by Mark Cohen
She glanced at her watch. “Oh,” she said, “it’s almost one. Walk me to the admin building?”
“Delighted,” I said. It was a bit out of my way, but I enjoyed being with her. We walked along Broadway to the administration building, then said good-bye. I never mentioned Finn’s visit to my house. I had my own plan for him, and she didn’t need to know about it.
The man who cuts my hair is a funny old guy. Milt owns one of the last neighborhood barbershops in Boulder and still proudly displays his old union card. My lunch with Jayne had been shorter than expected, so I’d decided to stop for a haircut. He was engrossed in the sports section when I walked in.
“Wake up, old man,” I said, “I’m tired of looking like a freak.”
“Pepper Keane, the lawyer marine.”
“Can you drag yourself away from the baseball stats long enough to give me a haircut?”
“It’s almost touching your ears,” he said. “You got cash?”
“Always,” I said. He sprang out of his chair with the pep of a man fifty years younger. I had no trouble believing he had once been a welterweight prospect.
“Don’t take checks,” he said.
“I know,” I said. Milt knew exactly how much income he could report each year without having to accept reduced Social Security benefits.
I stepped up into the black chair and let Milt do his thing as he expertly analyzed the Rockies’ pitching woes and brought me up to date on the latest happenings at the VFW. “Ten bucks,” he said as I stepped down.
“That’s robbery,” I said.
“Then go to Super Clips next time,” he shot back. “Let one of those homos cut your hair.” I handed him twelve dollars and told him I’d be back in a few weeks. Lit up the truck, popped in a tape of old Motown tunes, and headed for Denver.
I arrived at Troy’s gym just before three. There were a few hardcores pumping iron, but the overall volume was low. I opened my locker, stripped to my boxers, and weighed myself. I was still on the scale when my brother and Jeff Smart came up behind me. “Two-fifteen,” my brother observed. “Maybe you ought to think about liposuction.”
“Five-eight,” I said. “Maybe you ought to think about elevator shoes.” Troy laughed and I stepped off the scale. “Good to see you, Jeff,” I said as I extended my hand. “It’s been a while.” He grew up in our neighborhood and has been one of my brother’s best friends since grade school. “I thought you were in Chicago,” I said as I donned green workout shorts and a white tank top.
“Moved back a year ago,” Jeff said.
“Still flying the friendly skies?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “A buddy and I leased a Learjet and started a charter service. It’s called Smart Charter. All we do is fly executives around.”
“Beats getting a real job,” my brother said.
“The Keane family motto,” I said. They waited patiently while I put on my running shoes. “In the words of Gary Gilmore,” I said as I finished tying the laces, “let’s do it.”
With that, we began a thorough leg and back workout. Squats, dead lifts, bent rows, dumbbell rows, knee extensions, ham curls, calf raises, and more squats. Jeff kept up well, but used less weight for most exercises. He stands six-one and probably weighs one-seventy. It’s the perfect build for the sport he enjoys most—skirt chasing.
Jeff has been a womanizer since puberty. In addition to being outgoing and fun loving, he has a look some women find attractive. He has a dark complexion—probably the result of his Jewish ancestry—and dark, curly hair, which he wears just slightly longer than is today fashionable.
We finished our workout with a short jog through the tree-lined streets of the Cherry Creek area. There were plenty of young women out—shopping, jogging, doing yard work—and Jeff didn’t miss a one. “How many ex-wives are you up to now?” I teased.
“Still just the two,” he replied. I had represented him in his second divorce, a nasty affair despite the short duration of the marriage and their lack of children. It had been policy at Keane, Simms & Mercante to refuse domestic cases of any kind, but handling such matters for friends and relatives is just part of being a lawyer. You can’t avoid it.
Troy’s gym came into sight as we neared the end of our trot. We had jogged about a mile. “You guys want to go out for a beer?” my brother asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll go, but I can’t drink,” Jeff said. “We’re flying to Boston tomorrow and takeoff is at zero five hundred.”
“Beats getting a real job,” my brother reminded him.
“How long are you going to be in Boston?” I asked.
26
THE COCKPIT OF A LEARJET 45 XR is designed to allow the pilot and copilot to work efficiently and in comfort, but the engineers had not anticipated that thick-limbed private eyes might also ride up front, so I sat on the floor. Jeff and his copilot/partner had agreed to let me bum a ride, but I had to remain in the cockpit so the six executives in the passenger cabin could have the privacy they were paying for.
We took off at 5:07 A.M. It was still dark, but hints of dawn were evident on Colorado’s eastern horizon as indigo gave way to pale blue. “Is this legal?” I asked as the aircraft leveled off.
“No,” Jeff replied. “You’re not even on the manifest, so we’re violating at least two FAA regulations.”
“If we go down,” said the copilot, “the extra body is gonna confuse the hell out of the NTSB.” Jay was a few years younger than Jeff, perhaps thirty, and looked like one of the Beach Boys. He stood about five-nine and was trim like a pilot should be. Blond hair, blue eyes, nice tan.
We continued east and my lack of sleep caught up with me. I’d risen at 3:00 A.M. to give myself time to drop the dogs at Troy’s and get to the airport. “Take a nap if you want,” Jeff said. “Won’t hurt our feelings.”
