by Linda Barnes
I’d just finished working a case in which I’d managed to frustrate a bunch of survivalists cum terrorists. The Feebies, no less, had warned me to be on the lookout for revenge-crazed looneytunes. But the group supposedly out for my blood was the sort that wouldn’t associate with black people, much less admit them as prized members and give them the choice assignment of taking out the half-Jewish bitch who’d foiled their finest scheme.
I used to be a cop, across the river in Boston. I worked Major Crimes and I worked Homicide, and there are no doubt former and future felons who hold a grudge. But I was pretty sure most of them would do a better job of shadowing. Truly, this guy was not good at his work. If he was an accomplished felon, I was Queen of the Junior Prom.
He stayed too close, and then he stayed too far. He didn’t know the basics, like walking on the opposite side of the street. He didn’t use a shiner, a small mirror, so when he wanted to check where I was he had to turn, risk a full stare, and look straight at me. He was strictly an amateur but bird-dog stubborn, and extremely patient while I visited HMV and sorted through stacks of bargain CDs.
The gent also looked prosperous. If I’d sent him away and he’d come out of jail dressing the way he did, he owed me thanks. I considered strolling over to a beat cop, informing him that the elegant black man was tailing me, but I knew too many Cambridge cops to relish the horselaugh that would follow. Plus, I take pride in handling my own problems. My shadow didn’t seem like much of a threat so far, but I wasn’t about to lead him home or walk solo down some dark alley where he’d feel free to pull a gun if such was his intent. I could have lost him easily, could have hailed a cab or jumped a bus. Instead, I marched him around the Square while considering my options, then entered the Coop at the Mass. Ave. door, quickly stepped to the right into an open elevator, and pressed the button for the third floor.
As the doors narrowed, I saw my man rush inside and take note of the departing elevator. I figured he’d wait for the next trip, and wait a while, too, since there’s only the single car. I had plenty of time to turn left twice and secrete myself in an alcove surrounded by books on medicine and a handy fire extinguisher. Hidden from view, I stuffed my parcels into my backpack, turned my reversible jacket inside-out, blue to gray, and yanked a knitted cap over my red hair. I try to be prepared. Me and the Boy Scouts. It took him four minutes to elbow his way off the elevator and start tracking me down.
I stayed behind him, veering from extreme left to far right, shielded by high bookcases, feeling like a crafty fox who’d turned the table on the hounds. The guy was tenacious, I’ll give him that. He didn’t approach the information desk or ask any Coop shoppers if they’d seen me. Instead, he walked to the back of the store, glanced down the curving staircase, decided I hadn’t taken it, and charged across the third-floor pedestrian bridge, past the restrooms and the phones into the connected Palmer Street Coop. There, he checked out the aisles of the textbook department, then worked his way down the floors of the Palmer Street building. Dorm furnishings, greeting cards, Harvard insignia bears and chairs, sweatshirts and baby booties.
He took the seven steps down into the Brattle Street building, exited, did a brief survey of pedestrian traffic before stopping to consult a Rastafarian street musician who commanded a view of the door. I stayed put behind a circular rack of crimson insignia bathrobes. The guitar player shook his head slowly, dreadlocks wriggling like snakes, and accepted a cash donation. The black man re-entered the Coop, passing within ten feet of my hiding place. I followed him back up the stairs, across Palmer Street, and into the Mass. Ave. building again, where he took the elevator to the third floor and started working his way down through the huge bookstore, philosophy to periodicals to fiction.
He’d reached non-fiction before I grew impatient and approached. When he saw me, a look of relief washed over his face and crinkled the corners of his dark eyes. Then, when he realized I was walking straight towards him, the relief was replaced by panic. He grabbed a book off a pile and buried his nose in it. He was holding The New Joy of Sex upside down.
Maybe if he’d picked another book, or if a crease of anxiety hadn’t furrowed his brow, or if he hadn’t been quite so good-looking, I’d have shoved him against a wall, demanded ID, and threatened him with the cops. As it was, I made do with a firm hand on his arm.
