Part 14 (1/2)

”I skimmed it.” He paused. ”I'm embarra.s.sed to admit it, but I was only interested in whether or not I made an appearance. I'm telling you, I was pretty insufferable back then.”

”Why would you have?” I asked.

”What?”

”Made an appearance. Say you'd been in the book-”

”Which I wasn't.”

”No, but if you had been-”

”No reason,” Strachman said. ”Except, I guess, I was there. For a few weeks, pretty much everyone in the department was under a cloud of suspicion. The police questioned all of us. Not very well, in my opinion, but they did question us. It was what everyone was talking about in the hallways, the cafeteria, even in the study sessions. I remember thinking at the time that I was caught up in a real-life game of Clue. Was it Mr. Boddy in the ballroom with a rope? Professor Plum in the conservatory with a candlestick?”

I grimaced.

”I'm sorry,” he said. ”I don't mean to make a joke. But you've got to understand, we were all living mathematics night and day. It was very stressful, highly compet.i.tive, a petri dish of obsessive personalities. And then this terrible and, I must admit, fascinating thing happened. We were horrified and riveted at the same time. And the women-there weren't many of them, you know-were afraid. We all knew that Lila didn't have much of a life outside of the department, which seemed to raise the probability that the killer might have been one of us.”

”And what do you think?” I asked. I was watching his face for something-a flinch or nervous tic that might incriminate him, an obvious sign like sweating or looking away. But he looked me in the eyes and said, ”I have no idea.”

”What about McConnell?”

Strachman shook his head. ”Honestly, I think he was just an easy target. The obvious choice, perhaps, but I don't believe he did it.”

”Why?”

”It just seems out of character. Granted, we weren't best buddies or anything, but we did have a few cla.s.ses together, and I had worked on a project with him during my first year. I didn't like him much, but then I didn't like anyone very much in those days. I envied his confidence, his ease with women. They loved him, you know. He was tall, good-looking, funny, and when he walked down the hall you could just tell he had an effect on people. Women would stop in mid-sentence to look at him. I was this average-looking guy, clammed up whenever I tried to say so much as h.e.l.lo to a girl, and for him it all just came naturally.”

It had never occurred to me before to ask this, but hearing McConnell described in this way, I couldn't help but wonder. ”Were there other women?” I asked. ”Besides my sister?”

Strachman thought for a moment. ”There was one,” he said, ”a girl in the philosophy department. Pet.i.te, willowy, brunette-very pretty. I used to see them eating lunch together all the time, she was obviously smitten. He put an end to it soon after it started-maybe a couple of months-but it was an ugly breakup. Sometimes she'd show up at his office late at night, demanding to see him alone. There would be shouting, and he'd have to practically push her out the door. She threatened to tell his wife, but I don't know if she ever did. The other guy who was working with us on the project used to get very annoyed, but to be honest, I wished McConnell would teach me how he did it. I couldn't imagine any woman would ever feel that strongly about me.”

”Do you remember her name?”

”Melissa? Melanie?” He shook his head. ”I never knew her last name. I don't know what McConnell did to finally get rid of her, but by the time your sister showed up she wasn't coming around anymore.”

”I'm very curious,” I said. ”Why did you keep McConnell's secret? Why didn't you tell the police what you knew about him and Lila?”

He looked at his watch. ”I have a meeting in fifteen minutes.” And then, as if to prove to me that he wasn't just making the meeting up to get out of there, he elaborated. ”We're bidding on the tunnel to Montara. If you want to make a good investment, buy property on the coast now, before the tunnel goes in. People still think it's too far from the city, they're turned off by Devil's Slide. But once the tunnel opens, property's going to skyrocket, mark my word.”

He stood to leave. ”I a.s.sume you've talked to Carroll.”

”Carroll?” I repeated, trying to remember where I'd heard the name.

”Don Carroll, McConnell's mentor at Stanford. Carroll knew McConnell better than anyone. I'm sure he's still teaching.”

DRIVING TO WORK AFTER MY CONVERSATION WITH Strachman, I tried to banish from my mind the image of Lila and Peter McConnell, naked in the offices of the Stanford Journal of Mathematics. When I talked to McConnell in Diriomo, he had somehow managed to make his affair with Lila appear almost inevitable, inspired, driven by a deep intellectual and emotional connection that was more powerful than his will, or hers. From his telling, it looked more like a tragic love story than a sordid affair. But the image of them in the office together late at night-his wife would have probably been waiting for him at home, the child tucked into bed-made me confront something about Lila that I didn't want to think about, something I'd never wanted to think about. She'd knowingly had an affair with a married man, a father. Their relations.h.i.+p had not been based purely upon intellectual attraction, but also upon something earthly and common, something I had succ.u.mbed to more times than I cared to admit: l.u.s.t.

