New England White by Stephen L. Carter

by painting her lip with iodine.
    “You’ve been here a little over three years. The students adore you. The faculty respects you. You seem to like everybody. I suspect you’d even get along with Mr. Tice, unpleasant though he can be. He wants to meet you, Julia.” Claire made it sound like a blind date. “Yes, the man’s self-centered and probably greedy, and he talks a mile a minute. But, Julia, if you can get along with Boris Gibbs, you can get along with anybody.”
    “What does Tice want to talk about?”
    “Kellen Zant, I think. He says the two of them knew each other. They worked on a project together. They didn’t have the chance to finish their research. I formed the impression that Mr. Tice might want to recruit you to take Kellen’s place.”
    “Oh, Claire, no. No way.”
    A kindly palm came up. “Far be it from me to force you, Julia. But think about it. Mr. Tice is a major benefactor of the school, after all, and you are…a dean. You might at least talk to him. Or don’t. It’s entirely up to you.” Meaning it wasn’t.
    “I’ll think about it,” Julia promised. She owed Claire, and they both knew it, for the dean had searched her out in the miserable months after she lost her job in the public schools. To this day, Julia was not sure why, although Claire loved to give speeches trumpeting Kepler as a showcase of diversity.
    “The only strange part came at the end of our conversation. He asked me if you were good at running your office. I naturally said you were wonderful. Well, you are. The neatest, most efficient office in the building, Julia. You know that. I told him, of course. And then he asked me if he could have a look at it. At your office. At that point I had to tell him that, as grateful as we are for his support, there are limits to—”
    But Julia missed the rest, because she was pelting down the hall.
    (III)
    “A RE YOU SURE NOTHING’S MISSING ?” said Lemaster, sizzling with fury.
    “Nothing I could see.”
    “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it.”
    “I can hardly believe it myself.”
    They were sitting in Lemaster’s study, a two-story affair separated from the main house by a breezeway. Except for a few family photos, and a flurry of south-facing windows, books covered every square inch of wall. Lemaster had told her back in their courting days that he wished he could live in a library. Now he nearly did.
    “I know this Tice. Sat on a couple of bar committees with him. Half his clients are scum. Mafiosi, accused terrorists, ax murderers. Seriously. All right, they all deserve representation, but I get worried when one guy feels he has to represent all of them. Tricky Tony. That’s what they call him.” A heavy sigh. “Thing is, he isn’t a bad lawyer. He’s actually pretty good. But he has no sense of morals. None. And he doesn’t have an independent thought in his head. He wouldn’t cross the street without a client paying him for it. So, if he wanted to see the inside of your office, it was on behalf of a client.”
    Julia sipped her wine. They were sharing a rather pretentious Napa Valley white. “What kind of client?”
    “No idea. But, Jules, the nerve of this man. To come onto my campus, to try to get one of my deans to open my wife’s office to him!” On his feet now, striding around the room. “All right. All right. Believe it or not, he didn’t actually violate the canons of ethics, or the law, either. Lawyers have a lot of freedom to—never mind. He’s not going to get away with this.”
    My campus,
she registered.
My deans. My wife.
    “You just said he didn’t break the law and he didn’t break the canons of ethics.”
    “That doesn’t matter.”
    “It doesn’t?”
    He shuddered to a halt. When Lemaster put on this act, stomping around, Julia had to hide a smile, because, being so short, he reminded her of a child throwing a tantrum. “The rules laid down are not necessarily the proper measure of right and wrong.”
    “What