by FRANCES
Grant, reading this—it was a little like reading one’s own obituary notice—was mildly surprised. He had never thought of himself as particularly withdrawn and no man who lectures several times a week can reasonably be called “quiet.” It was true that he had not run up and down Dyckman corridors shouting, and waving a knife, if that was what was meant.
The account did, as he read it carefully, somewhat intensify his feeling of unreality, and with that intensification came, curiously, a kind of detachment. He found himself mildly hoping that this fugitive, who had the same name as himself but no other resemblance to himself, would get away.
In the World-Telegram, police “scoffed” at the suggestion that there was any “red angle” in the case. In the World-Telegram the police had “by no means abandoned” the theory that the “pretty co-ed” was a victim of juvenile gang violence, although her sister scoffed at the suggestion that Jeanette could have had any connection with a “gang.”
People scoffed a good deal in the World-Telegram and Sun, Reginald Grant thought, reading about this unlucky victim of circumstances who bore his name and was now the subject of a “man-hunt” along, apparently, the whole of the Eastern seaboard.
Miss Peggy Larkin, in the World-Telegram, declined to add to her earlier statement that her sister and Mr. Grant had been friendly and had had “dates.” In the journal-American, Miss Peggy Larkin was unavailable to reporters and said to be in a state of shock and under the care of a physician.
The Journal-American had editorial comment, which Reg almost missed. It was somewhat indirect. The first paragraphs read:
“The presence in the United States of an English lecturer who purportedly has Communistic connections raises again the question of our national vigilance. Was his association with atheistic Communism known to the officials who granted him a visa to come to these shores? If it was known, why was the visa granted?
“These and other questions are obviously raised. It is to be hoped that they can be satisfactorily answered. The American people are in no mood to tolerate—”
A little cousin certainly seemed to go a long way, Reg thought, and put the newspaper down. To be, by implication, called a murderer was certainly bad enough. But to become an infilterer—Come now, Reg thought. Why, dash it all! I’ve voted Conservative since I was old enough to vote. And my father was a canon. And poor old Ben was, by wide agreement, the family crackpot. Come now!
But with it all read and the newspapers laid aside, the attitude of detachment was laid aside too—it and the slight tickle of amusement which came when he read so many American newspapers; it and the indignation at being made, so unfairly, a new cause for viewing with alarm.
He could not detach himself from this room, or from memories of a limp girl whose blood had stained his hands. Nor could he, much longer, sit inertly here, merely waiting for others’ actions. He had not killed the girl; therefore, someone else had killed her. The police would not find that someone else while they looked only for him.
That was the altruistic side of it. There was also, immediately, the question of saving his own hide. Whatever the square man and the dark man, and others if there were others, were up to it was not to his good.
He went back to the window. He could get through it easily enough if he could get it open. He looked down through it. Quite a drop to the ground below. Still, if he hung by his hands from the sill he just might make it without too much damage. The trouble was, there seemed to be little chance to get the window open.
Break the glass in the lower sash? Pick the splinters out carefully—there would be no point in adding lacerations to the contusions which would more or less inevitably result from the drop. (At the least; a broken leg was a nasty possibility.)
It might be safer to try it now, while there was still light. He could, at least, see what he was dropping on. Rain-softened earth would be one thing; rocks, or pavement would be quite another. He could not, standing as tall as he could stand, looking down as sharply, see what lay directly below the window. Grass grew up to the line at which his vision stopped; a concrete path might hug the house.
But—if he waited for darkness, he might make an escape undetected. They might sleep, and sleep soundly. If he dropped now, he might come falling down past a window directly below this window, and they might be sitting at it, waiting contentedly to take pot shots.
There was no enticing prospect. He might as well toss a coin. Mentally, he tossed one. Wait for darkness. That was the way it came up. Wrap padding of some sort around one of his shoes to deaden sound. Hope that falling glass would hit only the softness of earth.
