The Return of the Black Widowers (7 page)
"Just the normal places. He ate, drank, slept, eliminated. He went to the school library to study, or sat in his room. He went to the post office, the bank, a shoe store. We followed him on every errand all up and down Berry's main street. Besides—"
"Besides, what?" said Trumbull.
"Besides, even if he had gotten hold of the question paper, it could only have been in those few days before the test, maybe only the night before. He would have had to sweat out the answers, being Lance. It would have taken him days of solid work over the books. If he could have answered them just by getting a look at them, he wouldn't have had to cheat; he would have gotten a look at them in the opening minutes of the test period."
Rubin said sardonically, "It seems to me, Jim, that you've painted yourself into a corner. Your man couldn't possibly have cheated."
"That's the whole point," cried Drake. "He
must
have cheated and he did it so cleverly no one could catch him. No one could even figure out how. Tom's right.
That's
what gripes me."
And then Henry coughed and said, "If I may offer a word, gentlemen?"
Every face went up as though some invisible puppeteer had pulled the strings.
"Yes, Henry?" said Trumbull.
"It seems to me, gentlemen, that you are too much at home with petty dishonesty to understand it very well."
"Why, Henry, you hurt me cruelly," said Avalon with a smile, but his dark eyebrows curled down over his eyes.
"I mean no disrespect, gentlemen, but Mr. Rubin maintained that dishonesty has value. Mr. Trumbull thinks that Dr. Drake is only annoyed because the cheating was clever enough to escape detection and not because it existed at all, and perhaps all of you agree to that."
Gonzalo said, "I think you're hinting, Henry, that you're so honest that you're more sensitive to dishonesty than we are and can understand it better."
Henry said, "I would almost think so, sir, in view of the fact that not one of you has commented on a glaring improbability in Dr. Drake's story that seems to me to explain everything."
"What's that?" asked Drake.
"Why, Professor St. George's attitude, sir. Here is a professor
who takes pride in flunking many of his students, and who never has anyone get above the 80s on the final examination. And then a student who is thoroughly mediocre—and I gather that everyone in the department, both faculty and students, knew of the mediocrity—gets a 96 and the professor accepts that and even backs him before the qualifying committee. Surely he would have been the first to suspect dishonesty. And most indignantly, too."
There was a silence. Stacey looked thoughtful.
Drake said, "Maybe he couldn't admit that he could be cheated
from,
if you know what I mean."
Henry said, "You find excuses, sir. In any situation in which a professor asks questions and a student answers them, one always feels somehow that if there is dishonesty, it is always the student's dishonesty.
Why?
What if it were the professor who were dishonest?"
Drake said, "What would he get out of that?"
"What does one usually get? Money, I suspect, sir. The situation as you described it is that of a student who was quite well off financially, and a professor who had the kind of salary a professor had in those days before the government grants began to come. Suppose the student had offered a few thousand dollars—"
"For what? To hand in a fake mark? We saw Lance's answer paper, and it was legitimate. To let Lance see the questions before having them mimeographed? It wouldn't have done Lance any good."
"Look at it in reverse, sir. Suppose the student had offered those few thousand dollars to let him, the student, show the professor the questions."
Again the invisible puppeteer worked and there was a chorus of "What?"s in various degrees of intonation.
"Suppose, sir," Henry went on patiently, "that it was Mr. Lance Faron who wrote the questions, one by one in the course of the semester, polishing them as he went along. He polished them as the semester proceeded, working hard. As Mr. Avalon said, it is easier to get a few specific points straight than to learn the entire subject matter of a course. He included one question from the last week's lectures, inadvertently making you all sure the test had been created entirely in the last week. It also meant that he turned out a test that was quite different from St. George's usual variety. Previous tests in the course had not turned on students' difficulties. Nor did later ones, if I may judge from Dr. Stacey's surprise. Then at the end of the course, with the test paper completed, he would have mailed it to the professor."
"Mailed it?" said Gonzalo.
"I believe Dr. Drake said the young man visited the post office. He might have mailed it. Professor St. George would have received the questions with, perhaps, part of the payment in reasonably small bills. He would then have written it over in his own handwriting, or typed it, and passed it on to his secretary. From then on all would be normal. And, of course, the professor would have had to back the student thereafter all the way."
"Why not?" said Gonzalo enthusiastically. "Good God, it makes sense."
Drake said slowly, "I've got to admit that's a possibility that never occurred to any of us. . . . But, of course, we'll never know."
Stacey broke in loudly. "I've hardly said a word all evening, though I was told I'd be grilled."
"Sorry about that," said Trumbull. "This meathead, Drake, had a story to tell because you came from Berry."
"Well, then, because I come from Berry, let me add something. Professor St. George died the year I came, as I said, and I didn't know him. But I know many people who did know him and I've heard many stories about him."
"You mean he was known to be dishonest?" asked Drake.
"No one said that. But he was known to be unscrupulous and I've heard some unsavory hints about how he maneuvered government grants into yielding him an income. When I heard your story about Lance, Jim, I must admit I didn't think St. George would be involved in quite that way. But now that Henry has taken the trouble to think the unthinkable from the mountain height of his own honesty—why, I believe he's right."
