by Amanda Cross
“Do you ever cut any classes?”
“Never, unless of course one is dying. If one simply cannot teach, one meets the little darlings, and then tells them to run along, Papa isn’t feeling well today. Of course, since the state is paying for them, and not they or their fond parents, they scamper off overjoyed and certain they have got away with something. What you must never do is get a friend to take your classes. If the friend is seen (and we are thick with spies), it will be reported to Big Brother, and both of you will have something to answer when you come before P. and B. You look, I am pleased to say, horrified. But the fact is that while the faculty is the only thing without which you cannot have a first-rate institution, it is the last element considered here. When, several years ago, polio shots became compulsory, they were given first to the administration, then to the kitchen staff, then to building and grounds, then to the students, and finally (always hoping there would be some serum left), to the faculty. The IBM machines would have got it first, had anyone been able to discover where to administer the injection.”
On an impulse, Kate drew what she now thought of as the picture from her purse and handed it to Sparks. “Have you ever seen him?” she asked. “I thought perhaps he might have been a student here,” she glibly lied.
Sparks took the picture and studied it with care. “I never forget a face,” he said. “Not a boast, just a fact. But I never remember voices or names, which is, I am told, not insignificant. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve met this chap, but I may have passed him on the stairs, or perhaps only gone up an elevator with him once in an office building. It’s not the whole face though; the eyes are wrong. But the shape of it—well, it’s no use, but if I think whom he reminds me of I’ll let you know. Did you mislay him somehow?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I thought he might be connected with Janet Harrison, a student of mine.”
“What! The young lady stabbed on the couch? I was there when they discovered her body, you know. Was she a student of yours?”
“You were there?”
“Yes. Bauer happens to be my analyst too. Speaking of faces, hers was extraordinary. I used to come early sometimes, if the damn subway didn’t tie me up, just to look at it.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“Certainly not. As I told you, I’m not much on voices, except my own, which I like to hear going on and on. Besides, suppose that face had turned out to have a squeaky, nasal voice? I could never have enjoyed it again. Tell me, by the way, did she?”
“Have a nasal voice? No. It was a quiet voice, yet nervous. Is Bauer a good analyst?”
“Oh, yes. First-rate. Excellent at hearing what one doesn’t say, which with me, of course, is all-important.” And suddenly, as though to give Kate the opportunity to hear what he did not say, he leaned back and literally vanished behind a curtain of silence. Kate, who disliked parties, and was tired, felt depressed. Reed had been right. Detective was not a game you played at because you admired Peter Wimsey, and had a friend in a fearful jam. She had crashed a party, cornered this man, bewildered Lillian, and all to what purpose? Did it signify that he was teaching at the hour after ten on the day when the uniform was stolen? He had kept his appointment with Emanuel. Could he possibly have got up to the women’s dormitory to rob Janet Harrison’s room? It seemed unlikely. Could he have hit out at this quiet girl because he loathed himself for succumbing to an institution he did not respect? You have developed quite a talent for questions, Kate told herself, but you have not found a single answer.
Kate said Good night and Thank you to her host, who clearly did not remember who she was, waved to Lillian, and found herself a taxi. What next? Supposedly Jerry would have got something from Horan, but was he likely to have got more from him than she had from Sparks? So help me, Kate thought, if this case is ever settled, I’ll never ask another question apart from literature as long as I live!
Firm in this resolution, Kate paid off the taxi and entered the lobby of her house to find Reed asleep there on a chair. She woke him, none too gently.
“I wanted to see you,” he said. “It seems to me that if you’re trying to be a detective you ought to stay home and answer the telephone instead of drinking at parties, forcing yourself on people and asking idiotic questions.”
“I agree with you,” Kate said, leading him into the apartment.
“Let me make some coffee,” Reed said.
“Why all this solicitude? I’ll make you some coffee.”
