The professor turned out to be a woman, though. Forty maybe. Small and lean but sturdily built—or sturdy-looking, anyway—in a no-nonsense navy pantsuit with a jacket tailored to hide her torso in slashing angles and straight lines. She was pretty enough, Weiss thought, but in an awfully severe sort of way. Elegant, narrow features framed by straight black hair. Quick, fierce, challenging brown eyes.
Sure, Weiss thought, with Bishop still on his mind, he gets the teenaged sexpot, I’m stuck with the Dragon Lady.
He was already coming around his desk to meet her, but she strode to him at once, direct, forceful. She had an enormous briefcase strapped over her padded shoulder, and she clapped it to her with one hand as she thrust the other toward him. Her hand was tiny in Weiss’s bearlike paw, yet she gripped him hard, shook tersely, once, like a man would.
It was a big show of assertiveness, but it had the opposite effect on Weiss than she’d probably intended. Poor Weiss, ex-cop though he was, was cursed with an idealized view of women. He thought of them as naturally tender and gentle-hearted. Had a deep yearning to protect them from evildoers, embarrassment, wind, weather, whatever else. As he looked down at the professor from his great height, his sourness over Bishop’s e-mail was swept aside by a sense of melting sympathy. He felt the lady must be in real trouble for her to try so hard to seem strong. That’s just the way he was—nothing got his Lancelot mojo working faster than a damsel in distress.
“My appointment sheet said ‘Mr. Brinks,’ ” he told her as he showed her to a chair.
“M.R.,” she answered with a cold flicker of a smile. “Professor M. R. Brinks. It happens a lot.” She didn’t tell him what the initials stood for. Her first name was Professor, as far as he was concerned.
“My mistake. Why don’t you have a seat…Professor.” She did. And Weiss walked back around his desk to resettle in his huge high-backed leather swiveler. He steepled his fingers. Went to and fro slightly. “How can I help you?”
The professor already had her briefcase in her lap. She was snapping it open before he spoke. She drew out a manila envelope, slapped it down onto Weiss’s desktop, pushed it across the surface at him.
“I’m being sexually harassed. By e-mail. For the past nine months, someone has been sending pornographic letters to my computer. Those are copies of some of them, portions of some of them, anyway. I want to hire you to find out who’s sending them.”
It came out just like that, all business, terse and dry. If she was embarrassed by this situation at all, she sure didn’t show it. But that didn’t register with Weiss. He simply assumed she was embarrassed. He assumed she was being curt to cover her natural feminine reticence about such a delicate matter. Again, that’s how he was.
So he let the envelope lie where she’d left it. He didn’t want to make things any more awkward for her by reading the obscene e-mails in front of her.
“Are the letters threatening in any way?” he asked.
“Not directly, no. But, as you’ll see, they go out of their way to depict me in humiliating and submissive situations. The implication of a threat is definitely there.”
Weiss gazed at her a long moment. “Uh huh,” he said then. “Have you complained to your Internet provider? Or contacted the police?”
“No, I haven’t.” Her dark eyes flashed. “Obviously I wanted this dealt with as discreetly as possible. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come to a private detective.”
“Uh huh,” said Weiss again, after another pause. “And what is it you want me to do exactly?”
“Well, I thought I made that clear. I want you to find out who’s sending me the e-mails.”
“And then?”
“And then…give his name and address to me. I’ll decide on the appropriate action from there. I’m sorry—I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about this.”
Weiss continued to gaze at her. She would find, as all clients found, that there was no getting through the deadpan expression on his saggy features, in his basset-hound eyes. There was often no getting through the sympathy in him, either. In fact, the tougher she played it, the snappier she got, the more he felt the poor creature must need his help.
He even found her endearing somehow. Her rigid little figure bristling and ferocious there in her chair. He was touched by the way she refused to be intimidated by her situation or her surroundings. She was just a bit of a thing, after all, and the office was so big. Everything in it was big, built to Weiss’s dominating proportions. The ceiling was high. The floor space was vast. The desk was vast. The leather swivel chair behind it was enormous. Even the clients’ armchairs were blocky and massive. One wall of the room was made up of soaring arched windows. The morning sunlight streamed in through them like burly temple columns. And outside, across Market Street, a row of sculpted stone buildings served as foreground to the glass and steel towers of the greater skyline beyond them, making it seem as if the office opened up on that side to include the entire city.
But the professor, small as she was, was not overwhelmed by any of it. She perched in her seat like an eagle in a mountain aerie, the little mistress of an epic terrain.
“Is there anything you can tell me that might help me find this person?” Weiss asked her gently now. “Is there anyone you suspect? Do you have any enemies, for instance?”
