front: Con-fid-fucking-dential.”
He put the blue file folder on his desk, and squared it neatly in the center of the green blotter.
“I’m going down the hall to the can,” Belson said. “Be about ten minutes. I don’t want you poking around in this confidential folder on the Lamont case while I’m gone. I particularly don’t want you using that photocopier beside the water cooler.”
“You can count on me, Sergeant.”
Belson got up and walked out of the squad room down the hall. I leaned over the desk and turned the file toward me and opened it. The report was ten pages long. I picked up the file and walked down to the copy machine and made copies. Then I went back to Belson’s cubicle.
When Belson came back the copies were folded the long way and stashed in my inside coat pocket, and the file folder was neatly centered on Belson’s blotter. Belson picked the folder up without comment and put it back in his file drawer.
“Unofficially,” I said, “you got any thoughts about this thing?”
“I’m never unofficial,” Belson said. “When I’m getting laid, I’m getting laid officially.”
“How nice for Lisa,” I said.
Belson grinned.
“I don’t see anything soft in the case,” he said. “The kid was gay, apparently had a love affair with an older man that went sour, and he did the, ah, Brody.”
“You interview the older man?”
“Yep.”
“He admit the affair?”
“Nope. He is a faculty member at the university. I heard he was up for tenure.”
“So he’d have some reason to deny it.”
“I don’t know how they feel on the tenure committee about professors fucking students,” Belson said. “You?”
“I’m guessing it’s considered improper,” I said.
“Maybe,” Belson said.
“You ask?” I said.
Belson dropped his voice.
“The deliberations of the tenure committee are confidential,” he said.
“So they wouldn’t tell you if sex with a student counted for or against tenure?”
“Some of the people I talked to, sex with anything would count,” Belson said.
“But you got no information from the tenure folks.”
“No.”
“And if you yanked their ivy-covered tuchases down here for a talk?” I said.
“Tuchases?”
“You can always tell when a guy’s scoring a Jewess,” I said.
“I thought the plural was tuch-i,” Belson said.
“Shows you’re not scoring a Jewess,” I said. “You didn’t want to shake them up a little?”
“We had no reason to think that the case was anything but an open and shut suicide,” Belson said.
He smiled. “Quirk wanted to run them down here just because they annoyed him,” he said. “But they had the university legal counsel there, and like I say, we had no reason.”
“But it would have been kind of fun,” I said.
Belson smiled but he didn’t comment. Instead he said, “So what’s your interest. You think the suicide’s bogus?”
“Got no opinion,” I said. “I been hired to find out why Robinson Nevins didn’t get tenure.”
“Really?” Belson said.
“He says a malicious smear campaign prevented it, including the allegation that he was the faculty member for whom Lamont did the Brody.”
“See?” Belson said. “I knew you’d like that word. Does he admit it?”
“He denies it.”
Belson shrugged.
“Should be easy enough to prove he had a relationship,” Belson said.
“Harder to prove that he didn’t.”
“Yep.”