“Store Security,” I said. “Come along—”
“You are not.” His low voice was indignant.
“Gotcha. How do you know?”
He pursed his lips and thought about fleeing. He was my height, maybe an inch shorter. Six feet, narrow frame. With the shoes he had on, I didn’t think he could outrun me.
“Miss Carlyle,” he said. “May I buy you a drink?”
“Isn’t it a little early?” I didn’t return his smile. He knew my name and I didn’t know his, which upset my sense of balance.
“Coffee? Tea?”
“If following me around is your idea of a cool pickup ploy—”
“This is, um, a professional matter.” His fingers discovered he was still clasping the book and replaced it automatically on the table. “It’s just I’d rather no one—I’d rather not be seen at the places I usually—places where I’m known—”
The Square is always crowded, the tables in the cafés jammed too close for private conversation. I considered and rejected several convenient spots. A professional matter. My home doubles as my office, but like I said before, I wasn’t about to guide a stalker, even an inadequate amateur, to my front door. It was chilly for early May, the hard winter refusing to release its grip, but warm enough to camp on a park bench or stroll by the river. I discarded both venues. If the man didn’t want to risk being seen with me, neither fit the bill.
I considered simply walking away. Curiosity won out. “Come with me,” I said.
Passim is a music club on Palmer Street, the alley-like stretch between Church and Brattle. It’s famous as the reincarnation of the old Club 47, where Dylan and Baez used to play, even though the actual club was in a storefront on Mount Auburn. It’s open for lunch, but secluded and sparsely populated in the afternoon. The small stage and tightly packed basement tables are approached by an outside staircase. The staff knows me, because I’m a semi-regular. I can leave the folky stuff alone, but if somebody’s playing the blues, especially the old Delta blues, I’m usually in the audience. They don’t sell alcohol or let you smoke, but where else can you hear the Nields one night, Paul Rishell and Little Annie Raines the next?
Skinny Sharon, on the desk, gave me a nod. I huddled with her briefly, and then my pursuer and I zigzagged past the kitchen, down the narrow hall near the bathrooms, and turned right into the back room where the talent hangs between sets. I’ve used it before; it’s nothing much—a couch, a couple of chairs, yellowed posters on the walls. Two hard-shell guitar cases were propped haphazardly against the sofa and the place smelled of cigarettes and stale beer, indicating that the talent indulged in vices forbidden to the audience.
I flipped on the overhead light and blinked in the harsh glare. “You want coffee?”
He gave his surroundings a careful once-over. “Actually, no. You?”
“I don’t know your name.”
He gazed around the small room like he was searching for the hidden videocam. “Can we leave it like that for a while?”
“A short while.”
I lowered myself into a folding chair and he did the same, both of us avoiding the enforced intimacy of the sprung sofa. The room was so tiny that our knees almost touched. If you could wipe some of the worry off his face, he’d be better than good-looking, I thought. His face was narrow, his forehead high, his nose broad. Angular cheekbones and a strong chin. I’d deliberately brushed against him in the narrow hallway, to ensure that he wasn’t carrying in a clip at his waist. He smelled of spicy after-shave, and his tailor hadn’t allowed room for a shoulder holster.
“Something I can do for you?” I asked.
He took a deep
breath, the kind a man might take before plunging over a cliff into a cold lake of uncertain depth. “Before I say anything, please tell me about your ties to Harvard.”
My eyebrows rose. “You’ve been tailing the wrong person.”
“Seriously, you don’t have any?”
More than one local newspaper columnist snidely refers to Harvard as “WGU,” the “World’s Greatest University.” Some tourists seem to think Harvard and Cambridge are interchangeable, one and the same, with MIT tossed in as a bonus. The students certainly think they own the place, and the Harvard Corporation actually does own a considerable chunk of the city to which I pay property taxes. Red-brick buildings and ivy-covered walls line both the narrow streets and the major thoroughfares. A constant influx of students keeps the stores humming, the rents astronomical, and the foreign language bookstores in business.
