Killing Cassidy (3 page)

“Why should they be?” I demanded.

“I haven't any idea, except that when someone takes such precautions, it's usually because he expects some hanky-panky. Just in case, love, why don't you open it at the bottom?”

I looked at him sharply, but picked up the paper knife and slit the bottom of the envelope.

The enclosure was a single sheet of paper, again thick and heavy and expensive. “I don't understand this stationery, either. Kevin lived very simply. He was never ostentatious about things like stationery.”

“More of the privacy concern, perhaps. I'd defy anybody to read that through the envelope, even held up to the strongest light.”

The paper was covered on both sides with the shaky handwriting of the very old. I spread it flat on the table so Alan and I could read it together.

Dear Dorothy,

By the time you read this, I'll be gone. We both know death isn't the end, and I'll see you again, though I trust not for some time, as time is counted on your side of the great divide. I wish you a long and happy life.

There is, however, one thing I wish you to do for me, which is why I have brought you here in this melodramatic way. It is a matter, I suppose, of shutting the barn door after the horse is stolen. I have tried to get in touch with you, but the idiots in the phone company claimed they didn't have your number, and you never replied to my letter.

“Alan, I never got a letter!”

Alan was reading ahead. He didn't respond.

You see, I have heard about your exploits as an amateur detective. You must be very careful

—this was underlined three times—

and say nothing to anyone, because this is a small town, and it could be almost anyone—my doctor, my lawyer, the police chief, one of my friends, even my own family, however painful it is to believe such a thing.

“What
is
he talking about?”

“Read on,” said Alan, his voice grim. I looked up at him in surprise and then turned back to the letter.

You see, my dear, someone is trying to kill me. When you read this, they will have succeeded. There is little I can do. I hate to admit it, but I am too old and too frail to pursue an unknown enemy myself. I have no concrete evidence to take to the police, even if I could be sure the police were to be trusted. No, my murderer, or murderers, will succeed. It is not a great tragedy, not at my age, but it makes me angry. I would prefer to live out my life to the span God intended. Furthermore, I believe in justice. No one should be able to kill without retribution. I want you to find my murderer.

I repeat that you must be careful, but I have every confidence in you. You have done some remarkable things in the past, and with that Scotland Yard husband of yours to help, I know you will not fail me.

All my love, Kevin

W
E
looked at each other in naked shock. “But—but—” “Shh!” Alan's his was short and very quiet. “Let's get out of here. And try to act nonchalant.” He put the letter back in its envelope and tucked it into his breast pocket before opening the door.

“It was certainly kind of your friend to remember you with such a nice note,” he said in a crisp, carrying voice as we went through the outer office.

“Umm—yes, he was that kind of person.” I bared my teeth in an imitation smile at the receptionist, who smiled in return and wished us a nice day.

“
Alan
,” I whispered urgently when we were got outside.

“Yes, it certainly
is
a beautiful day,” he replied with a brilliant smile. “Shall we take a stroll through the university?” He gripped my hand. “
Wait. No one will notice us on the paths
.”

He chatted inconsequentially until we were well inside the campus boundaries, and I exploded. “Alan, I
have
to talk about it!”

“I know. We should have relative privacy now. The students have their own concerns.”

“Then let's sit somewhere. There's a bench.”

“Don't look so grim,” he warned.

“Look, I'm not Sarah Bernhardt! If anyone comes near, we're talking about the death of an old friend, and one I might have prevented. Of course I look grim!”

We settled. There was so much to say, I didn't know where to start.

Alan broke the silence. “You're feeling guilty, aren't you?”

“Guilty and incredulous at the same time. If only we hadn't changed the phone listing to your name. If only that letter he sent hadn't gone astray! And yet—Alan, I don't know how to take it. It's entirely unbelievable, really. You're taking it seriously, though, or you wouldn't have insisted on all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“A policeman learns to be careful. If there's the slightest possibility that Professor Cassidy was right, we can't take any chances. I admit that I remain highly skeptical. The man died of pneumonia, didn't he?”

“That's what the letter said—the one from Ms. Carmichael.”

“Are we talking here about biological murder? The deliberate introduction of a virus or bacillus into the professor's environment?”

Alan's tone was carefully neutral, but I flared up.

“How do I know what we're talking about? It's all obviously impossible! That's the stuff of Golden Age fiction, people going around planting germs or untraceable poisons all over the place.” I thought about Agatha Christie's
Easy to Kill
and
The Pale Horse
—two wonderful books, but nobody ever claimed that their plots were highly realistic.

“Yes, you're right.” There was an awkward pause. “Dorothy, try to set aside your feelings for a moment and tell me what sort of man Professor Cassidy was, besides a kind one and a good friend. Did he have a lively imagination? No,” he said, raising his hand as I glared at him, “I'm not implying anything. We have to deal with facts, my dear, and your friend's character and personality are part of the facts. I know you loved him, and I know he was still a thoughtful old bloke.”

“How do you know that?”

“He got you here as quickly as he could. Wanted the trail to be as warm as possible. That implies a certain amount of consideration as well as intelligence.”

My annoyance was swallowed up in admiration for a neat piece of deduction. “Yes, he was considerate, and very intelligent.”

I thought about Kevin, trying to obey Alan and be objective. “First and foremost, he was a scientist,” I said finally. “A very, very good one. He helped, back in the fifties, to develop some wonderful new antibiotics. He made a great deal of money from the patents, in fact. So he had the kind of imagination it took to devise experiments and draw inspired conclusions from the results. But he also had the kind of absolutely logical mind that would never, ever jump to conclusions.”

“Go on. Tell me about his family, his friends.”

