The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (16 page)

“As you say, ‘exactly.’ So?”

“Have you ever heard of Ronald Knox?”

“I think so. Didn’t Evelyn Waugh write his biography? I remember Waugh said in the introduction that since the clergy are notoriously longer-lived than the laity, he’d never expected to survive Knox and be his biographer.”

“Correct. Knox was a Roman Catholic priest.”

“Kate, are we both in the same conversation?”

“In addition to being a priest,” Kate continued, ignoring this, “Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote several detective stories, and the ‘Ten Commandments of Detection’ for all other such authors of detective fiction. Let me read you the tenth.” Here Kate paused for emphasis, holding her text in front of her. She read:

“Ten (written as a Roman numeral, naturally):
‘Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have
been duly prepared for them
. The dodge is too easy, and the supposition too improbable. I would add as a rider, that no criminal should be credited with exceptional powers of disguise unless we have had fair warning that he or she was accustomed to making up for the stage. How admirably is this indicated, for example, in
Trent’s Last Case
’” Kate stopped and look at Mariana in triumph.

“Had Stampede been accustomed to make up for the stage?”

“No. But he has been involved a great deal lately with moviemaking, both for television and for the larger screen. It was child’s play to pick up the tricks and maybe even the actual makeup from around the various sets.”

Mariana looked so bewildered that Kate went on without waiting for her to speak.

“Making someone up to look like Stampede was easy, when you come to think of it. He looks like every tough Irishman you’ve ever seen in a theater, complete with beer belly and gold chain. A travesty, of course, but that’s what Stampede was after. Much easier to make two chaps look the same if they’re both travesties.”

“And which one was really Stampede?”

“The one who shot you, of course. That is, he meant to shoot you, but he probably wasn’t following the events on the stage too closely, and when he chose his moment the wrong middle-aged woman was at the podium, introducing a new stage in the proceedings. I think you better dedicate your next book to the memory of Mrs. Byron Boyd; she died in your place. No doubt a man capable of the extreme remarks Stampede liked to bellow forth couldn’t tell one dame from another.”

“But why did he want to shoot me?”

“You represent the mob of scribbling women. He’s one of those men who like to think women are ruining the
comfortable world men have made for themselves. They can’t believe they haven’t a divine right to the center of the stage and the making of all the rules. There are up to ten of them in any academic department in any university. They’ve all dreamed Stampede’s dream, believe me. His was supposed to be the perfect crime, and symbolic into the bargain. He reckoned without me, however, poor man. The hope is that he will never know I had anything to do with finding him out.”

“Couldn’t the police have done that?”

“Not really; they all think, like Monsignor Knox, that invention cannot attempt what life rarely offers. Stampede had the perfect alibi, and that was that. They undoubtedly would have attributed the shooting to a homicidal maniac, if you hadn’t happened to know me.”

“No wonder the Stampede on the stage never mentioned any of my books. That would have been too great a demand on the actor’s abilities. Insults are easier to deliver convincingly.”

“Now you see how it was done.”

“How long do you think he had been planning it?”

“Quite a while, I would say. At least it explains why he agreed to so unlikely an event as a panel with the two of you discussing gender roles in detective fiction.”

“Poor Elmer Roth.”

“Poor Mrs. Byron Boyd,” Kate rather perfunctorily said.

“But wasn’t Stampede in danger of being blackmailed by the fellow on the stage, impersonating him?”

“I doubt it. The actor probably didn’t know why he was there, and even after the shot, he may not have suspected. Even if he did, Stampede had only to tell him to go ahead and publish. Who was to know which of them fired the shot or thought the whole thing up? Nothing to stop Stampede from saying it was the actor’s idea in the first place.
After all, as Ronald Knox so carefully pointed out, what would Stampede, who never had any stage experience, know about makeup?”

“The poor man must be mad.”

“Mad enough to kill with a gun, not the more subtle weapons available to saner men who resent women. But his resentment was easily recognizable to any academic woman with feminist leanings. You should never have left the world of higher education, my dear Mariana, if you wanted to know all there was to know about motives for murdering aging or uppity women.

“Are you or are you not going to offer me a drink?”

O
n that particular evening, when Professor Kate Fansler settled at her desk to cope with the day’s mail–those letters that had arrived at home and those she had carried back from her office–she first sorted through the stack, committing to the wastebasket those envelopes that declared themselves to be requests for funds whether commercial or charitable, and those with less than first-class postage. This left considerably fewer to be examined with suspicion and sighs. The truth was, most of Kate’s mail, however first-class the postage, consisted of demands for recommendations, tenure reviews, contributions (literary, not financial), and the occasional request for a book review.

Today’s mail offered only one envelope not immediately identifiable: from Texas, a town called Litany–yes, Litany; Kate examined the return address and the postmark with care–and carrying the message “Postman, please forward if necessary and possible.” Forwarding had
turned out to be neither necessary nor possible, but, on the other hand, the letter had to have been intended for someone else. Even Kate’s most distant students, teaching in odd colleges in odder places, had never achieved so unlikely an address as Litany, Texas. From whom could such a letter be, and for whom? Kate doubted that, in reaching her, it had reached its intended destination. “Open it, for God’s sake,” Reed had he been there would have demanded in his most husbandly manner. But, left to her own devices, Kate hoped to solve the puzzle without, so to speak, sneaking a glance at the answer.