Trumbull said, "Then that's that. Jim, after thirty years, you can forget the whole thing."
"Except—except"—a half smile came over Drake's face and then he broke into a laugh—"I
am
dishonest because I can't help thinking that if Lance had the questions all along, the bastard might have passed on a hint or two to the rest of us."
"After you had all laughed at him, sir?" asked Henry quietly, as he began to clear the table.
G |
eoffrey Avalon swirled his second drink as he sat down to the table. It had not yet diminished to the halfway mark and he would take one more sip before abandoning it. He looked unhappy.
He said, "This is the first time within my memory that the Black Widowers have met without a guest." His bushy eyebrows, still black (although his mustache and trim beard had become respectably gray with the years), seemed to twitch.
"Oh, well," said Roger Halsted, flicking his napkin with an audible slap before placing it over his knees. "As host this session, it's my decision. No appeal. Besides, I have my reasons." He placed the palm of his hand on his high forehead and made a motion as though to brush back hair that had disappeared from the forepart of his pate years before.
"Actually," said Emmanuel Rubin, "there's nothing in the bylaws that says we
must
have a guest. The only thing we
must
have present at the dinner is no women."
"The
members
can't be women," said Thomas Trumbull, glowering out of his perpetually tanned face. "Where does it say that a guest can't be a woman?"
"No," said Rubin sharply, his sparse beard quivering. "Any guest is a member
ex officio
for the meal and must abide by all the rules, including not being a woman."
"What does
ex officio
mean, anyway?" asked Mario Gonzalo. "I always wondered."
But Henry was already presenting the first course, which
35
seemed to be a long roll of pasta, stuffed with spiced cheese, broiled, and sauce-covered.
At last Rubin, looking pained, said, "As near as I can make out this seems to be a roll of pasta, stuffed—"
But by that time, the conversation had grown general and Halsted seized a break to announce that he had his limerick for the third book of the
Iliad.
Trumbull said, "Damn it to hell, Roger, are you going to inflict one of those on us at every meeting?"
"Yes," said Halsted thoughtfully. "I was planning just that. It keeps me working at it. Besides, you have to have some item of intellectual worth at the dinner. . . . Say, Henry, don't forget that if it's steak tonight, I want mine rare."
"Trout tonight, Mr. Halsted," said Henry, refilling the water glasses.
"Good," said Halsted. "Now here it is:
"Menelaus, though not very mighty,
Was stronger than Paris, the flighty.
Menelaus did well in
The duel over Helen,
But was foiled by divine Aphrodite."
Gonzalo said, "But what does it mean?"
Avalon interposed, "Oh, well, in the third book, the Greeks and Trojans decide to settle the matter by means of a duel between Menelaus and Paris. The latter had eloped with the former's wife, Helen, and that was what caused the war. Menelaus won, but Aphrodite snatched Paris away just in time to save his life. ... I'm glad you didn't use Venus in place of Aphrodite, Roger. There's too much of the use of Roman analogues."
Halsted, through a full mouth, said, "I wanted to avoid the temptation of obvious rhyming."
"Didn't you ever read the
Iliad,
Mario?" asked James Drake.
"Listen," said Gonzalo, "I'm an artist. I have to save my eyes."
It was with dessert on the table that Halsted said, "Okay, let me explain what I have in mind. The last four times we met, there's been some sort of crime that's come up every discussion, and in the course of that discussion, it's been solved."
"By Henry," interrupted Drake, stubbing out his cigarette.
"All right, by Henry. But what kind of crimes? Rotten crimes. The first time I wasn't here, but I gather the crime was a robbery, and not much of one either, from what I understand. The second time, it was worse. It was a case of cheating on an examination, for heaven's sake."
"That's not such a minor thing," muttered Drake.
"Well, it's not exactly a major thing. The third time—and I was here then—it was theft again, but a better one. And the fourth time it was a case of espionage of some sort."
"Believe me," said Trumbull, "that wasn't minor."
"Yes," said Halsted in his mild voice, "but there was no violence anywhere. Murder, gentlemen, murder!"
"What do you mean, murder?" asked Rubin.
"I mean that every time we bring a guest, something minor turns up because we take it as it comes. We don't deliberately invite guests who can offer us interesting crimes. In fact, they're not even supposed to offer us crimes at all. They're just guests."
"So?"
"So there are now six of us present, no guests, and there must be one of us who knows of some killing that's a mystery and—"
"Hell!" said Rubin in disgust. "You've been reading Agatha Christie. We'll each tell a puzzling mystery in turn and Miss Marple will solve it for us. . . . Or Henry will."
Halsted looked abashed. "You mean they do things like that—"
"Oh, God," said Rubin emotionally.
"Well, you're the writer," said Halsted. "I don't read murder mysteries."
"That's your loss," said Rubin, "and it shows what an idiot you are. You call yourself a mathematician. A proper mystery is as
mathematical a puzzle as anything you can prepare and it has to be constructed out of much more intractable material."
