As a case in point, he had, sometime in the early part of 1989, been written in as a research assistant on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar NSF grant. He didn’t know this during the life of the grant. He had first become aware of it a couple of months ago, when he had received a W-2 form claiming he had been paid twenty-five thousand dollars that he had, in fact, never received.
He had gone to Larsen’s comptroller, who worked in downtown Wapsipinicon, at the law firm that handled his affairs. He had pointed out, with all due respect, that he shouldn’t have to pay taxes on money he had not received. He had done this, he’d thought, with great good humor, thinking that the whole absurd situation might be good for a chuckle. But the bookkeeper wasn’t amused—he wasn’t even surprised.
“Do you have a tax man?” the bookkeeper said.
Kevin laughed. “Heck, no. My taxes are so simple, I—”
“You do now,” the bookkeeper said. “Bring me all your other W-twos, ten ninety-nines, business expenses, and so forth, and I’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of it?”
“I’ll make sure that your tax return is filed properly, and on time,” the bookkeeper said, slowly and clearly. “And the taxes on this”—he wiggled the mysterious W-2—“will not trouble you.”
“Dr. Larsen will see you now,” the receptionist said. Kevin scrambled to his feet, snatched up his laptop, and strode down the marble-lined corridor to Larsen’s office, a basketball-court-sized room in the corner of the building with a 180-degree view over the Wapsipinicon Valley and the EIU campus. The walls that were not made of windows were lined with honorary plaques, and with autographed photos of Larsen hobnobbing with secretaries of agriculture, Nobel prizewinners, and foreign heads of state.
He had done these meetings before—he knew the drill. First of all, thirty seconds of chummy small talk with the Rainmaker. After that some kind of internal alarm went off in Larsen’s head, his eyes glazed over, and he became clipped and distracted. If you saw it coming, and got down to brass tacks before Larsen had time to become irritated, you were golden.
Today, though, was a little different: there was an unusual item on the agenda.
“This Habibi thing,” Larsen said. “You’ve handled that well so far. Nice work.”
Kevin shrugged. “Cops asked me questions, I told them the truth.”
Larsen gave him a wink and a knowing chuckle, which Kevin found disturbing. “You’ve handled it well,” he repeated. “DA wants to throw the book at Ashrawi and keep him down at Fort Madison until he dies of old age. Looks like he’ll probably just be deported instead—then he’s the Iraqis’ problem.”
“Uh, I think that Ashrawi is Jordanian.”
Larsen stared fixedly at Kevin for a few moments. “All those borders are bullshit—drawn by imperialists in the recent past. So don’t waste my time quibbling about whether he’s Iraqi or Jordanian or Kuwaiti or what have you. All I want is for him to go back over there and not trouble me and my operations again. And if you hear any hints or rumors about further developments in this case, you come to me first—you understand? We’ve dodged a bullet here, but we can’t afford to let down our guard just yet.”
It hadn’t occurred to Kevin that they had dodged any bullets. A murder had happened, the bad guy was in jail. But he could see Larsen’s point. This kind of thing could have serious repercussions for Larsen’s finely tuned PR operations.
“Out with it!” Larsen snapped.
“I’ve had a couple of visits from Clyde Banks—one just yesterday,” Kevin said.
“Clyde Banks? What the hell is he doing coming here?” As a pillar of the local GOP, Larsen knew very well who Clyde Banks was.
“He was asking me about some of the details in my statement to the detectives.”
“Which details?”
“Well, for example, when the others were carrying Marwan out of the lab, one of them said, in English, ‘Don’t bang Marwan’s head.’ Clyde was asking me about that.”
“What kind of questions was he asking?”
“He wanted to know whether the Arab students normally talked to each other in English, or if theynormally spoke Arabic.”
“And you told him?”
Kevin shrugged. “I said normally they spoke Arabic.”
Larsen’s face began to turn red.
“But,” Kevin hastened to add, “I mentioned that there were many dialects of Arabic, and so if Arab students from different countries were trying to communicate, they might occasionally lapse into English.”
Larsen took a deep breath. “You did good. You did good.” Larsen swung his chair around ninety degrees and looked out the window. “Clyde ask any other goddamn questions?”
“He was curious about the habits of the Arab students. Such as, was it normal for them to drink alcohol? And I said that they drank on occasion. Um, he asked whether they normally left door 304 open. I said no, but they were having a party that night, so maybe they left it open to get some fresh air. And he sort of poked around my lab for a little.”
“What do you mean, ‘poked around’?”