“Sit down. I’ll put up the coffee and then I want to talk to you. Two more things have come up—one is fascinating, though I’ll be damned if I can make any sense of it, and the other is a little frightening. I’ll take the frightening one first.” Maddeningly, he vanished into the kitchen, where Kate followed him.
“What is it? I’ve been sitting down all evening. Is Emanuel in more trouble?”
“No. You are.”
“I?”
“How wonderful to be a professor of English! Anyone else would have said ‘Me?’ The police have received a letter, Kate. Anonymous, of course, and impossible to trace, but they don’t pay as little attention to these things as they would like people to think. It’s quite coherently written, and accuses you of murdering Janet Harrison.”
“Me?”
“It claims, one, that the article you published a month ago in some learned journal or other on James’s use of the American heroine was written by, and stolen from, Janet Harrison. You had not published enough, and were concerned about your career. It claims, two, that you and Emanuel were lovers, that you are still in love with him, resented his marriage to Nicola, and planned to get rid of the girl who was a threat, and to ruin Emanuel and incidentally Nicola, whom you loathe. It points out further that you have no alibi, know the Bauer home intimately, and knew the girl well enough to get her confidence and sit behind her. It makes a few other accusations, but those are the main ones. Oh, and it does mention that you robbed her room to rid the place of any notes she might have made toward the article. Now, just calm down and listen to me a minute. It doesn’t explain why you should have published the article and only got the wind up after the article had appeared. But it’s a pretty cogent case, and the police are taking it with some seriousness. They have also noted that you spend a good deal of time at the Bauer house, possibly covering your tracks, and that you went tonight to meet Frederick Sparks because he may have seen something and you wanted to find out if he had.”
“How do they know where I was tonight? Did you tell them?”
“No, my dear, I did not. They extracted that information, very cleverly, from the Bauers.”
“Is that why you wanted to go to meet him with me?”
“No. I only heard about this later. Since I’m poking my nose into something which isn’t my business, I can’t get my information hot off the griddle. Let’s have some coffee.”
Kate touched his arm. “Reed, do you believe any of this?”
But he had placed the cups, saucers, spoons, sugar, cream, and coffeepot on a tray and carried them off into the living room.
Twelve
“DO you believe it, Reed? No, don’t pour me any coffee, I couldn’t possibly swallow it.” Reed poured it, nonetheless, and placed it in front of her.
“I said my news was frightening; I didn’t say it was terrifying. And if you ask me again if I believe it, I’ll beat you. Quite apart from all other considerations, do you think I would help someone, even someone for whom I felt gratitude and affection, to cover up a murder? What is true is that I know you, and do not know Emanuel, and therefore understand a little better how you felt about wanting to help him. That’s something, isn’t it? Now, please, drink your coffee. Kate, Kate, please don’t. As I shall point out in a minute, this is really the best break you’ve had so far, in your crusade for Emanuel. You didn’t expect to fight dragons and not even scratch your finger, did you? Here, use mine. I have never understood why no woman ever has a handkerchief, except i
n her purse, which is usually in another room. And I haven’t told you my fascinating bit of news yet.”
“I’ll be all right in a minute. And you know, the girl wasn’t found, after all, anywhere near me. How Emanuel must feel—how completely betrayed by circumstances! And do you know the first thing I thought—the first horrible, sniveling, petty thought I had—What will this do to me at the university? Can they possibly want a professor who’s been accused of murder? Yet it touches me nowhere as near as it touches Emanuel. Reed, who do you think sent the letter?”
“Ah, the wheels are beginning to go round again, glory be! That’s exactly the point. You’ve frightened someone, my dear, and frightened them badly. Though we may, of course, be leaping to a conclusion in thinking that it’s you who frightened them, simply because the anonymous letter concerns you. You may simply be the only available victim, the only one who combines all the necessary qualifications to make the letter stick, even for a moment. But they—I mean, of course, he or she, but the English language is sadly lacking a genderless singular pronoun (do you remember your teacher saying ‘everyone will please carry his or her chair into the next room?’)—where was I, yes, they-he-she is afraid that some of the threads which are so neatly tangled in our hands will suddenly form themselves into a rope. Now, the question before the house at the moment is, What threads have we, and can we even disentangle them before making them into so much as a piece of string?”
