"Oh, dear, I keep forgetting about the police. Are they getting restive?"
"Well," Nicola said, "this Daniel Messenger is a help, whoever he is. I got out of one of those detectives that he"s a geneticist, at least that"s what Emanuel says he sounds like from my rather garbled description; but apparently he"s involved in studying some mysterious disease that only Jews get, or that only Jews don"t get, in some Italian (I think) places, and apparently if they can find the clue to this evasive tolerance or intolerance they"ll know something more about heredity. As to whether they, the police, believe that Emanuel and I never heard of him, who, including the police, can tell?"
Kate looked at Emanuel. "She never mentioned him, I take it, or any theories about genes?" Emanuel shook his head. Kate saw that he was becoming depressed, and her heart went out to him, but there was little, except helping Nicola to babble at him, that she could do. Nicola"s mother, Kate learned, had carried the children off to her country home. They had been hearing too much here, and allowing them to go a week after the murder did not seem so much a capitulation before the fates.
"Dr. Barrister doesn"t have office hours on Fridays, is that right?" Kate asked Nicola.
"No," Nicola said. "Why?"
"I have come to ask questions," Kate said sententiously, "not to answer them."
"Are there any questions left to ask?" Emanuel said.
"Very many," Kate said firmly. "But you are not to repeat any of them to the police. Or to anyone else," she added firmly, looking at Nicola. "Here are some questions: Who stole the porter"s uniform on the morning Janet Harrison"s room was robbed?" Emanuel and Nicola both stared at her in astonishment, but she hurried on. "Why was her room robbed? Was it merely as some idiot suggested, that a frustrated man wanted one of her more intimate garments?"
"Are you drunk?" Emanuel asked.
"Don"t interrupt. If that is so, who is this man? Why did Janet Harrison make a will? It"s rather an odd thing for an unmarried young woman to do. Who is Daniel Messenger, that she should will to him, or he to her? Although your erstwhile patient, Emanuel, seems to have led a most circ.u.mspect life, to put it mildly, she was seen with a man. Who was he? Who saw her?"
"If you don"t know who saw her, how do you know she was seen?" Nicola asked.
"Stop interrupting. You may take notes, or just listen, but let me finish. I am organizing my thoughts. Why did Janet Harrison decide to study English literature when she had started in history, with a bypath into nursing? Why nursing? Why did she come to New York to study English literature?"
"That"s easy," Emanuel said. "She knew there was a charming lunatic named Kate Fansler teaching there."
Kate ignored him. "What worried Janet Harrison about the present? What worried her about the past? Who is the young man whose picture she cherished and hid? Did the police show you that? You didn"t recognize it. Neither has anyone else. Why? Or rather, why not? What about Richard Horan? What about Frederick Sparks? What about the window cleaner?"
"Window cleaner?"
"Well, it just occurred to me, perhaps a window cleaner, who might have some sort of thing about women on couches, who knew her from cleaning the office windows when she was there, or the waiting rooms windows while she was waiting, had observed the routine of your house, and stabbed her one day when he happened to glance in on his way to clean someone else"s windows, and had perhaps by now forgotten the whole thing. Who cleans your windows?"
If her object had been to distract Emanuel, she had succeeded. He laughed, and went to get them all a drink. "The office windows aren"t ever cleaned when patients are there," Nicola said. "And anyway, we don"t have a window cleaner. Pandora does them. There"s no danger of falling out, you know, and, in any case, the outside ones are done by the house, because they are a special job owing to the bars across them. But do explain all your other fascinating questions. How do you know Frederick Sparks?"
"I don"t know him."
"Then why are you going to a party with him?"
"Because I am Kate Fansler, the great detective," she said. Yet suddenly she thought: It"s all very well, there are a lot of questions and they add up nicely, but shall we ever find the answers? And why did Emanuel"s six o"clock patient cancel? That was, perhaps, the most important question of them all. Having lifted Emanuel from the pit of despair, she was about to tumble into it herself when the telephone rang. "It"s for you, Kate," Emanuel called from the kitchen.
"But n.o.body knows I"m here," Kate said, taking up the phone.
"I guessed," came Reed"s voice, "when there was no answer at home. Can you have dinner?"
"I"m having dinner here. Then I"m going to a party to meet Frederick Sparks."
"Why not take me along? Together, we"ll turn him inside out."
