Steve Martini - The Jury

“And how are you describing him? Tall? Dark?”

“Yeah,” says Harry. “A detailed description is always best.”

“And of course you’re telling them this is a man with a Ph.D.?”

“I think I may have left that part out,” he says.

I raise an eyebrow.

“You let their imaginations fill in the blanks.”

“With assumptions,” I say.

“Yeah. Well.”

I can imagine that the vision these shop owners have of Epperson after Harry’s visit is something from a mug shot. God help the man if he tries to buy more jewelry in any of these places. They’ll be calling out the SWAT team.

“Spent a lot of time, came up with nothing,” says Harry. “Squat. Nada. Of course, I only covered half of La Jolla. You have any idea how many jewelry stores there are in that town? And that’s just the ones selling new stuff. I haven’t even started with the antique spots, the fucking boutiques and galleries for the artsy set. I have a call in to get some help from one of the P.I. firms downtown. They’ll have a couple of investigators for us by tomorrow.”

“Good. How about the audit? You picked up the file, the papers from Doris Boyd?”

“Yeah. I went by. She couldn’t find them, but she turned the place upside down. She finally located them.”

“Where were they?”

“Seems her husband had looked at ’em last. He put the file in a drawer in a cabinet in the dining room. Good place to keep papers, huh? It got sorta touchy,” says Harry. “Doris wanted to know if maybe the grant application for the daughter was up and running again. I had to burst her bubble, tell her no, that we needed the documents in Crone’s case. Nothing like opening old wounds,” says Harry.

“Still, with their file I was able to track the stuff at the university. Only problem, there was nothing there but another dry hole,” he says. “If there was an audit, I couldn’t find it. They do a financial analysis every year for the budget, but that’s it. No certification by an accounting firm, and no audit trail of where last year’s money went. Everything I was able to get is there in front of you.” He gestures toward the pile of papers he has planted on my desk, under his shoes.

“If there’s no audit trail, it’s not going to tell us much.”

“There’s some stuff from Cybergenomics in there. I saw the letterhead as I was copying. Didn’t have time to read it all, but glanced at it. It looks like normal covering correspondence to me. No mention of Epperson, or Jordan. The letters were addressed to the financial affairs office at the university with copies to Crone.”

I pick up Harry’s shoes, hand them to him to get them off the desk, and start pawing through the papers, a stack about five inches thick. I go through fifteen, maybe twenty pages quickly, to see if anything jumps out. It doesn’t.

“They bind all the working papers together each year. Put ’em between covers in those plastic spiral things and stack ’em on a shelf. I get the sense nobody really looks at them. Makes it a bitch to copy, though,” he says.

“Hmm?”

“The spiral binding. Gotta turn each page. End up losing the margins in the copier.” Harry sounds as if he’s become an expert on this.

“Some of it’s gonna be hard to read. The action seems to be in the budget augmentations,” says Harry, “and new applications for grants.”

“Did you see any references to genetic graying?” I ask.

Harry shakes his head. “Like I say, I didn’t read every page. But then I wouldn’t expect to find anything in there on that. If Crone was siphoning money from the grant to put ethnic evolution into overdrive, he wouldn’t have been likely to document it in a grant application. You think?”

Harry is right.

“What’s the process for the money?” I ask. Age-old adage-follow the money.

“From what I’m told, everything from the state goes into the university’s general fund. Gets disbursed from there. Grant money is sequestered in separate accounts and doled out by the university in accordance with the written conditions for each grant. The vice chancellor for fiscal affairs has the final word if there’s any dispute. Unless it gets into court.”

“How often does that happen?”

“Never,” says Harry. “Though according to the woman I talked to in the financial affairs office, disagreements happen more often than you might think. From what I’m told, flaps over grant money are usually handled at the administrative level. The courts are a little too public for comfort.”

“Sounds like you got a lot of information from this lady.”

“I took her to lunch,” says Harry.

I give him an arched eyebrow.

“Nothing fancy, just the student union,” he says. “Between soup and salad she tells me there’s a lot of stuff goes on people don’t know about in higher education. A lot of it comes under the heading of entertainment. Deans and chancellors, it seems, have to entertain. They buy a lot of shit, pianos and furniture, university logos painted on the bottoms of their swimming pools. This seemed to be a real problem with her, so I listened,” says Harry. “Give somebody a shoulder to cry on, sometimes you hear something. According to her, some of this stuff may not be entirely necessary.”

“I’m shocked,” I tell him.

“And sometimes it disappears. The university set gets real sensitive about scandal. Seems the chancellor at one of the other campuses took a dive on insurance fraud a few years back. It’s one thing to fudge on the state budget, another to screw over an insurance company. Seems this chancellor spent a bundle of state money buying silverware to entertain,” says Harry. “Somehow they misplaced it between trips to Europe. So they file an insurance claim on behalf of the university. Problem was, when they found the mahogany case with the silverware a month later, they forgot to tell the insurance company. Cashed the check.”

“Oops.”

“To make a long story short, this lady thinks there ought to be more insurance companies involved in education audits. That or the mob,” says Harry. “Either way.”

“Sounds like she loves the people she works for.”

“According to her, the university is anxious to keep a low profile, especially when it comes to gifts, donations and the like. They don’t like judges looking over their shoulder, asking accountants to get out their calculators. This makes the givers nervous,” says Harry. “So disputes are almost always handled in-house. You get two professors pissing on each other over who gets what for research, the chancellor’s office steps in like the pope, resolves it and everybody kisses the ring and moves on. You screw with the chancellor, you find yourself in academic hell.”

“That means finding records of anything rising to the level of an argument is not likely,” I say.

Harry points a finger at me like a pistol and drops the thumb like a hammer. “Bingo.”

“According to the woman in the financial office, you have a director. In this case, Crone. Then you have associates, other people involved in aspects of the same project getting funding.”

“Jordan and Epperson,” I say.

He nods. “If the money is apportioned and funding gets shifted around like a shell game, somebody finds out theirs was spent on some other part of the study. Well. You see what can happen,” says Harry. “In that case, whoever got screwed might complain to higher-ups.”

“Do we know whether that happened here? With Jordan and Crone?”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” says Harry. “I asked the lady in the office. She didn’t know. She says it would be in the documentation, but we might have to read between the lines to find it. And that’s not all.”