Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3, page 41
Edward Horvath looked bewildered. He also looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “The Dean told me to cooperate with you,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Are you friendly with all of the kids on your floor?” Barent asked.
Horvath shrugged and puffed out his cheeks, thinking about it. “I guess so,” he said. “I’m not unfriendly with any of them, if that’s what you mean.”
“But you know all of them?”
“Sure. It’s my job.”
“How about Kevin Mahoney?” Horvath shrugged again. “Sure.”
“Has Kevin Mahoney ever been in any trouble that you know of?”
Horvath still looked bewildered. “What sort of trouble?”
Moran threw Barent a glance that said it was going to be a long day. Barent ignored it. “Mr. Horvath,” he said, “did you know that Kevin Mahoney’s father was recently murdered?”
Horvath gulped. “You don’t think Kevin had anything to do with that, do you?”
“Mr. Horvath, what I think is quite frankly none of your business. I want you to understand that Professor Mahoney was murdered in a particularly gruesome way. He was bludgeoned to death and then torn to pieces. Any questions that I ask you are part of the official investigation into a homicide. So I’ll ask you again: has Kevin Mahoney ever been in any trouble that you know of?”
Horvath’s face had turned red during Barent’s little speech. He bit his lip and looked out the window. A bunch of kids down on the quad were playing an impromptu game of football. It all looked very pastoral and collegiate. “No,” Horvath said. “I don’t know of any trouble at all.”
Moran suddenly leaned forward and said, “How about drugs?”
Horvath looked back and forth from Barent’s face to Moran’s. He cleared his throat. “Drugs?” he squeaked.
“Did Kevin Mahoney have anything to do with drugs?”
“Look,” Horvath said. He spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “This is a college.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Barent asked.
“Everybody does drugs,” Horvath said. “It’s part of the experience. You’re away from home for the first time. You’re on your own. The first thing you do is declare your independence.”
“So they do drugs.”
“Yeah,” Horvath said. He shrugged.
Well, it hadn’t been so different when Barent was in college, not really. If you didn’t smoke a little pot now and then, you just weren’t with it. “And what does the University have to say about this?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They know about it. They won’t admit it but so long as it’s kept quiet and nobody gets hurt, they’re not going to do a thing about it. What are they supposed to do? Kick three-quarters of the students out of school?”
“And where do you fit in? You’re the floor counselor.”
“More like the Master of Ceremonies. Look, not too long ago I was at a frat party. Professor Lobert was there, the Dean of Students, you know?”
Lobert was the one Barent had spoken to earlier, a frosty little man with slicked down hair and an unsmiling face. “I’ve met him,” Barent said.
“I went into the kitchen to get myself a beer and there’s Lobert, passing a joint back and forth with the President of the fraternity, discussing the relative merits of Glenlivet and Chivas Regal. The Dean of Students, you’ll be interested to hear, prefers a premium blended Scotch to a single malt.”
This did not exactly conform to Barent’s conception of the Dean of Students. Just goes to show. “I will certainly cherish that information,” he said.
Horvath grunted. “So what am I supposed to do? I smile and tell them to smoke it their rooms, not in the halls. We know we can’t eliminate it. We just try to keep it so no-one gets hurt.”
“How about other drugs? Cocaine? Heroin?”
“Cocaine is big, but not as big as it used to be. It’s no longer a rich man’s drug. Too many associations with crack houses and AIDS. Heroin, interestingly, is making a comeback.”
Barent looked at Moran, who shrugged and stared out the window. “A comeback?”
“It used to be, by the time heroin got to the street, it had been diluted a dozen times over. It was maybe two, three per-cent real heroin. The rest was powdered sugar or cornstarch or some other crap. The only way you could use the stuff was to shoot up. Now, college kids aren’t into pain and needles are definitely not cool. But things are different today. Now the heroin you see is at least sixty per-cent pure, sometimes ninety or above. You don’t have to shoot it up, you can smoke it or even snort it. It’s so much more genteel.”
“Genteel … tell me,” Barent said. “Where do you stand on the Glenlivet versus Chivas Regal controversy?”
“Huh?” Horvath looked at him suspiciously.
“Never mind,” Barent said. “Forget I asked. So heroin is making a comeback and cocaine is not as big as it used to be. Where does Kevin Mahoney fit in?”
Horvath leaned back in his chair and thoughtfully frowned. “Well, so far as I know, he doesn’t use any more than the average.”
“Great. A fine upstanding citizen.”
Horvath looked hurt. “Look, this is the way things are. When did you go to college? The sixties? Were things so different then?”
A ghostly smile briefly hovered over Moran’s face. Barent decided to ignore both Moran and the question. “So there’s nothing unusual at all about Kevin Mahoney?”
“I didn’t say that. I said he doesn’t use any more than the average.” Horvath shook his head. “I’m not going to get in trouble here, am I?”
“For what? Possession of narcotics? What are we supposed to do? Put three-quarters of the school in jail?”
Horvath smiled crookedly. “I didn’t mean that. I mean for slander, or libel, or something. You know, for talking about people.”
“You’re more likely to get in trouble for not talking about people, as in accessory after the fact to a homicide.”
