Poetic Justice (16 page)

“From all I’ve heard, part of Cudlipp’s dementia was his devotion to the College. Apparently neither he nor Clemance would ever consider going anywhere else. And of course, Dean Frogmore,” Reed said, rising,
“whoever gave Cudlipp the aspirin wasn’t necessarily planning murder; aspirin allergies are dangerous, but rarely fatal” Reed had planned to exit on that line, but there came a knock at the door. Miss Philips stuck her head in. “John Peabody is here, Dean Frogmore.”

Frogmore introduced them: “John, this is Mr. Amhearst.”

“Hi,” John Peabody said. “How about some lunch?” Clearly, informality was going to be Mr. Peabody’s keynote.

“Fine,” Reed said. “Thank you, Dean Frogmore. I may be back with more questions, if you’ll allow me, but I can’t think of any more at the moment.”

“Any time, any time,” Frogmore said. “Glad to have you aboard.”

“You must really be Some-Body,” Peabody said as they walked out, making it two words. “You the D.A. or just his brother?”

“Has something noteworthy occurred?”

“Frogmore never called you by your first name. Man, he must really be impressed.”

“I never told him my first name.”

“He picks up first names the way radar picks up moving objects. Regular bar and grill O.K. by you? We might even have a beer.”

“Suits me,” Reed said. He found himself amused by John Peabody, who looked not only as though he had slept in his clothes, but as though he had spent his whole honeymoon in them. Why wear a tie when it is not tied, a shirt when it is not buttoned, Reed wondered? Still, his tie is not psychedelic and he does not wear beads; there is always much to be thankful for.

The “regular bar and grill” turned out to be a largish restaurant with beer on draught, and Reed settled comfortably into a booth with John Peabody, who fetched them each a stein. “Here’s to it,” Peabody said. “I didn’t bump Cudlipp off, but, brother, I sure would have, given the chance. Man, we used to have fantasies—me and the other guys at U.C. Maybe we’d kidnap his kids and say, ‘O.K., mac, you get them back when you lay off old U.C.’ We dreamed about holding him prisoner in a cellar and beating him with wet ropes until he begged for mercy, and then we planned to say: ‘After you call the Acting President, mac, and make it O.K. about old U.C.’ So help me, if I’d known of this aspirin dodge, I’d have forced them down his stinking throat myself. He actually pushed me out of his office. I know he’s old enough to be my father, which would have made it one great big pleasure to lay him out flat, but he closed the door, and the other guys held onto me.” Peabody concluded with a few up-to-date epithets. Odd, Reed thought: When we were young we mouthed niceties and thought nastily. Mr. Peabody sounds like a horror and it’s perfectly obvious he’s nice as pie underneath. At least, so I assume.

“I thought two of the students with you were women?”

“Sure. And Randy Selkirk. All good guys.”

“I see. What happened exactly?”

“You want a sandwich? I’ll be glad to get us each one, if you’ve got what it takes. I’m stony.”

Solemnly Reed handed over some money. “Ham and cheese on rye for me,” he said.

Peabody returned in short order—clearly he was
known here and got immediate service—with two sandwiches and two more steins of beer and a pack of cigarettes. “You need cigarettes?” he asked Reed.

“I gather,” Reed said, “that you are fresh out.”

“Man, you learn fast,” Peabody said. “We like your bird.”

“I’m lost again,” Reed said. “I thought it was ham and cheese.”

“Professor Fansler, man. She’s your bird. Fun and games in the Graduate English Office, when Cudlipp took the wrong pills. She’s real sexy on the Victorian novel.”

“Sexy?”

“Good, man, good.”

“Yes,” Reed said. “Thank you. Now—about your meeting with Cudlipp. Could you give it to me slowly and in something approximating standard English?”

“There’s nothing to give. We went there, the four of us, armed with our stories. We’re used to giving them—we did that bit for your bi—for Professor Fansler. The point is to give someone an idea of how great U.C. is. What it’s meant to us. We’re all different types, but all kind of impressive, if you follow me. But I hadn’t even finished my piece—I sort of M.C. the show—when Cudlipp lost his cool; man, he flipped. I found out why after: I’d said something about U.C. not just being a place to take some courses and wile away the time—I always say that—and of course he’d been bounced from
The
College a hundred years ago, when he was a lad, and had taken courses at U.C., then called extension, to wile away the time till he could get back in with the upperclass lads.”

