Honest Doubt

by Amanda Cross

  I decided to postpone thinking about Richard Fowler’s friend until later. It was Elaine Kimberly’s name that grabbed me. Don saw the look on my face and said, “What? Tell me, for Pete’s sake.”

  “I spent this afternoon with Elaine Kimberly,” I said. “This very afternoon.”

  “I know that. Your secretary told me. I take it she didn’t happen to mention that she’d been at the Haycock shindig.”

  “Not only didn’t she mention it; she diverted me with stories of her major life decisions, tales about her children, solitude, all of it gripping as hell and maybe even true, but leading me far away from any idea that she was at the party or even knew much about Haycock. Damn it to hell! I don’t know, Don. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work. I thought I could see into people, and I let myself be led up the garden path by an ex-dean.”

  “Now, hold on, Woody. Don’t be so hard on yourself. How were you to know she’d been there? If someone who was there hadn’t been surprised to see her, and mentioned it when asked, we’d never have known.”

  “She didn’t want it known; she hoped it never would be. So what you’re saying is, she’s probably the one who dropped the poison into his Greek wine.”

  “I’m just saying she may be. She at least knew Haycock. What was that Frank person doing there?”

  “You haven’t asked him?”

  “That’s for you to do,” he said. “You’re the private eye.”

  “You mean you’re not going to interview either of them?”

  “We’ll have to, eventually. I’m giving you first innings.”

  “Okay,” I said, after some thought. “I like this diner, I like this hamburger, but I still don’t see why you couldn’t have told me that on the phone.”

  He smiled. “Because that’s not the big news. The big news is that Haycock’s widow is back in town— in between travels, I gather—to do her laundry and flip through her mail, and she’s willing to talk to me, but only tonight. We can’t stop her from leaving as long as she stays in the country. I thought you might like to be in on that.”

  I would have kissed him, but the booth’s table was too wide for that, and I wasn’t the right build to slip across it. I did wonder what made him so considerate of me, but the answer lay somewhere in his and Reed’s past, and I didn’t expect ever to find out.

  “We’d better go now, if you can pass up dessert; I’ll buy you some later. She’s staying at a motel.”

  “It’s my turn to pay,” I said firmly, and did. “You can buy dessert later,” I added, in case he thought I was being rigid or self-righteous.

  “Fine by me,” he said as we went out to his car.

  The widow Haycock was staying in what Don told me was the best motel in town. To prove this, it called itself a hotel, which seemed to mean either that it was a hotel with motel places to park or a motel with hotel-type service. She agreed to receive us in her room, which was a good idea; any conversation in the so-called lounge area might easily have become public.

  She had a largish room, with a huge bed and a table with two chairs around it. Don waved us women to the table and then sat on the end of the bed. He took out a notebook and looked serious, a look designed, I decided, to counter any suggestion that the bed was other than a chair.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said. “When did you decide to go away before your husband’s party, and why?”

  “You mean the fatal party,” she said. “I went because I couldn’t stomach watching him swell up with pride as all his acolytes paid him tribute. He hated the thought of retiring; he had to, because of his heart, but he wanted all the demonstrations he could arrange to prove the great respect and love in which he was held. I thought the whole thing best avoided.”

  “Mrs. Haycock,” I intervened at this point. Don looked about ready to make this a duet, so to speak, and I thought a woman-to-woman question might not be amiss. But she interrupted me.

  “Please don’t call me Mrs. Haycock. I never took his name; my name is, and was, Cynthia Burke. I know what you want to ask, my dear.” She smiled at me. “Why did I marry the brute, what made him a brute, and am I glad he’s dead?”

  I had to keep my mouth from dropping open. “I know,” she continued, “you wouldn’t have put it that crudely, but if we’re going to cover enough ground tonight—I’m definitely leaving for California tomorrow—I thought we had better get to the point.”

  I nodded my agreement and encouragement.

  “Why did I marry him? I was young, foolish, and eager to ally myself with an intellectual, believe it or not. I liked studying and school, I came from a family that thought all that sort of thing snobbish rot, and I thought marrying him would be a coup on several levels. How wrong can you be?”

