Murdering Americans (10 page)

‘I grabbed his keys, rang 911 again to tell them what he needed and what I was doing, and then ran to the parking lot. But by the time I got there and back, he wasn’t breathin’. I injected him with the EpiPen, but when the ambulance men arrived a couple of minutes later, they said he was dead.’

‘Sounds fishy to me, Marjorie. Very very fishy.’

***

‘It
is
fishy, damn it, Mary Lou.’

‘It’s four years ago, Jack. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘On the contrary. There is something I can do about it. I have my methods.’

‘Which methods are you talking about?’

The baroness ground out her cigar into the ashtray as if it were a pestle. ‘I’ve already got myself a gumshoe,’ she announced, her voice redolent with triumph.

‘You’ve what?’

‘You heard.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it was the done thing to do if intending to spend any appreciable time in the States.’

‘Are you going to stop being ridiculous?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Jack!!!!!!!!!!!!’

‘I wanted to know a bit more about the Provost’s hitman and—serendipitously—I happened to walk down a mean street and find a hero.’

‘The Provost’s what?’

‘I told you before.’

‘All you told me was that she had an unpleasant bit of work as her PA.’

‘She has the sinister Dr. Gonzales. I think he roughs up students so I’m having him investigated.’

Mary Lou paused to take this in. ‘Who or what have you hired?’

‘A rather delightful chap called Mike of M and V Private Investigators. I took to him immediately. Exactly what I hoped for in an American private eye.’

‘Trench-coat, fedora, and Colt 45, no doubt?’

‘I don’t know about the Colt 45, but Mike’s certainly got the trench-coat and fedora.’

‘Has he a partner called Velda with a figure a man would kill for?’

‘He certainly has a Velda, but sadly I haven’t yet had the chance to check out her figure. How do you know about her, anyway?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jack, have you never heard of Mike Hammer?’

‘Sort of,’ said the baroness. ‘But Mickey Spillane was a bit unsubtle I seem to remember. I was more of a Chandler man myself.’

‘Unsubtle isn’t quite the word. Hammer was given to blowing people’s guts out with his trusty rod even when only slightly piqued.’

‘This guy seems more even-tempered. Besides, he’s Mike Robinson. Perhaps he’s just a Spillane fan.’

‘Is he around ninety?’

‘More like twenty.’

‘Sounds like a weirdo. And a child to boot.’

‘Whatever or whoever he is,’ said the baroness, with as much dignity as she could muster, ‘I’ve hired him. If he’s no good, I’ll fire him. But if he delivers on Gonzales, I’ll get him on to checking out the prime suspect for Provost Haringey’s murder.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘President Dickinson, of course. He was in his office just down the corridor, and Marjorie said he had means, motive, and opportunity.’

‘Means?’

‘How hard is it to buy peanuts? Or how onerous to carry round a small packet awaiting your opportunity.’

‘Which was?’

‘Haringey was at a meeting in Dickinson’s office that morning where everyone took their jackets off. When everyone else had gone, Dickinson and Haringey stayed behind to try to resolve a major difference of opinion about grade inflation and failed, and in a rage, Haringey marched off without his jacket. Marjorie said she’d never seen him so angry. The jacket was delivered a few minutes later by the President’s secretary. So all the Pres had to do was to remove the EpiPen and then await an opportunity to insert the peanut in the sandwich in a fridge used by half a dozen people. Then fingers crossed that Marjorie wouldn’t be around when he ate it.’

‘Motive?’

‘The Provost was blocking him from turning the university into a factory. Apparently they absolutely hated each other.’

‘Couldn’t he just have fired him?’

‘Not that easy. Apparently Haringey was one tough cookie. But once he was dead, Dickinson was able to get the benighted Helen Fortier-Pritchardson in to do his dirty work. And she moved Marjorie out the day after she took over.’

‘Presumably the cops investigated all this.’