“I think I will,” I said. My only luggage was an overnight bag I’d been holding in my lap. Using that as a pillow, I let my head rest against the door and closed my eyes. I slept a little more than an hour. “Where are we now?” I asked.
“Closing in on Des Moines,” said Jeff. I nodded and decided to resume my struggle with Heidegger’s Being and Time, a self-imposed chore I’d been neglecting lately.
For any man, “Dasein,” in the world, Heidegger felt there are three possible modes of existence: undifferentiated, inauthentic, and authentic. A man in the undifferentiated mode never questions the meaning of his own life or faces up to the fact that his existence is defined by the culture fate threw him into. He never recognizes his own “thrown-ness,” but blindly accepts the existence he has inherited. If anything, I had questioned the meaning of my life way too fucking much, so the undifferentiated mode clearly did not describe me.
A man in the inauthentic mode recognizes that his existence is a result of coincidence—recognizes his own thrown-ness, but simply substitutes some other role for the life he inherited, not recognizing that both roles were created by the culture he was thrown into. I had left the Marine Corps for civilian life, and I had left the congestion of Denver for mountain life in Nederland, but I recognized that both roles existed within the American culture I’d been born into. I knew that if I’d been born in China, I’d have turned out to be a thick-limbed Chinese private eye, so I definitely recognized my own thrown-ness, and the inauthentic mode didn’t describe me either.
A man’s recognition of his own thrown-ness sometimes leads to what Heidegger called “anxiety.” He begins to think about death. When a man is unable to face up to the possibility of his own nonbeing or nothingness, Heidegger referred to this as “fallen-ness.” Instead of dealing with his anxiety, the man who experiences fallen-ness returns to the inauthentic mode.
But some who experience anxiety do face up to their own thrown-ness and their own death, and in so doing they accept responsibility for their own lives. Heidegger called this “care.” In caring for the world, each man makes the most of his own possibilities—even if tho
se possibilities were originally dictated by the culture he was thrown into. A man who adopts this attitude lives in what Heidegger called an “authentic mode of existence.”
I closed the book and put it down. Then I remembered the dream I’d had in Walla Walla. And I think I understood it. Joy hadn’t been shouting, “Dozen”; she’d been shouting, “Dasein.” The image of me falling to earth indicated a state of fallen-ness. I had changed my outer life, and I was happier, but I still hadn’t found a way to deal with death or the fear that there is no God and life is meaningless. And Joy had been carrying a CARE package. Had she been trying to tell me how to pull myself out of my state of fallen-ness?
“You’re awful quiet,” Jeff said. “Whatcha thinking about?”
“Falling,” I said.
“We’re not going to go down,” he said, “but if we do, at least you know you’ve got good genes for it.” A joking reference to the fact that my brother had walked away from his parachute mishap. I laughed.
We landed at Logan Airport just after ten o’clock local time. I had less than twenty-four hours to work with. The execs wanted to leave early the next morning so they could be back in Denver in time for Friday’s doubleheader at Coors Field.
Jeff offered to share a room, but I wasn’t sure where events would take me and declined. He gave me the number of their motel in case I changed my mind and told me where to meet them Friday morning. I bid them farewell, then found the nearest airport men’s room. To avoid taking a hanging bag, I had worn a suit. I put on a tie to complete the look, cleaned my black wing tips with a paper towel, then stepped outside and hailed a cab. “Harvard University,” I said.
“You a professor?” the driver asked. He had an admirable beer gut and a thick New England accent. White, early fifties.
“Not in this lifetime,” I said.
“Where you frahm?”
“Colorado.”
“What brings you to Bawston?” Great, I had drawn a talkative cabbie.
“Quick business trip,” I said. Before he could ask my line of work, I asked about seafood. He fancied himself an expert and described six or seven restaurants as he navigated through heavy mid-morning traffic.
“Hahvad University,” he said as we rolled through a yellow light. I looked to my left and saw several Georgian buildings constructed of redbrick and covered with ivy. To my right were two coffee shops, two bookstores, one Kinko’s, and a body-piercing parlor, all with apartments above. “Where you want out?” the cabbie asked. “I’ll getcha as close as I cahn.”
“This’ll be fine,” I said. He guided the cab to a stop beside the body-piercing place. I paid the fare, tipped him, and thanked him for the ride. A display in the piercing-shop window caught my attention and I decided to take a closer look. Dozens of photos of satisfied customers were taped to the plate glass, each proudly displaying a safety pin or stud in a nipple, tongue, or other body part. It frightened me to think some had probably achieved a perfect score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
I crossed the street and began walking the campus perimeter in search of a directory or a map. It was a typical campus, though I noticed more political literature than I’d ever seen in Boulder. Chess seemed popular; I observed people playing on benches as well as outdoor tables designed specifically for the game. I don’t enjoy chess, but it wasn’t a bad day for it. About seventy degrees and cloudy. A bit muggy by Colorado standards, but that could be said about the entire Eastern Seaboard.
