The James Joyce Murder

by Amanda Cross

  At the state police station, Kate was told to wait. She asked if she might telephone, but was again ignored. Then she was called to talk with an officer behind a desk.

  “Why were you driving without a license?” he asked.

  “Someone must have taken it out of my wallet.”

  “The same person who took the car’s registration?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why should anyone do that?”

  “I can’t imagine. They couldn’t have known I would have to stop, and if I hadn’t stopped, you wouldn’t have found out. So it can’t have been a desire to cause trouble.”

  “Know anyone who’d want to cause you trouble?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Got any identification with you?”

  “All the identification cards from the university where I teach.”

  “Which university’s that?”

  Kate told him. It was clear his opinion of it, if any, had declined on learning of her association with it.

  “Do you own the car you were driving?”

  “No.”

  “Who does?”

  There was a long, palpable pause while Kate did not answer the question. Should she give them Reed’s name? On the surface of it, it seemed logical enough. They would call him in Araby and straighten out this whole dreadful mess. But Reed, after all, was an assistant district attorney, and reporters did look at police blotters. Anyway, if two people recently connected with a murder should now be in the hands of the police again, however innocently, would it not be one of those tangles which somehow, as time passes, become inexplicable in simple words? In any case, it certainly couldn’t help Reed to be tied up in all this.

  “Who owns it?” the officer asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said.

  “You don’t know. Do you mean you borrowed it, but you don’t know from whom?”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Kate said.

  “Are you acquainted with the person you borrowed it from?”

  “It’s not that I don’t know,” Kate said, shifting her ground. “It’s that I won’t say.”

  “Take her inside,” the officer said.

  “Haven’t I a constitutional right to make a phone call before you lock me up?” Kate asked.

  “Everybody knows all about his constitutional rights today,” the officer said. “Rights, rights, rights, for everybody but the police. You can make one phone call. In there.”

  One of the troopers led Kate into another room where a telephone stood on a table. She put in the call to Araby. It was answered, against her most fervent hopes by Leo. “Leo. This is Aunt Kate.”

  “Hi, Aunt Kate. You in New York already?”

  “No, dear. Leo, will you let me speak to—she glanced up at the trooper, who was watching her—“let me speak to the oldest man there.” To the trooper, this sounded like just what he expected from a woman who had probably never had a driver’s license, had eaten the registration, and done something hideous to the generator. So his looks implied.

  “Mr. Pasquale’s gone home.”

  “Not Mr. Pasquale, Leo. Staying in the house.”

  “I don’t know who’s older, William or Emmet. Wait, I’ll ask.”

  “Leo!” But before Kate could stop him, he had dumped down the receiver in the way of small boys, and could be heard shouting in the distance.

  “Hurry up,” the trooper said.

  “I’m having a little trouble finding him,” Kate said. The trooper’s look suggested that it wouldn’t surprise him if she had trouble finding the Empire State Building on Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in the blaze of the noonday sun.

  “William’s older,” a breathless Leo reported. “Funny your wanting to know their ages now you’re gone. Emmet’s birthday . . .”

  “Leo. Please. Let me speak to the man who isn’t William or Emmet.”

  “Is this a game? Mr. Artifoni says . . .”

  “Leo. Please.”

  “O.K., O.K.” The receiver crashed down again. After what seemed only a little longer than forever, while Kate resolutely refused to meet the eyes of the trooper, Reed’s voice could be heard.

  “Kate? Where on earth are you?” No voice, Kate thought to herself, no voice ever sounded so beautiful.

  “I’m in a police station. State police. The car registration’s gone, along with my driver’s license, and something ghastly’s happened to the generator.” She realized her voice sounded as panicky as she felt. Ridiculously, she recalled a New Yorker cartoon of long ago, in which a woman is telephoning from a police station: “Henry,” she is saying, “I did something wrong on the George Washington Bridge.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Where am I?” Kate asked the trooper. He told her.

  “All right, I’m coming, in your brother’s scorned limousine. Let me talk to someone there.”

  “I didn’t give them your name. I was afraid . . .”

  “I respect your noble silence. Let me talk to the officer in charge, if possible.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll let you. They were going to put me in a cell.” Kate looked up at the trooper. “He wants to talk to you,” she said. The trooper looked dubious, but he took the phone.

  So Kate, only slightly to her disappointment, didn’t wait in a cell after all. She waited in the waiting room for Reed’s arrival which, she decided, could not be in less than an hour.

  He arrived in forty-five minutes, however, having driven the limousine, one supposed, at close to eighty. Kate hoped to remember in calmer times to ask him if he had made the Smith Hill light.

  “Here I am in the clink,” Kate said. “Oh, frabjous day. The question is, as I figured out while waiting for you, what am I accomplishing by being here, or, more exactly, what am I not accomplishing by not being somewhere else?”

  “Meaning: who took your driver’s license and my registration? A fascinating question. But I think we had better get out of here first.”

