He was wearing a rumpled brown suit one size too large for him, a blue shirt, and a green-and-orange-striped tie that looked, to Julio, as if it had been sold exclusively in novelty shops as a joke gift. Even by a generous appraisal, Solberg was not an attractive man, not even plain. He was short and stocky. His moonish face featured a small flat nose that would have been called pug on some men but that was simply porcine on him, small close-set gray eyes that looked watery and myopic behind his smudged glasses, a mouth that was strangely wide considering the scale on which the rest of his visage was constructed, and a receding chin.
In the hall outside his office, apologizing effusively, he had insisted on shaking hands with the two detectives, in spite of the load in his arms; therefore, he kept dropping books, which Julio and Reese stooped to pick up.
Solberg's office was chaos. Books and scientific journals filled every shelf, spilled onto the floor, rose in teetering stacks in the corners, were piled every which way on top of furniture. On his big desk, file folders, index cards, and yellow legal-size tablets were heaped in apparent disorder. The professor shifted mounds of papers off two chairs to give Julio and Reese places to sit.
“Look at that lovely view!” Solberg said, stopping suddenly and gaping at the windows as he rounded his desk, as if noticing for the first time what lay beyond the walls of his office.
The Irvine campus of the University of California was blessed with many trees, rolling green lawns, and flower beds, for it sprawled over a large tract of prime Orange County land. Below Dr. Solberg's second-floor office, a walkway curved across manicured grass, past impatiens blazing with thousands of bright blossoms — coral, red, pink, purple — and vanished under the branches of jacarandas and eucalyptus.
“Gentlemen, we are among the most fortunate people on earth: to be here, in this beautiful land, under these temperate skies, in a nation of plenty and tolerance.” He stepped to the window and opened his stubby arms, as if to embrace all of southern California. “And the trees, especially the trees. There are some wonderful specimens on this campus. I love trees, I really do. That's my hobby: trees, the study of trees, the cultivation of unusual specimens. It makes for a welcome change from human biology and genetics. Trees are so majestic, so noble. Trees give and give to us — fruit, nuts, beauty, shade, lumber, oxygen — and take nothing in return. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd pray to return as a tree.” He glanced at Julio and Reese. “What about you? Don't you think it'd be grand to come back as a tree, living the long majestic life of an oak or giant spruce, giving of yourself the way orange and apple trees give, growing great strong limbs in which children could climb?” He blinked, surprised by his own monologue. “But of course you're not here to talk about trees and reincarnation, are you? You'll have to forgive me… but, well, that view, don't you know? Just captured me for a moment.”
In spite of his unfortunate porcine face, disheveled appearance, apparent disorganization, and evident tendency to be late, Dr. Easton Solberg had at least three things to recommend him: keen intelligence, enthusiasm for life, and optimism. In a world of doomsayers, where half the intelligentsia waited almost wistfully for Armageddon, Julio found Solberg refreshing. He liked the professor almost at once.
As Solberg went behind his desk, sat in a large leather chair, and half disappeared from view beyond his paperwork, Julio said, “On the phone you said there was a dark side to Eric Leben that you could discuss only in person—”
“And in strictest confidence,” Solberg said. “The information, if pertinent to your case, must go in a file somewhere, of course, but if it's not pertinent, I expect discretion.”
“I assure you of that,” Julio said. “But as I told you earlier, this is an extremely important investigation involving at least two murders and the possible leak of top-secret defense documents.”
“Do you mean Eric's death might not have been accidental?”
“No,” Julio said. “That was definitely an accident. But there are other deaths… the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. And more people may die before this case is closed. So Detective Hagerstrom and I hope you'll give us full and immediate cooperation.”
“Oh, of course, of course,” Easton Solberg said, waving one pudgy hand to dismiss the very idea that he might be uncooperative. “And although I don't know for a certainty that Eric's emotional problems are related to your case, I expect — and fear — that they may be. As I said… he had a dark side.”
However, before Solberg got around to telling them of Leben's dark side, he spent a quarter of an hour praising the dead geneticist, apparently unable to speak ill of the man until he had first spoken highly of him. Eric was a genius. Eric was a hard worker. Eric was generous in support of colleagues. Eric had a fine sense of humor, an appreciation for art, good taste in most things, and he liked dogs.
Julio was beginning to think they ought to form a committee and solicit contributions to build a statue of Leben for display under a fittingly imposing rotunda in a major public building. He glanced at Reese and saw his partner was plainly amused by the bubbly Solberg.
Finally the professor said, “But he was a troubled man, I'm sorry to say. Deeply, deeply troubled. He had been my student for a while, though I quickly realized the student was going to outdistance the teacher. When we were no longer student-teacher but colleagues, we remained friendly. We weren't friends, just friendly, because Eric did not allow any relationship to become close enough to qualify as friendship. So, close as we were professionally, it was years before I learned about his… obsession with young girls.”
“How young?” Reese asked.
Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I'm… betraying him.”
“We may already know much of what you've got to tell us,” Julio said. “You'll probably only be confirming what we know.”
“Really? Well… I knew of one girl who was fourteen. At the time, Eric was thirty-one.”
“This was before Geneplan?”
“Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”
“A respected professor wouldn't go around bragging about bedding fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said. “How'd you find out?”
“It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was out of town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but me to keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of resented that, too. He knew I'd feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he also knew I'd feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he counted on the second obligation being stronger than the first. Maybe, to my discredit, it was.”
Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he talked, as if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk, embarrassed by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven years ago, after receiving Leben's call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from the man he knew: nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with drug problems, took their Johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.