  “Plenty of women marry the wrong man,” Don said. “This one does seem, from your point of view, a little more wrong than usual.”

  “You can say that again. I knew he was stuck on Tennyson—Lord Alfred, and all his gummy works. But I didn’t know he actually believed that Tennyson was right on all issues, especially women and the natural order of the sexes. Give me a break!”

  “ ‘He for God, she for the god in him,’ ” Don surprisingly said.

  “Exactly! Not that I ever actually heard that quote. Is that Tennyson?”

  “Probably not,” Don said. “It just came to my mind.” I made a mental note to ask Kate if it was Tennyson. If it was Tennyson, Cynthia would probably have had it quoted to her.

  “Listen, honey,” she said, echoing my thoughts, “if he’d have quoted anything from Lord Alfred that short on that subject, believe me, I’d remember it. ‘Man to command and woman to obey.’ I mean, what century did he think he was living in?”

  “Did his sons agree with him on that subject?” Don asked.

  “If so, they weren’t dumb enough to say so. They disliked me on sight, and never gave me the benefit of any doubt. Ever. They just thought I’d married him to hoist myself up in the world—which wasn’t altogether untrue—and that I bumped him off to get into his insurance and out of his bed. Well, I’m not a murderer, and I don’t like being called one.”

  “I think the fact that you were well away at the time clears you,” Don said. I wasn’t so sure of that, but held off saying so.

  “I’m really grateful,” Cynthia said, “to whoever at that college sent the letter saying it was them. It really let me off the hook, since up to that time I was the only suspect in sight; anyway the only one with a motive.”

  “It does seem that a lot of his colleagues didn’t care for him much either,” I said. I glanced over at Don to see if he minded me saying that, but he only changed the subject.

  “About the drug that killed him—I gather you knew about it, its uses and its dangers.”

  “Sure I did. He made such a point about it so often that a bug on the wall must have known its uses and the dangers.”

  “But you never thought of giving him a larger, fatal dose?”

  “No, I didn’t, and you can believe it or not; that’s up to you. I don’t say I never thought of giving him a good smack across his smirking face, but what I really thought of was getting out of there, away from him and his children. Can you imagine naming a kid Hallam because Tennyson had the hots for some guy a hundred years ago?”

  “You were planning to leave your husband?” I asked in a formal-sounding way, raising my pencil to make a note. This interview had startled me at first, but now it was falling more into pattern—the pattern of all women who had married the wrong man and deeply regretted it. Most of them took a little longer than this one to spill it all out, but otherwise there was nothing new here.

  “Leave him and divorce him. I was prepared to make a nasty case of it if he didn’t split the proceeds with me evenly. That’s what makes my supposed motive so stupid. With a divorce settlement I’d have gotten half; now I just get the income until I croak, except for his social security and medical benefits, which I would have been entitled to anyway
. I know according to Hallam I was supposed to have dropped the fatal drug into that horrible stuff he drank before the party, but I didn’t.”

  “We know that,” Don said. “There are a lot of witnesses to the uncorking of the bottle. Of course, it could have been recorked, but that takes a certain kind of expertise.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have corked or recorked that crap if you had paid me; he made me taste it once. ‘Like the pines of Greece,’ he said, or something of the sort. I like sweet drinks, like crème de menthe and cream sherry; nothing wrong with that I can see, but he thought it just showed how tasteless I was. Well, I was certainly tasteless enough to have married him, I’ll give you that. Mind if I smoke?”

  Don and I both shook our heads, though I think we both minded. But there was no point in cutting off a witness this forthcoming. Anyway, Don had told me that the bottle had not been recorked; they could tell, and a whole slew of people had seen someone uncork it at the party.

  “What about Haycock’s children?” Don said. “Of course, they’ve been investigated and interviewed, but I’d be grateful for your take on them.”

