heard that Professor Winslow was an easy grader, and how hard, after all, could art history be? With a few notable exceptions—primarily those few students who signed up each semester for his introductory painting class—his students were here for one reason only: the three credits that would magically appear on their transcripts if they paid attention in class, showed up on exam days and regurgitated his words back to him in some kind of meaningful form.
This was what his life had come to: he trafficked in regurgitation. Not a particularly pretty realization, especially at four forty-five on a sticky Indian summer afternoon when the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast was a couple of purple Peeps that had been left to petrify on the table in the faculty lounge. Judging by their cardboard consistency, they’d been there for a while.
At a soft rap on the door, Sam glanced up from his book and saw the face of Lydia Forbes, Dean of Arts and Sciences and his immediate supervisor, framed in the tiny window. Setting down his book, he got up from his chair, crossed the room and, with a slow sweep of his gaze over the classroom—his students were supposed to be adults, but it didn’t hurt to give them the impression that he had eyes in the back of his head—he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.
“Lydia,” he said, leaving the door open just a crack behind him.
“Sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t look busy.” Six feet tall in her conservative two-inch heels, Lydia met him nearly eye to eye. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, she wore a brown tweed suit, her gray hair pulled back in its customary severe chignon. Eyebrows that were a dark slash in her pale face gave her a look of perpetual surprise. The first time he’d met her, he’d thought she looked just like Miss Grundy, the schoolteacher from the Archie comics. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the outer package was merely professional camouflage for a woman with an infectious laugh, a bawdy sense of humor and a relentless addiction to unfiltered cigarettes. “Take a walk with me,” she said.
He glanced back at the classroom. Reading the uncertainty in his gaze, she said, “For Christ’s sake, Sam, pull that big stick out of your ass. They’re adults. Let them be responsible for their own actions.”
Sam latched the classroom door and fell into step with her, matching her leggy stride along the silent corridor and out into the crisp October afternoon. The sun’s rays, angling between brick buildings, bathed the entire scene in a muted pink glow. Lydia walked two steps from the entryway, fired up a Pall Mall and took a drag. Eyes closed in ecstasy, she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and said without rancor, “Damn idiotic state laws.”
Behind her back, Sam discreetly waved away the smoke. She took another drag and said, “I forwarded your tenure application to the committee yesterday.”
Moving upwind of the toxic blue cloud, he took a breath of fresh air. Or as fresh as it got on a weekday in downtown Boston. “And?”
She turned and studied him with shrewd blue eyes. Took another puff and said, “I’m worried about Larsen.”
Professor Nyles Larsen was Sam Winslow’s nemesis. He was also the chair of the tenure committee. In theory, if a professor didn’t achieve tenure, there was nothing forcing him to move on. In reality, being denied was a slap in the face, best responded to by making a rapid retreat with tail tucked firmly between legs. There was just one problem with that: Sam didn’t want to retreat. He might have come to teaching by a circuitous route, but now that he was here, he had no intention of going anywhere.
Sam furrowed his brow. “You think he’ll give us trouble?”
“I think Nyles Larsen would take great glee in denying your tenure application. He’s had it in for you since the day you first walked through the door of this place.”
It was true. Larsen had been a member of the search committee that had hired Sam, and when the man had taken an immediate dislike to him, he’d come close to losing out to another candidate. If not for the staunch ally he’d made in Vince Tedeschi, Professor of Mathematics, he’d have ended up standing on a street corner, selling pencils from a cup. Fortunately for Sam, majority vote had ruled the day, but Nyles Larsen continued to wage a one-man campaign against what he claimed were Sam’s mediocre standards and slapdash teaching methods.
“He’s jealous,” Lydia said. “Your students think you walk on water. Nyles puts his students to sleep.”
A pair of twenty-something young women carrying backpacks passed them, talking animatedly, and entered the building through the wide double doors. “So how do we counteract his influence?” Sam said.
“We’ve done as much as we can do,” Lydia said. “I’ve read your materials all the way through. Proofed them twice. Just to be sure. Your tenure packet’s thorough. You’ve provided good documentation. Your student evaluations are top-notch. Your publication record is a little thin, but it’s outweighed by other factors, like your outstanding committee work. Your peer recommendation was stellar.”
Of course it was. If not for him, it would have been his peers sitting on all those mind-numbingly tedious committees. They’d do whatever it took to keep him on board so they could continue nominating him to do the dirty work they were all so desperate to avoid. He figured it was worth the sacrifice. No matter what he was asked to do, he accepted the job with a smile. Damn little ever got accomplished in those committee meetings, but membership always looked good on paper.
“Christ, Lyd,” he said, hating the thread of desperation that ran through his voice, “I have to get tenure. If I can’t make it in this place…” The rest of the sentence went unspoken, but they both knew what he meant. When you started at the bottom, there was nowhere left to fall. “I can’t make a living from painting. And I’m not trained for anything else. If they boot me out of Back Bay, I’ll end up waxing floors at the bus station.”
Lydia took another puff of her cigarette, held in the smoke and exhaled it. Flicking an ash, she said, “You’ve done everything we asked you to do. There’s no reason on God’s green earth why you should be turned down. Not unless Larsen starts flapping his gums, and even then, the rest of the committee should ignore him. The man is irrational, and everybody knows it. They also know he’s determined to hang you out to dry. If anything goes wrong at this point, I’m holding Nyles Larsen personally responsible. If that happens, the little weasel won’t want to cross my path.”
The lowering sun slowly leached the afternoon of its warmth. Just beneath the surface of that golden glow lay October’s surprisingly sharp little teeth, nipping unexpectedly when a sudden arctic gust caught and lifted a strand of Sam’s hair.
“I appreciate the support,” he said. “I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me a thing. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette onto the ground and crushed it out with her foot. “And to let you know that I’m watching your back.”
Detective Lorna Abrams had a headache.
She fumbled in her black leather purse for the emergency bottle of Tylenol she always carried, opened the bottle and popped two capsules into her palm. Snapping the cap back on the bottle, she glanced around the interior of the car for something liquid, then said, “To hell with it!” and swallowed them dry.
Policzki, his hands at ten and two on the wheel and his eyes focused on traffic to prevent them from becoming yet another highway statistic, said, “I don’t know how you do that.”
“Easy. I just work up a mouthful of spit and—”
“Thanks,”