Brinks’s lips bunched up, a self-satisfied smile at the corner of them. “I guess it’s safe to assume you’re not familiar with my work, then.”
As a matter of fact, as soon as she mentioned it, Weiss thought that maybe he was. Maybe he’d read about her in the newspaper or heard about her on TV or something. He had an encyclopedic memory for crimes and criminals, but this was something else, not in his line, harder to dredge up. Something about pornography, though. Sexual harassment. Censorship.
“Wasn’t there an article about you in the Chronicle a while back?” he said, as it finally came to him. “In the Sunday magazine, I think.”
“That’s right. Last November.”
“Yeah, I remember now. I read it.” Actually he had skimmed it while sitting on the toilet. But the gist of it was that the professor advocated tougher sexual harassment laws and wanted pornography outlawed as an act of oppression against women. “So you’re saying you may have enemies because of your opinions.”
“I think that’s a safe assumption,” she answered dryly.
“November,” said Weiss after another moment. He tapped the fingers of his right hand with his thumb, counting the months. “That would be just before the e-mails started, wouldn’t it?”
She lifted one shoulder under the straitlaced, slashing jacket. “That could be. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what set it off. But my work is very public anyway, very controversial.”
“Like what, specifically? Give me an example. Something you think might’ve gotten this guy started.”
“Well…” She thought about it—or pretended to think about it. Weiss was pretty sure she already had a good idea. “What comes to mind immediately are my views on pornography—any form of expression, really, that subjects women to sexual subordination. I consider it an abridgment of women’s rights. I’ve worked hard to have it banned, and I think it’s fair to say I’ve been instrumental in rooting out that kind of harassment in our university, in lectures and texts and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if that makes some men feel…threatened, you know. Their power under attack. It makes sense, in a way, that one of them would imagine he could bolster his ego or intimidate or neutralize me by turning that particular weapon on me. Maybe he thought that by objectifying me in a sexual way he could…”
She went on like this a while, her voice clipped and scornful. Weiss propped his elbow on his chair arm, rested his cheek against his fist, the baggy skin bunching under his eye. He took the opportunity to look her over. The cut of her suit jacket made it impossible to make out the shape of her breasts, he noticed, and he wondered idly how large they were. Not very, he decided. In fact, he suspected that underneath all the tailoring she was a little too stringy for his taste.
Following that chain of thought, he stole a glance at her left hand. Not married—or at least, she wasn’t wearing a ring.
He waited for her to finish, then he said, “What about your personal life?” He gestured slightly toward her ringless finger. “A former lover maybe, someone you might’ve rejected romantically.”
She sniffed sharply. Answered tartly, “There’s nothing like that, no. Look,” she barreled on at once. “I was given your name by a colleague at Cal. She said you were very good, very discreet. She said you could probably do this electronically or something. Trace the e-mails to their source or whatever. If you’re going to go around questioning all sorts of people in my life—”
Weiss lifted his free hand. “No, no, don’t worry. It’s nothing like that. Sometimes people come in here looking for answers they already know, that’s all. I was just trying to save you some time and money.”
For the first time since she’d come in, Professor M. R. Brinks seemed to soften a little. She lifted her chin defiantly, as if threatening to slash him with the point of it. But she said, “Of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Weiss. It’s just very important to me that this matter remain private, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s nothing personal. I’m not embarrassed or anything.”
“Uh huh.”
“It’s just that—because my work gathers a lot of attention in the media, I have to be careful, I have to protect how it’s presented. If some television station got hold of a story like this—well, you know how they are, they would sensationalize it, sexualize it. That’s how you get the ratings, isn’t it? Appeal to the lowest common denominator?”
“I guess so.”
“My work is very important, and I don’t want to see it…genitalized like that. Reducing women’s issues to cheap titillation is an age-old technique for trivializing them. If I let that happen, then this person, this person who’s harassing me, will have won. That’s my concern.”
With his high, romantic expectations of the opposite sex, Weiss was often doomed to be disappointed in actual women. And in the end, as he showed her to the door, he found he was, in fact, disappointed with Professor M. R. Brinks. It wasn’t the big attitude that bothered him, the big academic talk or any of that nonsense. It was the fact that she was lying to him, that’s what he found so disheartening. He wasn’t sure how exactly, but she was definitely lying to him, and it struck him as…unladylike somehow.
He stood in the doorway a moment and watched her as she strode away. His sad eyes, as men’s eyes will, trailed naturally down to her backside. But the tail of her jacket was cut to cover it. There wasn’t much to see.
He gave another heavy sigh and went slowly back to his desk.