Thin Air (4 page)

"I know this is trying, Mister Spenser, but obviously the right to privacy is something we must respect in regard to our students."

"How about the right to get found, if they're lost?" I said.

The dean smiled politely.

"May I see your credentials, please."

I thought about showing him my gun, rejected the idea, and let him see my license.

"And you're employed by Ms. St. Claire's husband?"

"Yes."

"I'm afraid I'll need his authorization."

"Of course you do. After all, I'm asking if she's enrolled here, and if so what courses she's taking. Hot stuff like that has got to be handled discreetly."

"You may be as scornful as you wish, Mister Spenser, but it's not a question of what you're asking. There's a larger issue here."

"I think it's called self-importance."

"I beg your pardon?"

The dean's name was Fogarty. He was a small man with a trimmed beard and receding hair. He wore a business suit. He'd probably started life as a high school principal somewhere and moved up, or down, depending on your perspective. The state college system was not a hotbed of erudition.

"There is no issue here. I'm not asking you to reveal anything which is in any way of a private nature. You just like to think that whatever goes on here is weighty with high seriousness."

"Are you afraid to have me call Ms. St. Claire's husband?"

"Ms. St. Claire's husband is suffering from gunshot wounds. It will not help him to talk with a pompous asshole."

"I'm sorry. But there's no need to be offensive."

"You think I'm offensive? I'll give you offensive. Ms. Lisa St. Claire's husband is a cop. Cops look out for each other. I can, if I have to, have some really short-tempered guys from the Essex County DA's office come in here and ask you what I'm asking you. I could probably even get them to come in here in force with the sirens singing and the blue lights flashing, and haul your ass down to Salem and ask you these same questions in a holding cell."

Guys like Fogarty have power over a bunch of kids and it gets them thinking it's real, which makes them think that they're tough. It took Fogarty a minute to adjust to the fact that he was misguided in these perceptions. He stared at me with his mouth partly open, and nothing coming out.

Finally he said, "Well!"

"Well," I said.

"I don't wish to be unreasonable."

"Good."

We sat and looked at each other. Neither of us anything.

"Well," he said again.

I looked at my watch. Fogarty picked up his phone. "Clara, could you see if we have a student named Lisa St. Claire, please. Probably continuing education. Yes. If we do, may I have her folder? Thank you."

He hung up and looked at me and looked away.

"I guess it's why I'm an educator, Mister Spenser. I'm invested in students. Sometimes, maybe, too invested."

"Sure," I said. "That's probably it."

He was pleased that I agreed with him. He leaned back in his chair and patted his fingertips together.

"Young lives," he said. "Young lives."

A very small woman who might have been 125 shuffled in with a folder in her hand. She shuffled across the room, put the folder on Fogarty's desk, and shuffled backwards out of the room. She did not speak. She did not kiss the hem of his garment.

Fogarty picked up the folder and opened it and looked at it for a moment as if he were studying the Book of Kells. Then he raised his eyes from it and looked at me.

"Yes. Ms. St. Claire is enrolled in our continuing education program."

"What I would have called night school in my innocence," I said.

Fogarty smiled politely.

"Well, it's not really night school. Classes are held in the late afternoon and in the evening."

"What course is she taking?"

"HD31-6," he said. "Self Actualization: An Analytic Feminist Perspective."

"Yikes," I said. "What's HD stand for?"

"Human development."

"When's it meet?"

I was asking him to violate the code of Omerta again. He looked uncomfortable, but he rallied. "Tuesday and Thursday; eight to nine forty-five p.m. In the Bradford Building."

"Who teaches it?"

"Professor Leighton."

"And where do I find him?"

Fogarty hesitated again.

"Pretend I'm a student, and I want to take his class. Do I stand outside and yell, `Hey, Leighton?"'

"Her office is in Bradford, second floor."

"Thank you very much," I said. "Is there anything in Ms. St. Claire's folder that would shed light on where she went?"

Fogarty didn't hesitate a moment.

"Absolutely not," he said.

He'd have probably said that if there were a ransom note in there.

"And you have no thoughts on the matter?"

He shrugged in a worldly way.

"Marriages sometimes flounder," he said.

I nodded thoughtfully.

