She had arranged some chairs in a corner of the room, and we sat together to talk. "The dean went through the lists of Professor Dakota's classes from the last two years and picked a few of us to talk to you. Of course, lots of the students have already gone home. I don't know how many are still here."
Gloria took a deep breath, apparently having difficulty saying what came next.
"The easiest way for me to start off is to tell you straight out that I hated Professor Dakota. Despised her. Shall I go on, or are there specific questions you want to ask me?"
I tried not to show my surprise. I didn't want to stifle what might be a candid portrait from an intelligent source. "Why don't you just tell us everything you think we should know, and we'll take it from there."
"Professor Dakota joined the faculty at King's during my junior year, from Columbia. All my friends who'd studied with her there thought the world of her. Brilliant scholar, great instructor. Told me not to miss the chance to get to know her. I even sat in the back of her classroom once or twice the first semester 'cause everyone raved about how she brought the past to life. I had a double major at King's-history and poli sci-so it was a natural for me to sign up for her courses. It almost cost me admission to law school."
That was about the same time that I, too, had first met Lola Dakota. Maybe her domestic problems had created a change in her nature. I knew that kind of stress could alter a victim's entire personality.
"Second semester, junior year. 'Gotham Government-New York City, 1850 to 1950.' Sounded good to me, and I needed it for my major credits. I worked like a dog on my research paper. It may seem immodest, Miss Cooper, but I hadn't had a grade below A-minus since I started college. I was terrified about getting into a good law school, coming from King's, since it's so experimental, without any record of achievement by its students. All I could do was try to get as close to a four-point-oh grade average as possible, and study hard for my law boards.
"Dakota gave me a D. Only one I'd ever had in my life."
"Shit. I used to go home with one of those every semester. Stood for Damn Good, I told my old man." Chapman was giving her the full press now, putting her at ease, so he could ferret out whatever she had to tell us.
How could I measure her complaint? Every disgruntled student who'd ever fallen short wanted to blame the teacher for the grade. "Did you appeal it?"
"The dean of students almost drowned in appeals from Dakota's classes. She'd pick one or two pets for the semester- usually guys-and the rest of us would struggle to stay on board. We used to joke that she had a twenty-four-character alphabet, which began with the letter C."
Mike leaned forward, one elbow on his knee, supporting his chin in his hand. "Did you know she was in the middle of a pretty ugly marital situation at the time? That her husband had-"
"I didn't know she was still married till I read the story in the obituary. We thought she was having an affair with another faculty member."
Mike stayed focused on Gloria's face. "Who was that?" "Oh, no one in particular. You know how college students are. Anytime we saw two of them together in the faculty lounge, or she showed up five minutes late for class, rumors would spread. Goofy stuff, and we knew it."
"Like what kind of rumors? What names do you remember?" "One week it might have been Professor Lockhart-he teaches American history. Then it was one of the science guys-biochem, I think. I can picture his nerdy little face-wire-rimmed glasses with urine-colored lenses. When Recantati showed up this fall to take the temporary presidency, some of my friends thought she was slobbering all over him. Every now and then someone tossed a student's name into the mix."
"But did you hate her as much before you got the lousy grade?" "There was something very mean-spirited about her. In the classroom, actually. She loved performing, so we'd be mesmerized during lectures. All the detail she had and her willingness to give it to us so openly. But then she'd snap into a rage for no reason at all, especially on the days that we had to make presentations. Maybe some of the kids weren't as smart as her students used to be at Columbia. Maybe she took out on us the fact that she'd been asked to leave that faculty and start up a program at King's.
"But there was no excuse for the way Professor Dakota made fools out of us. Made students stand up for ten or fifteen minutes at a clip, firing questions at us about obscure political events of 1893. Questions nobody could answer unless you'd gone beyond the course materials and guessed correctly which year she might focus on that particular day. She reduced a couple of my classmates to tears, and she seemed to enjoy doing that. That sign on Dakota's door-badlands? She relished that reputation."
"Was Charlotte Voight one of those students? Was she in your class?"
"Who?"
"A junior, the one who disappeared from school last April."
"Never heard of her."
"What do you know about the drug scene there?"
"Like every other college campus, it was huge. Just happens not to be my thing, but you can find plenty of people to talk to about that."
"D'you have anything to do with the dig that Professor Dakota was working on, on Roosevelt Island?"
"No, but Skip knows about that. Professor Lockhart." Gloria blushed again, this time as though she had slipped in a too familiar reference.
"The one you said Dakota was rumored to be involved with?"
She twisted the ringlets behind her right ear. "Well, that's one rumor I know wasn't true. I mean, I was involved with Skip, junior year. We were sort of having an affair."
That helped account for the A in American history, I guessed. "Mind telling us about him?"
"I mean, he was single. There wasn't anything wrong with it." Gloria was looking at Mike for approval now. She seemed proud of herself, in that foolish way that girls sometimes are when they take a lover under inappropriate circumstances. "But I'd been seeing him since the summer after my sophomore year. That's why I confronted him about the stories that he and Professor Dakota were involved." She looked so earnest. "I guess I was jealous." "What did he tell you?"
"Not to be ridiculous. Skip told me that he used to spend a lot of time with her, because their intellectual interests were the same. But he said she was a real gold digger. Not his type at all."
"What did he mean, gold digger? Was that his word for her, or yours?" From what I had learned during my initial investigation of Lola's marital situation, she seemed to have a very comfortable nest egg of her own. She had invested her money intelligently, with Ivan's professional assistance at first, through all the years of their marriage. She didn't seem to have a penchant for jewelry or fancy clothes, as I had observed in our many meetings, and it was obvious that she hadn't spent big dollars on decorating her new apartment.
"It was something like that. Treasure hunter. Gold digger. That's all I could get out of him, really. You can ask Skip yourself. I'm sure you'll be speaking with him. He's part of that multidisciplinary project they were working on at some old loony bin. Just don't tell him I told you about our relationship, okay? The administration wouldn't approve."
"So what was the buzz on campus before everyone left town? Who killed Lola Dakota?"
"I went to the service on Friday night. Not 'cause I was heartbroken about the professor. But a lot of my old friends were going to be there, so we figured we'd go out together before everybody split town.
"By midnight, after a few drinks, we all began to look guilty to each other." Gloria laughed. "A few of my friends-the ones who'd done well in class-defended her. The rest of us had gripes to air and stories to tell. A lot of guys figure it's just some bum from the neighborhood who knocked her off. Everybody worries about getting mugged up here. It's a constant problem, on campus and off. One guy was a suitemate of that kid who hanged himself the next night. Julian? You know who he is? That's how I heard about Lola and her crazy husband." "Heard what?"