by Amanda Cross
But the chief factor in removing the Bauers from the center of attention and the glare of publicity was a horrible crime in Chelsea: some madman had enticed away, raped and murdered a four-year-old girl. The police and newspapers, for the time being at least, switched their main forces elsewhere. (The madman was captured, quite easily, a week later, which brought some comfort to Kate. Madmen, she reasoned, were usually caught. Therefore Janet Harrison could not have been killed by a madman. She found this magnificent piece of illogic quite consoling.)
At ten o’clock on Monday morning Kate lectured on Middlemarch. Did anything, after all, matter beside the fact that imagination might create worlds like Middlemarch, that one might learn to perceive these worlds and the structures that sustained them? Looking through the novel the night before, Kate had come upon a sentence which seemed oddly applicable: “Strange that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.” Really, the sentence had nothing to do with the present case: a murder was not an infatuation. Yet, after the lecture, Kate realized that while she had discussed Middlemarch, she had been incapable of thinking of anything else. The persistent self lived, she thought, in that work where one’s attention was wholly caught. Emanuel, listening behind the couch, knew perhaps the same thing. It occurred to Kate that few people possessed “persistent selves,” and that Emanuel, as one of them, had to be saved.
She therefore turned her steps, after the lecture, to the Graduate Women’s Dormitory, where Janet Harrison had lived. Not many of the students, as Kate had told Detective Stern, lived on the campus, but the university maintained a dormitory for women who wanted to live, or whose parents insisted that they live, under more proper and controlled circumstances. The dormitory was a benefit also to students who did not want to be burdened with any domestic concerns, and it seemed likely that Janet Harrison had chosen to live there for that reason.
Kate had worked out an extremely complicated plan of attack upon the dormitory, which involved a certain amount of strolling around corridors, conferences with porters and maids, perhaps the exchange of muted confidences with the woman in charge of the dormitory; but the need for all this was obviated by Kate’s colliding, on the doorstep, with Miss Lindsay. Last year Miss Lindsay had been a student of Kate’s in a course in advanced writing which Kate had taken over for a professor on leave and abandoned upon his return with greater relief than she had ever felt before. The course, nonetheless, had had its moments, and Miss Lindasy, whose main subjects were Latin and Greek, had provided most of them. Kate still cherished, in fact, a Latin translation of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” beginning Mica, mica, parva Stella, Micor quae nam sis, tam bella, with which Miss Lindsay had presented her on some now quite forgotten occasion. Kate’s own Latin, despite a fascinated reading, some years ago, of Virgil’s Aeneid, was still of the hic, haec, hoc variety.
Miss Lindsay was that rare student who can talk informally with a professor without ever crossing the line into familiarity. She followed Kate now, willingly enough, into the lounge, abandoning her destination without a pang. Kate, who needed her, did not argue very strenuously. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that in the solution of a murder Kant’s categorical imperative had continually to be ignored. Kate asked Miss Lindsay if she had known Janet Harrison.
“Slightly,” Miss Lindsay said. If she was surprised at the question she did not show it. “We have, of course, been talking of nothing else for days. As a matter of fact, the only time I spoke to her, we spoke of you. You are the only teacher who seemed to arouse her out of her usual academic lassitude. Something to do with moral obligations struck her particularly, as I remember.”
“Doesn’t she seem to you an odd sort of person to have been murdered? Not, of course, that one exactly expects anyone to be murdered, but she seemed so, I think ‘uninvolved’ is the word I want, so unlikely, despite her beauty, to inspire passion.”
