A Trap for Fools Read online

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  Amanda Cross

  A TRAP FOR FOOLS

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

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  Also by Amanda Cross

  and available from Bello

  In the Last Analysis

  The James Joyce Murder

  Poetic Justice

  The Theban Mysteries

  The Question of Max

  No Word from Winifred

  A Trap for Fools

  The Players Come Again

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  IF

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too;

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yes don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings

  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  And never breathe a word about your loss;

  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

  To serve your turn long after they are gone,

  And so hold on when there is nothing in you

  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

  Or walk and Kinds—nor lose the common touch,

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

  If all men count with you, but none too much;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  Rudyard kipling

  Chapter One

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you

  The body was found early on Sunday morning by a member of the university security force patrolling the campus. He thought the man was a student or a bum sleeping it off on the edge of the path, but closer inspection rapidly disabused him of so comfortable an assumption. Looking up, he was able to spot the window from which the man had jumped or fallen. This was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the security force was at minimal strength. The officer called the central office on his walkie-talkie, and was told to stay where he was. Cursing, the second-in-command in security hurried over, trying to decide whether, if the report turned out to be accurate, to inform the police first or an officer of the university. Better have a look at the body, and then decide.

  Butler, the second in command, annoyed at his absence for the Thanksgiving holiday, met the officer outside the building known as Levy Hall. One glance was sufficient to assure anyone that here was death, but Butler bent over the body to make sure. No need to feel for a pulse. An unbroken fall from seven stories had left no doubt. The day was cold; what little blood there was had congealed. It occurred to Butler that there was remarkably little blood, considering that the body had landed on cement.

  Butler decided to call one of the vice presidents of the university first—perhaps the one in charge of internal affairs. He also decided not to disturb the body with a search for identification; that was not bloody well going to be his decision. He had, however, no doubt that he recognized the man—a professor who had been around a long time and was well known to the security force for his petulance and pomposity. Using his set of master keys, Butler entered the building from which the man had jumped, fallen, or been pushed, God forbid, and used a telephone in the hall to call the vice president. “You’d better call the police,” this gentleman answered, once his irritability at being aroused was assuaged by the seriousness of the message. “But wait ten minutes, which will give me time to get there before them.”

  You’d have time to get here before them, Butler thought to himself, if I’d called them half an hour ago. He had dealt with the police before and had few illusions. Still, this was death; they would probably have to send out someone from the D.A.’s office, He glanced at his watch, walked around to comfort the still-waiting security officer, and began counting off the full ten minutes. Butler followed orders: anything else was madness in this place of rich kids and overpaid professors. If he, Butler, got paid as much for as little work, he wouldn’t bloody likely have thrown himself out of the goddamn window. But, of course, they were all wimps and, face it, the guy might have been pushed. (Kate Fansler, when she heard Butler’s rendition of his reactions some time later, wondered about his saying “bloody.” It turned out he had come from Ireland two decades ago, and refused to say “fucking” like all the other men. His reasons for eschewing the word were partly ethnic and partly devout.)

  The vice president, looking disheveled and distraught, arrived in eight minutes by Butler’s excellent watch—all this would go into the report—and was shown the body, which unfortunately (depending how you looked at it) he immediately recognized. It was Professor Canfield Adams, about whom the vice president, whose name was Matthew Noble, knew enough to tell Butler that he was the last man in the world likely to leap or fall out of a window; he was also someone who at least forty people connected to the university, and God alone knew how many outside it, would have dearly loved to push. Butler went to call the police, and Matthew Noble went to the lavatory. Then the three of them, Butler, Noble, and the guard, huddled inside the lobby, awaiting the police, for it was a cold day and the building was unheated during the holiday break. Matthew Noble, trying to control his errant stomach by some rational thought, made a mental list of possible suspects based on motive alone. The exercise was strangely consoling.

  The forty or so suspects on Matthew Noble’s list were members of Adams’s department, Middle East Culture and Literature, anomalously housed in a building named Levy after its long-dead benefactor; at the time of benefaction the building had housed the various Romance languages and literatures, which had since distributed themselves about the campus, Middle East Culture and Literature having received a handsome donation to allow it to acquire and fix up its own building. That no tenured professor in the department taught Hebrew or anything to do with Israel had seemed awkward, to say the least, at the time of the move, but an old professor emeritus who had known Levy remembered that he was not a Zionist, which nicely settled that question. Adams was a professor of history occupying a name chair. In addition to the members of his department, there were not a few outside it who loathed him, to say nothing of some of those in the administration. At least, Matt
hew Noble thought, finding some meager food for consolation at last, we shan’t have to deal with student and liberal faculty outcries about the death of a beloved member of our community. Adams was about as beloved as poison ivy and resembled that affliction in that one’s resistance to it decreased with each attack. Damn.

