The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross Page 2

  “Have you enjoyed the retirement, until this came along?”

  “Moderately. The days pass. I like working around the house. I have a few investments, and they need looking after. I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but having all day isn’t particularly conducive to creation, or so I’ve found. Funny thing, though, I discovered I really liked cooking. Tania always said she was the oldest kitchen boy in town. We had people in a lot, for dinner, drinks out here. It was a good life. Regular. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What do you mean by ‘regular’?”

  “Every day was just like every other. Well, not exactly, of course. The days Tania taught were different from the days when she didn’t teach. We joked: if Tania’s teaching Chekhov, it must be Tuesday. And then, every afternoon, when she’d come back from the university–she taught in the morning, and advised from one to three–or just when the hour came round, on the days she didn’t teach, she’d take her walk. Down Riverside Drive, across Seventy-second Street to Broadway, down Broadway to Fifty-ninth, and across to Fifth Avenue. Then she’d turn and come back, without the carrots.”

  “Carrots?”

  “For the horses, the ones that pull the carriages through the park. For tourists, I suppose. Tania loved to offer them a carrot each, brightening their lives. It’s funny how it began, really; she told me.” Tom seemed lost in thought.

  “How?” Kate urged him.

  “She was crossing Fifty-ninth one day, going somewhere–I mean, not on her exercise walk–and a little girl got out of the carriage she was riding in with her family, to have her picture taken with the horse, and she tried to feed the horse a carrot, holding it upright, by its end. Of course the horse took hold of her hand too, and the girl, screaming, dropped the carrot. To the rescue, Tania. She showed the girl how to hold her hand flat with the carrot on it, and calmed her down, although, Tania said, she couldn’t convince the child to try again. That’s what put the idea of carrots for the horses in Tania’s mind. Also, it gave her a destination for her walk, and made it possible for her to say: ‘I walk almost three miles every day–warding off osteoporosis and other dangers of aging.’ ”

  Tom fell into a sort of trance, staring out over the Hudson River. “I’ve been thinking,” he finally said, “how we work so hard to avoid the dangers of old age, now that we all live so long, and then, suddenly, we’re gone.”

  “There’s no real evidence she’s ‘gone,’ ” Kate said.

  “I can’t believe she wouldn’t have let me know, if she was able to. Something terrible must have happened.”

  “You’ve been married a long time then,” Kate said, not making it a question.

  “We were married in the war. We both finished graduate school, and then the children were born. Tania taught all through those years; we needed the money. It was a busy life, but a good one. The children keep calling,” he added, reminded of them. “I’ve gotten to dread the phone calls: ‘No news, Pop?’ And I always have to say, ‘No news.’ She can’t just have disappeared into thin air,” he concluded, in an unconscious echo of Fred Monson.

  “What have the police done?” Kate asked, more to have something to ask him than because she needed to be told. The police had put Tania on their missing persons computer, and had made inquiries–perfunctory, Kate felt sure. There had been no ransom notes, no signs at all. Either she was dead–though in that case where was the body?–or she had chosen to vanish. The police admitted that, in the case of aging wives, the latter was unlikely. Amnesia? Possibly. But the hospitals had received no one of that sort, nor had the shelters for the homeless. Weren’t there a lot of homeless women on the streets? God knows, there were, and one could hardly question all of them, though most of them were well-enough known in their neighborhoods. Still, no one was likely to report a new bag lady. The police shrugged, officially and metaphorically. Call them when there was a body.

  After a while, Kate ran out of questions and Tom fell into silence. She left him finally with sympathetic reassurances, but without much hope on either side.

  Later that week, Kate called the chair of the department, Fred Monson, and told him that frankly she didn’t think there was much she could do. Just for the hell of it, Kate had walked Tania’s exercise route, but no inspiration followed. It was a rainy day, and there were not many horse carriages lined up, just a few across from the Plaza, the horses, under their blankets, looking sad, and the drivers, under their raincoats, looking sullen. Kate liked walking; otherwise she felt a fool.

  Fred Monson was not in the best of humors when Kate reached him, and he told her, far from tactfully, that she had been their last hope but not, as far as he was concerned, a very likely one. He’d been told she had a reputation as a detective, but in his view detectives had their being exclusively between the covers of books highly suspect as to quality. Only Dostoyevsky had been able to write intelligently of crime, and he showed you the murder taking place–no nonsense about clues. Kate wanted to say she vaguely remembered a detective in that novel, but resisted the impulse.

  “Well,” Monson said, “I’ll have to hire a substitute for her in the fall if she isn’t back by the end of this semester. I’ve got an assistant professor teaching her classes, but it’s hardly fair to anyone. Do let me know,” he added unkindly, “if you’re inspired with any knowledge of her whereabouts. I certainly hope she returns, but I don’t mind telling you, it’s the uncertainty that’s killing us all.” And that was the end of the story as far as anyone knew.