‘Only cursorily, apparently, and not at all after the inquest said it was an accident. The autopsy indicated that Haringey’s last mouthful of sandwich contained a peanut, but that didn’t prove it had been there when it left the shop. His wife tried to find out what had happened by following the time-honoured American custom of suing the sandwich shop for $100 million, but though her lawyers got a private eye on to it, they found nothing. They used peanuts in the shop and the sandwich-maker could theoretically have accidentally dropped one into the salad, but, as the sandwich shop pointed out, they went to great pains to avoid such a thing happening and someone could have put it in his sandwich deliberately when it was in the fridge or he could have done it himself.’

‘I love the idea of committing suicide with a peanut, Jack, but I’m too busy to get involved with an engaging mystery that happened four years ago and four thousand miles away.’

‘Pity. Traci said something intriguing last night that I must follow up on.’

‘Which was?’

‘Never you mind. You said you weren’t interested.’

‘Sulk then if you want to.’

‘I shall. Where’s Robert?’

‘Still dawdling around the Czech Republic.’

‘Getting bored?’

‘Not one bit, Jack. Forget about Robert and Rachel. You’ll be home before they are. Now apart from the matter of Haringey, the deceased, what are you up to?’

‘Pedagogy. I have an event tomorrow.’

‘What?’

‘The Distinguished Visiting Professors will speak to the final year humanities students and answer questions. The Dean of Humanities, the Greek woman of so-called colour, will be in the chair.’

‘How many do you expect?’

‘Hundreds and hundreds, apparently. It’ll be a full house, since….’ She wrinkled her nose with distaste. ‘They get something called a credit for just turning up. And as well it’s part of what they call the outreach programme, so the public can come if they like.’

‘I’d buy a ringside ticket to see you four together.’

‘Might be very tame. Constance and I no longer hate each other with the ferocity of yore and Rowley is just so boring I doubt if he’s likely to get me roused.’

‘Jimmy Rawlings?’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the baroness. ‘Jimmy Rawlings is a different matter entirely.

***

The following morning, the baroness stopped by Mike Robinson’s office. The curly-haired brunette in T-shirt and jeans tapping at her laptop was pretty, though not spectacularly so.

‘Are you Velda?’ asked the baroness.

‘Oh, he’s been giving you that bullshit, has he?’ said the woman fondly. She laughed. ‘The silly fantasising son-of-a-bitch. No, I’m Vera and I refuse to be called Velda. And he’s not Mike, he’s really Maurice. But he just can’t bear either of our real names, so he calls us after Mike Hammer and his girlfriend. I don’t mind. It’s a bit of fun. Our pet names for each other are Maurice-Mike and Vera-Velda.’

If this example of the American propensity to tell complete strangers their innermost secrets disconcerted the baroness, she didn’t show it. ‘I can’t really complain about the name business,’ she said, as she sat down in the armchair. ‘I don’t use my Christian name either. But should I distrust anything else he tells me?’

‘No, no. Mike’s a good P.I. Just gets a bit carried away with the retro stuff sometimes. Never interferes with the job, though. Are you his new client?’

‘Jack Troutbeck.’

‘I guessed you were. Mike described you accurately.’

‘As what?’

‘A no-nonsense broad.’

‘That’s me. Now I haven’t heard anything from your silly fantasising son-of-a-bitch since the night before last, though I’ve tried him a few times. Do you know how he’s getting on or has he run off with my five hundred dollar advance?’

Vera giggled. ‘Times are a bit hard, but Mike wouldn’t skip town with five hundred dollars. Or even five thousand. He’s not like that. It’s just that he sees himself so much as the guy who works alone that he hates providing information along the way. Prefers to get back with the full story.’

‘I understand that.’

‘If he calls in, what’ll I tell him?’

‘That I want to see him asap. Preferably with you. There’s more afoot. I think I’ll be needing you both.’

***

‘Diversity is not something you can be half-hearted about,’ said Dean Pappas-Lott, a large woman with what looked suspiciously like a fake tan and hair so frizzy it looked as if she had suffered a severe electric shock. She was sitting behind a long table. To her left were Constance Darlington and Rowland Cunningham and to her right, the baroness and Jimmy Rawlings. All five had a large white card in front of them bearing their names. The white paper table-cloth bearing the trade-mark VRC message had been grabbed by the quivering Dean and dumped in a waste bin as soon as she arrived.

