“Girls didn’t go to college in your family?”
“Not so’s you’d notice it.” She gazed at me languidly, settling on my left hand. “But what’s marriage when you can study one-hundred-fifty-million-year-old tracks? So what did you do to your finguh there?”
“Slammed it in the kitchen door.”
“See? Kitchens are dangerous places.”
“Don’t I know it. Give me sandstone and the open spaces any day,” I said wryly, completing our discreet bit of girl bonding. And I stared at my thumb a moment, turning my hand palm up and then down again, still amazed at the fresh gauze Ray had put on it when we’d reached his car.
“So you were staying at George’s house when he got killed,” she said bluntly. “Was that ugly or what?”
“It wasn’t anything,” I replied, happy to have someone to confide my great big nothing in. “He just took off early yesterday morning, and the next thing I know, the police are at the door asking what’s up.” I shrugged. “I hardly knew the guy. He just called me out of the blue one day and told me about this conference and invited me to attend. I’d heard of him, so I thought, Well, I like fossils as much as the next person, so why not? So then he offered me a place to stay. What can I say? I’m a cheapskate. I said yes. How was I supposed to know he was going to, er, end up dead? So. You know him well?”
Now Allison shrugged. “Everybody knew George. It’s a small fraternity,” she drawled, building onto our woman-to-woman understanding.
“He was a dinosaur type, right?”
“Yeah.”
“What was he working on?” I asked.
“Oh, him? Carnivores. All them boys with the really big egos got to do something with sharp teeth. It’s a tick with them.”
“Oh? Where was he working?” I continued. “Did he have a dig going somewhere?”
“Do I know? George di’n’t take people out to his sites.”
I cocked my head to one side. “I thought it took a lot of
people to work a dinosaur site. I mean, like I watched one on TV, you know? Lots of rock to move, and the bones themselves weigh a lot, right?”
A veil seemed to drop over Allison Lee’s intelligent eyes. She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “So he liked to work alone, not show anyone anything until he had it in the bag or something.” Her eyes glowed a little more brightly again as her lips curved slightly and she said, “You got to put a guy like that out of your head. Yeah, so he got you with the old ‘star speaker at the big symposium’ line. Hey, he does that every year. Poor ugly George always had to have a babe on his arm. Poor you, you got snookered. Get over it; you got some pretty classy company.”
“You mean—”
“Me?” she said, placing a delicate hand across her breast. “Sure, I’m a sucker, but he didn’t like city girls. He goes for au naturel types like you.”
“He ever married?”
“Him? Who’d marry him? He had a love affair with himself!”
“You didn’t like him much.”
“Who did? Okay, so he screwed my college roommate.”
“So you mean he was a Don Juan?”
“Huh? No, not that kind of screwed. I mean like screwed her over. Promised her he could get her all sorts of prestige and assistance if she got into this particular program at a particular school. She applied. She got in. Turned out he wasn’t even affiliated with the department, let alone the university. She’d already packed up and moved there, at some expense, and, like, who was going to fund her research? Nobody, once she was dumb enough to open her yap to the department and say, ‘Where’s George?’ They
already
hated the bastard over some other gag he’d pulled.”
“But why do that? What did it gain him?”
“You got me. Maybe it was his way of jerking off, or he just lost track of who he’d told what. Or maybe he saw her as some kind of threat and thought he’d mess with her. Either way, it really hurt her feelings and got her off on the wrong foot professionally. So I like the idea of him down there hoppin’ on hot coals.” She pointed toward hell.
“Was he any kind of a scientist?”
“Who knew? We never got to see his sites, remember?”
“But he worked carnivores, you said.”
“Yeah, but we never saw his evidence.”
“You mean he was maybe inventing things?”
“No … he had photographs of prepared stuff, but that’s all he’d show anybody. Most other people at least keep their bones in a known collection somewhere, like at a museum, so everybody can see them and draw their own conclusions. But not George.”
“Where do you think he put them, then, if he was digging them up?”
She shrugged again, beginning to look a little bit nervous maybe to be giving up so much information. “Try his basement.” She looked down the long aisle formed by the nearest two rows of poster easels, as if willing someone else to come by and interrupt our conversation.
George’s basement. A big empty nothing. “But he published his findings. Right?”
“Oh, come on. You call that publishing? Sure, he published; he spread it all through the newspapers and magazines. If you asked him, he’d tell you he only published in popular magazines because they got his results out faster, but he knew better than to present his data where it could be scrutinized.”
I knew this kind of talk. It was how scientists badmouthed each other without going on record as having done so. It was a dicey business for a scientist to call a colleague a slob: a sort of “she who has not analyzed evidence wrong may cast the
first stone” proposition. “But no one drummed him out of the corps?” I asked.
Allison began to squirm a little, as if her blouse had started to make her itch. Evading eye contact, she said, “So who was he working for? No one.”
Playing devil’s advocate, I said, “But he had a doctorate.”
Allison sighed disgustedly. “Yeah, he had his doc all right. He had a job for a while, too, but he didn’t get tenured. Like I say, he did some quickie science.”
“But wait, isn’t he teaching at the university here?”
“That, he would like you to think. Lissen, this sort of thing happens sometimes; he had a nice dissertation, but then, well …”
I didn’t let it go. “So what are we saying here? Was he with a museum? Maybe he was working independently on a grant?”
“Nope. Nada.
Bubkes.
Nothing.”
“Huh. So how’d he make a living?”
Allison leaned pointedly away from me, willing someone else to walk up to her easel and drive me away. “Got me.”
