Curtain for a Jester (11 page)

“Payoff for what?” Weigand asked, going around a truck.

“Maybe he had a lot of guys working for him,” Mullins suggested. “Maybe he handled hot stuff. Maybe he was a bookie.”

There was no end to the possibilities. Weigand agreed to that. At this stage, there seldom was—particularly in the screwy ones.

“Jeeze,” Mullins said. “This sure is. Dummies falling off roofs, men in rompers, women screaming on phonographs.
And
the Norths.”

He was beginning, Bill told him, to think like Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley. It was a tendency to be discouraged. So far, at any rate, the Norths had merely gone to a party.

“And found a body,” Mullins said.

“One thing leads to another,” Bill told him, and drove toward Forest Hills, toward the home of Mrs. Gertrude Wilmot, former wife of Byron Wilmot and one of a good many people to be seen. At the moment, a person to start with.

Mrs. Wilmot lived in a comfortable house in a row of comfortable houses on a pleasant street which would, by June, lie in the shade cast by great maple trees. They walked up to the house along a cement walk, hedged by pruned hemlocks. Mrs. Wilmot herself came to the door when they rang the bell.

All over the country, Bill Weigand thought, such pleasant women in their middle years come to the doors of such houses when bells are pressed. They look up, ready to smile, at men who may be friends of friends, who may be selling brushes or vacuum cleaners. They look down, smiling already, on small boys collecting for newspaper deliveries, offering to mow lawns. They speak with a variety of regional accents, their clothes are different in cut and color. They are pleasant women, not easily perturbed.

Mrs. Wilmot seemed unperturbed. She looked up at Bill Weigand and smiled and said, “Yes?” in a voice without perturbation—and with not much expectation, either—and looked only a little puzzled when Weigand introduced himself. She had not, it appeared, been listening to radio news. A voice came through the opened door, from a living room. “In a moderate oven,” the voice said, with cadenced enthusiasm. Not, at any rate, to radio news of murder.

“I'm afraid I have bad news for you, Mrs. Wilmot,” Weigand said, and then her round, rather pretty, face did change. Her eyes widened and anxiety showed.

She said, “Not Clyde? Something's happened to—” Her voice was thin. She stopped because Bill Weigand shook his head.

“No,” he said, “not Mr. Parsons. We'd better come in, Mrs. Wilmot.”

She stepped back. They went through a small entrance hall into a living room of chintz. On a television screen a young woman in an afternoon dress, with a frill of apron, bent to remove something from an oven, no doubt moderate. She murmured of golden browns; faded into nothing as Mrs. Wilmot turned a knob.

Mrs. Wilmot turned to face them. She was of medium height, rounded comfortably, but only plump. Her gray hair had been arranged by accomplished fingers. She had blue eyes, and they were wide as she waited.

“It's about Mr. Wilmot,” Weigand said. “I'm sorry to have to tell you—”

But she interrupted.

“Byron,” she said. “Oh.”

It was as if she had come upon an anticlimax. It was then as if she caught herself. The expression of anxiety did not return to her face, but it reflected what might be regarded as concern.

“Oh,” she said, “I do hope nothing—”

“I'm sorry,” Bill said. “Mr. Wilmot was found dead this morning. In his apartment. I'm afraid someone killed him, Mrs. Wilmot.”

She said, “Oh! How dreadful!” She said, “How really dreadful!” She sat in a chintz-covered chair, and motioned to other chairs gay in chintz.

Bill Weigand re-expressed regret at the news he brought. She nodded her head as he spoke. She said, then, that it was a shock, of course. But then she straightened.

“I won't pretend,” she said. “It's just a—a shock. You don't have to be upset, captain. We weren't—we hadn't been together for several years, you know. I'm terribly distressed that such a dreadful thing should have happened—that poor Byron—” She finished with a small movement of well-shaped hands. Then she said, “But—” and let the conjunction suffice.

It made things easier.

“We have to try to find out what happened,” Bill told her. “Your former husband was murdered. We have to find out why, by whom.”

