A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  “But I am a knee-jerk liberal,” Kate said. “I’ve never understood what was wrong with that. If someone has a human and humane response faster than other people, does that make them despicable?”

  “No. The phrase has to do with people loath to take real action; with folks like the Kennedys, John and Robert, who never really did much for blacks, or women if it comes to that, and who cavorted on a beach that was as restricted and private as any club in the South. Even Lyndon Johnson didn’t seat Mississippi’s black delegation to the Democratic convention in 1964, as you may or may not remember. I think what Arabella meant was that you weren’t all gushy encouragement to her face and a supporter of the ‘old values’ behind her back; that is, no studying of any culture that didn’t have its roots in Plato.”

  “We’ll never know what Arabella meant, Humphrey,” Kate said. “Why did she have to get herself killed? I can’t escape the thought that if I had never talked to her, this wouldn’t have happened; and you know it too.”

  “I know that’s nonsense. We have to stop confusing grief and blame. Let’s try to find out who killed her. You didn’t; I didn’t. Someone did.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “at least you admit she didn’t just tumble out of that window in a moment of irrational exuberance. No doubt someone will suggest something of the sort before too long. What exactly did she say, Humphrey, when she talked to you?”

  “She said, if you want to know the exact words, ‘I’ve met your Fansler friend,’ with a strong emphasis on friend, ‘and I think she really wants to know who pushed old Canny. Maybe I can help her. Would that make you happy, Humph?’ ”

  “Her exact words, I take it.”

  “Her exact words. I’ll remember them all my life. Now you’ve got to help her. Ranting around is a necessary phase, I recognize that. I’ve had occasions when all the rage I had bottled up in my life rose to the surface and absolutely flattened me for months. That isn’t going to happen to me now, and it isn’t going to happen to you. We’re going to find out what, or who, killed her. By ‘what’ I mean what emotion, what source, what organization, what fear; that’s as important as who.”

  They had met on the campus, where they stood together watching the academic world going about its business, watching in amazement as so many people seemed not to have stopped in their tracks at this tragedy. Most, of course, Kate told herself, had not heard, would never hear that a student had died far uptown, smashed in a cement courtyard. To those who heard, it might be a three-hour wonder. Kate and Humphrey both accurately guessed at the administration’s relief that Arabella had not died on campus; but they did not need to say this or anything else to one another. They stood silent with their grief and determination.

  But Kate soon had a need to speak that amounted to an obsession; it was Reed who bore the brunt of this, as, he told her, was only right. She knew she was saying the same thing over and over and couldn’t stop herself. In between she apologized to Reed, who told her yet again that was what he was there for. She was almost talked out, weary, more determined than ever in her anger when she went to meet the police detectives who had been assigned to the case. They did not object to her presence or her questions. They were white male detectives with no illusions about what the death of a young black woman who was a student at an urban university would mean to her community and to the media. On instructions from higher up, they let Kate join them.

  The major facts were easy enough to establish, their similarity to the Adams case calling for even closer examination to verify them. She had died from the fall, from her family’s living room on the tenth floor. Apparently, no one else had been in the apartment with her at the time. There were the family fingerprints, but no others. The members of her family all had been somewhere else at the time, and the police were able to verify most of their whereabouts. All of her fellow students, especially those who had used the room in Levy Hall, had been questioned; most had alibis, but none that were unshakable. The Adams family, his widow, others in the university, would be questioned, but no one could even guess who would have wanted to kill her, as opposed to telling her to shut up and get on with her academic work. Suicide could not be eliminated absolutely, although all who knew Arabella denied its possibility. The two detectives were brutally frank with Kate, particularly the younger one.