“Funny, he had a house and all. I mean, it wasn’t like he was renting a studio apartment or something. And aren’t houses getting expensive here in Salt Lake?”
She cocked her head to one side distractedly, a Who knows? gesture.
“So George was in Vietnam,” I said.
“Was he?” she said, yawning.
“Yeah. There was a photograph of him with some helicopter buddies. He still see them?” I was thinking, of course, of the man with the high cheekbones and the frightening eyes. Frightening to me now as much because he bore a resemblance to the man who had followed me the night before, and shot at me.
“Who knows what kind of people George hung out with?
He liked the limelight, all right, but then you didn’t hear from him for months. He was a carny act.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, guys like that, you don’t see the real guy. You see what they want to show you.”
“Tell me more.”
Allison now looked anywhere but at me. I had pushed the line of questioning entirely too far.
I steered quickly onto other ground, hoping to get just an ounce more information from her. “So what about your roommate. Did she—”
“Lissen, you want to know what you need to know about George Dishey, you should go on Sherbrooke’s field trip tomorrow.”
“There’s a field trip tomorrow? I didn’t see it in the program.”
“Nah, it’s his big surprise. But the jungle telegraph has been busy, and everyone knows something’s up. Like I say, it’s a small fraternity.”
I thought for a moment. “So why is it I want to go on this field trip?”
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll see about signing up. So are you telling me Dishey and Sherbrooke worked together on stuff?”
Allison laughed—a quick, humorless grunt. “Not those two. Not hardly.”
“So then—”
We were interrupted as Allison leaned forward to offer her fingertips to be shaken by a passing colleague. “Howie, nice to see ya. My love to Gwen. Ya wanna see my latest tracks?”
The man smiled pleasantly, made a vague hand gesture, but moved on by.
I began again. “So Dishey and Sherbrooke—”
“Okay, you want to know about Dishey and Sherbrooke?
They roomed together at Yale. It was a little before my time. Go ask someone who was there. Better yet, ask Dan to explain it to you.” Allison made a swatting gesture, as if flies were buzzing in front of her face. “Go on the field trip. You can’t ride that bus without hearing all the dirt you could hope to dig in a month of poster sessions.”
“Your roommate,” I said. “Did she—”
Allison stood up and turned away from me. “Lost track of her.”
“Oh.” My heart sagged in my chest. I had succeeded in making this woman uncomfortable. And I had begun to descend into a dim, fusty world, a land of resentments and petty bitternesses, a circle lower into hell than I had meant to travel. I tried to focus my mind on the faces of other people who stood here and there among the easels, bending their highly trained minds toward their favorite topics of intellectual pursuit. As I observed them, I realized that I also was being observed: About forty feet away, standing near a display I’d passed earlier on the adaptive morphology of the pachyce-phalosaurids, stood Earthworm Magritte, the stump-shaped man who had declared it high time that George Dishey left the planet. He was watching me closely, stone-faced, and with concentrated interest, as if I were a movie.
I turned back to Allison Lee. “Do you know, ah, Dr. Magritte at all?”
“Worm? Everybody knows him.”
“A bit outspoken, is he?”
Allison shifted nervously in her seat. “Listen, the Worm’s just another drug-related tragedy from the seventies. I mean, he’s a good guy, right? And so he’s a bit rough around the edges. Who cares? Everyone gets so worked up. It just makes me sick.”
“But I mean, he—”
“Listen, Magritte’s
okay
. Look, here’s his business card.”
She fished a card out of her pocket, sorting it from a collection of twenty or thirty she must have garnered that morning from friends visiting her booth. It read:
EARTHWORM MAGRITTE, PH.D.
|
|---|
PROFESSIONAL SHIT STIRRER
|
|---|
Egos trimmed
| Paradigms shifted
|
Dirt dumped
| Errors illuminated
|
Banality noticed
| Astral planes torqued
|
“See?” she said. “You can’t take anything he says too seriously.”
“Oh. But—”
Allison had had enough of me. She narrowed her eyes and went on the offensive. “So who was the beefcake you were here with yesterday?” she began. “Please tell me he’s your brother. I mean, what a looker!”
I was saved from having to volley her question when she turned to a skinny man with a drooping mustache who was just walking up. “Hi, Fred. How’s tricks? You wanna hear my spiel about trackways?”
I drifted away from Allison’s poster session, hoping to put a nice, big easel between myself and the unrelenting stare of Earthworm Magritte under whose gaze I was beginning to feel naked. I moved a couple of aisles down and pretended to peruse a display entitled “The Histological Quantification of Growth Rates in Plated Dinosaurs,” but I soon found that Earthworm Magritte had trended that direction as well, and that he still appeared to find me more interesting than the posters. I didn’t like being observed, not one bit. There was
something anomalous about the man, something too far out of the ordinary to be quite sane. Professional shit stirrer, indeed. Was he the stuff of murder?
“You into thyreophorans?” someone asked. I turned. A tall, dark-eyed man with short salt-and-pepper hair was standing quite near me, lounging with his hands in his pockets. Though easily in his fifties, he had the trim, sinewy build of a man who has systematically kept himself in shape. “Enjoying the sessions?” he asked. It was the first time at this conference that somebody had taken the trouble to speak to me before I had first spoken.
“Sure. Great,” I said as I quickly scanned his face, then dropped my gaze to read his name badge. Tom Latimer, it said. No university affiliation, just the town, somewhere in Illinois. I had noticed quite a few people with no affiliations, so that wasn’t strange in itself, but there was something odd about this guy. What?