  Eventually, the police arrived; so did the president and a great many other people. Within several days it was determined that Adams had died, hit the ground so to speak, somewhere between eight and eleven o’clock on that Saturday night. Within several weeks, almost all the forty people on Matthew Noble’s list turned out to have alibis more or less private, but strong nonetheless, depending, as one might expect for a Thanksgiving weekend, on the testimony of relatives and longtime friends, a handful relying only on the testimony of a husband or a wife or as they now said everywhere, a significant other. A few hardy souls, fed up with Thanksgiving festivities, had been alone, but the plain fact of the matter was that no alibi was foolproof, and most were more than adequate.

  The question of what Adams was doing in his office in the deserted university on that night was answered coherently by his wife, as soon as coherence could reasonably be expected of her. Adams had probably been worried about some work he was doing, the papers were in his office, he had gone there. She was away; she could speak only of his usual habits, which often included weekend visits to his office. If he planned to meet someone, he had not mentioned it to her when they spoke to each other on the telephone.

  The police were readily, if reluctantly, convinced that Adams would never have jumped. But might he have fallen? He was in his sixties; might he not have leaned out of the window and grown faint? Such a comforting solution could not be ruled out, but its unlikeliness increased the more carefully it was examined. There was a broad sill outside the window; there was no reason for him to have opened the window that wide on so cold a night if he had merely wanted air, or felt dizzy. How, then, had he been enticed to the open window to be pushed? The answer to that was equally simple: although he had smashed his head on landing, obliterating any previous wounds he might have received, he had probably been hit over the head in his office, or had a plastic bag thrust into his face, and was then shoved out. Did this not indicate a strong man as the murderer? Not necessarily; a vigorous woman would have had little trouble; Adams was a slight man, and women these days developed their muscles in health clubs, and perhaps in even more disreputable ways.

  Because Professor Adams had recently served on a committee with Professor Kate Fansler, and because the most superficial investigation quickly revealed that he and Kate had long loathed each other with an intensity veering between cordial and bitter depending on how recently they had met, Kate was, with other professors similarly situated, asked to provide an alibi. She was, as it happened, the initial hope of the police as a secret suspect. The fact that she had some small reputation as a detective made her delightfully suspect on those grounds alone; the additional fact that she was married to a man who used to work in the D.A.’s office caused the police a momentary pause. But all of this turned out to mean nothing, for in those very hours when Professor Adams was hurling himself or being hurled over the sill of his seventh-floor window, Kate, along with a few thousand other people, was attending an Arlo Guthrie concert in Carnegie Hall. She was accompanied by her nephew Leo Fansler, a lawyer; her niece Leighton Fansler, an actress; and a friend of Leo who worked for a large banking firm. Kate Fansler herself was using, at the invitation of her niece, the ticket of another friend, also a lawyer, who had been called away suddenly to put in billable hours on a case. They had, moreover, met several acquaintances in the lobby and, erasing any possible doubt of Kate’s not having been there the whole time, had been part of an altercation arising from the fact that Leo’s friend had smuggled into Carnegie Hall a bottle of bourbon that the ushers had confiscated, not without enough general disturbance to draw to all the Fanslers and friend the attention of everyone in the surrounding seats. The argument centered around proper behavior at a rock or folk concert, and resolved itself into the only question concerning the management: proper behavior at Carnegie Hall. To the enormous disappointment of not a few, therefore, Kate Fansler had an unbreakable, public, widely witnessed alibi. That she was, as far as her character went, the last person likely to push anyone out of a window carried little or no weight with the police, or, if the truth be told, with the university administration. But presence at a public concert, even a concert by a long-haired radical like Arlo Guthrie who sang songs such as “This Land Is My Land,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Alice’s Restaurant”—he sang all three that night—was an alibi. So that was that.

  Thanksgiving had transformed itself to Christmas, and Christmas to New Year’s, and New Year’s well into the spring semester, with no solution to the Adams murder in sight, when Matthew Noble asked to see Kate Fansler in the provost’s office. Kate, who, as her niece Leighton frequently remarked, was not as great a detective in the ordinary course of things as she liked to make out, went to the provost’s office without a suspicion of what was wanted of her. Adams’s murder had receded, as university events seemed to do, before the avalanche of midterms, student applications, possible appointments to the faculty, and dissertation defenses. Kate walked into her fate as ignorantly, she afterward supposed, as Adams had entered his office on that fatal night. She was later to wonder if she would not, on the whole, have preferred grappling with an assailant on a windowsill. In that case, she was often to surmise, she might have had a better chance of winning.

