I strolled over to the campus under a bright sun. It was relatively warm and, for the first time since I’d arrived, snow wasn’t part of the forecast. That would help. Fewer students would be inclined to take the subterranean passageways between buildings. Now all I had to do was spot Kira and follow her without her noticing me. I took the high ground atop the library steps, watching.
Surveillance, boredom is thy name. I detested it. Hurry up and wait and wait and wait. It was the endless, often fruitless hours of loneliness that had helped push me out of insurance investigations. It was all about cold nights in cold cars drinking cold coffee. I used to think that Eliot had gotten it all wrong, life wasn’t about coffee spoons, but about coffee containers: I have known the ins, outs, downs and ups, I have measured out my nights with coffee cups.
But like MacClough used to say, “If you could quote T.S. fuckin’ Eliot, you were in the wrong job anyway.” He was right, of course.
I didn’t have to look at my watch to know an hour had passed. After doing enough surveillance, you gain intimate knowledge of the passage of time, the deathly slow march of it. Only in retrospect does time ever pass quickly. Besides, I was standing under the clock tower and the chimes were kind of hard to ignore.
By the second round of chimes, my more usual sense of pessimism had set in. I would never find Kira this way. For all I knew, she didn’t have class today. And I knew nothing for sure. For chrissakes, maybe she was an expensive hooker. I couldn’t recall the last time I felt so unsure of myself. I had forfeited control of my emotional life to desk clerks and chatty waitresses. I was so far removed from my original purpose that I doubted the value of getting involved. These things, I thought, were better left to hard men, men not so easily distracted.
I was on the downward spiral of negativity followed by self-recrimination. The anger and explosion would not be far behind. “Thanks Dad!” I said, wishing he could hear me. Noticing I was cold, I deserted my spot on the granite steps of the library.
The cafeteria wasn’t too difficult to find without a map. I poured myself the biggest container of coffee I could find. The fat, unsmiling woman at the register shook her head no at me.
“What’s the matter?” I gritted my teeth.
“That’s a soda container you got there. Can’t take coffee out of here in a soda container.”
“Charge me for it.”
“Can’t do that,” she explained. “Gotta get a coffee container.”
“Here’s five bucks, charge me whatever you want.”
“Can’t do-
“-that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I left the coffee at the register and started for Dean Dallenbach’s office. I hadn’t wanted to go through him to find out about Kira, but now I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was wrong.
There she was, fifty feet in front of me, a distressed leather book bag strapped to her back. I slowed my pace and fell in behind a crowd of students arguing the merits of the Categorical Imperative. Wasn’t liberal arts grand? I hoped none of these kids planned on working for a living. As she moved, I moved. She came to rest in the third row, third seat from the front of room 203 of Snodgras Hall.
I couldn’t hear the lecture through the closed door, but figured it was an English class of some form or another. The professor’s salt-and-pepper hair was too long, falling on the shoulders of his green corduroy jacket. He strutted about, waving his arms like a hackneyed Hamlet, his eyes never straying too far from the prettiest women in class. I’d taken enough English courses to know that most literature professors were just frustrated actors with ids the size of Chicago. Okay, maybe some were frustrated writers. Id size remained constant.
At the end of the lecture I ducked into a nearby doorway and picked up on my shadowing routine. It went on like that until late in the afternoon. It wasn’t all bad, though. I did rather enjoy the live models in Kira’s sketching class. When the instructor shooed them out of the art room, I watched Kira disappear around a bend in the hallway. I failed to see the point in following her any longer. What would watching her sit through one more class prove? Yet, my doubts lingered. I was afraid to trust the obvious, that Kira was a student at Riversborough. I needed a little independent confirmation.
“Excuse me,” I called to Kira’s art instructor. “Can I have a word with you?”
“Sure.” She waved me up to the front of the class. She was a smallish woman with close-cropped brown hair and copper brown eyes. She had hollow cheeks smudged with charcoal and a friendly smile.
“Hi,” I put out my hand for a shake, but she showed me her blackened palms and we agreed that my gesture would suffice. “My name’s Dylan Klein.”
“Jane Courteau. What can I do for you, Mr. Klein?”
“I write books, detective novels.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You’re in good company. Want to see my Authors Guild card?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a talented artist and no one’s ever heard of me. And we don’t even get cards!”
“To tell you the truth, mine’s expired. Anyway, I have some say over what the cover design of my next book will be and someone suggested one of your students as a potential artist,” I lied. “I wanted to get your opinion first before I approached the student.”
“Which student?”
“Kira Wantanabe.”
Jane Courteau had trouble concealing her dismay. It wasn’t exactly horror I saw flashing across her face, but it was more than a frown.
I played coy. “No good, huh?”
“She’s not terrible.”
“I admire a woman who rejects faint praise as an option.”
“Look, Mr. Klein, what I mean to say is that Kira is competent. I’ve had her for three terms now and she’s improved immensely, but she doesn’t have her heart in it. I don’t mean to insult her.”
“It’s our secret. No one’s been hurt. Thank you,” I gushed, barely able to contain myself.
“I have several other students I might suggest.”
“That’s okay,” I assured her as I turned to leave. “If I go to anyone, it will be directly to you. I won’t forget you.”
Walking away, I realized I must’ve seemed quite the fool to Ms. Jane Courteau. I was a fool, a very happy and relieved fool. I stopped in the student lounge and called the lab from a pay phone. Although I couldn’t vouch for Kira’s activity before she met me, let’s just say that much of the suspense had been taken out of the call. In a thoroughly disinterested voice, the attendant confirmed I was HIV negative. You always tell yourself that you’ll deal with whatever happens, no matter how bad. But I’ll confess to feeling such a high at that moment I could have kissed the pepper-spray boy right on the lips, Rush Limbaugh and Joe McCarthy not with standing.
I bought two bottles of champagne at the liquor store. I intended to share the painted-flower bottle of Perrier-Jouet with Kira. I was undecided about the second, far less expensive bottle of Korbel. I was either going to send it to Jane Courteau without a note or use it as a fleet enema for the desk clerk at the Old Watermill Inn. I was thinking I’d been an idiot for listening to him. People get other people’s faces mixed up all the time. He had probably been drunk out of his mind when he was across the border at his buddy’s bachelor party. Then, like a kick in the groin I wasn’t expecting, it hit me; maybe the desk clerk hadn’t gotten it wrong at all. Maybe he was lying to me. I wondered about why he would do that. I’d have to have a chat with him on the subject when MacClough got back into town. I lacked John’s wherewithal when it came to interviews.