  Then, just about at the end of that semester, Tania called Fred Monson and said she was back, she’d just been away awhile, and she’d be teaching and everything as usual in the fall semester. Naturally, Fred wanted to know where she’d been, and how she was. But she wouldn’t say much, just that she was back, and that it was good to see Tom, who was glad to have her back, and that the children were also relieved, and they could all now forget the whole thing and enjoy their summer. Except, Tania added, Fred ought to call Kate Fansler and thank her, and apologize for being such a prick (obviously Tania’s language hadn’t been changed by her absence), because it was due to Kate she was back. She was never, Tania announced, going to say another word about it, but she didn’t think Fred ought to have sneered at Kate as a detective. Kate didn’t identify with criminals, like the detective in Dostoyevsky and other deep types, but she was damn good, and Fred might as well say so. Fred did write Kate a rather gracious letter, and that was that for a long while. It was only many years later, when Kate told me about Tania, that I learned the part of the story nobody else had ever been told.

  TANIA AND FRED were both killed in a car crash years after Tania had retired, and it was when Kate heard that she finally told me the whole story. Kate doesn’t often fall into a reminiscent, storytelling vein, but she did that day.

  Kate said it was the most patient, foot-slogging work she’d ever done. I like this case because I think only Kate could have solved it. Policemen and tough guy detectives don’t bother with cases where they haven’t got a body and at least five suspects with a bellyful of hate. That’s what made this the perfect Fansler case. At least, pointing that out was how I got Kate to let me publish it.

  Somehow, Kate kept finding herself across from the Plaza, studying the horse-drawn carriages. She seemed to have developed a new consciousness of the things: they stopped being a familiar background and moved into the foreground of her awareness. Many years earlier, she and Reed, when they were newly met, had hired one of the carriages and tried to imitate the proper romantic attitudes connected with them. (Reed is now Kate’s husband, a word she loathes, but after all a fact is a fact.) They had ended up dissolved in laughter, at their own antics and the prattle of the driver, who took them for newlyweds and tourists, pointing out features of Central Park that Kate had known since birth. The ride had cost five dollars, which indicated how long ago that had been. The notices on the carriages Kate observed informed the romantic and unwary that the price was seventeen do
llars for the first quarter hour. Despite these prices, business was good, to judge from the number of carriages lined up, especially on the weekends.

  On a warm, spring weekday afternoon Kate hired one. The driver was a young girl in a top hat, her blonde hair seeming to pour out below it to the middle of her back. Kate had approached the girl because she looked, somehow, easier than the male drivers to induce into conversation as opposed to barker talk. Her other attraction was that she had tacked onto the front of her carriage a neat placard announcing that she took American Express cards. The combination of the girl’s attractiveness and Kate’s lack of cash clinched the matter.

  “I’m not a tourist,” Kate said, when they had turned off into the park at Sixth Avenue. “I really wanted to ask you about driving these things. It looks like every child’s dream, of course. Do most of the drivers like horses? Do they always drive the same horse?”

  “Even tourists ask that,” the girl said, smiling to make the words pleasant. “Some of us do, some of us don’t, to both questions. Mostly we drive the same horse, but if we aren’t going to be out, someone else takes over, on a weekend, say. I always try to drive this horse; her name, though you might never guess, is Nellie. She’s one of the few mares; mostly they’re geldings.”

  “Do any of you own your horses?”

  “Not many anymore. You writing a book or something?”

  “Not even ‘or something,’ ” Kate said. “I’ve just got interested.”

  “Why don’t I give you the usual spiel without your having to ask the questions? Would that help?”

  Kate laughed, sitting back, enjoying the slower pace and the sound of the hoofs on the road. The park was closed to cars in the afternoon, and the forsythia was out. Kate couldn’t think why she hadn’t done this before. Because, she guessed, one thought of it only as a couple or family thing, while it was (though she saw not a single other carriage with only one person in it) an ideal solitary experience. Kate asked for the “usual spiel.”

  “We all keep our horses in the same stable, the carriages too. There’s a good bit of turnover in drivers. As I said, we like horses, or if we don’t we pretend to; it would never do to be mean to a horse in the public eye, and we’re always in the public eye–that last was not part of the usual spiel, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. There are rules governing the treatment of the horses. On the hottest days in summer, they can’t stay out too long, and they have to have water, and blankets in the winter. People worry a lot more about the horses than the drivers–I don’t usually say that either.”

  “There’s a novel by Aldous Huxley,” Kate said, “in which some animal lovers take an ill-treated horse away from the man who works it, and as a result he starves to death together with his family. Nobody notices that.”

  “You a professor or something?”

  “Do only professors read?” Kate asked.

  “Nobody ever mentioned a book to me before, at least, not a book like that. In the summer when there’re more carriages to go out, we get some guys from college as drivers. They don’t last very long, but they’ve read a book. Probably some of the customers are readers, but they don’t have books on their minds. You’d be surprised what goes on in these carriages sometimes, particularly at night–I mean people make out anywhere. I like a little privacy myself, but it all goes with the territory, I guess. Anything else I can tell you? This trip’s going to cost you already.”

  Kate agreed to return, and watched the driver pull out her charge card machine and then write out Kate’s charges. Kate signed the slip, adding a generous tip. “Thanks a heap,” the young woman said. “Any time.”

  “Do many people feed the horses carrots?” Kate asked, as an afterthought, pocketing her receipt.