"Nonsense, I"ll do better myself. If you"re there, and everybody discovers you"re an a.s.sistant District Attorney, we"ll spend the evening discussing why so many people bribe policemen. You forget, I"ve been to parties with you before."
"All right, you ungrateful wretch, then I"ll have to give you my great piece of news over the phone. I hope I can conclude that no one but you can hear the sound of my voice."
"Oh, quite."
"Good. Dr. Michael Barrister was once sued for malpractice. It had the looks of quite a nasty case, but was apparently settled. Of course, doctors carry malpractice insurance."
"What had he done?"
"Apparently some woman began to grow hair on her chest. Years ago, of course."
"Are you trying to be funny?"
"I couldn"t be that funny, even if I tried. Remember, Kate, it probably doesn"t mean a thing. The patient in the case had no connection with Janet Harrison. But I thought it might encourage you to know that at least someone in this benighted case has a blot on his escutcheon."
"Reed! Does this mean they"re really starting to look elsewhere?"
"Let"s say I"m encouraging them. But don"t get your hopes up. It"s a big step from hormones to a knife plunged home."
"Thanks, Reed. I"m sorry about tonight."
"I should hope so," said Reed, and hung up.
When they sat down to dinner, Kate asked Emanuel to explain to her about hormones. He began by saying he knew very little about it, he hadn"t followed developments in the field since his days at medical school, and then he began, as only Emanuel could, to discourse on the subject. At first Kate understood every third word, and then she understood every sixth, and then she caught only a familiar conjunction every dozen words or so, and then she stopped listening. If this case is going to require a detailed knowledge of endocrinology, she thought, I"d better give up right now. Yet, even at that moment, the telephone was ringing in her apartment, peal after unanswered peal, only mildly frustrating to one with a message which was to mark, for the three of them at the dinner table, and for one other, the beginning of the end.
Eleven.
FROM the moment when Kate, bottle in hand, arrived at the party, she felt like someone at an amus.e.m.e.nt park being thrust on one dizzy ride after another. She met her host for only a moment when he seized the bottle, thanked her, and introduced, inaudibly, four or five people standing about. These glanced at Kate, decided she was a specimen of which they already had a sufficient number in their collection, and went on discussing some intramural college fight the central issue of which, if there was one, Kate did not manage to grasp. Lillian had warned her that when members of this department got together, they never discussed anything but department politics, the exigencies of the teaching schedule, the insufficiencies of the administration and the peculiarities-moral, physical, psychological, and s.e.xual-of certain absent members. What Kate was not prepared for was the violence with which all these things were discussed, the enthusiasm with which points were made which must certainly, it seemed, have been made before.
Several aspects of the gathering surprised Kate not at all. One was the amount of alcoholic stimulation which members of the academic profession could withstand. They were by no means constant drinkers, but as members of an underpaid profession, they drank whenever they got the chance. This had long since been discovered by textbook publishers, whose habit it was, at any official academic convention, to rent a room and hand round the drinks with a free hand. Nor was Kate surprised that literature was nowhere being discussed. People whose profession was the study of literature did not discuss it when they foregathered, unless the question concerned the const.i.tution of courses or the a.s.signment of them. The reasons for this were obscure and complex, and Kate had never thoroughly a.n.a.lyzed them. She had been present with enough groups of doctors, lawyers, economists, sociologists, and others to know that it took the talents of a Svengali to get them to talk about anything at all besides their subjects.
Yet the people here suffered, apparently, from the fact that they were employed not by an educational inst.i.tution, but by a bureaucratic system. They were all, to a large extent, clerks, neatly bound up in red tape, and, like clerks, they gave themselves the illusion of freedom by discussing and ridiculing the strictures that bound them. Kate thought lovingly of her own university, where one struggled, G.o.d knew, against the ancient sins of favoritism, flattery, and simony, but where the modern horrors of bureaucracy had not yet strangled her colleagues or herself.
