The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (14 page)

Kate did not break for some minutes the silence that fell upon them. She was trying to order her perceptions, to
analyze her responses. Could the hate Beatrice felt have driven her to violence? Kate put that thought temporarily on hold. “Tell me about the night of the murder,” she said. “You were here the whole time alone. Is that the whole truth?”

“All of it. The irony is, Cynthia tried to persuade me to go with her to the party, which she thought might be better than most. I almost went, but I had papers to correct, and in the end I stayed home, thereby sacrificing my perfect alibi. Do you think the moral is: Always accept invitations?”

“When did you last see Daphne?”

“I last saw them all the day before, at the meeting of the seminar. I think they had been told that I would give them a grade, and that attendance would count. The director was probably trying to help me, but that of course only increased their resentment, which increased mine. I don’t want to exaggerate, but at the same time you should know that this was the worst teaching experience I have ever had.”

“Were you shocked when that young man picked you out of the lineup?”

“At the time, yes, shocked and horrified. But soon after it all began to seem like a Kafka novel; I wasn’t guilty, but that didn’t matter. They would arrange it all so that I was condemned. And they had found my fingerprints on Daphne’s notebook; it was like mine, and I had picked it up by mistake at the last seminar. Daphne always sat next to me, I never knew why, but I supposed because from there, as I was at the head of the table, she could most readily turn her back to me and address her comrades. I had opened her notebook before I saw my mistake; I’ve no doubt I left my fingerprints all over it. But that also told against me. You might as well hear the worst. Before I was
arrested, I would have told you that I was incapable of bludgeoning anyone to death. Now, I think I am quite capable of it.”

SOME DAYS LATER
Kate summoned Leo to dinner, requesting that he bring along Beatrice’s lawyer; they met this time in an Italian restaurant: Kate’s tolerance for watching Leo consume raw fish had its limits. Sally had clearly come prepared for Kate’s admission that any defense would be quixotic, if not fatal.

“I’m not so sure,” Kate told her. “There’s nothing easy about this case. Beatrice’s reaction to this seminar was unquestionably excessive; on the other hand, had murder not occurred, she would probably have forgotten the whole thing by now. No doubt her words would seem extreme to anyone who had not labored long in the academic vineyards. I’ll only mention that when Beatrice took up teaching, she saw respect for the scholar as one of the perks of the job; she has, in addition, risked much and undergone considerable pain as an early feminist. To her, it seems as though all this has become less than nothing. Add that to what may well be a period of personal depression, and you have this reaction. Do we also have murder? I don’t think so, and for three reasons.

“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?”

M
ark 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.”