“Did anyone else say anything?”

“Didn’t have a chance. He went for me. The others had to help me—boy, I was powed. But that Barbara Campbell is a cool chick. After they all got me out, and before Cudlipp could slam the door, she turned to him—of course her clothes are by Dior out of Bergdorf—and said, ‘Professor Cudlipp, a man of your standing should have better control of himself.’ Just like that. He slammed the door so hard I thought its hinges would spring off. And that’s all there is to that story.”

“Not much help, I’m afraid,” Reed said. “You optimistic about the Administrative Council’s actions?”

“Well, we got to clear up this mess. What about the elevators, man, carrying on like that. Beer tastes better in a stein, don’t you think, and certainly better on draught. Want another?”

“No, thanks. What about the elevators?”

“What about them?”

“Didn’t you say …”

“Man, you better take it easy. You’re pushing too hard.”

“Right.” Reed pocketed his change. “It was a pleasure, Mr. Peabody.”

“Likewise. Take it …”

“I know,” Reed said. “I plan to.”

Reed had an appointment downtown; one cannot, after all, spend one’s entire day vamping and drinking beer with undergraduates, but he dropped into Castleman’s office, just on the chance. Castleman was, Reed learned, at lunch at the Faculty Club. Reed said thanks and strolled toward the Faculty Club, not quite clear in his
mind what he wanted to ask Castleman, but figuring he better have a look at the Club anyway, since that seemed to be where everybody spent all their time laying plans, nefarious or other. Entering the Club, he met Castleman coming out.

“Ah,” Castleman said, stepping aside with Reed. “Any progress?”

“Tell me,” Reed said, “is there somebody in the administration with whom I could discuss elevators?”

“Will I do? Or do you want the maintenance department?”

“I’m not sure what I want. I take it my question does not surprise you.”

“Not unbearably. Shall we sit down a minute? Have you had lunch?”

Reed nodded. “Let me just say ‘elevators’ and you tell me what comes into your mind.”

“The Acting President mentioned it to me this morning, as it happens. I never thought of there being a connection with the Cudlipp business—but of course he was caught in an elevator, wasn’t he?”

“Fatally, as it turned out. Or probably so.”

“I see. This has got to be strictly confidential, Mr. Amhearst. Not part of any report or officially noticed at all.”

“I have seldom found any use for information that isn’t off the record,” Reed said, “but if an actionable crime has been committed, I can’t blink it away.”

“No, naturally not. I was referring to the general University problem. But I know, who better, that you can’t ask someone to do a job and then bury him in
caveats.
The trouble with discretion in a university, I’ve
been learning, is that if a man is discreet, it turns out his friends are the only ones in the dark. Everyone else, of course, has been consulting like mad. The line between full consultation and decent discretion is finer than the razor’s edge. Well, elevators. The elevators in the University have always been a blasted nuisance, an irritating joke. They are much overused, and by a community of youngsters whose gentleness with feedback devices is not noticeable. Still, it was never a serious problem. What usually happens is that an elevator which you have ridden for what seems like millennia in order to reach the top floor would decide one floor from the top that it was going no higher, and deposit you back on the ground floor minus two. Like that game my kids keep playing where you land on the wrong square and return to go. Annoying, but all in a day’s work. Quite often the elevators going down would simply refuse to stop at all, but we always suspected they were secretly geared that way as a hint that we ought to walk down.”

“I lived once in a
pension
in Paris,” Reed said, “where you were only allowed to take the elevator up. I found it extremely annoying at times, particularly if one were descending with heavy packages.”

“It is annoying. But that was about the size of it until this fall. Then, elevators began stopping between floors, sometimes in one building and sometimes in another. There was a great rash of that, and then the elevators took to stopping only during special hours, days or evenings when there was a meeting in a building, or all the deans were on their way to see the President, or, for example, when the whole senior classics faculty was in
the elevator. Occasionally an hysterical student would get stuck and have to be treated for shock. Only very recently did we officially begin to wonder if it was actually part of some subversive plan.”

“To what end?”

“Disruption. Confusion. One more inducement to lose confidence and believe in the general ineptness of universities. It’s a clever trick, really, better in its way than class disruption, because no one’s caught at it, no one organizes against it, and its effects are more subtle and therefore longer lasting.”