  “A lot. Occasional children, though mostly they don’t know how, and old ladies who are pretty regular about it. People used to feed the horses sugar, which was bad for them, although they loved it of course. But the new diet mania in America has helped horses: most people don’t seem to have lumps of sugar anymore; it’s more carrots now, much better for the horses.”

  Kate thanked her again. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” she said. “I may be back.” And she was, the next day, and the day after that.

  Kate got into the way of coming almost every afternoon with carrots for the horses, and sometimes an apple. After a while, she began to distinguish between the horses and to recognize the drivers, who tolerated her and even greeted her, a not untypical female animal lover of the sort they found familiar. But this one distinguished herself by occasionally hiring a carriage and taking a ride, not often, but often enough to keep hopes and tolerance high. The regular carrot ladies never rode.

  Kate, of course, could come only in the afternoon, and not every day. Unlike amateur detectives, whether the effete upper-class English variety or the tough American kind, Kate had a full-time job. I’ve never really understood what a professor does who teaches only four to six hours a week, though Kate tried to explain it to me once. There are committee meetings and office hours and the need to go on writing and publishing and presenting papers at conferences. That spring, though, Kate devoted a lot of time to horse-drawn carriages. She’s an animal lover, like all the Fanslers–I sometimes think it’s all she and I share with the rest of the family–and she became quite fond of the horses after a couple of weeks.

  There was one driver she noticed, indeed everyone noticed, who worked almost every day, including weekends, and who stood out because he dressed up for the part. He looked exactly like a cabbie from a Sherlock Holmes movie. He wore a black suit, a white tie and shirt, and a top hat. You almost expected someone to get into his carriage, hit the roof (there wasn’t any roof, of course) with his cane and say: “Victoria Station, driver, and hurry.” Kate took a ride with him one day. This was not as easy as it sounds, because you couldn’t just pick out the carriage and driver you wanted. They lined up in order, and you had to take the next one. Kate thought free enterprise would have been better demonstrated if the customers were allowed to choose their carriages. Certainly the competition would have spruced up the carriages and done something for the drivers’ appearance; most of them wore old pants and T-shirts, which is what made the elegant man so noticeable. He probably would have had all the customers if the customers had had the choice.

  But one day, when Kate came and began her offer of carrots to the horses, the “Edwardian” driver, as she had come to think of him, was third in line. So she sauntered along, feeding and greeting the horses, and chatting with the drivers, until her man was first. Then she hired him.

  His spiel turned out to be as unusual as his costume. He began by wishing her good day, and asking if she had any place she especially wanted to see. When Kate said no, just around the park, the driver asked if she would prefer that he talked or kept silent. “And if I keep silent, ma’am,” the driver said, with, Kate was amused to notice, just the hint of a cockney accent–one expected him to say “right you are, Gov’ner,” but of course he didn’t–“I’ll still be here to answer questions, if any.”

  “I’d rather hear what you have to say,” Kate said, leaning back.

  “Righto, ma’am,” he said, turning sideways in his seat so that he could talk to Kate and at the same time keep an eye on the road and the horse. “There’s been a carousel here for over a hundred years; they give the horses a bit of paint every so often, and change the tunes. Forty years ago they still had rings you caught as you went by, silver rings but one gold, and if you got the gold, they gave you a free ride.” The man seemed to embrace all the park as he spoke of it, as though it were his creation; certainly it was his special pride.

  “How long have you been driving a carriage?” Kate asked.

  “Oh, most of my life, ma’am, one way or another. I was driving in the park before they ever closed it to cars. I remember when people were married at the Plaza, and they would have a horse-drawn carriage ready to start them on their honeymoon. There were fewer of
us in those days, and a different type, ma’am, if you take my meaning. I sometimes try to imagine what New York was like when there were only horse-drawn vehicles about.”

  “It probably smelled of horse manure, and not carbon monoxide,” Kate said, sitting back and enjoying herself as the description of the passing park scene continued. She didn’t interrupt with any more questions; she mused. Wherever Kate is, if she’s into musing, she muses. I like to think of her riding around the park on that spring day.

  In the end Kate paid the driver with cash; he did not have a charge card notice on his carriage, and Kate had come equipped with enough cash. “I like the way you drive,” Kate said. “Is there a time I can come when I’ll be fairly certain of getting you?”

  “This is a good day,” he said. I think it was a Tuesday. “If you come about the same time you did today, we ought to connect. Sometimes business is brisker than other times, so you might miss me, or you might have to wait. The other drivers are all good chaps,” he added.

  “I’m sure they are,” Kate said. “I like your top hat and your line of patter, and your spruced-up carriage. Maybe I’ll try again.”

  And she did try again, a week later. The spring semester was coming to a close, and Kate had to all but walk out on a meeting to get to Central Park South in plenty of time. It was not a particularly fine day, and the “Edwardian” driver was fourth from the head of the line. Kate sat on a bench with the other drivers–those were the only benches on that block–and corrected term papers while she was waiting. To her astonishment, she looked up to see “her” driver pulling his horse out of the rank of waiting carriages and driving off. Kate leapt into the carriage at the head of the line. “Follow that carriage!” she said to the driver.