“Professor of pediatrics?” An alto that might have been mellow under other circumstances, sectioned each word into precise syllables. “I don’t recall any appointment.”
“I don’t have one,” I said, showing her my LAPD consultant ID. She came closer, read the small print, frowned.
“Police? What’s this all about?”
“Nothing alarming, but if you’d be kind enough to spare me a moment?”
She stepped back and appraised me again. “This is irregular, to say the least.”
“I apologize. I was doing research in your library, and your name came up. If you’d rather set up an appointment—”
“My name came up how?”
“As chair of Communications. I’m looking into one of your alumni. A man named Kevin Drummond.”
“You’re looking into him,” she said. “Meaning the police are.”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly, is Mr. Drummond suspected of?”
“Do you know him?”
“I know the name. We’re a small department. What has Mr. Drummond done?”
“Maybe nothing,” I said. “Maybe murder.”
Elizabeth G. Martin removed her glasses. Dull thumps sounded from the corridor. Shoes on cork. Youthful chatter crescendoed and diminished.
She said, “Let’s not stand out here.”
Her office was Persian-carpeted, book-lined, compulsively neat, with two walls of windows that looked out to luxuriant lawns. California impressionist landscapes, probably valuable, probably college-owned, hung wherever the bookshelves left off. Elizabeth Martin’s Berkeley Ph.D. and ten years of ensuing academic honors were heralded on the wall behind her carved, gilded-age, partner’s desk. On the desk were a smoke gray laptop and an assortment of crystal office niceties. A green marble fireplace hosted a rack of cold, scorched logs.
She sat down and motioned me to do the same. “What exactly is going on?”
I tried to be forthcoming with as few details as possible.
“Well, all that’s dandy, Professor Delaware, but there are First Amendment issues here, not to mention academic freedom and common courtesy. You don’t really expect to waltz in here and have us throw open our files simply because that would abet your investigation. Whatever it’s alleged to be.”
“I’m not interested in confidential information about Kevin Drummond. Just anything that might be relevant to a criminal investigation, such as disciplinary problems.”
Elizabeth Martin remained impassive.
I said, “We’re talking multiple murders. If Drummond turns out to be involved in criminal activities, that will become public. If he posed problems here, and Charter hushed it up, the college will be drawn in.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No,” I said. “Just a statement of how these things play themselves out.”
“Police consultant . . . your academic department’s comfortable with your activities? Do you keep them fully apprised?”
I smiled. “Is that a threat?”
Martin rubbed her hands together. A silver-framed photo on the mantel showed her in a formal red gown, next to a tuxedoed, gray-haired man ten years older. Another shot pictured her in casual clothes, with the same man. Behind them, gold-and-rust tile-roofed buildings in the background. A diagonal stretch of teal canal, the curve of a gondola prow. Venice.
She said, “Whatever the contingencies, I can’t go along with this.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But if there’s something I should know—that the police should know—and you do eventually find a way of helping, it will make a lot of people’s lives easier.”
She picked a gold pen from a leather box and drummed the desk. “I can tell you this: I can’t recall Kevin Drummond posing any problems for the department. There was nothing . . . homicidal about him at all.” The pen tapped her in-box. “Really, Professor Delaware, this all sounds quite outlandish.”
“Did you teach Kevin, personally?”
“When did he graduate?”
“Two years ago.”
“Then I’d have to say yes. Two years ago, I was still teaching my mass-media seminar, and every Communications major was required to take it.”
“But you have no specific recollection of teaching him?”
“It’s a popular class,” she said, without hubris. “Communications is an arm of Charter’s Humanities Nexus. Our students take core classes in other departments and vice versa.”
“I assume Kevin Drummond had a faculty advisor.”
“I wasn’t his advisor. I work with the honor students.”
“Kevin wasn’t an honor student.”
“If he was, I’d have a specific recollection.” She began typing on the laptop.