  “ ‘Take on them’ is good. I wouldn’t take them for all the tea in China, as my grandma used to say. Well, let me see. Hallam’s not the oldest, but he acts as if he is; he’s as horrible as his father but in a different way. Amazing, isn’t it, how many ways men find of being horrible?” she said to me. “No insult intended,” she added, looking at Don. “He was a stuffed shirt like his father, but more about money and against Democrats and feminists than to do with Tennyson or any other poet. I’m not a feminist, so I’ve never understood what they’re going on about, but if Hallam hates them there must be something to be said on their side; the same for Democrats.”

  “And Charles Jr.?” Don said, to keep her off politics. I believe in letting witnesses run off at the mouth; you learn a lot that way. But I guess Don thought we’d be there all night if we didn’t keep her on track.

  “Chuck is the oldest, but he’s smaller than Hallam, and quieter than Hallam, and the only one of the three who seemed to think I had a right to be living, let alone with their father. I think he disliked Hallam and his father as much as I did, as much as I came to dislike them. I wasn’t buddies with Chuck, but we got on all right.”

  “Did he live at home?” I asked. I thought Don probably knew the answer to that, but I wanted to keep her talking. I could sense that she was tiring a bit; quite often you need to get witnesses going again, before they’ve really run down.

  “None of them lived at home. The daughter, Maud, was the closest to Daddy. I suppose girls often are. She was quite young when her mother died, and Daddy was a comfort, I suppose. She’d gotten married a short time ago, to a guy who traveled around the world a lot, India and places like that, so she came to see Daddy more often than I cared for; he liked it. If you want my opinion, the poor girl never had a chance, but I don’t think she’d have killed Papa. She’s the only one who I think is really sorry he’s dead, if you’ll excuse my bluntness. Hallam wants what there is to get, and he’d love to have me blamed for the death, but I think he’s given up that hope. Chuck is relieved, is my guess, and Maud, like I said, is sorry.”

  “Ms. Burke,” Don asked, consulting his notes, though that’s just a thing you do to sound business-like; all police detectives do it. “Do you know if there were any members of the English department at the college with whom your husband had a close relationship —that is, someone who was a friend, or someone he particularly disliked?”

  “Well, he certainly disliked that woman professor. Couldn’t stand her. I think he spent a lot more time worrying about her than she did about him, but what do I know?”

  I looked at Don to indicate I knew something about this, so there wasn’t a need to pursue it, unless he especially wanted to. He didn’t. “Were there any friends in the department, men he felt closely allied with?” Don asked.

  “He would have said so, but I wouldn’t have. They didn’t all agree with him as chairman, and some of them wanted his job. He was really afraid that woman would get it, and one of the men said to him here, one night at dinner, that if she were chairman he would leave the department. I thought that guy was an arrogant fool and that the department would be better off without him, but I wouldn’t want any woman as head of any place where I worked, so maybe he was right.”

  I would have liked to argue the point, but didn’t; you never can. One speaks to witnesses for what they can tell you, and even if they turn out to be fascist pigs or into family values, you just let them get on with it. It’s not the easiest part of the job. I’d like to have asked her if not wanting to obey a man in marriage was in any way related to not wanting to obey a woman on the job, but forget it. She wasn’t the most thoughtful person, this Ms. Burke, but then if she’d ever decided to marry Haycock, she wasn’t likely to do much thinking.

  “So you don’t believe that any of Professor Haycock’s three children could have wanted to kill him?” Don asked. I guessed he was hoping that some more facts about her and them and their relationship might arise if she decided to be frank enough.

  “Hallam is the likeliest, but I don’t think he’d have the guts. Besides, in his own peculiar way, I think Hallam liked the old fart—sorry,” she added, smiling at Don. That made me wonder if he wanted me to play bad cop. I was on the alert for a signal. He nodded at her to keep going.

  “Chuck wouldn’t kill his father or anyone; he’s not the sort.” I wondered if she thought murderers all looked the part, but didn’t say so. “As for Maud, like I said, she seemed to care for her father, but maybe that was all an act and she really hated him. Although, now that I think of it, it would have made more sense for her to have murdered me.”