He sat down on the couch and waited for light to fail. Gradually, darkness seeped into the room. After a time, he got up and turned the light on. They would expect that.
It was a little after eight when he heard them walking in the corridor outside. Two of them again; presumably bringing him food. If it weren’t for that damn gun. Even with the gun—No, he’d wait and see. No use, at this stage, of going up against a gun. Too bad the door opened outward. One can hide behind an inward-opening door and jump those who enter. At least, one can in the flicks. Odd to find that ancient, non-U word jumping into his mind. Melodrama appeared to deteriorate the vocabulary.
They came in, in order as before, square man with tray and dark man with gun. The square man put the tray down on the table and pulled off the napkin. Involuntarily, Reginald Grant leaned down over the low table to see what, this time, he had to eat.
He did not really see. It was some time, indeed, before he again saw anything.
IV
What chiefly surprised Detective (1st Grade) Nathan Shapiro was that they had not taken him off the case entirely. He would not have been greatly surprised if, in view of so monumental a boner, they had put him back in uniform and, quite possibly, in the outer fringes of Staten Island. He had returned, after his day off, and switch in duty tour to daylight hours, expecting the worst, which was what he usually expected. The captain had merely said that it appeared they—not “you”—had slipped up on this one and told him Tim O’Hara would be working with him and to find out what he could about the relationship between Grant and the girl.
The actual search for a poet on the run was routine, a matter for plain-clothes men and uniformed patrolmen; a matter for everybody with eyes and the words of a description in mind. Eyes were being kept on railroad and airplane terminals, on the gates of ferry slips; memories were being searched at bridge and tunnel and highway toll booths. Since it did not appear—had not appeared during Wednesday’s checkout, while Shapiro was at home in Brooklyn (except when he was walking his dog)—that Reginald Grant had a car of his own in New York, car-rental offices were visited. It was not apparent that Grant flew airplanes, but it was not apparent that he did not. Hence, plane-rental fields were visited. Everything for which modus operandi was established proceeded according to m.o.
“See what you can get from the sister,” Shapiro told O’Hara, sadly, on Thursday morning, some thirty-six hours after Jeanette Larkin had died on the floor of a taxicab. He himself went on to the Washington Square Branch of Dyckman University, and went brooding, as was his custom.
His had been, obviously, the boner of all time. No cop in his right mind would have let Grant go, let alone have speeded him on his way in a police car. A man brings a dead girl to a station house and says he never saw her before and a detective of some years’ service—from which, obviously, he has learned nothing—says, “Thank you very much, and would you like transportation to wherever you’re going?” Back in uniform, hell. Back in civilian clothes, with no shield and no gun would have been more like it. I, Nathan Shapiro thought, amount to a menace to law and order.
There was no point in telling himself that everything in Grant’s face and manner had been conducive to belief. There was no point in telling himself that it was preposterous that a man who has killed a girl would go to such complicated lengths to involve himself in the killing; that a
nybody in his right mind would, having killed, have left his victim where she fell and got himself out of it, not her into a cab he planned to use.
He had, Shapiro supposed, walking across Washington Square toward a building which looked more like a factory than a college, been provincial in his thinking. What Grant apparently had done would have been preposterous if Grant had been an American. By and large, murder in the United States is reasonably uncomplicated. He should certainly have remembered that Grant came from England where, if one is to believe what one reads, killing is seldom straightforward. English killers, again if one is to believe what one reads, are constantly putting bodies into trunks, usually after cutting them into small pieces, and shipping them off in luggage vans. No English killer worth his salt murders save in a room securely locked from inside. What Grant had done probably seemed, to him, entirely logical, even in the grand tradition.
Taken in by innocence of face and manner, that was what Nathan Shapiro had been, Nathan Shapiro thought, entering the building which might have housed factory machinery instead of academic aspiration. How like him. And—face it, Shapiro—by something else. Shapiro sighed.
