"Let's begin with Shreve. Nan puts him back at the beginning of all this. Why don't we see how helpful he is?"
Mike walked past the lieutenant's empty office and returned with a man I guessed to be in his late forties and dressed, like Mike, in jeans and a crewneck sweater, carrying a cardboard container of coffee that had been set out in the waiting area for our guests from King's College. Before we could be introduced, he reached for my hand. "Good morning. I'm Winston Shreve. You must be Ms. Cooper."
I pointed to one of the chairs usually occupied by the hapless or homeless who were being interviewed by Mike on a murder case. The stuffing was hanging out of the seat pad and two of the four rollers on the chair legs were missing, so it scraped unevenly along the floor as Shreve moved it forward to rest his folded elbows on the desk.
About all I knew was that he was an anthropologist. "Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself, Professor? We're trying to get a picture of the group of people who worked most closely with Lola Dakota."
"Anything you'd like to hear." He started with his credentials, which had been cited to us the previous evening by Nan Rothschild. His accent sounded vaguely foreign. Shreve's responses to my questions were quite direct. "No, I was born on Long Island. Oyster Bay. But you've got a good ear. My family took me abroad when I was an adolescent. I did what you would call high school in England, before coming back here for university. Harvard."
His eyes moved back and forth between us. "You seem to know some of this already. Shall I go on?"
"Till we stop you," Chapman said with a grin. "From London to Paris to King's College? Sounds like a downhill run to me."
"I'm young enough to take chances, Detective. There's something quite exciting about an experimental school, about the opportunity to build an entire department and all the programming from scratch. They've already attracted quite a bit of intellectual talent, wouldn't you agree?"
"Can't say I'd recognize it. I'm the beauty of this operation. Coop's the brains. If she tells me you guys are smart, I'll accept it. Talk to me about Lola."
"You knew her?" Shreve asked, surprised by the familiarity of Chapman's first-name reference.
"Coop's actually the one who worked with her. I'm in charge of the homicide investigation. How well did you know her?"
"Well enough to recruit her for King's. And to consider her a good friend. Lance and Lily, they're her-" "Yeah, we know."
"They asked me to say a few words at the service yesterday. I guess I was as close to her as anyone at the college." "Have you known her long?"
"I'd say almost ten years. I'm forty-six now, a few years older than Lola was. Met her the first time at the Aspen Institute. We were each delivering a paper at one of those summer panels. Seemed we had a lot of the same interests, professionally."
"How about personally?" Chapman jumped ahead, trying to speed the process of getting some body fluid to Bob Thaler's office. It wasn't subtle.
"Were we ever intimate, Detective? Yes, but it's been quite a while. The summer we first met, Lola and Ivan were separated. She had walked out on him the first time he lifted a hand to her."
I tried to recall the history of her marriage, as Lola had detailed it to me during our first few meetings. She had never mentioned any formal separation, but all the statistics about domestic violence supported the probability that several had occurred. In most abusive situations, there are seven failed elopements-seven unsuccessful efforts to split from the abuser-before a woman completes the move.
"How long did your relationship last?"
"The better part of a year. Long distance and infrequent, at that. I went to Paris to work on a project that just opened to the public last year. Are you familiar with it? There were extensive ruins that had been built on top of several times throughout the centuries, right at the front of the plaza where Notre Dame stands. Lutetia, it was called. The original Roman village that was settled on the He de la Cite in medieval times."
Interesting, I thought. Nan had likened Blackwells' midriver positioning to the He de la Cite, too.
"Lola was teaching at Columbia then. Used to find any excuse she could to fly over to France. Field trips, student holidays, academic seminars on international government. Boondoggles of every kind. I had a charming flat on the Left Bank, near the university, between Luxembourg Gardens and those amazing bookshops along the Seine. We spent some great weekends there."
"Ah, we'll always have Paris, right, Shreve?" Doing his best Bogie, Mike couldn't help taking a shot at the romantic reverie. The professor didn't catch the reference. "What broke it up?"
"Lola and Ivan had gotten back together. And I'd fallen madly in love with a Frenchwoman from Toulouse. Six months later I was married. I'm a French citizen now, in fact."
"So your wife lives here with you?"
"No, she doesn't. Giselle's in France. The marriage lasted eight years. But our divorce is quite amicable, and you're very welcome to talk to her, if that's what you mean. We have two young children, whom Giselle wanted to raise in her country. And she wanted to finish her degree at the Sorbonne, too. She was my student when we married, so that meant she had to drop out of the classes. She'll finish her studies and graduate in the spring."
"But she knew Lola Dakota?"
"Certainly. Whenever Ivan and Lola traveled to Europe, the four of us spent time together. It was no problem for Giselle. I'd been single when I hooked up with Lola. But I don't think Ivan ever knew anything about our relationship. Open-mindedness is not his strong suit.
"She and I always remained close. I'm to blame, if you will, for inviting her to come to King's to teach. I assumed she would have a much greater opportunity to become a department head here. Fewer entrenched alumni to battle with over her unorthodox or, shall I say, more innovative ideas, less heritage to have to embrace than back at Columbia. Lola could rub some of the traditionalists the wrong way."
"How about you? D'you ever battle with her? Get on the receiving end of her tough streak?"
"I take it you've been talking to some of the students. Lola Dakota-the professor-was a perfectionist. If these kids weren't applying themselves according to her standards, she was ruthless." He was somber now. "My department had little to do with hers, in general. But because of the Blackwells project, many of the interns from King's worked under our joint supervision. We planned a number of courses that we cotaught, combining the anthropological features of the island with the politics of the period.
"But I can't remember fighting with Lola about anything significant. On which end of the project should the dig begin? Should a student be graded a B, or did we throw in a plus or minus? How much time should be spent talking to descendants of some of the inhabitants?"
"When's the last time you slept with her?"
"She'd admire your directness, Detective," Shreve said with some hesitation. "More than I do. Eight years ago, to be exact. In her cheap hotel room on Boulevard St-Germain-des-Pres. "And it was good for me, if you want to know that, too."
I tried to get us back on course. "Did you know a girl named Charlotte Voight, Professor?"
He straightened in his chair and put both hands on the back of his neck. "Sad case, Charlotte. She was in one of my classes last spring, when she suddenly walked away from all this." He looked back at me. "Now, she was a source of disagreement between Lola and me. I thought the girl had a lot of intelligence to be channeled, and a creative imagination."
"With or without the aid of hallucinogens?"
"Her drug use was no secret, Detective. But when she was clearheaded and engaged, as I think she was in my classwork, I thought we had a chance of saving Charlotte. Lola didn't see it that way. Came down on her hard. Some of us thought that helped drive the child off, send her over the edge, emotionally speaking."