  “But all the children knew you didn’t drink retsina?” Don asked.

  “Oh, God, they sure did. He made me taste it once; I nearly threw up. If I want to drink Mr. Clean, I said, I’ve got some under the kitchen sink, thank you very much.”

  Don glanced my way for a second. “Still,” I said, “it might have been clever of you to put it in that drink exactly because everyone knew you would never drink it.”

  “Everyone knew no one else would drink it. Not even lovey-dovey Maud could stomach the stuff. And if you think I’d wipe out the whole family without caring which one went first, well, all I can say is, you’ll have to prove it. As for me, just getting the hell out of his house was all that was ever on my mind.”

  “Of course,” I said, as Don stood up. “I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.” I too got to my feet.

  “Thank you, Ms. Burke,” Don said. “You’ve been very good about answering our difficult questions.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I know you’ve got to clear this thing up. But,” she added, looking at me, “I hope you don’t think I would have killed him. To tell the truth, the idea never occurred to me.”

  “Of course it didn’t,” I said, and smiled at her, making up, as it were. I wasn’t used to conducting an interview with someone else, and I hoped I hadn’t been too rough on her.

  We said our goodbyes, and walked silently out the building and down to Don’s car.

  “You were right to ask that last question,” he said. “The one that got her mad. Her response was spontaneous and told me what I wanted to know, which was that she’d never for a moment thought of dropping a deadly pill into the old guy’s nasty drink.”

  “Did you ever suspect her?” I asked.

  “Officially, I suspect everyone,” he said as we drove off. “Personally, I don’t think she did it; I never did think she did it. What I think now is that we have time for that dessert before your train.”

  And it was she who, while attending an “intellectual” dinner where everyone was supposed to give an opinion on adultery, said airily—and impertinently—“I’m so sorry, I prepared incest by mistake.”

  —EDMUND WHITE, Marcel Proust

  Eight

  NATURALLY, o
r so it seemed to me, I wanted to call up Kate the next morning and request an afternoon meeting. I wanted to ask her who said, “she for the god in him,” and I wanted to tell her what I had learned—not much—and what I’d figured out from what I’d learned: even less. But, I reminded myself, I was supposed to be doing my job, which was in New Jersey, not conferring with the likes of Kate Fansler, however much I wanted to do just that.

  It did occur to me, as I stuffed my backpack with the necessities, now including a cell phone with which the ecstatic Octavia had presented me on my arrival, that I had had more stimulating conversations since the beginning of this job than in most of the rest of my detective career. I decided I had to protect myself against this new form of flirtation— well, new to me, anyway—and to ask some hard, pointed questions. My trouble was, I told myself after waving goodbye to Octavia, that I’d let my suspects set the agenda when talking to me. I’d learned about Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater, and about Dean Kimberly’s gutsy decisions about her children, and about Antonia’s views of the department, but only Kate Fansler, without sounding off, had actually explained something in direct answer to my questions, and Kate wasn’t a suspect or even part of the scene of the crime. Pull yourself together, Woody, I ordered.

  Riding out there, I went over the list of professors, all ranks, and reminded myself what they taught and what I knew about them. In most cases, damn little. I’d talked to David Longworth and Antonia Lansbury; Haycock was dead, but I’d talked to his wife recently, and his children before the anonymous letter had widened the field of departmental suspects.

  I also knew all there was to know about digoxin that could be gathered anywhere. It was a certain cause of death, and seemed to be a bit too readily available for so toxic a drug, but then, I had to remind myself, most folks weren’t trying to kill themselves or anybody else. It’s widely prescribed for anyone with a history of atrial fibrillation, which is, I had learned, the most common cardiac dysrhythmia. Haycock, who had cardiac dysrhythmia along with all his personality defects, kept a supply. So do many other people. The family, wife and children, used to get Haycock’s prescription refilled for him—they were known to the pharmacist he used—but it wasn’t clear at the time and probably never would be whether the digoxin used was from Haycock’s supply or someone else’s.