“He had very little family. A sister and a brother who both died some time ago, and their children and grandchildren. No one closer. He never married. It wasn't that he was cold or distant—quite the contrary. You already know how wonderful he was to me, but it wasn't just me. He enjoyed everyone's company and loved to flirt with pretty women. But he was truly dedicated to his work as a microbiologist. He told me once that everything in his life was secondary to that. He never felt it would be fair to neglect a wife when some experiment required his constant presence in the lab.

“But he had piles of friends, mostly among the students and alumni and faculty. When he wasn't buried in microbes, he was a fine, caring teacher. Everyone on campus loved him, and that's pretty unusual in a university, believe me. The petty jealousies can create vicious infighting. But Kevin was above campus politics. He never took sides, but he used to show up at faculty parties and make a point of trying to reconcile combatants. The remarkable thing is that he sometimes succeeded!”

Alan groaned. “The universally beloved victim. The stuff of fiction, indeed!”

“Well, I can't help it. You did ask.”

“I did. You mentioned one promising detail, however. He was a wealthy man?”

“Hmm. He certainly was at one time. His work on antibiotics came before the pharmaceutical houses began sponsoring all the research, so he owned his patents outright, and they brought in tons of money.”

“What's ‘tons'?”

“Oh, hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Maybe even a million or two. But of course as the germs got smarter and the antibiotics began to lose their effectiveness, the money dried up.”

“But he must surely have invested it. Or did he spend it all in riotous living?”

“Not Kevin! He lived in a log cabin that he built himself, out in the woods; he liked the simple life. He invested some of the money, of course, but he also poured a lot back into research. Randolph University isn't exactly poor, but it isn't Harvard, and it can't afford to have really superbly equipped labs. Anyway it couldn't back then. Kevin bought equipment and supplies and paid his assistants out of his own money. All in all, I wouldn't think he could really be a wealthy man by now. And then there were the loans.”

Alan perked up. “Loans?”

“Well, he called them that. He was always on the lookout for students or friends who were in a bind for money, and he'd ask if they could use a small loan. People almost never came to him. He was so sweet, nobody liked to take advantage, and then he didn't exactly advertise himself as a bank. But if a grad student's wife had a baby and they couldn't make ends meet, or a part-time faculty member didn't have work one semester, or somebody needed to go to a conference and couldn't afford it, there was Kevin, ready with a handout.”

“I thought you said they were loans.”

“In name only. Kevin always drew up promissory notes. I think he had stacks of them printed, just ready to fill in the names and dates and amounts. But he never expected anybody to pay the money back, really. It was just so people's pride wouldn't be hurt.”

“So nobody would kill him to avoid paying back a large sum of money.”

“Heavens, no! Some people did pay him back, of course. Frank and I did. He helped finance our first sabbatical in England, you see. But he never made any demands. I think he forgot about most of the deals. And very few of them were for large amounts, anyway. At least, so far as I know. The whole thing was kind of a secret, you see. A conspiracy of silence among Kevin's friends and the people he helped, so he wouldn't end up with beggars on his doorstep.”

Alan ran a hand down the back of his head in a familiar gesture of frustration. “Yes. Well, we haven't exhausted all the possibilities, but on the face of it he doesn't appear to be a likely murder victim.”

“No. But—the letter—”

“Yes. The letter.”

We were back to that charged silence.

“Alan, honestly, he wasn't at all likely to make up something stupid.”

“I hate to say this, love, but you last saw him—when?”

“I know, I know. Over three years ago. And yes, he was very, very old. And old people do lose their marbles and get paranoid and all the rest of it. But his last Christmas card was perfectly sane and lucid. And even though the content of the sealed letter was pretty weird, the tone was quite reasonable. Don't you think?”

Alan stood up and sighed. “What I think is that we don't know anything like enough to make any judgment. And I also think—no, I
know
—that our holiday is a total loss until we learn enough to dismiss the question.”

I stood, too, and we began to walk slowly to the edge of the campus. “Then you don't believe it?”

“Not yet, no. But I'm keeping an open mind until we have some hard facts.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, careful to keep it inaudible. “Alan, I was so afraid you were going to say we ought to just forget about it. And I couldn't have done that.”

He tucked my hand under my arm. “My dear, I would have liked to say just that. I dislike the idea of your becoming involved in anything that even might bring you into danger. But we made a pact quite some time ago, didn't we? I promised to curb my protective instincts if you would promise to use reasonable caution.

“Besides,” he added, “I was a policeman for too many years not to be intrigued. I, too, want to get to the bottom of this.”

“Then we need a plan of action,” I said eagerly.

“Pencil and paper. Back to the hotel, Sherlock.”

The hotel room was a typical one, clean, bland, anonymous. King-size bed with an ultra-firm mattress I hated, bedside table, desk, chest of drawers, television cabinet, round table with two chairs. The only available paper, besides that provided for hygienic purposes, was a telephone pad about three inches wide. Alan picked it up with a look of distaste and sat down with me at the table.

“What do we need to know?” he began.

“Everything.”

“Right. But we have to start somewhere.”

“Where would you start, if we were at—if we were in England?”

“With the SOCOs' report. If, of course, a crime had been reported and scene of crime officers had been dispatched.”

“Well, that doesn't get us much of anywhere here, does it? I mean, there was no apparent crime, and I very much doubt if the police were even involved.”

“But we don't know that, do we? We know nothing whatever about the circumstances of the professor's death.”

“That's true. Maybe that's the first thing to ask about.”

“And whom,” said Alan, “do you plan to ask?”

“His doctor, his neighbors—oh.”

“Exactly. ‘Say nothing to anyone.'”

“But then how on earth …?”

Alan made a face. “It does appear, doesn't it, that your friend has set you an impossible task. You're to investigate a crime that may not be a crime, and without talking to anyone.”