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Show Acting Alone Page 3?9 and panache. If he'd been robbed of his moment of alien titillation, at least both his professional feet had been planted in terra firma. He had come here simply to gather some extra material for the dossier: incriminating sexual or pharmaceutical revelations; libelous statements active or passive; potential postage for familial blackmail (figuratively speaking) - the usual stuff that would with moderate prejudice help "dis-obligate" Nimrod, Jr.'s media-figure from the youngster's contract. The Elder had his eye peeled for just such things as that blasphemous, scurrilous graffiti on the bulletin board in the young people's marijuana-smoke-filled communal office, the Christ-baiting limerick that someone (he had a sneaking intuition who) had carved up there. After making several ostensibly discreet inquiries among the graduate teaching assistants and temporary instructors as to the identity of the vandal or, rather, author, the Elder had made a mental note to get the Kansas Bureau of Investigation - or KBI-like poseurs, to be more precise - to photograph that little poem and, also, incidentally, to make a big fanfare as of a full investigation: call the head of the department in the middle of a weeknight requesting access to the building; tote in an unnecessary tonnage of klieg lights and strobes, etc., leaving some of the equipment behind as by accident to pique people's curiosity; involve that particularly impressionable-looking amphetamine addict in the investigative process, so word would get out among the younger departmental people as well. The idea was to get the Edwine boy expelled from school, fir.ed from the faculty as a criminal or communist or terrorist of some debased description. One assumed that the professors would jump at the chance to expel from their ranks a publicly acknowledged specimen |