“Why on earth would the police do that?” Coe said, red spots appearing on his cheeks. “Can’t you tell them it’s not necessary, Rory? After all, this is your campus. What right do they have to be here, anyway?”
President Brennan chewed on his lip. “To tell the truth, Coe, I don’t know what I can do. I’ll talk to the chief when we’re done here. It seems overly dramatic, but I guess there’s not much excitement in small towns, and the chief’s determined to look as good as the police he sees on television.”
Silently, I thanked Gabby for her quick action this morning, but decided I’d keep quiet about my earlier access to the originals and the fact that I had a copy of Saylor’s handwritten notes in the briefcase sitting next to my chair.
The president turned to me. “Perhaps you’re right, Danielle. It would be best to do what you can from San Francisco for the moment. If you need anything from us, call my assistant or the young woman from the development office for help. We can finish this up early next week.”
Margoletti spoke up. “If not sooner. Ms. O’Rourke, if I can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to call. I don’t think you’ll need a lot of what I assume is voluminous research, but if there is anything more you need, you can come directly to me.” He handed me a thick, cream-colored business card. “My office can find me on a moment’s notice. I want this process to go smoothly. We all want the same thing, don’t we?”
The men stood as I picked up my briefcase. This might be the only time I had to ask, and I blurted out the question that was bothering me before I had fully weighed the wisdom of asking.
“I’m a bit confused, Mr. Margoletti. I understood you were playing with him when Mr. Saylor died, and now I realize all three of you were there. Was it you who called for help when he fell into the pond? Or,” turning to include Coe Anderson and Rory Brennan, “any of you?” What I really wanted to ask was how did a grown and presumably healthy man manage to drown in what Coe Anderson had assured me was shallow water, but I wasn’t brave enough to go that far.
The dean jumped in, ready to be offended. “Of course not. I was shocked when that young woman burst into my office to say he was dead. I had no idea when Rory and I left the clubhouse that he’d been taken ill.”
The president murmured his agreement and Margoletti’s brow furrowed while the corners of his thin mouth turned down. “Unfortunately, none of us was with him.” He turned to include Coe and the president. “The four of us played together and went to the bar for drinks after. But Larry had messed up at that hole and decided to go back on his own after the last scheduled foursome had played through and see if he couldn’t improve his performance. He left us right as we were ordering a second round.”
I glanced at the two other men, who had adopted the same serious looks. Coe hadn’t mentioned having been on the course with either Saylor or Margoletti when we met earlier and I wondered why not. Surely, he would have worked the prominent man’s name into the conversation. “Who did find him, then?”
“The groundskeeper went out looking when it got dark. He couldn’t account for the cart Larry had signed out,” Brennan said in clipped tones. “I’m not sure how this is relevant, frankly.”
“We had all gone our separate ways by then, so we didn’t realize there was a problem,” the dean said, pronouncing ‘realize’ in three distinct, southern-accented syllables.
Margoletti sounded genuinely sorrowful, but his eyes darted up to the ceiling past my shoulder. “We were saying earlier that we wished we had persuaded him to join us for another glass of wine in the bar.” Hadn’t I read that people do that upward thing with their eyes when they’re not telling the truth? Or was it downward?
The phone rang then and broke some undefined tension in the room. I said a quick goodbye and opened the office door. I could hear the president on the phone already asking his assistant to track down the police chief as I left. The dean was insisting in a shrill voice that the files should now revert to him. The people waiting on the couches looked me over again as I left, and I made sure I held in my sigh of relief at being released from the hot seat until I hit the sidewalk.
****
There were two police cars parked in the No Parking zone outside the president’s office. Passing students eyed them curiously and I wondered how far news of the administrator’s death had traveled on campus. I noticed that a few of the young women focused their stares on the dark-haired cop who leaned against the side of one patrol car, and no wonder. His short-sleeved shirt showed off muscled arms and a flat stomach. The square jaw, dark sunglasses and impassive expression on his face were right out of an action film. He clenched a toothpick in his mouth, which gave him a chance to bare his white teeth slightly. For me, the macho effect was diluted by the impression that he knew exactly how he looked.
A second uniformed policeman got out of the driver’s side of the car and came around to speak to Macho Cop, who turned his head slowly away from the passing parade of students to listen. He pushed himself off the car and sauntered off with his partner toward the building where the development office was located. It seemed like a lot of police attention for a drowning accident. Maybe President Brennan was right and there wasn’t much else going on in town to compete for the attention of the uniformed cops today.
I reminded myself I had a lot to do if I was going to head back to San Francisco sooner. The air was sweet and the breeze hardly more than a whisper, and I was wearing the right shoes for it, so I decided to walk the mile to my hotel. On the way, I used my cell phone to call Teeni Watson, my assistant, to tell her I planned to be in the office Thursday.
“You solved all their problems already? Damn, here I was thinking we’d have some party time before you rolled back in.”
