A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  “I see,” Kate said. “Now, could we go back to the beginning? When you got the radio call from the guard who found the body. And from there back to anything else to do with Adams over the years. Not all at once, but in what I’m afraid you will regard as too many conversations.”

  Butler stared at her. “The call came, as you very well know, early on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. Adams was lying on the pavement below his window. I recognized him at once; he’d been a proper pain in the belly and no mistake. But I haven’t seen a shred of evidence to say he was pushed, and that’s the truth.”

  “Not in the office; not anywhere?”

  “No. And the only thing the police have let us know, and bloody noble of them it was I must say, is that there was no evidence of foul play: he wasn’t shot, knifed, poisoned, or bruised. If he was hit to knock him out, there was no evidence of it left. Could I ask you a personal question? Two?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Are you married?”

  Kate looked at her ringless hand. “Yes, I’m married. I don’t wear a ring, or use his name, but for all that I’m married. A long time now. Are you?”

  “She wears my ring, uses my name, and lives on what I earn.”

  “You said two questions.”

  “Why are you doing this job? If I’m picking up the right signals, you disliked Adams as much as I did; as much as everyone did. Why look for his murderer?”

  “A good question. I’ll make it even better. Why should I help a university that I have been forced to honor less and less as the years go by? Not that that means I despise it. In the beginning I honored it this side of idolatry.” Kate looked out of the window, from which she could see a large sweep of the campus. “I don’t believe in murder; I don’t condone it. I can’t put it any more elegantly than that. And I believe that if we don’t get as near as possible to the truth, someone will suffer for it, perhaps many people. I’m not sure the truth exists, but I’m looking for it. Sorry not to sound more convincing; I haven’t even convinced myself.”

  “I can’t see murder’s so much worse that what goes on around here,” Butler said. “Homosexuality, fornication, drugs, disruption—all mortal sins. You can’t pick up a black male casing the campus because you might infringe his civil rights, when it’s rape and mayhem and burglary he’s after. And the campus priest arguing against the cardinal. What’s the murder of a no-good man to all that?”

  “We are going to have to agree to disagree on many things,” Kate said, “Perhaps we can argue; perhaps we can convince one another. As I said, I need your help and I’m asking for it. If you can’t or won’t, then tell me. I don’t think I’ll get very far without you. I don’t think I’ll try.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a Democrat. I bet you didn’t admire President Reagan.”

  “Right on both scores. Despite all our differences, I think we both know what we mean by our word, and keeping it, and helping each other toward working out this thing. Can you make a bargain on that? Please think.”

  “I always think. The answer is yes, not because you’ve persuaded me, but because if you give me the credit owing, it’ll be a feather in my cap.”

  “Good reason,” Kate said. “Now, can we begin over again, Butler?”

  “Shoot, Professor.”

  Kate settled back in her chair, stretched out her legs, and collected her thoughts. Butler went to the door, opened it, and shouted through it for a couple of coffees. “Black, I suppose,” he said. Kate nodded. “To be expected. I take mine with sugar and cream if I can get it, milk if I can’t. Now, where were we?”

  Where they were, as Kate told Reed later that evening, was back at the beginning: with a body and no idea how it got there or why.

  “I may have Butler’s help because he disliked Adams even more than he dislikes me,” Kate said. “We’re both infidels of the worst sort, but Adams was arrogant and dishonest into the bargain. And I have a feeling Butler may be important, not just for easing my way in and out of buildings, but also because he’s around at night and on weekends, just when there aren’t too many people about, and it’s nice to know someone on your side is firmly in charge in the security office. Also—I know this will sound crazy and probably is, but despite all the disdain I have for the security force in general, there’s some way in which I want someone not an academic or an administrator on my side.”

  “If you say so,” Reed said. “I only hope he’s there when the real murderer decides to go after you.”

