Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  “It was on the top of my list to report on that,” Don said, smiling. “And I would have if we hadn’t been distracted by the latest outbreak.”

  “Are you suggesting it had anything to do with the murder?”

  “No. I only meant a murder and a beating on this campus in one semester . . . well, one does notice the timing.”

  “I know. The only problem is, Oakwood is not a nice person, which I figured out in my one short conversation with him—if you could call it a conversation; it was more just Oakwood revealing his unpleasant nature.”

  “Right. There wasn’t anything unusual about the students. One of them was a substitute—the girl Oakwood told you he knew, in fact. She had asked the girl who got called for the job if she could go instead. She said she needed the money, and the other girl agreed. They were used to doing this sort of favor for each other. Nothing bad known about the girl who served at the party, unless you count the fact that she seems to have put up with Oakwood. Do you think it means anything?”

  “Probably not,” I said, sighing. “Nothing in this damn case means anything.” It was true. There were all sorts of promising leads, all trailing off into nothing. I was wishing we could nab Oakwood for Haycock’s murder. He was the only person I’d met from either the English department or the guest list who seemed to me capable of murder, capable even of delighting in it. But poison seemed to require a bit too much planning for him. Also I couldn’t really imagine his dropping eight or more pills into the bottle of retsina with nobody noticing. He couldn’t do anything without everybody noticing. Beating or bludgeoning was more his style. I told Don what I was thinking.

  “I know,” he said. “We’ve been thinking along all the same lines, which is how anyone with two brains to rub together would think about the evidence we have. The fact is, Woody, it was probably one of those professors of English literature who’d never done anything like that before and never will again. Probably someone who’s read a lot of detective stories and was able to make a plan about what he or she had learned. Isn’t that how you figure it?”

  “Exactly,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Time I pushed off,” I told him. “Maybe we could call and find out how poor Petrillo’s doing.”

  “I think he’s all right, not seriously injured, though they need to keep him for a while. Some of his organs got a bit bruised, but they weren’t badly damaged. That can happen. And he has a couple of broken ribs from being kicked, and his face is a mess. We’re really going to get Oakwood on aggravated assault. The college wants us to take him off their hands, so he’ll get what’s coming to him. I’ll stop by and see Petrillo tomorrow, but I don’t think there’s much he can tell us. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was out of the blue, without reason.”

  “There must have been a reason, or what Oakwood considered a reason,” I said.

  “Sure. But that doesn’t mean Petrillo knows what it is.”

  “No,” I said. “Probably not. Will you call me tomorrow and let me know what you learn from Petrillo, or what you don’t learn?”

  “Of course,” Don said as we left the restaurant. I was feeling at a loose end, as my mother used to say, everything hanging in the air. I dropped Don off at the police station and set out for home. It had been a long, if inconclusive day.

  The next day I had an invitation from Kate Fansler, who asked if I would like to stop by in the late afternoon. She would certainly understand if I couldn’t, but would welcome me if I found it convenient.

  I found it more than convenient: enticing. I needed to talk to someone about the case, someone who had most of the background and just needed filling in on the most recent events—my meeting with the dean and the dean’s secretary, and the brutal encounter between Oakwood and poor Petrillo.

  At Kate’s insistence, I told her about these matters—after greeting Banny, of course, and accepting a drink. Kate listened intently, and then suggested that we put off discussing it until she could tell me about the more or less Tennysonian fun she had been having.

  “I’ve been reading Freshwater,” she said. “It really is a hoot.” I must have looked blank because she held up the slender book.

  “Ah,” I said as the penny dropped. “The play they put on that so upset Haycock. But of course everything upset Haycock. Why is it called Freshwater? I suppose I ought to know,” I added gloomily.

  Kate ignored this. “Freshwater was the house on the Isle of Wight owned by Mrs. Cameron, who was Virginia Woolf’s aunt and a great photographer. Tennyson had a house nearby. Do listen to this. In the play, Tennyson is talking to Ellen Terry, who would become a famous actor but who was, at the moment, the very young, unhappy wife of the painter Watts, decades her senior. She is flirting with Tennyson, who says to her: ‘You should see me in my bath! I have thighs like alabaster!’ ” Kate looked at me expectantly.