"My final exam in 3.5," one young man was saying, "was scheduled for the last day of the exam period, and they wanted the marks in within twenty-four hours. I pointed out that I could not possibly read thirty-five examinations with anything approaching fairness, let alone intelligence, and why couldn"t I get the grades in three days later? Do you know what the dean of Utter Confusion said-actually said-sitting there in his huge office, while the faculty, of course, far from having an office, can"t even find a drawer in which to place their private belongings? He said, *But the IBM machines must begin to operate twenty-four hours after the exam period is over." The IBM machines. Why? I ask you, why? But at least I discovered whom the college is run for. One knew, of course, that it wasn"t run for the students or the faculty; after all, this isn"t Oxford or Cambridge. I had thought it was run for the administration, or the building and grounds committee. But no! It"s run for the IBM machines. Do you know, when I was filling out all those atrocious little grade cards for the IBM machine, with that revolting little pencil one has to use, I wanted to write F--- Y-- right across the d.a.m.n thing, and see what the IBM machine would make of that, the cybernetic little b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"
"That"s nothing. The other day I got one of those apt.i.tude exam results, all figured out by machine, and that idiotic student counselor ..." Kate moved off in the direction of Frederick Sparks, slowly, for she didn"t want to appear to have been stalking him. Lillian had pointed him out to her. He sat back in his chair, gla.s.s in hand, observing the room with the pleasant superiority of one who has emerged successful from the struggle for tenure, and has not yet dropped, screaming, into the pit where promotion is fought for.
Kate sat down on the chair next to him, for most people, the better to make their points, were standing; she asked him, with a regrettable lapse of originality, for a match. He produced an elegant lighter and lit her cigarette with a flourish.
"Are you a friend of Harold"s?" he asked. But apparently he accepted the fact that she must be, for he went on to ask if she taught, and where. Kate told him. He expressed envy. Kate, with some dishonesty, asked why she was to be envied. "I"ll give you an example," he said, swinging around in his chair to face her. "How many mimeographed communications have you received so far this semester?"
"Mimeographed communications? Oh, I don"t know. Four or five, I guess, perhaps more. Announcements of department meetings, and that sort of thing. Why do you ask?"
"Because I have had hundreds, hundreds, thousands, perhaps, by now, and so has everyone else. Not only announcements of committee meetings to discuss every conceivable and inconceivable subject upon the face of the earth, but announcements from the administration: all students wearing shorts or blue jeans must be reported; the faculty is reminded that smoking is not permitted on the stairs (this of course is a cozy one, because if a man and woman faculty member want to have five minutes" conversation, and happen to be smokers, they must either retire to the faculty lounge, which is a nest of political intrigue, and in any case is usually given over to some student function, or they can one or the other indulge in transvestism and retire to the men"s or ladies" room, as the case might be, because smoking is allowed there, or they can smoke on the stairs, which is what they do). Or, there may be an announcement that the pencil sharpener has been moved to Room 804 (if not out of the building altogether). Or, there may be an announcement the garbage will now be collected from the courtyard immediately outside the cla.s.sroom windows every afternoon from one to five. The administration realizes that this will make teaching practically impossible (have you ever heard the noise of a garbage truck close up?), but the faculty must learn which are the important problems in the running of a college. I once got a mimeographed atrocity asking me to come and discuss methods of giving the faculty more time for original work. I wrote back that the best way I could think of was not to hold meetings discussing it. As I say, I envy you."
"I hear you"re to be congratulated on getting tenure."
"Where did you hear that? I"m not to be congratulated; I"m to be pitied. Gustave is pleased because we now know we shall eat regularly, and retire on a pension; but if I had an ounce of guts I would say: *You idiots, don"t give me tenure; I am already dreadfully inclined to indolence, la.s.situde, self-indulgence, and procrastination. You have enough deadwood in this benighted inst.i.tution, enough minds which have not been penetrated by a new thought since the possibility of nuclear fission filtered through; but, no, you are a political inst.i.tution; you must offer me what the ma.s.ses crave: security." Of course, it is possible that I shall succeed. That I shall break out from the bounds of faculty life."
"Write a great book?"
"No. Become a member of the administration. Then I shall have a carpet, a whole desk to myself, and perhaps one for my secretary, a larger salary and the right to be nostalgic about teaching. Will you have another drink?"
"That, at least, is the same at my inst.i.tution," said Kate, declining the drink with a shake of her head. "As somebody said, the reward for teaching well is to stop teaching." Kate was not really fooled by his manner. Beneath the gabble of exaggeration, and the chi-chi reference to his dog (she should really have asked, "But who is Gustave?"), Kate suspected a first-rate brain and a daunted personality. She had no doubt he possessed the guts, the brains and the egoism essential to the stabbing of anyone, but had he done it? Ardent lovers of dogs are frequently those who cannot bear any less than an unquestioning love. He would certainly have had the nerve to make those phone calls. Could he have been attracted to Janet Harrison, largely because she was noncommunicative and withdrawn, and then have offered love, to have it rejected? "How many days a week do you teach?" she asked.