“Of course,” she said. “But I don't know. I hardly knew anything about him in the last few years.” She paused. “Perhaps I never did,” she said. “He was a strange man. A strange and—” She stopped. She seemed to consider. “We shouldn't speak ill of the dead,” she said. “Particularly, I shouldn't. I was his wife.” She paused again. “Actually,” she said, “I'm not really so much surprised that somebody—killed him. He was a cruel man.” She nodded her head. “A very cruel man,” she said.

“Cruel?” Bill said. “How, Mrs. Wilmot?”

“Every way,” she said. “Those dreadful—he called them jokes. But always they hurt people. I know, captain. Take what he did to Clyde—” She stopped abruptly. “But Clyde wouldn't hurt anybody,” she said then, quickly. “Anybody but himself.” She paused for a moment. “Clyde's my husband's nephew,” she said.

“I know,” Bill said. “I've talked to Mr. Parsons. He told me about Mr. Wilmot's little—joke on him last night.”

“A malicious thing,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “Byron did so many things like that. But Clyde wouldn't—”

“I haven't suggested Mr. Parsons did anything,” Bill told her.

“Never,” she said. “He never would. But—but Byron was cruel to so many people. Those poor young people last night. The awful thing he did to poor Arthur.”

“Monteath,” Bill said, and she nodded.

“Making him think it had happened again,” she said. “Think how—how awful that would be for anyone. And there were—oh so many other people. So many people must have hated Byron.” She looked up. “Sometimes I hated him,” she said. “I didn't kill him, though.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Tell me about last night, Mrs. Wilmot. What you remember.”

She told him. She had remembered a good deal, little of it he had not already heard from the Norths. Her interest, he felt, had been centered on her nephew. There was anger against Wilmot when she spoke of Clyde Parsons. “Always he did that,” she said. “Played on Clyde's weakness. I know it's a weakness. Everybody does. Everybody else has tried to help. But Byron—it wasn't the first time. When Clyde was going up for that interview—” She stopped. She said, “But that hasn't anything to do with it.”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “We never know, at this stage, what's important. Tell me what you were going to, Mrs. Wilmot.”

“Nothing,” she said. But then she appeared to reconsider. “I suppose I'd better,” she said. “You'd think it was something important if I didn't, wouldn't you? It was when Clyde was trying to get into the diplomatic service. Like Mr. Monteath—the career service?”

“Yes,” Bill said.

“It was several years ago,” she said. “Clyde wanted it so much. He was so keyed up. He hadn't had a drink for—oh, months. We were all so pleased and—and hopeful. And then there was this interview.”

She was not specific; she probably was not, Bill thought, a specific woman. There had been “this interview” with someone who would decide whether young Parsons could get into the service or stay out of it. Parsons had been nervous, wound up. And it had been Byron Wilmot who had suggested, who perhaps had even urged, that it was at such times that one particularly needed a drink. It had been Wilmot who had worked on Parsons's pride—told him to ignore all the old women who treated him like a baby; assured him that he could take a drink when he needed it, perhaps even a couple if he needed them, like anyone else. Like any other grown man. So, to steady himself, for the crucial interview, Parsons had taken a drink.

“He knew he shouldn't,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “But Byron—Byron
taunted
him. And so—”

And so, it appeared, was not specifically said, young Parsons had turned up for the interview a little drunk, perhaps a good deal drunk. And that, not unreasonably, had been that. “A dreadful thing for Byron to do,” Mrs. Wilmot said.

Bill nodded. He thought, but did not say, that perhaps Wilmot had, without too much intending it, served the larger good. A diplomat ought, surely, to be able to take a drink—to take even a couple of drinks.

“Go on about the party,” Bill said, when Mrs. Wilmot stopped.

She went on, her account still fitting, not much amplifying, that of Pam and Jerry North. She told of the dummy's “murder.”

“It wasn't as if Byron didn't know what it would mean to Mr. Monteath,” she said. “To have it happen again.”

She had said it before. It was time now to take it up. What had happened before of which the shooting of a red-wigged mannequin was a repetition?

Mrs. Wilmot seemed surprised at the question. She said, “Why, the burglar, of course” and waited as if, with that, she had explained everything. But Bill Weigand only shook his head. “But the police knew all about it,” she said. “I thought of course—”

“No,” Bill said. “You mean Mr. Monteath shot at a burglar once before? Under circumstances similar to this—this contrivance of Mr. Wilmot's?”