  “Was there something wrong with his thighs?” I asked.

  “Oh, dear,” Kate said. “No, I don’t think there was anything wrong. It’s just not the sort of remark one expects from so famous a Victorian poet. Clearly Virginia Woolf, who wrote the play, felt great affection for Tennyson, but to Haycock this must have seemed like the cruelest and most unnecessary mockery.”

  I slid down further into my chair, took a swig of my drink, and tried to look happy. Kate decided to have one more shot at convincing me of whatever she was trying to convince me of.

  “Well, then, listen to this. Tennyson is talking to Mrs. Cameron, who has been posing a donkey, who was supposed to be carrying St. Christopher on its back; Mrs. Cameron liked to make allegorical pictures. She mentions the ass to Tennyson, who says:

  Yes, there was a damned ass praising Browning the other day. Browning, I tell you. But could Browning have written: “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, / The murmuring of innumerable bees.” Or this, perhaps the loveliest line in the language—“The mellow ouzel fluting on the lawn.”

  There was a pause. “Kate,” I said, in what I hoped was a pathetic tone, “I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.”

  “Because you don’t know what an ouzel is,” Kate said. “No one but Tennyson knew before he wrote that line. He liked to use odd words from Middle English. I think it’s a kind of water bird.”

  “It’s not just the ouzel,” I said. “It’s all of it. I’m sorry to be such a disappointment, Kate.”

  Kate put the book down with a sigh, and then I thought of my conversation with Rick Fowler. “I do remember something,” I said. “Something about ‘thump, thump, thump.’ ”

  Kate brightened up. “That’s ‘Alice’,” she said. “A takeoff on ‘Maud’ and the fact that the flowers in Tennyson’s poem talked.” Kate looked at the ceiling and recited:

  There has fallen a splendid tear

  From the passion-flower at the gate.

  She is coming, my dove, my dear;

  She is coming, my life, my fate;

  The red rose cries, “She is near she is near”;

  And the white rose weeps, “She is late”;

  The Larkspur listens. “I hear, I hear”;

  And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

  There was a pause. “Well,” I finally said, “no one can accuse you of not liking Tennyson, and you say they couldn’t accuse Virginia Woolf of not liking him either. I can’t see what Haycock was all wrought up about.”

  “That’s it, you see. Woolf’s comedy is all good, clean fun, not meant to injure or mock anyone. That it got under Haycock’s skin suggests he may have been, to put it mildly, a bit off balance. And it’s not that I really appreciate Tennyson. I had an aging professor in college—she was probably not much older than I am now, but she seemed ancient to me then—and she used to quote Tennyson with relish. We found her funny, of course, but we also saw that her affection for his poetry was profound, particularly for ‘Maud.’ Those are the only lines I remember, if you want to know.”

  I couldn’t think what to say. I took another sip and just sat there, w
aiting. Maybe everyone who taught literature went a bit nuts from time to time. That would certainly explain a lot. Kate seemed to be still thinking of talking flowers or something. Slowly I got my mind back into gear.

  “We don’t need Virginia Woolf or anyone else to tell us Haycock was peculiar and obsessed with Tennyson,” I said. “But where does that get us? I mean, do you think he meant to kill Antonia or all of those who put on Freshwater, but got mixed up and drank the retsina before offering it to them?”

  “I don’t think we should put too much emphasis on Tennyson,” Kate said. I thought she had a nerve, frankly. Who’d been quoting him about larkspurs and passionflowers? “Was the dean at that party of Haycock’s?”

  “No. He was in Arizona at some conference.”

  “Haycock was certainly giving him a lot of misery. Maybe he hired someone?”

  “I’ve thought of that. Do you really think a dean could set out to murder a professor?”