Horvath did not seem impressed by the threat. “Fine,” he said. “Well, I’m not certain, but I suspect that Kevin is a dealer.”
“A dealer …”
“This is the part of it that gets dicey. I mean, the school deliberately turns a blind eye to casual drug use. It’s simply too widespread to try to stop. But if you use it, you have to get it from someplace. Using is cool but dealing is definitely not cool. For one thing, the people you get it from are a very sleazy bunch. You can get your head blown off.”
“Really?”
Horvath nodded, totally serious. “It’s happened.”
“You don’t say. Around here?”
“About a year ago, some kid came into the dorm and ripped off another kid at knife-point. The kid who was ripped off had half a kilo of coke and two kilos of pot sitting in his closet. This kid was not too smart. He figured that since it was tolerated, it was condoned. He complained to his floor counselor. The floor counselor went to the Dean. The Dean decided that they have to draw the line someplace so they suspended both kids for a semester.”
“Cool,” Barent said. “So where do you get your stuff?”
“Me?” Horvath looked surprised. “I don’t use it. I’m supposed to be more responsible.”
“Right. It’s your job.”
Horvath nodded. “Exactly.”
“So you suspect that Kevin Mahoney deals.”
“That’s correct.”
“But you don’t know.”
Horvath grimaced. He looked embarrassed. “Well, in point of fact, I do know. He deals. What I don’t know is how much he deals. There are plenty of kids on campus you can go to for an ounce now and then. But where do these guys get their stuff? Who’s the next level up the ladder? I don’t know that. And I don’t want to know that.”
Barent leaned back in his seat, thinking. The picture that Horvath painted was one that he recognized, but what did he want to do about it? He could request that the local cops put the whole University under surveillance. They could gather the evidence and as he had not too seriously said, send three quarters of the student body to jail. But for what? An object lesson?
Barent did not for an instant think that drug use, even casual drug use, was a good thing. Nevertheless, he was not in a position to eradicate it and he wasn’t about to ruin a bunch of kids’ lives because they liked to take a toke or a snort now and then.
He certainly wouldn’t mind busting the local dealers, but Ithaca wasn’t his jurisdiction and petty drug use, even petty drug dealing, was not his crime. Barent’s crime was murder. The only thing he cared about here was whether or not Kevin Mahoney, who might or might not be dealing drugs, had anything to do with the death of his father, which might or might not have had anything to do with drugs.
Barent turned to Moran. “Let’s have another talk with Dean Lobert.”
Chapter 20
Kurtz felt ill. He was operating on a thirty-two year old named James Severance, an engineer for Allied-Signal. Severance had come into the office complaining of vague abdominal pain. He had an elevated white count and a mild fever. The symptoms could have indicated a number of things but appendicitis seemed most likely. So here they were in the OR and it wasn’t appendicitis. It was cancer, what type Kurtz wasn’t exactly certain, probably pancreatic. It was a relatively common presentation for a relatively uncommon condition. Pancreatic cancer usually started in the head of the pancreas, where it blocked the bile ducts. The patient got jaundiced. When it started in the tail of the pancreas, like now, it tended to spread far and wide before the patient had any symptoms at all. Severance had a small mass in the tail of the pancreas and the entire peritoneum was seeded with tiny nodules, like millet seeds.
“Oh, shit,” Kaplan said.
Most of the time, you had a patient like this, you expected it. You at least suspected it. This guy had a wife and three little kids, none of whom were prepared for a death sentence on daddy.
Kurtz grabbed one of the nodules with a forceps and cut it off at the bottom with a scalpel. The scrub nurse held out a jar filled with formalin. He dropped the nodule into the jar, put two sutures around the base of the wound and tied them tight. He repeated the process twice more, with nodules from different quadrants of the abdomen. “Send them for frozen section,” he said.
“Why?” Kaplan asked. “We’re not going to do anything differently.”
Frozen sections were not as accurate as a full pathological prep, but they gave a quick diagnosis, which was important when knowing the type of tumor you were dealing with might affect the type of operation you were going to perform. That was not the case here. Whatever the origin of the tumor might be, there was no possibility of removing all the nodules surgically. Most of them were undoubtedly too small to even see with the naked eye. “I know that,” Kurtz said. “But I want to know what he’s got. I have to talk to the family.”
They inspected the abdomen one last time. Aside from the obvious, nothing else was unusual. “Let’s close,” Kurtz said.
The closure did not take long. The patient was in the recovery room by the time the results came back on the frozen section. As had seemed most likely, it was pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer occasionally responded to chemotherapy but only for a short period of time. It always recurred. Also occasionally, you had a miracle; a patient with disseminated carcinomatosis went home on his deathbed and by mechanisms totally unknown, cured himself. The cancer vanished. Spontaneous remission, it was called, as if giving it a name helped to explain it. But the odds against that happening were considerably more than one in a million. No, James Severance was going to die and that was that.
The family of course had trouble accepting it. They always did. He spent as much time with them as they needed but it never did a lot of good. The foundations of their universe had been yanked out from under them and the readjustment would not be pleasant.
