(2012) Cross-Border Murder (11 page)

Stella responded in kind. “No. I’m afraid not.” She said softly, “I wish I could be more helpful.” She gave Gina a smile that, under different circumstances, one might have described as surprisingly demure for someone of her age and training. But there was no mistaking the carefully controlled discipline of her eyes which no amount of practice in genteel Burlington society could camouflage. “I was at home with a serious bout of the flu. I had, in fact, canceled my only class. I wasn’t in the building that day at all. Not that it would have made much difference. My office was on the main floor far away from the engineering department. And I would have had no reason to be in that area at all. Nor Steve for that matter.”

“And so the mystery remains,” Gina said with a defeated sigh. “Since my father didn’t murder Monaghan, who did? And why? I’m surprised that no one we’ve talked to so far has even the hint of a suggestion to offer. I’m sure that the two of you must have discussed it. Was my father really the only serious suspect?”

Stella and Steve Symansky exchanged glances.

“Of course we speculated about it,” Steve Symansky said, “my first inclination was to think that maybe something had gone radically wrong with Monaghan’s involvement in the Bull project. Some form of professional jealously or dispute. But there was nothing to justify that assumption. We finally concluded that it was probably one of his students, someone he was planning to fail. I think I may have filed a report along those lines.” I suspected that he had. He would have felt the need to file something. It would have been a way of covering himself. He went on, “the police knew he was anything but popular with his students. But they chose not to pursue that line of investigation. And so the mystery, as you put it, of who really killed Professor Monaghan was just left dangling in thin air.”

“My father,” Gina persisted, “believed that someone you all knew continued to fan assumptions about his guilt even after he was released. Does anything along those lines occur to you?”

Steve Symansky gave a puzzled negative shake of his head. Stella frowned, and then shook her head as well. But Gina had noticed the slight hesitation.

“Nothing at all?” She asked Stella.

“No. Not really. Nothing that would justify what your father believed.”

“But something did occur to you.”

Stella hesitated. “Only one incident. And it was really very minor.” Gina waited. Finally Stella gave in. “It was at a party, I don’t remember whose, and Harold Hendricks, have you met him?”

We both nodded. “We’ve also touched base with Naomi Monaghan, or Bronson, as she is called now.” I added. It was not the kind of thing I had planned to mention.

“Is she still in Montreal?” Stella asked.

I nodded.

“Well, at any rate, on that particular occasion, Harold had drunk too much as usual, and he said, if my memory is correct,” she was staring thoughtfully at some point in the Persian rug, “something to the effect that given the way Monaghan had treated his wife, he had probably deserved to have his head bashed in by someone who truly loved her.” Her face reddened. “Looking back, I realize that it is possible that he was referring to your father. But at the time I didn’t think so. You see we all knew that Hendricks was pathetically infatuated with Naomi. I only saw it as a pitiful form of macho grandstanding on his part.” She thought for a moment. “I’m still inclined to put that interpretation on it.” She smiled apologetically.

I felt a need for some fresh air. The Symanskys were not my kind of people. I glanced at Gina. She nodded. “We should be going,” I said, nodding politely to each of them in turn, “if anything else occurs to you, I’d appreciate your giving me a call.”

“Yes, of course.” Stella Symansky said.

While Stella held Gina in conversation in the doorway, Steve Symansky followed me out to the car. I had the feeling there was something he wanted to say to me. He stared down the street at the campus. “If, as part of your story about Monaghan’s death, you feel you have to include my work for the CIA while I was at Winston, I’d appreciate a few hours advance notice before it appears in the paper.” I noted his careful use of the conditional. He must have known his CIA connection while in Montreal was a story in itself for almost any Canadian journalist. Still, it was an interesting opening gambit. Not a special plea to be kept out of the papers but something close to it. I responded with a gambit of my own.

