Monkey Puzzle Read online

FIFTEEN

  Normal Monday mornings are bad enough, Kate thought.

  This Monday morning is the pits.

  They’d had the weekend to brood. The smiles they exchanged as they wandered in were brief and unconvincing. One by one they went to their pigeonholes and discovered a directive from Dan – if approached by Press, students, or other faculty, they were to say nothing, admit nothing, discuss nothing concerning the murder of Aiken Adamson. Otherwise business as usual.

  Fat chance, Kate thought. Even here, in the supposedly safe cloister of their own departmental office, the tension was painfully evident. No small talk at all. Someone, opening a letter, hissed like a snake in anger or dismay. Another cursed softly over some bill, a third crumpled things into balls one after another and tossed them into the wastebasket. Kate surveyed her own meagre harvest: an overdue notice from the University Library, an offer to buy reference books at a third off, a long-overdue paper from a student, a note from another begging her to make space in a Monday–Wednesday class, and a notification of a conference in California she had neither the time nor the money to attend. Looking up, she tried to smile but it was not re-turned.

  Mark Heskell was frowning at Dan’s note, Jane Coulter was stuffing things into her briefcase, Pete Rocheleau was folding up a letter on blue paper, and Arthur Fowler was tearing another into pieces. As he went past her to drop the resultant confetti into the basket, she saw he’d put on mismatching socks. Arthur? He must be upset.

  Mark Heskell, going out the door, bumped into a distracted Chris Underhill, who didn’t even bother to snarl.

  Frank Heath and Lucy Grey-Jenner stood to one side, each engrossed in their mail, looking for all the world like an old married couple with their heads tilted the same way, their bodies in sympathetic proximity. And Edward Pinchman, sinking into a chair, muttering to himself angrily.

  Kate, looking at them all, saw they were suddenly strangers, and felt isolated and peculiar. She supposed they viewed her the same way.

  Uneasy at her own altered perceptions of colleagues and friends, she left the main office and walked to her own. Richard was before her, unlocking his door across the hall. He looked up at the sound of her step. His own unopened mail was clutched in his hand along with the handle of his briefcase.

  ‘My God, where have you been?’ Kate demanded. ‘I kept phoning you all day yesterday – didn’t they give you the message?’

  ‘I was out.’

  She stared at him. He seemed suddenly a stranger, too. He put his briefcase down, very deliberately, and turned to stare at her. His eyes told her he was not only a stranger, but an enemy. When he spoke his voice was dangerously calm.

  ‘I’d like you to give a message to your good buddy Liz Olson, she of the ever-open mouth, but I don’t think you’d like carrying it. Just thank her for her “help”, will you?’

  ‘Richard, you don’t understand . . .’

  ‘Oh, but I do, that’s just it. She has nothing to do with this department, and any alibi she gives you is far stronger than any I might provide. Very sensible of you to make the switch. The fact that it leaves me with my ass hanging out . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Kate said, hotly. ‘I tried to stop her . . .’

  ‘I’ll bet you did. Just like you tried to stop your precious policeman from dragging me out of the fraternity house in front of most of the kids and transporting me to the police station like some common criminal? He put me through the wringer, all right, the bastard.’

  ‘He didn’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, he did.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have lied, Richard. Having no alibi is almost better than having a tight one. Most people don’t have alibis at all for any given time . . .’

  ‘But you do, don’t you sweetheart? Thanks to Liz. You’d almost think you’d realised you’d need one, wouldn’t you? So much for me trying to protect you . . .’

  ‘You were protecting yourself, too,’ she flared.

  He went pale. ‘I see. Well, thank you for that, Kate. There’s nothing like the trust and confidence of friends to see you through, is there?’ He picked up his briefcase, went into his office, and slammed the door.

  Instantly she felt her own anger ebb, and the old habit of forgiving and protecting him tugged at her. She hesitated, wondering whether to cross the miles that lay between them, took a step – and then jumped as the nine o’clock bell rang.

  No time.