  “We aren’t going to find threads, from someone’s clothes, or mud from their backyard, or cigarette ash. We aren’t going to find a fucking thing, begging your pardon, ma’am. My mother watches Angela Lansbury on television, and this is nothing like that. Nothing. Maybe that’s ‘Murder, She Wrote’ or someone wrote who’s never been near a corpse in his or her life, but it’s nowhere near reality, believe me. We’re all assuming her death is connected to the previous one, but that might just be convenient for someone who hated her guts for a different reason. I mean, if I were her black dude and she gave me the gate, I might think this was not a bad way to show her what was what and lay the blame on some fancy white institution. And no, I’m not racist, I’m telling you the truth as I see it, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to hang around. Nothing personal.”

  Kate had no desire to argue with either of them. She went with them on their interviews; she saw the body in the morgue; she read the lab report. She managed to avoid the media, who, intrigued with the professorial defenestration, smelled blood in a case of a young black “coed,” as they persisted in calling her.

  Butler was as unhappy as Kate but for different reasons. “They’re going to keep looking at us cross-eyed,” he said. “We’re supposed to be racist bastards, and throwing a black troublemaker out of the window is just about our style. That’s what everybody’s thinking, you can count on it. If I could get my hands on the bastard who did this, I’d trade ten years of my life, and that’s the truth.”

  “It’s obvious,” Kate said to him, as she had repeatedly said to others, as they had all said, “it’s obvious that she was killed by Adams’s killer. Can there be any doubt of that?”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Butler said, “there can be doubt of absolutely everything. Suppose some other student or someone who had it in for her for other reasons was smart enough to figure out this was a good time to get her out of the way? Is that so unlikely?”

  Kate shook her head without mentioning that the police had also suggested that possibility. According to plans made before Arabella’s death, Kate would soon interview the student who had been a secretary in Adams’s department; would there be any different questions now? Kate had the sense that the university had become a figment of all their imaginations, a construction designed to protect them all from the violence of the real world. Which, she told Reed that evening, made as much sense as her theory about the alien from a UFO. “Because,” she had added, “there are no aliens. There is only us.”

  Kate and Reed went to Arabella’s funeral, but Kate did not join the police in questioning Arabella’s family. She was content, at least for the present, to get that information secondhand.

  Chapter Nine

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings

  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  And never breathe a word about your loss

  Kate had arranged to see Susan Pollikoff, the former secretary of Adams’s department, on the day following Arabella’s funeral, but a call from Arabella’s mother asking to talk with Kate forced her to postpone the Pollikoff appointment. Rather to Kate’s relief, Arabella’s mother offered to come to Kate’s office. Kate would have liked to visit her in her home, to see where Arabella’s family lived, but the thought of talking in the room from which Arabella had fallen to her death was too much for Kate and, she supposed, for Mrs. Jordan.

  Without having become consciously aware of it, Kate had braced herself for Mrs. Jordan’s anger: expected, logical, natural. That Kate should be
the object of it was perhaps unfair, but not unreasonable. When, therefore, Mrs. Jordan expressed not rage but sadness, and above all a desire to understand her daughter, Kate was almost physically aware of the adrenaline leaving her body; she had not known how braced she had been for this interview.

  Mrs. Jordan was an attractive woman in her early forties. Kate had caught a glimpse of her at the funeral, but Kate had stayed on the edges at the cemetery, and rather far back in the church, fearing both intrusion and the appearance of curiosity. Her grief was profound, and she was grateful for Reed’s support, yet felt him even more of an intruder than herself. Why was she an intruder? Had I been her teacher, her adviser, her friend, Kate thought, I would have come in accepted sorrow. As it is, I suspect myself of having caused her death. And Reed, standing beside her, seemed in protecting her to deny that charge. She was grateful, not for the first time, for his wisdom and his willingness to bear her undeserved resentment. Mrs. Jordan, in the front of the church, was more a personification of mourning than an identifiable individual, given Kate’s state of mind.

  She studied the woman now, even as she was studied herself. As she had been when she met Arabella, Kate was aware that her usual social antennae were unable to operate at their full capacity; something subtle in the environment was askew. Kate again recalled what Toni Morrison had said about black and white women having far less in common than black and white men. But, she found herself thinking, that should not apply to us, more or less of an age and both professional. True, Kate thought, I am not a mother, much less of a dead child, but that has set me aside with white women as well. “I’m glad you came,” Kate said spontaneously. “I’m glad to meet you.”

