by Amanda Cross
“Hardly a member. Just under their rule, and they pay my meager salary. I don’t go to meetings and I don’t know anybody in the fucking department, so it’s no good interrogating me.”
“But you went to Haycock’s party.”
“Got an invitation, which is to say a command. No good insulting the guy. I didn’t stay long, though. Of course, I didn’t know someone would bump him off after I left, or I might have hung around for the big event.”
“It wasn’t worth staying for the free drinks?”
“Hardly. I’d already packed away a few. And one of the students hired to pass around the drinks and nibbly bits slipped me a large Scotch, so I was feeling just about right when I left.”
“Is she in your writing class?”
“Was. I give her more private lessons now. Well, you know,” he added, as though it had occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t making a terribly good impression, “she’s here on a scholarship and has to work besides. I bring a little bit of frivolity into her demanding life.”
“Would you care to guess at who, of those you know in the department, might have wanted to kill Professor Haycock?”
“Anyone with all his or her marbles. The guy was crackers, and had far too much power. He even suggested that I get the students in my classes to write Tennysonian verse. I told him I don’t teach poetry, but what I would have liked to tell him was . . . Well, he was paying my pittance, wasn’t he? Or the department was, and he could have stopped it. I can’t be sure the next chairman will even want a creative writing program, so why kill off the old fool I was sure of ? That suit you for an answer? As to who else would want to knock him off, I haven’t a clue.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful. I appreciate your giving me the time.”
“Hey, no rush, is there? Don’t you want another G and T?”
“One’s enough for me,” I said, and walked away. But as I was leaving, I saw him move over toward one of the girl students. Well, I thought as I trudged back to the parking lot, if someone murdered him I wouldn’t even take the case.
We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-proposed goal, Path of Advance!
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Rugby Chapel”
Nine
THE next evening I sat in Kate’s living room spilling my guts. I was feeling humiliated, insecure, and in need of consolation and support. I would really have liked to lie down on the floor next to Banny and rest my head on her huge body, but I sat up in a chair and, fortified by the drink Kate had offered, tried to display what dignity I could muster. It wasn’t much. Kate listened sympathetically and didn’t try to interrupt or halt my complaint; she allowed it all to spill out.
“I’m out of my depth, useless, incompetent, and inadequate,” I announced, just for starters. “I’m a pretty efficient person, or thought I was. I get results; I have a good record; most of my cases are satisfactorily concluded. I size people up, figure them out, catch all the nuances, especially the unintended ones; I’m a good listener, and until this horrible case came along, I would have told you I was a good detective—first-rate, in fact. On this bloody assignment, I find myself spinning around in a state of bewilderment. I don’t know what to make of what anybody says, except maybe the Haycock family. That’s familiar enough.
“But I ask you: plays about Tennyson and required courses and tenure decisions and Freud worship — give me a break. I’m resigning, in fact. I thought it only right to tell you first. Next comes Claire Wiseman, then Don Jackson. Then I write a formal admission of failure to the family and the English department at that lousy college, together with a bill for the time I spent. After all, I did work for them, and success is not guaranteed, although in my own mind I always thought it was.”
Kate opened her mouth to speak, but I beat her to the punch. “Don’t try to talk me out of quitting. I went to college, I went to law school—it isn’t as though I’d never had an academic experience. I might as well have been running this investigation in a small foreign country with an unknown language. I don’t wonder people came to you to investigate their academic crimes. Who else could possibly get what the people in today’s crazy institutions of higher learning were talking about.”
I stopped because I was practically out of breath, and anyway I couldn’t think of any more angry statements. Maybe I put it on a bit thick, but everything I said was true. I hated letting Kate down, and Don, but for the rest—well, it was my first absolute failure and I hoped never to think about any of it ever again. Also, I should in honesty add that since I’d come in the evening, leaving my bike at home, I’d enjoyed my drink and was set to go on to more if asked. Kate had said she had more time in the evening, and today I was going to need it; perhaps she had figured that out.
“Surely,” Kate said, “there have been cases that seemed unintelligible at some point, where you thought you’d better just bow out. I’ve never worked on a problem where I didn’t feel like that at least once in a major way—more often in a minor way. I expect you’re really farther along than you know. I think you need to talk it through. I’m listening.”
I accepted another drink, single malt Scotch—it goes down smooth and doesn’t seem to cause the usual confusion in one’s mental capacities; they just loosen up a bit. The drinks certainly didn’t stop me from giving Kate a neat account of the bloody affair, not quite from the beginning—she’d heard that— but from the last time we’d met. I had to backtrack just a little to fill in now and then, but on the whole I did well. Kate thought so too.
I’d come provided with a list; she already had the department list and the family list, but I added the names of everyone who had set foot in the Haycock house on the day he keeled over. Everyone, down to delivery men, student helpers, and Haycock relatives not earlier designated. Then I told her, word for word, every conversation I’d had. I described every place I’d been, I left out my interpretations or impressions, if any, but I accounted for every minute spent on the case. So by the time I wound down, Kate had all I had. Which wasn’t much, or wasn’t what I’d call coherent.
