by Amanda Cross
“That’s a great plot, Woody. You ought to sell it to someone who writes those detective stories that are so popular.”
“Well, remember you heard it here first,” I said.
He smiled. “I’ll certainly remember,” he said. “Who could forget a thing like that?”
We seemed to be comfortable again, so I dropped him off at the police station, thinking as he got off the bike, Maybe someday I’ll take him for a nice, long ride.
I meet and dole Unequal Laws unto a savage race.
—TENNYSON, “Ulysses”
Thirteen
THE next morning in the office I determined to stop thinking about Don Jackson, Clifton College, and, if it came to that, all of New Jersey. Octavia had finished writing up the bills for the few finished cases we’d completed in the last weeks, and had made an appointment for me to see a new client at ten. I hoped it was not another case involving crazy academics, but I was a bit worried because all Octavia could tell me about the man coming to see me was that he sounded old rather than young, and not uneducated. Octavia’s double negatives were always meaningful. This meant he might have an advanced degree or might have picked up so-called proper speech somewhere along the line, she wasn’t sure which. Please let him not be an academic, I muttered, with no idea of whom I was addressing.
But my prayer, if that’s what it was, was heard. The man who introduced himself was, he told me, a lawyer with a particularly delicate problem. I nodded encouragingly. “I must be assured of absolute confidence,” he said. “You’ll understand why when I explain what this is about.”
“All my clients, Mr. Petrosky, are assured of total confidentiality and care in how their situations are approached.”
I had his name on the sheet Octavia had left for me, as well as the name of the person who had referred him. Octavia had looked that person up and left me a note regarding that case. She was priceless, was Octavia, and no less so because I knew the reason for her efficiency and she knew I knew: Octavia liked working for me because I left her ample scope to develop all her skills, legal and secretarial, and because she thought that without her I would get myself into a fine old tangle. I knew that men, at least in the old days, had had secretaries like this, but Octavia’s devotion to me was a bit different. She wasn’t acting like a wife; she wasn’t half in love with me. She had simply decided to make sure I succeeded in my profession, and she kept her eyes on everything. I tried not to become dependent, but of course I did. Still, I told myself, I could manage without her. She, I was sure, told herself I could not manage without her. Somehow we had achieved a fine balance; I basked in her devotion, and she delighted in my success. And all this with both of us knowing that, in any relationship more personal than ours, we would not get along at all.
Mr. Petrosky settled back into his chair and I got out my notebook. “I’m glad that Mrs. Staunton recommended me,” I said. “Please tell me how I can help you.”
“It’s really nice to see a young woman with some flesh on her,” Mr. Petrosky said. “I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it. I expect you make your clients feel comfortable; not like some of those half-starved women these days who make you want to give them a good meal.”
“I do enjoy a good meal, Mr. Petrosky,” I said encouragingly. “Now, about your case.”
I had already guessed that Mr. Petrosky would turn out to be a good guy, a lovable fellow—I’d guessed that even before he mentioned admiring my shape—and I turned out to be right. He had started his own law firm many years ago, together with two other lawyers, and they had made a good thing of it. Recently, he and his partners had become amalgamated with a much larger firm, taken over in fact. Mr. Petrosky had made it part of the deal that his staff would stay with them in the new firm, and that had been satisfactorily arranged. The only people he really worried about were his secretary, one of his partner’s secretaries—both of them longtime fixtures—and an associate who had never been made a partner but who was considered permanent and who had contributed a good deal to the practice. Here followed a long explanation of why this associate had not been made a partner, which Mr. Petrosky felt was a necessary piece of information for me to have. It wasn’t really; I had already gathered the fact of his devotion to this associate.
