Seven

“To 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 …”

“And in the men’s room,” Hankster said. “Let’s face it, anyone could have switched those pills, if murder were the intent. I don’t believe it was. I think someone copped what he thought were a couple of aspirins, and then returned others, unaware of their lethal qualities for Cudlipp.”

“Then,” Castleman said, “we’ve got to find him—the innocent aspirin-changer.”

“Perhaps he will confess,” Frogmore said. “Let us hope so. Meanwhile, I would like to know what the next move is—for University College. Whether or not we can find the person who caused Cudlipp’s death, we can certainly determine the effect of the death on us. O’Toole will be taken up with running the College. Clemance, while not our advocate, seems actually to have some decent sense of reticence about wiping us off the face of the map. The Graduate English Department, from what I can gather, is all for promoting our assistant professors from the English Department, helping themselves and doing the College in the eye at the same time. I think we ought to move.”

“Move cautiously,” Castleman said, “but move—I agree with you. Let’s discover, in an informal way, how the administration feels.”

“I thought we were clean out of administration,” Kate said.

“The Administrative Council is still functioning,” Frogmore said, “and will go on until we get the Senate. The Acting President has promised that a statement of confidence in the viability of University College, and instructions to departments to promote its qualified faculty to tenure, will come before the next meeting of the Administrative Council.”

“Which is when?” Hankster asked.

“In three weeks, and every hour of that time has to be used to get us the votes we need—not only in favor of the motion, but also against a motion to table for any reason whatsoever—for example, so that all undergraduate education at the University can be studied. Because if the Administrative Council doesn’t give us its mandate we’re as good as finished. By the time we get a Senate and a new President it will be a whole new ball game—as Cudlipp knew.”

“So his being out of the picture will make a difference?”

“Oh, yes,” Frogmore said, “all the difference in the world. Cudlipp had a lot of favors to trade, and now isn’t around to trade them.”

Kate walked from the meeting with Hankster; she fell in step beside him so that, without being rude, he had no choice but to proceed at her side—and Hankster was never rude. He had, since the spring, acquired a reputation for devoted radicalism; yet, tête-à-tête with him, one found it hard to believe. Not only the scarcely audible voice—the intimation was that he was unable to speak loudly, though Kate suspected strategic rather than physical inhibitions—belied the drama of radicalism. He was a gentleman, from the top of his sleek head, past the elegant clothes, to the tips of his beautifully made shoes. Kate, because she had come from his world, understood him, and knew better than most that there are those who cling to the finger bowls, those who dismiss them with a shrug but not without nostalgia, and those like Hankster whose life was devoted to smashing the finger bowls against privy walls.

“What did you talk about with Cudlipp, if I may be forthright enough to ask? If you don’t want to tell me, don’t; spare me the gentlemanly circumlocutions.”

“I’m honored,” Hankster said. “As I have gathered, you’re often peppery, but seldom rude. You dislike me very much, don’t you?”

Kate stopped a moment, with Hankster waiting patiently by her side. “Yes,” Kate said, “I do. I think I always dislike people who are destroyers by principle, though I never really faced up to it, until this moment. Sorry. I’ve no right to ask you any questions at all.”

“Sure you have. You really think, don’t you, that we’ve seen the last of the troubles. That from now on, we just rebuild our university, better than before but not fundamentally different.”

“Oh, I expect students will sit in buildings, or whatever the new ploy is, again this spring. But I don’t think it will make any real difference; not here. We’ve had our moment of awakening. This spring, it will be other universities who have the uprisings; don’t you agree?”

“Perhaps. But the whole system’s finished all the same. Sure, you’ll have your Senate, which will bring students and junior faculty into the system, and will perhaps keep an antediluvian administration from making the kinds of mistakes which, in any case, they aren’t going to make anymore, because no university will ever again have so basically stupid a president as this university had. But it’s only reaction you’re institutionalizing. Administrators on the whole, you know, are more up-to-date than the senior faculty. That’s where the bastion of conservatism is, if you want to know. And this Senate will simply give them more power. So—when the big break comes, it will be a lulu.”