I shut up, took a sip of my drink, and looked expectant.
“This may sound wild,” Kate said, “but I have to ask it. Can you be absolutely certain that Haycock didn’t take the pills himself, that he didn’t put them in his special wine and hope that someone else, anyone else, would be accused of murder? I know it’s unlikely, but not unprecedented. Let’s say he was simultaneously discouraged about the reception of his life’s work on Tennyson, fed up with his family, and finding purpose and excitement in the thought of the havoc his death would cause. Is there any evidence that is not the case?”
“I can’t say it’s altogether impossible,” I said, pulling myself together. “I did float the idea here and there, not to the family but to his colleagues. They all dismissed it as out of the question. The general opinion seemed to be that he was far too narcissistic to consider doing away with himself, even for the chance to cause general misery. Uppermost in his mind would be the thought that he wouldn’t be there to see the fun. I also played around with the idea with Don Jackson; he’d thought of it too. If we don’t find who did it, we may be able to console ourselves with this theory, however.”
I took another sip, slowly. “I’d like to cling to your idea for dear life. But there’s something else against it having been suicide. There was the same amount of digoxin in both the bottle of retsina and in Haycock’s glass. If he could have put it in the glass to kill himself, why put it in the bottle too?”
“Am I missing something?” Kate asked. “If there was a certain amount of digoxin in the bottle and he had poured himself a glass, wouldn’t you expect the two solutions to be the same?”
“You would, if he had put his self-administered dose in the bottle. But why do that? Why take the chance of someone else showing up who liked retsina, unlikely as that might be? Why not put his dose in his glass? Then he’s safely dead and no one else is. If you see what I mean.
” It seemed to make sense to me, but perhaps the single malt Scotch was having more effect than I realized.
“I see what you mean. Neat deduction. But can we be sure Haycock, if he had decided to leave this world, would not want to take a few people with him? That might strike him as a suitable ending to the lack of appreciation he’d been dealt.”
“Well, we can’t have it both ways.”
Kate nodded. “Good. Let’s abandon that idea for now. I thought it important to mention. The other reflection that has occurred to me has to do with Tennyson. I mean, there has been a tendency on everyone’s part—his colleagues first of all and then yours and mine—to consider his relative lunacy about Tennyson as particularly germane to his murder. But I tend to think that Tennyson was a symptom, not the cause.”
“Antonia said that—that if Tennyson were the main motive, Haycock was likelier to have killed her. And what do you mean by relative lunacy?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve known cases of greater lunacy, of really mad devotion to one’s subject. We all tend to get our own subjects a bit out of proportion; we defend those we have written about and resent others who cast aspersions, even reasonable ones. Then there are the real nuts like the Freudian advocates, who won’t brook the slightest criticism or reinterpretation of holy writ. This type comes with devotion to a whole range of individual writers and thinkers. I’m not sure that Haycock quite reached the maniac dimension,” Kate said, sighing. “But I think it was good to mention that, as well as the theory about suicide. They’ve cleared our heads a bit.”
“They may have cleared your head,” I said, “but they haven’t done much for mine. The point, you see, is that I feel that I’ve wandered, or allowed myself to be led, into a situation beyond my capabilities. I’ve studied all the information I’ve gathered so far, I’ve looked at it upside down and backward, and it’s . . . well, what I said—I don’t really know this foreign country’s culture or its language. I think the best thing for me to do would be to bow out. It would also be the fairest all around.” I had the feeling that I might have said this before, but if so, I thought it would bear repeating.
In fact, I really felt awful, which is why the Scotch didn’t seem to be making me drunk, or merry, or full of hope and resolution. I’ve noticed that there are times when one hopes for release by way of drink, and if the problem or fright is sufficiently serious, release does not come, as it had not come now.
I thought Kate might feel impatient, but she didn’t. I suppose over the years she had dealt with enough discouraged students wrestling with their dissertations and convinced they’d picked the wrong subject to know what I was talking about. I decided to point this out.
“Look, surely you’ve had students who started writing on some literary subject, say Tennyson, and then they discovered, partway through, maybe halfway through, that they were so bored or annoyed by him and his poems that they couldn’t continue. Well, that’s how it is with me. Hasn’t that happened?”
“Rarely, in fact,” Kate said. “No, I’m not tampering with the truth in order to persuade you to continue. There have been one or two who quit, but not many. One I can think of was writing on Swinburne and had reached the point of total abhorrence. He said it was like that drug alcoholics take to stop drinking: any alcohol at all and they vomit. One more glance at a Swinburne poem and . . . well, you get the point. But most of the time, the writer of the dissertation needs to approach the subject from a different angle— often only slightly different, as it turns out— or needs to expand or contract the extent of the original idea. That happens quite often. Anyone who writes, let alone works on a dissertation, often has to switch gears, change the emphasis, cut the material to be covered, or move whole sections around. It doesn’t mean that quitting is the only solution, and it seldom is the one taken.”
“That’s a nice little speech, and neatly applicable to my situation. Except that this job isn’t a do-or-die situation; I just go on to other jobs more suited to my talents.”