“I don’t agree. In the town I came from there was a girl like that, distant, you know, and rather above it all; but it came out finally that she had been living, ever since she was fifteen, with a grocer whom everyone thought to be happily married. Not so much still waters, but calm waters with a lethal current underneath. Of course, I could be quite wrong about Janet Harrison. The person you want to talk to is Jackie Miller. She has a room near Janet’s. Jackie is the sort who talks all the time and never seems to listen, yet she punctuates the flow with pointed questions one somehow can’t avoid answering. She knows more about everyone than anybody else. Perhaps you know the type?” Kate merely groaned. She knew the type all too well. “Why not come up and see her now? She’s probably just getting up, and if you can once start her talking, she’ll tell you everything anyone could know. I believe,” Miss Lindsay added, leading the way upstairs, “that it was she who told the detective that Janet had always carried a notebook. No one else had noticed.”
Jackie responded to their knock by flinging open the door and waving them gleefully into the messiest room Kate had seen since her college days. Jackie, dressed in a sleeping outfit of very short pants and a lacy, sleeveless top that seemed quite wasted in a woman’s dormitory, was making herself a cup of instant coffee with water from the tap. She offered them some; Miss Lindsay refused with commendable firmness, but Kate meekly accepted hers in the hope that this would lead them sooner to the point. She might, however, have saved herself from the agony of drinking the concoction.
“So you’re Professor Fansler,” Jackie began. She was clearly the sort who a hundred years ago would have tossed aside her parasol and said, “So you’re President Lincoln.”
“I keep hearing about you from all the students, but I just can’t seem to work one of your courses into my schedule. All my credits from Boston University were in literature—I just love reading novels—so I have to spend all my time here taking courses in other ghastly things. But I must fit in one of your courses because they all say you’re one of the few professors who manage to be entertaining and profound; and let’s admit it, most women professors are dreadfully dull old maids.” It did not apparently occur to Jackie that there was anything infelicitous about this statement. Kate fought down the outrage which such a generalization always aroused in her.
“Janet Harrison was a student of mine,” she said, without too much finesse. But finesse would undoubtedly be wasted on Jackie.
“Yes, I know. She mentioned it once at lunch, and usually you know she never so much as uttered—the strong silent type, not at all attractive, I think, in a woman. Anyway, this day at lunch (you must have had your mouth full, Kate thought maliciously) she said that you said that Henry James had said that morality depended—the morality of one’s actions, that is—depended, or should depend, on the moral quality of the person who was going to do the action and not on the moral quality of the person one was doing the action to. Of course,” Jackie added, with the first sign of insight Kate had seen in her, “she put it better. But the point was, she didn’t agree. She thought if someone was morally bad, you should do something about it because of their morality, not because of yours.” Kate, gallantly allowing herself and Henry James to be so traduced, wondered if Janet Harrison had indeed said something of the sort. Could she have gotten wind of a drug ring?
“Of course,” Jackie continued, “she was frigid, poor thing, and completely unable to relate to people. I told her so and she practically admitted it. I guessed, of course, that she was being analyzed. She used to leave here promptly every morning at the same time, and I found out she wasn’t going to a class, and a very good thing for her. If you want to know, I think the analyst stabbed her out of sheer frustration. She probably lay there hour after hour not opening her mouth. Have you been analyzed?”
It was nearly a quarter of a century since Kate had felt the impulse to stick out her tongue at someone. “Were any other rooms robbed except hers?” she asked.
“No, it was really very peculiar. I told her she had probably aroused some sort of fetishism in some poor frustrated man. If you ask me, he took the camera as a cover, but he was really looking for something personal; but there really wasn’t anything in her room worth looking for”—Jackie slid rather hastily over the unfortunate implications of this remark—“and, of course, she dressed like the matron of a girls’ school. I used to tell her she was really very good-looking, if she would only cut her hair instead of just wearing it pulled back, and you know—showed herself off a little. I was fascinated by that picture the detective was showing around here, apparently of someone connected with Janet. Perhaps she did go out to meet a man, after all, though it seems unlikely. If so, she certainly kept him well hidden.”
“Did she go out often?”
“Well, not often, but fairly regularly. She went out to dinner, or she would just disappear, and obviously she wasn’t going to the library. I think someone saw her with a man once.”
