Death Has a Small Voice (19 page)

There was one shot. Its sound seemed to fill the office. Pam's hands sought to hold the smoothness of the slipping wall; she crumpled against the wall; was on the floor.

Jerry's body hit the door. The man must have moved quickly as the door slammed toward him, but he was not quite quick enough. The revolver was caught between door and frame, wedging the door a little open.

Jerry's hand reached for the barrel of the revolver, closed on it. For an instant Pam, her eyes wide, could see him struggle for it, twisting it away. Then the revolver came free in Jerry's hand. He relaxed his pressure on the door for an instant and drew the gun out. He strained to close the door again, throwing the gun aside.

The man inside was pushing against the door. The crack did not narrow. It seemed to Pam slowly to widen.

She moved, then. It was hard to move; her progress was harrowingly slow. She did not quite get to her feet as she crossed the office. Only at the last instant could she make herself stand erect, lean with Jerry against the door; push with him against the resistance within.

It didn't help much; she was too tired to help much, too slight in body for the force needed. It couldn't help enough.

But it helped. Inch by inch, it helped.

Then, abruptly, resistance ended. The door slammed shut Jerry's hand dropped to the knob, gripped it so his knuckles whitened.

Pam did not hear his voice. Neither of them could ever decide, afterward, whether he had spoken. But Pam got the straight backed chair he wanted and they wedged it under the knob. He held the knob still; leaned still, with all his weight, against the lockless door. But the trap was closed.

“Get—” he began, and this time he did speak. But he did not need to finish. Men were running in the outer office; the door of Jerry's office banged open and Bill Weigand stood in it, gun ready. Mullins stood behind him.

Explanation was not necessary. And Bill Weigand spoke.

“All right, Wilson,” he said. “You may as well give up.”

There was no answer from the washroom. For a moment there was no sound. Then there was a sound.

“The window!” Jerry said. “He's—”

It took only seconds to wrench the chair away, to pull open the door they had so laboriously fought closed. But the seconds were too long.

Weigand was in the doorway as it opened. He shouted, “Stop!” and his gun went up. But he did not fire.

Bernard Wilson had got through the window, to the sill outside. He faced to the right, moved his feet so that he could leap along the face of the building; clung for an instant to the top of the opened sash.

Then he leaped.

They could not see his fingers just touch the rail of the fire escape platform outside the office window. They could not see the contorted face; the body twisting in a final, hopeless effort.

But they could hear Wilson scream as he fell.

Pam's hands covered her ears, but they could not shut out the scream. She stood for a moment so, and then blackness circled in around her, circled closer and still closer—She did not know when Jerry caught her.

It was a little before six o'clock. Jerry had made drinks, put them on a tray. He started to carry the drinks to Pamela North in her bedroom, but Pamela appeared at the living room door. She was pale still; her eyes were smudged in the whiteness of her face; the redness of her lipstick was too sharp against pallor.

“I feel fine now,” Pam North said, and swayed slightly in the doorway. “Perfectly all right.”

Jerry got her to a chair. She admitted that, sitting, she felt better. After a drink she felt better still; she even, Jerry had to admit to himself, looked better.

Two of the cats sat at Pam's feet and stared up at her, intent, as if to re-familiarize themselves with a face almost forgotten. Martini was less forgiving. She sat at some distance, back to her humans who would be required, in the end, to make their peace; to humans who must be taught that cats are not lightly to be left alone for days; that it is intolerable for humans; finally returned, to shut themselves away from cats and sleep the day away.

“Martini's very mad at us,” Pam said. The end of the little cat's tail twitched, but the cat did not turn. “It's over now, Teeney.”

It was, or almost. Before they slept, Pam had told Jerry how the record had come, how she had listened, and been caught. She told him of the attic, and of the prat-fall when she dropped from the roof, and of the poison ivy. She examined her legs at that point; found them scratched but without ivy symptoms. It was too soon for that, Jerry told her, consolingly; that would come in time. He made her sleep, then, although he could not persuade her to take Nembutal. “You know I don't take
things,
” Pam said, and took aspirin, which is not a thing in the category of “things,” and slept. Jerry slept too, awakening at intervals to look at the other bed, to reassure himself of a dear, if rather battered, presence. But they both awoke for cocktails.

