by Amanda Cross
“First, I think the last thing Beatrice would do would be to go to that girl’s room under any pretense whatsoever; Beatrice claims never to have entered a dormitory and I believe her. I know, so far nothing counts that much with you”–Kate held up a cautioning hand to Sally–“but I have two other reasons, both of them, I think, persuasive. One, I purchased a cheap gray wig, donned some rather raggy clothes, and wandered into the dorm where Beatrice was supposedly spotted. I’m prepared to stand in a line and see if that young man or anyone else picks me out: to youth one gray-haired, frumpish woman looks very like another. Doffing my wig, donning my usual dress, I returned to the dormitory half an hour later; needless to say, no one recognized me. I was there this time to interview Daphne’s roommate, who was also in the seminar. She told me how close she and Daphne were–they even looked alike–and how devastated she was. She, it turned out, was writing on the homeless and had had almost as much difficulty in interviewing her objects of oral history as had Daphne. Her animus against Beatrice was pronounced, but that was hardly surprising. I asked how her paper was going; she had gotten an extension under the circumstances, but had, in fact, found only one homeless woman to interview. She told me about her. No, don’t interrupt. Good pasta, isn’t it?
“I tried to find this homeless woman and failed, but I did get a description. I would suggest that when you find her, she and some others similarly dressed be put in the lineup with Beatrice to let that young man reconsider. No, that isn’t my clincher. Here’s my clincher.” Kate took a sip of wine and sat back for a moment.
“I noticed that Daphne had a MasterCard, an American Express card, and no VISA card. Now that’s perfectly possible–not all of us carry every card–but I was, as you know, grasping at straws, or at least thinnish reeds. Nudged by me, the police arranged to see every credit card bill that came in after Daphne’s death. That merely seemed like another crazy idea of the lady detective, until yesterday. The VISA bill came in yesterday. Here it is.” Kate passed it to Sally; Leo looked at it too. “See anything of interest?” Kate asked.
“Yes,” Sally said. “There’s a charge during the days when Beatrice was in Riker’s Island; two, in fact. But are these charges always recorded on the day they’re charged?”
“Those from supermarkets are,” Kate said. “I’ve checked with this particular supermarket, which is in a shopping center near the college. Beatrice never goes there, since she lives in the city, but it’s also doubtful that Daphne did; she was, in any case, dead at the time of this charge.”
“Let me be sure I have this right,” Leo said, as Sally continued to stare at the bill. “You’re saying Daphne’s roommate’s homeless interviewee killed Daphne, tore up the pictures in anger, perhaps mistook Daphne for her roommate or was too full of rage to care, stole the cash and one credit card that she later used to buy food at a supermarket. The police will have to find her. That’s for sure.”
“I think if the police put their minds to it, they’ll find more evidence still. What you’ve got to do, Sally, after you’ve got the charges against Beatrice dismissed, is take up the defense of the homeless woman. I’ll pay the legal costs. Given one of those uppity girls questioning and patronizing her, and probably inviting her once or twice to their comfy dormitory room, I should think you’d get her a suspended sentence at the very least. Extreme provocation.”
“Please God she hasn’t got previous convictions,” Sally said.
“I doubt it,” Kate said. “It could well take an undergraduate to send even the most benign homeless person over the edge. The trouble with the police,” she added sanctimoniously, “is that they’ve never tried to teach a class without a text. One can do nothing without the proper equipment, as they should be the first to understand. I have urged Beatrice to write a calm letter to the director of women’s studies suggesting an entire revamping of the senior thesis seminar. They must require texts. Under the circumstances, it seems the least they can do.
“More wine?”
WHO SHOT
MRS. BYRON BOYD?
