“Anita’s father, Andrew McGraw, hired me to find her. I have a feeling, which he shares, that she may be in bad trouble. Shall we go somewhere and talk about it?”
“You have a feeling, do you,” he said heavily. “Well, go feel about it somewhere else. We don’t like police-public or private-on this campus.” He turned to stalk back down the corridor.
“Well executed,” I applauded. “you’ve been studying Al Pacino. Now that you’ve finished emoting, could we talk about Anita?”
The back of his neck turned red, and the color spread to his ears, but he stopped. “What about her?”
“I’m sure you know she’s disappeared, Mr. Weinstein. You may also know that her boyfriend, Peter Thayer, is dead. I am trying to find her in the hopes of keeping her from sharing his fate.” I paused to let him absorb it. “My guess is that she’s hiding out someplace and she thinks she won’t be found by whoever killed him. But I’m afraid she’s crossed the path of an ugly type of killer. The kind that has a lot of money and can buy his way past most hideouts.”
He turned so that I could see his profile. “Don’t worry, Philip Marlowe-they won’t bribe me into revealing her whereabouts.”
I wondered hopefully if he could be tortured into talking. Aloud, I said, “Do you know where she is?”
“No comment.”
“Do you know any of her good friends around here?”
“No comment.”
“Gee, you’re helpful, Mr. Weinstein-you’re my favorite prof. I wish you’d taught here when I went to school.” I pulled out my card and gave it to him. “If you ever feel like commenting, call me at this number.”
Back outside in the heat I felt depressed. My navy silk suit was stunning, but too heavy for the weather; I was sweating, probably ruining the fabric under the arms. Besides, I seemed to be alienating everyone whose path I crossed. I wished I’d smashed in Howard’s face.
A circular stone bench faced the college building. I walked over to it and sat down. Maybe I’d give up on this stupid case. Industrial espionage was more my speed, not a corrupt union and a bunch of snotty kids. Maybe I’d use the thousand dollars McGraw had given me to spend the summer on the Michigan peninsula. Maybe that would make him angry enough to send someone after me with cement leggings.
The Divinity School was just behind me. I sighed, pulled myself to my feet, and moved into its stonewalled coolness. A coffee shop used to serve overboiled coffee and tepid lemonade in the basement. I made my way downstairs and found the place still in operation. There was something reassuring in this continuity and in the sameness of the young faces behind the makeshift counter. Kindly and naive, they preached a lot of violent dogma, believed that burglars had a right to the goods they took because of their social oppression, and yet would be rocked to their roots if someone ever required them to hold a machine gun themselves.
I took a Coke and retired to a dark corner with it. The chairs weren’t comfortable, but I pulled my knees up to my chin and leaned against the wall. About a dozen students were seated around the wobbly tables, some of them trying to read in the dim light, most of them talking. Snatches of conversation reached me. “Of course if you’re going to look at it dialectically, the only thing they can do is-” “I told her if she didn’t put her foot down he’d-” “Yeah, but Schopenhauer says-” I dozed off.
I was jerked awake a few seconds later by a loud voice saying, “Did you hear about Peter Thayer?” I looked up. The speaker, a plump young woman with wild red hair, wearing an ill-fitting peasant blouse, had just come into the room. She dumped her book bag on the floor and joined a table of three in the middle of the room. “I was just coming out of class when Ruth Yonkers told me.”
I got up and bought another Coke and sat down at a table behind the redhead.
A thin youth with equally wild but dark hair was saying, “Oh, yeah, the cops were all over the Political Science Office this morning. You know, he was living with Anita McGraw, and she hasn’t been seen since Sunday. Weinstein really told them off,” he added admiringly.
“Do they think she killed him?” the redhead asked.
A dark, somewhat older woman snorted. “Anita McGraw? I’ve known her for two years. She might off a cop, but she wouldn’t shoot her boyfriend.”
“Do you know him, Mary?” the redhead breathed.
“No,” Mary answered shortly. “I never met him. Anita belongs to University Women United-that’s how I know her. So does Geraldine Harata, her other roommate, but Geraldine’s away for the summer. If she wasn’t, the cops would probably suspect her. They always pick on women first.”
“I’m surprised you let her into UWU if she has a boyfriend,” a bearded young man put in. He was heavy and sloppy-his T-shirt gaped, revealing an unlovely expanse of stomach.
Mary looked at him haughtily and shrugged.
“Not everyone in UWU is a lesbian,” the redhead bristled.
“With so many men like Bob around, it’s hard to understand why not,” Mary drawled. The fat youth flushed and muttered something, of which “castrating” was the only word I caught.
“But I never met Anita,” the redhead continued. “I only started going to UWU meetings in May. Has she really disappeared, Mary?”
Mary shrugged again. “If the pigs are trying to put Peter Thayer’s death off on her, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Maybe she went home,” Bob suggested.
“No,” the thin youth said. “If she’d done that, the police wouldn’t have been around here looking for her.”
“Well,” Mary said, “I, for one, hope they don’t catch up with her.” She got up. “I have to go listen to Bertram drone on about medieval culture. One more crack about witches as hysterical women and he’ll find himself attacked by some after class.”
She hoisted a knapsack over her left shoulder and ambled off. The others settled closer to the table and switched to an animated discussion of homo- versus heterosexual relationships. Poor Bob favored the latter, but didn’t seem to get many opportunities for actively demonstrating it. The thin boy vigorously defended lesbianism. I listened in amusement. College students had enthusiastic opinions about so many topics. At four the boy behind the counter announced he was closing. People started gathering up their books, The three I was listening to continued their discussion for a few minutes until the counterman called over, “Hey, folks, I want to get out of here.”
They reluctantly picked up their book bags and moved toward the stairs. I threw out my paper cup and slowly followed them out. At the top of the stairs I touched the redhead’s arm. She stopped and looked at me, her face friendly and ingenuous.
“I heard you mention UWU,” I said. “Can you tell me where they meet?”
“Are you new on campus?” she asked.
“I’m an old student, but I find I have to spend some time down here this summer,” I answered truthfully.
“Well, we have a room in a building at fifty-seven thirty-five University. It’s one of those old homes the university has taken over. UWU meets there on Tuesday nights, and other women’s activities go on during the rest of the week.”
I asked her about their women’s center. It was clearly not large, but better than nothing at all, which was what we’d had in my college days when even women radicals treated women’s liberation as a dirty phrase. They had a women’s health counseling group, courses on self-defense, and they sponsored rap groups and the weekly University Women United meetings.
We had been moving across campus toward the Midway, where my car was parked. I offered her a ride home and she flung herself puppylike into the front seat, talking vigorously if ingenuously about women’s oppression. She wanted to know what I did.