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Noel had seen his type before—tousled, dirty hair, granny glasses, denims a size too small, a corduroy jacket with worn houndstooth elbow patches—the costume of the career graduate student.
    Boyle spotted Noel. “Did you get my note, Mr. Cummings? Do you have a moment now?”
    Not waiting for an answer, he went back into his office.
    “Here goes,” Noel whispered to Alison and headed after him.
    “You must be Noel Cummings,” the graduate student said. “You wrote that article contra Wilson.”
    “I admit it.”
    “Everyone’s talking about it in Chicago. No kidding. We think it’s a terrific critique!”
    “Thanks,” Noel said, and would have stayed to find out what else they were saying at the University of Chicago, but Boyle was signaling to him.
    “Nice boy,” Wilbur Boyle said when they were alone. “Very up on things. Might join our staff next year.”
    He motioned Noel to sit down, but remained standing himself, looking up at the high windows under the prominent eaves of the old building.
    “When I first took this office, I thought how wonderful it would be, right here in the heart of Manhattan overlooking the park. A roof with eaves to keep off sun and snow. Birds singing. All I notice now is pigeon shit.”
    Noel sat down and automatically inspected the bookshelf. A glance told him not a volume had been moved since his last visit at the beginning of the term. He’d heard such prologues before. They always led into a long, convoluted soliloquy of disappointments, hardships, and department problems. To listen to one was to hear all of them. But to break in was a breach of etiquette.
    Noel used the time to prepare answers to Boyle.
    The chairman got to the point rather suddenly, breaking off in the middle of a platitude to ask, “By the way, what is all this about, yesterday morning?”
    “I witnessed a murder.”
    The handsome, well-cared-for, middle-aged face stopped for a second as though a plaster mask had received a light hammer tap.
    “No? Really?”
    “Really. I think the victim was a police decoy. I never found out more. He was still alive. He sent me for help. It arrived too late for him. They said they would call to check my story. They even began to beat me up. Their chief stopped them.”
    “Not a nice bunch,” Boyle said, all sympathy and interest. “What happened?”
    “Some men knifed him. In one of the abandoned piers on the Hudson River.”
    Boyle winced, but seemed fascinated. “And they let you go?”
    “Here I am.”
    “If only you’d told me,” Boyle said, “you needn’t have come to class. I would have found someone else. Or canceled it.”
    “I didn’t mind,” Noel said. He was enjoying himself now. “I thought work would keep my mind off it. It was grisly.”
    “It must have been.” Those words said, Wilbur Boyle was once more the unworried, slick university administrator, his hair stylishly long, neatly combed, his clothing meticulous, his tone that of an aging politician. Boyle had made his name with one idea in one book twenty years ago. Since then, nothing had panned out, except this job. He’d done his best to glamorize it and himself.
    “What were you doing there? In that area, I mean?”
    “I bicycle every morning, before class.”
    “Sounds invigorating.” Boyle shuddered. “And that’s all?”
    “What else would I be doing in an abandoned pier at that hour?”
    “Then you aren’t the one,” Boyle said, sighing with obvious disappointment.
    “What one?”
    “No one tells me anything in the department. But I had heard an intriguing rumor that one of the staff was seen at curious hours recently in that area. Getting material. You know, of course, that area is a center of homosexual bars, clubs, haunts of different sorts? I was certain I’d soon be reading a proposal for a ground-breaking study on that milieu seen from within. It’s needed. It sounded good. Very good. I’d hoped that person was you, Noel.”
    “Me?” Noel had been