“You mean objectless hostility builds up?”

“Exactly. Anger, or hostility if you prefer the term, is one of those forces modern society hasn’t devised any really good way of dealing with. Kicking an elevator you’re locked into, or an elevator door which shows no sign of opening, is humiliating and unsatisfactory—so one takes it out instead on the next student or colleague one meets. Yet stopping elevators isn’t really a major crime. Whoever does it probably isn’t even trespassing, according to the letter of the law, and they aren’t really causing any damage that can be laid directly to them. Always supposing we knew who ‘they’ are.”

“But how are the elevators stopped, do you know? It sounds a bit dangerous.”

“That’s what had puzzled us for so long. This whole business seemed to require a high degree of technical knowledge and timing. Then one day we nearly caught one of the culprits, or at least, Cartier thinks he nearly caught him. Cartier had dashed to the basement of the building once when he heard an elevator stop, just in time to see someone sneaking out. Cartier, who has
more nerve than sense if you want to know, almost grabbed the guy, but not quite. Anyway, when he looked at the place where the miscreant had been standing he discovered the power box.”

“So they simply turned off the juice?”

“As simple as that. We couldn’t lock the damn thing; one has to be able to get at it in case of emergencies. The campus guards tried keeping an eye on the elevators, but, needless to say, they couldn’t be everywhere at once. No doubt someone was waiting to tamper with the elevator in Baldwin the night Cudlipp died, knowing there was something going on up there. Simple enough, when you figure it out.”

“Is this the sort of thing these radical groups go in for?”

“No, it isn’t. That’s the most surprising aspect of the whole thing. They want publicity, some big, showy gesture which embarrasses the greatest number of people in the most flamboyant possible way, and puts the authorities immediately on the spot.”

“The word is confrontation, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. Whereas confrontation is what one doesn’t have here. Just a rather diabolic scheme by someone who’s more interested in annoying the University than confronting it; someone with a twisted sense of humor; if you want my guess, it’ll turn out to be someone who got bounced out of here and is still simmering. The sort of people who used to sue the University for failing to fulfill its contract after they had flunked out, in the good old quiet days. But it’s anyone’s guess.”

“Well,” Reed said, rising, “it’s not a pretty mess, but
I don’t suppose it’s got anything to do with the present investigations.”

“Let me know if I can be of help in any other way. There’s no question that time … Hi, Bill. I’d like you to meet Reed Amhearst from the D.A.’s Office; he’s looking into Cudlipp’s death. Bill McQuire.”

“If you’re walking to the subway, Mr. Amhearst, I’ll go with you and see if I can be of any help. My office is in that direction. You interest me.”

“Do I? Why?”

“Lots of reasons. Let’s say I think it’s going to be uphill work, finding out who slipped those aspirin into Cudlipp’s pocket supply. Let’s say, what I happen to believe, that the University killed him.”

“Now that’s an interesting idea. Why?”

“Because he was doing his best to kill the University. Oh, he thought he was saving it, of course. But he was pushing the College out of all proportion. I think he would have been willing to see the rest of the University go if he could have used the resources for The College. Even if you could find out how the aspirin got into Mrs. Murphy’s chowder, would it matter?”

“It seems it will matter to the University College quite a lot. The Administrative Council won’t move if this matter isn’t cleared up.”

Bill McQuire whistled. “That sounds like the work of our friend O’Toole. Well, it’s the last gasp. Do you know everyone Cudlipp saw? Someone must have done some hanky-panky with those pills of his.”

“I’ve got a pretty good line on most of them now. What do you think of Cartier?”

“He’s in the English Department; hated Cudlipp’s
guts, but that hardly makes him even noticeable in that crowd. I’m an economist myself.”

“Someone suggested, in passing, that Cartier was perhaps somewhat hotheaded.”

“He is. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s always popping around and turning up in odd places. During the police bust last spring, he was hit on the head by a policeman and carried off in a paddy wagon and damn near charged before anyone identified him, and all because he got into an argument with a student about the indecency of calling any human beings, even policemen, pigs. When he got out, the students said surely he’d changed his mind, but he said no, policemen were unnecessarily brutal, probably sadistic, and certainly ill-advised, but they weren’t pigs.”