“I walk on their sidewalks. I cross the quadrangle, so I guess I walk on their grass, too. I’ve used a book or two from Widener, but I swear I returned them.”
“You didn’t go there?”
I’d worked nights as a cabbie to afford down-scale UMass–Boston. “Nope.”
“What about your house? Harvard owns property all over that area.”
Bastard knows where I live. He must have picked me up there this morning. I didn’t like that. I’d seen him for the first time at the post office.
“Not my property,” I said.
“Ever do any work for them? Ever take a class there?”
I run a one-person private eye outfit, and I doubt Harvard has taken notice even though I’m perched in their back yard. I don’t have a sign on my front door. The neighbors would never approve of such a thing, some of them having graduated from the hallowed halls of the WGU.
The extent of my Harvard connection … Let’s see; I used to park illegally behind the Ed School before they put in the raised-arm sentry system. I figured he didn’t need to know that, so I simply shook my head no.
“Good. Excellent. Next, I need to know about confidentiality. I’ve never consulted a private investigator before, and I need to know to what degree I can be frank about my requirements.”
“I’m a private citizen, not an officer of the court. If I’m working for an attorney, then his privileges can extend to cover me as well.”
I wasn’t sure what this guy did for a living, but whatever it was it paid. His understated clothes were expensive, his hands well kept, the fingernails manicured. His hands were ringless and very pale, the palms paler than my own.
I’ve been going out with an African-American, an FBI agent temporarily on assignment in Boston, and the paleness of Leon’s palms was nowhere near as pronounced.
My stalker bit his lip. “Therefore you could be compelled to testify in a court of law.”
“Yes.”
“Damn.” He worried his lips some more and seemed at a loss as to how to continue. He had faint lines at the corners of his drooping eyes. I placed him at forty to forty-five, give or take a couple years.
“Are you ready to tell me your name?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
A clatter of dishes and silverware penetrated the soundproofing, reminded me that people were finishing up lunch not fifteen feet away. Sounded like a hapless waiter had dropped a tray in the kitchen.
I said, “Often prospective clients consult me about hypothetical matters. Or they might talk about something that’s happened to a friend.”
“I have a friend,” he said, leaning forward eagerly, “who is being blackmailed. He is—he doesn’t know what to do.”
“Your friend could pay up,” I said sharply. Then I took a deep breath and decided I wasn’t behaving in a manner likely to produce paid employment. I was behaving more like a pissed-off woman who didn’t enjoy being followed around. “Sorry. I was thinking that your ‘friend’ could have made an appointment to see me.”
“I was—I should have—I didn’t mean to alarm you.”
“You didn’t alarm me. Go on.”
“About the blackmail. My friend has paid. He thought it was over, but … it’s more than that … It’s the threat. I find—my friend finds he can no longer live with the constant threat of exposure.”
I don’t know what I’d expected—police harassment, a missing friend, an unfaithful wife—but blackmail took me by surprise. Blackmail is an unusual complaint. Blackmail isn’t what it used to be. Secrets aren’t what they used to be. What with confessional TV, and talk-radio jocks hosting gay cross-dressers and their second wives, and internet chat rooms devoted to perversion, it takes a certain type of deed to provoke modern blackmail, and more importantly, a certain type of person to attract it.
“Tell me more about your friend,” I said.
“He is in a position of trust.”
“Working with money?”
“Working with young people.”
“Very young people, or people the age you might encounter at Harvard?”
The mention of Harvard was enough to make his hands clench. “Do you know how few tenured faculty positions exist? Tenured positions at fine universities?”
“I can see where your friend might want to keep his job.”
“He does, believe me. He does.”
The man probably looked familiar because I’d seen him around the Square. A Harvard professor. Not one of the famous ones, not a local celebrity like Henry Louis Gates. Still, the quality of my prospective clientele was on the rise.