He did not noise it about, but Nathan Shapiro was addicted to poetry. Such addiction is not, obviously, anything one talks about. He read poetry and admired poets. He had read the poems of Reginald Grant and had admired them. This had rendered him, obviously, incapable of recognizing that a poet—and even a good poet—may also be a killer. The name of François Villon occurred to Shapiro as, in the registrar’s office, he identified himself and said he was there in connection with Mr. Reginald Grant.
“One moment, please,” the girl said and consulted files. “Mr. Grant does not lecture on Thursdays,” she reported, after consultation. “I can give you his address, if that will help.”
Shapiro had supposed that the Downtown Branch of Dyckman University would be more or less seething over the Larkin case. It apparently was not, at least at this level.
Shapiro said he doubted that Mr. Grant would be at home. He said that what, to begin with, he really wanted was to talk to a few people—other faculty members, say—who knew Mr. Grant.
“Mr. Grant,” the girl said, “is not a member of the faculty. A special lecturer only.”
Nathan Shapiro resisted the impulse to say, in response to tone as much as to words, that that was indeed a pity. He checked back to his Own memories of college—C.C.N.Y. night classes—and wondered if he might, perhaps, see the dean of faculty.
“Professor Little,” the girl said. “I really don’t know, Mr. Shapiro. So many things to attend to, you know. Under pressure always.”
“Ask him, won’t you?”
She pursed her lips, which were not—Shapiro thought—really made for pursing. She said, “Well—”
“Please.”
“I don’t know,” she said. But she used the telephone.
Professor Robert Little had an office on the sixth floor. It was one of several offices partitioned off in a large room. Professor Little was a small, roundish man, wearing a brisk halo of white hair. He did not, to Shapiro, seem to be under any very extreme pressure. He looked at a pad on his desk, which was remarkably uncluttered. He said, “Ah. Detective Shapiro,” with the air of one who has put a triumphant finger on an elusive fact.
“Yes.”
“About poor Grant,” Professor Little said. “A sad business, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“However,” Professor Little said, “he was not in fact a member of the faculty. We must remember that. Eh?”
“I understand that,” Shapiro said. “What I wondered—”
“And so,” Professor Little said, “it isn’t actually the way it appears to be, is it? For a faculty member to—shall we say seduce?—seduce a female undergraduate would be most, er—shall we say improper?—improper. Eh?”
“Sure,” Shapiro said. “What we’re trying to do—”
“Shocking, in fact,” Professor Little said.
“Shocking. In cases like this, Professor, we try to get lines on the—on people involved. Talk to people who knew them, when they aren’t available themselves. As Mr. Grant isn’t at the moment.”
“On the lam,” Professor Little said. “To employ the—shall we say vernacular?—vernacular. Hadn’t been here long, you know. And not a member of the faculty. Also, he wasn’t married, was he?”
Shapiro said, “Apparently not,” and waited elucidation.
“A married lot, we are,” Little said. “For the most part. Search for security, eh? Part of the way of life, wouldn’t you say? Draw us together, the wives. A homogeneity, shall we say?”
Shapiro said, “By all means.” He felt he could allow himself that. He gathered, then, that Professor Little could suggest no one who might know Reginald Grant well, be able to give some hint as to what kind of man he was? Professor Little made a steeple with his fingers and looked over it.
“Conceivably,” he said, “some of the younger men in the English Department. Instructors, shall we say? Assistant professors, possibly? Why not ask Busley?”
For one reason, because he had never heard of Busley. Shapiro contented himself with repeating the name. Little said, “Goodness. Head of the English Department, man.”
