To Play the Fool

by Laurie R. King

  They were directly in front of him now, separated by four or five layers of people, and although his words were clear, Kate did not hear them. All her attention was on Eve Whitlaw, that dignified English professor who was now practically whimpering—she was whimpering, with the frustration of being unable to move the bodies ahead of her, those shoulders clad in knit cotton, shining heads of hair a foot above her own. Finally she just put her head down and began to push her way in, Kate close on her heels.

  He saw Kate first. His eyes rested on her calmly, sardonically, as if to say, Are you here again, my child? And then they dropped to look at the tiny woman emerging from the circle of onlookers before him. Kate saw the shock run through him, saw him rear up, his two-toned face draining of color, his head turning away even though his eyes were riveted on Eve Whitlaw. His mouth, his entire body were twisting away from her, and the expression on his face could only be one of sudden and complete terror.

  “David?” the professor cried. “David, my God, I thought you were dead!”

  And with her words, he turned and bolted through the crowd.

  Fifteen

  The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again.

  Kate would never have thought that a seventy-year-old man burdened by a wooden staff and overly large shoes could have evaded her, but this one did. His early advantage through the thinnest edge of the crowd while Kate was wading out from the very center got him to the road first. He shot across, to a screeching of tires and the blare of angry horns, and by the time Kate had threaded her way between the camper van and a taxi, he had vanished. He had to have entered Ghirardelli Square somehow, but the shopkeepers all looked at her dumbly and none of the other closed doors would open. Red-faced and cursing her lack of condition, she went to her car to radio for help but then stopped to think.

  What difference did his running make? That had not been the flight of a guilty man upon seeing a police officer; indeed, he hadn’t been the least bit disturbed at seeing her. She could hardly have him arrested for fleeing an old acquaintance—because that’s what he had been doing. He knew Eve Whitlaw, and she knew—David? Kate put down the handset and got out of the car. She could always put out a call for him later, if she needed to.

  Professor Whitlaw was sitting on a bench, looking pale, hugging her large black handbag to her chest. Kate sat down beside her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh yes, dear. Upset. It was a shock. For him, too, obviously. Oh my, how very stupid I was, bursting in on him like that.”

  “You know him,” Kate said, not as a question. “I mean personally.”

  “Oh my yes, I know him. Knew him. We worked together for ten years, what seems like a long, long time ago.”

  “David…Sawyer?”

  “You know of him, then?”

  “There was a note in your file, a personal communication from David Sawyer, dated October 1983.”

  “Lord, yes. I had forgotten that. Just three months before he disappeared. We all thought he was dead.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  She closed her eyes and put a shaky hand across her mouth. Kate looked up and noticed the last of the crowd, lingering to have the excitement explained. She shook her head at them and they began to drift away.

  “I don’t think I can go into it just here and now,” said the professor. “I feel very unsettled. I should like to pull my thoughts together first, if you don’t mind.”

  Truth to tell, she was looking old and badly shaken.

  “That’s fine. Let me take you back to your house; we can have a cup of tea. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to offer you?” The professor smiled at her gratefully.

  “The English panacea, yes. Tea for upsets, tea when you’ve been working, tea for hot and cold, thirst and hunger, tea to ease an awkward conversation. Yes, we shall drink tea.”

  While the kettle was heating in the cheerful pine kitchen, Kate borrowed the telephone in the study, closing the door behind her. She reached Al Hawkin on the third try, neither in his car nor in his office, but at home. She could hear the television in the background.

  “Al, this is Kate. I’m glad I reached you; I thought you might be in Palo Alto.”

  “Jani’s got a conference this weekend, so I’m catching up on paperwork and watching the moss grow on my carpet. What’s up?”

  “Professor Whitlaw knows who Erasmus is. I took her to see him, down on the lawn of Aquatic Park, and when he spotted her, he ran—literally. He was frightened of her, Al.”

  “You were there? And he got away from you?”

  “I know,” she said, embarrassed. “Only as far as the shops, but one of them was either hiding him or had let him out through a back door. I didn’t think I should make a big thing of it, though. I mean, he’s hardly your average Joe, if we want to pick him up again.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At Professor Whitlaw’s house down in Noe Valley. She’s going to tell me what she knows about Erasmus, or I should say David Sawyer. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Give me the address,” he said, and when she had described how to find the place, he growled, “Fifteen minutes. I need to shave first.”

  “Oh, give her a thrill, Al. She’ll think you’re doing undercover work.”

  He grunted and dropped the phone, and Kate replaced her own receiver, then stood looking at the walls of books that rose up on all sides. Two sides, she saw, were filled with an unlikely combination of medical texts (with an emphasis on childhood diseases and allergies) and best-seller hardbacks with brightly colored dust jackets (novels and the sort of non-fiction books everyone talks about but no one reads). One wall and the narrow shelves beside the door had been cleared for use by the temporary resident; these books were mostly old and lacking dust jackets, with library stickers on their spines. Ignoring the whistle of the teakettle and the sounds of cups and spoons, Kate ran her eye slowly over the assembled volumes until she found what she had thought would be there: The Fool: Order Through Chaos, Clarity from Confusion by David M. Sawyer, M. Div., Ph.D. She pulled it out, then saw another with the name Sawyer on the spine, a slim volume called The Reformation of the Catholic Church. She carried them both with her out to the kitchen and laid them on the oak table, which was looking slightly less polished than it had two days before.

