Death in Vineyard Waters (26 page)

I thought that Professors Helen Barstone and Bill Hooperman looked pretty happy when we met them in John's library. And why not? They'd been sampling his bar for an hour at least and were, moreover, feeling smart. I soon discovered why.

“D'Avenant,” said Helen Barstone, lifting a forefinger into the air and poking it at me. “D'Avenant. There's the link.”

“Exactly. D'Avenant,” agreed Hooperman, admiring his glass of Cognac and giving the contents a swirl under his nose.

“Who's D'Avenant?” I asked.

“William D'Avenant,” said John, pouring himself a drink from the rapidly emptying Cognac bottle. “The guy who wrote
Salmancida Spolia,
the last great court masque. Remember?”

I did, barely. “The masque that sounds like a disease. Charles the First and his wife were in it. Just before Cromwell decided to take over.”

Helen Barstone smiled. “Something like that.”

“It's hard to believe,” said Hooperman almost soberly. He shook his massive head. “Really hard to believe. I'm not sure I believe it even now. It's very hard to believe. Very hard. I'm not sure I do, really. I mean—”

“What he means,” said Helen Barstone, “is that when Marjorie Summerharp wrote of D'Avenant she not only used all of the right people in her bibliography, including Maidment and Logan and Nethercot and the rest, but—”

“But she used at least one other source, too!” exclaimed Hooperman, spilling brandy on his shirt as he gestured with his glass. He looked down at his front. “Oh, dear . . .”

“Exactly,” said Helen Barstone, poking her finger into the air again. “Exactly. F. X. Eastford!”

“Who's F. X. Eastford?”

Barstone and Hooperman exchanged meaningful glances and nods.

“Exactly,” said Hooperman. “There you've got it. Amazing, eh?”

“How so?”

“Because,” said Helen Barstone, stepping closer so that when I looked down at her face I also looked down the vee of her dress, “there is no F. X. Eastford. What do you think of that?” She tapped my chest with her finger. “Eh?”

She had very fine breasts. I admired them. She smiled up at me. I glanced at Zee, who rolled her eyes and looked disgusted.

“Nonexistent,” said Hooperman. “Wrote a nonexistent manuscript, too. In Marjorie's bibliography.
Forbidden Drama.
I'm not sure I believe it even now.”

“How do you know it's nonexistent?”

“Not listed. Everything's listed, but not F. X. Eastford. No F. X. Eastford, no
Forbidden Drama,
either. We went to Tristan Cooper and double-checked with him. Knows everything, that old man. Says there never was any F. X. Eastford and never any
Forbidden Drama,
either. Shocking.” Hooperman drank off his Cognac. “Shocking.” He looked happily into his glass.

“Supposedly it was a commentary on the theater that went on during Cromwell's rule—underground, so to speak.” Helen Barstone looked up at me as I looked down at her. She was, I realized, much more sober than Hooperman. “D'Avenant staged a couple of plays then, too. F. X. Eastford supposedly was a sort of theater buff who knew D'Avenant and other playwrights and actors of that time and who kept a private journal, which he had printed after the Restoration.”

“Forbidden Drama.
”

“Yes. But there is no such book.”

“But Marjorie Summerharp quoted it nevertheless.”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure there's no such book?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and her breasts shrugged with them. “We couldn't find-it listed anywhere. And Tristan says not.”

I looked over her head at John Skye. He looked at me. “If the book doesn't exist, why didn't anyone notice it before this?” I asked the room in general.

“Who checks every name in a bibliography?” asked Hooperman.

“How about the committee that approves the thesis?”

“Marjorie Summerharp's dissertation contains hundreds of references. F. X. Eastford is the only one that's not valid. It probably wouldn't be noticed unless you were looking for it. Remember, too, that Marjorie was an early product of Northern Indiana's graduate program in Renaissance Studies. Her committee might have been a bit weak.”

“How did you notice it?”

“Because we were looking for something strange.” Helen Barstone tapped my chest again, bringing my eyes back down to her. “And at first we didn't notice anything either. I mean how many people know that some privately printed book doesn't exist? But when we checked the listings, F. X. Eastford wasn't there, and when we talked to Tristan it turned out that there was a reason for it.”

