Playmates (12 page)

"Why not?" I said.

"Well, I mean, you'd have to make appointments, and, well, they wouldn't ... many of them wouldn't like it."

"Would they not wish to reach an understanding," Susan said, "as to how a young man who can neither read nor write could get a passing grade in their courses?"

"Do you teach, Dr. Silverman?"

"I give a course at Tufts. Primarily I am in private practice as a psychotherapist."

"Well, with a Ph.D. you've certainly been in an academic setting long enough to know, with your teaching experience at Tufts also, how prickly the academic world can be about any threat, real or imagined, to academic freedom," Madelaine said.

Susan smiled. "What greater threat is there to academic freedom than illiteracy? To any kind of freedom?"

"You will offend a great many people," Madelaine said.

Susan smiled more widely.

"My colleague will weather that, I think."

We all sat for a few moments.

Finally I said, "Do we get the schedules?"

Madelaine shook her head. "I'm sorry, I'm just not comfortable giving them to you."

"Well," I said, "at least you have a good reason."

I stood. Dr. Silverman stood. Dr. Roth did not.

"Wasn't it Dr. Johnson," I said, "who called academic freedom the last refuge of scoundrels?"

Dr. Roth said nothing. Dr. Silverman and I left.

We walked down the corridor and back down the stairs.

"Dr. Johnson said 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,' " Susan said.

"I know, but does Dr. Roth know?" I said.

"Unlikely," Susan said.

President Cort's office was in the other wing of the administration building.

"I warn you,'' I said to Susan, "this woman is infatuated with me. So be prepared to smother your jealousy."

Susan yawned. "I'll do what I can," she said. We went into the President's office and June Merriman at her desk looked at me passionately.

"Oh, God," she said.

"This will be hard," Dr. Silverman murmured.

"June," I said. "This is my friend Susan Silverman."

Ms. Merriman smiled with her lips only and made a small nod of her head.

"We'll need a list of Dwayne Woodcock's teachers, June."

"May I ask why?" June said.

"June," I said. "I know you want to string this out so you may spend more precious minutes with me. But Dr. Silverman here is my honeybunch and she's alert to even the most subtle of love ploys."

"Please do not be offensive," she said.

"Oh, June," I said. "How transparent."

"You won't leave without the list, will you," she said.

"No," I said.

"I can call the registrar and have Dwayne's schedule over the past four years Xeroxed. You'll have to make the list yourself."

She then made her phone call, prefacing the request with the phrase, "President Cort wonders if you would. . ."

In an hour we were having a spot of lunch at the Lancaster Tap. In a manila envelope on the table beside my water glass were copies of Dwayne's classes over the past four years.

"And what are you going to do with all those class schedules?" Susan said.

"I'm going to talk to all his teachers."

Susan shook her head. "You are a piece of work," she said.

"Says so," I said, "on ladies' room walls all over the country."

"No," Susan said. "It doesn't."

FOR the next week I interviewed professors. Susan came with me when she could on the assumption that she was more academic than I was and could add some insight. George Lyman Kittredge couldn't have added enough insight.

I was alone when I talked with J. Taylor Hack, Francis Calvert Dolbear Professor of American Civilization. Hack was tall and portly and well tailored except that his shoes weren't shined.

"Woodcock," he said. "No, I'm afraid I can't remember the boy."

"Took your course in The Frontier Hypothesis, last spring," I said.

Hack smiled graciously. "It's quite a popular course," he said. He dipped his head modestly. "I'm just not able to recall all of my students."

"Gee," I said. "That's too bad. I thought maybe because Dwayne is six feet nine inches tall and the best college basketball player in the world, you might have noticed him more than others."

"The best, really, how interesting. I don't pay much attention to basketball, I fear."

I was looking at my notes. "Dwayne got a B- in your course."

"Well, he did very well. It's rather a demanding course and for a, ah, basketball player to do that well, Dwayne must be an unusual young man."

"He can't read," I said.

"I beg your pardon."

"He can't read."

Hack was absolutely silent.

"Probably gotten an A," I said, "if he could read."