  So he thought she’d betrayed him. Left him standing alone without an alibi, without a friend, when he’d lied so glibly for her? Well, she hadn’t asked him to lie, had she?

  And he had left before midnight.

  Appalled, she listened to her own silent accusations. So this was what murder did to people. Aiken Adamson was. dead – and his poison lived on after him. No good would be interred with his bones.

  Two classes later, she went to collect the reading lists she’d left to be photocopied. As she entered the Departmental Office she was astonished to see the four secretaries spring apart, like guilty schoolgirls. Three of them hurried to their desks and began typing furiously. Karen Lasterman came over to the reception desk.

  ‘Can I help you, Kate?’ Karen had been Departmental Secretary when Kate had been both student and student assistant to Dan Stark, and had yet to begin calling her ‘Miss Trevorne’. Karen was a tall, slim blonde girl who’d come straight to the Department from secretarial school, and she was fiercely loyal to it and everyone in it.

  ‘My reading lists ready?’

  ‘Sure.’ She retrieved them from the copier.

  ‘Thanks.’ Kate lingered, perversely. ‘How’s – everything?’

  Karen’s mouth grew grim. ‘Well, a couple of the girls were cornered by reporters, but managed to get away. Mostly it’s been the gawpers that have caused trouble.’

  ‘Gawpers?’

  Karen made a face. ‘You know – sight see-ers. We’ve had more kids up here making more damn stupid requests about classes and schedules than we have enrolled in classes this term. I finally had to call Security and ask them to put someone on the stairs and lifts to stop them unless they had legitimate business up here. A bunch of ghouls, if you ask me.’ She leaned forward slightly. ‘Even a few stray faculty members from other departments.’

  ‘I suppose it’s inevitable,’ Kate murmured.

  Kate shrugged. ‘I really thought that Lieutenant Stryker would have solved it all over the weekend, but no. He was on the phone to Dan first thing this morning, wanting to make appointments and asking me for everyone’s class schedules.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I suppose he wants to talk to everyone again.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  Karen looked surprised. ‘I think he’s kind of cute.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s kind of anything but necessary – and I wish he weren’t.’

  ‘Even if it meant having Adamson alive again?’

  ‘Even that.’ As she went out she heard the bird-like chittering of the secretaries begin again, higher and faster than before. She supposed they were happy, in their way. Murder was much more interesting than who was dating whom these days.

  She came around the corner, propelled by rising indignation, to discover someone standing in front of Aiken Adamson’s office door. It was a young girl, carrying a large brown envelope. She turned as Kate approached, startled and somehow guilty. Kate assumed this must be one of the ‘gawpers’, caught in the act.

  ‘What do you want, there?’ she asked, perhaps a little more officiously than she’d intended, for the girl flushed.

  ‘I read – about him dying,’ she faltered, her knuckles whitening on the envelope. She could have been a student, but lacked the arrogance.

  ‘And?’ Kate asked, sternly.

  ‘Well, I had this for him and now I don’t know what to do with it.’
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  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something I was typing up for him. I took a long time because Jimmy got sick again so I was working over the whole weekend and then this morning I saw the papers and I probably won’t get paid, now, and I need the money so much . . .’ The words came faster and faster, as if a plug had been pulled. Tears threatened to follow.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bark at you’, Kate said, feeling small and mean. ‘Look, you did this for Aiken, is that it?’

  The girl nodded. ‘I’ve had it for weeks, and when he called me on Friday afternoon he was so angry, so I worked all weekend – ’

  ‘Okay, okay . . . look, come on to my office and tell me all about it. I’ll see you get paid.’

  ‘Oh, will you?’ The sun came out from behind the clouds. ‘Soon?’

  ‘If I can. Why didn’t you just take the thing down to the office?’

  The girl blushed. ‘He told me that he should have given it to one of them to type, but he didn’t want anyone to know about the book in case they stole his ideas. He wanted to surprise everyone, he said.’