All these years I'd thought of her more as a girl than as a woman. Even though she was three years older, I'd always been the more worldly one. This perception had to do with her naivete in social matters, her lack of romantic and s.e.xual experience. I'd never once gone to her for advice on men, and had a.s.sumed that, when the time came, she would come to me. But the fact was that she had been twenty-two years old when she died, old enough to know what she was doing, old enough to understand what an affair might do to a marriage. I tried to chase the thoughts away. To even contemplate that Lila might have been at fault in any way felt wrong. In my story, she had always been blameless.

Thirty.

ON FRIDAY EVENING, I WENT TO SEE BEN Fong-Torres.

”Red or white?” he asked, when he greeted me at the elevator door.

”Red.”

”Perfect. We have a Syrah I've been wanting to try.”

We took our gla.s.ses outside, where a steep wooden staircase led down to a shady garden of fern trees, luxuriously blooming rose bushes, and banana palms. I could imagine sitting in the garden in the morning, sipping my coffee and reading a book. I asked Ben if he and his wife, Dianne, ever did that.

”Oh, we're not coffee people,” he said. ”We drink tea.”

While I could enjoy a good cup of tea every now and then, I had a hard time relating to people who didn't drink coffee at all. Granted, they were probably calmer, kinder, and less p.r.o.ne to anxiety-but I couldn't imagine going a day, much less a month or year, without coffee.

”Did you know that, in Turkey in the fifteenth century, there was a law allowing women to divorce their husbands if they didn't provide them with adequate amounts of coffee? But a century later in the Ottoman Empire, anyone caught operating a coffeehouse could be officially beaten as punishment. On the second offense, they were sewed into a leather sack and tossed into the Bosphorus River.”

Ben nodded politely. It was always my first instinct when there was a hole in a conversation-talk about coffee. I worried that I was like a dentist who regales strangers with stories of molar extractions, or a realtor who can't stop talking about fluctuations in the thirty-year rate.

”Thanks for finding the tape,” I said.

”No problem. After we talked about it, I became a little obsessed.”

”Where did it turn up?”

”I'd loaned it to a friend years ago. I had to make several phone calls. Turned out my friend let his cousin borrow it, who let her son borrow it, who listed it on eBay last year. But no one bought it. Imagine the kid's surprise when I e-mailed him through his eBay account and told him I wanted my tape back.”

In the TV room, we sat side by side on the plush sofa. The recording was low quality, the sound scratchy. You could tell it had been recorded in somebody's bas.e.m.e.nt. The first song was good but not great, a slow, Dylanesque ballad about mornings on Haight Street, before the bars had opened. The second was an acoustic number, the kind of guitar work that made you feel both lonely and inspired. I could almost feel Boudreaux in the room with us, sipping whiskey and weeping over the strings. Before the third song came on, Ben paused the ca.s.sette player and said, ”Pretty amazing, huh?”

”It is.”

”This next one caught me off guard. It's the first time I ever heard Boudreaux on keyboard, but that's not the half of it. I almost didn't call you. Didn't know if I wanted to open up that can of worms. But then I talked to Dianne, and she said you really ought to hear it.”

I swallowed. ”All right.”

He pressed play. I leaned forward and listened. The first couple of minutes were just Boudreaux on keyboard. The notes were less certain than when he was on ba.s.s, but there was still something about the music that surpa.s.sed the brain and went straight to the heart, like Boudreaux was feeling every note of it. There was something very private about it, too, as if Boudreaux didn't expect another living soul to hear this music. It felt like I was listening in on someone's dreams. And then he began to sing. His voice faltered through the first few lines, then grew stronger, but it never did become entirely confident. Later, listening to the song again, dozens of times, alone in my apartment, I realized that it was this uncertainty in the voice, the emotional rawness, that made it beautiful. His voice reminded me a little of Townes Van Zandt, and I thought of a night more than thirty years before, when my parents had taken me and Lila to see Van Zandt perform at the Fillmore. We waited in line out in front of the building on Geary on a cold night in February. Next door to the Fillmore was the imposing three-story building that served as headquarters for the People's Temple. Mingled in with the people waiting for the Van Zandt concert were Temple members, and indigents waiting to be fed in the church dining hall. At one point a man with dyed black hair stepped out of a limousine, and he was instantly surrounded by people who seemed to want to touch his hair and his clothes. He smiled and hugged everyone, kissing several women, and even a few girls who didn't look much older than Lila, on the mouth.

”Is that Townes Van Zandt?” I asked.

My mother pulled me and Lila close. ”No,” she said. ”That's Jim Jones.”