She lay on the bed in the darkness and thought about her situation. Despite the eroding intensity of her fear, she was still all right. He had not touched her. And except for tying her up when he took her, he hadn't harmed her. She wasn't home. The ordinary life rhythms she had, perhaps for the first time in her life, established, were cacophonously disrupted, but she was still whole. She was still Lisa St. Claire. She thought of her husband. She knew he would find her. Sooner or later, no matter what, Frank would come. She missed him. She wanted more than she had ever wanted anything to see him. To see the door to this black room open and to see Frank walk through it. She had never been altogether sure she loved him. She liked sex with him. But she liked sex. If she were to be totally objective, she would probably say it wasn't better with Frank than others. With Luis, before, in fact, the wildness of it, the adventure of it, might have made sex with Luis a little better than sex with anyone. Frank had been the one she fled to after she fled Luis. And more than Luis, when she fled all that she had been. Frank had been calmness and stability and probably above all else safety. A tough cop. He would keep her secure. He would keep her whole. He would protect her from what she had been and from what she always feared she might be again. In his calmness and his clarity and his strength he was a stay against disintegration. It was ironic really, if she could detach herself, that the kidnapping had dispelled the last of the romantic vapors that had clung retrospectively to Luis. Now and then at breakfast in their upscale kitchen, quietly, ready to go to work, she would remember Luis and wonder if there might be something there that she shouldn't have abandoned-infinite possibility, maybe, music from beyond a distant hill, something like that. There had been an I-don't-give-a-damn excitement about Luis that Lisa occasionally remembered with nostalgia as she watched her husband eat the same breakfast he always ate. She liked him. He was good for her. But she had sometimes wondered, as her mind rolled over her life before him, if she had made a mistake. She knew she hadn't. She knew what Luis was, and even more, she knew what Luis represented for her. But often, in a sort of visceral way, she wondered about Luis. Now I do not, she thought. Now more than anything I have ever wanted, I want him to find me, and take me home. It was more than the corrosive fear that made her long for her husband. It was what he, was and what he represented-a life to be, lived, a connection to be nurtured, a full chance to be Lisa St. Claire. He'll come, she thought. He'll find me. And alone in the dark lying on the alien bed she cried for the first time since Luis took her.

I smiled courteously and said, "My name is Spenser. I'm a detective, and I'm looking for Lisa St. Claire, who appears to be missing."

She kept marking and I held the courteous smile until she finally looked up and saw it.

Charmed by the smile she said, "Dean Fogarty called to say you might come by. What's this about Lisa?"

"She a student of yours?" I said.

"Yes. Very gifted."

The office was cluttered with the detritus of scholarship. There were books piled everywhere, and manila folders spilling papers on the top of a long mission oak table under the windows. A Macintosh word processor sat on the corner of her desk, hooked to a laser printer on a small end table beside her.

"And you teach a class in self-actualization?" I said.

"A workshop, actually, for women in process," Professor Leighton said. "It's based on some of the transactional theories I've developed in my work."

She gestured slightly with her head to indicate a cluster of five books on one shelf of her bookcase. They had been set aside and held upright by a pair of used bricks. I could see her name on the spine of each. I couldn't read the titles without turning my head parallel to the floor. That position is never my best look, so I passed on the titles.

"Tell me about Lisa?" I said.

"You're a detective?"

"Yes."

"A police detective?"

"No, private."

"Really? How fascinating. Have you always been a private detective?"

"No, once I was a police detective."

"And were you discharged?"

"Yes."

"Dishonestly?"

"No, they felt I was rebellious."

She leaned back in her chair and laughed. It was a real laugh.

"I didn't know intellectuals did that," I said.

"Laugh? Oh, I think real intellectuals do. Remember, life is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."

"Horace Walpole?" I said.

"Oh my," she said. "A learned detective. Did you enjoy Dean Fogarty?"

"Uneasy lies the head that wears a Deanship," I said.

She laughed again.

"Well, you are a delight. Yes, Dean Fogy, as we call him, has never taken himself lightly."

"Was it Horace Walpole?" I said.

"Oh hell, I don't know. I think it was. Certainly you're in the right century. How can I help you with Lisa?"

"Did she have a friend in your class named Tiffany?"

"Yes," Professor Leighton smiled. "Typhanie Hall. She spelled her first name T y-p-h-a-n-i-e. She wished to be an actress."

"Talk to me about Lisa, what was she like, who her friends were."

"Well, of course I am limited by the artificialities of the student-teacher relationship. Clearly she was a bright woman. Clearly she had damn good insights about human interaction-she may have had some psychotherapy. And clearly she was not very well educated. She was some sort of radio personality, so she'd learned how to speak smoothly and she was facile and charming and attractive, all of which might mislead one at first, but it became quickly apparent that she'd had little formal schooling."

Professor Leighton smiled at me.

"You would notice it promptly," she said.

"I did," I said.

