Free Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

department, right?” He refused to look up. I felt my temper rising, but I wondered if Mallory had been here before me. “Have the police been around asking for her?”
    “You ought to know,” he muttered, not looking up.
    “You think just because I’m not wearing sloppy blue jeans I’m with the police?” I asked. “How about digging out a departmental course list for me?”
    He didn’t move. I stepped around to his side of the desk and pulled open a drawer.
    “Okay, okay,” he said huffily. He put the book spine up on the desktop.
Capitalism and Freedom,
by Marcuse. I might have guessed. He rummaged through the drawer and pulled out a
nine-page
list, typed andmimeographed, labeled “College Time Schedule: Summer 1979.”
    I flipped through it to the Political Science section. Their summer schedule filled a page. Class titles included such things as “The Concept of Citizenship in Aristotle and Plato”; “Idealism from Descartes Through Berkeley”; and “Superpower Politics and the Idea of
Weltverschwinden.
“ Fascinating. Finally I found one that sounded more promising: “The Capitalist Standoff: Big Labor Versus Big Business.” Someone who taught a course like that would surely attract a young labor organizer like Anita McGraw. And might even know who some of her friends were. The instructor’s name was Harold Weinstein.
    I asked the youth where Weinstein’s office was. He hunched further into Marcuse and pretended not to hear. I came around the desk again and sat on it facing him, and grabbed his shirt collar and jerked his face up so that I could see his eyes. “I know you think you’re doing the revolution a great service by not revealing Anita’s whereabouts to the pigs,” I said pleasantly. “Perhaps when her body is found in a car trunk you will invite me to the party where you celebrate upholding your code of honor in the face of unendurable oppression.” I shook him a bit. “Now tell me where to find Harold Weinstein’s office.”
    “You don’t have to tell her anything, Howard,” someone said behind me. “And you,” he said to me, “Don’t be surprised when students equate police with fascism—I saw you roughing up that boy.”
    The speaker was thin with hot brown eyes and amop of unruly hair. He was wearing a blue work shirt tucked neatly into a pair of khaki jeans.
    “Mr. Weinstein?” I said affably, letting go of Howard’s shirt. He stared at me with his hands on his hips, brooding. It looked pretty noble. “I’m not with the police—I’m a private detective. And when I ask anyone a civil question, I like to get a civil answer, not an arrogant shrug of the shoulders.
    “Anita’s father, Andrew McGraw, hired me to find her. I have a feeling, which he shares, that she may be in bad trouble. Shall we go somewhere and talk about it?”
    “You have a feeling, do you,” he said heavily. “Well, go feel about it somewhere else. We don’t like police—public or private—on this campus.” He turned to stalk back down the corridor.
    “Well executed,” I applauded. “you’ve been studying Al Pacino. Now that you’ve finished emoting, could we talk about Anita?”
    The back of his neck turned red, and the color spread to his ears, but he stopped. “What about her?”
    “I’m sure you know she’s disappeared, Mr. Weinstein. You may also know that her boyfriend, Peter Thayer, is dead. I am trying to find her in the hopes of keeping her from sharing his fate.” I paused to let him absorb it. “My guess is that she’s hiding out someplace and she thinks she won’t be found by whoever killed him. But I’m afraid she’s crossed the path of an ugly type of killer. The kind that has a lot of money and can buy his way past most hideouts.”
    He turned so that I could see his profile. “Don’tworry, Philip Marlowe—they won’t bribe me into revealing her whereabouts.”
    I wondered hopefully if he could be tortured into talking. Aloud, I said, “Do you know