Bill Weigand arrived a few minutes after six. He had not slept; his always thin face was drawn. He hesitated to take a drink, pointing out that if he once sat down, once drank, he would, quite probably, never get up again; telling them he was on his way home.

“Wilson's dead,” Bill told them. “He died a couple of hours ago. He talked first.”

Wilson had admitted killing Hilda Godwin—admitted it in many words, sometimes rambling, sometimes violently denunciatory of the dead girl, sometimes endlessly extenuating of himself. It had not, Bill told them, been pleasant. Wilson had gloated toward the end, as he became less rational; he had told them over and over of the way his hands had felt on Hilda's slim throat, of the way she had struggled. He had, as his life ebbed, re-lived that climax in it; savored murder.

“It was rather as if he thought he had proved something,” Bill told them, and now, finally, he did accept a drink. “I suppose he felt he had. A kind of adequacy.”

Wilson had admitted killing the little burglar, but about that he was dispassionate. The man had tried to blackmail him; it was appropriate that the man die. He did not seem to know, or particularly to care, how Harry Eaton had found him.

“We don't either,” Bill said. “Presumably, Hilda used Wilson's name at some time. Perhaps when he first came in. Eaton was there, of course. He must have heard the name and remembered it and looked it up in the telephone book.”

Eaton had had the record in an envelope, addressed to Mr. North, when he arrived at Wilson's apartment Sunday evening. Money, he told Wilson; money, or the record went to the Norths. “Not to us, for obvious reasons,” Bill said. “Money doesn't do much good if you're in Sing Sing for life as a fourth offender.”

Eaton told enough of the recorded conversation to convince Wilson. Wilson pretended to agree, asked time to get the money. But he had had no intention of agreeing; he followed him, planning to get the record back. He had not been quick enough; he had bungled.

“He did all along,” Pam said.

Bill nodded; he said, “Right.”

Eaton, before Wilson killed him, got the envelope in a mail box. Wilson had thought of waiting for the collector from the box; had thought better of that. “The government scares people,” Bill said. “More than we do.” Wilson had decided to get the record from the Norths; he had telephoned, found them both absent, discovered that Pam would return Monday evening.

“Mr. Mutton,” Pam said, suddenly. “There was a Mr. Mutton.”

They looked incredulously at Pam North. She explained. “I wonder,” she said, “what name he really used? Nobody would call himself Mutton.”

Bill shrugged. Wilson had not got around to telling that.

He had gone, after dinner, to the North apartment house and been about ready to go in—apparently planning to use whatever method was necessary to recover the record—when Pam came out.

“You were carrying the record in your hand, apparently,” Bill said.

“My purse was full,” Pam said. She considered. “I really need a bigger bag,” she said. “None of this would have happened if—” She stopped. She said she was sorry.

He had followed Pam, driving Hilda Godwin's station wagon. He had left his own car in the country the week end before, not expecting to use it again until spring. He had followed her to the office.

“The record was becoming a kind of obsession, apparently,” Bill said. “He had to get it. Of course, he never knew exactly what was on it.”

He had died raving about the record. “They lied,” he kept saying, in delirium. “They lied. I'll make them tell me where—”

“By the way,” Pam said, “where is it really, Jerry?”

Jerry North looked at her blankly.

“I told you,” he said.

Then Pam looked blank. Her eyes, already larger than they should have been, grew larger still.

“It was really true, then?” she said. “What you told him? In the end, there wasn't any record?”

Jerry nodded.

“Except in your mind,” he told her. “In your memory. What was on the record, Pam?”

Pam tried to remember. She shook her head.

“It's fuzzy,” she said. “He was going to kill her. He called her a snake. He wanted her to give him something, I thought, and she laughed. I remember that more than anything—the way she laughed. I think she called him pompous once and—” She stopped. “What he said doesn't exist anywhere any more, does it?” Pam said. “All of it was about an echo, and it's died away.”

