked again, hard, but the result was the same, so I made my way to the math-and-science building. It was a newer structure with a copper facade along the roof. A long metal bike rack was positioned outside the entrance. Some of the windows were open, the faculty members apparently enjoying the nice weather and/or the music pouring forth from the dorms.
Max LeBlanc and two other math professors agreed to speak to me, but nobody could shed any light on the mystery. Fontaine had spent the summer running his parents’ farm. If he’d been involved with a woman at the time of his death, nobody knew about it. They let me see what had been his office, but it had since been assigned to another mathematician who had rearranged things to suit her needs.
My next stop was the student union. I bought a large diet Coke at the fountain, ignored the NO FOOD OR DRINK sign, and meandered through the student bookstore. I love bookstores. Sometimes I think owning a bookstore would be the perfect job.
“May I help you?” a woman asked. Too old to be a student, but not bad looking. There was something sultry about her in spite of her glasses. Maybe the bored wife of a faculty member.
“Just browsing,” I said. Wishing I didn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
“That’s fine, sir,” she said with a smile. “If you need anything, please let me know.” She turned and started to walk away.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “There is something you can help me with. Where are the textbooks for your math classes?”
“Right over here,” she said. I followed. I found Fontaine’s text on fractal geometry, removed one from the top of the stack, and opened the cover: $44.95. I put it down and clutched my chest as if having a heart attack. She laughed.
“I’ll take it,” I said. I handed it to her and followed her to the register.
“Will that be all?”
“Trust me,” I said, “this’ll keep me busy for a while.”
I walked back to Douglas Hall and heard faint music from Bartels’s room, but my knock went unanswered. I gave the knob a gentle twist and peeked inside. Disaster area. Clothes and fast-food wrappers everywhere. Bartels and his roommate had built a loft to make better use of the space, and I noticed a young man asleep on the bunk. I rapped the open door a few times with my knuckles and he began to stir. A dark-haired young man sat up, rubbed his eyes, and tried to focus. He wore beige shorts and a T-shirt with “Just Do It” printed across the front.
“Are you Ronald Bartels?”
“Yeah,” he said. I guessed he was six feet tall. About one hundred sixty pounds. He was a handsome kid, but had one of the worst haircuts I’d ever seen. It looked like someone had just taken scissors and snipped their way around his head to create a poor replica of Ringo Starr circa 1964.
“My name’s Pepper Keane. I’m a private investigator.” That caught his interest. “Lieutenant Gilbert suggested I talk with you.” He stretched his arms.
“Sure,” he said, “no problem. Sorry about the mess. We’ve been taking finals all week.” He made no effort to climb down and both chairs were covered with clothes, so I took the liberty of sitting on a footlocker that evidently doubled as a coffee table.
“I’d like to talk about Professor Fontaine. I’m trying to determine if there is a connection between his murder and the deaths of two other mathematicians.”
“Yeah, the FBI mentioned that when they questioned me. Weird, huh?”
“When was that?”
“I don’t know, a month or two ago.”
“What did they ask you?”
“Which time?” he replied.
“They questioned you more than once?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Two agents from Spokane came down here maybe six or eight weeks ago and spent a day with me. Then an agent from Denver interviewed me by phone, maybe a week or two later, and asked the same questions all over again. I told him I’d already been interviewed, but he didn’t want to hear it.”
“You get his name?”
“No, but I should have. He was kind of a dick.” An agent from Denver. Kind of a dick. That sure sounded like Polk. Why would Polk reinterview a witness who had been questioned at length and in person by two Spokane agents? Standard practice would be for those agents to prepare a Form 302—“FBI Interview Summary”—and forward it to the office handling the investigation. I put that question aside and continued questioning Bartels.
“I’m sure they asked you whether Professor Fontaine had had any contact with Carolyn Chang or Donald Underwood?”
“Yeah,” he said, “they asked about that. I told them I wasn’t aware of any, but I was just his student assistant.”
“What exactly does a student assistant do?” I had never been a student assistant, though I had earned a little extra money in law school as a bouncer at a place called the Grizzly Bar.
“Grade tests, work with freshmen who are having problems.”
“Do you get paid for that?”
“Not enough,” he said. I smiled.
“What about his research and writing, were you involved with those things?”
“A little. We were always getting comments about the textbook, and one of my jobs was to organize those and make notes about changes we might consider in the next edition. Sometimes he’d ask me to get articles from the library or proofread something, things like that.”
