The Jinx (9 page)

I felt a brief twinge of guilt but quickly brushed it away.

It was only dinner.

I
t was time for the recruiting roundup session. I shut down my laptop, put my suit jacket back on, stuffed my feet, complete with throbbing toe, into my shoes and grabbed my shoulder bag and coat.

Skipping the elevator, I took the service stairs to the floor below and headed down the corridor to the Winslow, Brown suite. I heard Scott Epson's nasal voice before I saw him.

“…can only benefit us,” he was saying. Actually, he was bloviating, as he was wont to do. “Yes, it's unfortunate, but it does weaken their position.” I turned the corner and nearly ran into him, which would have been a far less pleasant experience than smashing into, say Jonathan Beasley. Although I doubted Scott's concave chest would pack as much of a wallop.

“Hi, Scott,” I said, stepping to the side to avoid a collision.

He gave a start of surprise then put his hand over the mouthpiece of his cell phone. “Oh. Hi, Rach. Just wrapping up an incredibly important call. I'll be right in.”

“Sure,” I said. He seemed strangely flustered, but I didn't give it much thought. It was Scott, after all.

I passed through the open door of the suite and selected a can of Diet Coke from the refreshments table. Several of my colleagues had already gathered, and most were busy on their assorted phone and e-mail devices. I said hello to Cecelia and made small talk with a guy from the Capital Markets department. Scott joined us a couple of minutes later, and when everyone was seated I called the meeting to order so that we could begin our tedious rehashing of the day's interviews.

Good bankers are usually clever rather than intellectual, quick rather than thoughtful. They get paid for getting deals done; the bigger the deals and the quicker they're closed the better. They tend to be the least self-reflective species on earth—self-centered and self-involved, yes, but hardly self-reflective.

I've thus never understood the questions that some of my colleagues asked of business school students, another species not known for their personal depth. When I interviewed students, I tried to understand whether a candidate was strong quantitatively, would work well with others and not embarrass us in front of clients, and had the drive and endurance required to handle the grueling pace of the job. Many of my fellow bankers, however, preferred to approach interviewing in a more Freudian way.

Scott, for example, loved to ask students about the biggest challenge they had faced and how they had overcome it. I never asked this question because the answer usually bored me—students were prepared for it, and they would usually give a canned response describing motivating an unwilling team or solving a thorny analytical problem. Scott, however, seemed disappointed with this sort of reply, but he would crow with enthusiasm over any candidate who used the question as an opportunity to discuss her parents' tempestuous divorce or when his dog was run over by a truck. “That really shows incredible character and sensitivity,” he would say. That neither trait was particularly important in our line of work didn't matter much to Scott. Nor did he seem to realize that he was completely lacking in both.

My other pet peeve was the subtle undercurrent of sexism running through the discussion. It was rare that a male candidate was asked to do off-the-cuff bond math or grilled on his SAT scores to test his quantitative abilities. But female candidates were routinely asked to compute complex algorithms in their head or opine on options theory. The seven men and lone woman who'd performed that day's interviews weren't much different. I listened silently as a female student's quantitative skills were debated ad nauseam until I had to point out that she'd been an applied math major in college and earned top grades in her finance courses at the business school. I'd probably been only a low-grade feminist when I started at Winslow, Brown, but my experience there had turned me into a full-fledged radical. Compared to me, Gloria Steinem's politics were practically red-state.

We finally wrapped up at half past seven, and I was pleased with the results. Regardless of the various irrelevancies that Scott and like-minded participants kept harping on, we'd emerged with an accomplished and diverse slate of candidates to send to New York for the final round of interviews. I left a message for Stan Winslow to update him and took the elevator down to the lobby. The doorman put me into a cab, and I gave the driver the address for the restaurant in Central Square.

 

I felt pleasant anticipation as the taxi sped up Mass. Ave. I pulled my small cosmetics pouch from my shoulder bag to reapply lipstick and blush. My midwinter pallor needed all the help it could get.

