Poetic Justice (14 page)

“I hadn’t looked at it in that light. It really represents new experiences for everyone.”

“Essential to a well-lived life. Take loneliness, for instance. Terrible in its way. And yet, for me, a few days of complete solitude in the country, away from an outrageously happy marriage, work I love, and noisy, gifted children is a joy so intense that perhaps not even Auden could describe it. But one day too much, and one plunges into the abyss of enforced solitude, of not being wanted or missed. I don’t know if you or Auden ever noticed it, but the only earthly joys are those we are free to choose—like solitude, your college, certain marriages.”

“And what about unearthly joys?”

“Ah, those, if we are fortunate, choose us. Like grace. Like talent.”

Mark Everglade caught Kate as she emerged into the hall. “Just the person I wanted to see. We shall want your advice. We haven’t done too well with Swahili, but we’re interviewing someone who reads and writes Ndebele. You needn’t look blank; as everyone should know these days, that’s a dialect of Zulu, and contains the
greatest literature of Africa not in English. We’re stirring up people to come and chat with him tomorrow between two and four. Do try to come.”

“But what on earth will I talk to him about?”

“Offer to help him translate the novels of Bulwer-Lytton into Ndebele. A way of preparing for next year’s text course.”

“But why do we have to teach Ndebele literature in the English Department?”

“The Elephant’s Child,” Mark Everglade said. “There you go again. We are restructuring after the revolution, remember?” And Kate, remembering, went off to teach her class in Victorian literature.

She returned home somewhat late that afternoon, showered, dressed, and went to meet Reed at his apartment where, he had announced, he was preparing dinner. “My plan is this,” he had said. “If we are going to get married, there are bound to be evenings when we will not feel like eating out. There is a place which, with ample notice and heroic payment, will send up some sort of casserole all ready to be popped into the oven, but the way I figure it, once or twice a week we will want to eat in and
cook.
I know you can cook at least three dishes, because I’ve eaten them, and I’ve just learned from a friend that if you have a fireplace like mine you can buy little thingamajigs with which to make logs out of the
New York Times
(I’m getting quite the married man, you see, finding a use for everything), and then we can grill steaks over an open fire, but I still ought to be able to make a contribution. I have therefore learned to cook one dish and will soon learn to cook another,
both in an electric frying pan which a bachelor friend of mine gave me. (I took that, by the way, as a sure sign that I ought to get married.) You are to come and eat sausages and peppers with crisp bread, cucumber sticks sprinkled with fresh-ground pepper, red wine, and black coffee. I’ve discovered that to appear a gourmet, one serves too little food, highly seasoned: the sausages are hot.”

He greeted Kate with a book in hand. “Here,” he said, “listen to this; it should make anything delectable.” The book was
Letters from Iceland
, and Reed read from Auden’s tourist guide: “ ‘Dried fish is a staple food in Iceland. This should be shredded with the fingers and eaten with butter. It varies in toughness. The tougher kind tastes like toe-nails, and the soft kind like the skin off the soles of one’s feet.’ Bound to make peppers and sausage luscious, don’t you agree? Sit down and let me fix you a drink. Then I’ll give you my news.”

“Here’s a passage you missed,” Kate said, reading from the book. “ ‘A curious Icelandic food,’ he says, ‘is Hakarl, which is half-dry, half-rotten shark. This is white inside with a prickly horn rind outside, as tough as an old boot.’ Auden seems to have become a foot fetishist in Iceland. ‘Owing to the smell it has to be eaten out of doors. It is shaved off with a knife and eaten with brandy.’ Do you think he can be serious? ‘It tastes more like boot polish than anything else I can think of.’ I’m not at all certain,” Kate said, accepting her drink from Reed, “that I want to eat at all.”

“When you hear my news you’ll want to eat even less. I have had visitors from your glorious University, not to say from one of your select, conspiratorial
lunches. Marrying you makes for a busy life, that much is clear.”

“Frogmore and McQuire, by any chance?”

