He’d rapidly discovered that, in any case where a particular family was involved, he just had to say, “I’ve been retained by the family to check on the details,” and people became helpful, or even sympathetic depending on what the case was about. If somebody’s gone missing or been assaulted and the police don’t have the time or people to throw at it, who wouldn’t want to help the family? Carter had learned there didn’t even have to be a family directly involved for the magic of the phrase to work.
If that failed or didn’t work in context, he would try to imply he was an outsourced insurance investigator. It was weird how many people were more in awe of insurance investigators than they were of the police. Carter guessed the police could only arrest you. Insurance investigators could fuck up your premiums.
On this occasion, a passing reference to “family” was enough to do the trick. James Belasco was well regarded by the small cabal of academics tenured at Clave College, but they didn’t know much about his personal life. He had been married, but his wife had died some three years before from sepsis. There had been no children. His colleagues said that he had worked longer hours after that, and produced a greater number of papers. Of all the professors at Clave, he was considered safest in tenure, and would probably have stayed there until retirement.
“I didn’t know he had family,” said Pauline Watson, Belasco’s assistant.
“A brother in Cleveland,” lied Carter. “I think there was an argument a few years ago and they didn’t talk. A few months ago they started speaking again, looked like reconciliation was in the cards, then this happened. The brother just wants to know everything was done.”
They were in Belasco’s office. Already one shelf of books had been boxed, but the move had been put on pause then.
Watson caught the direction of Carter’s glance. She shrugged. “It’s a nice office. There was an attempt to land grab it. I know it seems cold, but … well, some of the other staff, their social skills could use work. The dean herself had to send around an e-mail telling people the office was to be left alone until she said otherwise.” She smiled, more a social construction than an expression. “I’ll be honest, Mr. Carter, I don’t really understand why you’re here. The professor died because of some sort of lung infection, didn’t he?”
Carter had seen the postmortem report, and it wasn’t helpful. Belasco’s corpse showed every sign of having drowned, except there was no water in his lungs. The ME had vaguely hand-waved at the idea of a lung irritation creating a similar effect, but without much enthusiasm. All that could be said with any certainty was that Belasco had asphyxiated, and it looked more likely to have been due to a natural cause than not.
Providence PD was not keen to make more work for itself, and was happy to accept that. Detective Harrelson was not nearly so happy about it when he tipped Carter off about the findings. The whole business with the phone call had fallen between the cracks—no, it had been
dropped
between the cracks—and his lieutenant and captain seemed to regard it as a freakish detail with no real bearing. It bothered Harrelson a great deal and, he told Carter, he was going to keep an eye out for anything else about the Belasco case that might cross his desk or the desks of any of his colleagues.
“Yes,” said Carter. “It was just some sort of lung infection, but the brother … he’s broken up about it. You know how it is when you decide to do something after meaning to deal with it for years, and then something stops you? I guess that’s what’s happening with the professor’s brother. He’s upset and seeing a pattern where there isn’t one. Just lousy luck. But … I’m being paid to ask around. I have to ask some pretty paranoid questions. Gets embarrassing, to be frank, Ms. Watson.”
“What sort of paranoid questions?”
“Nothing too crazy, just the usual. Did Professor Belasco have any enemies? Did he move in any suspicious circles? Did he have any dangerous habits? Usual things.”
“The professor?” Watson almost laughed. “He wouldn’t mind me saying this, used to joke about it himself, but he was a very boring man. Pleasant, but his work was his life. After Gemma died, it really was all that there was to his life. He was here most of the time. I don’t think he had an opportunity for some sort of clandestine life.”
“No other women?”
“None. Unless they could talk pure math, he didn’t have much interest.”
“No enemies?”
Here, Watson grew quiet and looked uncomfortable. “Nobody who hated him enough to kill him, if that’s what you mean?” she said finally.
“Anybody who disliked him at all,” said Carter, at pains to be casual. It was no big deal. He wasn’t going to make a song and dance about it. She should just tell him to get it out of the way.
