The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (15 page)

“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?”

“How old is he?” Kate asked.

“Middle to late fifties, I would say.”

“It wasn’t easy to find a picture of him,” Kate said.

“There’s a picture on the jackets of his recent books, if you can locate a hardcover copy. He’s developed a real style. Gold chain, open-necked shirt with sleeves rolled up. I think he dyes his hair. He’s definitely on the muscly side, though heavy. Was that what you wanted to know?”

“If I knew what I wanted to know, I’d be better off. You weren’t there that night?”

“No; I don’t go to those writers’ series things much. Mostly I just sit there alternately bored and envious,” he said frankly. “I take it the police haven’t got anywhere.”

“One can hardly blame them,” Kate said. “My husband is with the DA, so I have something of an inside track. The obvious suspect, Stampede, couldn’t have done it, and the slightly less obvious suspect, Mr. Byron Boyd, turned out to have to be attending a Republican fund-raising dinner in the presence of at least two hundred people.” Kate did not bother to add that her favorite suspect, the scheduled moderator who had canceled at the last minute, had spent the operative time at the bedside of his son, who had been in an automobile accident. “We seem to have the perfect crime,” she said, “which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that some lunatic decided to see if he or she could shoot someone in public and get away with it, did shoot and did get away with it. Are Stampede’s books very successful?”

“Madly so,” Larry Donahue said, looking at his empty glass.

“Would you like another?” Kate asked. Whether Larry Donahue would be more informative drunk or sober was a neat question. Apparently Donahue, considering it, decided to compromise.

“I’ll have a beer,” he said. “Money was what it was all
about, Stampede always said. Anyone who said any different was either a liar or a fool, and doubly so if a writer of crime fiction. His novels sold to the movies and television, and he loved to sneer at the whole crazy process of filmmaking, but he always said you didn’t make much money from movies and TV. I never knew whether to believe him or not.”

“Is he married?”

“Legally, I think, but he’s frank to say he just stays married to protect himself from having to marry someone else. If his wife doesn’t mind, why should anyone else? is my thought.” To Kate’s relief he sipped at his beer slowly.

“What is he like at meetings, for example?” she asked.

“There have only been one or two, about nominating people for the board of the Crime Writers’ Association. Stampede got on to see we didn’t get too many women. His ideas were not well received, so I guess he probably won’t come anymore. He liked to say that the best rules of detection were laid down by a priest, and that only Roman Catholics truly understood deception. It’s hard to tell whether he’s serious or just trying to make a point in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.”

“Do you think he’s crazy?”

“Not a chance. He’s one of those people like stand-up comics who insult everyone and say things no one is supposed to say, he wants to make an impression and he certainly does.” And Kate got nothing more of interest out of him.

KATE HAD MET
Mariana Phillips in graduate school, shortly before Mariana abandoned her pursuit of a doctorate in history for the more immediate rewards of popular
fiction. Mariana had felt it natural to consult Kate after the crime, and was not amused when Kate pointed out that this was more Mariana’s kind of crime than hers. After talking to Larry Donahue, Kate settled down to contemplation of the police reports on witnesses, which Reed had allowed her to see. These were not very helpful, to put it at its most gracious, which was hardly how Kate put it to Reed.

“That, my dear,” he responded, “is why they let me waft them before your eyes. All amateur insights welcome, if suitably anonymous. I trust you will have some.” Kate stuck out her tongue at him.

“There’s nothing here about Stampede himself,” she said.

“That probably means he doesn’t have a criminal record. I’m sure they ran it through the computer.”

“Haven’t they put together anything on his life?” Kate asked. “Mariana tells me they’ve been asking around about her, or so she gathers from her friends’ reports. I’d even like to know when and where Stampede was born, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Reed said. “I’m sorry I referred to amateur insights.”

“Don’t be. I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what’s needed here.” And she winked. It always worried Reed when Kate winked.

“
DO YOU TELL
the police or do I?” Kate asked Reed, some days later. It was a rhetorical question; Reed would, of course, tell them, if there was anything to tell. Kate had her own ways of announcing things.

“You’ve solved it, figured it out, discovered how it was done?” Reed said.

“Certainly,” Kate said. “Whether you have enough to arrest him on is another question. That, I am glad to say, is
not my problem. I’m a detective, not a lawyer, and as you so truthfully pointed out, an amateur detective at that.”

“Who might we be thinking of arresting?” Reed asked, rather against his will.

“Stampede, of course,” Kate said. She told Reed all about it, and he, editing her deductions down from their literary heights, told them at the DA’s office. They had no trouble with the prosecution; Stampede turned out to have left a trail the rawest of detectives could follow. It was all circumstantial evidence at first, of course, but whatever the police might say, that was the kind of evidence they liked best.

“
EXPLAIN IT TO ME CAREFULLY
,” Mariana Phillips said. “I thought Stampede was the one guy who couldn’t possibly have done it. Any more than I could.”

“Exactly. So either he didn’t do it, or he wasn’t standing next to you on the platform.”