Not a Creature Was Stirring(6)

He hadn’t told Susan she’d have to sleep with him if she wanted her credit, either. He might have implied it, but he hadn’t said it. He never made promises he had no intention of keeping.

“Miss Carpenter,” the fish was saying, “has submitted to us a photocopy of this—”

Teddy closed his eyes. A photocopy. Yes, he’d been waiting for a photocopy. After all, Susan Carpenter wasn’t the first. She wasn’t even the twentieth.

“Professor Hannaford,” the chairman said solemnly.

Teddy looked up quickly. He had broken out in a cold sweat.

“You understand,” he said, “that every professor has this problem from time to time with students, especially female students, who think they haven’t received the grade they, uh, deserved.”

“It comes up,” the chairman agreed, and then spoiled it by saying, “rarely.”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “Well. Rarely or not, it comes up. If you’ve read Miss Carpenter’s paper—”

“I have not.”

“Well, read it. You’ll see it’s nothing NEJLA would be interested in. Miss Carpenter’s, ah, communications skills are not of the highest. As for research—”

“Yes?”

“There isn’t any,” Teddy said. “It was an exposition. Textual analysis.”

“And Miss Carpenter’s analytical skills are not of the highest?”

“They’re nonexistent.”

“Ah.” The chairman sat back and folded his hands over his stomach. He no longer looked like a fish. He looked like a pregnant frog.

“I see,” he was saying. “This should be relatively easy to clear up. We have Miss Carpenter’s paper. We have your article—has it been published yet?”

“No,” Teddy said, knowing this was the worst luck of all. “It’s due in their spring issue.”

“I see. Do you have a copy?”

“Of course.”

“Fine, then. We’ll have both the paper and the article. We’ll have copies made before the hearing. Then, at the hearing—”

“What hearing?”

“The departmental hearing,” the chairman said. “There’ll have to be one. If the charges had any merit, there’d have to be a hearing in the Faculty Senate as well, but as you’ve assured me—” The chairman didn’t look assured. He looked, in fact, rather smug. Teddy was suddenly sure the chairman had known about his papers for years.

Just then, the buzzer went off on the chairman’s phone. The chairman picked up, grunted a few times, and then hung up again.

“That was Miss Holcomb in the office,” he said. “It’s a Mrs. Richard Van Damm. She says she’s your sister. She says it’s urgent.”

The chairman looked as if he thought Teddy had fixed this up just to escape from the interview, but Teddy didn’t care. Myra, of all people. Bless her malicious little heart. Myra could make an emergency out of a lost earring, but Teddy wasn’t going to tell the chairman that.

After all, for the moment, she was his salvation.





5


When the phone rang, Bobby Hannaford was sitting on the king-size bed in the second-floor master suite of his $1.5-million house in Chestnut Hill, trying to extract forty-two $100 bills from the waistband of his boxer shorts. It would have been easier if he hadn’t been so edgy, but he was always edgy on the days he saw McAdam. When the bell went off, he jumped half a foot in the air, scattering bills everywhere. He had to get down on his hands and knees to rescue the two that blew under the night table. When he got up, he was breathing heavily, and he still had money in his underwear. He snatched at the receiver with all the good humor he could muster, which was none at all.

“Bobby? Bobby, I know it’s probably a bad time, but I’ve got to talk to you.”

Bobby paused in his struggles with elasticized 100 percent cotton. He’d know that voice anywhere. When he died and went to Hell, it would be waiting for him in the fiery pit, right along with Donald McAdam.

“Shit,” he said, extracting another $600 from his shorts. He didn’t need Myra. He needed to think about McAdam. McAdam was getting crazy. If he got crazy enough, they were both going to get caught.

Bobby knew exactly what getting caught would mean. He’d gone about white-collar crime the way he went about everything else. He’d done a cost-benefit analysis. The benefit: three-quarters of a million dollars so far, in cash, most of it still in the tempered steel wall safe in his room at Engine House. The cost: either nothing, or public exposure, an IRS judgment, a criminal trial, and Leavenworth.