  “You’ve found David’s books,” noted Professor Whitlaw. She put down the plate she was carrying and reached out for the book on top, the Church title. She held it in her right hand and, pinching the hollow of the binding between her left thumb and forefinger, she ran her fingers up and down the spine a couple of times before putting the book down again with an affectionate pat.

  “These are the only ones he wrote?”

  “There are two more, which I’ve loaned out, and he was halfway through a fifth one when he disappeared.”

  “If you don’t mind I’d like my partner to hear about Sawyer’s disappearance, too. His name is Al Hawkin; he’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

  “Of course not, I don’t mind waiting.”

  Kate looked again at the two books, which gave her a topic of peripheral conversation. “Isn’t that a broad sort of reach, from Catholicism to Fools? I thought scholarly types tended to specialize more than that.”

  “The Reformation book was his Ph.D. thesis, an investigation into how early Protestantism changed the Roman Catholic Church. And yes, you’d think the two topics unrelated, but David was interested in the ways an existing organization, when confronted by rebellion, moves not away from but toward its opposition. After Luther, the Roman Catholic authorities—” She was off, in full-fledged scholarly flight, and Kate did not even try to follow her. She just nodded at the pauses and waited for the doorbell to ring.

  When Hawkin arrived (shaven and dressed in tan shirt, tie, and tweedy sport jacket), the pot of tea had to be emptied and made anew, the plate of what the professor called “digestive biscuits” refilled, and tea begun again. Ev
entually they were settled, refreshed, and ready. Kate took out her notebook.

  “You want to know about David Sawyer,” Professor Eve Whitlaw began. “I first met David in London in 1971. It was July, the beginning of the long vac, and I was in the reading room of the British Library when he came up to my table and demanded to know why for the third time he had requested a book, only to be told that I had it. He was over from America, looking into the Fools movement, which was barely two years old and had caught his fancy. Our interests overlapped, so for the rest of his stay, which was, I think, a couple of weeks, we joined forces. Academically,” she added sternly, although the vision of even the most platonic relationship was inevitably amusing, given nearly two feet in height difference. Seeing neither suspicion nor humor in either bland detective face, she went on. “He was married and had a son. The family stayed in Chicago that summer, although the next year they came over with him. His wife was younger than he was, and the child was eight or nine.”

  “Where are they now?” Kate asked.

  “I think you’d best let me tell the story as it comes, if you don’t mind. As I said, we joined forces. I drove him around southern England to the various Fool centers, and he helped me with my work. He had a remarkable understanding of cult psychology, and he knew everyone in the field, it seemed. After he’d left, we corresponded. That first spring we wrote a joint article for a journal. The next summer when he came over with his family, they hired a house near Oxford, and for two months I practically lived with them. His wife was the loveliest person, had just finished her Ph.D. in early-childhood education, and their son was sweet, too. He had a mild speech defect and was at that sort of unformed age, but he had occasional sparkles of joy and intelligence. Ay, what a grand summer that was.

  “At the end of it, I went back to gray old London and they flew back to Chicago, and two months later I had a telephone call from David asking if I’d be interested in applying for a job. Teaching undergraduates, to start with, with some research time. I jumped at it, and I got it, and we worked together for the next ten years. They were the best ten years of my life,” she said, pursing her lips as if to keep from having to speak further.

  “Now comes the hard part. Perhaps I should point out that David was considerably higher up the ladder than I was. He worked almost exclusively with graduate students and on his own research. In a way, that was a pity, because he was one of the most stimulating lecturers I’ve ever heard. I used to pull him into my classes regularly, just for the pleasure of seeing their faces light up, and to see him respond to them. When he talked about church history, his voice would make poetry out of the councils and the heresies. Brilliant.

  “But for the most part, he had graduate students. Some of them were very good; a few were mediocre—he found it difficult to refuse anyone outright; he thought it better to let them discover their own limitations. There were a few disappointments, a couple of kids who were angry when they finally realized they weren’t world-movers, but mostly it went smoothly. Until Kyle.

  “I never liked Kyle Roberts, and I don’t think it’s only hindsight talking. I didn’t trust him, and I told David so, but he said it would be fine, that it was only Kyle’s rough edges. Kyle came from a very poor family, made it through on some minority scholarship, although he looked straight Caucasian to me, and basically he assumed the world owed him a living. What he wanted was to be a full professor at Yale, no less. David thought…Oh God. David thought it was funny. He thought that when Kyle really knew what he was getting into, he would settle for teaching in some lesser university, or a college. He should have taken his master’s degree and gone away, because he had a wife and two children to support, but his work was just good enough to keep him in the program. David and a couple of the others used to give him part-time jobs, research assistant and teaching aide, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I thought, frankly, that it was cruel to encourage a man who had working-class manners, a family to feed, and no brilliance to think of himself as top academic material.