“There is no F. X. Eastford.”

“Correct. Would you like to dance?”

“Not right now, thanks. Excuse me.” I slipped past her and poured myself the last of John's Cognac. “So Marjorie Summerharp slipped a ringer into her bibliography.”

Helen Barstone said, “Exactly,” and Bill Hooperman agreed but just couldn't believe it. John nodded without expression.

“Why?”

John shrugged. “Maybe she thought she needed another source to back her argument about William D'Avenant's
activities during the Commonwealth. She's not the first or last to fake a document. I imagine that one reason it got overlooked is because it's really an insignificant part of her total dissertation.”

I thought about Marjorie Summerharp. It did not surprise me that she had been more than the rigid, wry old lady I'd known so briefly, for which of us is only what he seems? I remembered Hooperman's voice on the telephone speaking of Marjorie and saying “It takes one to know one.” Of course that had been his pettiness speaking of her pettiness, but he had been near to another truth about her, too: She was a forger herself, which perhaps accounted for her lifelong fascination with the practice. There is no one more fanatically religious than a reformed sinner, and of course no one better at catching thieves than a former thief.

Somehow I did not think the less of her. In fact, it made her a bit more human. I thought of the crooked things I'd done during my life. The thefts during my army days when I had liberated gear I felt I deserved, the occasional peeks over a friendly shoulder during high school exams, the girl who had helped me write my papers in History.

I wondered if my own excursions into immorality had anything to do with my later becoming a cop. I didn't think of myself and of Marjorie Summerharp as fanatics, but maybe down deep somewhere we had a touch of that sort of madness within us. I remembered Dostoevski writing that there was little difference between moral and immoral men, between saints and sinners.

I suggested a motive: “Could it have been done as a joke? A fast one pulled on the scholars who were supposedly judging her scholarship? She didn't have a very high opinion of a lot of people who had high opinions of themselves.”

John arched an eyebrow. “I'd love to have been able to ask her. She always had a wicked sense of humor.”

“Did you find anything else?” I asked Hooperman and Barstone.

They exchanged meaningful glances.

“Indeed,” said Hooperman, with an alcoholic smile. “There is a link between Ian's thesis and Marjorie's. Very interesting. Very, um, distressing.” His large face showed no distress at all.

“F. X. Eastford again,” said Helen Barstone. “Ian quotes Marjorie's thesis in his own discussion of the last years of Elizabethan drama. Quotes a remark Eastford made about D'Avenant, in fact.” She smiled and I saw a lioness. One of Ian McGregor's cast-off women was showing her fangs. She raised her pointing finger and made little circles with it in the air, then aimed it at me. “The remark he quotes is not in Marjorie's dissertation.”

“Shocking,” murmured Hooperman. He lifted the Cognac bottle and noted that it was empty. A sherry bottle was not, so he poured himself a glass from that. “Had he been content to quote Marjorie's thesis, he could not be faulted. But quoting a passage from
Forbidden Drama
that is not in Marjorie's text. Tsk, tsk . . .” He gave a happy sigh.

I looked at John. He spread his hands. He did not share his colleague's joy at their discovery.

“Anything else?” I asked. “Any other revelations?”

“None at all,” said Helen Barstone primly. “Not that we need anything else. We found quite enough, I think.”

“Quite enough,” agreed Hooperman. “Yes, indeed.” He drank down his sherry and looked at Helen Barstone's breasts. He smiled.

“Scandal,” said John. “Major scandal. Marjorie and Ian both guilty of fakery. Two reputations ruined. I don't like it. I suggest that the four of us keep this pretty quiet until we know what to do with the information.”

“I don't see why,” said Helen Barstone coolly. “Marjorie's dead—she can't be hurt. Besides, she never pulled a punch when it came to others' shortcomings. The things she's said about me! And Bill! And God knows Ian has been hard on people when it suited him. Under all that sleekness, he's been hard on a lot of people.”

