The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (11 page)

Finley stopped asking questions and went to work. He
rang back with the information in a remarkably short time. Kate, listening to Georgiana receive it on the telephone, fought the impulse to grab the receiver from Georgiana’s gentle hands.

“I don’t know what you expected, my dear,” Georgiana said when she had hung up after thanking Finley in her deliberate way, “but the photograph was dropped off at the paper anonymously; that is, it was left at the reception desk, and no one remembers who left it. It was marked ‘urgent,’ but bore no message other than the name of the minister in the picture.”

“An invisible person left it,” Kate announced. “Didn’t they check out the picture?”

“I was just coming to that, dear,” Georgiana mildly said, while Kate wondered if stressful impatience could shorten one’s life by decades, as seemed likely. “The newspaper sent out an ‘investigative reporter,’ ” Georgiana ever so lightly emphasized the phrase, “and he found the–er–woman in the picture. She admitted readily enough that it was indeed she, and that the man with her was indeed the minister, whose photograph the reporter showed her. She had not known who her ‘client’ was, but this was not the first time she had ‘serviced’ him. Poor Matthew Finley was quite embarrassed at having to report this unseemly business. When they had verified all this, the newspaper people decided to print the picture.”

“The rest is history,” Kate said. “Georgiana, may I stay on a day or two more? I think I may be able to find Flavia. But I’m going to have to visit your old people’s home, Merryland, as soon as possible.”

“Merryfields, dear. We’ll go this very minute, if you’ll just let me get ready. Surely you don’t think one of those old people did Flavia in?”

“I think they did the naughty minister in,” Kate said. “But only time will tell.”

“If you want any information from the old people, Kate,” Georgiana said, pausing on the staircase, “perhaps you had better let me try to elicit it. Your rather, well,
Northern
manner might just confuse them, and take more time in the end. Besides, they know me. Now what is it you’re trying to discover?” Kate, who could not but see the force of Georgiana’s words, had to consent, but she wondered if she would survive waiting for Georgiana to return with her information. I told Kate later that now, at last, she knew how
I
felt when she left me so cruelly suspended in the course of investigations.

Georgiana allowed Kate to go with her to Merryfields, but not to accompany her upstairs on her visits to the old people. “You’ll just upset them; even if you don’t speak (and we know how unlikely that is, dear), just the presence of a stranger may very well put them off their stride. Now you just sit in the waiting room and
wait
.” No one but Georgiana could have got away with it.

But when she came down again a considerable time later, it was clear that she thought she had got what Kate wanted. And Kate, when she heard it, thought so too. “Though what this has to do with Flavia’s disappearance, I cannot imagine,” Georgiana announced in the face of Kate’s excitement.

Georgiana reported that the dear old ladies had told her
all
about the visits of her dear friend from the North: Flavia. They tended to wander and to repeat themselves, but there was no doubt the conversation had certainly turned to the Divine Church of the Air, which they watched assiduously. Surely, they told Flavia, their dear Minister was talking to each of them personally, because he had read their letters, had answered them personally,
and was grateful that their contributions, slight as they were, were helping to spread the word of God and lead others to be born again to Christ. Each lady had shown Flavia her letters, typed of course but addressed to her personally, with the minister’s promise to pray for her with special fervor and by name. Each old person, however deserted in this world, was not forgotten by God or by His minister on earth and the Divine Church of the Air. The ladies had even trusted Georgiana with a few of their letters, which Georgiana produced.

“How much money did they send?” Kate asked. Of course Georgiana didn’t like to ask the
exact
amount, but it had been as much as the poor dears could afford. They didn’t have much left over after paying for their care: just a little for personal use, most of which they were honored to give to the dear Minister.

“Flavia must have felt like throwing up,” Kate said without thinking. Georgiana, firm in her breeding, ignored this. Kate saw her into her car, and left, saying she would return soon, and assuring Georgiana that Flavia too would soon be back.

“
BUT HOW DID
you know where to look?” I asked Kate when she had returned to New York, bringing Flavia with her. Flavia had thought she owed it to Georgiana to stay on a few days, but Kate wouldn’t hear of it. “You can never be as invisible as all that, not in Georgiana’s house,” Kate said, and to this they all had to agree.

“I began with camera stores,” Kate said. “Flavia hadn’t taken a camera down with her, so she had to have acquired one. Oddly enough, the only place an old lady is noticeable is in a camera store, particularly if she asks for a special kind of camera to do a special kind of thing, money no
object. There were three large camera stores in town, and Flavia turned out to have got her camera in the third, naturally. The young man at the counter remembered her perfectly: Northern, perky, knew exactly what she wanted. He tried to fob her off with an Instamatic, but she wanted a camera with a telephoto lens and great clarity of focus. That wasn’t the way she put it of course; she said she wanted to take pictures from a distance and have them come out well. The man sold her an expensive camera with a telephoto lens and fully expected to have it back on his hands the following day, but he never saw her again. Asked to describe her, he said that she looked like any other old lady, neat, grandmotherly but firm. She paid with cash, which surprised him, but she explained that she was too old to learn to use credit cards.” Kate smiled at this, since she had often seen Flavia use credit cards in restaurants and comment on their usefulness: so much easier to figure out the tip. Flavia had been covering her tracks.

Finding Flavia herself was a little harder, but not much. She had stolen one of Georgiana’s credit cards and one of her suitcases, and simply checked into the town’s largest hotel as Georgiana. Naturally, the police didn’t think of that. They had checked hotel registrations, looking for Flavia’s name, or at least an obviously phony name. They had interviewed the help in all the hotels, but there were far too many old ladies to make further investigation practical. None of them, in any case, were reported as looking the least bit “lost.” When Kate finally tracked her down, Flavia was relieved, but also frightened. “I fear for my life,” she said, “which is rather silly since I had been thinking of flinging it away. That Divine Church has lost millions of dollars because of me, and they may decide not to leave vengeance to the Lord.” Kate agreed with her.