“When was the next edition scheduled to be published?”
“There wasn’t a firm date, but it was still several years off. I think the last edition came out a few years ago.” I felt
the footlocker starting to sag a little under my weight, so I stood and faced Bartels.
“Was Professor Fontaine working on anything new before he died? Anything he hadn’t written about in the past?”
“Not that I know of. To be honest, I never saw him on campus last summer. He spent most of his time managing the farm.”
“How do you know that?” One of the most important questions an investigator can ask.
“I stayed here last summer and worked the harvest for him. He loved that farm; if a combine or tractor broke down, he’d be out there with a toolbox. Wouldn’t let anyone else work on ’em.”
“He just gave up academics for the summer?”
“For the most part. He’d read the Wall Street Journal every day, but that was like a hobby. He enjoyed charting his stocks and following the market.”
We talked another twenty minutes and he gave me his story. A native of Missoula, he was finishing his junior year and would work for the Fontaines again over the summer. Long-term plans included graduate school and a career in engineering.
When I couldn’t think of any more questions, I gave him my card and asked him to call me if he thought of anything that might be relevant. I was just leaving when I heard my name. “Mr. Keane?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s paying you to do all this?”
“My client was a friend of one of the victims,” I said. I didn’t tell him she was a math professor. Or that she lived in Boulder. Someone was killing mathematicians; I didn’t know who or why, but I didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to my client. Wouldn’t be prudent.
When I returned to the motel in the late afternoon, a man in a gray suit was waiting for me. My size, my age. The odds were two to one that he was the FBI’s resident agent in Walla Walla. “You must be J. P. Sartre,” he said with a smile. I approached my room and opened the door. He followed me, but stopped just outside the doorway. I removed my tie and began to unbutton my shirt. “I’m Wallace Gibbs,” he said. He removed his credentials from his suit pocket and held them out for me. “I’m the FBI’s resident agent in Walla Walla.”
“Sounds like a cush job,” I said. “I’ve been here two days and haven’t seen a single federal crime.”
“It’s a good gig,” he admitted. “Mind if I ask about your interest in Paul Fontaine?”
“You must be friends with Edna down at the courthouse.”
“She knows my number,” he said. I continued changing into casual clothes, even though the door was wide open for all the world—or at least all of Walla Walla—to see my Scooby-Doo boxer shorts. “I’m guessing you didn’t pay cash for the rental car,” he added, “so I can get your real name out at the airport if you don’t want to tell me.”
“My name’s Pepper Keane,” I said. “I’m a private investigator from Colorado.” I handed him one of my cards. “Tell Polk I said hi.”
“You know him?”
“Since law school.”
“I went to high school with him. Had our twenty-fifth reunion last year.”
“Was he a dick in high school?” I asked.
“Yeah, he was,” he replied. “And he hadn’t changed much when I saw him last year.” I pulled a pair of khaki shorts from my suitcase and said nothing. “Care to tell me the identity of your client?” he asked.
“Nope.”
He sort of grinned and nodded his head up and down. “Well,” he said as he began walking away, “it was good talking with you.” I began to close the door. “Hey,” he added, “I really enjoyed The Age of Reason.”
8
HOW WAS WALLA WALLA?” asked Scott.
“It’s ‘the city so beautiful they named it twice.’”
“Is that what they say?”
“That’s what it says on the police cars.”
“That’s better than ‘to serve and protect.’”
“It says that too.”
“Oh.” It was a sunny Wednesday morning and we were enjoying bagels and coffee in Boulder at Moe’s Bagels, on Broadway. Wearing shorts, sitting at an outside table. Moe’s is located in an old strip mall that has managed to thrive by embracing its 1950s architecture and leasing space only to trendy stores and restaurants. It’s a popular place.
“I hit it off with the detective up there,” I said. “Another ex-marine.” I summarized what I’d learned.
“Two million dollars is a lot of money for a math professor,” he said.
“He invested wisely.” I handed him my copy of the inventory of assets. He studied it.
“We should be in the wheat business,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Bought stocks instead of mutual funds. Kind of risky.”
“A couple of people told me he liked to play the market. Can’t argue with the results.”
“Guess not,” he said as he handed the document back to me.
“What did you learn?” I asked.
“You owe me,” he said.
“Noted.”