“Sorry if I sounded patronizing,” Kate said. “I was just recalling the dissertations I’d sponsored and how they turned out. But I guess I was talking with a motive, which was to persuade you not to quit. You may not find the murderer; if you do find him or her, you may not be able to prove it. But for your own satisfaction, I don’t think quitting is called for. Not yet.”
I sighed. Deeply.
Kate laughed. “Look, Woody, if you really want to quit, you should. Don’t worry about what I’ll think, which will be nothing critical of you. Don’t worry about what the people who hired you will think. Who knows what their motives are anyway? Just ask yourself how you’ll feel after the satisfaction of signing off has started to dilute just a little.”
“You sound convincing. You’re ready to talk about the case with me, and I’m mighty grateful for that. Why do I get the feeling that you’re keeping something back—that you don’t want me to quit for all the reasons you’ve so movingly laid out, but that there’s some other reason too? Maybe my suspecting this is just an indication that my intuition, when applied to academic, intellectual types and folks practiced in literary criticism, is out to lunch?”
Kate got up to get another drink. Once she was back in her seat, drink in hand, Banny moved over to her, thrusting her nose against her arm.
“She’s telling me it’s time to go out,” Kate said, setting down her drink. “And it is. How about that walk we talked about the three of us taking?”
“At night, in the park, in the dark?” I asked. I’m used to danger, but I don’t cultivate it in parks in the middle of the night—well, evening.
“I rather think that Banny, you, and I will be quite safe enough. Banny and I don’t go into the park at night alone. Usually Reed is with us. It’s become a routine, at least when possible. You’d be surprised how many people are in the park, and not all muggers and worse.”
“It’s a deal,” I said. Probably the air would do me good. Also, I figured, if Kate was going to deliver a low blow, I’d rather be walking in the dark when it hit.
So the three of us strolled in the park, Banny ahead without a leash. “I thought big dogs had to be leashed now,” I said. “One of the mayor’s ways of interfering in city life.”
“Not after nine at night,” Kate said. “Or before nine in the morning. That is not an hour when I am conscious, but sometimes Reed takes her out then, if he’s woken up early. Let’s look at the lake. I always hope to see the swans. They mate for life, and arrive in pairs.”
I kept quiet. We walked past the lake while Kate was pulling her thoughts together, deciding what to say, and how to say it.
She finally spoke. “Woody, what I’m going to say is just a suspicion, a theory, no more likely to be true than my earlier idea about Haycock’s possible suicide. What I’m going to say isn’t necessarily the truth, has no foundation other than supposition, and may be nonsense.”
I nodded, though I didn’t know if she could see me nod. “Go on,” I said. “Tell me your second wild idea.”
“You see, you remember that earlier I said I had a wild idea. You remember words; you’re smart. I’ve learned how smart you are. But as you say, this isn’t the sort of case you usually undertake or, in fact, have ever undertaken. Also, you tend to make remarks about your being fat, which also makes a certain impression. What I’m trying to say is—”
“I get it,” I said, interrupting her rather loudly. “I get it. You think they hired me because I was too stupid to figure it out, because they knew that with me on the trail, the murderer would get away with it. They hoped I’d be just as bamboozled as . . . as I am, in fact. That was the whole idea. Is that what you were going to tell me?”
“That’s it, Woody. But that’s not all of it. I think Claire Wiseman guessed at that motive for hiring you, or suspected it. But because she knew a bit more about you than the Clifton people did, because you’d done a good job with her friend, she decided to, well, urge you to get me on board.”
“Kate,” I shouted. “I can’t believe you used a phrase like on board. Did telling me this make you as nervous as all that?”
“You’re damn right,” Kate said. “The way I figure it, assuming the truth of my premises, Claire decided that if she was right I might protect you from becoming unduly discouraged; if she was wrong, well, nothing would have been lost by our brainstorming together from time to time on your case.”
“Brainstorming,” I shouted. “That’s almost as bad as on board.”
“Reed has pointed out to me that I tend to fall into clichés when under emotional stress. It’s a sign he has long since learned to read. Now you can read it too.” And she took a small plastic bag from her pocket and bent down to retrieve Banny’s poop. She dropped the bag into a trash can as we walked by.
“In London,” she said, “they have separate receptacles for dog refuse, as they call it. A damn good idea, but the English are more orderly than Americans.”
“Okay,” I said, ignoring this. “I’m not quitting. I’m going over it all again, with you, with Don, and in my head. And they can all take their academic arrogance and shove it. Can’t Banny walk any faster than that?”
The world will not believe a man repents; And this wise world of ours is mainly right.
—TENNYSON, Idylls of the King
Ten
THE next day was again New Jersey, but I went this time as a transformed woman: I was feeling my oats, much friskier and more determined in my mind; I wasn’t about to be humbled again by academics. I had called Antonia Lansbury that morning and told her that I needed a long session with her and needed it soon. She said that today was her day without classes, could I come to her house, and what time would I be there. I said one o’clock, and arranged to meet Don Jackson beforehand. It’s amazing what powers one can call upon when told those very powers have been underestimated. Very underestimated, as I hoped to demonstrate. Well, I knew I might fail, but I was certainly going to try.