When we were all discussing it later in Kate’s apartment, armed with fortified refreshment, Great Aunt Flavia was full of praise for Kate for finding her and especially for realizing that she had been responsible for the photograph. “You recognized your advice about invisibility, didn’t you, dear?” she said. “How right you were. I loitered around that motel for days, and no one even saw me. People are afraid to speak to old ladies for fear they won’t stop talking, and they aren’t afraid we’re going to be burglars or gunmen. It worked like a charm.”

“That’s all very well,” Kate said, keeping a firm grip on Flavia’s exuberance, “but how did you know he would show up, with or without a prostitute?”

“I saw him with her on the street, and I followed him. They were in a car, but I recognized him when they stopped for a light. They turned into the motel a few yards further on. I suppose he thought he was safely distant from his usual stamping ground. They didn’t even glance at me when they went into the motel, intent upon what seemed a familiar routine. So I waited until they came out, just to see where they would go. I had called a taxi, and when it came I waited in it, with the meter going, until the Divine Church and his companion emerged. Then I said: ‘Follow that car.’ I think if I’m ever asked, I’ll say that was the high point of my life. After that I bought the camera.” Flavia took a long sip of her Scotch and soda.

“How could you be sure the woman was a prostitute?” Kate asked.

“He dropped her off, so I saw where she lived. I asked a man working in her building if he knew her name, because I thought she might be the daughter of a dear friend but I hadn’t really seen her very clearly. The man said he thought I must be mistaken, since she wasn’t the sort of
woman a lady like myself would know. ‘Do you mean she’s a fallen woman?’ I asked him in my most elegant way.”

“Flavia, you didn’t!”

“I did, and very convincingly too. He told me you might put it that way. So I went off and bought a camera. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to get my picture; he was clearly in town for several days. But after I got the picture back and sent it to the newspaper, I thought I’d better hide out. I didn’t want to bring any danger on poor Georgiana. I just went right on being invisible in that hotel until you found me. I’m glad you did, Kate; I was getting very tired of that life.”

“What set you off on this adventure,” I asked, “apart from the thrills of being invisible?” I glared at Kate.

“Hypocrisy and greed, dear. I can’t bear people ranting on about sin and old-time values and being born again, when they’re just trying to make money like any inside trader on Wall Street. And then, to take money from those poor, old ladies, and pretend you are writing personal letters, when it’s all done with computers. Taking advantage of loneliness: I was shocked, really shocked. I thought if the old ladies all over the country knew what sort of man he was, they might think again before sending him money. Really I was just lucky that he picked that place to sin in. Or do you think the Lord was getting tired of him?”

“Well, you certainly started a huge scandal. It may be in the news for weeks.”

“I hope it will all have died down by next spring when it’s time for my visit to Georgiana,” Great Aunt Flavia said.

A
t the time of her arraignment, Professor Beatrice Sterling had never set foot in a criminal court. As a juror–a duty she performed regularly at the close of whatever academic year she was called–she had always asked to serve in the civil division. She felt too far removed from the world of criminals, and, because of her age (and this was true even when she was younger, referring as it did more to the times in which she had been born than to the years she had lived), too distanced from the ambience of the criminal to judge him (it was almost always a him) fairly. She was, in short, a woman of tender conscience and unsullied reputation.

All that was before she was arrested for murder.

Like most middle-class dwellers in Manhattan, therefore, she had never been through the system, never been treated like the felon that the DA’s office was claiming her to be. It is a sad truth that those engaged in activity they know to be criminal–shoddy business practices, drug dealing, protection rackets, contract killings–have quicker access to the
better criminal lawyers. Those unlikely to be accused of anything more serious than jaywalking often know only the lawyer who made their will or, at best, some unpleasant member of a legal firm as distant from the defense of felons as from the legal intricacies of medieval England.

Beatrice Sterling’s lawyer was a partner in a corporate law firm; long married to a woman who had gone to school with Beatrice, he had some time ago agreed to make her will as a favor to his wife. His usual practice dealt with the mergers or takeovers of large companies; he had never even proffered legal advice to someone getting a divorce, let alone accused of murder. There was not even a member of his firm knowledgeable about how the criminal system worked at the lower end of Manhattan, next door though it might have been to where their elegant law firm had its being.

The trouble was, until her arraignment, neither Beatrice nor her sister considered any other lawyer. It is always possible that with the best legal advice in the world Beatrice would still have been remanded, but as it happened, she never had any chance of escaping rides to and from Riker’s Island in a bus reinforced with mesh wiring, and incarceration in a cell with other women, mostly drug dealers and prostitutes. By that time Beatrice was alternately numb or seized with such rage against the young woman she was supposed to have murdered that her guilt seemed, even to her unhappy corporate counsel, likely.

Professor Beatrice Sterling was accused of having murdered a college senior, a student in a class Beatrice had been teaching at the time the young woman was found bludgeoned to death in her dormitory room. The young woman had hated Beatrice; Beatrice had hated the young woman and, in fact, every young woman in that
particular class. She would gladly, as she had unfortunately mentioned to a few dozen people, have watched every one of her students whipped out of town and tarred and feathered as well. She had, however, insisted that she had not committed murder or even laid a finger on the dead girl. This counted for little against the evidence of the others in the class, who claimed, repeatedly and with conviction, that Beatrice had hated them all and was clearly not only vicious but capable of murder.