  “I’m sure a lot of them would like to. I’m hardly unbiased, but I find it easier to imagine a dean doing that than a professor, however unhappy.”

  “Kate, I really have trouble believing that academics, professors, can behave as crazily as these seem to do, at least some of them. I know Oakwood is only an adjunct, but how many teachers of writing beat people to a pulp?”

  “I’ll tell you something I heard just the other day,” Kate said. “This wasn’t an English department, but the situation isn’t all that different. In this case, the head of the department, who was in tight with the administration, took petty revenge on any faculty member who disagreed with him, even in a reasonable way. He would take away courses, or find some way to pay them back. So nobody disagreed with him, and there was no point in trying to move him out of the chair because he would still have his in with the boys in central administration.”

  “Did anyone try to murder him?”

  “No. I was right when I said murder was very seldom if ever resorted to in the academic world. But members of the department have started leaving, and at some point the administration may catch on. Or they may not, of course. The point, Woody, is that petty tyrants exist everywhere, and no less in academia.”

  “I guess they’re not so petty.”

  “True, they’re not Saddam Hussein. And their revenge is usually in the petty things that can make a professor miserable. Of course, Saddam Hussein murdered his son-in-law, so maybe Haycock is more like that.”

  “Kate,” I said. “We’ve gone from a play called Freshwater to Saddam Hussein, and I have the feeling I’m not exactly making any progress. About this play, for instance. Has it ever been put on? Except by Rick and Antonia and their friends at the college?”

  “You mean professionally? No. It was just written for a birthday party. And it was really a group project. We tend to read what Woolf wrote and concentrate on that, but the costumes and the setting and the acting were all just as important to the Bloomsbury group when they put it on.”

  “It wasn’t in a theatre?”

  “No, it was in Vanessa Bell’s studio. They were all talented, and they liked pooling their talents and having fun, which they certainly did on that occasion. Don’t worry about Freshwater, Woody. Have another drink.”

  I accepted with thanks. But I couldn’t get over the fact that none of this, however intriguing to literary types like Kate and Antonia, was throwing any light on the murder. I thought of saying this and then decided to drink up and depart. Not that I blamed Kate for not coming up with something. What could she possibly have come up with, knowing what I knew and lots of poetry besides? She couldn’t pluck a solution out of the air. I did rather want to ask Kate what Reed had done for Don Jackson to make him so nice to me, and not at all like the usual policeman, but it wasn’t any of my business. I knew that if I asked Kate or Reed, they would say that Don would tell me if he wanted to. That’s what I would have said under the circumstances.

  After a while I left. Once I was out of the building, I started muttering to myself about larkspurs and lilies. I went home on the subway and took a long, hot bath.

  I was back in New Jersey the next day. Don had agreed to meet me and tell me about Petrillo and what he said, if anything. Somehow tearing out to Jersey and talking with Don gave me the sensation of doing something, though I knew damn well I wasn’t doing anything, and the way I felt now, probably never would—not with this case. I tried to calm myself with the thought that Haycock was really a nut, that the college, his family, and everyone else would be better off without him, and that some crimes never get solved and this, obviously, was going to be one of them. But I still don’t believe that anyone has the right to take another person’s life, and I also didn’t think they should get away with it. Well, Woody, I told myself, win some, lose some.

  Don and I met in the restaurant, of course. It was lunchtime, and food or coffee or booze, if available, makes it easier to talk. I particularly like talking in a restaurant booth. You feel private in a booth, not like people at the next table might find your conversation more interesting than theirs. Booths are cozy. I had mentioned this to Don once, and he thought so too, so it was a natural place for us to meet.

  “I saw Petrillo,” Don said. “Most of the faculty had come to see him, though they could stay only for a minute. And everyone seems to have sent flowers, and his students sent notes. He’s clearly a man for whom people have a lot of affection.”

  “Maybe that’s what got under Oakwood’s skin.”