“Was your friend’s action illegal?” I asked.
“What action?”
“I assume your friend is being blackmailed for a reason.”
A fine sheen of sweat was visible on the man’s forehead and I wondered if he was going to balk at detailing his imaginary friend’s offense.
“No, not illegal. I—my friend, upon consideration, would call it immoral—although considerations of morality—I don’t know, times changed, didn’t they? The rules changed, somewhere along the line. Sex was—is—always about power, but we—we deluded ourselves, told ourselves how irresistible we were, told ourselves bullshit stories. I deluded myself. I thought of myself as an individual, a man, myself, not some powerful god-like professor.”
I didn’t interrupt, but I didn’t like the way the conversation was going.
“She was of age, and in fact, she initiated the, er, contact.” He looked me directly in the eye. “I should say, the affair, the relationship. What the hell do you call it without sounding like an idiot or a cad? Understand that my friend is not proud of his behavior.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your friend, is he the Master of a House?”
“No.”
“Is he some whoop-de-do professor of Ethics?”
“No.”
“What I hear, his behavior is absolutely normal, par for the course, unexceptional.” I was understating the case; from what I’d heard, Harvard profs could sleep with assorted students of both sexes, not to mention barnyard animals, pay for prostitutes, call it research, and get away with a polite slap on the wrist if caught with their pants around their ankles.
“Times have changed,” he said. “And my own particular circumstances make me vulnerable.”
“Tell me about them. Beginning with your name.”
“Please try to understand. I find myself unable to concentrate, unable to contemplate the future. I had everything, but I didn’t know I had it, and now that I could lose it, I find myself behaving irrationally.”
Irrational was right. A Harvard professor chasing an ex-cop through the Square.
He went on. “I find myself making foolish promises, going to church more often than I have since I was a child, begging forgiveness of some supreme being I’m not even certain I believe in. I feel out of control, in a way I can only compare to a mental illness—Excuse me. This is beside the point.”
“The point being—”
“Leonard Wells mentioned you.”
Ah. Leonard Wells is the FBI agent I’m
dating. When I met him, he was calling himself Lee and I was pretending to be Carla, both of us working undercover on the Dig. “You asked Leon for help?”
“No, but he mentioned a connection to an investigator and I thought of it as a possibility, a place to begin. I was taken aback when—”
“What?”
“I assumed you would be a black woman. When I followed you—I—I suppose I was trying to decide whether it made a difference.”
“Does it?”
“Doesn’t it always?”
His tone held me. It wasn’t bitter, more flat and certain. Matter-of-fact. I let his words fade. It didn’t seem there was anything I could say in response.
“Leon trusts you,” he said. “Could you find out who this blackmailer is? I need to find out who’s doing this to—to my friend.”
“Then what? You planning to go to the police and have your blackmailer arrested?”
“Of course not. I’ll talk to him, to her. I’ll explain myself. Surely there must be some way I can stop this person from ruining my life.”
“I have a feeling blackmailers aren’t big on chit-chat.”
“I’m an academic, a talker by profession. I’m a very persuasive man. Don’t you think so?”
I almost smiled. I found his earnestness and naïveté touching, and I wondered how he’d come to know Leon. “You’re telling me you have no idea who the blackmailer is?”
“I don’t. I—my friend was discretion itself. He told no one, he never met the woman on campus.”
“Told, met. You’re speaking in the past tense.”
“The affair is over.”
“Because of the blackmail.”
“It ended before the blackmail began.”
“If your friend was discretion itself, we have to assume that the woman—his student?”
“His student. Yes, but she seemed so much older, so mature for her years, so intriguing. I can’t explain or excuse—” He studied his hands and adjusted his posture in the rickety chair. “My friend could never explain his infatuation satisfactorily to me.”
“If I took on the investigation, I’d start with the woman. Would she be doing this, as a kind of revenge? Was it a bad breakup?”