“And you look forward to it, hope for it, will work for it?”

“It will happen whatever I do, though I’ll lend a hand if I can. I don’t know what revolutions you’re dreaming of, Professor Fansler, or hoping for, or fearing.”

Kate laughed. “You’re accusing me, in your ever-polite way, of being like the dreaming lady in an anecdote of Kenneth Burke’s. She dreamed a brute of a man had entered her bedroom and was staring at her from the foot of her bed. ‘Oh, what are you going to do to me?’ she asked, trembling. ‘I don’t know, lady,’ the brute answered; ‘it’s your dream.’ ”

Hankster laughed. “It is delightful to talk to someone who enjoys one’s point, even against herself.”

“I know. It’s our guilts and our hidden desires that you work on most, you radicals. We shall destroy ourselves in the end, whether because we understand the radical students too well or too little.”

“But it’s not just the radical students; it’s all students. There simply is no longer any reason for their being in college—not the smart ones, anyway. The engineering students, those on their way up the social ladder, the blacks—college has some point for them. But for the bright kid who’s been to a first-rate high school, what’s he got to learn at college? He no longer comes to college for his first drink, his first woman. Until college becomes a privilege again.…”

“But that’s the point of the University College—for the older students. Education is again something they’ve had to earn.”

“The University College, and places like it, are the future. Whether this University has the sense to see that or not is important only to us here, now, but in the end it will make no difference. The question is not if the state will take over this University, but when. Every year, also, fewer kids make it through undergraduate education uninterrupted. To leave college is the norm, not the exception now. The whole picture’s changing. That, if you want to know, is what I talked to Cudlipp about at lunch. Since I teach in both the adult and the boys’ colleges, he wanted to know where my loyalties lay.”

“And what did you tell him?” Kate asked.

“That I was a smasher of finger bowls. But ask your colleague Emilia Airhart. She joined us near the beginning.”

“How come?”

“I met her and asked her to.”

“Didn’t Cudlipp mind?”

“Horribly. He dislikes women if they are not beautiful, not slender, not stupider than he—or willing to pretend they are—and not flirtatious. Mrs. Airhart made a clean sweep. You would do better, or would have done; we will never know now.”

“I am quite past deciding if that is nasty or nice. Anyway, I like Emilia Airhart.”

“So do I. And if you ask her, she will tell you that Cudlipp tried to co-opt me and I said no. The system’s finished. You and I came out of the same world, but only one of us dreams of going back.”

“I know I can’t go back,” Kate said. “I just don’t hate the memory. What’s Frogmore going to do now?”

“What everyone must do: reach every member of the Administrative Council; tell each one a vote for University College is a vote against the growing power mania of The College. We’ll come through now. It’s truly amazing what aspirin can cure, wouldn’t you say?”

Kate found Emilia Airhart in her office riffling, as one seemed to do these days, through mimeographed pages. “Come in,” she called to Kate. “I was just about to write you a note. One less dirty piece of paper, thank God. I knew I had lost my interest in revolution when I lost my interest in mimeographed announcements from every splinter group on campus demanding this, foretelling that, condemning the other. There is now even an organization for liberating women—utter nonsense. Women are liberated the moment they stop caring what other women think of them.” With a gesture of great delight she dumped the whole package of papers into the waste basket. “I hear you’re an admirer of Auden’s and have just sponsored a brilliant dissertation on him.”

“Yes, though the less said about the dissertation defense, the better. There was a moment there when I feared for the whole future of the academic world.”

“Do tell. Professor Pollinger mentioned it as the most interesting dissertation defense he had been to in years. What do you admire about Auden, by the way, if you can enunciate it in several well-chosen sentences—a talent of yours, I’m told.”