  Kate paid no attention to this. “There is one other hopeful sign,” she said. “When I called Adams’s wife—widow, I should say—and identified myself she was perfectly willing to see me. Apparently being a woman professor with a little reputation and strong connections to the university count more than I had realized. I’m going to see her tomorrow. When do you leave?”

  And they went on to talk of other things.

  Kate called on Cecelia Adams the next day at lunchtime, in between university commitments. Cecelia was not at all what Kate had expected, but then few were, as Kate had lived long enough to learn. Yet just as you begin to rejoice in the individuality of human beings, there appears some creature from central casting so predictable that all rejoicing ends. Like Adams, perhaps.

  As it happened, Kate was struck almost simultaneously with the astonishing vision of Cecelia herself, all girlish ebullience and heavy makeup, and a representation of Cecelia confronting Kate as she was shown into the Adamses’ living room. The portrait of her hostess was so large, lifeless, flattering, and god-awful that Kate had consciously to keep herself from shuddering before it. The woman in the picture seemed even to be almost simpering, but not quite, as though she was mocking herself. But that, surely, was unlikely.

  “Myself in younger, happier days,” Cecelia Adams said. “Can I fix you a little something?”

  Kate declined demurely. A strong drinker, Kate rarely drank in the middle of the day and never with those who drank to stop themselves thinking. But she accepted some ginger ale and tried to meet the oddly convivial mood of her hostess.

  “If you want to talk about Canny, I’ll have to get another,” Cecelia frankly said. Kate’s face must have reflected momentary puzzlement, because she added, “My dead husband, you know, Canfield. We called him Canny, and believe me, he was. Cheers.”

  Kate smiled at her. Cecelia was clearly a narcissist of sorts, devoted to herself, her beauty, her desires for expensive objects and rich clothes, but she had a refreshing openness the more valued in a university community, where egoism was disguised as scholarly rigor and enjoyment as intellectual despair. Kate knew there were many couples in academia as close to the ideal of marriage, that is, the continuing possibility of conversation, as were to be found anywhere, but academia also offered many cases of marriages without any sort of interaction, let alone conversation, and this looked like having been one of them. Still, one never knew, and Kate was not a leaper to conclusions when she worked at it. “How was he canny?” she finally asked, which seemed better than the question of why Adams’s wife seemed nearer rejoicing than mourning.

  “You know, liked to think he had it all figured out, that he had superior knowledge, not to say wisdom. But he wasn’t half as canny as he thought; if he were, he’d never have married me.”

  Kate looked her question.

  “Well, my dear, he thought that, unlike other men similarly inclined, he could marry a much younger woman who wasn’t after anything but the glow from his beautiful soul. It’s easy enough pretending you’re after their aging bodies, but convincing them that you would love them, as dearly if they were without what my dear mother called a pot to piss in is a wee bit harder. But not that hard. That’s why I called him Canny.”

  Kate stared at the woman for perhaps a full minute while she pranced gaily about the living room, rearranging objects and flaunting her small, full body as though she
were a voluptuous gazelle; Kate, who was tall, felt enormous and even clumsy beside this merry widow, who did look quite capable of bursting into song. Kate decided to stop being a green thought in a green shade and said, “Mrs. Adams, are you trying to impress me with your motive for murder or merely enticing me into a thoroughly improper conversation? If the latter, I’m ready now.”

  “Call me Cecelia; everybody does. I added the first syllable. Just Celia sound so ordinaire, if you know what I mean; over before you’ve even begun. I didn’t really have a motive for murder; if he’d lived another year I’d have had the whole kit and caboodle, instead of only two-thirds. Anyway, I have a lovely alibi; I was away visiting a dear uncle of mine who had some sort of seizure. He’s quite well-off and with no noticeable heirs, so I dote when called upon. It never hurts. I was in the clear sight of at least half a dozen people every minute of the day and night, not to mention being three thousand miles away in sunny California. You do look very professorish, I must say, though beautifully thin. Lots of breeding, clearly, not like me. I clawed my way to the top, or as near the top as I could get these days, and I’m ready enough to admit it.” Saying this, Cecelia held out both hands to Kate, their backs outward so that the long nails and white nail polish were in clear view. White, Kate supposed, not to suggest clawing.

