Honest Doubt (10 page)

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, or 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.

Don had told me the police were looking into that; it was so common a drug, however, and easy enough to make from the even more common foxglove plant, that the source was unlikely to offer much of a clue to the person who'd dropped eight 250-microgram pills into Haycock's retsina. Given that he had heart trouble, fewer would also have worked, suggesting that we didn't have a specialist in heart medicine among our suspects, but then we knew that already. Anyhow, information about digoxin was easily gotten—look how much of it I knew by heart, when I couldn't remember why a play of Virginia Woolf's should have annoyed the chief victim. No wonder Kate was in demand for literary-type murders; you had to be one to know one, as the saying goes.

When I swung off the highway and onto the smaller road leading to the college, I went over in my mind who exactly I was going to meet up with today, even if I had to pursue them to their homes. I have a trained memory, which, so far at least, has always produced what previously acquired information I asked of it, but I don't burden it unnecessarily: last names only for Clifton's English department, except for Antonia and Dawn. So I had to track down Goldberg, American Literature; Petrillo, Medieval; Wanamaker, Comparative; Janeer, Romantic, not tenured; Lermann, Eighteenth Century, tenured but only an assistant prof; then there was Graham, Novel, un-tenured, and Oakwood, Creative Writing, adjunct. Thank God one of the cast of characters was on leave. This could take all day. Well, it
would
take all day, but I was ready.

Dawn had told me that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays were the best days to find everyone around. Fridays many of them took off if there wasn't an important meeting, and Monday they were still a little spacey—my word, not hers—from the weekend. These professor types seemed not only to be the most disagreeable bunch I'd ever heard of outside of the criminal world, but they were also the luckiest. Maybe it wouldn't be bad to sit at home reading Tennyson and writing about him, and then holding forth on him in the classroom. Maybe there was something I was missing here, but it did seem as though hating each other provided the only real excitement available.

Dawn was busy when I came, but she greeted me and handed me a schedule that showed who would be in their office, a classroom, or home at what hour. Very useful. I had all their résumés, of course— CVs, they called them. The department had started to protest when I asked for those, but I said, “Either help me or find yourself another private eye.” I meant it too. Truth is, I wouldn't have known to ask for the damn things, but the police had found them after arming themselves with a search warrant—Haycock had wanted to be chairman, after all; they needed to look around his office—and Don had told me about them.

I decided to begin with Petrillo, Medieval, who was having office hours even as I arrived and who sounded the nicest of the men. Petrillo had published a lot, most of it about people I'd never heard of, unlike Tennyson and Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, and half of whom seemed not to have written in English—but the number of student committees Petrillo had served on, and the fact that he was teaching a course on race in addition to his regular schedule and his regular period, made me think he might be more human than the others.

I waited outside his office door for the last student to depart, then introduced myself. Petrillo got to his feet and welcomed me as though I were someone he was really glad to see. Watch it, Woody, I said to myself. Don't get bamboozled again by a charming intellectual who knows how to manipulate conversation. Even Longworth, after all, had told me exactly what he wanted me to know, and had done it charmingly.

“Ask away,” Petrillo said, leaving me to set the tone. I asked all the necessaries. Yes, he was at Haycock's house that day and stayed around for quite a while, being a convivial type, which was far from easy here—waving his arm to indicate the department's territory. Yes, he saw Haycock die, or anyway collapse. It was he, Petrillo, who had dialed for help, and he'd already told some nice policeman whom he'd seen there. Did I want him to repeat it?

I had a real talker here, I could see that. I asked how he felt about Haycock.

“Not a nice person,” Petrillo said, “but an honest one. The trouble with most of the right-wing boys, frankly, is that they lie so easily there's no reason to believe anything they say. Haycock's ideas were crazy, and he was certainly a bit feudal about Tennyson—no trespassing, no reason for anybody else to be there—but you knew how he felt and where he stood. He considered women an inferior species, designed to serve man, not to equal him or, heaven forbid, to try to rule with him, but at least he said what he thought. Believe me, around here that's almost admirable, even if his opinions were antediluvian even in Tennyson's time.”

“ ‘He for God, she for the god in him,' ” I said.

Petrillo didn't even look surprised at a private eye's quoting that. I paused a minute, hoping he'd mention the author, but he didn't. Well, he'd assume I knew what I was talking about, wouldn't he?

“So, hypothetically speaking,” I said, “even if you'd had the chance to murder someone in this department and get away with it, you wouldn't have picked Haycock?”

“That's a terrible question for an officer of the law to ask,” he said, quite shocked. “You are an officer of the law, aren't you? Well, whether you are or not, surely you can't suppose that any sane person would want to murder anyone, especially someone he knew?”

“You'd be surprised,” I said. “But I do apologize if I've offended you. Not that many people believe in sin these days, and murder's only the biggest sin of all.”

