A Trap for Fools

by Amanda Cross

  “How did you find out?”

  “Ever the practical woman,” Kate said. “I figured it out; I told you quite a while ago I thought the whole thing was phony, only I didn’t know how phony. Oh, I didn’t think of you right away; when I expounded the whole pretty plot to Reed I didn’t even mention you. Because even though I was sure you had to be in on it, I didn’t want to believe it. Sure, you had suggested I plug in to the network of administrative secretaries, not to mention the women faculty: you knew they didn’t know anything, that Noble had covered his tracks well. All you could do, after enticing me into this little charade, was to keep suggesting, as subtly as possible, that the family had the biggest motive. Were you going to see one of Adams’s sons accused of this? Or had you planned to pin it on the widow, who fouled you up by disappearing to see her sick uncle three thousand miles away?”

  “Are you finished?” Edna asked. She seemed to have stopped crying, but not easily.

  “I’m not quite finished. I still didn’t want to believe it. There could have been an innocent explanation for all these things. After all, you didn’t try to steer me away from Mr. Witherspoon; Noble did. And then, rather late last night, I had a phone call from PC.”

  “Who?”

  “Penelope Constable, a famous English novelist, turned up by the women’s faculty network. That really was cute of you, Edna, pretending to have faith in the sisterhood: I liked that touch. It had me fooled, no question.”

  “What did the English novelist say?”

  “She said, my dear Edna, that her son-in-law, a professor in the psychology department, had mentioned that your friend had indeed had an answer to the ad. But you had told your friend when she reported it to you that it was no longer needed and to forget about it. You told me there was no answer, remember? Only it seems one young man had been on the campus on that Saturday and might have seen—what? We shall probably find out as this investigation winds its way down. I don’t, however, take great delight in the fact that your guilt was finally proved to me by a coincidence: PC’s son-in-law happened to be in the office of your friend when the answer to the ad came in, and happened to think of it when PC recounted to him the events of that particular Saturday on Thanksgiving weekend. I had begun to suspect you had lied to me on many occasions, but this was the first proof that you had lied to me, and it went a long way to convincing me that you’d been, if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, a total shit. And I warn you, if you try to overcome me for any reason, I have a lot of adrenaline surging through my system.” With that, Kate, in denial of her last statement, walked around the couch and dropped onto it.

  Edna leaned forward and dropped her head into her hands. Kate was now ready to let her speak. It took a while.

  Edna said, “I got on to what Matthew Noble was doing quite by accident. When we set up the center for Jewish studies, I asked to see how the Arab money was used; I wasn’t used to dealing with such large endowments. The center for Jewish studies came under my direction, not that it was exactly a professional school, but there’d been some reorganization, and programs and centers were put under my umbrella.

  “I didn’t ask Matthew about the Arab money; I asked the development office and the controller. I’d learned to read financial statements and actuarial accounts from my husband when I took the job. I thought I ought to know, since I had a friend who got into some trouble because he’d been an academic and had had the wool pulled over his eyes for a while in a similar situation.”

  “Where is your husband?” Kate suddenly asked. It had not occurred to her to wonder if the husband was home, or in on the scheme, or even a danger.

  Edna said, “He’s at the hospital getting a radiation treatment. He doesn’t know anything about this. He has cancer of the prostate.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate heard herself saying. “Why didn’t you tell me?” The question sounded idiotic to her own ears, but not, it seemed, to Edna’s.

  “I wanted to. But if I started telling you any of it, I would have come apart. I needed the money. I wanted us to have a nice place to live, and I wanted it now. Not that I would ever have started this. You slip into things. I faced Matthew with what I’d found. I said I had to tell the provost or president unless he would put the money back. He said he wouldn’t and that the chances of it being discovered were slim, I realize now that was nonsense, but he’d certainly been safe for quite a while. I suppose I wanted to believe it. Somehow, I started letting him pay me money. It seems incredible as I tell it; I told myself I’d keep it as evidence, in a separate account, and give it back when he failed to make up the amount he’d stolen. Then Frank got sick and—well, things fell apart.”

  “Why did Noble have to kill Adams?”

  “He’d gone on demanding things. He liked his sense of being able to call the shots, that was the trouble. Matthew began to be afraid. Adams had even insisted on Matthew’s giving the black kids a key to Levy Hall, though Matthew managed to do it through Humphrey. Adams knew that would get under Matthew’s skin. He didn’t know it would mean his own life.”

  “When did he tell you what he’d done?”

  “When he got the idea of asking you to solve the case. He threatened me with exposure. He even said I could be accused as an accomplice in the murder.”

  “What exactly was I supposed to accomplish? Or not accomplish?”

  “You were a diversion. He hoped there’d be publicity and a lot of talk and that the police would get fed up sooner. Believe me, Kate, I tried to talk him out of it. But he said if I didn’t talk you into it I’d go down with him. I knew that was true. And now, of course, I’ll go down with him anyway.”