“I want to try to restore Montini’s reputation, and to do that I need to find out who murdered Monaghan. And to do that I need the co-operation of those who were part of his circle then. But I’m not on a hobby horse about anything else that happened that many years ago,” I said. I saw hope briefly touch his features. “So unless what you did is a crucial factor in why Monaghan was murdered, I’m not interested in having it upstage the restoration of Montini’s reputation.” I managed to make my intentions sound more noble than they were.

He nodded as if he understood. He wanted very much to put a positive spin on what I had said. “I appreciate any consideration you give me. I still have important work I want to do at Boulder College. Call me if you think I can be of any additional help.”

“So what did you think?” I asked once we were back in the car.

“A nice piece of theater. Well-planned. We all played our roles beautifully.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” I was slightly disappointed with her reaction but I was curious abut how she had reached it. “What makes you think that?”

She threw me a catty glance. “When he was proposing to be candid about some of his spy work at Winston, I was watching Stella closely. Her protests were fake. They had planned that little duet in advance. I wouldn’t even be surprised if his modest revelations had prior approval in Washington.”

I grinned. “That strikes me as a bit much.”

“Not really. There’s a certain logic to it.”

“Oh?” I pressed her, “what logic?”

“They know you’ve initiated inquiries in Washington, and possibly in Ottawa. They figured what you don’t know now, you’re likely to find out later. Just the fact that you made arrangements to interview Symansky at length suggests that you’re on to something. Spin doctors call the technique damage control. Better to appear frank about it now and gamble on a very limited exposure in some Montreal newspaper, rather than have inquiries continue to be made in Washington. Everyone knows,” she said, “how voracious the media in Washington can be about almost any kind of CIA scandal. Surely you’re aware of that.”

I didn’t disagree with her. But I was inclined to discount her assessment. She was thinking like an American. The truth is that the Washington media rarely reports anything that happens in Canada unless it impacts on their world in a major way. A minor revelation about something that happened that long ago would not even make the back pages. And anyone with power in Washington would know that. I tended to agree with Symansky when he told his wife that Washington had no interest in what he might reveal. “Did you detect any false notes in what he said?”

“Their alibis for instance struck me as a bit too pat. Why would they remember exactly where they were the night Monaghan was murdered unless they felt they needed to have alibis? Or unless they were asked to account for their movements by Ryan and his team. Were they?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“So they probably had reasons to fear that they might get dragged into some subsequent investigation, if and when it ever got serious. I also noticed another oddity.”

I frowned. She was noticing quite a few things I seemed to have missed. “And what was that?”

“Her alibi wasn’t as solid as his. That could be just an accident of course. But maybe she was the one who always did the snooping for them in Monaghan’s office.”

“Are you suggesting that maybe Monaghan caught her at it, and that she killed Monaghan in a moment of panic?”

She wasn’t quite prepared to go that far. “I don’t know. But I would never underestimate her toughness. She’s more black and white than he is. Less slippery too as a result. It’s significant that they chose to let him do all the talking. They even seemed to get upset when I made her enter the conversation.”

Once again I didn’t disagree with her. But neither was I convinced. It would explain, of course, why he was able to deny ever having broken into Monaghan’s office. The categorical nature of his denial had struck me as a bit glib. Even more puzzling was the impression he left that all he had done was keep an occasional eye on Monaghan, and from a distance at that. He or his wife would surely have attempted to do better than that. A key to an office is not hard to get. They would probably have been familiar with Monaghan’s agenda and appointment book. Furthermore, given what Hendricks had hinted to me, I doubt if Monaghan was the only one doing work for Bull. He probably employed assistants at the University or worked in tandem with other associates in the broader engineering community. That was something the Symanskys probably would have known. But Symansky had been careful to reveal none of that. He had proved to be a prudent man. Or maybe, just maybe, he had really been a very minor cog. Once again I was aware that I was out of my depths, beyond the range of my previous experience.