"In some ways I would say she is the opposite of you. You speak like a hooligan, but you know a great deal."

"I am a hooligan," I said. "I read a lot."

"Apparently. Do you fear, ah, for lack of a better word, foul play? Or is she simply a wandering wife?"

"You knew she was married?"

"She wore a ring."

"But she kept, whatever the proper phrase is now, the name she had when she was single," I said.

"You can relax, Mister Spenser, I am not one of your bushy feminist theoreticians. I accept `maiden name' as a useful locution. In fact, I have always used my maiden name."

"You're married?"

"Thrice," she said with a smile. "None of them current. I guess I'm a bit rebellious myself."

"Good you used the maiden name then," I said. "Be a Chinese fire drill to keep changing it every time."

"Plan ahead," she said. "Is she in harm's way, or merely adventuring?"

"I don't know," I said. "A few days after she disappeared, her husband was shot."

"Did he survive?" Professor Leighton said.

"Yes."

"Is she a suspect?"

"I don't suspect her. But I'm not trying to catch the shooter. I'm looking for Lisa."

"Was it Luis?"

"Was who Luis?" I said. Cagey.

"Did she marry Luis Deleon?"

"No. She married a Boston cop named Frank Belson. Who's Luis Deleon?"

"He was a student of mine last year, in my evening seminar on Media and Identity. Lisa St. Claire was in that class as well. I believe they enrolled together. They were very friendly, intimately so."

"You know this?"

"I can't prove it. I know it."

"By observation?"

"By observation. They sat together, they giggled together like much younger people. They clung together in the hall during the break. They held hands. They whispered. I've been in love, or infatuated, or both many times. I know it when I see it."

"Tell me about Luis," I said. "Is he Hispanic?"

"Yes, from Proctor, and like many Hispanics in Proctor, I fear he is very poor. The college runs an outreach program for the disadvantaged, as they like to call them. It sets aside a certain number of scholarships for the community and Luis took advantage of one of them."

"How old?"

"Luis? A bit younger than Lisa, perhaps, say twenty-six, twenty-seven."

"Does he have an accent?"

"Not very much, enough to discern, but nothing to impede communication."

"What else?" I said.

"Luis, like Lisa, was very bright, but very uneducated. Most of what he knew that was germane to my classroom, he learned from television and movies. I am not entirely sure he knew where film ended and life began."

"`Germane to my classroom'?" I said. "Why the qualifier?"

"Because I have some sense that he knows many things about life in the Proctor barrio that I cannot even dream of."

"Is he in any of your classes this year?"

"No. I'm a visiting professor here so I can do some postdoctoral study at Brandeis. This is my one class of the semester."

"He still enrolled at the college?"

"I don't know. Dean Fogy can tell you. I don't believe he was entirely comfortable in an Anglo academic setting, even this one."

"He ever come around to see Lisa before class or after?"

"Not this year."

"Any observations you've made on Luis you'd like to share?"

"In some ways he was quite formidable. Very tall. Athletic looking."

"How tall?"

"Unusually tall. Taller by several inches than you. Though not perhaps as thick. How tall are you?"

"Six one."

She looked at me appraisingly for a moment.

"He was probably six feet four or five," she said. "Very intense, full of machismo. I know that is said of many Latin men, but Luis did tend to strut."

She leaned back a little and closed her big eyes behind her huge glasses and thought for a moment.

"And yet he was also very innocent," she said. "He believed in absolutes, in the kind of world you see in television movies. Good is always good. Bad is always bad. Nothing is very complicated, and what is once is forever. He imagined the kind of life that one would imagine if one grew up staring at television. No experience seemed to shake that imaginative conceit."

"You wouldn't know where he lives?"

"No, I'm sorry. I guess I'll have to refer you once again to dear Dean Fogy. The college must have an address."

"Anyone named Vaughn in Lisa's class?"

"Not that I recall."

"You know anyone named Vaughn?"

She smiled.

"There was a baseball player named Arky Vaughn," she said.

"Yes there was," I said. "Pirates and Dodgers. Probably not our man."

"Horace Walpole and Arky Vaughn," she said. "I am impressed."

I gave her my card.

"If there's anything else that you think of, no matter how inconsequential, please call me."

"I'll be pleased to," she said.

I started for the door and stopped and turned back. "I have met a number of professors," I said. "And none of them were notable for honesty, humor, lack of pretense, and ability to observe. What the hell are you doing here?"

She smiled at me for a moment and then said, "I came for the waters."

"There are no waters here," I said.

"I was misinformed," she said.