“Reed, you’re being very nice. You are very nice, you know, though I may not have mentioned it before. There’s something I think I ought to tell you.”
“That sounds ominous. You are now going to confess to some incredible folly, after telling me how nice I am. What have you done?”
“Well, the fact is, I’ve hired Jerry.”
“Jerry! Kate, don’t tell me you’ve got involved with a private detective! That would muck things up properly.”
“No, Jerry is a sort of Baker Street Irregular, and he’s going to be my nephew.”
“You can’t mean you’ve hired a little boy! Really, Kate …”
“Don’t be an idiot. How could a little boy be going to be my nephew?”
“I can’t imagine. Perhaps your sister is planning to adopt him.”
“Reed, do listen. Of course he isn’t a little boy, and I haven’t got a sister. But I have got a niece, and she’s engaged to Jerry, who happens to be in between things, and could go around seeing people I couldn’t see.”
“You’re not old enough to have a niece about to be married, or are they getting engaged at fourteen these days? And if you needed someone, what’s wrong with me? Was being engaged to your niece a major qualification for the job?”
“Reed, do try to understand. You have a job, just as I do, and can’t go moseying around all day, even if you would, which, given your job, you couldn’t. Anyway, you wouldn’t take orders from me; you would just sit around and argue.”
“I should hope so. Kate, you aren’t fit to be let out alone.”
“I’m beginning to believe you. Nevertheless, if you can manage to keep quiet for the length of time it takes you to drink another cup of coffee, I’ll tell you where Jerry and I have got so far. That is, I’ll tell you what I know; Jerry doesn’t report on today’s activities till tomorrow morning. Then we can see where we are, and you can tell me your fascinating bit.” And, beginning with a description of Jerry, she told him about the porter’s uniform, which reminded her of her conversation with Jackie Miller, so she told him that too, and about her investigations among the university records, and about Sparks, and Jerry’s plans for meeting Horan and the nurse.
Reed took it, all things considered, rather well. He mulled the facts—if they were facts, he assiduously pointed out—over in his mind. “You realize,” he said, “that the unspeakable Jackie Miller may hold the key to the whole business, always supposing that someone did see Janet Harrison with a man, and that the man is somehow connected with this case, though that’s an awfully large number of supposes. Meanwhile, let me add my information to yours. And don’t get all excited when you hear it. It sounds marvelous, but the more you think of it, the less sense it makes. In fact, the more I think about this whole affair, the more disjointed it seems. And, my dear young woman, we will certainly have to discuss this whole Jerry business. How you could for a moment have considered hiring—I suppose that means you are paying him to get himself in trouble, and go about muddying the waters—how you could have considered …”
“What’s your fascinating fact, Reed? Let’s hear it, and consider it, and then, when we’ve discovered the whole thing is nonsense, we can argue over Jerry at breakfast—I’m assuming it will be breakfast time by then.”
“Very well. I told you about Daniel Messenger.”
“I know. He’s doing something with Jewish genes.”
“Kate, that settles it. I am going. You are going to have a good night’s sleep, and sometime tomorrow when you are rested …”
“Sorry. You told me about Daniel Messenger, and …”
“I told you, though you were, as I remember, not prepared to accept the statement, that Dr. Messenger looked nothing like our man of the picture. We had sent a young detective out to interview the good doctor, and it seemed we had wasted the detective’s time and the citizens’ money. Messenger had never heard of Janet Harrison, had never heard of Emanuel Bauer, had no particular opinions about psychiatry, and had certainly not left Chicago within weeks of the murder. Moreover, he couldn’t begin to guess why Janet Harrison should have left him her money, but he suggested that perhaps another Daniel Messenger was meant. This was, of course, nonsense. She had delineated him clearly enough—knew, for example, where and when he had his residency, what sort of work he was doing, and so on. The lawyer had advised her to include the man’s address, age, etcetera, which she had done. No doubt in the world that he was the man.
