Hardscrabble Road(121)

Harvard probably wouldn’t have been much better, he thought, climbing out of the police car and going up the steps to the building he knew the Math Department was in. Still. He’d checked the map, and the Math Department was still in this building. He’d thought it was only the humanities that were stalled physically and institutionally. He wondered if Penn’s Math Department was a good one, or a filler to stuff the vacant spaces between Physics and Chemistry. There was Jig Tyler, but you could never tell.

Marbury and Giametti didn’t want to come in. Penn, it seemed, was deliberately intimidating to local law enforcement.

“It’s not that they don’t cooperate when they need to,” Marbury said. “If they did that, we could nail them. It’s that you don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people.”

“You especially don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people like Jig Tyler,” Giametti said.

Gregor could actually see the point. He left them his cell phone—Rob Benedetti had called him at least six times since he’d been to see Marla Hildebrande, and he hadn’t done anything but ride across town in a patrol car—and went in, through the front doors, and up the stairs. It was not like last night, with Alison Standish. The building was full of people. The students looked the way they had always looked, except that there were more “different” faces among them than there had been in his day. There were not, however, as many “different” faces as the brochures and Web site made it appear. These days, all recruiting materials from the Ivy League looked as if they were advertisements for the Model UN.

He knew where Jig Tyler’s office was because he had looked it up on Penn’s Web site before coming in to see Rob Benedetti this morning. Tibor should get credit for another bit of work on the case, because without him Gregor couldn’t find anything on the Internet. Tibor had gotten him Jig Tyler’s teaching and office hour schedule, too. He just wished he’d been able to think of a way to get Dr. Tyler out of this building and down to a precinct station, where he wouldn’t feel as if he were about to be stopped and questioned at any moment. Gregor had spent his entire time at Penn waiting for somebody—a security guard, maybe—to tell him he didn’t belong there and had to go home.

Jig Tyler was sitting behind his desk behind piles of books, reading down through a page of text with his finger following the lines. Gregor wondered if he always did that when he read, or if he was only doing it now because he knew Gregor was standing in the doorway. You had to wonder what that was like, to have that kind of mind, to be able to do the things Jig Tyler was able to do. Maybe it was like nothing. Maybe he experienced it as normal.

Gregor cleared his throat. He felt silly doing it. They were not only playacting with each other, they were playacting badly. “You can put the book down,” he said. “You know I’m here. You had to know I was coming.”

Jig sat back. He had the kind of tall ranginess basketball players had, but Gregor didn’t remember hearing that he’d ever played basketball. He took his wire-rim glasses off and put them down on the book. “I take it the nun called you,” he said.

“She came to talk to us, yes,” Gregor said. “You had to know she was going to do that.”

“Oh, yes. Do I get any points for not taking the day off and going to New York?”

“Not really. You’re smart enough to know that wouldn’t work.”

“You’d be astonished to know what kinds of stupidity smart people can get themselves into,” Jig said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You graduated from Penn. I looked you up.”

“And?”

“Very impressive. I’d say very impressive especially considering your background, but I know better than that, too. Those were the days before affirmative action and diversity goals, and you probably wouldn’t have qualified for either anyway. So, very impressive. I liked the dual major in history and philosophy. I liked the fact that you didn’t major in literature.”

“You don’t like literature?”

“I like it fine. I don’t like literature professors.”

“You have to know by now that you delivered the poison to Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said.

Jig rubbed the sides of his face with the palms of his hands and then picked up his glasses and put them on again. “Yes, of course I know. I knew as soon as they found the body. I suspected before that. I just wasn’t sure he was dead. Do you know that I didn’t deliver the poison intentionally?”

“Do you mean that you didn’t think you were delivering poison?” Gregor said. “Oh, yes. You had absolutely no reason to kill Drew Harrigan. In fact, you had a few decent reasons to want him to stay alive. What was it you thought you were doing?”