  “I thought it would be easier here,” Mrs. Jordan said. “They gave me some weeks off. I work for a large financial firm; they were kind to offer me all the time I needed, but I think I would rather go back, keep busy. And the work does pile up when I’m absent.”

  “You must have been very young when Arabella was born,” Kate said because she thought it, and because she was trying not to be heavily tactful, not obviously fearful of saying the wrong thing.

  “Her mother wasn’t even eighteen when Arabella was born. She died from an embolism after a cesarean. The whole thing was wonderfully ironic. She was happily married, to a devoted man—there are not too many of those in the world, let alone the black world—and she was getting the best of medical care. It happens in a certain number of cases. I met Arabella’s father when she was a year old; his mother had been caring for her. I’m the only mother she has known, and I loved her very much. So did her father. He’s the minister of a church in lower Manhattan.” (So the minister who ran the service had been Arabella’s father. Kate ought to have known that, but she had not wanted to ask questions of anyone; questions seemed unbearably intrusive.) “We had the rare stable home, a stable marriage, a happy family. But Arabella was never really happy; she was always running counter, wanting to stir things up, angry at us, and the world, and the university; angry about South Africa, and Palestinians, and all the Third World. The tragedy is not only her death but that just recently she seemed to be distilling that anger, keeping what was right in it, but directing it more, not taking the world’s evil out on those who loved her or who wanted to help her. Humphrey has helped a good deal. But it’s hard to know, especially with the young, how much anger is justified. It’s so easy to become complacent. She was just beginning to let us love her.”

  “I can’t think of what to say, Mrs. Jordan. And the joke about that is that I can always think of something to say, but I don’t know what in the world to say to you. That I’m so dreadfully sorry seems not only inadequate but obvious and useless.”

  “We’ve talked to the police; they tried to be nice. They even sent a woman policeman, not a bit like Cagney or Lacey, but nice. Arabella used to loath ‘Cagney and Lacey’ as racist, classist, homophobic, and fake. Those were all her words. But I loved it. Sure, they’re white, but they’re professional women who are friends, who make jokes about men and are ambitious. How much of that has there been on television?”

  “The policeman I saw mentioned Angela Lansbury; do you think we are all beginning to think in terms of television series?”

  “It’s a convenient language when you’re stuck. Anyway, the policewoman was nice, and so were the men, though they had to try much harder. What made it awful was that we couldn’t help them. We knew so little of her life. She lived in an apartment somewhere with friends, we never even knew where. We would call Humphrey if we absolutely needed her, or were worried. She wouldn’t call or come by for months; then she would promise to call or visit in a few days, and wouldn’t. I’m sounding as though I resent her, and you may be smart enough to understand that I do, and that I resent her dying. We never had time to get it all straight, not when she was an adult. When she was little, we had the sort of loving relationship they like to put on television but that scarcely exists; it did for us.”

  “Have you other children?”

  “Yes, we have two younger boys.” The answer was short, and Kate didn’t ask for it to be expanded. That wasn’t what Mrs. Jordan had come to talk about. The failure, as she probably saw it, with Arabella would be on her pulses all her life; Kate knew that, and felt that Mrs. Jordan would only want to talk about it if she could do it for Kate’s sake.

  “What started the anger? Did you ever know?”

  “We can only guess, of course. We sent her to a private school here in New York; they gave her a scholarship because they wanted ‘minority’ children, she was smart, and she came from a ‘stable’ background. I put these words in quotes,”—and Mrs. Jordan held up both hands and wiggled the first two finger of each—“because I think we all resented the school without exactly knowing why. As though we were serving their purposes; but, we could tell ourselves quite truthfully, they were serving ours. She got a good education, all right, but she resented every minute of it. Being attractive didn’t help. She hung out with black boys not from school who reinforced all her anger and who gave her drugs; I was fierce about that, wild with fear and anguish, and I didn’t help the situation. Neither did her father, who came on sounding to her ears like the headmistress of her school. We lost her, you see. I’d heard of losing sons; it’s a common despair among our friends, but we’ve usually been able to hold on to our daughters. Not anymore. It’s as though by becoming middle-class, professionals, we lost her respect.”

