A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  Why pick on me? Kate thought. Why not hire a private eye or use the clout of the university to put some power into the police investigation? Am I being set up? But Edna would hardly go along with that. Her head remarkably uncleared, Kate reached home.

  Where Reed was waiting for her. “I’ve heard,” he said. “Edna Hoskins called me. I didn’t promise her anything, but I said I was glad to know, and would try to talk it out with you. If you want to. Perhaps silence is what is called for at the moment, with generous lashings of gin and vermouth.”

  “Scotch,” Kate said. “But it doesn’t seem to be having any effect. I know what the problem is, though. It came to me, in the elevator here, after the doorman said you’d just come in. I think their asking me is a trick. I don’t feel like a detective, let alone a detective the university would dream of hiring. I think their motives are despicable, and their hopes that I will fail and make a fool of myself into the bargain.”

  “Prophets in their own countries,” Reed said, handing her a glass. “When is the only time you’re ever nervous before lecturing? A public lecture, I mean.”

  “At my own university, of course. Doing things where they know you and are waiting to leer. Is that all it is?”

  “A large part, I should think. Edna felt unable to convince you that the administration’s need for you to undertake this, and their trust in you, while not unanimous, was strong and sincere. She didn’t know how to tell you, so she told me. She said you have a built-in inability to believe compliments, and a dislike of being needed. She went so far as to say you married me because I didn’t need propping up. Her making so personal a remark should carry a good deal of weight; it did with me.”

  “You think I should do it.”

  “I didn’t say that. I need to know more about the case, what they know, what’s expected. I just said that Edna said that your first reactions were probably not to be trusted. She may be right.”

  “I don’t know much more than you do, reading the papers and hearing me gossip,” Kate said. “The more I do know is persuasive and troubling.” She told him about Humphrey Edgerton and the key to Levy Hall. “To say nothing,” she added, “of the fact that Adams hated practically everyone; he once told me to my face that homosexuals belong in a sewer. Male, that is. I don’t think he believed any more than Queen Victoria that women did that sort of thing. Adams thought any woman would take a man, any man, if she could get him. There you are, you see. I start to say something and go on and on, with one nefarious report after another, but where is that likely to get me? I could of course begin by interviewing his wife; if she’s mourning him, I’ll think she’s mad, and if she isn’t, I’ll think she’s guilty. I’ll just say no, shall I?”

  “There is Humphrey Edgerton. Why not talk to him? Why not call him now? Perhaps he’d come over, or we could meet him, and that would help to settle your mind. Meet him alone, if you prefer.”

  “I’ll call him,” Kate said, “Anything concrete to do, apart from rambling memories of the late and horrible Canfield Adams.”

  “Good,” Reed said, “The truth is, I’m more worried about you at this moment than I can ever remember being.”

  “That makes two of us,” Kate said on her way to the telephone.

  Humphrey Edgerton was on the point of leaving to meet his wife; he would stop in for a short time. Glad to. He had something to tell Kate. And why, Kate thought, do I instinctively know that it is bad news? Because it’s that sort of bloody situation, she thought, unconsciously echoing Butler of the security force.

  Humphrey accepted a chair and a drink. “You’d better sit down,” he said to Kate, who was pacing the room. “The fact is, I didn’t have the key to Levy Hall. I’d given it to a student who wanted to hold a meeting there of the black student caucus. Of course, the administration will say that I should not have helped the students to get a key; the police will say that she gave it to someone or used it herself to murder Adams; and I can’t even swear to the total absence of what my mother used to call hanky-panky because Arabella is what I call an activist when I’m talking to the world and a dedicated troublemaker when I’m talking to friends. Arabella’s like an army in today’s world: essential that you have it; even more essential that you don’t use it. She is also an ardent supporter of the PLO and of divestment of companies who do business in South Africa. I know that neither of these seemed to concern Adams, except that he probably told her she knew nothing about the PLO and that he did not believe in divestment. In short, I can’t give them Arabella, of whom I wish I felt surer than I do.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” Kate said. “Hunky-dory, as my mother used to say. Did you stop by to cheer me up, cheer me on, or warn me off? Just clear up your message, if you can.”

  Humphrey laughed. “Clear messages belong to another age. I think this mess has to be straightened out, and I think you’re the best person by several light-years to do it. I know and love you too much to suggest that you will be thanked, or even end up with a sense of accomplishment. In this world, we do what we have to do, and we look for rewards, if any, in the work itself and the love of friends. That’s absolutely as rhetorical as I intend to get. If you were a black man at a university you’d know exactly what I mean, always remembering that the work is tiresome and the friends frequently at odds.”

  “That,” Kate said, “is the best double message I’ve heard in years. Almost the paradigmatic double message. Thanks a lot, as my young relatives say.”

  “You’ve got to do it, Kate. You know it, I know it, Edna Hoskins knows it, and I suspect Reed does. I’ll give you all the help and support I can. I don’t say that lightly, but when I say it I mean it, and I’m saying it. Usually we haven’t a choice. Some people like Adams have a choice and always make the wrong one. Sometimes we have the illusion of having a choice. None of the above applies here.”

