A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  The banging on the door could be incorporated into Kate’s dream for less than a minute. She awoke to find Butler, looking frantic but controlled, letting himself in the office door.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked.

  “An hour, you said. It’s nearer two.”

  Kate looked unbelievingly at her watch. “I must have fallen asleep; that’s very unlike me; I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t say. I thought they’d gone and killed you in the chair instead of throwing you out the window. Then who would we have found to play detective?”

  “I am sorry,” Kate said. “Nothing happened at all. I seemed to be looking for a button, and then I fell asleep.”

  “A button, was it?” Butler said. “At least it wasn’t the wee folk. I think you ought to go home.”

  “I think so too,” Kate said, feeling altogether better than she had in many days.

  “I’ll lock up,” Butler said. “And you better give me your key too, the one you got in here with. If you’re deciding to make this a home away from home, you’ll let the security department know, won’t you? Can I count on that? You ought to remember Housman, professor: ‘Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut, / And silence sounds no worse than cheers / After earth has stopped the ears.’ ”

  “I am remembering Housman, Butler, Different poem, different verse altogether: ‘The sound of fight is silent long / That began the ancient wrong; / Long the voice of tears is still / That wept of old the endless ill.’ ”

  “I think you better go home, Professor.”

  “Right you are,” Kate said, and went.

  When she had been home only a few minutes, fixing a martini and waiting for Reed, the phone rang. It was Mr. Witherspoon.

  “I’ve been thinking about your investigation,” he said. “It occurred to me that there was another part of Adams’s life you ought to know about. A part of it that concerned me to some degree. How would you feel about coming to tea again? Shall we say Friday?”

  Kate said Friday. She wondered if Mr. Witherspoon was even lonelier than he had seemed, and if when she had observed that she was the only person he knew with no interest in his money she had been horribly near to the truth. Poor rich Mr. Witherspoon.

  Chapter Eleven

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

  Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

  If all men count with you, but none too much

  Mr. Witherspoon had already arranged for tea when Kate arrived; she found herself glad to see him and please that he was so clearly happy to see her. She wondered, this time, who else lived in this large duplex apartment with him, but didn’t want to ask and doubted he would mention it. He had not inquired about her living arrangements.

  “When you asked me about Professor Adams last time,” he said as they waited for the tea, “I told you my whole experience with him. You seem to want to know the sort of man he was, or at least my view of him, and that was what I gave you. But since then I’ve been thinking more about his death. And my daughter’s friend on the faculty told her, and she told me, that a young black woman had been killed, probably in connection with Adams’s death. That set me to thinking harder. I know there may be no connection between the deaths, but it was the second death, at any rate, that started me brooding once again about your problem. Ah, here is our tea.”

  “Our tea” was as lavish as before, with lovely thin sandwiches, delicate cookies, and finely sliced lemon. Care had been taken. Kate settled back to enjoy herself, beginning with the watercress sandwiches. Mr. Witherspoon seemed to surprise even himself by taking two cookies onto his plate and eating them with something close to relish.

  “Tea has always been my favorite meal,” he said. “I like cookies. You must be wondering what I could possibly have to say.”

  “You must have a lot to say,” Kate answered him. “But I am having a lovely time no matter what you say.” Indeed, Kate felt as though she had fallen through a hole in time and was back in another era, when people were neither pushed out of windows nor killed by stray bullets from drug gangs nor blown up by terrorists. She would not have returned to that era at any price, but a moment now and then, feeling like Alice in Wonderland but at a proper tea party, could be cherished. She took two more sandwiches.

  “I told you that I was a ‘friend’ of the university, which is their word for someone who gives money in ample amounts. I know you knew that, and of course I told you that I had studied with Professor Adams. What it didn’t occur to me to mention until the events in the Middle East made me think of it, was that after I met Adams I raised money especially for his department.”

  Kate looked her intense interest.

  “It seemed an excellent idea at the time. Once I had abandoned the Crusades, which I could hardly encourage financially in any case, I turned to Islam. The bank for which I worked before my retirement”—Kate wondered if all high officers in banks referred to themselves so modestly in retrospect—“had many dealings with Arabs; it seemed natural enough to raise money from these Arabs for a chair in Islamic studies.”

  “The one Adams occupied?”

  “Exactly. He was its first occupant; there will, of course, be others. I heard from the committee about his replacement recently—they are courteous enough to keep me informed, if not exactly to consult me—and that also reminded me that I hadn’t told you of this. But I had assumed you knew about Adams’s chair.”

  “I knew he held one. I never thought to inquire how it came into being. Many of the older chairs are left over from earlier times when it was possible to endow a chair with what today looks like very little money. The holders of those chairs get the honor, but no additional money. I didn’t stop to think that Adams’s might have been more recently endowed.”

