by Amanda Cross
“Some,” Kate said, since this seemed to require an answer. “But I’m not very good at ladling out sympathy. I try to respond as sensibly and forthrightly as I can, but to tell you the truth, I’m not the motherly type. Of the students who don’t like me, and their numbers are legion, half say I’m as hard as nails and the other half that I’m cold as a fish. They’re probably right.”
“You seem to me to be kind, and intelligent and sensible and able to keep things to yourself, and I simply don’t know what to do,” the girl said, and burst into tears.
“Blast,” Kate said. “I am sorry. Can I offer you my handkerchief, only slightly used to get something out of my nephew’s eye? The great advantage of country clothes is that they contain pockets, which city clothes, of course, never do—unless some dress designer has undergone an inspiration, and then the chances are ten to one he’s put the pocket in such a place you can’t put anything in it without looking as though you were starting a tumor—look here, Miss, I don’t even know your name, but whatever the problem is, I’m certain it can’t be as terrible as you think. Certain things, incurable diseases, are terrible—but most things only need to be expressed and they start getting into proportion. ‘Troubles told are troubles halved,’ as someone said, and if his little aphorism does sound simpering, it’s nonetheless true for that. What is your name?”
“Molly.”
“Look, Molly, if you’ve had the perception to see that I have an honest face, you’ve obviously got powers above the ordinary, and might as well take advantage of it. I don’t gossip, or care especially about making trouble—my sins lie in quite other directions—so if talking will help, allow me to offer my ear. Don’t you, by the way, think you ought to do something with that lovely mixture there? I’ve never made a cake in my life, but ought the milk to be soaking into the flour in those funny little channels?”
Molly smiled and turned on the electric mixer. “It will sound awfully foolish to you,” she said.
“Probably. You’d be amazed how few human deeds don’t sound foolish. My own follies are innumerable. With a girl as young and lovely as you it must be either a man or money; which is it? And you may not realize it, but if you plan to tell me you’d better hurry up about it or I’ll begin sounding like a character in a bad play.”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
“I see. Mr. Bradford’s baby?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“People often make the mistake, Molly, of thinking that one learns nothing from books. One learns a great deal, actually. You’re obviously in love with him. How pregnant are you?”
“Oh, I don’t want an abortion, if that’s what you mean?”
“That is not what I mean. I was simply wondering, as they say in bad plays, how long this has been going on.”
“I met Brad first at auctions—my father is one of the main auctioneers in the county, and I used to go with him. Farmers’ auctions, I mean. At first we only talked, but then—well, we knew we cared for each other.”
“You must have met somewhere besides auctions, though admittedly my only experience of auctions is Parke-Bernet, where . . .”
“We did go out for meals sometimes, or for a drive. But we didn’t, nothing happened, of course. He was married.”
“And continued to be until he became a widower, what is it, four days ago? You can’t have discovered you’re pregnant in that amount of time. Now you know what is meant by ‘hard as nails.’ ”
“You’re right. If a man’s married, it doesn’t make any difference how he feels about his wife, or what she does.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Frankly, Molly, I met his wife, and I should think that even the archangel Gabriel would forgive her husband for taking love anywhere he could find it, let alone with anyone as sweet as you. If I sounded harsh, it’s because I’ve become a little sensitive about self-righteousness this summer. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve just about said it, the way we felt. The reason we—it happened, finally, was because Brad said—he said she’d been unfaithful to him.”
“Mary Bradford! I don’t believe she could have stopped talking long enough. Is it possible?”
“He said—I’m afraid this sounds terrible. Brad said she’d only have done it if she was certain she could make two men absolutely miserable while she was at it. Him and the other one.”
“I see. Incidentally, didn’t all the years Brad has spent inseminating cows teach him anything about where babies come from?”
“That was my fault. Brad got me pills. But . . .”
“But you forgot to take them, one or two days.” Molly hung her head. “You know, my dear, there’s nothing like wanting to get pregnant by a man to whom you’re not married to increase fertility. I wonder it hasn’t been looked into more. It’s the same principle by which married women who can’t conceive always manage it the minute they take a job, return to school, or plan a trip to Europe. Well, marry Brad and have the baby. I’m morally certain you’ll be a better mother to his other two than the late departed.”
“Don’t you see,” Molly said, pouring the batter into cake tins, and then putting the tins in the oven, “everyone is sure to say he murdered his wife. They won’t be able to prove it, I guess, but why shouldn’t Brad have put the bullet in the gun? He knew all about guns, and he knew all about their pretending to shoot.”
“How did he know that?”
“The little boy told him.”
“Leo?”
“Yes. He and the young man who takes care of him, they used to come down to see Brad, and ride on the baler, or in the hay wagon. Brad told me the boy loved riding in the hay wagon and dodging the bales as they were thrown in. I’m sure the boy—Leo—didn’t mean to say it was Mary they were shooting at, but I’m sure he did. Anyway, Brad told me about it.”
“I must be a very inattentive aunt. I didn’t even know Leo was riding in the hay wagon. It sounds rather dangerous, dodging bales of hay. But then, William was supposed to . . .”