“Easy, girl. Plenty of time to party when your Funk Art exhibit opens.” Teeni is a graduate student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, whose doctoral dissertation is in the form of a project she’s curating for the Devor. I get heartburn thinking about what I’ll do after the exhibition, when some smart museum snatches her up. “Oh, before I forget, your cute cop called. I told him where you were. I hope that’s okay?”
“Sure. Did he say why he wanted to talk to me?” Like, maybe ask me out on the off chance he could actually keep a date? Charlie was sweet and desirable, but a lot of trouble as a romantic possibility. As half of a busy San Francisco Police Department homicide team, it felt as though he was on call all the time. The local TV reporters might say that murder rates were down in the city, but you couldn’t convince me of that. Gang fights, drug deals gone bad, innocent victims who opened their doors to the wrong people—I know the city isn’t worse than other places. However, from my angle of vision as someone who would enjoy finishing a Friday night dinner in peace, or watching a play past the first intermission without having her date glance at his pager and start making his excuses, the city was in a non-stop crime wave. It certainly hadn’t done anything for our love life. After months of dancing around it, we had finally spent a couple of late nights together and they were delicious, except for the time his pager would not stop buzzing even though he was theoretically off duty. He had finally apologized and snatched it up off the bedside table, explaining that on rare occasions—hah—it was all hands on deck.
“No, but he has your cell phone number, right?” Teeni said. “I figured he called you directly.”
“Not yet. Anything else I need to know before I get back?”
“You got a call from a guy named Burgess from a law firm in the Valley. Said you wouldn’t know him, but he’d like to talk to you when you have time.”
“Did you ask him if someone else could help him?”
“Yeah, but he said no. Said he’ll explain when you call him back.”
“Okay. I’ll deal with it later.”
“How are you enjoying being a big shot consultant among the preppy set?”
“The good old boys are making it clear my job is to rubber stamp their plan, and the guy who raised the red—well, the yellow—flag about the gift died before I could find out what was bothering him.”
There was silence for a long moment. “Hold it,” Teeni said, dropping her voice a half octave. “You’re telling me you’ve been in that town for two days and someone is dead already? Oh, girl, you’d better get on home. You are bad luck.”
“Not fair. I barely met the man. Anyway, it was an accident.”
The silence from the other end of the phone was as pointed as a sharp stick, but that’s not fair. I can’t help it that a few odd things have happened around me. They didn’t happen to me, or because of me, and anyone in my position who worked with rich, powerful, and sometimes eccentric people would have had the same experiences. At least, I like to think so. I have admitted to myself that once in a while I don’t leave well enough alone.
Teeni’s unspoken rebuke did its job and I promised myself I’d focus on Mr. Margoletti’s intentions and his enviable warehouse full of art for the remainder of my consulting gig. First, I had an errand to do. I walked past sidewalk planters filled with azaleas and ducked in a couple of stores in search of a present for my cat sitter. Since she doesn’t actually like cats, the scores of needlework cat pillows and framed cat sayings were out. Ditto red and green plaid stadium blankets, thick mittens (on sale at this time of year), and Grandma Moses prints, charming as they were. I left empty-handed and, without any further excuses, went back to my room to think about Vince Margoletti’s proposed gift and how to get it to go quickly.
I jumped when my cell phone rang, not in surprise, but in relief at the distraction. I was having trouble concentrating on the gift, and kept drifting into consideration of how someone could drown on a golf course. Who knew? From the viewing perspective of a TV set, I had always assumed the water was all shallow puddles.
It was Charlie and I was quick to dump my random thoughts on him. He didn’t think it sounded the least suspicious, which reassured me. “It could have been his heart. People have heart attacks everywhere. They’ll do an autopsy and that’ll answer a lot of questions. If anything at the scene hinted at violence, they’d already be talking to his golf partners and anyone else who had been around him that day.”
I told him a little about Margoletti, but Charlie had never heard of the guy. “Our circles don’t intersect, Dani. Wait ‘til he kills someone on my turf and then I’ll know.”
“Not likely,” I said, laughing at the idea. “He has everything anyone could want. He’s not going after someone’s sneakers or fancy car.”
“There’s always something that a person wants and doesn’t have,” he said, “and, sadly, some of them can’t figure any way to get it other than to take it violently. I know.”
“You see that side of life every day, don’t you?”
“Hey, I’m not the only one. Remember—”
I cut him off. I didn’t want a repeat of my conversation with Teeni. “Call me this weekend if you have some time off, okay? I’ll be ready for some distraction. For now, I have to go bury myself in paper.”
“Distraction? Is that all I am?”
“I didn’t mean…actually, yes, I did mean a distraction, the very best kind, a serious sort of distraction.”
He chuckled. “I guess I’ll have to accept your definition for now, and think of a way to prove it to you when you get home.”
Sweet. We were definitely getting somewhere in this relationship, even if it was slow going. I said a few nice things that seemed to please him, and we left it at that.