  “I can’t really know,” Kate said, “but I think perhaps she was changing just a bit, toward you and the world. Maybe I just want to think that; maybe Humphrey wanted me to think it.” (And it hit Kate suddenly that she got on easily with Humphrey, probably because he was like white men, if the nicest of them. It was, Kate hardly knew why, a deeply disturbing thought.) “What did the police suggest? What do they believe?”

  “They can’t prove it wasn’t suicide, though there isn’t the smallest evidence for that, and no one who knew her believes it. Her anger was all going out, not in. She was right about that, at least. She was right about the objects of her anger, just not about its relentlessness. But if it wasn’t suicide, who and what was it? I thought you might have an idea. I hope, I think from the way we’ve talked, you’ll be honest with me.”

  “I feel sure she was killed by whoever killed Canfield Adams. She became an unbearable danger to that person. They say if you kill once, it is easier to kill again. Anyway, the murderer used the same method; it would have been easier with Arabella: she was smaller, lighter, and there was no wide, outer sill, no chance of anyone passing below.”

  “Do you think that’s why she wasn’t killed in the professor’s office? That seems more reasonable, somehow, if anything about this can be called reasonable.”

  “I agree. But university campuses these days, and especially those in urban, eastern areas, are highly conscious of racism. They are ready to explode at any attack on blacks. To have kille
d her on the campus would have started a riot. It’s still news, because she was a student, but much less so than if she had died here. I think that’s the reason. How the murderer got to her in your living room—well, that I can’t even conjecture about. The murderer is clever.”

  “Isn’t it possible someone tried to buy her off, or persuade her about something, and they fought?”

  “That’s the other script. That the murderer wasn’t the Adams murderer, but someone else involved with Arabella. It’s certainly possible, and the police incline toward it, probably because it’s the more comfortable position for them. I don’t buy it, but I could be wrong. In this case, I don’t seem to be anything else.”

  “Don’t get discouraged; Humphrey says you are doing your best, and always do.” The woman’s eyes filled with tears, and so did Kate’s. They sat there, in Kate’s office, both crying and wiping their faces before they finished the conversation. Later, Kate was to recall the scene as remarkable, but at the time she simply went on with the conversation.

  “I have to ask you, Mrs. Jordan, as no doubt the police have, if Arabella had any special friends, any circle or group she moved in that you know of and we may not?”

  “I prefer Ms., actually. The firm uses it regularly now, and I like it. Whose business is it if we’re married; you can’t tell with men, who all just use Mr. I don’t know of any groups, except the one at the university. Humphrey told me about them; Arry didn’t. Sometimes she saw the boys from her high school years, but she never talked about them; I didn’t approve. I shouldn’t have shown it so clearly. But what’s the good of wishing one had been different? I did my best, I know that. I loved her so much.”

  Kate wanted to put her arms around the woman; that was impossible, of course, for many reasons. Kate’s impulse was unusual, and she knew the reason for that, at least. Both Ms. Jordan and Ms. Fansler understood the anger Arabella had felt and lived. They knew it in their guts, because they were women, and, for Ms. Jordan, because she was black. They had both chosen not to live with the anger as a daily, hourly throbbing. Yet they had respect, admiration, and, however grudgingly, envy for those like Arabella, who had not reined her anger in, nor modified it to please the world’s liberal, right-feeling people. Kate knew, moreover, as her companion doubtless knew, that the reasonable ones, sitting here together in Kate’s office, were allowed to fight their fight in a reasonable manner, in a cordial way most of the time, because the really angry ones occupied the margin and left the sensible center to the Kate Fanslers and Ms. Jordans of the world; the Arabellas made their job easier.