She did. She had assumed that the police, as represented by Captain Weigand, knew about that. It was, it had to be, a matter of record. Bill could only shake his head again. Perhaps some policemen knew; he did not. Where had it happened?

“Oh,” she said. “Up in Maine. About—well, it was just before the war.”

She was invited to go on. She went on.

The Wilmots had been motoring in Maine in late July of, she thought, 1940 or 1941. They had come to a little village near the coast—she paused at that, and shook her head. “I've forgotten the name of the place,” she said. Byron Wilmot had remembered suddenly—told her he remembered suddenly—that the Monteaths had a cottage somewhere near, and had suggested they look the Monteaths up. “I remember I wasn't very enthusiastic,” she said. “I didn't know them well at all and we'd planned to spend the night somewhere quite a ways ahead and—Well, anyway, Byron insisted.”

They found the Monteaths' cottage after a little search, found it isolated, on a just passable road which ended with the cottage, and near the sea. They had found Monteath there alone.

“Right away I knew we shouldn't have come,” she said. “He was so obviously worried and he was packing up. You see, his wife had been taken ill suddenly and was in a hospital in Portland. He had taken her there, I think, and then come back to pack up because—well, she was very ill.”

Mrs. Wilmot had felt they were in the way, even though Monteath politely urged them to stay, to have a drink. They had, but over her protests. They had left in the late afternoon and driven on. “I still remember how worried poor Arthur was about his wife,” she said. “How I felt we had intruded.” She paused. “It was that same night it happened,” she said. “We read about it in a newspaper the next day, or heard it on the car radio. I don't remember. Somebody tried to break into the cottage and Mr. Monteath shot to frighten him off. But—well, he killed him. Just by accident, of course. Not meaning to at all. You can imagine how he must have felt—his wife dying and then—this awful—mistake. And for Byron to bring it all up again last night!” She shook her head; she made a small sound, deprecating without words.

“Mrs. Monteath died?” Weigand asked.

She nodded. Mrs. Monteath—her name had been Grace—had died a day or two later in the hospital.

“Of course,” she said, “everybody knew it—the shooting, I mean—had been an accident and the police didn't do anything to Arthur. Didn't arrest him or anything. Of course, they wouldn't. I don't suppose he could ever forget, though. The two things coming at the same time, that way and—and everything.”

“The man he shot,” Bill said. “Was he identified, do you know?”

She didn't.

“Did your husband?”

So far as she knew, Byron Wilmot had known no more than she.

“It hasn't anything to do with this, has it?” she asked. “I mean—I told you about it to show what—well, the kind of cruel things Byron would do. Do deliberately.”

Bill Weigand understood that. There was no reason to think that this unfortunate accident of almost fifteen years ago had anything to do with Byron Wilmot's death.

“To get back to the party,” he said. “After the incident of the dummy, do you remember anything that might help us?”

She told what else she remembered, which brought little new. Her story of the last few minutes of the party accorded with that of the Norths', her account of her unsuccessful effort to get Clyde Parsons to go home with her agreed with his. She had taken a cab—she did not remember of what fleet, if any—from downtown New York to Forest Hills, getting home late. She had gone to bed. She waited, then. She was thanked. She went to the door with Bill Weigand and Mullins, stood on the porch watching them as they got into the car. Somewhere, in a shadowy marsh, peepers started their shrill salute to spring.

VI

Thursday, 3:55 P.M. to 5:15 P.M.

Mrs. Gerald North had telephoned, requesting that she be called back. A patient, bar-to-bar check had placed Clyde Parsons until around a quarter of two that morning—at which time he had been too intoxicated to be served at a small place on Eighth Street. (Or so the night bartender, pursued to his home in the Bronx and awakened there, had virtuously insisted.) Bill started another check, which would require equal patience: Did some hack driver's record show a trip, beginning at around one in the morning, from downtown New York to Forest Hills? Bill Weigand regarded Mullins. After consideration, he nodded. He gestured toward a telephone.