  “Well. By the autumn of 1983, he had been in the program for five years. The first of the men and women he had entered with began to finish their programs, but he hadn’t even had the topic for his dissertation approved, much less written it. Now, that’s not all that unusual—a Ph.D. varies tremendously in how long it takes—but for him it was becoming a real problem, because in his own eyes he was brilliant.

  “Then in early December, one of the assistant professors announced that he was leaving, and Kyle went to David and said that he wanted the job. It was utterly impossible, of course. He might just have qualified as a candidate if he’d had the thesis in its final stages, but when he had not even begun to write it? There were at least forty others who would be completely qualified, so why lower the standards in order to get Kyle Roberts?

  “It all happened so quickly. Looking back, that’s the most baffling thing, that there was no time for clouds to form on the horizon, no warning. Kyle confronted David, and David finally told him the truth about his academic future. Politely at first and then, when Kyle just refused to understand, David became harder, until he finally lost his temper and said that Kyle was deluding himself if he thought he’d ever reach higher than assistant professor, and that he, David, would be hard put to write a letter of recommendation even for that.

  “Kyle had never had anyone he respected tell him that, and it simply shattered him. I saw him when he left David’s office—the whole building heard the argument—and he was just white. Stunned. I will never forget how he looked. And I know, I knew then, that any one of us could have rescued him, just by putting a hand out…. But we didn’t. He’d become too much of a leech to risk making contact. I let him walk past me.

  “He went home. But on his way, he stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a shotgun, and when he walked through his back door, he loaded it and shot his wife, his eight-year-old son, and his three-year-old daughter. The police later decided that he must have sat there for nearly an hour, and during that time he must have found his anger again, because instead of killing himself, he went to find David. It was dark. He went to David’s home. David was not back yet, but his wife and son were there, and so Kyle shot them both and then finally turned the gun on himself. Jonny died. He was nineteen. Charlotte, David’s wife, had a collapsed lung, but they saved her. She got out of the hospital just in time for Christmas.

  “David was utterly devastated, empty—an automaton. He wouldn’t go out, except to buy food for Charlotte and pick up her prescriptions. He wouldn’t talk to me; when I went to his house, he would not even look at me. The administration arranged for a leave of absence, of course, but he didn’t even sign the papers they sent him until the chair of the department went and stood over him.

  “Finally at the end of January, Charlotte was well enough to travel, and she went home to her parents’ house on Long Island. He drove her to New York and then went back to their house, just long enough to type out his letter of resignation, arrange a power of attorney for his lawyer so that all his personal assets could be transferred immediately to Charlotte, and make three phone calls to friends. I was one of them. All he said…” She swallowed, blinking furiously. “This is very difficult. All he said was that his vanity had…had killed five people and that he—Oh God,” she whispered as the tears broke free. “He said he loved me and wished me all good things, and would very probably not see me again. And he asked me to take care of Charlotte…. Thank you.” She seized the box of tissues Hawkin had put in front of her and buried her face in a handful of pink paper. “Ten years ago last month,” she said, and blew her nose a final time, “and it seems like yesterday.”

  She got up and walked into the kitchen, where she stood on the stool to splash water onto her face, then dried it with a kitchen towel and came back to the table.

  “We all assumed that he had gone somewhere and killed himself. He was very nearly dead already. And then today I see David Sawyer looking like an
old derelict and acting the Fool for tourists, and he runs at the sight of my face. And,” she added a minute later, “he is somehow involved in a murder. Yet another murder. Oh, poor, poor David.”

  Holding her threadbare dignity around her, she stumbled down from the tall chair and walked away down the hallway. A door opened and closed. Kate blew a stream of air through her pursed lips and looked at Hawkin.

  “I could understand if someone had bashed bim—Erasmus, or Sawyer. I’ve seen two good solid motives for killing him in the last few hours. But as for him killing someone else, I haven’t seen anything.”

  “John was a blackmailer,” said Hawkin quietly.

  “And he found out about Kyle and threatened to tell the other street people, so Erasmus bashed him to keep him quiet? I can’t see it, Al. Sorry.”

  “He ran.”

  “From her, not from me.”

  “She knows who he is. She’d give you the motive and ID him. Maybe if you hadn’t been there he would have lured her off to a quiet corner and whacked her one, too.”

  She leaned over the table to study his face, but it told her nothing.

  “Are you serious, Al? Or are you just playing with this?”

  “I’m mostly trying it out for size, but I will say that I’m not too happy he made a run for it. I don’t like the idea of him skipping town.”

  “Okay, you’re the boss. Do you want to put a call out for him tonight or wait and see if he shows up in the park tomorrow?”

  “We can wait. Meanwhile, see what you can find out about this Kyle Roberts thing. Where’s Sawyer’s wife now; was it really an open-and-shut murder/suicide; did Roberts have family that might want to even things up a bit?”