Mark Stampede wrote the most macho books that could still pass for crime fiction, at least as most of the other members of the Crime Writers’ Association of America defined it. Mariana Phillips’s mystery novels, while far from what anyone could call ladylike or, heaven forfend, romantic, deprecated male violence and brought into fictional disrepute the male vision that classed women, in E. M. Forster’s immortal words, with motor cars if they were attractive and with eye flies if they were not. Mark Stampede worked out in a gym, with the result that the muscles in his upper body were highly developed while his protruding belly betrayed his voracious appetite and ready thirst. Mariana Phillips, who possessed neither biceps nor belly, tended to place women at the center of her fictions, pleasant, kindly men at the periphery, and macho men either as villains or, preferably, as corpses. How the two of them turned up on one platform in a very large hall during the course of a rather high-flown fiction writers’ series was a question no one would answer, either when asked politely at the beginning of the event by Mariana Phillips, with considerably less gallantry during the course of the event by Stampede, or with no courtesy at all by the police as the evening wore on.
Mariana Phillips, a woman of honor and a scholar of sorts, had read at least two of Stampede’s books before the panel to see what she was up against, and out of courtesy. Stampede had never heard of Phillips’s books, considered courtesy an effete maneuver to enslave men, and would not have read a syllable Phillips wrote if no other words had been available on the proverbial desert island.
The event or panel never did end, leaving forever unresolved the question of how in the world anyone was going to get out of this unfortunate confrontation; rather it was interrupted, after the two panelists had disagreed with one another on every possible subject in an atmosphere growing increasingly unpleasant, by a gunshot. For whom the bullet was intended was unclear: indeed, establishing that was the first priority of the police and the unfortunate institution sponsoring the event. What was unhappily obvious was who the bullet hit: an elderly woman who had been persuaded at the last moment to moderate the panel. Perhaps, given the youth-worshipping qualities of our culture, “middle-aged” was the kinder phrase for the victim, although, as Mark Stampede had earlier made clear in tones that reverberated throughout the acoustically alive hall, dames over thirty-five were like Australia: everyone knew it was down there and nobody gave a damn.
The original moderator had been held up by a personal crisis, and the dead woman, Mrs. Byron Boyd (as she preferred to be called) had been persuaded to preside in his place at the latest possible moment. She was on the “hostess” committee, and near to hand when the telephone message announcing his inability to arrive was received from the original moderator.
The police assumed that the gunperson, as the officer in charge said with a sneer, was mad, personally connected to the victim, or possibly both. Everyone else in the hall assumed that an alter ego of Mark Stampede’s had supposed himself (or herself) to be aiming at Mariana Phillips and had shot another female non–sex object by mistake. If women are all the same in the dark, older women are all the same in the light. That seemed the readiest explanation, if explanation it could be called. No one was prepared to believe that someone in the audience had shot Mrs. Boyd out of frustration with the evening’s event. Audiences have been known to snarl at and desert speakers; they do not usually shoot them, having easier means of revenge at hand, such as refusing to buy or even read the speakers’ books and advising everyone they know to the same course.
The police, while permitting no one in the audience to leave until names and addresses could be recorded and probable witnesses identified, searched the premises and found the murder weapon in a wastebasket in the women’s room. Since that room had, it eventually transpired, been deserted at the time of the shot and immediately afterward, this did not necessarily point to a woman murderer. The gun itself was the sort that can be illegally
purchased in all states, and legally purchased in most. It had been wiped clean, although the chance of a gun bearing identifiable prints is, detective fiction to the contrary, small. The police settled down to the long process of listing all those present.
Mark Stampede, clearly identified and innocent, since in the sight of all those people he certainly did not wield a gun, nor could he have shot anyone else on the platform from the position he himself occupied, was allowed to depart. Mariana Phillips, who might have chosen to leave on the same grounds, remained out of sympathy with the dead woman and because she had an abiding interest in other people, their actions and reactions. So she stood for a good while just looking on, and finally subsided into a chair some member of the audience, now standing and swirling about, had deserted.
“THE GENERAL IDEA,” Kate Fansler said some days later, having been called in for consultation by her friend Mariana Phillips, “seems to be that whoever shot the gun was aiming at you.”