“Getting into the databases was easy, but lots of people have passed through the doors of those schools since seventy-seven, so I had to design a little program to search for matching names and Social Security numbers. I found three people who fit our parameters. Then I went back and dug up as much as I could on each of them.”
“I might have to promote you to vice president for information services,” I said. He bit into his bagel, then retrieved some notes from his portfolio.
“Number one is Gail Olgilve. Majored in math at Whitman and graduated in ninety-two. Did graduate work at Nebraska for two years, then on to Harvard for her doctorate. Now teaching in Madison, Wisconsin. She never took classes from Carolyn Chang, and her academic trail suggests she never had much interest in fractals or any other type of geometry.”
“I don’t think our killer’s a woman,” I said, recalling that Carolyn Chang had been raped.
“Me either, but I wanted to be thorough.” He went inside for more coffee, then struck up a conversation with a sophisticated-looking blonde at another table. In her early thirties, wearing a great tan, a little too much makeup, and lots of gold jewelry. Her German shepherd lay at her feet as she perused the Boulder Daily Camera. Scott began by asking the dog’s age, then used his Brad Pitt smile to get the basics. “She’s single,” he said when he finally returned.
“High maintenance,” I said. “Tell me about the other two.” He looked at me as if to say, Suit yourself, then glanced at his notes.
“The next name that pops up is Mark Sweeney. He spent a year at Whitman, but finished his undergraduate work at Harvard, where he too majored in math. Graduated in eighty-seven. Joins the navy’s nuclear submarine program and spends his life doing something that is not just a job, it’s an adventure.” He handed me some documents. They were copies of Sweeney’s officer-effectiveness reports.
“How in the hell did you—”
“Proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished, the navy rewards Sweeney’s outstanding performance by sending him to Nebraska to teach ROTC for three years. While there, he takes graduate classes from Carolyn Chang. He earns his master’s and goes back to driving subs. Does that for eighteen months, then lands an assignment at Annapolis. By this time, he’s a lieutenant commander.”
“Jesus, Scott, that’s great work.”
“I thought so.”
“We’ll want to take a hard look at him.”
“No need to,” he said. “He’s dead. Struck by lightning last August. Plenty of witnesses.” He handed me a newspaper article he’d downloaded describing the incident. Sweeney had caught a lightning bolt while jogging.
“How’d you learn he was dead?”
“Navy officers get effectiveness reports every six months, so there should’ve been another report in his file. That made me curious, so I called Annapolis and pretended to be an old classmate. A lady in the math department told me what had happened.”
“Death,” I said, “the ultimate alibi.”
&
nbsp; “Cheer up,” he said, “I haven’t told you about bachelor number three.”
“By all means.”
“Guy’s name is Thomas Tobias. Majors in math at Whitman and earns graduate degrees at Harvard. Despite his credentials, he can’t find a tenure-track position, so he takes a temporary appointment at Nebraska. After that, he returns to Whitman for a year to take the place of a professor on sabbatical. Then he lands a job at NYU.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “African bees stung him to death at Yankee Stadium just hours before Fontaine was murdered?”
“No,” he replied, “Tom’s case is considerably more interesting than that.”
“Why is that?” I asked. He leaned forward.
“Because the son of a bitch has disappeared from the face of the earth.”
Later that morning I broke down and called the High Country Clinic. The Sinus Infection from Hell had returned with a vengeance and I’d decided it was time to go nuclear on it. I’d never had reason to visit Nederland’s only clinic, but they got me in that afternoon. I completed my health history, told the receptionist I’d quit my HMO as a result of a billing dispute and would just pay cash, then considered the case as I sat in the waiting area.
Scott had done first-rate work. The database maintained by Harvard’s alumni office had alerted him to Tobias’s employment at NYU. He’d then phoned NYU and learned Tobias hadn’t taught there since the end of the school year a few years ago. He’d made no other telephone inquiries, but tried several commercial locator services, coming up empty each time. He’d even run Tobias through Social Security’s master death file. He’d offered to keep on it, but without knowing more about Tobias, Scott’s skills would be of limited value. At a minimum, I’d have to disregard the uncertainty principle and make some phone calls. Worst-case scenario, I was going to New York.
The doctor was behind schedule, so I picked up Being and Time and continued plodding through it one page at a time. Heidegger’s technical expression for man is “Dasein,” which means “being-there.” Dasein, Heidegger declared, is the only being capable of raising questions about existence. We are unique because our existence is an issue for us. He wrote:
