LITMIR.BIZ

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up and gang wars breaking out all over Oakland. You know what it means when junior high school kids bring Uzis and AK47s to school with ’em? Junior high school kids! And meanwhile we’re in a budget crunch and we can’t hire the cops we need. Jesus, man, we can’t pull officers from other jobs to look for your stolen car.”

      Lindsey counted to ten. “I’ve heard that line before, Oscar.”

      “I’ll bet you have.”

      “I want that car back.”

      “You want me to call up Wyatt Earp and have him deputize you? Pin a star on your shirt so you can strap a gunbelt around your waist and go after the rustlers?”

      Lindsey put down his cup, slipped the auto theft report into his pocket organizer and stood up. “Stay in touch, will you? And thanks for the coffee.”

      Gutiérrez said, “Don’t forget to turn in your visitor’s badge. They freak out if the count gets off.”

      Lindsey found a phone booth in the lobby and dialed the University of California in Berkeley. Maybe Martha Rachel Bernstein, Ph.D., could tell him something useful. Oscar Gutiérrez certainly hadn’t. What department was Bernstein in? Oh, yes, Sociology. He reached the department secretary and learned that Bernstein had finished teaching her morning class and was in her office. Lindsey got through by phone and introduced himself.

      “You’re the man who called yesterday.”

      “Right.”

      “You still trying to pester Joe Roberts?”

      “I’d like to talk with you, Dr. Bernstein.”

      “Why me?”

      “I’m investigating the theft of the Duesenberg from the Kleiner Mansion Saturday night.”

      “I didn’t take it.” She laughed, not altogether pleasantly.

      Lindsey sighed. “I didn’t really think you took it, Dr. Bernstein. I’m just gathering information at this point. I have no idea who took the car. May I come up and talk with you?”

      There was a pause. “I was going to work here for the rest of the morning, but if you want to come over I suppose it will be all right.”

      He got his Hyundai back and started for Berkeley. As he headed up Broadway toward College Avenue, he opened the pocket organizer on the passenger seat beside him. At a traffic light he studied his notes on the Gutiérrez meeting. The only worthwhile item was his scribble about Gutiérrez’s comment on buy-backs. It was definitely possible that Gutiérrez was tied in with an auto ring. If he was, he could set up a buy-back, rake off part of the ransom, and quash the police investigation at the same time.

      The owners would have their car back, the insurance company would get off light, the thieves would pick up a nice piece of change and they didn’t have to worry about disposing of the stolen goods. And with a friend in charge of the investigation, there was no way they were going to get caught.

      It was all very neat!

      But that didn’t mean it was so. It was just something to bear in mind. Lindsey wondered if there had been many buy-backs of stolen cars in Oakland. Probably better to follow up through the industry than through the Oakland Police Department. If Gutiérrez was part of a ring, better not to make him nervous at this point.

      Lindsey managed to get into a campus parking lot at Cal, and threaded through a mixture of young-looking, clean-looking students and crazed street people to Dr. Bernstein’s office. What kind of woman would he find? A doctor of philosophy who lived with a former Oakland Raiders lineman.…

      “Dr. Bernstein?”

      She stood up and smiled faintly. She was a stocky, tweedy woman with short brown hair. She stuck out her hand and shook his with vigor. He handed her a card and she dropped it onto the top of a desk cluttered with papers, journals, and notebooks. To one side a computer monitor glowed, a pie-chart in three colors filling the screen. At the other end of the desk a huge cut-glass ashtray held down a stack of photocopied forms. A brown-wrapped package of Philip Morris cigarettes and a monogrammed book of matches lay in the ashtray.

      Dr. Bernstein’s eyes followed Lindsey’s glance to the giant ashtray and the unopened pack of cigarettes.

      “I didn’t think they made those any more,” Lindsey said.

      “Don’t think they do. I keep ’em there as a reminder. I’m supposed to be a smart woman. Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, tenure before forty. Pretty smart, right?”

      “I—guess so.”

      “Smart enough to get hooked on a killer drug when I was twelve years old. Kept smoking when my father died of heart disease thanks to butts. Kept smoking when my mother died of lung cancer thanks to butts.”

      “What made you stop?”

      “Mason. My friend Ed Mason. Said he’d move out if I didn’t quit. I believed him. I’m strong and independent, too, not just smart. Okay.” She turned to her computer and clicked at the keyboard until the screen went dark. “Okay, Lindsey, what can I do for you?”

      He’d planned this interview. He expected Dr. Bernstein to be difficult, and there seemed little point in asking directly about the Duesenberg. “Why did you join the Smart Set?”

      She was leaning back in a leather swivel chair, fingers laced beneath her chin. Now she popped upright, dropping her hands to the desk. “What a nifty question! What’s it to ya?”

      “I want that car. My company will save a fortune if I get it, and that means a lot to me. To my career.”

      “An honest man,” she grinned. “No bullshit about punishing criminals and the breakdown of morality in American society. I joined the club to study the freaks. Pardon me, that’s a judgmental term, isn’t it? The members. To study the members.”

      “And you’re an honest woman. I heard about the paper you’re writing. Anachronistic Mimesis. Pardon me, I don’t know what that means.”

      “Should be an easy journal placement. Maybe do a popular version for Psychology Today or some other consumer sheet, then tuck it away as a chapter for my next book.” Her eyes flickered for a moment. There was a cork bulletin board covered with scraps of notepaper, news clippings and scribbled index cards, all of them held in place by push-pins of various colors. Beside the bulletin board, in a glass-fronted case, she kept four or five copies of each of her books. She caught him following her own glance. “My brag shelf.”

      “Very impressive. This paper your working on—the one about the Smart Set.”

      “Yes. Anachronistic mimesis—imitation of other eras. Did you get the full title?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “Anachronistic Mimesis and Temporal Alienation, Violent and Nonviolent Acting-Out Strategies of Readjustment. It’s about people who don’t fit in. Lots of different ways of not fitting into society, and lots of ways of compensating for that. I mean, there are plenty of standard roles available to us in our society. Businessperson, homemaker, academic, factory worker, salesman, soldier, cop, truck driver, priest, mechanic, gardener, medical worker, politician, artist. Notice how we define ourselves by our work. Not all societies do that, but ours certainly does.”

      She spun in her chair, slapped a fat leather-spined book on the shelf behind her. “Dictionary of occupational terms. Fifty thousand entries, and they keep issuing supplements. But a career isn’t an identity, is it? How about spouse, parent, child, friend, boss, rival? Sports fan, filmgoer, music-lover, barfly, pool shark, new age flake—how the hell do you spend your time? How do you define yourself? How do you relate to the world, Lindsey? That’s my field.”

      She leaned forward, poked a finger at him. She was one hell of a lecturer, Lindsey thought. Bet a nickel her classes were over-enrolled every semester.

      “Those people at the Smart Set, they can’t live in the present. So they live in the past. What is it about this year that they can’t take?

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