“Who?” Kate asked. “Was it someone who saw the picture?”
“The detective asked me that,” Jackie said in her maddening way, “and, you know, I can’t remember. It was someone I was talking to by the fountain, because I remember that someone had put soap in the fountain, and this girl and I were commenting on that; but I can’t remember how the question came up—something like my saying one doesn’t expect to find soap in a fountain, and she said, speaking of the unexpected, etcetera. But, you know, I just can’t remember who it was. Perhaps I dreamed it all. Of course, she—Janet, I mean—was an only child, and I always think that the reciprocal rivalry of the sibling relationship does a great deal to develop the personality, don’t you?”
It was likely that she did not expect an answer, but Kate rose to her feet, with a frank look at her watch. Even for the solution of a murder, there was a point beyond which she would not go. Miss Lindsay joined her in a movement toward the door. “You will let me know, won’t you,” Kate said, striving for a casual tone, “if you remember who the person was who saw Janet and the man?”
“Why are you so interested?” Jackie asked.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Kate flung back, and, closing the door, sped down the corridor with Miss Lindsay.
“It’s a pity no one murdered her,” said Miss Lindsay, echoing Kate’s thoughts. “I think even the police would gladly leave it as one of the unsolved cases.”
With an intense feeling of frustration, Kate made her way to the office of university records. Here, with a certain amount of what Jerry would probably have called “throwing her weight around,” she managed to obtain Janet Harrison’s records. For the first and undoubtedly the last time in her life, Kate was grateful to the modern mania for forms. She began with Janet’s record at the university; her marks had been B minuses, with an occasional B. To Kate’s professional eye, this indicated that her instructors had found her clearly capable of A work, but performing, probably, on the C level. There was a strong tendency among professors, including herself, to save C’s for the strictly C students, of whom, God knows, there were enough.
Janet Harrison’s college credits were all in order; she had majored in history, with a minor in economics. Then why had she chosen to come to graduate school to study English literature? Well, the fields were not, of course, precisely unrelated. She had apparently applied for, and received, several college loans, and she had also applied for a fellowship. For the details of this application one had to consult the fellowship office.
Cursing, Kate went to consult the fellowship office. Janet had probably gotten the fellowship, but it would be interesting to know. Her marks in college had been almost all A’s, though the college, supposedly near her home (Kate was somewhat shaky on the geography of the Midwest) had been too undistinguished to have Phi Beta Kappa. Yet why had a girl who had got A’s in her college, however small, fallen to the B-minus level in graduate school? It was almost always the other way around. Probably she had had something else on her mind. In fact, everyone seemed impressed with the fact—now that Kate thought of it—that Janet Harrison had had something on her mind. But what? What?
The fellowship forms were even more demanding than the university forms has been. Where, the fellowship forms wanted to know, had she spent every year of her life? (Leave no gaps! the form stated sternly.) After college, Janet Harrison had gone to the nursing school at the University of Michigan. Nursing school! Now that was certainly odd. History, Nursing school, English literature. Well, young American females did have a way, if they were not early married, of searching about for possible professions, but surely this search was a trifle wide in scope. Perhaps her parents had been of the old-fashioned sort who might send a girl to college, but insisted that she be trained to earn a living. To such people, Kate knew, there were only three ways a girl could be trained to earn a living: by becoming a secretary, a nurse, or a schoolteacher.
But Janet Harrison had not persisted with her nursing. Her father had died a year after she began training, and she had gone home to live with her mother. It was apparently at her mother’s death that the girl had come to New York to study English literature. But why come to New York? The damned form raised more questions than it answered. According to the financial statement appended, Janet had been left, on the death of her mother, with some income, but not enough to pay the large fees of the university, unless she also took a job, and the university preferred to lend students money rather than have them try to carry jobs and graduate work at the same time. She had, Kate noticed, got the fellowship, which was not very large.