“I can’t imagine by whom. As a matter of fact, I babble on, hitting the truth occasionally by happenstance which inspires students by the sheer surprise of it; the rest of the time they just feel comfortably superior. As to Auden, he’s interested in squares and oblongs, rather than in sensory effects, which I like; that is, he understands that men always have moral dilemmas, which makes him intelligent, and he is able to present these structurally, which makes him an artist. The structures he uses are patterns of words, which make him a poet. He’s conceptual rather than descriptive, and he always sees objects, natural or not, as part of a relationship. He knows that, first and last, a poet has to express abstract ideas in concrete forms, his own words, as it happens. How’s that for a one-minute lecture?”

“Brilliant.”

“Thank you. I stole it from Richard Hoggart’s introduction to Auden’s poems, which Mr. Cornford in turn quoted in his dissertation. If you want to know what I personally admire, well, Auden knows that poetry ‘makes nothing happen,’ though it is of supreme importance: the only order. And Auden is the only poet I know whose poems are serious and fun. He refuses to let poetry be pompous or empty. That’s why he appreciates Clio, and leaves the other muses alone. Clio ‘looks like any girl one has not noticed,’

Think of that in connection with Cudlipp for example. An explosion of sorts conquered him, but can you think of him as filled by a lover’s Yes?”

“Now that you mention it, no. He was always empty and scorned girls one had not noticed. I’m wondering, actually, about the plays Auden wrote with Isherwood.”

“Must you?”

“Duty calls. A student wants to work on them, and who am I to say him nay? Will you kind of advise on the Auden part?”

“All right. But I don’t look forward to the dissertation defense.”

“Our examinations are all wrong. In Sweden, the whole thing is done what I call properly. There’s a professor who attacks the work, a professor who defends it, and a third who makes humorous remarks, which of course we’re all dying to do but never can do properly in this country. Then when it’s over the candidate gives a ball, white tie and long dresses. I’m thinking of emigrating.”

“It’s true,” Kate said. “When formality went from life, meaning went too. People always yowl about form without meaning, but what turns out to be impossible is meaning without form. Which is why I’m a teacher of literature and keep ranting on about structure. Perhaps it’s different in the drama.”

“On the contrary. When a culture no longer agrees on form, it loses drama. Certain ardent souls, to be sure, try to get effects by undressing on the stage, having intercourse in front of the audience, perhaps even getting the audience to join them, but it won’t work. That’s why films are the thing today—perceived in loneliness, like novels.”

“I thought the young were all mad for filmmaking today—quite ritualistic and groupy.”

“Making them, perhaps. But one sees a film in the dark, alone. Isherwood and Auden plays, though, could count on an audience of the left.”

“Sure—like today. The bad guys were in, and the good guys wanted to get them out. Things were simpler then, though. I have often wished I were not among the Epigoni:

Which reminds me, what about your lunch with Hankster and Cudlipp?”

“Well, Cudlipp disliked me, and Hankster disliked Cudlipp and wanted to make him uncomfortable. It was one of those situations no one could get out of without being brutal, and so far one doesn’t openly snub a colleague in the Faculty Club. In short, Cudlipp wanted Hankster to admit he was a gentleman and come in with the College in some grand though unspecified position; Hankster declined.”

“Was Hankster alone with Cudlipp at all in the Club that day?”

“They were at a table together before I came—not for long, I think. They were together in the men’s room, one supposes; I was in the ladies’ room and can’t be sure. I was alone with Cudlipp for a minute; I ought to tell you that. Hankster got up in search of a bottle of ale, the waiter having apparently gone on some extended errand in another part of the forest, you know how it is in the Faculty Club. When are you getting married?”

“I don’t know. Reed says we’ll talk about it tonight, if we can get our minds off Cudlipp’s aspirin. Emilia, did Cudlipp ever promise you anything to get your support for the College?”

“Yes. He promised me positions for women in the College, which he thought dear to my heart. What does it matter now? Anyway, why shouldn’t you have your University College? A new experience, like getting married.”

“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.”