“But why? I may not be universally loved, but I’m hardly hated enough to justify murder.” Mariana smiled, indicating that the thought of being worth murdering was not wholly unpleasing. “Thank you for coming to talk about it. It’s remarkably hard to think about anything else. Maybe you can help me to talk it out. Maybe,” she added, “you can even figure it out. In my opinion, the whole thing was a miserable fluke, an unpremeditated, unmotivated, therefore undetectable crime.”
“The general impression I get from the newspapers,” Kate said, “is that admirers of Stampede–or the creature himself–are so distressed at his losing sales to ‘the mob of scribbling women,’ as Hawthorne called them, that they are gunning down the competition: the manly solution to all such problems.”
“Stampede is the one person who couldn’t have shot her, except for me,” Mariana said. “The angle was all wrong; anyway, we would have been seen by five hundred people.”
“A hit man,” Kate said, with a certain satisfaction. “I haven’t come across one before, not in what is so charmingly called real life. I thought they operated only in spy novels and Mafia warfare. Was the poor woman’s family there?”
“No. I think the police were trying to get on to her husband. Her children are grown and scattered.”
“Did you know her at all well?”
“Not really,” Mariana said. “You know how it is. She arranges the reception that always follows these events: wine, cheese, cookies. She’s the one who sees that the books of the speakers are available for purchase and autographing. She stands about being gracious. Very old-fashioned; this is her form of good works. I don’t even know her first name; I just always said ‘Hello, Mrs. Boyd’ and passed right along. Wait a minute, I do know her first name: it’s Marilee. She did mention that our names were alike. Do you suppose she was a secret admirer of Mark Stampede? She certainly can’t have taken to me; I’ve never had a character in any book who called herself by her husband’s name; I’m not her sort at all, really.”
“People have an infinite capacity to enjoy books while ignoring the message they find provocative. Someone once said of Shaw’s plays that they were revolutionary messages covered with chocolate, but that the audiences licked off the chocolate and left the message. They always wanted Eliza to marry Higgins despite all Shaw’s efforts, and still do: Remember My Fair Lady?”
“Where do you pick up all this miscellaneous information?”
“I’ve been a magpie from birth. Here’s another example. I just read that Anna Freud, who liked detective novels, only admired books with male heroes, in fact, only fantasized herself as a male hero. But later in life she was willing to read even detective novels with a female detective. See what I mean? Now tell me more about last night.”
“Well, after a while I went back up to the stage and looked down from there. The body had been removed, and the police had finished protecting the area. Whoever the murderer was, he or she had certainly not been on the platform when the shot was fired.”
“Did you see anyone else on the platform when you went back there?”
“Yes. A young man named Elmer Roth. I never imagined anyone was named Elmer anymore, and I used to watch him as though he’d come from another planet. He had stood about with us–that is, with me and Stampede–while they hurriedly recruited Mrs. Byron Boyd, and he’d tried, with little success, to make conversation. Well, hardly conversation: chitchat. ‘We are an ill-suited pair,’ I said to Stampede, trying to be minimally friendly. ‘I didn’t know who else would be on the program when I agreed to appear. Did you?’ Stampede answered that question succinctly with a howl of dismay. It occurred to me that Stampede was literally frightened of post-nubile women: either he was with the boys or he was anticipating a good lay. Any other situation was filled with terror.”
“Is Mark Stampede married?”
“Not that I know of. Anyway, afterward, Elmer Roth said to me sort of plaintively, ‘I thought it would be a real discussion.’ I had the feeling he had decided to explain it to me in anticipation of explaining it to the world. ‘I thought you both might read a bit from your works and then discuss the function of gender roles in crime fiction. It doesn’t,’ he added ruefully, but then everything he said was rueful, ‘seem to have been one of the century’s great ideas.’ ”
“It was a good enough idea,” Kate said. “He just picked rather extreme examples of the possible points of view. My own feeling, though I’m a friend of yours and therefore hardly unbiased, is that you were prepared to be courteous at least, but Stampede responded like a man in a brothel who’s been forced to perform with the owner’s grandmother. Outraged, I mean. Not getting his rightful desserts. That, at least, was what I gathered from the account in The Village Voice. He apparently told someone he was tired of being ‘pussy-whipped.’ Quite a pungent phrase, that.”