Kate walked back to the office with questions whirling in her mind. Had Janet Harrison left a will, and if so—or if not—who got her money? Was it possibly worth murdering her for? Reed would have to find that out. Perhaps the police, whom Kate had a regrettable habit of forgetting, had already looked into this. It seemed obvious enough. Why had Janet Harrison come to New York? The University of Michigan had a perfectly good graduate school. Well, perhaps she had wanted to get away from home, but did it have to be so far from home? Why had she chosen so varied a program of study? Why, if it came to that, had she never married? Jackie Miller, blast her loquacious imbecility, might think Janet frigid, or “unable to relate to people” (the girl had, of course, used that very phrase to Emanuel); but she was certainly beautiful and had had, so Emanuel thought, a love affair.
At her office Kate found waiting students and, feeling rather like a trapeze artist, plunged once again into academia.
Exhausted, she reached home later in the afternoon to find Jerry camping on the doorstep. He had the gleam in his eye of the prospector who has found gold. She consoled him for his wait with a beer.
“I have been on the job,” he said. “I couldn’t reach you this morning, after handing in my temporary resignation, and since I assumed my pay started today, I honorably determined to get to work. You had not, however, left any directions, so I decided to mosey around on my own. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I went over to that dormitory where Janet Harrison had lived.”
“Really,” Kate said. “I was there myself. Did you meet Jackie Miller too?”
“I was not concerning myself with females; that, obviously, is your department. I went down to the basement and talked to the porter. Naturally, I didn’t ask him a lot of questions about Janet Harrison; that is not, in my opinion, the way to elicit information. I was just a nice eager boy who wanted to know how I could get a porter’s job at the university, where I wanted to work, because then I wouldn’t have to pay for the courses I wanted to take. Employees don’t, you know. We mentioned that the Tigers had a good chance for the pennant, we talked about how much money everything costs, and thus, gradually, did I come into possession of the fact that will save Emanuel, if I may call him that.”
“For God’s sake, stop being dramatic and get to the point.”
“The point, my dear Kate, is that the porter’s uniform was stolen on the morning that Ja
net Harrison’s room was robbed. The porter was very exercised about the whole thing, because the university is being stubborn about buying him another one; you know the sort of uniform they wear—blue shirt and trousers, with ‘Building and Grounds’ stitched on the pocket. All right, all right, don’t get hysterical. Obviously, you see, a man stole that uniform to get into Janet Harrison’s room. A man can’t usually go wandering around female dormitories, as I know to my cost, but no one ever notices a porter; he’s obviously on his way to fix something, and no one gives him a second glance.
“Now, the beautiful part of all this is that the porter came on duty at noon, when he noticed the uniform had been stolen, and the room wasn’t robbed before ten-thirty, because the maid went in then to straighten up. Therefore the uniform was stolen and the room robbed when Emanuel had a beautiful alibi: he was with a patient, and the patient, ladies and gentlemen, was Janet Harrison, who therefore could not have been in the room either. Therefore the room was not robbed by Emanuel, and since I don’t see why we shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that whoever robbed the room murdered the girl, it wasn’t Emanuel.”
“He could have hired someone, the police will say.”
“But we know he didn’t, and we will prove it. Furthermore, I couldn’t check on any of the others, but I went around to Emanuel’s house for another buddy-buddy chat with the employees—the Tigers really have a good chance of winning the pennant this year—and discovered that the elevator man is off on Friday. Dr. Michael Barrister does not hold office hours on Friday, and if you will give me the names of the ten o’clock and twelve o’clock patients, we will discover shortly what they do on Fridays. I’ll bet you my salary, double or nothing, that whoever robbed that room murdered the girl. And I don’t think whoever it was relegated the task to anyone. My reasons for thinking that are that it would be too damn inconvenient if he, or she, had. Speaking of shes, Mrs. Bauer—may I call her Nicola?—was probably at her analytic hour with an alibi. But of course it was a man who stole the uniform, so that doesn’t get us very much further.”