"It's not possible. Someone must have taken the exams for him," Hack said finally.

"Probably," I said. "And probably wrote his papers for him. You wouldn't have known if someone sat in for him during class?"

Hack paused a long time before he answered. Finally he said, "No, I wouldn't ... there are forty or fifty people in this class, I give it every semester. I have two other classes each year. There're papers, and my own research."

"Anyone ever ask you to give his grades any special attention?" I said.

"No. Good God, no. No one would intrude on the grading process like that."

"Of course not," I said. "And you never heard of Dwayne Woodcock?"

"No."

"Amazing," I said.

"I do not," Hack said, "spend my time poring over the sports pages."

"I know who Frederick Jackson Turner is," I said.

"I don't see the relevance."

"There's a surprise," I said.

Susan was with me when we talked to a young assistant professor named Mary Ann Hedrick. She had an office about the size of a confessional, in the humanities building.

"Sure, I remember Dwayne," she said. "I had him in the American lit survey, two years ago. Who could forget him?"

"He's easy to notice," I said.

Mary Ann winked at Susan. "I'll say," she said.

"Was he in regular attendance?" I said.

"In class? Hell no. He showed up once in a while and he'd come to conference in my office when it was scheduled. But he had practice, and then he had games, and it's hard for a kid. The course is required, and I'm sure was about things that he had no interest in. Imagine him reading Emily Dickinson?"

"He couldn't read," I said.

"Excuse me."

"He couldn't read Emily Dickinson. He can't read."

"What do you mean he can't read?" Mary Ann said.

"He's illiterate," Susan said.

"God, aren't they all," Mary Ann said. "But you mean really, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Jesus Christ," she said. "What is he now? A senior?"

"Yes."

"And he can't read," she shook her head. "Don't we look like a collection of prime jerks," she said.

"Yes," I said. "You do."

"We're interested in how that happened," Susan said.

"It happens because nobody gives a goddamn. Me included. The students are the necessary evil in the teaching profession. Otherwise it's a pretty good deal. You don't work hard, you have a lot of time off. The pay's niot much, but nobody hassles you. You can lead and write and publish, pretty well unimpeded except for the students. Most of us don't like them much."

"Anybody ever pressure you to give Dwayne a better grade or whatever?" I said.

"No," she said. "What did I give him?"

I consulted my list. "C+," I said.

"And he can't read," she said. "Boy, is this embarrassing or what?"

"Dwayne's embarrassed too," Susan said.

"I don't give exams, and I don't take attendance. I give them two papers a semester, and I work on grading them. But I don't like bluebook knowledge and I don't like teaching kids who are there only because they're compelled."

"So someone wrote Dwayne's papers for him," Susan said.

"Sure," Mary Ann said. "I don't remember him now, but I probably suspected it when they came in sounding like an Oxford honors thesis, but frankly I figure you get more teaching done by keeping them in school than by flunking them out. Besides, the truth, charging him with plagiarism and flunking him is a pain in the ass. It's easier to let it go."

"Why is it a pain in the ass?" Susan said.

"They come in and whine to you and swear they did it, but their roommate helped them, and . . ." Mary Ann made a push-it-all-away gesture with both hands. "I'm doing a book on Ellen Glasgow, and I like to work on it when I'm not teaching."

"No pressure not to catch him plagiarizing?" I said.

"None," she said. "That's the truth. What are you going to do about this?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Will you tell people?" Mary Ann said.

"It's what Dwayne wanted to know," I said.

"We're all ashamed of this," Mary Ann said.

"That's the easy part," I said.

Now and then I'd see Hawk, drifting across the street behind me. Parking at the other end of the block when I got out of my car. Motionless and barely real at the far end of a corridor as I stepped into someone's office. He was there, for a moment, with the morning light behind him when I went to see Harold Wagner.

Wagner taught Black History and had given Dwayne a D in the fall semester.

"He didn't do much," Wagner said. "And he didn't seem very interested."

"Do you know that he can't read?" I said.