  “Probably. He’ll try to blame you for most of it. Unless someone can strike a bargain with him. Perhaps the provost. But I’m not going to raise a finger, as my mother used to say.”

  “About Arabella. She’d seen him that Saturday. I think she planned to tell you, but she told him first. She said she’d keep it to herself if he offered her something. Poor Arabella. She wasn’t unlike Adams, wanting to manipulate systems that had been entrenched far too long to be that easily diverted from their ends.”

  “Adams was a finagler,” Kate said.

  “A what?”

  “Susan Pollikoff’s word. A finagler. You know, everyone underestimates the resentment of apparently powerless people. And the things they have to say. Noble underestimated it. His other mistake was not to realize that I look for narratives. That’s my profession, not being a detective. That’s the profession of every professor of literature. He thought to provide a diversion, but lit crit teaches you to be on the watchout for exactly that. We deal in subtexts, in the hidden story.”

  Edna said, “What are you going to do?”

  “About you? I don’t know. I’ve already told the provost about Noble and made sure he called the police. I didn’t mention you. So if you have the poison in a vessel with a pestle, now’s the time to bring it out. Or a flagon with a dragon.”

  But Edna had begun to cry again. In the end, Kate sat on the arm of her chair and patted her shoulder. After a while, Kate left.

  “A masterful job, if you don’t mind my saying so,” the provost said some weeks later.

  “But I do mind,” Kate said, accepting a glass of scotch after declining sherry. It was late in the afternoon. “It was a most womanly job; most men couldn’t have done it. But if acting like a man is your highest compliment, then I can only accept it while hoping to change your terms of reference.”

  The provost had the grace to smile.

  “Thank God Noble’s been cooperative, anyway,” he said. “We wouldn’t press charges; he’ll only be tried on the Adams murder, and he’ll plead manslaughter. We’ll keep all this out of the papers. I can’t think it would encourage donors of any faith, do you?” He didn’t exactly wink at Kate, but he didn’t exactly not wink either.

  “He blackma
iled Edna Hoskins,” Kate said, “and cost her her job. I think she was very good at it.”

  “She was,” the provost said. “We’re helping her to find another position. Noble is playing his part nobly. I was sorry to hear about her husband.”

  “I learned a certain amount about blackmail,” Kate said. “It’s dangerous, as when Arabella tried it with Noble, or when Adams went too far. But it worked when Noble tried it with Edna; she felt she had no choice.”

  “Blackmail is a dreadful business,” the provost said with, Kate thought but she might have imagined it, a suspicion of nervousness.

  “Dreadful,” Kate said. “But this whole investigation has revealed nothing but dreadful things. Of which by far the worst, in my opinion, was the death of Arabella Jordan.”

  “Of course. We all feel that.”

  “But some of us,” Kate said, “feel it more guiltily, or more profoundly, than others. I do.”

  “But what can be done?” the provost said. “We have written to her family; the president has written. I understand her father cherishes the letter.”

  “I’m sure he does. And I’m sure her mother cherishes Arabella’s father’s cherishing it. It has no doubt made him easier to live with.” Kate examined her briefcase with a thoughtfulness that utilitarian object seemed hardly to deserve.

  The provost said, “What do you want?”

  “I’m not pretending it isn’t blackmail,” Kate said. “I detest pretentions; always have. It’s blackmail.”

  “I repeat my question,” the provost said, not kindly.

  “I thought three large scholarships,” Kate said. “Generous, you know, covering living expenses, and what the student would have been able to offer toward her or his family’s support had she or he not gone to college. I was rather hoping for shes, of course, but it doesn’t pay to be sexist. They’ll be the Arabella Jordan Fellowships, of course. I rather hope they’ll come to be called the Arries.”

  “You’d better settle for one or two,” the provost said.

  “Three,” Kate said. “It’s a holy number.”

  She got up then and left before the provost could answer her. Kate had little doubt that thought of this story reaching the wealthier Arab and Jewish communities, not to mention the considerably poorer black communities, was going to be sufficient inspiration to the provost in the raising of the necessary funds.

  It was too bad, really, about the provost. Kate had always rather admired him, as much as she could admire any administrator. They were unlikely to meet, except under the most formal circumstances, ever again.

  Kate passed Levy Hall on her way off the campus and into her beloved city streets. Even the garbage and graffiti looked better than they had in a long, long time.

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  Amanda Cross

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) attended Wellesley College, class of 1947, and later received her graduate degrees in English Literature from Columbia University, where she joined the faculty in 1960, retiring in 1992 as the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities. She authored nine scholarly books in the fields of feminist literary criticism and autobiography. As Amanda Cross, she wrote fourteen academic mystery novels and several short stories, featuring Kate Fansler, an English professor and amateur sleuth.

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  Bello

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