I must admit I was also puzzled by their decision to leave Stella’s former role out of any admission of the double life they had lived at Winston. As if throughout it all she had never been more than the dutiful wife with a modest academic career on the side. They had to have assumed that I might know otherwise, or find it out in the course of my investigations. I asked Gina what she thought about that.

“That did puzzle me a bit. Perhaps they were not sure about how much you knew at this stage,” she sighed, “they were careful. They did not deny her FBI background. Maybe they were waiting for us to show our hand. Maybe they wanted to protect her because as a woman she would pay a bigger price if it all became public.”

Here we go again I thought. I wondered what twist of feminist logic and theory I was about to uncover. I decided to bite, to step into yet anther world I clearly did not fully understand. “But surely he’s the one with the most to lose,” I said as provocatively as I could, “a presidency of a college, a good salary, a prominent role in the community.”

“Maybe. But think about it. In today’s America, he would be easily forgiven, even in academic circles. Particularly in small town academia. After all, he had only done his public duty as he saw it at a difficult time in America’s history. Men are inclined to accept that kind of thing more easily.”

“I see,” I said, “but she, being a woman, would not be so easily forgiven?” I could not keep a slightly mocking, skepticism out of my tone of voice.

Gina indulged me with an exasperated smile. I think she was actually looking forward to this part of our discussion. “Men are bred,” she said, “to regard the world outside the family as a kind of game, albeit a potentially dangerous, competitive game. They know they have to pretend to get along with some pretty dubious characters much of the time in order to play it. And partly because of that very few of them ever have more than a few really close friends. I mean the kind they would reveal their most intimate problems too. Friends that they would willingly trust without giving it a moment’s thought.”

I was willing to concede the point. Whether it applied to a younger generation of males, I wouldn’t know. But it was not far off the mark in terms of my generation and, by implication, of Steve Symansky’s. Where that was leading us I did not know.

“At the worst,” Gina added, “he could still teach and work on his book. But women,” Gina paused to make sure she chose the right words, “have a need to share their problems, usually by default, with other women. It involves real emotional risks. A way of bonding. It provides them with some of the essential support they need in a world that they know is hostile and abusive. And so, if it ever comes out that Stella was trained as a professional spy by a male world, and worse, trained to be calculating about whom she befriended so that she could spy on them, and that this had been going on for decades.” She shook her head with the wonder of it all. “Well, it means instant ostracism, and not just by her close friends in Burlington. There won’t be a woman within her social class in all of New England who won’t take her distance from Stella. The back-biting will eat her alive. If rumors could follow my father across the border, imagine what they would do to Stella!”

I felt sure Gina had exaggerated. The real world was never quite that gender different. But still I saw her point.

Some of her observations had come to me as a surprise. Some of my own subsequent thoughts also troubled me. I thought I had conducted a thorough and relatively knowledgeable interview. But I realized now that I had only scratched the surface. I was about to apologize for not having probed harder when Gina let me off the hook.

“On balance,” she said approvingly, “it was smart not to push them too hard today. It would have put them on their guard. And they might have revealed even less. Now that they’ve opened up, it will be easier to get even more out of them later if we need to.” Something about the thought seemed to amuse her. “They’re probably indulging in a late afternoon sherry,” she remarked. and comforting each other on how well they handled the whole thing. I bet she’s telling him about the special pleading she did on his behalf while we were standing in the doorway chatting.”

“Oh, what did she say?”

“Oh, she talked about how important his role at Boulder College was to him. How much he hoped to achieve there if he was re-appointed when his term came up later this year. How damaging any report out of context might be to what he still had to offer the academic community here. God, she even dragged in my mother.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, she mentioned how much she had liked her, and how she intended to get in touch with her soon.”

I told her about Symansky’s more conditional approach.

“It figures.” She laughed. She seemed to be enjoying the progress we seemed to be making. “Maybe we can use the fix they know they’re in as a kind of lever later.” I had the feeling she was already beginning to plan our next meeting. She gave me a knowing grin. “I bet you practically promised to leave him out of your reporting unless it was absolutely necessary!”