'Murder?' she asked, taking down my number.
By the time I had left a similar message with Rose Malone for Battaglia, Sylvia Foote was on the line.
'Miss Cooper, my secretary just repeated your conversation to me.' Foote was in her late sixties-humorless, rigid, and entirely protective of the administration's concerns. 'I need to tell my president about this immediately. I'd like you to answer some questions for me.'
'And I'd like
I knew that the Jersey prosecutors would move in as quickly as possible, looking for clues that would connect Ivan Kralovic to Lola's death. If, in fact, Dakota had been murdered in Manhattan, then Sinnelesi would have no jurisdiction here. But if he wanted to keep his name in the headlines, as Battaglia figured, Sinnelesi would argue that he had a duty to investigate whether Lola had been kidnapped from his side of the river and follow the trail to our doorstep.
By Monday, New Jersey police might already be swarming around the King's College campus and Lola's apartment building, scouring students and neighbors for information, gossip, and potential witnesses.
'I think we need to talk this afternoon. One of the detectives can bring me up to your office.'
'I simply don't have time to do that.'
'Don't have time?' A prominent member of the university family was dead, and I was only hours away from formal confirmation that we were dealing with a homicide, but Sylvia Foote was stonewalling me already. 'I'll be up at your office by two o'clock.'
'I'm sorry I won't be here to discuss this with you today.'
'In that case, I'll start with the students over in the political-'
'We'd prefer that the students are not involved in this.'
Where was Chapman when I needed him? He'd be telling Foote that either she could play hardball with him or do this the nice way. He'd be up there with grand jury subpoenas that she could ignore at her own risk, or she could cooperate and be treated like a lady. And the first time she looked down her long crooked nose at him and attempted to dismiss him with an arrogant order to leave, he'd stick out the subpoena and tell the sour old bag to take it.
'Not involved? It would be lovely if nobody had to be involved, and even nicer if Lola Dakota was alive. That's simply not one of your choices. We're going to have to sit down with you and go over everything that will need to be done, identify every individual we'll need to interview and each document we'll need to access.'
Laura walked into my office and placed a slip of paper on my desk as I listened to Foote drone on:
'I've already got the
Foote was silent. I expected that she was balancing the reality of what I was saying against the bet that her old friend Paul Battaglia would not approve of my heavy-handed style. But she was also smart enough to know that he would back me in my effort to get to the campus before Sinnelesi's troops arrived on the scene.
'My office is in the new King's College building on Claremont Avenue, half a block in from 116th Street. Did you say you could be here by two?'
I phoned Chapman and told him that since I'd left my Jeep at the office the night before, I would swing by to get him in front of his place and head uptown to interview Foote. I told Laura to beep me if any urgent calls came in, and that I would check with her for messages when the meeting was over. The ice was still caked thick on the windshield, and I struggled with the scraper as the defroster worked slowly to melt it.
Chapman was standing in front of the coffee shop next to his apartment building on First Avenue. His only concession to the bitter cold was the fact that he wore a trench coat over the navy blazer that he had adopted as his uniform once he had been assigned to the detective bureau. His black hair was blowing wildly in the wind, and he kept reaching up with his hand to chase it. He opened the passenger door and got in. 'So what else do I need to know about Columbia beside the fact that its football team sucks?'
'You'll drive Foote crazy if you don't keep it straight that Dakota was teaching at King's College when she died, not at Columbia. They'll be very jumpy about that. They use some of the same facilities, and students enrolled in either school can take courses at the other, but they are entirely separate institutions.'
I had spent a lot of time in Manhattan during my undergraduate years. My best friend and roommate at Wellesley, Nina Baum, met her husband, Gabe, when we were sophomores. He was a junior at Columbia, and I had often accompanied Nina when she came to the city to spend a weekend with Gabe.
As we drove uptown, I tried to fill Mike in on the bits of college history that I remembered. Columbia was founded in 1754, by royal charter of King George II of England, and its original name was King's College-the name recently adopted by the experimental school that carved out a piece of the neighborhood for itself at the start of the new millennium. The university's first building was situated adjacent to Trinity Church on lower Broadway, and some of its earliest students included the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay, and the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The institution closed down during the American Revolution, and when it reopened eight years later, it had shed its imperial name in favor of 'Columbia,' the personification of the American determination for independence.
By 1850, the college had moved to Madison Avenue at Forty-ninth Street, shaping itself into a modern university by the addition of a law school to its undergraduate and medical faculties. In 1897, the campus was moved to its current site in Morningside Heights at Broadway and 116th Street; this academic village- modeled on the idea of an Athenian agora-represented the largest single collection of buildings designed by the great architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.
'What's with this experimental school thing?'
'I only know what I've read in the news. King's is an effort to set up an alternative educational model, drawing from a few of the stars of the Columbia teaching staff, but trying to structure a fresh view of the process. It borrows some of the stature of the Ivy League reputation, but it's been spun off on its own, free and clear of the mother university.'
'Who's in charge?'
'We're about to find out. Foote said she'd have the acting president at the meeting.'
'Wanna take Third Avenue uptown? Stop for a minute at the corner of Seventieth Street.'
I pulled up in front of P. J. Bernstein's.
'Hungry?'
'No, thanks. Had a salad at my desk.'
Chapman got out of the car while I double-parked and waited for him. In a slight nod to Christmas, Bernstein's window displayed a few large smiling Santa faces. But there was also a huge menorah with electric candles on the countertop, while blue, gold, and white-fringed streamers declared a Happy Hanukkah to the deli's customers.
Mike returned in a few minutes with two hot dogs wrapped in a napkin, overflowing with sauerkraut and relish, and a can of root beer. 'I know the rules. No droppings on the floor mat. No sucking the sauerkraut out of my teeth in public.' He chewed on his lunch as I continued driving and cut through Central Park at Ninety-seventh Street, taking Amsterdam Avenue the rest of the way north to the campus.
'Had any cases out of King's College yet?' Mike asked, licking the mustard off his fingers and swigging from the can of root beer.
'Not one.'
'Must be the only school in the country with no reported crimes. Wait till these kids find Cannon's and the West End.' Those two bars were magnets for the collegiate community and havens for the binge-drinking students who found their way to our offices with every kind of problem that alcohol abuse created.
Mike displayed his badge to the expressionless, square-tinned security guard who sat inside the small gatehouse at the entrance to College Walk on 116th Street, barely looking up from the skin magazine he was