“Scientists don’t usually get on well with
everyone
,” said Watson. “You have to understand, Mr. Carter. There are some powerful egos out there. If they get even a little bit bruised, they can hold a grudge for life.”
“Any example?”
“Nobody that would kill, put it that way.”
“I didn’t think they would.” Carter took out his notepad and warmed up his most charismatic smile. “If you could give me whoever had the professor on their shit list, I can ask them a few questions, prove they didn’t have anything to do with it, and tell my client there’s no story here other than what the police have already reported.” Watson seemed loath to name names, but keen to spill gossip all the same. “There must be
somebody
?” he said gently, nudging her toward that gossip.
“There was one,” she said reluctantly. It was a reluctance that faded quickly as she told Carter the story.
* * *
His name was William Colt. It was a good name for a cowboy, but Colt was about as far from a cowpuncher as it was possible to be. Looking like a suitable candidate for a David Byrne biopic set around the time of
More Songs About Buildings and Food
, Colt was not a popular man around campus. Carter found himself adjusting his approach to suggest (without stating as much) to interviewees that he had been hired by the academic administration to investigate William Colt with an eye to either defunding or even expelling him. Once whoever he was interviewing understood by Carter’s double-talk that Colt might be deep in the shit, they could hardly wait to help pour more on his head.
“Arrogant asshole” and variations was a common epithet, along with an admission that he was undoubtedly brilliant and any institution would be happy to have him, and indeed could take him with Clave College’s blessings, just so long as it was understood that Clave wouldn’t take him back when his new college discovered what an arrogant asshole he was.
Nor was he quite the genius he had been when he first joined the college. His work was produced as and when he felt like doing so, and he was failing to maintain the tutorial levels that were expected of him as a postgraduate. He seemed to have raised the hackles of just about every lecturer he had ever encountered, but he did have one special bête noire.
James Belasco.
Normally their paths would hardly have crossed, Colt’s field of study being combinatorics as opposed to Belasco’s topology.
“That all changed about a year ago,” Professor Delaine told Carter as he walked with her across the campus toward the commissary building. “I think Will was getting restless, and the idea of specializing in one branch of math was frightening him a little. We talked about career options, but he kept talking about how limiting he found it, and how if everything was mathematics, then mathematics was everything.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Every branch of science likes to think it’s important, and of course, they all are. But they’re specializations. Much of biology, for example, is biochemistry, which is a specialization of organic chemistry, which is a specialization of chemistry, which is a specialization of physics, and physics is practical mathematics. No matter which set of
matryoshka
dolls you open in science, the innermost is always math.” She winced slightly at a memory. “Will thinks there might be another doll inside that.”
“Something underlying math? Such as?”
“The purest form of it. The mother of everything. He’s not the first to think that way, and he’s not the first to be disappointed. The truth of it, Mr. Carter, is that we’re already there. The different branches of mathematics are simply different aspects of the same discipline. The innermost doll looks like calculus from one direction, number theory from another, and so on. The next doll outward takes those views and begins to interface them to the real world. Information theory, game theory, statistics, modeling reality from the purity of numbers.
“It’s probably blasphemous of me to say it, but God is right there in that act. From the ‘Let there be light’ of pure math through the five subsequent days of creation embodied in applied mathematics. I’m an atheist because I don’t need a god to explain the universe. I have seen the truth of the numbers, and they should be enough for anyone.”
“But not Colt?”
“No. Young and restless. Which is good, don’t get me wrong. Restless minds are questioning minds, and curiosity makes us what we are. William’s didn’t take him into the broader world, though, not when he had it here on campus in microcosm. He made a nuisance of himself in some of the other departments. He was the subject of debate for some weeks in the collegiate corridors of power, such as they are. Then he lost interest, and turns up when he feels like it. His work is still good, on the occasions he produces it, but not as sharp as it used to be. He’s lost some of his fire. Coming into money was probably what did it.”
Carter’s cop instincts were not about to let a mention of sudden wealth go by, and he asked about it.
