Poetic Justice (12 page)

“Thank you,” Cudlipp said at last when he had gulped the two pills. “I’ve spent the whole day listening to the representatives from your University College. Four students who appear to be in your class; Dean Frogmore, Bill McQuire from Economics, whom I really would have expected to have more sense; all of them going on as though that silly extension school, degree-granting though it may be, were actually viable, actually …”

Cudlipp turned white and apparently grew dizzy, for he reached out to balance himself against one of the desks. “My God,” Kate heard him say, “aspirin. Aspirin.” And before anyone could move at all he had vomited violently, brown blood the color of coffee grounds.

Everyone except Reed was too stunned to move. “Call the hospital,” he said to one of the secretaries, who had rushed over, “tell them we have an emergency case, hemorrhaging, blood loss from the stomach. You,” he said, pointing to Plimsole, rendered amazingly silent, “help me get him into the elevator. We better not wait for an ambulance. Isn’t the hospital right down the street?”

Plimsole helped Reed to life Cudlipp, no mean weight. With the assistance of two other professors, they were able actually to carry him. Kate ran ahead to ring for the elevator which, for a miracle, was waiting at the eighth floor. She held the doors open as they carried Cudlipp in. While the doors were closing, Kate saw Cudlipp vomit again. Plimsole pressed the button and the elevator started. Everyone stood there, uncertain what to do next. “Perhaps I’d better run down and help them,” O’Toole, who had seemed too stunned to move, said. He raced down the stairs, followed by Clemance, who moved more slowly.

But, as it happened, the elevator reached the main floor many minutes after O’Toole and Clemance. It had stuck between the third and fourth floors, Cudlipp had continued vomiting, and by the time they got him out of the elevator and to the hospital it was too late. He had
lost great amounts of blood, and they could not revive him. He died that night.

It was almost morning when Kate opened the door to Reed, and for a moment, seeing each other, they remembered the reason for the party that had so abruptly ended and were glad in spite of everything.

But sooner or later they had to talk about it. “It’s quite a while,” Reed said, “since I watched a man die, though technically he wasn’t yet dead when the hospital carted him off. The appalling irony of it is that he had time to call out ‘aspirin,’ and there were God knows how many people in the room who could interpret that remark—I’ll explain it to you in a minute. I knew exactly what to do, we all did exactly the right thing, but the elevator stuck, the mucous membrane of the stomach began to erode very near to a major artery—talk about destiny. He’s dead. How much difference will that make in the whole University picture?”

“I’ve no idea. Does it really matter?”

“I think it might; I very strongly suspect that he was murdered.”

Kate stared at him. “But you’ve only just now said that given your presence, and lots of other factors, it was really only the most extraordinary bad luck that he died.”

“Perhaps you’re right. If I decide to run someone over with my car, injuring him sufficiently so that he will be out of commission for a good while, and by mistake I skid and kill him, would you or would you not call it murder?”

“Great Scot,” Kate said. She was, when really affected, likely to revert to the innocent ejaculations of her childhood. “What’s it all got to do with aspirin?”

“Like many other common medicines, aspirin is a poison to some people.”

“I never knew that. Aren’t Americans supposed to gulp down millions of aspirin tablets a year? ”

“They are not only supposed to; they do. Not to mention the aspirin they swallow in Alka-Seltzer, Coricidin, Pepto Bismol, and fifteen other household remedies you might care to mention. But to some people aspirin is a deadly poison. The moment it is absorbed by the bloodstream—and that doesn’t take very long, nor, which is more mysterious, does the amount of aspirin taken matter—an allergic person begins to suffer erosion of his mucous membrane. He feels dizzy and weak, he vomits—you saw before you a classic demonstration. There is, I now learn, more and more question whether aspirin ought, in fact, to be as readily available as it is.”

“What would they have done if they had got him in the hospital on time?”