  “Where do you suggest I begin?”

  “I’d begin with the guy’s wife; soften her up for future questioning. Meanwhile, I’ll round up Arabella and we’ll come to see you soon. I think there’s a certain amount to be got out of her, and we’ll get it. I better go now or there’s a certain amount my wife will get out of me; she doesn’t like waiting in restaurants, and who’s to blame her.” He kissed Kate solemnly on both cheeks, shook Reed’s hand, and rushed away.

  “Well,” Reed said. “I’m glad that’s settled. What about dinner?”

  “Reed,” Kate said. “Let’s go up right now and have a look at Levy Hall.”

  “On an empty stomach?”

  “You’re not in Napoleon’s army,” Kate said. “Yet,” she added ominously.

  Levy Hall was one of the older buildings on the campus, built in more gracious and expansive days. Its ceilings were high, its stairways broad and open to the large lobby: fire laws had been less stringent then also. Adams’s office was on the top floor: Kate and Reed walked up, not trusting the elevators in a deserted building at night. They had first completed the usual routine for gaining admission to a locked building after hours: one had to have previously applied for what is called a key card (most departments applied en masse for their professors). When one picked up the building key—always attached to a large piece of wood—one surrendered one’s ID card, to be reclaimed when the key was returned. Kate had done all this, and then more. Putting the administration’s cooperation immediately and unreasonably (for she had not yet officially accepted the job) to the challenge, she had requested also the master key to all the doors inside Levy Hall. To her intense annoyance and disappointment, for she was looking, as she admitted to Reed, for any complaint, the man in charge of the security office, after examining her ID and his own instructions, handed her the master key.

  She and Reed had gone together to the building, proving, as Reed pointed out while opening the door, that no one necessarily expected the claimer of the key to enter alone the building to which the key belonged. �
��Please note also,” Kate said, “that if someone I knew, particularly someone I knew had legitimate business in this building, came along as I was opening the door, I would certainly let him or her in. Or them. We can never know if Adams let anyone in that way.”

  The main floor with the lobby was designated the third floor, in a manner common to buildings erected on a hill. Rather than call the lower floors minus one and two, the entrance floor was dubbed whatever number it had in the usual sequence starting at the bottom. Kate and Reed climbed four floors to the seventh. Adams, however, as Kate pointed out to Reed when they had reached the seventh floor, had an office facing the opposite way from the entrance, meaning that he had fallen the full seven floors to the concrete path below.

  Adams’s office was attractive. He, or someone, had added an Oriental rug and drapes to the stark room; these, together with the crowded bookcases and the easy chair and lamp, gave the room a far homier air than was usual in university offices, at least those at this university. That suggested, Kate told Reed, that he worked in his office in preference to working at home, indicating a stronger argument for his coming there at such an odd time. Kate, like many of her colleagues, used her office solely for business: seeing students, holding office hours, holding the occasional meeting.

  They both walked over to the large window. An air conditioner was in the very top, but the lower pane opened readily, easily wide enough to accommodate a person contemplating, or being forced to contemplate, defenestration. The outer sill, eighteen inches wide, certainly precluded the possibility of anyone’s carelessly falling unaided from the window after a dizzy spell. Kate supposed the window had been found open after Adams’s death, but that was just one of the many facts wholly unknown to her.

  Kate sat down at Adams’s desk, inviting Reed to rest on the easy chair. “We’ve got to decide,” she said.

  “Wrong pronoun.”

  “Right pronoun. If you can’t persuade someone to give me a few of the facts the police are clutching to their bosom, or suggest another way I might get them, I can’t even begin. Have they tidied up this office? Did the desk seem to be rifled through? That sort of thing.”

  “I’m certain the university can persuade the police to tell you all that. All they’ll withhold are statements by suspects. I didn’t have a chance to tell you before,” Reed added, “but I’ll soon be off for a few weeks, to Holland and beyond, to that legal conference I told you was looking. It’s now here, unfortunately, and is international and important, so I can’t beg off. I won’t be here to help at first.”

  “Pooh,” Kate said. “I’ll probably not even have begun in a matter of weeks.”

  Reed said, “If you begin, you’d better begin right away. That’s the only advice. Start off with a rush, and learn everything you can.”

  “Why do you think I should do it? And don’t say it’s my decision, in that holy way. I’m asking for advice, damn it.”

  “Because, as Humphrey wisely observed, you have a choice, and I think you’ve already made it. There are jobs one only refuses at one’s peril. And don’t ask me what peril; you know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “He sat here,” Kate said. “Adams sat where I am sitting. You know, he has enacted, or had enacted upon him, a common academic fantasy: that certain faculty members would rid the world of themselves by some precipitous act, like flinging themselves from a window. The objects of these fantasies are often aging professors, intellectually stagnant, with no offers from anywhere else, only the determination to stay until the last possible moment before retirement. And of course with Congressman Pepper’s new law, a man of Adams’s age could stay on forever. Not that many actually do or are expected to, but the possibility looms. Suppose someone, some otherwise quite agreeable someone, simply acted out that general fantasy?”