The new firm, I learned as my new client got down to cases, wanted to fire this associate; they were accusing him of stealing from the firm to the tune of two or three hundred thousand dollars. “Which is ridiculous,” Mr. Petrosky said. “Harry wouldn’t steal. It’s not in his nature. But they’ve got all sorts of evidence, stuff off computers and financial sheets, and what they call proof that it had to be him. They also claim that his bank account has deposits that are unusual. Don’t ask me how they got to see his bank account. It seems that anyone can find out anything about anyone these days. Maybe it’s the Internet.”
“And you want me to look into it,” I said encouragingly. I felt grateful to Mr. Petrosky. This was the kind of case I knew how to handle, and would handle well. True, should the associate turn out to have been fiddling with the books, it would not be easy to have to tell Mr. Petrosky so. My suspicion, however, was that the firm was using a not unusual sort of leverage to get the associate to quit. But why?
“There are two possibilities,” I told my client. “Either your associate is up to new tricks or”—I held up my hand as he began to protest—“they do want to get rid of him. The question is, why would they want to get rid of him?”
“That’s what I want you to find out for me. Mrs. Staunton said you were wonderful; she admired the way you went about solving her problem.”
We discussed a few more points, I reminded him of my fee, which he happily agreed to, and he gave me a check for the down payment. I stood to escort Mr. Petrosky out of my office, opening the door for him, shaking the hand he held out to me, and telling him that we would be in touch as soon as I had information, even if it was of no progress. I saw Octavia beginning to take down more necessary information from him as I closed my door.
I put my feet up on my desk and settled back into my old, efficient, professional self. The hell with Clifton College and Professor Haycock. I couldn’t imagine why I had ever agreed to get involved. Probably I thought it would be a new experience; maybe I thought I’d meet some interesting people, some problems different from the business and marital kind I was used to and, I reminded myself, good at.
Well, I had met interesting people, women especially. Maybe it was worth it to meet Antonia and Elaine Kimberly. Even Dawn was a bit different from the usual order of executive assistant. And of course Kate. Well, knowing when you’re licked is a sign of professional competence. I got in over my head, and having treaded water for a while, I was now swimming to shore—shore being my office, Octavia, and Mr. Petrosky. I began to think about his case.
But of course, I reminded myself, I would have to tell Kate Fansler I was giving up. She’d been good at supporting me and not letting me get too morose about my failure, but this time she’d have to admit we would never know who had offed Professor Haycock. Then there was Don. Well, maybe one day I’d ride out, pick Don up at the station, and take him to our booth for a reunion beer. Maybe, but probably not. I felt bad about that, but I also realized the case was the glue in our friendship, and no glue, no sticking. It surprised me how relieved I felt. I’d send in a final bill, say the case was beyond solution, and tell Kate I was through.
I was just getting ready to do some research on the Internet for Mr. Petrosky—it’s amazing what you can learn on the Web —when Octavia buzzed me. It was Kate Fansler. I’d always suspected the woman of being a mind reader.
“Hi,” I said. “I was just going to call you.”
“Oh,” she said. “What about?”
“About how I’m giving up on Haycock and all those who sail with him. I can’t tell you what a relief it is. It takes a brave person to admit she’s failed, to face the fact and sign off. Octavia is even now preparing their bill.” That was no
t quite true, but she would be preparing it before too long.
“Well, tell her to hold off for a bit. Could you come by tonight? About eight?”
“Kate, I’d love to, but things have rather piled up here and—”
“It will be the last time, I promise. I hope you’ll visit us again, but this will be the last time we shall mention Clifton College.”
“Or Haycock, or Tennyson, or Freshwater?” I rather rudely asked.
“Absolutely,” Kate said. “I may decide to quote from ‘Maud’ again on some distant occasion, but you won’t have to take it personally.”
“Good enough. I’ll be there. Eight on the dot.” “I’d better warn you. We’re going to watch a movie.”
“A movie! Really, Kate, I’d far rather talk or walk with Banny or—”
“Trust me, Woody. And don’t ride here on your motorcycle; you may want several drinks before the evening is finished.”