“He won a decently sized prize on the state lottery, some tens of thousands.” Professor Delaine grimaced. “A startling event. The faculty was appalled. A mathematician, somebody who actually understands numbers, buying a lottery ticket. It beggars belief.”
* * *
Delaine was hardly the only member of staff to be more or less candid about William Colt, but none of them could offer any concrete suggestions as to why there was enmity between him and James Belasco, other than Colt not taking the work seriously. It was left to Carter to do a little detective work to find somebody who would give him details.
A very little detective work, as it turned out. Outside Belasco’s office was a notice board bearing a schedule for tutorial groups and this Carter had photographed in passing. Now he checked the names of those in the groups against the society lists in the student union building, and found a couple of likely candidates. Having made friendly contact with campus security, and after a few more inquiries, Carter was able to locate one of the names having lunch in the cafeteria.
Jason Xu smiled when Carter introduced himself and started spinning a line about a potential disciplinary action against William Colt.
“Bullshit,” said Xu good-naturedly. “This is about Professor Belasco. Everyone knows it.”
“Okay,” said Carter, “that’s cool. I prefer being up-front in any case. Colt and Belasco. I keep hearing about bad blood, but no details.”
“You think Colt killed the prof?” Xu was eating a Caesar salad in a plastic container. He speared a piece of anchovy with his fork and chewed it while he waited for an answer.
“It’s not a murder inquiry. This place would be dense with homicide cops if it were. I’m just trying to find out what went on in the professor’s life. It’s a pretty broad brief, but it’s what his family wants me to do.” Carter didn’t mind not being
entirely
up-front. “I keep hearing the name William Colt. What was going on there?”
“Colt’s a dick,” said Xu without hesitation. “He’s smart. No one is saying he isn’t, but he knows it and thinks it’s a superpower. He’s like … what’s that kind of autism? The mild kind?”
“Asperger’s?”
“Asperger’s syndrome, yeah. He just doesn’t deal so well with reality. Goes around like he’s the lead character in a movie and everything has to be about him.”
“Playing a role, huh?” Carter had found Xu’s name on the Roleplaying Society notice board.
Xu laughed. “Man, don’t get all
Dark Dungeons
on me. I know what reality looks like. A game’s a game. When we put the dice away, we’re done for the evening. Colt’s not playing a game. He honestly thinks the world’s a big story and it’s all about him.”
“Okay. And how did that play into his relationship with Professor Belasco?”
“He suggested … nah, he flat out
said
that Belasco had a poor intellect. That’s fighting talk in these halls. It’s not even true. Belasco was a prodigy back in the day. You find his name all over. Not such a bright star these days, but that’s math for you. Almost every big name you can think of did all their best work before they were thirty. Newton developed calculus when he was, like, twenty-six. You know that? Colt got off on saying Belasco’s best work wasn’t that great, and he was burned out.”
“He said this to Belasco’s face?”
“Pretty much. He was snide about it. Really got into Belasco’s grill. A guy can only have so much patience with that kind of shit. Colt was saying he was warming to topology as a field—”
“That was Professor Belasco’s specialty, right?”
“Yeah, and Colt was saying he was going to rewrite the book on topology and everyone who went before him would be forgotten.”
“Like Belasco.”
“Yeah. Like Belasco. Belasco didn’t take it lying down. Colt is, as mentioned previously, a dick, and has pissed off just about everybody on campus at one time or another. Belasco had been sitting on some shit that Colt pulled over in archaeology, but then Colt pissed him off so Belasco was going to put together a formal complaint.”
“Which you know how?”
Xu laughed. “Because he said it right in front of us in the tutorial group. Kicked Colt out, and said he wouldn’t be happy until Colt was expelled.” Xu shook his head, smiling ruefully. “The prof’s standing went up with us all that day. Nobody can fucking stand Colt, man. But now … Belasco’s dead.” He looked appraisingly at Carter. “You
sure
this isn’t about a homicide?”