"How about a short one? How about a sighting?"
"I know I saw her the week of Thanksgiving. I remember coming in with a lot of groceries and stopping by to talk with her for a while on my way upstairs. Have a drink. Then she was off to her sister's home, and-I simply can't summon up any other time that I saw her."
Was he lying to us, or had Bart Frankel been mistaken when he told us he had left Lola at the door because she saw Lavery going into the building?
Chapman had nothing to lose at this point. "The day she died, like half an hour before she was killed, did you happen to run into her, right at the front door of the building?"
Lavery was biting the inside of his cheek, looking perplexed. "I may have gone down to the lobby once in the afternoon to get the mail, but after I came back from my errand that morning I'm absolutely certain I never went back outside. Where would you have heard something like that?"
"How do you know Bart Frankel?"
"He was in charge of her case, Ms. Cooper. He had come to the apartment once or twice to bring Lola papers to sign. I think that's what she told me. And to help prepare her for their plan to build the case against her husband, Mr. Kerlovic."
"Kralovic."
"I didn't know the man. I'm not really sure what his name was. One time, I ran into Lola with Bart Frankel at a restaurant in the neighborhood. I guess she had come to rely on him in these last difficult weeks."
"How come you called Bart last night and asked him to meet with you?"
Now he was growing more wary. "Well, Detective, either Bart told you the answer to that question when he asked you to come here, or you've pulled one over on me." He walked to his desk and picked up the receiver, looking at a number on the piece of paper next to the phone. "Shall I just call him and clear this up?"
Mike stood up, too. "No, but Bart did tell us he saw you walk into this building, holding the door open for Lola, about half an hour before she was killed."
"And I'm telling you that statement is not true, Mr. Chapman." Lavery started to dial.
"We'll have to resolve this some other way, Mr. Lavery. All you're gonna get is a machine. Or maybe one of Bart's kids. He's in the hospital. His car ran off the road this morning on his way here to see you."
Lavery replaced the receiver. "Was he hurt badly?"
"Probably won't make it."
The professor winced and sat down at his desk.
"You wanna explain to us why you called him to come talk to you? Tell us what you were planning on telling him?"
He looked up at Chapman to answer. "I didn't have anything to say to him."
"But you called him. Even his daughter can confirm that."
"I got back from my trip last night and among the messages on my answering machine was one to call Bart Frankel. He reminded me what his connection to Lola had been, and he left his home phone number in New Jersey."
By the end of next week, telephone records might again resolve the issue for us, but at the moment I did not know whether to believe him.
"Did he say what he wanted?"
I sensed that Lavery thought he had regained the upper hand His tone was cool once more, and almost arrogant as he talked to us. "Not at all. Just that he needed to see me. I assumed it was about Lola's case."
"He was taken off that investigation. He's-"
"And I've been out of the country, Detective. Staying at a beach house in the islands with no television and with newspapers that arrived about three days after they hit the stands in Miami. So I don't have the faintest idea what's been going on up here. Why was he taken off the case? Would you like to bring me up-to-date?"
Mike ignored his question. "Did Lola talk to you about the Blackwells project?"
"Of course she did. It had consumed her these past few months. We're a relatively small faculty, Detective, compared to those at large universities like Harvard and Yale. I'd had my enemies when I first came over to King's, but we've generally tried to work it out among ourselves. When I was hired, the head of the anthropology department didn't want me working under his watch."
"Winston Shreve?"
"Precisely. But then Lola went to work on Shreve, on my behalf. I wouldn't say he's my close friend, but he accepted me within his division and has been rather kind to me lately, with all the troubles I've had. And Grenier, he's in charge of the biology division. He was a bit more anxious to have me.
"Now, if you're spending any time with those three-Dakota, Shreve, and Grenier-you can be sure the subject of Blackwells will come up," he said. "That's what they've spent most of their time working on for the better part of the year. And Lockhart. I'd say he's their fourth Musketeer."
"Have you had anything to do with the project yourself?"
"I live in the present, Ms. Cooper. Oh, they talk to me about what they're doing, and they ask me plenty of questions about it."
"Like what?"
"I think when Lola first found out about the drug trade in the old penitentiary, three-quarters of a century ago, she was amazed at the scale of the problem. But it was quite a famous scandal, and of course, I'm familiar with the history of the drug culture in this city. So I was able to explain to her what the drugs of choice were in those days and how widespread the narcotics business was- even inside American penal institutions."
"And Grenier, what was his relationship with Lola?"
"I bet you've had a hard time getting him to come to the table, haven't you?" Lavery wasn't wrong. I was hoping that by Monday We would have word from Sylvia Foote that the biology professor was back and available to us.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because Thomas Grenier is a selfish son of a bitch and it would be quite out of character if he was any use in a matter like this."
"We've been told that Grenier was actually willing to bring you into his department, when Shreve and the others weren't all that interested in having you in anthropology."
"That's true, Detective. But not because he had any belief in what I was doing. He saw it as a business proposition. It put dollar signs in front of his eyes, not mortarboards."
Both Mike and I were lost. "I never knew that money was so much of an issue in academia," I said.
"Then I would guess that you've never met Thomas Grenier. And you have no idea what the Internet has done to the college campus. Not in the classroom alone, but as universities have tried to cash in on the commercial market."
"Would you mind telling us what you mean?"
"It used to be, Ms. Cooper, that the idea of an academic making money from his research was not acceptable at any university. I'm not talking about my situation, if that's what you're thinking. There has always been a perception that we scholars are outside the marketplace, and we've long benefited from that. We've been giving away our knowledge for generations. Now many of the large institutions are looking to get a fair return on their intellectual capital. Turn it into financial capital, like the rest of the world."
"And the Internet?"
"It's a gold mine. It provides a much larger payback, and a much faster one, too. There's a lot of competition in the dot-com community, and administrators everywhere are trying to foster various opportunities to let faculty members increase their income-through the expanded use of their research-and let the universities themselves share in the bounty. That's the big score. I'm surprised you haven't read about this. Front page of The Times a short while ago. Grenier was a key player."
"I just do the sports page, comics, horoscope, and 'Dear Abby.' Tell me about it."
"Columbia University has sort of led the field in this business. The vice provost there has promoted the efforts of some of his professors to joint-venture with Internet start-ups. They've partnered with an on-line company to do a human nutrition study. And made money by mating with that junk-bond character, Michael Milken, in a curriculum of serious college courses. They've already made millions from that."