  More likely he didn’t want to pay the going rate, Kate thought, and when she asked the girl what her fee was, her suspicion was confirmed. How typical of Aiken to get some poor kid to type his measly manuscript on the cheap and then brow-beat her into the bargain. ‘You need the money now, do you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Jimmy being off work and all, and the pills the doctor prescribed cost so much . . .’

  ‘Okay, don’t worry. I’ll give you a cheque myself, and get it back from Aiken’s estate, all right?’ Kate wrote out the cheque. After all, the girl wasn’t a sensation-seeker, Kate had scared her half to death, and she did look a little threadbare.

  ‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ the girl said, swelling with gratitude until she looked almost well-fed. ‘And I’ll give you a receipt, all right?’

  ‘Fine.’ Kate took the bit of paper, glanced at it and stuffed it into her purse.

  ‘Gee, I don’t know how to thank you, Miss Trevorne.’

  ‘No need. I hope your Jimmy is better, soon.’

  Kate smiled the girl out, then turned to look at the fat brown envelope resting on the corner of her desk. Another of Aiken’s clever articles? Or that thing on the erotic aspects of mythology he’d been threatening to bring out for the past fifteen years? No – the girl hadn’t been embarrassed when she handed it over, just very relieved. On impulse, Kate opened the envelope and peeped inside, squinting to read the title upsidedown. ‘Four’ something ‘Cavalry’? A study of Custer’s Last Stand, perhaps?

  The eleven o’clock bell went, leaving her no more time for snooping or conjecture. She’d have to read it later. Quickly she shoved Aiken’s manuscript into the bottom drawer of her desk and fled down the hall. Students were traditionally expected to wait fifteen minutes for a full professor, but for a lowly instructor like herself, only five.

  She could see it in their eyes.

  What was the point of talking about crime fiction when a real-life murder had been committed over their very heads? The lecture room in which Kate’s History and Development of the Crime Novel took place was on the third floor of Grantham Hall, more or less directly below Aiken Adamson’s office.

  They kept glancing up, as if expecting blood to drip through the ceiling on to their nice new notebooks.

  ‘Now, you’ll probably have done Crime and Punishment and Les Misérables in your other classes, and that’s why I haven’t put them on the Required Reading list. But we will be referring to them in the first six weeks of class, in which we’ll be covering the roots of modern crime fiction, so if you haven’t read them it might be a good idea to do so. Crime and Punishment is, of course, a classic examination of the psychological effect of guilt, and Les Misérables of pursuit and persecution, on the murderer, and how the police use these effects to their advantage. In both books we have examples of the character of the Relentless Police Officer. In these earlier works this character was seen as heroic. Nowadays it is more often used to personify bigotry, a closed mind, and a bully. I leave you to judge which is closer to the truth.’

  This gentle gibe always produced a ripple of laughter. This morning’s was more uneasy than amused. Had she put more bitterness than usual into her voice or had it sounded to them as it sounded, suddenly, to her – a cheap shot? She glanced up at the rows of students and found her eyes instantly locked with Stryker’s. He had taken a seat near the back and she hadn’t noticed him in the sea of faces – until now.

  He was not amused.

  Stricken, Kate went back to her lecture notes, skipping the rest of the page about ‘cops’. More cheap shots for laughs – why had she thought them so amusing before now?

  ‘In addition to studying the crime novel as literature and as entertainment, I also propose to investigate its structure and to compare methods not only of the detectives, but of the writers themselves. We’ll examine their individual ways of achieving their aim – which is to keep the reader mystified until approximately five pages from the end. That is the so-called ‘ideal contract’ between writer and reader – the former fairly supplies the clues, and the latter agrees to suspend disbelief while trying to solve the puzzle. The reader does not want to solve the crime ten pages from the beginning, he wants to be mystified and dazzled – that is the entertainment he has paid for. But he would also like the opportunity to try. Indeed, in the Ellery Queen novels, Dannay and Lee actually inserted a challenge to the reader before the ultimate revelations, informing them that all the clues had been supplied and they should be able to do what Ellery was about to do – name the killer.