  “The name of that is murder, and it is unacceptable in a decent society. As you very well know.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I very well know. But I cannot rid myself of anathematical thoughts about the Adamses and their kind. Isn’t that a nice word? I was determined to use it, and I have. When are you leaving for Holland?”

  “In a week. Come on; let’s have dinner. Or do you think if we sent out for Chinese food, one of those intrepid fellows on a bicycle would manage to deliver it up here?”

  Kate, having locked up the office and the building, returned the keys and reclaimed her ID. The noticeable attention and courtesy of the man in the security office suggested that the administration was both hopeful and ready. As she and Reed walked out onto the largely empty campus, Kate remarked that she always felt lonely walking around the university in off hours. “Perhaps Adams felt lonely too,” she said. “Maybe that’s why he fixed his office up to be more cozy and homelike.”

  “That’s perceptive of you, my dear. And unusual. There’s a sentence from John le Carré I admire: ‘It is the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.’ ”

  “I fear my vanities are unpardonable,” Kate gloomily remarked. “Certainly as regards failure in this case.”

  Chapter Three

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies

  Kate began the next morning with Butler, the man in the security force who had been in charge the night the body was found. He, obviously acting under orders, related all he knew of that night more or less graciously, always allowing for the fact that his views on women and where they belonged were not inadequately reflected by the laws of the Irish Republic. He brought Kate carefully up to the arrival of the police.

  And then what? Kate asked. Had Butler gone up with them to Adams’s office?

  Butler had. One of his standing orders was to remain with the police at all times when they were on campus, which mercifully had been fewer in recent years. The police had taken the elevator (being, Kate decided, unlike her and Reed when they had looked at the office, in radio contact with would-be rescuers). The office door was shut and locked; Butler had had to open it with his master key. The window was wide open, and the curtains had whipped out the window when he opened the door. Some papers were flying about. The police brought in special people to look for blood, fingerprints, or whatever they looked for; as far as he could tell they had found no blood and enough fingerprints to suggest that half the university had been through the place. They sealed the office, subsequently unsealing it when their investigations were over but asking that no one be allowed to enter (a request that Kate knew, and Butler knew she knew, had not been followed; the police might give their orders, but Butler worked for the university).

  “You see, Professor [for she was a professor, much as he disapproved], there wasn’t anything there that wasn’t caused by the wind blowing about.”

  “No other signs of struggle,” Kate added. “No sign of the desk or any other part of the room being searched?”

  “No sign; which doesn’t mean nothing was searched, just that I saw no sign of it. The police opened the desk drawers, and they certainly didn’t see any sign of disorder, more than you expect in desk drawers, if you follow me.”

  “Could we sit down?” Kate asked. Butler, acquiescing with a reluctance sufficiently muted to allow for its being adamantly denied, led her from the central security office, where they were talking, into a small room in the back. He shut the door. They both sat down, Butler behind his desk.

  “Mr. Butler,” Kate went on, “I’m asking you to help me; you don’t have to like me, or even put up with me for long, but without your hearty help we’re both going to be talking too long and to little purpose. I need to know all you noticed but are not required to say; all you think, but don’t want to say; all, anything, to do with Professor Adams that might, whether you can see it or not, cast some light. I’m mentioning it frankly, because without your help I feel stymied before I start. To make me completely discou
raged you’ve only to continue in your proper, polite, ungiving manner.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Butler said.

  “Of whose help, or anyone’s, I would be glad,” Kate responded; “at the moment, especially of yours. And do stop calling me ‘Professor.’ If I call you Butler, you can call me Fansler or, if you prefer, Kate.”

  “As in The Taming of the Shrew,” Butler said. “I read my Shakespeare, though I’m no bloody professor. My name is Patrick.”

  “ ‘Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio.’ Hamlet.”

  “Is what?” Butler asked.

  “ ‘Much offense,’ ” Kate said. “A man has been murdered.”

  “May have been. Or flung himself from the window, being the follower of an unholy religion.”

  “He taught Islam; I don’t know that he followed it. They say professors of religion are the only ones who don’t believe what they teach. Do you think he did—fling himself from the window?”

  “If wishes could kill, he did.”

  “Widely disliked, was he?”

  “I shan’t call you Kate, I shall call you Professor. You call me Butler. But I’ll help you if I can. Not because you persuaded me, which you didn’t, but because I’ve remembered what a sorry man he was. That Professor Adams. I’d rather work with a woman, and that’s the truth.”

  “Good,” Kate said. “First of all, what does, it mean that you are second in command; what does the position entail?”

  “It means that I’m in charge when the man in charge of the whole shebang isn’t here.” His tone implied that this should be obvious even to a professor. “It also means that I tend to be here on weekends and holidays and other times when someone has to be in charge of the security force and the chief has first choice on when he takes off.”