“As you can see, Kate, a pretty problem, though typical of this whole infuriating case—and the young detective was about to call it a day when he thought of something so obvious that he will probably turn out to be a genius and go far in the world—all ideas of genius appearing obvious after the genius has thought of them. Naturally, the detective had a copy of the picture found in Janet Harrison’s purse, to be certain that Daniel Messenger did not, by any possible stretch of the imagination, resemble it. And just before he parted from the doctor, on an impulse, though no one had thought to suggest it to him, he showed Messenger the picture. He showed it to him quite casually, apparently, and not expecting anything to come of it. ‘You don’t happen to know this man, I suppose,’ he said, or something of the sort.
“It seems that Messenger stared at the picture for quite a while, so that the detective thought he had gone off into a trance—you know how long seconds can be when you’re waiting for a reply—and then Messenger looked at the detective and said ‘That’s Mike.’ ”
“Mike?” Kate asked.
“Just what the detective said: ‘Mike? Mike who?’ And what do you think the doctor said?”
“Oh, goody, guessing games. I just love guessing games. How many guesses may I have, Daddy? What did he say, in heaven’s name?”
“ ‘Mike who?’ he said, ‘Mike Barrister; we shared a room once, donkey’s years ago.’ ”
“Mike Barrister!” Kate said. “Dr. Michael Barrister. Reed! There’s the connection we’ve been waiting for. I knew sooner or later some of our stray facts had to fit together. Janet leaves her money to Messenger, Messenger used to know Michael Barrister, and Michael Barrister has the office across from Emanuel. Reed, it’s beautiful.”
“I know it’s beautiful. For one blinding, flashing, allover moment, it’s beautiful. But after the ringing in your ears stops, and you start to think about it a little, it’s still beautiful all right, but it doesn’t mean a goddam thing.”
“Nonsense, she was murdered for her money.”
“Even supposing it was enough money to murder someone for—which
I don’t for a single second grant—who murdered her? Messenger didn’t; he didn’t leave Chicago. And even if we’re prepared to fall back on the hired murderer, which you admit is ridiculous, the result of every investigation in the world proves Messenger is the last person in the world to have done such a thing. He didn’t frantically need money, we know that much, with the cooperation of his bank. His wife works as a secretary, and while they aren’t rich, they aren’t desperate. Far from it, apparently, because they’ve been quietly saving for the college education of their daughters. They haven’t extravagant tastes—their idea of a marvelous vacation is to go camping in the northern reaches of Michigan. They aren’t in debt, unless you call a mortgage on their house a debt; in which case you’ve got several million future murderers in the United States.
“I know, Kate, your mind is moving toward your favorite candidate, Dr. Michael Barrister. We even know he was once sued for malpractice, though I’ve since learned that the great majority of such suits are quite unjustified, and that every doctor is as likely as not to tangle with some lunatic who resents the fact that he hasn’t been given a miracle cure, or who’s heard somewhere that this treatment should have been preferred to that. But even if the suit was justified, being sued for malpractice doesn’t make you a murderer. And if it did, why should Barrister murder a girl he had never met in order to leave a not very large sum of money to a man he hasn’t seen in donkey’s years?”
“Maybe Barrister just wanted to get Emanuel into trouble; maybe for some crazy reason he hates Emanuel.”
“Maybe he does, though it’s hard to imagine why. All we know is that Emanuel didn’t particularly take to him. But then what has Messenger got to do with it? Why does the fact we are so excited about—that Messenger and Barrister once knew each other—have any bearing on Barrister’s feeling for Emanuel? Emanuel and Messenger don’t know each other, nor, except for a fortuitous sharing of the same address, do Barrister and Emanuel. It’s a lovely fact, Kate, but it gets us nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.”