“Castleman and Klein. Castleman, it turns out, knows some of my associates, and Klein knows others, so they decided to trust me. They were further encouraged in this decision by the fact that I was present when Cudlipp took the aspirin, and as helpful as possible when he died, which isn’t saying much. They were very kind, formal, discreet, and honorably, and I didn’t envy them their mission at all.”

“Reed! They came to ask you to be President of the University! You’ve no idea the trouble everyone’s having finding presidents these days. Who wants the job? It was bad enough when one had to raise money and talk to rich alumni, but these, however stupid and trying, never occupied one’s office or ransacked one’s files. I hope you turned them down flat.”

“They came to ask if I thought you had interpreted their plea for help at luncheon and Frogmore’s enthusiasm for his school as a mandate to put Cudlipp out of commission. Their motive in inquiring, I gathered, was not law and order but simple clarity: they wanted to ascertain who had slipped Cudlipp the aspirin in a wholly admirable effort to establish who had
not.
”

“But why on earth me? I didn’t even know about Cudlipp’s blasted British pills, I haven’t that sort of mind, and while I have admittedly become devoted to the cause of the University College, there are limits to my devotion even to so worthy a cause. Do you think it’s blackmail?”

“By God, Kate, for the first time I have come to appreciate
your blasted revolution. Such sangfroid well becomes you. I remember once, years ago, having to tell you that you were suspected of murder and you burst into tears and had to be comforted with pats on the head and hot coffee.”

“What a long memory you have.”

“It didn’t have to be all that long to enable me to recall that you were standing with Cudlipp when he took the aspirin. In fact, he was arguing with you at the time.”

“Arguing is a bit strong—for Cudlipp, who never did anything else. I’m sure he was bald because he’d torn out his hair so often it decided to give up the struggle. He was wielding the University College catalogue, as a matter of fact, presumably prior to letting me know how inferior the offerings were—or am I theorizing ahead of my data?”

“Since, short of séances, that’s as much data on Cudlipp’s intentions as we’re likely to have—no.”

“What else, if anything, did Castleman and Klein want—after you convinced them that I was Nancy Drew and not Lucrezia Borgia?”

“They wanted to know if I’d help.”

“Clever of them; but didn’t they guess I’d have asked you already?”

“Their asking me made it semi-official.”

“Like our relationship now. I can hardly wait for Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving is only four weeks away.”

“Reed, that is the most ungallant remark you have ever made, and that’s saying a good deal. I know I said you couldn’t back out after the secretaries’ party, but
after all, we hardly expected Cudlipp to pop off like that, so you can always say there were extenuating circumstances. Only be kind enough to remember that
I
only asked to move in with you and have you cook sausages and peppers in your new electric frying pan;
I
never asked for legal assurances.”

“Kate darling, that was not a remark, it was an observation, and the ‘only’ referred not to my implied regrets about my waning days of bachelorhood, but to the fact that the meeting of the Administrative Council which is to decide the fate of University College is scheduled for one week before Thanksgiving. As Castleman and Klein point out, if the question of Cudlipp’s death isn’t closed by then, the matter of the University College may be. It is being widely suggested to the Board of Governors, the administration, and everyone else in sight that no move should be taken in the matter while any suspicions about Cudlipp’s death remain. Castleman’s sense of things is that if approval doesn’t come at the next meeting, it will likely never come at all. In fact he quoted the line about a tide in the affairs of men and so forth. Cudlipp’s death has got to be cleared up a week before the four weeks to Thanksgiving—hence my unfortunate observation.”

“Well, I’m mollified if not reassured. Are you supposed to deliver the murderer’s head on a platter—that is, with enough evidence to prosecute—or is the Board of Governors’ knowledge of what happened sufficient?”

“It’s not only sufficient, it’s advisable. After all, the chances are still open that it was all an accident. Castleman and Klein, who are men of real substance, want to be able to give their word to the Board that the accident
was
not
the work of anyone from University College. Then, supposedly, the Administrative Council will proceed. I gather the Board never overrides the Administrative Council.”

“They never have, no. And of course once the new Faculty Senate is in business, which should be by the New Year, the Administrative Council will dissolve itself. I agree with Castleman about the tide.”