Summer or not, the math department at Harvard was alive with activity. Instructors lectured, small groups congregated in halls for impromptu discussions, and graduate students worked diligently in small offices or cubicles. I located the departmental office on the third floor, introduced myself to a trio of young secretaries, and stated my purpose. The consensus was that mine was a matter for the chairman’s secretary, Mrs. Rutherford.
I found her at an executive desk at the back of the room, immediately outside the chairman’s office. She was in her late fifties. Tall and thin, her gray hair feathered in a short, but attractive, style. She wore reading glasses and a green knit dress. She was proofreading a thick document, red pencil in hand, when I appeared.
“Excuse me,” I said. She continued scanning until she came to the end of a paragraph, then folded her hands and looked up at me with the presence of a marine colonel.
“If you’re here about the teaching position,” she said, “applications were due yesterday.”
“I doubt I’m qualified for it,” I said. I set my bag down and handed her one of my cards. She studied it, then allowed a barely noticeable smile.
“I should have known,” she said. “You’re too well dressed to be a mathematician.”
“I’m looking into the death of Donald Underwood,” I said.
“One of the few gentlemen in this department,” she remarked.
“Do you have five minutes?” I asked. “I was told you were someone I might want to speak with.”
“I suppose so,” she said. She stood and removed her glasses. “We’ll use the conference room. Leave your bag behind my desk.”
I accepted coffee—I was still tired—and followed her to a small and unimpressive conference room where I explained that I was investigating the possibility that Underwood’s death might have been related to the deaths of two other mathematicians. “I’m familiar with that,” she said. “The FBI interviewed a number of people here.”
“So I’m told,” I said. I had read the interview summaries, but I planned to pursue a somewhat different line of questioning.
“I never put much stock in the suicide theory,” she continued. “That dear man wasn’t the least bit depressed and, even if he had been, he loved his sons far too much to take his own life.” I let a few seconds pass as I pondered how to broach the next subject.
“I spoke with the detective who investigated this case,” I said, “and he suggested Professor Underwood’s death might have been an accident.”
“I’ve heard those nasty rumors,” she said, “and I don’t put much stock in them either.” Mrs. Rutherford wasn’t shy about making her opinions known.
“Why not?”
“Mr. Keane,” she said, “the man was a mathematics professor at the most respected university in the nation. I should think he’d be smart enough not to inadvertently hang himself.” I nodded and moved on, asking a litany of questions on topics ranging from Underwood’s personality to her familiarity with E-Prime. She described him as polite, soft-spoken, and laid back. She was familiar with E-Prime, but said nobody in the math department was particularly fond of it. “Mathematicians frequently use the verb ‘is,’” she explained. “Two plus two is four.”
Despite her abrupt manner, it was clear that Mrs. Rutherford remembered Underwood with genuine affection. When we returned to her desk and I asked for the names of colleagues Underwood had been close to, she produced a printed list of the department’s faculty and placed red marks next to a half dozen names. “Since your time is limited,” she said, “I suggest you start with these six.” She handed me the list. “I’ll instruct them to cooperate fully.” Thus assured, I asked if I could leave my bag and began my journey through the mathematics department.
I first spoke with a computer science professor named Singh. Mrs. Rutherford had already contacted him by the time I arrived. He was from India and had a dark complexion accented by jet black hair. Six feet tall, thin build, love handles developing on the waist. “It’s a shame about Donald,” he said. “We miss him very much.” I asked some questions to gain a sense of Singh and his relationship with Underwood, then turned to more specific matters.
“Professor Underwood specialized in fractal geometry?”
“Yes, he was quite well known in that field.”
“I read his articles,” I said, “and I noticed one of them concerned neural networks.”
He smiled. “Donald and his neural networks.”
“Is that something which interested him?”
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br /> “Neural networks are simple programs,” he said, “but they fascinated Donald.”
“Why is that?”
“Donald was consumed by a desire to demonstrate the usefulness of fractal geometry in the real world, and neural networks offer one way to do that. With sufficient data, a neural network can recognize patterns and assist in predicting the future behavior of certain phenomena.”
“Things like the weather?”
“Precisely.”
“What about economic markets,” I continued, “did Professor Underwood ever attempt to apply his knowledge to business or economic issues?”
“Ah,” he said, “you should talk with the people at NPS.”
“NPS?”
“New Paradigm Systems. It’s an economic consulting firm. Donald did some work for them. They’ll tell you all about neural networks and economic markets.”
“Did you tell the FBI about this?” I asked.
“The gentlemen never asked,” he said.
By midafternoon I had interviewed five men and a diminutive woman who could’ve been Donna Shalala’s twin sister. All agreed that Underwood had not seemed depressed prior to his death. All denied knowledge of any kinky side to his personality. Three mentioned New Paradigm Systems. I hailed another cab.
New Paradigm Systems was located in a nicely landscaped office park in the Boston suburbs. The building was five stories of greenish marble and smoky glass. A young security guard at an octagonal black kiosk near the entrance asked me to sign in. I told him I had business with NPS and he directed me to the fifth floor. Large metallic letters above the entrance to the suite spelled out “New Paradigm Systems.” Smaller letters beneath that announced the company’s line of work—“Economic Consulting.”