  For the first time in her university experience, she was not asked to wait for a meeting with an administrator but was immediately ushered into his office by a clearly nervous secretary. Administrative secretaries, who Kate often suspected of running the university while their bosses attended meetings and tasted power, tended to be cool without hauteur and pleasant without intimacy; that the provost’s secretary was rattled boded no good. Could they be about to fire her? For what? Well, Kate thought, I shall set up as a private eye. That this was her thought upon entering the room was later seen by her nearest and dearest as evidence (and about time) of prescience. At which Kate snorted.

  But at the moment, she took a seat—all the administrators except the one woman had risen as she entered, and all shook hands with Kate. The woman dean was a friend of Kate, and alone in this strange assembly seemed, though Kate hardly knew how she discerned it, amused by the proceedings. The others were whatever the absolute opposite of amused is. Matthew Noble, having issued the invitation, spoke first. “No doubt,” he said, “you can guess why we have asked you to meet with us here.”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Kate said, her evident astonishment erasing any possibility that she was assuming an unbecoming innocence.

  “Ah,” the provost said. He was an extremely large man with an affable air that fooled no one and an ability to know exactly what was going on and to judge it fairly that fooled almost everyone. He was clever enough to listen to gossip and to believe a good part of it; he was brave enough to be disliked, and sensible enough to try to keep the number who disliked him to a minimum. All those on the faculty with more intelligence than ego hoped he would not leave his position before they did. Kate liked him, and sank simultaneously into her chair and bewilderment.

  “You recall, of course, the unfortunate death of Professor Adams. More unfortunate, let us say within the sanctity of this room, in its manner than in the fact of it. Certainly, except by his immediate family, one hopes, and a few members of the faculty, he is unmourned; that has become painfully clear, and there seems little to be gained by denying it. At the same time, a university can hardly allow one of its most prominent faculty members, or in fact any faculty member, to be murdered without attempting to bring the culprit, as they used to say when I was a boy, to bay. I need hardly add that the police have got precisely nowhere. No; ‘precisely’ is an exaggeration—they have provided much negative evidence. They
have, however, got nowhere in solving Adams’s murder. We have decided, not easily”—and here he smiled at Kate and something close to a wink seemed for a moment to reveal itself—“to ask for your help.”

  This speech was followed by a profound silence.

  Kate had time to see it coming. The provost, kind and clever man that he was, had given her time during his rambling speech to understand his meaning and consider it. While appreciating his courtesy, she had no intention of being persuaded by it. But he spoke again before she could.

  “Matthew here,” he said, gesturing toward Noble, “summoned you on behalf of us all; he was the first member of the university apart from members of the security force to see the body, and he has been bearing the brunt of the inquiries; I’m afraid brunt is the right word. Quite a few people have pointed out to him that you are known, only in the best circles, of course, for having solved a few crimes. We ask you, in the name of the university, to try to solve this one. We promise you all and every help we can give. It is clear that the police cannot possibly get anywhere. The prosecutor from the D.A.’s office is highly intelligent; in fact, he attended our law school. But the crime was a clever one and will require the investigation of someone who knows the university from the inside, so to speak, and who can move among its members without arousing suspicion. Or,” he added, again with the flicker of a wink, “more suspicion than is her normal lot.”

  Kate sighed. Whatever her answer, a dignified request for the facts was the best way to begin and had the pleasing appearance of providing a sensible reason for her answer. She requested the facts. The provost turned to Matthew Noble, who cleared his throat and began stroking one of his eyebrows with a regularity that Kate found maddening and hated herself for finding maddening. She tried to listen to his facts while keeping her head down, as though lost in contemplation.

  “You have heard about the universal alibis,” he said. “The student newspaper reported them in tedious detail. Except for your own, none of them is absolute. That is, if we had a suspect, it might be proved that he—or she—had had the chance to slip away and back unnoticed. Only you were in your seat for three solid hours, intermissions included. We understand that you do not like intermissions, and always remain in your seat.” Kate nodded, looking up and then resuming the contemplation of her hands in her lap. She held them still. She was not going to elaborate to this boob on her dislike of intermissions, nor explain to him that getting into the ladies’ room during an intermission of any performance in any hall or theater in New York City was only possible, let alone bearable, if one’s need was overwhelming.