  “We raised over a million for it. It’s the easiest money I’ve raised, as a matter of fact, so of course it was natural for me to go back to them to see if they would made more contributions to the university.”

  “Them?”

  “The Arabs. They have large holdings in this country, and have endowed many universities. It turned out, however, that they had a price. They didn’t want any Jews in the department they had given a chair to . . .”

  “And subsequently endowed with a library.”

  “You do know about that then.”

  “I only just found out. I think I see the rest of the story. The price of all that Islamic money was that there were to be no Jewish studies and no Jewish appointments.”

  “I’m afraid so. All this was some years ago, of course, and I put it out of my mind. Adams wanted to promote a young man who was Jewish, and the sources of the money objected. Adams, to do him justice, was upset; not to do him too much justice. I think he was more upset at having his candidate turned down than at the reason for it. He got in touch with me, and I was able to convince the sources to allow Shapiro to become the librarian of the large collection they had given. They weren’t happy, but they learned to compromise, which is more than most of the people in the Middle East learnt to do, or so one would gather these unhappy days.” Mr. Witherspoon paused to refill his teacup and take another cookie.

  “I was rather upset about all this at the time. Anti-Semitism is not unknown in the circles in which I moved, and still move, and I don’t want to sound noble in recounting this. I did feel, however, that the Jews had as great a right to be studied as the Arabs in a university department, and I said as much to the administration. They assured me that there was being set up, at that very time, a center for Jewish studies, and that I need have no fear of its not being very well endowed. So that was the end of that story. I don’t really think it has anything to do with Adams’s death; the Arabs I know are quite incapable of any such action. Still, my daughter and I talked of it, and she fel
t convinced I should tell you about all this. I was the more willing to be persuaded since I thought it would be pleasant to see you again.”

  “It is pleasant,” Kate said, her mind whirling about in an attempt to put these new facts in some sort of order. Did they mean anything at all? She thought the administration, who were not likely to shut off a source of generous funds no matter what was going on in the Middle East, had handled the matter well. And Adams, to do him justice, had kept out of the whole thing, except for the Shapiro case, and that had been resolved satisfactorily for all concerned. Arabella had probably been on the side of the PLO, as she was always on the side of the dispossessed, but not even she could have got in the way of some Arab or Israeli plot: the very idea was preposterous. Nice as it was of Mr. Witherspoon to have told her, and pleasant as were his tea and company, Kate couldn’t see that the information got her much further. Still, it was certainly worth thinking on.

  “I can’t imagine that this information will be of much use to you,” Mr. Witherspoon said, echoing her thoughts, “but I gather that detection is mostly putting together a great many facts and bits of information, most of which don’t fit into the final solution at all, but all of which may be of value.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Kate said, deciding to have a cookie after all. “One never knows what will fit in, but one can hardly decide if one hasn’t collected as many bits as possible. I wish they could all be collected in as delightful circumstances as this. I imagine,” she went on, in order to offer them another topic, “that banking like everything else has changed enormously in recent years. Do you think it has changed for the better?”

  Mr. Witherspoon was glad enough to expound on his opinion that banks had for too long been restricted in their activities, and that they ought to be allowed to give investment advice and to take part in other aspects of the financial world. From banking they moved to the stock market, and from there to the selfishness of the younger generation in the corporate world. They both ended feeling that their lives had been, on the whole, nobler than those members of a later generation who wanted to earn two hundred thousand a year by the time they were thirty, and didn’t care fright-fully about much else. This carried them nicely through their third cups of tea and the graceful end to their afternoon’s conversation.

  Kate walked once again across the park, this time passing a school soccer game. She remembered playing field hockey in Central Park in much the same way, dashing up and down fields whacking at a ball and being, it seemed in retrospect, constantly slammed in the ankles by hockey sticks. Why had they not worn some protection on their ankles? Kate could not imagine, but she remembered clearly that they had not; only the goalie wore padding on her legs. We were made of tougher stuff in those days, she ridiculously told herself, emerging from the park. Ever since her sleep in Adams’s chair she had felt renewed, as though she had reached a turn in the road, and was on her way down the final stretch. “Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea,” she said to herself, unlocking her apartment door. Butler has really got me into the throes of minor Victorian poetry, she observed to herself.

  Kate went to the phone and called the detectives who had been assigned to the Arabella case. Rather to her surprise they said they would be on their shift for a while yet and she was welcome to come down to the precinct and talk to them if she liked. Back to the hill and the sea, she said, locking the door behind her.