“Anyway,” Mariana went on, “Elmer was clearly worried that everyone would remember that it was his idea, and blame the whole thing on him. I didn’t even realize it was his idea, so I told him not to worry.”
“After all,” Kate said, “there have been unpleasantnesses on other platforms before this, but no one was shot.”
“Poor Elmer said he kept thinking the whole thing was a joke, and that Mrs. Boyd would get up and walk away. I knew exactly what he meant. Do you think someone could have planned a joke, and a real bullet got into the gun by mistake?”
“I’m not sure that’s possible, but it’s an interesting suggestion,” Kate said. “I’ll ask Reed.”
“Elmer said he felt awfully guilty, because I’d agreed to be on this panel as a favor to him, and I might very well be dead.”
“Poor baby,” Kate said. “I feel sorry for him. I have to admit it’s a bit harder to summon up some real compassion for Mrs. Byron Boyd.” This was due, Kate realized, to a certain unreality about the lady or, if it came to that, a certain impression that the whole episode was some trick with mirrors that would ultimately be revealed in all its contrivance. It still seemed imaginable that Mrs. Byron Boyd had sat up in the mortuary van and said, “Well, that joke worked rather well.”
Not that the accounts in the papers allowed any such fantasy. Mrs. Byron Boyd’s obituaries were lengthy, as were the articles about the shooting. Mrs. Boyd, the newspapers reported, had been shot through the chest and had died within moments. She had, quite literally, never known what hit her. Unlike soldiers and gangwarfarers, she had never braced herself for attack. People in her world were never shot.
“REED,” KATE ASKED him that evening, after she had told him about her talk with Mariana Phillips, “is it possible that someone could have been shooting a blank to create drama or for whatever reason, and killed her by mistake because someone else had put a bullet in the gun?”
“It’s possible, the way it’s possible you’ll win the New York State lottery,” Reed said. “Apart from all the technical problems, and they are many, the chances of the bullet hitting her in the chest, apparently in the heart or lungs, when shot by someone not really
aiming and perhaps not able to aim that precisely–I’ve lost the end of the sentence; I’ll leave you to finish it.”
“That’s what I thought you would say,” Kate sighed.
“How much does Mariana know about Mark Stampede?” Reed asked.
“I asked her that,” Kate said. “She doesn’t know much of anything–nothing that everyone who reads mysteries and hears talk of crime novels doesn’t know. He’s supposed to be a pretty rough character, and certainly his remarks that night bear that out. But maybe it’s all a public image, and at home he’s an angel boy with a cozy wife and five adoring children, all kept strictly out of the limelight. I did ask her if she knew anyone who knows him. She finally came up with someone she knew on a Crime Writers’ Association committee who had actually mentioned that Stampede also served on it.”
“And you got his name and plan to go to see him.”
“Of course,” Kate said. “Not that anything will come of it. But I do have to find out more about Stampede. I don’t even suppose that can be his real name. As it happens, Larry Donahue has agreed to see me tomorrow. He’s a mildly unsuccessful writer, happy to exchange what information he has for a few drinks, like all of his happy breed. And after all, writers can’t just stand around and watch each other be shot.”
“Good luck,” Reed said.
“STAMPEDE IS HIS REAL NAME,” Larry Donahue said as he was served with his second martini. Kate could not decide if he had never heard that hard drinking had gone out, or if he had reverted. He was a young man in his thirties, and Kate had long since noticed that members of his generation often lived as though the decades between the Fifties and the Eighties had never been, to say nothing of earlier history. “Somebody asked him at the committee meeting. I think it may have inspired him in some sort of way. He’s not a bad guy, really, if you’re willing to judge men by their camaraderie with other men, and not their professed opinions of women. His were simplistic: young women were rated one to ten; older women were not a fit subject of conversation or contemplation. But you had the feeling this was all an act he had tried on for size and fit into perfectly. Who knows how many he might have tried on before?”