“An interesting point we need now never really explore. Probably they would have wasted time doing blood tests, and so forth. They would probably suspect an ulcer or something of the sort. What is of special interest, however, is not only that there probably were many people in that room who knew Cudlipp was allergic to aspirin, but that I am still in the D.A.’s Office and able, therefore, to demand and get a certain amount of prompt action from the hospital. It’s almost as though
Cudlipp were given the aspirin under conditions guaranteed to prevent a fatality.”

“Couldn’t he have taken the aspirin by accident? I mean, couldn’t it all have been a mistake?”

“Not a bit likely. Someone who knows he’s allergic to aspirin—and Cudlipp knew—would have to be forced at gunpoint to take it. In fact, Cudlipp was in the habit of taking an imported product—made in England. I have it here.” Reed put a bottle of pills on the table. “All labeled and clear. An analgesic without aspirin: in other words, a pain-killer which does not expand the blood vessels.”

“Paracetamol, B.P.,” Kate read.

“B.P. is British Pharmacopoeia, in case you wondered. I discovered there is an American product, in capsule form, now available, but Cudlipp had supposedly got used to Paracetamol and continued to use it.”

“Wouldn’t he have tasted the aspirin?”

“What a clever girl you are, to be sure; it took me five hours to think of that question. But I know why you thought of it. What kind of aspirin do you use?”

“The cheapest sort they have in the drugstore. My doctor said aspirin is aspirin and it’s preposterous to pay more than a dollar for five hundred of them.”

“He’s right, of course, except that if you don’t happen to like the taste of aspirin, which will begin to dissolve on the tongue immediately, you pay considerably more than that and buy buffered aspirin—you are acquiring, in your new husband, a buffered aspirin eater, by the way—which doesn’t taste any more than Paracetamol does; get it?”

“Someone, therefore, supposedly replaced Cudlipp’s
Parawhateveritis with a buffered aspirin that looked the same. How much else about you is there that I do not know?”

“I shall refuse to follow that entrancing thought, and plod on instead with the question of aspirin-analgesics. You know, in any case, how dull I am when puzzled.”

“I was just thinking earlier this evening how enchanting you are at all times. You know, Reed, I think if you’d only come to a Department party earlier, and let me see you, beautifully lanky and relaxed among all those professors, I would have proposed long ago. Would you have accepted?”

“Probably with a lot less trepidation than I have now. You know, Kate, I’ve never really minded your being a sort of overage Nancy Drew …”

“Now that’s unkind, Reed, that’s downright nasty …”

“Forgive me. I guess I realized you were going to be smack in the middle of this business and I was hoping, in my manly way, that you might be willing to bow out—you know, just go on with what you were doing.”

“But none of us can just go on with what we were doing; it’s just no longer possible, not, at least, if you’re the sort who listens and admits to being confused, which is something no one ever said of Nancy Drew. But why are you getting the wind up so? It’s unlike you. I know it’s a ghastly mess, but after all, it could have been an accident—or somebody may have put some aspirin in his British thingammies months ago.”

“They mightn’t, as it happens. Naturally, that’s the first thing I looked into. He was beginning on a new load of pills just today—yesterday, I guess, by now—and the entire bottle of two hundred tablets is O.K., so
clearly, it was the small tube in which he carried a day’s supply of pills around with him that had been tampered with. As it happens, the two he took at the party were the first of the new batch, but he might have taken them at any time—he was nervous, and prone to headaches. Someone got hold of that pill-carrier, supposedly after Cudlipp had filled it, and replaced the first two British pills with buffered aspirin.”

“There, you see,” Kate said. “And he might have taken them anywhere, and I wouldn’t have been at all involved.”

“You weren’t near his office that day, no. But you had had lunch with Clemance some days before—though you had admired the man this side of idolatry for decades without finding it necessary to lunch with him before. And, as it happened, Cudlipp was talking to you when he decided to take the pills, and Clemance rushed right off and got him some soda water—right?”

“Right. Who noticed that?”

“Just about everyone.”

“Well, all it proves is that I couldn’t have had anything to do with it. If he had just got the new pills today, I wouldn’t have had time to substitute the aspirin for the pills in his pill tube.”

“You could have done it right at the party.”

“My dear man, I may be Nancy Drew; I’m not Houdini.”