"Four, G.o.d help me. And next semester it may well be five. This semester I happen, through the queerest chance of fate, to have Monday off."
"Do you teach in the mornings on all the other days?" Kate hoped the question did not sound as pointed to him as it did to her.
"I will show you my schedule," he said, reaching into an inner pocket. "You might think that this late in the year I would know my schedule. But, in fact, our schedules are so complicated that if I were to commit this to memory it would take up so much s.p.a.ce in my meager brain that I would forget something else, like Anglo-Saxon." He handed her the schedule.
It was indeed extraordinary. He taught a course labeled 9.1 at nine on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, ten on Thursday, and ten (!) on Friday. Kate asked the reason for this oddity, while thinking, Here is an alibi, clear and straightforward.
"Oh, but it"s very simple, really, provided you have the peculiarly inchoate mind of the man arranging these things. Some students are on P schedules, or Q, or S or W. This means they must swim at a certain time one day, and eat at a certain time on another, and on no condition be on the stairs at a certain time on the third. All this gets whirred around, and here we are. Sometimes it works out that a cla.s.s will meet at one, and then again at three on the same afternoon. There"s a pedagogical challenge, if you want one."
"Do you ever cut any cla.s.ses?"
"Never, unless of course one is dying. If one simply cannot teach, one meets the little darlings, and then tells them to run along, Papa isn"t feeling well today. Of course, since the state is paying for them, and not they or their fond parents, they scamper off overjoyed and certain they have got away with something. What you must never do is get a friend to take your cla.s.ses. If the friend is seen (and we are thick with spies), it will be reported to Big Brother, and both of you will have something to answer when you come before P. and B. You look, I am pleased to say, horrified. But the fact is that while the faculty is the only thing without which you cannot have a first-rate inst.i.tution, it is the last element considered here. When, several years ago, polio shots became compulsory, they were given first to the administration, then to the kitchen staff, then to building and grounds, then to the students, and finally (always hoping there would be some serum left), to the faculty. The IBM machines would have got it first, had anyone been able to discover where to administer the injection."
On an impulse, Kate drew what she now thought of as the picture from her purse and handed it to Sparks. "Have you ever seen him?" she asked. "I thought perhaps he might have been a student here," she glibly lied.
Sparks took the picture and studied it with care. "I never forget a face," he said. "Not a boast, just a fact. But I never remember voices or names, which is, I am told, not insignificant. Do you know, I don"t think I"ve met this chap, but I may have pa.s.sed him on the stairs, or perhaps only gone up an elevator with him once in an office building. It"s not the whole face though; the eyes are wrong. But the shape of it-well, it"s no use, but if I think whom he reminds me of I"ll let you know. Did you mislay him somehow?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. I thought he might be connected with Janet Harrison, a student of mine."
"What! The young lady stabbed on the couch? I was there when they discovered her body, you know. Was she a student of yours?"
"You were there?"
"Yes. Bauer happens to be my a.n.a.lyst too. Speaking of faces, hers was extraordinary. I used to come early sometimes, if the d.a.m.n subway didn"t tie me up, just to look at it."
"Did you ever talk to her?"
"Certainly not. As I told you, I"m not much on voices, except my own, which I like to hear going on and on. Besides, suppose that face had turned out to have a squeaky, nasal voice? I could never have enjoyed it again. Tell me, by the way, did she?"
"Have a nasal voice? No. It was a quiet voice, yet nervous. Is Bauer a good a.n.a.lyst?"
"Oh, yes. First-rate. Excellent at hearing what one doesn"t say, which with me, of course, is all-important." And suddenly, as though to give Kate the opportunity to hear what he did not say, he leaned back and literally vanished behind a curtain of silence. Kate, who disliked parties, and was tired, felt depressed. Reed had been right. Detective was not a game you played at because you admired Peter Wimsey, and had a friend in a fearful jam. She had crashed a party, cornered this man, bewildered Lillian, and all to what purpose? Did it signify that he was teaching at the hour after ten on the day when the uniform was stolen? He had kept his appointment with Emanuel. Could he possibly have got up to the women"s dormitory to rob Janet Harrison"s room? It seemed unlikely. Could he have hit out at this quiet girl because he loathed himself for succ.u.mbing to an inst.i.tution he did not respect? You have developed quite a talent for questions, Kate told herself, but you have not found a single answer.