Well, all right, academics are all peculiar; at least I’d learned that. Meanwhile, blessed Mr. Petrosky had reminded me who I was, what I was good at, and how I earned my living. I turned on the computer and got to work.
I took the subway to Kate’s house. If she said I might want to drink, I had to believe I would want to. I had gotten in the way of trusting Kate; there was no doubt of that. At the same time, I knew I had to be firm about my decision to end my association with this case. I had appreciated her honesty on that nighttime walk in the park with Banny, when she told me the reasons I shouldn’t quit, but no such argument was going to work this time. And we were to watch a movie. Well, I’d learned one thing: even the nicest of academics tends to act a bit odd from time to time.
Banny and Kate came to the door to greet me. They led me into the living room; then Kate told me to have a seat, and offered a drink. I accepted, but with some uncomfortable qualms. It was clear Kate had something up her sleeve. Nothing I could do but sit back and let whatever it was happen.
Kate, however, seemed determined to chat, and I decided the hell with that. “If we have to see a movie, let’s see it,” I said. “Who’s in it, anyway?”
“Everybody, or so it seems,” Kate said. “Wendy Hiller, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Albert Finney, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud—that’s just for starters. I can’t remember who else, but they’re all famous, even to an old-timer like me.”
“All in one movie?” I was beginning to worry about Kate’s sanity.
“Absolutely. Shall we watch it now?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “What’s it called?”
“Murder on the Orient Express,” Kate said.
It sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember it or what it was about. “What’s the date on it?” I asked.
“1974,” Kate said.
I would have been eight or nine, I thought. Maybe I’d gone to it with my mom. If so, it had vanished out of memory. It seemed likelier that I hadn’t seen it, however. My mom didn’t like movies with murders in them, let alone murder in the title. Mom has given up on movies altogether these days. As far as she was concerned, they stopped making good movies when Fred Astaire quit. Now I was investigating murders, but I didn’t see many movies either. It just didn’t seem to fit into my way of life. Not that I can’t work a VCR. I live alone and like to watch movies there from time to time. But movie theatres, no.
Kate stuck the film into the VCR and pushed PLAY on the remote. I was glad to see she could manage that. I’ve noticed that most people over fifty have trouble with VCRs unless they’re particularly handy types. They say if you want to use a VCR you ought to have a six-year-old in the house. I knew people who couldn’t watch movies on video once their kids left home. I didn’t usually get asked to showings at other people’s houses, and I couldn’t help wondering what the hell was on Kate’s mind.
I took a sip of my drink and sat back to watch, feeling rather the way I did when I visited my family. One did what they wanted to do, and movies, or the soaps, were better than the same old conversations, not that you could call them conversations.
It was an old tape, and groaned a little; the sound was not great. It opened with a 1930 scene about a kidnapping and murder of a little girl—very spotty and old-fashioned. Then we were in Istanbul five years later.
I’d gathered by now that this was an Agatha Christie job. I asked Kate when it had been written. She said in 1934. So we were being contemporary with old Agatha.
Watching, I slowly came to the sad conclusion that Kate had gone ballistic. We met the characters one at a time—two, if they were in love—all getting on the same damn train. Nice train, though. I liked those old trains with the steam and wheels, although some poor mug had to shovel coal to keep it going. We met Poirot, played by someone all wrong, in my opinion. I haven’t read much Christie that I can remember, but I have seen David Suchet, and he was my idea of Poirot. This guy looked like he was putting on an act and trying to appear small, which he wasn’t. Well, it turns out there’s a bad guy—we know that because he won’t let his secretary finish his soup, let alone the rest of the meal—and he ends up dead, drugged and stabbed lots of times. Everybody was made up to look aged and peculiar. I mean, I saw Wendy Hiller not long ago in one of the P. D. James mysteries on TV, and she looked older here than she did twenty-five years later. As for Ingrid Bergman . . . Well, never mind. Poirot interviewed them all one at a time, and seemed to me to be getting nowhere fast.
