hallway. “I took you home to go to bed, not take a vacation. What have you been doing?”
“Sleeping.” I reached through Maxine’s small sliding-glass window and pulled out a daily report. The night had been blessedly boring. “What’s the rush?”
“Brandt thought it might be nice if you got on your way in the predawn darkness, especially since you’ll be carrying a cooler marked Caution-Human Remains.”
“So they came?”
“Yeah; about three hours ago. It’s in the fridge. I put it in a brown paper bag.”
“They pack that stuff in dry ice, Frank. You could have just shoved it under my desk.”
Murphy scowled. “It doesn’t matter.”
I shook my head, opened my office door, and turned on the light. Murphy turned it off. “You don’t have time. You’re leaving.”
I closed the door with a sigh and retraced my steps to the hall. Murphy left me to get the cooler. He returned carrying a grocery bag. “See? It doesn’t look weird.”
I shook my head and relieved him of it. “I’ll take your word for it.”
He escorted me out the door and to my car, looking around as if Katz would swing by on some vine, camera in hand. The mother-hen routine was a far cry from yesterday. Not that I was complaining, but I was still a little wary. I could only imagine last night’s conversation must have been a huge weight off his shoulders.
He put his hand on the car door as I was about to open it. “You think someone ought to go with you?”
“I don’t see why. I might be gone several days.”
“You and what’s-his-name, you mean.”
The thought had occurred to me. I looked at him closely. “Is this a complicated way of inviting yourself along?”
He beamed. “Yeah.”
“What about Brandt?”
He walked over to his car and got a small overnight bag out of the passenger seat. “I already cleared it with him… and Martha.”
The drive to West Haven takes about three hours, a straight drop south on the interstate. The weather was beautiful, cold and blue skied, and we shared a good mood. I was happy to have him along, and happy to see him out from under his self-imposed cloud. Comments about the end of the road and living on borrowed time go with the territory of old age, and Frank didn’t hold a candle to my mother, who in her mid-eighties was complaining that God had just forgotten her.
But it was a sliding scale, and Frank had temporarily slid himself too far down. I felt he was back now; still fearful of bad news but committed to finding the answer.
The University of West Haven is an unpretentious collection of ugly concrete buildings scattered across the top of a hill with no view. We got directions to the Business Administration Center, where Cetio the guard insisted we would find Dr. Kees, and parked in front of a gray and largely windowless five-story cube that was still very much under construction.
We got out and stared at it. There were other cars in the lot but not many. In fact, the entire campus had a forlorn, empty look to it.
“What do you think?” Murphy asked.
“Well, Hillstrom’s office is over a dentist. Maybe this guy likes abandoned buildings.”
He gestured to the back seat. “Should we take the stuff?”
“Might as well. I don’t want to lose it now.”
The red-and-white cooler, free of its brown bag, did indeed have Caution-Human Remains taped on one side. On the other was a happy penguin and the words Chilly Willy.
We picked our way over the construction-site debris that lay scattered across the frozen mud and entered a doorless front lobby. The buttons for the elevator hadn’t been installed yet. Nor, for all we knew, had the elevator. We began to climb the stairs, the clatter of our footsteps echoing off the bare concrete walls.
On the fifth floor, we found a door and behind it a wall of warm air. We walked down the unfinished, uncarpeted hallway, looking through doorways as we went, vaguely following the sound of a radio. We found it, and the young woman in cowboy boots listening to it, about halfway down. She was standing at an equipment-jammed counter, dropping blood from a pipette into a row of tiny saucers in perfect rhythm with the music.
She finished and smiled brightly at us. “Hi. Can I help you?”
Murphy and I looked at each other. “Does Dr. Robert Kees work here?”
“Sure does.”
She clomped out of the room and down the hall, leaving us surrounded by a truly impressive hodgepodge of gleaming, metallic, totally mysterious machines. The radio sounded tinny and cowed by its competition.
She returned in a couple of minutes, followed by an athletic middle-aged man with thick, swept-back black hair. He smiled broadly and stuck out his hand. “Hi. I’m Bob Kees.”
We introduced ourselves and he looked at the cooler. “Is that your friend?”
“Both of them. Maybe all three of them. Actually, that’s why we’re here; we don’t know how many are involved.”
“Beverly tells me you want all your information in twenty minutes or so, is that right?”
Murphy’s face brightened. “Is that all it takes?”
Kees laughed. “Not a chance. Assuming I was sitting around here dying for something to do, it might take me sixty to seventy-two hours, if I was lucky. The way things are, I could get to you in three weeks to a month.”
“A month?” Murphy burst out.
“How much did Dr. Hillstrom tell you about this?”
“She said it had something to do with reopening a case-that you might have put the wrong guy in the slammer.”
“This is going to sound a little corny, but we think an innocent man died because of what’s in this cooler.”
Kees pursed his lips and motioned us into the hallway. “Jeannie, let me know what you get from these as soon as you’re finished, okay? And hold off on the Spiegelmann stuff until I tell you.”
“Okay.”
He led us down the corridor and through a maze of overstuffed offices bulging with furniture and strange machinery. “In case you didn’t notice, we haven’t quite moved in. The university, in its wisdom, contracted for the destruction of our old quarters before the new ones were built. Then the workers went on strike.”
“What about the students?”
“You mean the lack of them? They went out on strike too-in sympathy with the workers and just in time to extend their Christmas leave. Protest isn’t what it used to be.”
We ended up in a pretty nice office, complete with rug on the floor and pictures on the walls. Half of it was piled high with junk too, but the other half looked neater and more pleasant than anything we had back home. Kees sat behind an old and unpretentious turn-of-the-century desk and locked his fingers behind his head. To his right, on a separate table, two glowing computers hummed softly to themselves.
“So, tell me your tale.”
The stereotype of the self-proclaimed “busy” man is a guy who spends half his time telling you he’s got none to spare. With one assistant and the rest out on strike, combined with what Beverly Hillstrom had told me about his popularity, Robert Kees struck me as having his life under control. He let us bumble through our story without one glance at his watch or a single sigh of impatience. When we finished, he got up, plucked the cooler from my lap, said, “Okay,” and left the room.
Frank raised his eyebrows. “What did that mean?”
“I guess he’s either doing it right now, or he just threw it out the window.”
“Were we supposed to follow him?”
“Not unless you know how to work any of that stuff.” We sat there for over an hour, staring out the window, staring at the floor, staring at each other, until he finally returned. “That’s quite the collection.”
“How do you mean?” He parked himself with his hands behind his head again. “It’s filled with goodies. A standard batch of samples, even from Beverly, has a few slides, a few swabs, maybe some tissue, and that’s about it. She threw in everything but the kitchen sink-she must have had some serious reservations when she did the