  The man behind the desk, while managing to convey that he was in no way mitigating the severity of Kate’s misdemeanor, spoke to Reed as though he was now assured of not having an escaped, if harmless, lunatic on his hands. “Very well,” he said, “we’ll release Miss Fansler, provided she does not drive. You, I trust, have both an operator’s license and a registration for the automobile you are driving?”

  “Certainly,” Reed said, reaching for them.

  “All right.” His glance was perfunctory. “You’ll want to drive round to the garage that has the other car. Perkins, tell this gentleman where it is.”

  “I have a card,” Kate said. “Is there a fine?”

  “There will be. And you’ll have to send your license in to have the convictions recorded, if and when you find it. In case you don’t find it, you’ll have to apply for another, and be certain to report the convictions. Good-bye.”

  “Oh, Reed, was I ever glad to see anyone? You may not feel in your element treading through cow dung or clinging to tractors, but in a police station, you’re the man of my dreams.”

  At the garage, the mechanic, waving the generator, greeted Kate. “Someone pulled the wires out,” he said. “Disconnected it. A kid’s trick, I thought the brushes couldn’t be gone after nine thousand miles. Look”—he waved the generator at Reed—“not even any corrosion on the armature.”

  “What would have happened,” Kate asked, “if I hadn’t had to slam on the brakes for that car?”

  “Sooner or later, after you turned on your lights, the engine would just have died on you.”

  “But those wires must have been pulled out before I started. How could I have got this far?”

  “There was enough juice in your battery to start her up. With just the engine running, you’d go O.K. But your lights draw on your battery.”
>
  “Clever; very clever. I’m sorry about your generator, Reed.”

  “It’s all fixed,” the mechanic said. “I’ll just screw it back in. Shouldn’t give you any more trouble. Lucky I happened to be here.”

  “How much do I owe you?” Reed said.

  “Six dollars, three for the labor, three for the towing.”

  Reed handed over the money. “The question is,” he said, “how are we going to get this bug home? It will almost go in the back of your brother’s car, but not quite.”

  “I could drive it, Reed. I’d be really careful, and now, with the generator back . . .”

  “Perhaps I should have left you in jail. We’ll just have to come back for it. Would it be possible,” he asked the mechanic, “for me to leave it in your lot over there?”

  “Help yourself. But I’ll be glad to sell you a towline if you want to pull her home.”

  “Is that legal?” Reed asked.

  “Not on the Taconic. Take 22.”

  “I guess it’ll be cheaper in the long run,” Reed said.

  So it was rather with the air of being a procession that they arrived home in Araby. The household, including Leo, who had refused to go to bed, and who was suspected of hoping to see his aunt in jail, all came out on the lawn to greet them.

  “And you said we never had adventures,” Grace said.

  “Some adventure. I was made to look like a perfect fool, never got to New York, and have exposed poor, much-beset Reed to even more Galahad-like endeavors.”

  “He always seems to be hauling one of us out of jail,” William said, “but I still don’t see what you did wrong.”

  So they all went inside to discuss it over refreshments, Kate, like Pooh, feeling the need of a little something.

  “It’s all very funny,” Kate said to Reed later, when the others had finally gone to bed, “and doubtless it will make a lovely story in several years’ time, like all those dreadful things that happen to Cornelia Otis Skinner that she manages to be so hilarious about, but what I want to know right now is . . .”

  “Who was interested enough in your not getting to New York to go to all that trouble?”

  “Suppose the state police hadn’t come along? They might never have found out I was driving without a license.”

  “If you stopped anywhere along a parkway, they were bound to find you. But if by some chance you’d ended in a garage, even if you found someone who understood a car’s electric system—and at that hour, most gas stations have only boys who fill tanks and wipe windshields—all of that would have delayed you sufficiently. Why?”

  “It can’t have been too serious a reason. I mean, the person clearly wasn’t prepared to take life-and-death measures. He didn’t fiddle with the steering mechanism, or the brakes.”

  “Kate, my darling.”

  “Oh, it would probably have been better if he had. I’d have landed in a ditch and gone on to take the train. I suppose everyone in Araby knew I was going to New York?”

  “Did they know you were going to talk to someone at Lingerwell’s firm?”

  “Everyone in the household knew, I suppose. Somehow, in the country, everyone does know everything. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not used to living in a household.”

  “Everyone in the house and Mr. Mulligan.”

  “Blimey, yes. And Calypso’s his publisher. Reed, do you think . . .”

  “I think we had better sleep on it. Tomorrow I’m going to drive to New York, in brother’s limousine, without telling anyone about it, and see Ed Farrell at Calypso myself. Of course, it may all have been sheer malevolence.”

  “Let me go with you.”

  “Certainly not. You must wait here to come and rescue me when I get picked up for vagrancy. Anyhow, I hope to go and come in a day. You’ll just have to drive Mrs. Monzoni in the bug without registration.”

  “Don’t you think Ed Farrell is likelier to talk to me than you?”

  “My title, such as it is, may go further toward convincing him this is a matter of great importance.”

  “Meaning, you can bully better.”

  “Meaning, whatever it is he has to tell, it may be betraying a confidence. There is, somehow, something more palatable about doing that to a lawyer whose interests are strictly professional.”