“We can’t go on living here if everyone thinks Brad killed his wife. And he didn’t, Miss Fansler. You’ve got to believe that. Brad wouldn’t.”
“Molly, let me give you one piece of ponderous advice. Never worry about what people think—people, that is, whom you don’t care for and whose opinions you don’t respect. And the odd thing is, once you stop caring what people say, they largely stop saying it. I don’t deny it may be hard on the children if you stay here with this murder over your heads—but anywhere Brad farms, the story is bound to turn up, so why not face it out here? There is, you know, always the chance that they will find out who really put the bullet in the gun. Live your life. Marry Brad, love his children, all of them, and stop paying attention to people who aren’t worth ten seconds’ thought.”
“I feel better. You won’t tell anyone what I’ve told you.”
“I don’t promise that. I will almost certainly tell Mr. Amhearst, who is, so to speak, working on the case. But trust me not to tell anyone who isn’t capable of keeping a confidence. Mr. Amhearst, by the way, is as likely to start gossiping with the neighbors as I am to become Shah of Persia, so don’t brood about it.”
“Will you have a cup of coffee?”
“Thank you. And then I must get back and join my guests for lunch.”
“Please wait till the cake’s finished and take it with you.”
“I mustn’t wait that long,” Kate said, glancing at her watch, “but if you really want to make Leo madly happy, and send us all off our diets, we’ll pick the cake up when we come to sit with the children, say at seven?”
“I’ll send the cake up this afternoon. Don’t think about sitting with the children, Miss Fansler. I like it here. I don’t really want to go out anywhere at all.”
“That’s so obviously true, I won’t urge you. When Leo comes home, I’ll send him down f
or the cake. Will you promise to let me know if there’s any practical way I can be of help?”
“Miss Fansler, do all your students burst into tears at the sight of you and tell you all their troubles.”
“Only the few who notice my heart of gold beneath the rough exterior. Don’t fret, Molly, it’s not good for the baby. I’ll stop in again in a few mornings, and we’ll confine our conversation to the weather, if that happens to be all you feel like talking about. Thank you for the coffee.”
It’s all very well, Kate thought, scuffing her way back up the road, but what a motive! And who, after all, knew more about guns than Brad? His one defense might have been that he didn’t know those two idiots were shooting at his wife, but Molly’s now told me he did know. Can anyone be as innocent as she is and not be innocent? It would require a kind of doublethink I refuse to believe her capable of. What a ghastly mess. If Brad did do it, we can never prove it. It’ll hang over his head all his life, and over William’s head as well. But what way out is there? We are scarcely likely to find any hot clues now. If this were happening in one of those marvelous books by Ngaio Marsh, we would reenact the whole thing, starting with Saturday morning, and in the course of it the guilty one would give himself away. But I fear that’s beyond our powers. Inspector Alleyn’s methods are no doubt fine for Scotland Yard, but here in Araby it would merely seem as though we’d all gone crackers. Damn Reed. Why isn’t he here to discuss this with me?
Reed, at the moment, was walking the pavements of New York musing, astonishingly, upon the breeze-swept meadows of Araby. The pavements seemed actually to absorb the heat and send it forth, many times increased. But the offices in which dwelt Calypso Publishing were air-conditioned. The receptionist who greeted Reed added her own coolness to the atmosphere, as though she suspected him of trying to offer her a lengthy, hand-written, unsolicited manuscript. When she learned that he wanted to see Mr. Farrell, her general suspicion of authors became visibly transmuted into a particular suspicion of salesmen.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Not. Will you be good enough to take in my card, and tell Mr. Farrell I would like to see him on a matter of some importance?”
“Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll see.” She returned shortly to announce that Mr. Farrell was on the long-distance telephone, but would be out shortly.
Ed Farrell, when he appeared, turned out to be a tall, handsome graying man of troubled mien. Reed got the impression that he spent many hours sitting up with authors, and was glad to see someone not large with book. “You haven’t written something, have you?” he asked, as though unwilling to take Reed’s nonwriting status on faith.
“I haven’t even written a letter since my mother died five years ago,” Reed said. “Thank you for seeing me. I’ll try to be as quick as I can.”
“What’s the district attorney’s office investigating now? Salacious literature? We don’t print it.”
“As it happens, Mr. Farrell, I’m here under false pretenses, and I had better tell you that straightaway.”
“You’re not an assistant district attorney?”
“I am, yes. But there’s nothing official about my visit to you. In fact, I’m on vacation, and was on an assignment in England before that, so I haven’t been near the office in months. On the other hand, this is not entirely a private matter either. It concerns a murder.”
“You fascinate me. I don’t read mysteries, though we publish, I am told, some of the best. In fact, I agree with that brainy critic who didn’t care who killed Roger Ackroyd. But none of us, I imagine, is above the thrill of murder in real life, particularly if we don’t know the victim.”
“I’m staying in the country with Kate Fansler. A woman was accidentally shot near the house, by one of her houseguests. We have reason to think that the shooting may not have been as accidental as it looked—that is, that someone loaded the gun, knowing that it would be aimed in the belief that it was not loaded.”