"I don't know it," Wagner said. "But I suspected it. He missed the midterm, and prevailed upon me to let him do a paper instead. He got an A on the paper. He said he was going to have to miss the final because of basketball. I said he'd have to make it up. I was skeptical about the paper. He missed two scheduled make-ups. He said an incomplete would make him ineligible to play. That Coach Dunham was a martinet, not his phrase, about such things. I knew what was riding on his having a good senior year. I said he could take a D for the course. His grades in his other courses were such that a D wouldn't make him ineligible."

"And that was it?" I said.

"No. I spoke to Dr. Roth, the academic coordinator for basketball. I said Dwayne was academically troubled. That I questioned his basic skills and that I thought perhaps he should be tested to see if we could help him."

"What did she say?"

"She said she thought I was unduly worried. That Dwayne had been doing well in other classes, but that she'd talk with him."

"She didn't press you to alter his grades?" I said.

Wagner shook his head. I thought about it for a minute.

"I didn't want to take away his chance," Wagner said. "There's not that many of us get a chance like Dwayne."

"I know," I said. "I got the same problem ... among others."

"It is Dwayne's fault too," Wagner said.

"Yes. He knows he can't read. He hasn't done anything about it."

Wagner looked down at his hands for a moment. "Our fault too," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

SO far as I could tell no one had conspired to keep Dwayne in school, although Dr. Roth kept bothering me. If Wagner had told her, and he didn't seem to be lying, she had not only her own knowledge, but the testimony of a professor. Why would she run the risk of covering it up at that stage? For herself, the help-out-the-poor-little-darkie attitude might explain it. But once someone else knew, would she jeopardize herself? Not the Madelaine that I knew.

I swiveled my office chair around and pulled my phone closer and dialed information in Washington, D.C. In maybe two minutes I had tracked down the registrar's office at Georgetown University. They had no Madelaine Roth. I called the alumni office. They had a Madelaine Reilly who had married Simon Roth in 1984. She was a member of the class of '82. They did not know the status of the marriage; but Simon Roth lived currently in Fullerton, California, and Mrs. Roth lived in Newton, Massachusetts. I hung up and went to my file cabinet in the corner so when the door opened it was concealed. Susan said it was the single ugliest piece of furniture she had ever personally seen, though a friend of hers who worked for Bedford Travel claimed to have seen an uglier piece in Paraguay in 1981. I got out my file on Meade Alexander and thumbed through it. Ah ha! Gerry Broz graduated from Georgetown in 1983. So they could easily have been acquainted. Pays to do business with a professional detective.

While I was on a hot streak I called a New York City cop I'd met a couple of years ago when I had worked for Patricia Utley. He wasn't in. He'd call me back.

The office felt stuffy. I opened the window a crack and then went and opened my office door to get some cross ventilation. Hawk was leaning on the door jamb across the hall talking with the paralegal. I left the door open and went back and sat at my desk and thought about what I was doing. After about fifteen minutes of running it back and forth it was clear that I didn't know what I was doing. What I had accomplished so far was to make people want to kill me. I'd gotten Dwayne in trouble with his coach. I had already found out what I'd been hired to find out, and I wasn't telling the people who'd hired me. I knew Dwayne was shaving points. I knew Deegan and others had put him up to it. I knew Deegan was connected to Gerry Broz, and I knew that Dwayne's academic adviser could be connected to Gerry Broz. And I could find that out in time, if she was, or if she wasn't. And I knew that the faculty at Taft, by and large, didn't much care if Dwayne could read. What I didn't know was what good any of this did me, and how to get Dwayne out of the mess he was in without destroying his life.

I looked across the hall. Hawk had moved into the office and taken a seat next to the paralegal's desk. Easy for him. All he had to do was follow me around and keep people from shooting me in the back. I heard the paralegal laugh. What's so goddamned funny? Probably be moving in with her Monday. She laughed again, and the liquid hint of a giggle lurked in the laugh. Probably wants me to be best man.

The phone rang. I answered. A voice said, "This is Corsetti."

I said, "Remember me? The killing on Seventy-Seventh Street, guy named Rambeau?"