Read Online Honest Doubt by Amanda Cross - Free Book Online Page B

those movies they used to make in the Forties. My mother always loved them, and dragged me along with her to revival houses to see them. I expected June Allyson to come chirping out onto the quadrangle at any moment. But what approached as I stopped to ask where the English department hung out was a man who did recognize me as a woman in my helmet and who didn’t think motorbikes belonged on his precious campus. My being a woman made him a little less nasty about it. Or maybe he thought a big dame on a motorbike was not going to take bullying too easily.
    I lifted the helmet and smiled. “I’ll leave it in the parking lot,” I said. “Then, how do I find my way to the English department? I’m expected, and they won’t be too happy to be told I was stopped by campus security.” Total bullshit, but how was he to know? If you’re thin, you bat your eyelashes. If you’re fat, you throw your weight around. It almost always works.
    â€œThe English department’s in that building,” he said, pointing to something in the near distance covered in ivy. “And walk your bike to the parking lot back there. Motorbikes aren’t what they want around here.”
    I obeyed meekly. Knowing when meekness gets you what you want is a P.I.’s best tool, and much easier to do if you’re female. He nodded, watching me push the bike toward the parking lot. I was thinking he was a lot easier to handle than the professors in the English department were going to be.
    Once I’d parked the bike, reached the right building on foot, and climbed the stairs to the English department—I avoid elevators; they can get stuck or, worse, force you into close contact with someone you don’t want to meet—I greeted Dawn and asked which professor I might talk to now. She gave me a list of the faculty, and helped me to match the names up with the fields. I’d brought a list of those with me. Haycock I knew was Victorian, or had been, and I knew the only woman full professor was Modern. Her name turned out to be Antonia Lansbury.
    â€œAny relation to Angela?” I asked. Talk about women detectives on television; that Lansbury dame played a woman who never went anywhere without tripping over a body, but I liked the actress: not young, and not into romance.
    â€œA distant cousin, I think,” Dawn said. “Antonia’s teaching, but she’ll probably be here later, if you want to wait for her. She always sees students in her office after her classes, which is more than the men do. Anyway, most of them. You could find her then.”
    â€œI might,” I said. Now I wanted to get the names of the others. American was a guy named Donald Goldberg; he just got tenure, Dawn advised me in a whisper—terrible fight, the department was divided, but the dean and the president got him in.
    â€œDo things often work out that way?” I asked, also in a whisper.
    â€œMostly the dean and the president turn people down,” she hissed back. “This caused a lot of comment, I can tell you.”
    â€œI hope you will, one day, when you let me buy you another dinner. I did enjoy that one so much.”
    â€œI did too,” Dawn said. I had the impression not a lot of people took the time to be nice to Dawn. Lucky for me, though that didn’t make me glad.
    We returned to the list. Medieval turned out to be a very nice guy named Larry Petrillo; that is, Dawn thought him nice, and said the students did too. I figured out he was probably not as big a pompous ass as the others. Renaissance—which means mainly Shakespeare, according to Dawn—was named David Longworth, an older man, close to retirement if he ever decided to retire, which nobody had to these days, not the way it used to be: sixty-five and you were out. You couldn’t celebrate your sixty-sixth birthday standing up in a classroom. Then, also probably long in the tooth, was the Freud fanatic Dawn