“The fact is, anyone at the party could have done it. He carried the tube with the pills loose in his outer pocket; child’s play. Or anyone who visited his office today—which includes students from your beloved University College (which should have gone right on
being extension courses, if you want my candid opinion), Frogmore, McQuire, and one or two other chaps from that little luncheon you had before you asked me to marry you.”

“Reed, aren’t you being a little overdramatic? If anyone wanted to kill Cudlipp in that way, doesn’t it seem likely that it was someone of a non-university sort? His wife, someone like that?”

“When you hear the history of the pills, I think you’ll discount that.”

“
Is
Cudlipp married?”

“He and his wife have recently separated, amidst much acrimony, I am given to understand.”

“You’ve picked up more in five hours than I have in five years.”

“You are not, I am pleased to say, a gossipy sort. What floors, by the way, were you stuck between when you and Everglade were in that elevator together?”

Kate stared at him. “The third and fourth. Why?”

Reed took her in his arms. “Why indeed?” he said. And then for a while forgot all about it.

“T
o put it crudely,” Frogmore said, “Cudlipp’s death can be the end for us, or the beginning. I would not have lifted a finger to injure Cudlipp, but if his death can help the University College, I will make use of it. Need I say more?”

“It will scarcely help us,” McQuire remarked, “to have the University College discovered to be the motive for the murder. It does seem to suggest that we don’t produce people of the right sort. There is, after all, a distinction between occupying the President’s Office and murder. Or so I assume.”

“Correctly, I am certain,” Hankster said in his hoarse whisper.

The same group who had met previously, when McQuire had brought Kate to luncheon, was now reconvened, minus the student (to Kate’s relief). She did not
doubt the judgment of students, which, in some cases, she valued over that of the faculty, but she did doubt their discretion. In a case like this, rumor could do irreparable harm, particularly if it were true.

Castleman apparently not only understood the power structure of the University with remarkable clarity but with ease shifted this understanding to problems of murder. “We have donned our academic gowns and attended a memorial service for Cudlipp,” he said, “and we have all contributed to a fund to establish a prize in his honor.”

“To be awarded, naturally, to an outstanding student in the College,” Frogmore said.

“Naturally,” Castleman acknowledged. “But we had better realize that the administration and the senior faculty are profoundly shaken by all this. Disruption is one thing, murder—however haphazard in appearance—another. It follows inevitably that if Cudlipp was given the aspirin accidentally, more or less at random as a flying brick may hit
someone
, that is one thing; if he was given the aspirin intentionally as part of some personal grudge or individual pottiness, that is another. If, however, he was poisoned fatally on behalf of any school in this University, or any group of students or faculty …” Castleman shrugged, not bothering to complete his sentence.

“Whether fortunately or not,” McQuire said, “we know exactly when Cudlipp got this latest batch of non-aspirins, so we know that the substitution of the pills must have taken place on that day, the day of Kate’s party.”

“I don’t see how that really helps us,” Cartier said.

“It helps the detective work, not us,” Castleman pointed out. “It means that the aspirin Cudlipp took had to be given to him that day—they couldn’t have been mixed in with his British pills, simply waiting for him to light on them. We know, furthermore, whom Cudlipp saw that day. Alas, having refused for weeks to talk to anyone from the University College, he appears, on the day of his death, to have decided to lend his ear if not his sympathy.”

“That may have been thanks to Clemance,” Kate said.

“Thanks are not, as it has turned out, what we especially want to offer,” Frogmore said.

“That’s unfair, I think,” Kate said.

“Of course it is,” Frogmore agreed.

“We know,” Castleman went on, “that on the afternoon of the day of his death, Cudlipp saw McQuire and Frogmore and Cartier; he agreed to be called upon by four students from the University College; he also had a conference about the College English Department with Clemance and O’Toole. In the morning he had a class; he had lunch with Hankster and …”

“And,” Hankster added, “we were joined by Professor Emilia Airhart.”

“Which does not, of course,” Kate added, “necessarily account for everyone he saw that day. There are the secretaries, casual encounters on campus paths …”