He left them an hour later in a foul mood.
He changed into his street clothes in the locker room, took the elevator down to the ER exit. He was less than a hundred yards from the hospital when a well-dressed young man with sandy hair, freckles and an eager smile came up to him. “Uh, excuse me,” the man said. “Are you Dr. Kurtz?”
“Yes,” Kurtz said.
The man bobbed his head and looked apologetic. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Doc, but there’s a man behind you with a gun. Don’t turn around and don’t yell. We really don’t want to hurt you but we’re going to have to take you for a little ride.”
“A little ride,” Kurtz said. Just like the movies. That was the trouble with real life. You saw enough movies, real life turned into a cliché.
The man nodded. “Yup,” he said. “Right this way.”
Dean Lobert wasn’t the Dean. Dean Lobert was the Dean of Students. The Dean of the College (known in every college and university simply as the Dean) was picked by a search committee appointed by the Board of Trustees. The Dean of Students, on the other hand, was picked by the Dean. Though the title was impressive, the position more often than not was given to an academic who was popular with the students but whose publication record was not quite good enough to justify tenure. And so it was with Dean Lobert. By the time his appointment as Dean of Students ran out, he would have enough papers to get tenure or he would be out the door. The academic life, he explained plaintively, was an unforgiving one.
Barent didn’t give a shit. “How widespread is drug use on this campus?” he interrupted.
Lobert stared at him.
“Drug use?” he finally said. “What makes you ask about drug use?”
“Look, we don’t have all day. I’ve been told that drug use is common among the students,”–he smiled thinly–“if not among the faculty. I’ve also been told that Kevin Mahoney may be dealing drugs. How many students are there around here who deal drugs, do you think?”
“Truthfully?” Lobert frowned and gnawed the inside of his cheek. Then he drew a deep breath. “I have no idea. What’s more, I don’t want to have any idea. The concept of in loco parentis went out a long time ago. We’re not these kids’ parents. It’s our job to educate them, not police them. So long as they pass their courses and don’t cause any trouble, we have no reason to look any further into their behavior.”
He looked sincere. Vaguely disdainful, but sincere. Dean Lobert’s own involvement, according to what Edward Horvath had told them, could easily be interpreted as corrupting the morals of a minor, if not child abuse. However, mentioning this fact without a lot more evidence than they had would not be likely to solicit Lobert’s cooperation. “But I have,” Barent said. “I have a murder to solve. A number of clues point to an involvement with drugs. The fact that the victim’s son may or may not be dealing drugs might be no more than a red herring. I hope that it is but I have to find out. How do you suggest that I do that?”
“I don’t know,” Lobert said.
“I would like to search Kevin Mahoney’s room.” “No,” Lobert said immediately.
“Why not?”
“Because it would cause a riot.” Lobert gave a frigid smile. “One thing about college, these kids pay tuition. They think that gives them certain rights. Whether or not it does is debatable, but it most certainly gives them the ultimate right from the University’s point of view, which is that they can vote with their feet. There are plenty of colleges around and our students are an elite bunch. They can go anywhere they want.”
He had a point, not one that Barent cared too much about, but a point. A more important point was that Edward Horvath’s opinion was not what a judge would call evidence, which meant that they had no real chance at getting a search warrant.
Moran leaned forward. “Let’s go talk to Kevin Mahoney.”
Barent cocked his head at Lobert. “That okay with you?”
Lobert puffed up his cheeks in thought. “I believe so, as long as you remember that you have no jurisdiction here. I’ll ask you to be discreet, and don’t make any threats that you can’t carry out.”
“Fine,” Barent said. “It’s a deal.”
Déja vu all over again. This was not the first time that Kurtz had been abducted at gunpoint. On the previous occasion, he had been an unlucky bystander. The real target had been Harrison Thomas, Lenore’s former fiancé, whose father had been involved in a money laundering operation. Kurtz had just happened to be there when it happened.
This time, it appeared, he was simply unlucky.
“What’s this all about?” he asked (speaking of clichés).
There were three of them. The one who had originally accosted Kurtz sat up front with the driver, who kept his eyes on the road and never said a word. The third man, the one with the gun, sat in back with Kurtz. All three wore suits. The car was a dark blue Lincoln with tinted windows. The first man turned around. His face looked troubled. “You can call me Simms. And that’s Rico.”
He nodded his head at the gunman. “It’s simple. You’ve been poking your nose into things that don’t concern you. We’ve been asked to tell you to stop.”
Offhand, Kurtz could think of a number of things he had been poking his nose into, none of which had yielded him a scintilla of information.
Nevertheless, the general message was clear. “I see,” he said.
“I hope you do.” Simms looked as if he meant it. “I want you to understand that we’re doing this the easy way. You’re a doctor. Doctors aren’t stupid. You should realize without my having to tell you that we can kill you just as easily as we can pick you up off the street. More easily, in fact.”
“Like you killed Rod Mahoney?” Kurtz said. He couldn’t stop himself. It just slipped out.
Simms blinked at him and slowly shook his head. “Who?” he said. Then he sighed. “I can see we’ve got a problem here. You don’t think we’re serious. Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”