Having seen that they were variously described as Lady Connie, Lord Rowland, and Lady Ida, the three peers had requested a black marker and had written on the other side of their cards the more conventional version of their names. Not to be outdone, Jimmy Rawlings had changed his to Mujaahid, which he explained to them he used when meeting people who didn’t know him in his old incarnation as a boxer.

The baroness’s midnight-blue suit, made of fine wool, was severely tailored, and the blue-and-white polka dot blouse had a floppy bow. That it was a sartorial tribute to Margaret Thatcher was not lost on Constance.

Reading from a script, after a good deal of general welcoming waffle, Dean Pappas-Lott had embarked on what was clearly a familiar theme. ‘As you all know, here at Freeman U we’re passionate about embracing diversity. Embracing diversity is what makes a school a great school. Embracing diversity is what makes a society a great society. And embracing diversity is what will make this world a place where everyone can realise her or his potential.

‘Our goal, here at Freeman U, and we pursue it 24/7, is to give minorities the chance that the majority has shamefully denied them throughout human history. As Martin Luther King said, “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.” As Toni Morrison has said, “The range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.”

‘At Freeman U, we reject the dominant cultural narrative that has indoctrinated society with the idea that white is better than black, that male is better than female and that abled is better than differently abled. And as a wise, deaf parent said to me recently, “How dare anyone say I was wrong to want my child born deaf. Or that I should want her deafness fixed. It’s not an affliction. It’s an identity.”

‘And how dare too anyone suggest that being American is better than anything else. Here at Freeman U, we are learning that—as Emma Goldman said—“Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods.”’

She looked slowly around the audience from the left to the right and the front—where the academics were sitting—to the back, and returned to her rather laboured reading. ‘When we have truly abandoned patriotism for the superstition it is, we will learn the truth of what Muriel Lester, the Mother of World Peace, said many years ago: that “war is as outmoded as cannibalism, chattel slavery, blood-feuds, and duelling…an insult to humanity.” It is our minorities who will teach us that.

‘There’s much more that I long to say to you, but I must stop now and introduce our Distinguished Visiting Professors from England, radicals all. Do you know what Angela Davis said about radicals? She said that radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” We are privileged to welcome to New Paddington four people who in their own country are a byword for radicalism. They are the kind of people that change the world. People you can learn from.

‘I’m going to ask them to tell you who they are and why they care and then I’m going to open proceedings to questions from the floor.’

She turned to her left. ‘Lady Darlington. Tell us about yourself.’

***

The true facts about Constance Darlington were that she had been head girl of one of the best girls’ grammar schools in England, had read law at Oxford, where—under the influence of a mesmeric lecturer—she had become a Trotskyite, had spent many weekends protesting noisily against the Vietnam war, had gone after graduation to work for the civil liberties lobby, and had been a fervently left-wing member of the Labour Party.

In her thirties, married to a prosperous barrister and with two children and a nanny, Constance was elected to the local council, where she became a shrill voice for levelling down. She opposed the sale of council houses to tenants, as chairwoman of the education committee she fought against any selection for and in schools, and she made much headway in ensuring that non-English speaking children could be taught and take exams in their own languages—at serious detriment to their futures and vast expense to the taxpayer. Her own house being in a prosperous, middle-class area with excellent state schools (the only immigrants in the neighbourhood were doctors), her children were unaffected by her reforms. They did well at school, and with the help of private tutors, were sufficiently academically successful to win places respectively at Oxford and Cambridge, institutions which their mother campaigned to have closed to all but the products of state schools.

Constance saw racists under every bed and insisted on the introduction of politically correct language to all council communications. It was she who caused much merriment in the media when reported to have objected on a school visit to infants being taught ‘Baa baa, black sheep’: although this was later alleged to be an urban myth and in her later incarnation Constance denied it, it did actually happen. In the mid-1980s, as leader of a council that was now flying the Red Flag over its headquarters, she easily won the nomination to stand in the by-election after the local MP died suddenly.