Professor Busley had an office two compartments down. He was in it. He did not seem under special pressure. He said that Reginald Grant was, indeed, a poet of distinction and a critic of the first order. He said that he himself was of course an old fuddy-duddy and that he doubted Shapiro would find anybody to disagree with that. He said that his field was Shakespeare, which would give Shapiro an idea. He said that it was hard to teach old dogs new tricks, and that in the field of poetry he was an old dog. Shapiro would find nobody who would disagree with that. Nevertheless—
Grant had been suggested for the fall’s Bingham Lectures the year before. Busley couldn’t recall by whom. The memory falters as the years advance. Somebody not of the faculty? An alumnus? Who could remember? There would, perhaps, be records. Negotiations with Grant had been conducted by mail; his acceptance secured during the previous winter. He had introduced Grant at the first lecture and had listened to it. Very stimulating, even for an older dog. The audience had responded—a varied audience, including some very well known people. Conceivably of the avant-garde—“advance guard?”—but there you were. Fashions changed in all things, as Shapiro had probably noticed.
The classes of undergraduates to which Grant lectured had been in the nature of an afterthought—Grant’s own, as Busley remembered it, prompted by Grant’s curiosity about American youth.
“Which he seems to have carried rather far,” Busley added, somewhat to Shapiro’s surprise. “Wouldn’t have thought it of him, I’ll admit. Seemed a responsible enough man, considering his age and, er, profession.” If one were to call writing poetry, and talking about poetry, a profession.
Anybody known to Busley who knew Grant well? Now let us see, let us think. Parkins? He thought he had seen Parkins having a drink with Grant at the Faculty Club. Or was it Reynolds? Memory not what it was. “And we expand. We expand indeed. Like the universe.”
Busley was a spare gray man in his early sixties. Having mentioned the universe, he paused.
“On a lesser scale,” he said. “Probably Parkins. Around Grant’s age. Rather a gay dog, I shouldn’t wonder. He—” Busley paused again. “English 15A,” he said. “Nine-o’clock class. Room 76. Go right in, if you like. Reynolds is working nights just now.”
Shapiro thanked him and stood up to go in search of Parkins. (“Dr.” Parkins? “Professor” Parkins?)
“Pity Pepperill’s gone sick,” Professor Busley said. “Might be your man.”
Shapiro waited.
“Might have known him at home,” Busley said. “That is, in England. Gap in ages, of course. And Herbert Pepperill does—how do they say it?—keep himself to himself to a rather remarkable degree. Still—both Britishers. Only, Pepperill’s not around, so that’
s that, isn’t it?”
It seemed to be.
“Unless he’s showed up this week,” Busley said. “Little’ll know, of course. But Pepperill’s been gone all of this semester, so far. Picked up a virus somewhere and got shipped off to the Caribbean. Pleasant sort of virus to pick up, wouldn’t you say? So he wouldn’t know anything about Grant’s—er—behavior here, would he? No, Parkins is your man. Unless, to be sure, it’s Reynolds.”
The door to Room 76 was closed. Shapiro opened it gently and looked at the backs of some thirty boys and girls—no, young men and young women—and at the front of a black-haired youngish man who was sitting on the edge of a table, facing his class.
“—only certain things you can be taught,” the black-haired man said, and looked at Shapiro and did not interrupt himself. “I realize I have said that many times before during this semester, and shall no doubt say it many times again. Little more, really, than you should all have learned in high school, and that some of you did learn. To use the tool your language is with reasonable precision, based on some knowledge of the tool’s shape, the tool’s structure. If any one of you aspires to use it for more than that, I cannot teach you how to.” He looked at the watch on his wrist. “Which,” he said, “is the last of today’s clichés. They will continue at the same time day after tomorrow. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.”
Shapiro stepped aside to permit the departure of the ladies and gentlemen, who were, with one or two exceptions, in their teens; who had a tendency, as they departed, to pair, a little as the animals must have paired on leaving, as on boarding, the Ark. Several went forward, instead of toward the door, with, it was apparent, things to say to the black-haired Parkins. Shapiro waited until they had finished. Then he, too, went forward.
“Casually,” Parkins said, on being asked. “Seemed like a good egg. Damned good poet. In a jam, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so,” Shapiro said. “Dr. Parkins, did you think—or know, for that matter—that he was specially addicted to—that is—”