In the end, she had to give up and slice open the envelope. Even so, when she had discovered the signature at the bottom of the page she was not immediately wiser.
Sr. Monica Robinson
. Kate, she was certain, knew no sisters in Texas, and no one named Monica. Kate was actually driven to reading the letter. “Dear Kate,” it began:

“
I TRUST THAT
, after a moment’s cogitation, you will remember me and our long talks into the night, although I was named Leslie then; I never liked the name though you, I recall, did. I’m now Monica, and still the one who believed in God while you, I vividly remember, were the one convinced that the only true Christians you had ever met were humanists; you would have said ‘secular humanists’ had the term yet come into fashion. Certainly you had much reason and sound argument on your side. The harm, the cruelty, the suffering inflicted in the name of Christ is no easier to defend now than it ever was. Were we to meet today (which is what I hope for), and were we to pick up our ancient controversy (which I scarcely dare to hope for), you would no doubt take a more tolerant but no less firm
stand in defense of a godless if not lawless universe. I wish we could have the discussions now as we had them when we were young and tactless and wonderfully earnest.

“But I must not go on as though we had all the time in the world, as we did in our youth. I write because I need your help and hope I may ask you for it, plainly and without excuse, on the basis of our long-ago friendship and what I remember as your generosity, called humanist by you but recognized as a kind of holiness by me. (I realize this sounds like flattery, and may offend you; believe me, I mean exactly what I say.)

“But to my point. I live here in Litany with a small group of sisters who serve the rather bleak Texas communities for miles around. We perform many of the services the Church insists must rightly be performed by priests, by men properly ordained. But there are few enough of those about, and the number dwindles by the month. We live in a house built not long ago for his Church by a man who was born in these parts; it is adobe-like, with white stucco walls, and must have been quite beautiful at one time. We sisters still find it strangely peaceful and attractive too, though it is run down and worn down by the constant winds and dust. It is lonely, even desolate country hereabouts in the High Plains, where few stay if they can find a way to go. Yet some of us love it with a passion as intense as it is inexplicable. I feel sure, dear Kate, that you will not understand that passion, but I ask you to visit in the hope of your offering temporary help, not of my converting you to my strange tastes in religion and landscape. In fact, I can offer you nothing except my gratitude and my blessing, whether or not you value it.

“But I have not yet reached the point; you must by now doubt that I shall ever reach it. Here it is: we had here, in
our possession, I might admit as our prized possession, a painting by a seventeenth-century woman artist named Judith Leyster. Perhaps you will have heard of her. I never had, but I now know, as do we all, a certain amount about her. If you happen to own or have access to a history of women painters by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin and read about Judith Leyster therein, you will know all I know about that artist.

“Our painting was, we were told, a rather inferior reproduction, but for all that none the less valued by us. It is called ‘The Proposition,’ and seemed to many an odd painting for a convent. But it is the picture of an honorable woman refusing money for sexual favors, and is, according to Harris and Nochlin, the only portrayal in that genre of a firm refusal; in every other example of such pictures the proposition was accepted if the money was sufficient. That Leyster was the only woman painting in that genre is no doubt significant.

“Someone, dear Kate, has stolen our painting. But why? And what, in this barren place, could they dream of doing with it? It is not hidden anywhere in Litany nor in any town within many miles of Litany: we have ascertained that, and you must believe me. No one has left the area recently enough to be accused of having taken our picture with them. We stare at the empty place on our wall and miss our picture terribly, I more terribly than any of the others.

“Please, dear Kate, come and help us to recover our picture. That is the point of this long letter.

“I add only one further personal note. The picture came here as the gift of a woman who joined our order some years ago. She was not from these parts, and I don’t know how she came to be here, except that God moves in mysterious ways, to say nothing of the Church hierarchy. She
was a woman I came to love, Kate. She is dead, and the picture was her legacy to me and to the other sisters, but especially to me. I want to recover it. I hope you will take some satisfaction in proving that humanistic detection can accomplish what God and prayers cannot. Or perhaps you are the answer to my prayer.

“Please come, dear Kate, for my sake and for the sake of our youthful friendship.”

TOUCHING AS THE
letter was, Kate would no doubt have responded with a regretful refusal had she not, by coincidence or the hand of God depending on your point of view, been scheduled to visit Dallas the next week. A call the next day to her travel agent revealed that it was quite possible to fly from Dallas–Fort Worth to Amarillo, the airport nearest to Litany; indeed, the agent surprisingly informed Kate, the Amarillo airport had the second-longest runway in the United States. “That’s comforting,” Kate said. “Is there a reason?” The reason, hardly comforting, was that the runway had been built to launch nuclear warheads assembled in Amarillo. The warheads were now being disassembled, or something like that, the travel agent cheerfully added. “Watch out for plutonium,” she had said, signing off.

Kate’s only other preparation, apart from writing Sister Monica with her plans, was to consult the Harris-Nochlin book Sister Monica had mentioned.
^*
“The Proposition” was there, with the comment Sister Monica had referred to: “While paintings and prints showing men making indecent proposals to women were common in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a work portraying a
woman who has clearly not invited such an invitation and refuses to accept it is unique.” There was a color plate of the beautiful and unusual painting. It brought to mind, in the light of Anita Hill and the growing concern with sexual harassment, all the women who had had, without complaint, to fend off for so many years such unwelcome invitations.

By the time Kate arrived in Amarillo, having given her talk in Dallas, she began to wonder if, unlike the lady in Leyster’s picture, she had acquiesced too easily in what was, after all, an outrageous proposition. Her worries were increased by the fact that the plane did not go immediately into reverse upon landing, as most planes on shorter runways, certainly on all New York runways, were forced to do. Having automatically braced herself for the jolt as the pilot went into reverse, she had the sensation of some failure, of the certainty that they would smash into something. But they glided to a smooth stop and taxied toward the airport building. Sister Monica, as Kate must learn to call her, was waiting. She was dressed as a nun, not with a wimple but with a handkerchief over her hair and a dress and skirt that were clearly part of a uniform. Suddenly, Kate felt shy and wondered again why on earth she had come.