Why was Kate making us watch this creaking old mess with everybody in it famous? None of Poirot’s questions, let alone the answers, seemed to make any sense at all. He kept gathering facts and impressions, and none of them showed any sign of leading anywhere. Like me. I began to watch the movie a bit more closely, or anyway, less resentfully.
That this was all connected to the kidnapping we’d seen at the beginning was becoming clear. So far only one or two of the characters had admitted knowing the family of the kidnapped girl, but that was the way the wind was blowing—it all had to do with that crime, which had resulted, we learned, in the deaths of four other people besides: the kid’s father and mother, an accused housemaid who hanged herself because wrongly accused—I ask you—and, well there must have been one other, but at the moment I forget who.
Poirot solved it, of course. If you don’t know the end, I’m sorry to spoil it for you, but the movie’s so creaky you probably want to give it a miss. It turns out that everyone has lied, but Poirot knew the truth behind their lies, arrived at by reasoning I thought a bit farfetched. Detective story writers: they all make these leaps, which I could hardly do. What would Mr. Petrosky think if I summoned everyone before me and told them they were liars, but the truth was . . .
It turned out that they had all done it—planned it and done it together. They were all connected to the kidnapping and the household at that time. So they had drugged the mean guy and then each of them had plunged a dagger into him. Naturally, there turned out to be a convenient doctor in the Calais coach who could tell human from animal blood just by looking at it, and there turned out to be a snow-storm holding up the train so everything could be solved before they left the place where they were stuck. It all got enacted in replay before our eyes as Poirot explained it. No need to provide proof or anything like that. And then they decided to withhold everything and let the stupid police in the next town, in the Balkans of all places, assume the murderer escaped. I ask you. Everybody clicked glasses of champagne and all was well. Whoopie-do.
“Well, Kate,” I said as we reached the end of this riveting entertainment, “thank you for sharing that with me. I must say detective work was a lot easier in those days, at least in films.”
“Did you find it unrealistic?” she said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, allowing myself the relief of sarcasm. “But of all the preposterous, unlikely, stupid stories, this one takes the cake. And even if that was how the murder was done, there was no way Poirot could possibly have guessed it. To say nothing
of the fact that for no reason offered he seemed to have total recall of the five-year-old kidnapping that happened in a country he’d never even visited. Why should he have been able to solve anything as unsolvable as that crazy murder . . . ?”
And then I got it. Okay, I was pretty slow about getting it, but who am I to identify with Poirot and a movie supposedly set in Yugoslavia over a quarter of a century ago? Of course, I might have asked myself why Kate wanted me to watch this creaky old thing, and not just sit there assuming she was just another flaky academic.
“You think they all did it?” I said, holding out my glass.
Kate took it from me, fixed both of us new drinks, and sat down.
“It’s a guess,” Kate said. “No more than that. I don’t know what made me think of the book in connection with Clifton College—I thought of the book first, by the way. It was originally called Murder in the Calais Coach. Anyway, Reed happened to wonder if anyone read Agatha Christie anymore, and I said I thought so. It occurred to me to look at one of her mysteries just to see how it would strike me now. I hadn’t read her for ages. We had a few of her books, but it must have been my subconscious or dumb luck that made me pick this one. I read it, and was going to suggest you read it, when it seemed to me the film, which I did vaguely remember, would concentrate our attention better. End of story.”
She sipped her drink and then said, “Let’s go over all you know. Not out loud, but in our minds. After you’ve had a think, let me know if there is any reason this couldn’t have been a crime like Christie’s, with pills, of course, rather than a dagger.”
“There is one thing,” I said. “I never paid much attention to it before, but everyone kept talking about how horrible retsina tasted. I’ll have to go back and ask, but my impression is that much was made of its horrible taste, and the bottle may have just stood there a while, or been passed around as they discussed it.”