“How extraordinary. I know Kate, of course. Sam Lingerwell left all his papers to his daughter, and Kate’s helping her look over them. Don’t tell me you think she shot this woman. Kate’s incapable of killing anything but a mosquito. She’s even a great defender of spiders, whom she insists on calling our friends. Kate’s all right, isn’t she?”
“Fine, at least, as far I know. But interestingly enough, she set out last night on her way to see you.”
“Really? I never heard from her.”
“Not unnaturally, since she didn’t get to call you. Her car was tampered with, and the license stolen; she ended up in a police station.”
“She’s not in jail?”
“No. We prevailed on the officer in charge to be merciful. I want to ask you this, Mr. Farrell. Did anyone call you last night and urge you not to reveal something or other to anyone, under any circumstances?”
Mr. Farrell looked at Reed as though he had at last been granted a vision of the Delphic oracle. “Did you tap the telephone line?” he asked.
“Of course not. Can I persuade you to answer my question?”
“In a general sort of way, yes, considering your position and that you’re a friend of Kate’s. Someone did call last night, though not until rather late. I wasn’t within reach of a phone till I got home about eleven. Maybe a little before.”
“And he reached you then?”
“Yes. Always accepting ‘he’ as a pronoun applying to both sexes.”
“Did he mention that he had been unable to reach you in the afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“What I want to know, Mr. Farrell, is what that man, for I think it was indeed a man, said to you. I give you my word, as a lawyer, a district attorney, a man, and incidentally a friend of Miss Fansler’s, that the information will not be used, or made public, unless it becomes essential to the solution of the murder. And in that case, I feel certain you would not consider it proper to keep silent after all.”
“You put me in a very difficult situation, Mr. Amhearst.”
“I’m aware of that, and believe me, I’m sorry. Kate seems to think a lot of you, and of course, as you know, she thought the world of Sam Lingerwell, whose firm you are now the head of.”
“Only editor-in-chief of the trade department.”
“Kate seems to think that you’re the one who matters.”
Mr. Farrell stood up. “Will you excuse me a moment, Mr. Amhearst? I’ll be right back.” He went out, shutting the door behind him, leaving Reed to look at the bookshelves, filled with books published by the Calypso Press. It occurred to him, not for the first time, what an extraordinary human endeavor a book was. Mr. Farrell returned in fifteen minutes.
“All right, Mr. Amhearst, I’ll talk, as they used to say in the movies when I was a boy. I’ve told them not to interrupt me with any calls, and to put off my appointment. Oh, never mind, just some hungry young idea man with a book that will sell in the thousands and not add one cubit to human stature. I went out to check on you. Anyone, after all, can have a card made up, or steal one, and know Kate Fansler, or say he does. Also any sort of man could be an assistant district attorney. We have a book of memoirs being done for us now by Justice Standard White, who used to be on the Federal Court of Appeals.”
“I worked for him at one time.”
“So he informed me, though I had only hoped he would have heard of you sufficiently to give you a recommendation. I’ve always thought it a great pity that he was never appointed to the Supreme Court, but no doubt we can discuss the vagaries of American justice on another occasion. He said he would trust you with his most treasured secret, should he have one. I also asked him to describe you. I may not read spy stories for pleasure, but one need only read the newspapers to know the odd things that happen every day, including impersonations.”
“How did he describe me?”
“He said your c
lothes were Brooks Brothers, your manners Groton, your ideas Stevensonian (Adlai, that is), and that you looked like an extremely attenuated Trevor Howard with glasses.”
Reed laughed. “It ought to be a very good book when he gets it written.”
“So we believe and hope. Now, as to our problem.”
“Perhaps I can simplify your unwelcome task by saying that I’m virtually certain the man who called you was Padraic Mulligan. What we can’t imagine, frankly, is what he’s got to conceal. I gather, from what Kate tells me, that he isn’t the greatest writer of literary criticism since Matthew Arnold, but supposedly anyone could find that out by reading his books.”
“That’s the understatement of the century. He pours out books on modern fiction—‘modern’ being for him an elastic term to cover any work since Shakespeare he feels like mentioning—and makes a great many generalities about modern chaos together with plot summaries.”
“Kate says he writes with some felicity.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Farrell.
“Do you mean he doesn’t write his own books? You’d think he’d find someone at least competent to write them for him.”
“Oh, he writes them, all right. At least, nobody else does.”
“Mr. Farrell, you intrigue me. Has he blackmailed someone in the firm? Not you, I hope.”
“It’s hard these days to blackmail anyone who’s heterosexual and hasn’t actually left evidence of a major crime. That is, if that’s what you mean by blackmail. Actually, he has blackmailed me, though the word is perhaps a trifle harsh. Book publishing is a business. Tell me, Mr. Amhearst, Justice White described you as a man of few frivolities. I gather that you read every word in the Times, enjoy an occasional decorous evening at the Plaza, and go to the movies and theater from time to time. Have you heard of Frank Held?”
“You don’t have to be wildly frivolous to have heard of him. Like having heard of the Beatles; one can’t help it. I’ve seen some of the movies about him—all naked women and complicated gadgets. I particularly enjoyed the one where the girl . . .”