Kate said Good night and Thank you to her host, who clearly did not remember who she was, waved to Lillian, and found herself a taxi. What next? Supposedly Jerry would have got something from Horan, but was he likely to have got more from him than she had from Sparks? So help me, Kate thought, if this case is ever settled, I"ll never ask another question apart from literature as long as I live!
Firm in this resolution, Kate paid off the taxi and entered the lobby of her house to find Reed asleep there on a chair. She woke him, none too gently.
"I wanted to see you," he said. "It seems to me that if you"re trying to be a detective you ought to stay home and answer the telephone instead of drinking at parties, forcing yourself on people and asking idiotic questions."
"I agree with you," Kate said, leading him into the apartment.
"Let me make some coffee," Reed said.
"Why all this solicitude? I"ll make you some coffee."
"Sit down. I"ll put up the coffee and then I want to talk to you. Two more things have come up-one is fascinating, though I"ll be d.a.m.ned if I can make any sense of it, and the other is a little frightening. I"ll take the frightening one first." Maddeningly, he vanished into the kitchen, where Kate followed him.
"What is it? I"ve been sitting down all evening. Is Emanuel in more trouble?"
"No. You are."
"I?"
"How wonderful to be a professor of English! Anyone else would have said *Me?" The police have received a letter, Kate. Anonymous, of course, and impossible to trace, but they don"t pay as little attention to these things as they would like people to think. It"s quite coherently written, and accuses you of murdering Janet Harrison."
"Me?"
"It claims, one, that the article you published a month ago in some learned journal or other on James"s use of the American heroine was written by, and stolen from, Janet Harrison. You had not published enough, and were concerned about your career. It claims, two, that you and Emanuel were lovers, that you are still in love with him, resented his marriage to Nicola, and planned to get rid of the girl who was a threat, and to ruin Emanuel and incidentally Nicola, whom you loathe. It points out further that you have no alibi, know the Bauer home intimately, and knew the girl well enough to get her confidence and sit behind her. It makes a few other accusations, but those are the main ones. Oh, and it does mention that you robbed her room to rid the place of any notes she might have made toward the article. Now, just calm down and listen to me a minute. It doesn"t explain why you should have published the article and only got the wind up after the article had appeared. But it"s a pretty cogent case, and the police are taking it with some seriousness. They have also noted that you spend a good deal of time at the Bauer house, possibly covering your tracks, and that you went tonight to meet Frederick Sparks because he may have seen something and you wanted to find out if he had."
"How do they know where I was tonight? Did you tell them?"
"No, my dear, I did not. They extracted that information, very cleverly, from the Bauers."
"Is that why you wanted to go to meet him with me?"
"No. I only heard about this later. Since I"m poking my nose into something which isn"t my business, I can"t get my information hot off the griddle. Let"s have some coffee."
Kate touched his arm. "Reed, do you believe any of this?"
But he had placed the cups, saucers, spoons, sugar, cream, and coffeepot on a tray and carried them off into the living room.
Twelve.
"DO you believe it, Reed? No, don"t pour me any coffee, I couldn"t possibly swallow it." Reed poured it, nonetheless, and placed it in front of her.
"I said my news was frightening; I didn"t say it was terrifying. And if you ask me again if I believe it, I"ll beat you. Quite apart from all other considerations, do you think I would help someone, even someone for whom I felt grat.i.tude and affection, to cover up a murder? What is true is that I know you, and do not know Emanuel, and therefore understand a little better how you felt about wanting to help him. That"s something, isn"t it? Now, please, drink your coffee. Kate, Kate, please don"t. As I shall point out in a minute, this is really the best break you"ve had so far, in your crusade for Emanuel. You didn"t expect to fight dragons and not even scratch your finger, did you? Here, use mine. I have never understood why no woman ever has a handkerchief, except in her purse, which is usually in another room. And I haven"t told you my fascinating bit of news yet."
"I"ll be all right in a minute. And you know, the girl wasn"t found, after all, anywhere near me. How Emanuel must feel-how completely betrayed by circ.u.mstances! And do you know the first thing I thought-the first horrible, sniveling, petty thought I had-What will this do to me at the university? Can they possibly want a professor who"s been accused of murder? Yet it touches me nowhere as near as it touches Emanuel. Reed, who do you think sent the letter?"