“Who that plane belong to?” Hawk said.

“Last Stand Systems, Inc.,” I said. “Out of Beecham, Maine.”

“Beecham, Maine?”

“I never heard of it either,” I said.

The door to my office was open so that Hawk and I could keep an eye on Lila in the design office across the hall. Six men in close formation came through the open door like a drill team. Two moved to the left of the door, two to the right, and two marched straight up to my desk.

“Maybe these guys know,” Hawk said.

“You guys know where Beecham, Maine, is?” I said.

They looked like Secret Service men or IBM executives. They were all in dark suits and white shirts. They all wore ties. They all had short hair. They all were of northern European descent. When everyone was in place the suit closest to the door pushed it shut.

One of the two men in front of my desk said, “Spenser?”

He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, which made him look smart, probably why he was the designated speaker.

“Yes,” I said. “Is it on the coast?”

“Is what on the coast?”

“Beecham.”

Horn Rims shook his head in dismissive annoyance.

“You’ve been put on notice,” he said. “As of this morning at three thirty-five.”

I looked at Hawk.

“Did you take those library books back like I told you?” I said.

Hawk was leaning against my file cabinet as if he might fall asleep. He smiled softly.

“Can’t be librarians,” Hawk said. “Librarians would know where Beecham is.”

Horn Rims didn’t change expression.

“You are to stay entirely away from Amir Abdullah. Repeat, entirely. If you fail to comply you will be incinerated as was your car.”

“How come,” I said.

“You’ve been informed,” Horn Rims said. “Your Negro friend as well.”

“You guys associated with Last Stand Systems?” I said.

One of the guys in the back opened my door, and four of them marched out. Horn Rims and his partner marched out after them. At the door, Horn Rims’ partner turned and aimed a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer. He squeezed off three rounds; each shot broke one of the three coffee cups that were lined up on the file cabinet about a foot from Hawk. Hawk never moved. The gun disappeared. The door closed. We were left with the silence and the smell of the gunfire.

Hawk looked at the remains of the coffee cups.

“Guy can shoot,” Hawk said.

“Yes, my Negro friend, but is he a nice person?” I said.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The pictures of Lillian and Robinson arrived in my office by FedEx. I took them with me when I drove up to the Sea Mist Inn and talked with the homey-looking woman at the desk. She remembered them clearly enough, a black man and a white woman. They had registered as Mr. & Mrs. Robinson Nevins on the Friday before last Labor Day, and, yes, that was Mrs. Nevins in the picture.

I drove back to Boston and over to the university and took the information and the pictures with me. I fell in beside Lillian Temple as she came down the steps of the library carrying her briefcase. She appeared to recognize me, but she didn’t appear to take any pleasure in it.

“Hi,” I said.

“I’d prefer that you did not bother me while I’m at work,” she said.

“Don’t blame you,” I said. “You know anything about the Sea Mist Inn?”

“Excuse me?”

“Sea Mist Inn, place up in Rockport where you and Robinson Nevins spent last Labor Day weekend.”

She stopped dead in the middle of the quadrangle.

“Labor Day?”

I took the photographs from my inside pocket.

“I showed these pictures of you and Robinson,” I said. “And the woman on the desk recognized you.”

She stared at the photographs.

“This came on you kind of sudden,” I said. “Should we sit on this bench, while you think about it?”

Without comment, she plopped down on a bench beside some evergreen bushes near the entrance to the administration building. She was staring at the pictures I still held for her.

“Those pictures don’t prove anything,” she said finally.

I put them back into my inside pocket.

“No, but they’re suggestive, coupled with what the Sea Mist lady told us, and what Robinson Nevins said.”

Again she was silent, staring at the place where the pictures had been. She let out a long breath.

“Well,” she said, “you seem to have invaded my whole life.”

“Just doing my job, ma’am.”

Lillian looked at me somberly.

“Not a job one can admire,” she said.

If Lillian had a sense of humor, I had no idea how to access it.

“So,” I said. “Since we can assume you know Robinson Nevins was heterosexual, a question presents itself.”

Lillian continued to look at me with blank sobriety, which might have been her attempt to look stern. Lillian’s mind didn’t seem to move very quickly, even for a professor. While the question had come upon her rather suddenly, it was a pretty obvious question. I waited.

Finally she said without affect, “What question?”

“Why you reported to the tenure committee a story about Robinson Nevins that you had considerable reason to doubt.”

“He could have been bisexual.”

“Yes he could have. Did you think he was?”

“I didn’t know he wasn’t.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Of course not.” She was, maybe genuinely, outraged. “One’s sexuality is neither my business nor yours.”

I looked at her for a while, aware of my breath going in and out.

“It’s breathtaking,” I said. “You have ruined a man’s career by repeating a slanderous allegation you know to be false, and you still find a way to mouth moralistic platitudes when you’re caught.”

“I’m sorry you think the right to privacy is a moralistic platitude.”

“I am also not sure if you know that you keep diverting the topic or not. I don’t think you’re smart enough, but now and then I’m fooled.”

She stood, holding her briefcase with both arms, as if I’d tried to cop a feel.

“I do not have to sit here and allow you to berate me,” she said.

“No you don’t,” I said. “And neither will the Dean of Liberal Arts, when I discuss it with him.”

She sat back down again, hugging her briefcase a little closer.

“You’d go to the dean?”

“Yep. Probably go to Bass Maitland, too. And probably the student newspaper.”

She was horrified. The look of haughty incomprehension had been replaced by wide-eyed staring fear.

“I want a lawyer,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Go get one. I’m not a cop. You’re not under arrest. But I now know that Robinson Nevins got jobbed in his tenure hearing, and I know by whom, and I can prove it, and I will. What I don’t know yet is why, but I’m not sure why matters.”

The class break had ended and the next period had begun. The quadrangle was relatively empty. Some students sat on the library steps smoking, and listening to headphones, and talking and thinking about sex. In the small plot of dirt where the evergreens grew by the steps of the administration building, some tough-looking city birds, starlings mostly, and a few sparrows, pecked industriously for whatever birds peck after. In front of the university, MBTA trains stopped and let people out and took people on before they tunneled back underground.

Finally in a voice that sounded almost girlish Lillian said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Probably not,” I said.

She took her left hand off her briefcase and began to play with the hair at the back of her neck.

“A university faculty is special. It is a place, maybe the only place, where the ideal of a civil society still flourishes.”

“I can see that,” I said.

If she heard me she didn’t show it.

“Robinson is a decent man, but he… he has no place on a university faculty. He is not… how to say this… he is not consistent with the current best thinking on racial matters.”