  “Cecelia,” Kate said, allowing a certain imperious note to come into her voice, as was clearly expected by her giddy hostess, “might I ask a few questions? I am, as you say, professorish, and, like all professors, have convinced myself that I have an orderly mind when it comes to essentials. Of which, at the moment, you are certainly one.”

  “But you talk wonderfully,” Cecelia responded, perching in a chair like a restless child forced to be nice to her elders. “Ask away.”

  “I take it you married Professor Canfield Adams recently?”

  “Not recently, you know. Just more recently than his first wife. Canny was in his late fifties. I’m a teeny bit past forty, no use lying to a professor who’s also a detective, is there? His first wife was his age and got dumped shortly after Canny and I met. That is, he thought he dumped her. She clearly dumped him, but I never saw any point in arguing the question with Canny. She wanted only to provide for her children out of Canny’s inheritance from a beautifully rich papa, but we fooled her, Canny and I. Her children will probably sue, but possession is nine-tenths of the law, isn’t that what they say?”

  “And they also say that legal fees are nine-tenths of what you possess, but it may not come to that. What did you inherit, exactly, if you don’t mind telling me?”

  “Longing to, as you very well know. First I got this apartment. Joint ownership, so it goes to the spouse, who is me. Then I got him to build us a little love nest on the Mediterranean, where he liked to go to feel part of the Middle East. That is also joint, therefore to spouse. Then I got him to set up a little trust fund, income to me, and to the ‘children’ on my death. Since the ‘children’ are not that much younger than I am, they’ll have quite a wait; I certainly hope so. He also left them each a tidy little bundle, which I would have added, to the trust, income to little me for life, if I’d had time enough. But someone bumped him off. Not something I’d be likely to do, at least not at that moment. So there you are.”

  Kate had to make an effort not to gasp. Refreshing was certainly the word for her, which had no doubt occurred to Cecelia long before this. “Are you sure someone ‘bumped him off,’ as you put it; that is, pushed him from an office window to his death? You don’t think there’s a chance he fell, or climbed out onto the sill in a moment of dementia?”

  “Not a chance, Professor, you can take it from me. He was as protective of himself as a turtle with its head and feet pulled in. He was afraid of drafts, let alone standing outside a window in November. No. Someone tipped him out. Too bad, really, on the whole.”

  “Did you spend Thanksgiving together?”

  “But of course, Professor. Together with sons and the sons’ wives and kiddies. Both of his sons hated me, and usually took Thanksgiving turn-about, but this time they all came, don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me why they ever came. Not because they loved him, and not because they were worried about their inheritance, I don’t honestly think, just good old middle-class guilt: you’re supposed to want to see your father once in a while. I think they really felt that once every two years was enough, and frankly so did I. I was hoping they’d go back to turnabout, and now we don’t ever have to share another turkey; how’s that for a jolly thought?”

  “What about Christmas?”

  “Hark the Herald Angels and all that? We spent Christmas in our little Mediterranean hut, warm sun and just us two, the Christmas roast and pudding being cooked and served by a native woman there who cleans for us and is paid next to nothing, like all the other local servants, at least compared to servants around here. The hut was supposed to induce romantic powers into old Canny, but I’ll tell you frankly it hadn’t worked lately. Still, we could cuddle. And no damn grand-children. I don’t care for children, do you?”

  Kate, who didn’t, decided to ignore this. “Cecelia,” she said, “I do appreciate your frankness. If everyone I talk to is as frank as you, I shall have this whole business cleaned up in a week. Were you this frank with the police?”