  Witherspoon’s revelations had not been quite as unexpected as Kate had pretended, either to him or to herself. True, she didn’t know quite what she was going to do with Mr. Witherspoon’s information, or exactly how it would fit in with her evolving theories, but as the verse from Housman she had quoted to Butler proved (despite the fact that Housman was speaking not of the Middle East but of the Welsh), she had already realized that her overlooking of the Arab-Israel situation as it affected the university was a mistake. How did Mr. Witherspoon change that, apart from reinforcing what she had begun to guess? She put this matter aside, and concentrated, as she approached the precinct, on the questions she would ask the detectives.

  Kate had never been to Grade Mansion, where the mayor lived, but every city office she had ever been in had been housed amidst conditions ranging from indifference to squalor, with most of the balance on the squalor end. The courtrooms were a disgrace, the jury rooms and the rooms reserved for voir dire hearings resembling cells in a rundown prison. Perhaps the federal courts were better, but Kate had not yet made it to a federal jury. She had heard tales of welfare and other centers supposedly run for the benefit of the poor. Even if one did not speak of the very poor, and they ought of course to be spoken of, there was enough squalor and inefficiency and unpleasantness in the city offices to make Kate wonder, whenever she had to deal with them, why she or anyone else continued to live here. Because she would miss it unbearably and could not think of living anywhere else, was the answer, but hardly an adequate one. Marriage had relieved Kate of certain unhappy collisions with the New York City system; Reed had taken over, for example, all the car complications. She had also been appalled to learn from him that those with the wherewithal could hire firms who dealt with the bureaucracy for the purpose of getting car registrations and other matters. Kate had no doubt that these folk did not wait on line. Italian-American friends assured her that New York was getting more like an Italian city daily, and everyone knew what getting business done in Italy was like. All of this was not to mention the schools, the custodians of the schools, the conditions of the school buildings, and on and on.

  The police precinct did nothing to assuage these unhappy thoughts. Telling the desk sergeant her errand, Kate wondered again of the possible urgency to the police of one or two murders when they operated under the conditions prevailing here. The arrival of the two detectives fortunately curtailed this downward-spiraling train of thought. They led her off to an interview room, making her feel (television again?) like a reluctant witness or a surly perp.

  “I didn’t have anything of great importance,” she apologized as they sat down around the table. Kate refused a cigarette and coffee. She half expected them to be annoyed with her, but something in their posture made it clear that they had to serve out their shift, and talking to her was no better or worse than anything else they might be doing.

  But it was not just lassitude. They also had news. They were going to bring Humphrey Edgerton in for questioning. Helping the police with their inquiries, as they said they would explain it to him.

  “What inquiries?” Kate asked, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “He hasn’t any alibi at all for the time when a black man was seen with Arabella entering the elevator of her family’s house.”

  “That’s it; that’s the basis of your suspicions?”

  “We didn’t say suspicions,” the younger cop said. “We just want to ask him where he was. I don’t know what your questions have turned up,” he added, “but ours indicate a certain worry Mr. Edgerton had about what Arabella was up to. Maybe they went to her house to discuss it, and the discussion got a little heated.”

  “There was once a great actor,” Kate said. “He really threw himself into his parts. They say that when he played Othello he blacked himself all over.”

  “Meaning?” the older cop said, chewing on a toothpick.

  “Meaning appearing black isn’t exactly hard. Did you see Laurence Olivier as Othello? Very black indeed.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No. I think, rather I hope, that you’re kidding. The police have been accused of racism pretty steadily. You better watch out or you’ll have one of those famous black lawyers, whose names at the moment escape me, on this one, and they’ll have my eager help.”

  “You got a better suggestion?”

  “As a matter of fact I have. That’s why I asked to see you.” Kate paused a moment, and the older cop offered her a toothpi
ck. She took it and rolled it between her fingers. After a bit, she snapped it in two with one hand, as she had seen it done long ago.

  “Did you also check Matthew Noble’s alibi for that time when the chap was exiting from the elevator with his suitcases?”

  “Noble? The administrator? The man who called us in, with whom we’ve been consulting? Look, lady, don’t let’s try to settle your university feuds by means of the police department.”

  “Did you ask where he was?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “Well, I suggest you do before you bring a black professor in for questioning on no more grounds than you’ve got. Noble has one of those marvelous secretaries. Drop in on her and ask where her boss was at the relevant time. I’ve no doubt she’ll tell you he was at some meeting. Check on the meeting or the people or person he was supposed to be with. If you don’t find the smallest slippage, let’s go back to discussing Professor Edgerton.”

  “You’re suggesting Noble did it? Twice?”

  “I’m suggesting it’s possible. I’m suggesting you check on it. That’s what I came to say.”

  “You got any personal feelings about this matter? Off the record.”