“There are probably worse sins,” he said. “I'm a Catholic and I believe in sin; not everybody does. I don't say the Church and the pope are not responsible for serious crimes, but that has nothing to do with my beliefs.”

“I guess you have to explain that to a lot of people,” I said.

“Yes, I do. But I shouldn't be preaching to you. What else can I tell you?”

“Well, frankly, this department seems a pretty unpleasant place. Everybody seems suspicious of everybody else, and half of them are frightened of something or other. Why do you think that is?”

“Why do
I
think it is, or why is it? Or are those the same question?”

“Most people think they are.”

“Too true. As to why is it, it's never easy for those who have long languished in unchallenged power, power awarded them because of their sex, their color, and their family background, to tolerate, much less welcome, insurgents who are challenging their domain. No one is going to give up the old privileges of being an important professor or an old-fashioned husband or the teacher of canonical texts—not easily, not readily, not without a good deal of force being applied. Why should they? A few odd, quirky types like me want to do the right thing, but we're usually called fools and worse for feeling that way. Mostly, if people out of power want to have a share in that power or even take it away altogether from those who've always had it— that is a revolution. Even in my long-ago period, the smart chaps knew that if you give the underdog the smallest bit of power, he— or she—is going to want more and more. That's how it is.”

I nodded; nothing new here, though I must say I couldn't get over marveling at the way these people talked.

“Why do I think it's worse here?” he continued, not missing a beat. “Because we have not, alas, collected a bunch of good people, differing in their views, perhaps, but basically broad-minded and generous. No, indeed. And that's not an accident,” he added, sensing what I was about to ask. These guys not only talk more and with longer words, they answer questions before they're asked. I suppose it comes from teaching.

“Those in power,” he said, “tend to attract to them, and to attach to them, others like them. They want colleagues who agree with them, who think the same remarks are funny and the same jokes allowable. That explains this department, I'm afraid.”

“How did they happen to attract you?” I couldn't help asking.

“Well, medievalists are rather different. It isn't easy to tell from their writings or their shop talk how they feel about contemporary life—not right off the bat, anyway. I wanted this job. My wife works in New Jersey—she's a surgeon, in a good place for a woman surgeon, comparatively speaking—so I guess I didn't go out of my way to say disturbing or aggressive things.”

Well, Woody, I thought, if he's leading you astray, he's damn good at it. I'd have to see if this struck Kate the way it struck me. I had to admit once again that Claire Wiseman sure knew what she was doing when she told me I needed someone to consult re: academia.

“Just one more question,” I said. “If you had to pick the likeliest among your colleagues to have dropped the pill in Haycock's Greek drink, who would that be? Please be frank; I won't tell anyone, but I do need help here.” I'd gathered, of course, that he was the sort who would always want to help if he could.

“I don't mind the question,” he said, “but I can't answer it. I've thought about it a good deal: who among them would be willing to have murder on his soul? Oddly enough—perhaps because none of them is Catholic, or not so's you'd notice—I thought that any one of them could have done it, or couldn't possibly have done it, depending on how you looked at it at any one time. I know that's not much help, but there it is, I'm afraid.”

“Thank you for your honesty,” I said, getting up and grabbing my bag and helmet.

“A pleasure,” he said, rising also. “Not the subject, alas, but talking with you. I've never before met a private detective. I'm glad we hired you.” So he was helping to pay my fee also. One thing I didn't know, and would probably never know, was who had willingly kicked in to the agreement to hire and pay me, and who had been dragged in because of what not taking part might suggest.

Wanamaker, Comparative, turned out to have taken his students to some exhibit somewhere, and would have to be postponed. Goldberg, American, was lecturing; I decided to drop in and listen to him. At least I could get some impression, and not waste time getting it one-on-one. It was a crazy case, really. They could all have done it; they all had motives, at least one as good as the other; and the only ones with the biggest motives were the ones I didn't want to have done it. Not a very professional attitude, but there you are.

Goldberg glanced up when I came into the lecture hall through a squeaky door at the back, but he didn't take much notice of me. I slid into a chair next to a guy who seemed to be sleeping; his feet were on the seat in front of him, and his chair was tilted back against the wall. He straightened it up when I came in and stared at me. The helmet seemed to win his attention. I smiled at him—it always pays to seem friendly—and turned my attention to Goldberg. He was holding forth about the American tradition, with a lot about God and puritanism and veils; at least, I thought he said veils, the sort that cover a woman's face; I got that much. But there wasn't much more to get, in my opinion, unless you were into guilt and stuff. The guy next to me seemed to agree; he took a piece of paper from his notebook, which I gathered he carried as a form of disguise, since there was nothing in it, and scribbled a note to me:
What kind of bike?
it said.