Then I checked myself. What was I doing, putting on makeup for dinner with Jonathan? It was probably presumptuous of me to even think that he thought of this dinner as anything resembling a date. Furthermore, if he did think it was a date, I was ethically obligated not to primp and to at least drop a passing reference to my boyfriend. Yes, old crushes die hard, and it had been the crush to end all crushes, and Jonathan was even more gorgeous now than he'd been in college, but I was in a committed relationship. I was in love with Peter.

This line of thought was the cue for the mean-spirited little voice in my head to chime in. “Peter hasn't exactly been acting like he's in a committed relationship these past couple of days. Interrupting romantic evenings to take calls with Abigail, leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, canceling dinner….”

“He's busy,” I told the mean-spirited little voice.

“But what's more important, you or his work?” it answered. “Or maybe he'd just rather spend time with Abigail and is trying to let you down easy?”

That was especially mean-spirited, so I didn't justify it with a reply. Besides, the cab driver was looking at me oddly in the rearview mirror. I guessed he wasn't used to passengers who talked to themselves. In New York, he wouldn't have batted an eye.

 

I paid the fare and stepped onto the curb in front of the address Jonathan had given me. The restaurant was flanked by a newsstand, and I caught a glimpse of a headline as I walked past. Prostitute Found Strangled, it blared. Yuck. I wondered if it was the same woman who had been Matthew's patient, or yet another victim. It must be another victim, I surmised, if the paper was leading with the story.

Inside, I saw Jonathan already seated at a corner table, an open menu in front of him. He smiled and waved me over, standing to greet me. My heart did an involuntary flip. He really was beautiful. But, I reminded myself, I was going to mention Peter to him as soon as I found an appropriate opening.

“I'm starved and I'm thinking we should get some appetizers. Any interest in samosas?” Jonathan asked after leaning down to kiss my cheek, which caused the tingling from earlier that afternoon to begin anew.

“A lot of interest. That sounds perfect.” A waiter hurried over to pull out my chair, but I was too busy tingling to see him coming and accidentally elbowed him as I was taking off my coat. He accepted my apologies with grace and got me into my seat without further incident.

Jonathan ordered samosas and two Kingfishers and we consulted over the menu. “How do you feel about spice?” I asked, trying neither to tingle nor nurse my elbow in any visible way. It seemed to have connected with a particularly bony part of the waiter.

“The hotter the better.”

“Good answer.” After some debate, we decided to share a vegetable biryani and a chicken vindaloo billed as “fiery.” Jonathan gave the order to our waiter when he returned with our appetizers and drinks.

“I spoke to Clark Gibson this afternoon,” Jonathan said, as I cut off a piece of the flaky potato-filled pastry and dipped it into coriander chutney.

“Clark Gibson? Oh, your old roommate.”

“He sends his warm regards.”

I laughed. “Like he remembers me.”

“He remembers you all right. You made quite an impression. He always had a thing for redheads.” There was an indefinable gleam in Jonathan's blue eyes as he spoke, and I felt my face turning the same color as my hair, the better to complement my tingling.

“That's embarrassing.”

“Trust me. Nothing to be embarrassed about. So, tell me what you've been up to since English 10. You gave me the condensed version over lunch, but I want the details.”

We filled each other in on the last decade between sips of beer and bites of vindaloo. I told him about my years at Winslow, Brown, and he told me about his path to professor-hood. I probably shouldn't have been surprised when Jonathan mentioned he was divorced. I knew he'd had a serious girlfriend in college—I'd spent a lot of time resenting her from afar. I even had my own private nickname for her: Perfect Girl. She was a willowy blonde with a sweet smile, and she was head of Phillips Brooks House, the organization that ran all of the community service programs on campus—pretty much the last thing you'd want for the guy you had a crush on.

But while Jonathan and Perfect Girl, whose real name, appropriately enough, was Angela, may have looked perfectly matched to the hopelessly pining freshman observer, the match wasn't made in heaven. They married shortly after they graduated but had divorced a couple of years ago.

