CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Grant was reminded of the lecture hall in The Paper Chase. It was half-full with half-asleep-looking students, but even the most bored of them had an open notebook and was holding a pen in his or her hand.

Harmon marched to the lectern and said something to the short, rotund teacher, who stopped in midsentence and followed Harmon out of the hall. At the doorway the teacher turned and said to the class, “We’ll pick it up next time.”

The teacher, who was introduced as Dan Stein, looked Grant up and down and said, “You’re really a cop?”

Grant opened his jacket and showed him his gun.

“Hey!” Stein said. “We can put this in the teleplay!”

“Dan and I are writing a teleplay for Law and Order,” Harmon explained as they went back to Stein’s office. He looked suddenly sheepish. “It’s not sold, yet, just on spec. I’m sorry, but that’s all I could think about while you held your police special to my neck.”

Stein’s eyes went wide. “He held it to your neck?”

Harmon waved a hand in dismissal. “We’ll use it in the teleplay, Dan. Open the door.”

Stein fumbled his keys out and opened the door. They entered a cluttered office with papers and books stacked everywhere.

“We need Anne Simmons’ thesis.”

“Who?” Stein said. He frowned.

“Two semesters ago. She didn’t complete.”

“Wow, two semesters. I can’t remember them a week after they’re gone. We’ll check the machine.”

They followed him around a wall of law books topped with stacks of spiral notebooks at a precarious angle. Behind the wall was a desk covered in junk—pens and pencils, more notebooks, stacks of loose papers, more law books, thriller novels—and in the midst of it all the largest computer screen Grant had ever seen.

“Great for DVDs, when I can’t stand grading anymore,” Stein commented, as he pushed a button hidden behind a pile of books. There was an uneventful moment and then the screen filled with what looked like a homemade movie, a handheld camera recording a flight down a concrete set of steps in what looked like Central Park.

Stein uncovered his keyboard and tapped some keys. “We filmed part of the teleplay, borrowed some film students,” he said.

The screen went blank, then bright blue, hurting Grant’s eyes. Then a white screen came up with a cursor in the upper left corner.

“What was the name again?” Stein asked.

Harmon told him.

Stein typed it in.

A name came up, followed by rows of information.

“Hey,” Stein said, suddenly wary, partly covering the screen with his hands, “does Mr. Detective here know about the confidentiality laws?”

Harmon said, sighing, “It’s all right, Dan.”

Stein shrugged and pushed his face close to the screen.

“Oh,” he said.

“What?” Harmon replied.

“It says it’s here. She never finished it, right?”

“Correct,” Harmon said.

“Then all we have to do is find it,” Stein said, sweeping his hands around the room, the endless stacks.