  Early in the morning, Kate heard Reed’s car pull out. Deciding to get up and dress, she was not unbearably surprised to find, on opening her underwear drawer, her driver’s license and the Volkswagen’s registration reclining neatly on top of a pile of bras.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Mother

  After breakfast on Wednesday, Kate decided that, whatever the rites and rituals of rural life, simple kindness urged a call upon the young lady now holding up, so to speak, the pillars of the Bradford household. Undoubtedly, Kate thought, there was something she could do; if no act of neighborliness were discoverable, she could at least provide sympathy and an assurance of help at any future time, should it be needed.

  Emmet, instead of immuring himself in the library, as was his inevitable wont, had taken himself off on a hike across the fields, an undertaking so atypical as to suggest an aberration. Still, there was no doubt no one, since the murder, was really behaving a bit like himself. William, having taken Leo to camp, had continued, with Kate’s permission, to Williamstown, where he intended to consult some books in the Williams College library, the nearest respectable collection of literary and scholarly works. From time to time Kate thought, rather desperately, of Reed’s money, subject to forfeiture should William disappear altogether. Yet it did not seem either possible or desirable to restrict his movements. He knew the situation, and if his own sense of honor would not keep him from fleeing, certainly no external restraints were likely to.

  Lina and Grace Knole were supposedly at work or, at the least, at thought. Lina, with her career yet to make, was working on a book to do with the proper names in eighteenth-century novels—an abstruse enough topic, yet not quite as firmly in the “how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?” category as the ordinary mocking layman might think. Lina was a brilliant teacher, alive, interesting and interested, deeply devoted to her work and respecting herself for doing it; but these qualifications were, these days, insufficient without publication. That no one but other scholars would ever read about proper names in the eighteenth century was not held to be an argument against the book, nor should it be. Still, how far had the subject chosen Lina, as subjects should choose those whom they overmaster, and how far had Lina arbitrarily decided on the subject since a book there had to be? Soon the whole profession would be swamped in an avalanche of published, unreadable works, neither conceived with excitement, nor nurtured with love, nor welcomed with gratitude.

  Which recalled, of course, Grace’s proposition of the night before. Might a college president actually reverse the trend, or at least run counter to it, making teaching, rather than research, again an honorable profession? Walking down the road, kicking at the gravel, Kate willed herself into a refusal to consider the offer of the presidency. Not yet, at any rate, was she ready to consider it. The brown dog trotted up. Kate greeted him, pulling his soft ears affectionately. “Reed’s gone today, old chap,” she said. As to Reed . . .

  Kate had at least learned enough about rural ways to know that one never knocked at the front door unless one had been invited formally, and not always then. She walked around to the kitchen door and tapped on the pane. A young, pretty girl opened the door. Neither her age nor her looks seemed of first importance in any consideration of her because of a quality which was so clearly hers in amplitude: sweetness. It occurred to Kate, stepping into the neat kitchen, how rare a quality it was, how often its appearance was merely a cover for passions of an unusually hostile sort.

  “How nice you’ve made the kitchen look,” Kate said Mary Bradford had talked constantly about h
ow hard she worked, how none of her family ever put anything away, but her kitchen, her house, had always looked like Pandora’s box, constantly pouring forth its unattractive contents. Now the working space in the kitchen had been cleared off; flowers, which Mary Bradford had never had time to gather, stood on the table. The girl had been about to make a cake using, Kate noticed, real ingredients—butter, sugar, flour, eggs—not a prepared mix, as Mary had done.

  “I’m Kate Fansler from up the road,” Kate said. “I should have come along sooner to offer my help, but somehow . . .”

  “It must have been very hard,” the girl said, “having all the confusion and nastiness of a shooting. Are the police gone?”

  “Quite gone, I think, at least for now. The autopsy held no surprises; the arraignment of the young man who fired the gun, while disagreeable, was not surprising either. Wouldn’t you like to send the children up to us and have a few hours to yourself? You must have been working very hard.”

  “It’s mostly been the visitors. Today at least they haven’t started coming in the morning. But I do expect them this afternoon. I like people, really, but . . .”

  “But not when they ooze four parts maliciousness to one part curiosity. And now I’ve come and ruined your one free morning. Why not let some of us sit with the children tonight, and you can go to a movie. Perhaps Mr. Bradford would like to go too. Let’s take it as settled then. Don’t let me keep you any more, now. If you should decide you want a few hours . . .”

  “Please don’t go, Professor Fansler.”

  “Goodness, no one calls me that, except a few students and book salesmen.”

  “Dr. Fansler, then.”

  “Absolutely no one calls me that, if I can help it. I’m always afraid of being asked to set a leg. Just Kate will do, or Miss Fansler, if informality makes you uncomfortable.”

  “Miss Fansler, a lot of the people who have stopped in have had a good deal to say about you, as I suppose you realize. That’s how I knew you were a professor, of course: gossip. But Mrs. Monzoni says you’re one of the few people she’s ever worked for who trusts other people to go about their own jobs, and I imagine you’ve had a great deal of experience with people as a teacher.”