“For one thing,” said John carefully, “we don't know for
certain that there isn't any F. X. Eastford or a book by him called
Forbidden Drama.
All we know is that it's not in the lists you know of and that Tristan never heard of Eastford or his book. I'd advise all of us to move very cautiously in this matter. We must consult with other experts and make a very thorough study of the catalogs and listings before we can decide that Marjorie and Ian are fakers. Their reputations are all that they have, after all. Marjorie's is a major one and Ian's promises to be so. I cannot say too strongly that we must walk lightly here until we know our ground better than we do now.”

Somewhat to my surprise, Hooperman agreed. “Quite so, John. Self-interest, if nothing else. What if we cried scandal and then discovered that Eastford actually
had
written that book? Damned awkward, I can tell you. No, no, we must be cautious. Swear ourselves to secrecy until we can dig deeper. Yes, indeed. Particularly since the whole thing is so hard to believe.” He poured himself more sherry.

“That's not my sort of work,” I said. “I leave it to you three. How long will it take you to check it out?”

The three academics exchanged questioning looks. “Oh, months, at least, I should think,” suggested Hooperman.

“Months?” exclaimed Helen Barstone. “I should think less time than that. Weeks, at best.”

“Weeks, months,” said John. “Something like that. It takes time and money to do this sort of thing. Money would buy us help to speed things up, but none of us is rich. The important thing is to agree among ourselves not to let this suspicion out until we're absolutely certain that
Forbidden Drama
doesn't exist. Are we agreed?”

Helen Barstone rubbed her neck with her hand, sighed, and smiled a small, tight smile. “All right, John.”

“Good,” said Hooperman. “I find this very exciting, I must say. Shall we also agree not to publish separately, but as one? If, that is, we discover that we actually have something to publish. . . .”

“Yes,” said John. “I agree to that. It'll keep any one of us from going off at half cock.”

“Very well,” said Helen Barstone. “I agree. We'll publish together, if at all. I say, Bill, would you like to dance?”

John frowned at them, not really seeing them as they began to sway to music heard only by themselves. It must have been sweet music, for they looked blissful as they danced. Then I was aware that he was also frowning at me. He moved closer, glanced at the dancers, then spoke quietly. There was a note of sadness in his voice.

“This means Ian had a motive for murder. Marjorie got the theses, read them, and confronted Ian. He killed her to protect himself.”

“Sounds neat,” I said.

I put my back to the happy dancers. “Of course, if she squealed on him, he could squeal on her, too. What about that?”

He thought. Then, “She was at the end of her career anyhow. His was just beginning. She would retire to Maine where no one knew her reputation, or cared, but his future would be destroyed. She was quirky enough to tell all and take her chances, I think. Besides, she really didn't have to say anything; all she had to do was withdraw from this Shakespeare project. That alone would make the discovery suspect enough to dim Ian's hope of fame and fortune. It would put the whole matter in limbo even if the document is authentic, which it well may be.” John did not like what he was saying. He was not one who liked to sit in judgment and was, therefore, one whose judgment I trusted.

Zee was listening. “Motive isn't enough,” she said. “A killer has to have opportunity, too.” We looked at her. “Marjorie was seen driving to the beach that morning. Ian was seen running the bike path shortly afterward. He couldn't have killed her. If he had, her body would have been washed farther east. You said that yourself, Jeff.”

“Try this on for size,” I said. “His car was seen in the
vicinity between midnight and four. He went home after dropping you off, confronted Marjorie, overpowered her, dressed her in her swimming gear, drove her to South Beach, drowned her, and took her offshore on his surfsailer so no one would find her body too soon, if at all. It sounds complicated, but he had time to do it. Then, in the morning, he puts on a pair of gloves and her white swimming cap and drives her car to the beach. In case anybody actually pays any attention, they'll think he's her. He parks the car and runs home along the bike path. What do you think?”

The dancers jostled a table and laughed. They were very happy about killing two birds with one stone. John and Zee were not happy at all.

“Or,” I said, “maybe he didn't mean to kill her. Maybe they struggled and she fell and then the rest of it happened. She can't tell us, but he can.” As my voice said this, it occurred to me that I should reread the
Gazette
reports of the drowning.