“The voice could have been identified,” Jerry said. “That was why he whispered when he talked to you; when, until almost the end, he talked to us.”

“I don't know,” Pam said. “I suppose so. But—it was a very little voice. I thought he might be British from certain words. But I heard—what was his name? The man at the cabin?” They told her. “Lyster,” Pam said. “It could have been his voice, I thought.” She turned to Bill, suddenly. “Could you really have proved anything from the record? she asked.

And Bill Weigand shook his head.

“I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt that it could even have been got into evidence. The assistant D.A. thinks not. But—it would have told us where to look for evidence we could get in. Like the shovel.”

They waited. He did not immediately continue. He seemed, in fact, about to drop off to sleep.

“The shovel,” Jerry repeated.

“What?” Bill said. “Oh—yes. The shovel. It was broken, of course. He had been trying to mend it. It was a little thing to—” He broke off. He looked at Pam. “To save a life,” Bill said. “Yours, my dear.”

“A broken shovel?” Pam said. Then she said. “Oh. That was why?”

“Right,” Bill said. “He was digging a grave—a large grave. For Hilda. And, if it came to it, for you, Pam. And, he broke the shovel. He was awkward about physical things. You wouldn't have pushed him back into the closet, got the gun, if he hadn't been. So—he broke the shovel, digging. He took it home to try to mend it. The handle was broken. He was trying to wire it together. We found it—the State Police found it—on a bench in the basement of his house.” Bill finished his drink; shook his head when Jerry glanced at the shaker. “He wasn't doing a very good job,” Bill said, mildly. “I suppose he was still working on it when we showed up and then, naturally, he had to find out what was going on.”

“But,” Pam said, “just a broken shovel.”

“And,” Bill said, “the manuscript, of course. They found that, too. A copy of the first draft; one of the final draft. Probably the last was the one Wilson took from the publisher's after he had returned it for the record. If there were others, he destroyed them. But he couldn't, apparently, bring himself to—wipe out the book entirely.” Bill paused again; lighted a cigarette. “After all,” Bill said, “he was a—what would you call it, Jerry?—a man of letters.”

Jerry nodded. They waited.

“Oh,” Bill said, “the book's about Wilson, all right. A wicked, ugly story about a man like Wilson. Very witty, very cruel. He's a lawyer, in the book. He makes love to the girl, who is pretty obviously Hilda herself. It's the story of her finding him out, so that in the end she ‘comes up smiling.' We've been finding out more about Wilson, and the character fits him. Plenty of people would have identified this man—she called him Benjamin Watson, just to make it easier. In the first draft, she identified him as a professor and all but named Dyckman. Somebody, I suppose, persuaded her that that went a little too far. She went far enough, without it.”

He paused. He finished his drink.

“But still—” Pam said.

“Right,” Bill said. “Only a megalomaniac would carry it to murder. Not that anybody wouldn't—well, like to wring her neck. She made her identifiable Benjamin Watson a pompous ass. She also hints that he was a—well, an inadequate one to boot. The gossip columnists would have had fun with it. Probably, in the end, the famous professor, the widely known lecturer and radio figure, would have been laughed out of existence. More specifically, he'd probably have been dropped by Dyckman.”

They waited.

“The crux of it, probably,” Bill said. “He'd have lost his job—the job the rest hinged on. You see, Hilda was an undergraduate when they first met. It's pretty evident they had a love affair. Well—universities don't much favor faculty members who—seduce pretty young undergraduates. As a matter of fact, they fire them.”

“‘Seduce,'” Pam said. “I'd almost forgotten the word.” She looked at Bill, with directness.

“Was that how you guessed?” she asked. “You named him, through the door.”

“Right,” Bill said. “If the rest was right, it was Wilson. Because—he had a specific thing to lose. His whole profession. Lyster didn't; Shaw didn't. People would have laughed at them. They'd have laughed at Rogers—and he's a violent young man and wouldn't have liked it. But, he was, it seemed to me, still in love with Hilda, and sure she was with him. That pretty much let him out. Anyway, laughter doesn't kill.”