  ‘True – in a well-constructed mystery novel the clues are supplied. But we must remember that this is a game, a treasure hunt, a crossword puzzle. All is not what it seems. To provide clues most authors use what I have come to call the Mock Turtle Approach – Multiplication, Pretension, Distraction, and Derision . . .’

  Somehow she got to the end. All through the lecture she could feel Stryker’s eyes on her. His steady regard unnerved her so that, to her at least, everything she said had a double meaning. Or worse, no meaning at all.

  The bell finally went, and the room echoed with shuffling feet, slamming books, chirpy conversations or moans about the unexpected demands of a course some had thought an ‘easy credit’. In about two minutes the room had emptied, save for Kate and the man in the back row. ‘Very interesting,’ he said, without moving.

  ‘I’m glad you thought so,’ she said, gathering her papers together and jamming them into her briefcase.

  ‘I’m glad to see you’ve included Charlie Chan on your reading list,’ Stryker said, indicating the photocopied sheet lying on the desk in front of him. ‘How they ever managed to build six superb books into two dozen lousy movies I’ll never know.’

  ‘All right, I’m impressed,’ Kate conceded. ‘Did you merely come to scoff, or will you remain to prey?’

  ‘You have a free period now.’

  ‘So I do. Are you going to usurp it to put me through the wringer, as you did Richard Wayland?’

  ‘I didn’t put him through the wringer,’ Stryker protested mildly.

  ‘You dragged him downtown . . .’

  ‘We asked him to come down, yes . . .’

  ‘And questioned him . . .’

  ‘That happens to be my job.’

  ‘So they said at Nuremberg.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Look, think what you like of me personally. I can’t stop you. But since you weren’t present at the interview I had with Wayland, I would respectfully suggest that any impression you may have received concerning the way it was conducted must necessarily be biased.’

  She picked up her briefcase and started for the door. ‘You sound like a lawyer.’

  He stood up as he considered this. ‘Guilty. Of sounding like a lawyer, that
is. Not of harassing Wayland. Any aggression displayed was his, not mine.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, I did raise my voice once. That’s all. If he told you I did anything more, he must be very afraid of me. Why would he be afraid of me, do you suppose?’

  She went out into the hall and he followed close behind her. ‘He doesn’t have an alibi and he didn’t like Aiken,’ she said.

  ‘About half the population of this city are in the same position,’ Stryker commented. ‘You’re the one who’s unique, with your alibi. I don’t have an alibi for the relevant time, either. And from what I’m learning about the man, I’d guess that if I’d known him I might have been tempted to bump him off, myself.’

  ‘Well, then – ’ She was walking very fast down the hall and he was keeping pace, keeping close.

  ‘Being a son-of-a-bitch doesn’t deprive Adamson of the right to society’s vengeance for his murder. I’m paid to investigate cases of homicide. God judges the dead, the courts judge the living. I’m neither.’ He scowled at her as they neared the far doors. ‘Where the hell are you going, anyway?’

  ‘To the Union to get a sandwich.’

  ‘You haven’t got a coat on.’

  ‘I’ll run.’ She was, nearly.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a mitten. ‘Maybe this would help keep you warm.’

  She glanced at it, stared at it, stopped. ‘Is it yours?’ he asked.

  ‘I do have a pair like that,’ she conceded, reluctantly. She knew it was hers, she could see the place on the thumb where her briefcase habitually rubbed. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘I found this under the front seat of Adamson’s car.’ The second bell had rung and the hall had cleared of students. His voice was soft, and the silence that followed his statement was a question in itself.

  She put down her briefcase and took the mitten to examine it. ‘I might have dropped it last Wednesday,’ she admitted, slowly. ‘Aiken drove several of us downtown to see an exhibit.’

  ‘Nice of him.’

  ‘Oh, he didn’t intend to do it. But my car wouldn’t start and Jane’s was blocked in. We were standing in the car park deciding what to do when Aiken came along and was more or less shamed into offering.’ Was it her imagination or did he seem relieved? ‘Do you want this back for evidence or anything?’