  “What do you take me for? Woman to woman is one thing; the damn police are another. I sat like a proper widow, wiping away a tear and talking about the shock of it all. It was a shock, of course, and that helped a good bit. I don’t mind being frank with you, but if you quote me to anyone I’ll deny the whole thing and call you a liar; I’m good at that.”

  “What do you think most people thought of your husband?”

  “They thought he was a shit, which he was. But you could get around him if you just flattered him enough. I once heard a quote from some Englishman in politics; he said, ‘You always flatter everyone, and with royalty you lay it on with a trowel.’ I laid it on with a trowel for my royalty. But he only got on really well with a few girl students, who slimed all over him, and a few young men who thought he could give them a shove on their way up the academic greasy pole. Don’t mean to sound offensive. Professor, that just came out sounding odder than I intended. Not that I talked to many of those who hated him, of course, but he came home all the time with accounts of committee meetings when he thought he triumphed and showed someone or other up for a fool, and you didn’t have to have a Ph.D. to know they probably hated his guts and thought him an ass besides. But I can’t tell you anyone who was likelier to have shoved him out the window than anyone else. I’d help if I could; they shouldn’t have picked this moment to do it, so I’m not as grateful as I might be.”

  “Did he socialize with many of his colleagues?”

  “If you mean did we have them here to dinner, we did once in a while, usually when the department paid for it because they were looking someone over, as Canny always put it. We were asked out sometimes, and Canny realized we had to ask people back. But he hadn’t any real buddies, if that’s what you want to know. There were those who agreed with him, of course, but usually he had something nasty to say about them; he had to feel superior, you see. It was part of his canniness.”

  “You left the day after Thanksgiving for California; had you any idea what he intended to do, or whom he planned to see, while you were gone?”

  “Well, I know he had some page proofs from his new book, and he meant to get them done. He was going to work day and night when I was gone. I suppose he must have needed something to check them with and that’s why he went to the office.”

  “I see,” Kate said. It was the first she’d heard of the book. “Where are the proofs now?”

  “That’s what’s so odd, you see; he mailed them off to the publisher on that Saturday. Sent me a card in sunny California to tell me so. Of course, my uncle only sent it on after I’d come back, hearing the next morning about Canny’s death. Do
you think the book had something to do with it?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely, not if he’d mailed the proofs off before he went to his office, which he must have done; do you know who the publisher is?”

  “Harvard. He was very proud of that. He’d belonged to one of those snotty clubs at Harvard, and some woman at Harvard sued to get in. You’d have thought she was after his balls, if you see what I mean. Everything was Harvard to him. So it had to have the best press and the one he wanted to do his book. He’s quite an authority on Arabs, or their religion, or history or something; I never really listened, to tell you the truth. After all, it was all a long time ago, wasn’t it? You ready for a little something yet?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, “I am. More than a little something. But I mustn’t have it, I must go back and teach. May I take a rain check and come some other time for my drink?”

  “Any time, Professor,” Cecelia said, sashaying to the door and flinging it open. “I’d like to hear what you have to say for yourself when you let your hair down, if you ever do.”

  Kate, passing through the doorway, waved a feeble farewell as she walked down the corridor to the elevator. She had trouble bringing her thoughts back to the French novels of the eighteenth century on that day’s reading list. What in the world would Corinne have made of Cecelia? Or Heloise, if it came to that? What Rousseau would have made of Cecelia, Kate had no doubt whatever.

  Chapter Four

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise

  The phone was ringing as Kate opened her office door. It was Dean Edna Hoskins. “How about a drink and conference today?” she asked.

  “ESP,” Kate said. “I was just about to call you with the same suggestion. Have you ever met the late Adams’s wife?”

  “No,” Edna said. “Have I missed something?”

  “That’s putting it conservatively. That woman convinces me that life holds more possibilities than are dreamed of in my philosophy. Also my views on women are beginning to resemble Hamlet’s. I shall need you as a counterforce.” And Kate rushed off to class, to be followed by office hours and, if possible, an hour’s necessary devotion to her mail.