“What happened?” I asked, a little too eagerly. Then I apologized. “I'm sorry. That's none of my business.”

He shrugged. “No, it's okay. It's hard to explain, really. Ange earned her master's in social work after college, and she got pretty wrapped up in it. She was always off at a homeless shelter, or trying to rehabilitate addicts or get prostitutes off the street. And I was wrapped up in my work, too. We just sort of grew apart. Isn't that what they always say?”

“I think so. But I guess it still happens.”

“So we split up. It was fairly amicable. She got the house in Cambridge, and I moved into a condo in Kendall Square.”

Our conversation eventually turned to Sara and the police investigation. According to Jonathan, the police still seemed concerned that there was a link between the attack and the prostitute killer.

“He's been awfully busy, then,” I pointed out. “I just saw a headline in the evening paper about another murder. Did you find out more about why they think there's a connection? There's a big difference between a student getting hit on the head and prostitutes being strangled.”

“I know. I'm hoping to get more detail tomorrow.”

“What's going on with the crime rate around here, anyhow?” I asked.

“Boston may not be New York, but it is a big city and it has all of the problems of any big city. There are a lot of lowlifes around getting into all sorts of trouble.”

The word
lowlife
made me think of the Creepy Violent Stalker. “What did the police say about the letters she was getting?”

“The love letters? They're looking them over, but they didn't seem too excited.”

“Really? They don't think there's a stalker angle to this?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged again. “As I said before, the letters looked pretty harmless to me.”

“But you never know.”

“Of course not,” he answered. “Still, there are a lot of other paths to explore.”

“Besides the stalker?”

“I don't know if I'd call him a stalker. Probably just an anonymous admirer.”

“I hope that's true. So, what's your theory?”

“Well, I don't have one, really, but I've been thinking. Much as Sara keeps a pretty low profile, she's high profile by definition. I mean she's smart, she's beautiful and she's an heiress. I could imagine that a lot of people would be jealous of her.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, although his words instantly brought to mind my chat that afternoon with Gabrielle LeFavre.

“I'm not sure if I know. But let's say you're somebody who doesn't have all of the things that Sara has but has worked really hard to get to business school. You'd probably be pretty jealous.” Gabrielle sure was, I thought.

“Sara's worked hard,” I pointed out. “She definitely pulled more than her fair share of all-nighters when she interned at my firm last summer.”

“Sure. And I've seen her in class, and she's always well prepared. But there are still people who would envy who she is and what she has. She's going to be CEO of a major company, sooner rather than later, and while we recognize that the path that's gotten her there hasn't necessarily been the smoothest, some people might not be so sympathetic. And HBS is an incredibly competitive and stressful place—people lose perspective.”

Gabrielle definitely appeared to have lost perspective. That that sort of envy could trigger an attack seemed even more far-fetched now that I'd had two beers and a healthy portion of curry in me than it had that afternoon, but it was interesting to hear Jonathan put forth a similar theory. “So, you think Sara could be a symbol of some sort to an unhinged underdog type?”

“I know, it's crazy. But you know what it's like on campus.”

“Yes. Especially during Hell Week.”

“Anyhow, that's what I've been wondering about. It's probably stupid—I'm a professor, not a detective,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “So, what about you? Do you have any ideas?”

I washed down an especially fiery bite of vindaloo with a sip of beer. “Aside from the letter-writing stalker?”

“I doubt he's a stalker.”

“No,” I admitted, “I'm fresh out of ideas. Frankly, I'm more worried about Sara's company.”

“Grenthaler Media?”

“Yes. There have been some weird things going on with the stock.” I gave Jonathan a brief summary of the conversation I'd had with Sara on Wednesday night and the research I'd done that afternoon.

“I don't know what it's all about, and it's probably nothing,” I concluded, “but I'm trying to gather some more information.”