“I didn’t actually give Castleman an answer; I said I wanted to talk to you first. I hope I did assure them that not only were you wholly incapable of carrying out such a plot, you were even not likely to have thought of it, among other reasons because, as I would be prepared to swear, you had never heard of the deleterious effects of aspirin until I pointed them out to you. Do you think I ought to help? It’s all right with the D.A., by the way, who turns out to be a friend of someone or other.”

“Of course you should help. Wasn’t that your first impulse?”

“My first impulses, like most people’s, are generous. That’s why Talleyrand told his ministers to resist first impulses. Not, however, being involved in the French government, I may decide to indulge myself. What fascinates me, you know, is the fact that the aspirin had to be substituted that day. It’s impossible that someone had, from whatever motives, dropped two aspirins into his supply at a previous time. That means we can really concentrate on the people Cudlipp saw that day, and we’ve got his day pretty well covered. That he happened to have spent it almost exclusively in the company of people from the University College is certainly unfortunate.”

“Didn’t he see anyone else?”

“Clemance and O’Toole. What with the revisions in the College English Department and everywhere else—I will say for you academic people, once you start revising you really make a job of it—he was seeing both of them fairly regularly. With O’Toole about to be Dean, they had plenty to talk about.”

“Who’ll be chairman of the College English Department now? It’s been Cudlipp for years and years, and O’Toole was the heir apparent.”

“An interesting question. Do you think you could find out?”

“You’re not suggesting someone bumped him off to get the job? I do assure you, Reed, except for Cudlipp, who was power-mad, no one takes the job except as a service to mankind. Look at poor Michaels and Everglade in the Graduate English Department; nothing short of an elephantine sense of duty could have persuaded
them.
”

“Perhaps. Haven’t you some brilliant ex-student now teaching in the College who would be pleased to visit you and spill the beans?”

“I might. You realize, of course, that almost anyone might have dropped into Cudlipp’s office and diddled with his pills. English Department offices are very milling-about sorts of places.”

“I know. That’s why I shall begin with the Department secretaries. Now let’s see. We’ve got McQuire, Frogmore, and Cartier, each of whom saw Cudlipp in his office, by appointment, on the day he died. Then there are your four students; you might, simply oozing
tact and discretion, get them to tell you about their conversation.”

“Reed, you know perfectly well I never ooze tact, and will either ask them flatly what happened or not mess with it.”

“There is tact and tact. Very well, I’ll take on the students. Then there’s Hankster and your Mrs. Airhart. Anything likely there?”

“I wouldn’t put much past Hankster. But how could he have replaced the top two pills at lunch without Cudlipp noticing? Reed, wait a minute, I’ve got an idea. Suppose at lunch Cudlipp takes two of his British pills, which are, of course, harmless, and says something to Hankster about them—take these instead of aspirin, ha, ha, or something—and Hankster asks to see the tube, and replaces the top two pills with two aspirin.”

“Which he just happened to have on him?”

“Why not? Anyhow, we’ll never know now, since he won’t have them on him anymore. Maybe that’s the whole solution.”

“Mrs. Airhart also had lunch with them. Castleman told me. Wouldn’t she have seen them diddling with the pills?”

“It would have been before she joined them; in fact, Hankster probably asked her so that he would have a witness for most of the lunch.”

“For that matter, Emilia Airhart could have done the same trick with the pills.”

“True. She told me she was alone with Cudlipp while Hankster went for an ale. But he probably just went to cast suspicion on her. I
like
Emilia.”

“I too like Emilia. I like everybody concerned except the victim.”

“Could the victim’s estranged wife have sent round doctored pills—suppose she put two regular aspirin in and Cudlipp got them at the first shot?”

“Even if he managed to get one aspirin at the first shot, his chance of getting both was, statistically speaking, nonexistent. If we’re going to have to count on a long shot like that we’d better give up before we start.”

“Speaking of starting, whatever is happening to your sausage and peppers? Don’t you think …”

“No,” Reed said, “I don’t. The great thing about electric frying pans, my bachelor friend said, is that they can be ignored for hours and hours.”