  “Among other things, I guess. I did get to talk to Petrillo. I asked him if he knew what was bothering Oakwood, and why Oakwood had said what he did, about shutting up. Petrillo said he’d thought about that a lot, lying still, with his head and everything else hurting, and feeling drowsy from the painkillers they’d given him, and he’d decided that he’d never figure out what was troubling Oakwood. That was his word: ‘troubling.’ Then he said, ‘I guess I just got on his nerves; I do get on people’s nerves sometimes.’ There didn’t seem much else to say, so I left. Petrillo is a genuinely sweet guy, if you want my opinion.”

  “Mine too,” I said. “Did you get the impression at all, even faintly, that he might have known what Oakwood meant but had decided not to say?”

  “Yes, I did. But it was a very faint impression; it was also what I wanted to think.”

  “Don,” I said, “should we just throw in the towel? I mean, we’ve been over it all; I’ve learned more about Tennyson and about some crummy play put on by friends of Virginia Woolf and about academic politics than I ever thought I would know or need to know. And it all turns out to be spun sugar. You must see what I mean. It’s not bad to lick at, even to enjoy, but it’s not food; it’s not substantial.”

  Don nodded. “You’re probably right, but I don’t see any need to give up just yet. Let’s let it all sit for a few days. Each of us can go over it and see if any light breaks through. After that, I’m ready to call it a day when you are.”

  “A few days,” I said. “Anyway, it was nice to meet up with you, Don, and I know that without your help, without your being ready to cooperate with me, I wouldn’t have gotten this far. It helped a lot to be able to throw the authority of the police around when I wanted something, and to have someone to talk it over with.”

  “I liked working with you too, Woody. It started out as a favor to Reed, but it ended up being a pleasure. At least there’s that.”

  I didn’t say anything; I didn’t trust myself not to become silly, or some other damn thing. I did like Don. After the few more days we were allowing ourselves, we’d probably never meet again. Oh, maybe I could call him and say, “Hey, I’m going to Jersey; want to have a hamburger at our place?” But it was unlikely. I just kept quiet, getting a grip on myself.

  “Woody,” Don said, “you must have wondered what Reed could have done for me so that he had a chip to call in, a reason to ask me to help you with this investigation.”

  “I did wonder. But I don’t need to know.”

&n
bsp; “I’ll give you a brief outline. I used to be a cop in New York City. I got to know Reed when he was an assistant D.A. There was a big foul-up. I got into trouble with the other cops because I objected to their racism, to what we now call profiling: you know, if he’s black and in a nice car, pull him over, maybe rough him up. There were other things; not all cops are good guys. Anyway, I didn’t react very well; I went off the deep end. My marriage broke up, I drank too much, I fought with everyone. Maybe a little like Oakwood. And Reed got hold of me. We’d gotten to know each other a bit through some of the cases he had handled, and he . . . well, he showed up one day and started yelling. Screaming, telling me I was a bloody fool, and to shape up, and not to let those damn cops ruin my life for me. I started screaming back about what did he suggest, I still had to support my kids and ex-wife—well, you can imagine it. I was deep into self-pity and self-hate and on the road to God knows what. Reed said if I pulled myself together he’d help me. He got me this job here; he talked me into the benefits of small-town life; he must have pulled some strings with this police department, because they’ve treated me decently. I could never thank him, we never talked again, but when he asked for me to, well, watch out for you, I did it. That’s about it, except that I can have my kids here for vacations and weekends, and I’ve discovered that how high you go is less important than how it feels going along. So that’s it.”

  It was the longest single speech he’d ever made, and I really admired him for telling me. But I didn’t want us to sit around feeling embarrassed. So I skipped right on to another topic.

  “I had an idea of how they ought to have killed Haycock,” I said, after we’d gotten refills on the coffee.

  “Oh, you’re planning murders now.”

  “That’s it. I just learned that Viagra, you know, the drug men take—”

  “I know about it,” he said, smiling.

  “Well, it’s dangerous to take it if you’ve got a heart condition. Now, if the murderer had just given Haycock Viagra we’d never find out if he took it because someone wanted to kill him or because he wanted to get it up.”