Hanged for a Sheep (25 page)

“I think,” Pam said, “it was somebody from outside—I mean from outside the house. Probably somebody inside the family from outside the house. Because the door wasn't locked.”

Weigand returned to her, regarded her theory—which he seemed to find hanging in the air between them—and said, “Oh, when Jerry came, you mean?” Pam nodded.

“Somebody came in from outside to kill poor Harry,” she said. “And so the door had to be unlocked.” She thought it over. “I don't get that,” she said, frankly. “What am I talking about?”

“The door was unlocked when Jerry came last night,” Bill Weigand reminded her. “Somebody had tripped the catch, so it didn't lock when the door closed. Therefore, somebody came in, either with the aid of somebody or because he had tripped the lock himself when he went out earlier. Which does indicate that he had no key. But—”

“I've been thinking about that,” Jerry cut in. “It doesn't have to be last night. It could be left over from the night before. And so it could have been tripped to let Anthony in, so he could be killed.”

Weigand nodded and said, “Precisely.” Pam looked doubtful.

“Somebody would have noticed,” she objected. The three men shook their heads at her, in unison.

“No, baby,” Jerry told her. “Not necessarily—not unless somebody tried it from outside, on the assumption it might be unlocked. Anybody who assumed it was locked would merely use a key, which would let him in just as well as if it were locked.”

Pam looked at them and, after a moment, said: “All right.

“Then,” she said, “it was somebody inside the family
inside
the house. Which could be anybody.” She paused. “Except me,” she added. “And Jerry, because he was in Kansas City. When I thought the telephone company had been so bright. Which is just as well, because we had motives, too.”

Jerry looked at her and shook his head.

“If you mean your inheritance,” he told her, “the answer is no. Because that applies only to Aunt Flora, and we weren't here then. It didn't make any difference to us if Stephen Anthony lived.” He looked at Weigand. “What
is
the sequence?” he asked. “Or isn't there any?”

That, Weigand admitted, was the question.

“Suppose,” he said, “we lay it out and look at it, starting with Aunt Flora. See what we know.”

“All right,” Pam said. She reached to the table, just as Roughy was about to push the ball-shaped vase over the edge. She removed Roughy to her lap and replaced the vase. “Where are we?”

This, Weigand told them, was what they knew:

Mrs. Flora Buddie, who had shortly before ejected her fourth husband, Stephen Anthony, had been given a small dose of arsenic in a digestive powder about two weeks previously. She suspected poison, although her physician was willing to diagnose merely a violent digestive upset. Her suspicions had been proved correct. The poison apparently was administered in something she ate or drank that morning, and since no analysis was made of unconsumed food or drink, it might have been in anything. The finding of the bottle, however, had proved that the dose, too small to cause more than acute discomfort, had been given in Folwell's Fruit Salts.

Mrs. Buddie apparently did not remember who had given her the salts. Weigand paused and looked at Pam. “Wouldn't she?” he asked. “You know her?”

Pam thought it over.

“Maybe not,” she said. “She expects things just to—appear. As long as they do, she doesn't bother. Only sometimes she does. It might be either way, but she might forget.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “We'll assume for the moment she did forget, particularly since at that time she didn't know where the poison came from. She didn't have anything to focus on, I mean—maybe she thought it was the orange juice, or the coffee. Anyway, we'll assume she didn't. And the bottle disappeared.”

To group the things they knew by the events to which they related, instead of chronologically, they knew that the salts containing the poison had been administered by Craig. The bottle bore only his fingerprints, a fact which he insisted showed that he had been framed. He told a story, which could neither be proved nor disproved, that he had received the bottle through the mail and that it purported to come from his half-brother, Wesley Buddie. This Dr. Buddie denied. Either might be lying; both might be lying or each might be telling the truth as he saw it. Because it was always possible that some third person had sent the bottle to Craig, making it appear—with the aid of a little easy forgery—that Dr. Buddie had sent it. All they knew about this was what they had been told; the stories diverged but were susceptible to reconciliation.

The bottle had disappeared, without anyone, except Ben, noticing its absence. Mrs. Buddie had kept her own counsel for almost two weeks, but she had invited Pam North, apparently planning to use her as an amateur detective. On the night of Pam's arrival, she had told the other members of the family of the attempt to poison her.

On that same night, her estranged husband had been shot and killed in the breakfast room.

The following night, Harry Perkins, who had been hiding out—with the help of Sand—had come to Pam's bedroom door, given her a package—“which you promptly lost,” Bill Weigand interjected, disapprovingly—and promised to give information. He had been hanged before he gave it. Later Pam's room had been searched; still later, with the help of the cats, the bottle had been found. Presumably, it was the package which Perkins had given to Pam.

“And which I lost,” Pam said. “Don't forget that—Lieutenant. Also, I heard a sort of bump—like a door slamming—the first night I was here. And didn't know what time it was.”

“Also,” Jerry said, “you hit me on the head with a vase. Because you thought I was the murderer.”

“You two,” Pam said, “sometimes make me so
mad!
I could—I could—.” She looked down at Toughy, still in her lap. “They pick on me, darling,” she said. “Scratch them!” Toughy looked up at her with languishing eyes and resumed his purring, which he had absent-mindedly interrupted.

“And hit you with a vase,” Bill Weigand repeated, very gravely. “We also know that the murderer can tie a bowline; that he had an opportunity to take and secrete Nemo's leash; that he still has the gun he used to kill Anthony; that he does not repeat his method, which is an old wives' tale anyway; that he fired up at Anthony, who presumably was standing over him and that—although this is merely a deduction—he killed Harry Perkins because Perkins knew who he was and was going to tell. We don't know how Perkins knew.”

They digested that. Mullins shook his head.

“Me,” he said, “I don't get it. Any of it. I think we ought to ask some more questions. We don't even know why.”

“Why what, sergeant?” Pam enquired.

“Why anything,” Mullins said, succinctly.

Weigand shook his head. He said that, on the other hand, they knew too many “whys.” They knew “whys” for practically everybody.

“Assuming the most probable,” he said, “we assume that somebody did try to kill your aunt, Pam, and failed because they knew too little about arsenic. Then the motive for any member of the family is the commonest motive in the world—money. Your aunt has it; her potential murderer inherits from her; her potential murderer wants the money now. So he kills Mrs. Buddie. So—Now for Anthony, there are two possibilities: Either his murder had a connection with the attempt on your aunt, Pam, or it didn't. If it did, probably he was killed because he knew who had given your aunt arsenic. Because, even though the attempt failed, the fact that it had been made would—well, enrage Mrs. Buddie.”

“Make her mad as hops,” Pam agreed. “It would me.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “Which presumably would mean, at the least, that the person who had poisoned her could expect to get no money from her, now or in the future. It might mean that he would be arrested for attempted murder, to boot. But with Anthony out of the way, there was nothing to stop him—or her—from making another attempt on Mrs. Buddie.”

“Try, try again,” Pam agreed.

“On the other hand,” Weigand went on, “Anthony was a candidate for murder on his own account. He was a blackmailer—he was blackmailing the major, almost certainly. He may have been blackmailing Clem or her sister, Judy. Bruce McClelland—by the way, which one of the girls
is
he after? He said Clem but—”

“I know,” Pam said. “It's been puzzling me, because now he acts as if it were Judy. I think he found out too much about Clem and then met Judy that night and decided she was the one, really. And anyway, finding out—so he really knew—about Clem and Brack would—well, sort of dash him. So now I think it is Judy. Does it matter? I mean to them it does, I guess, but to the murder?”

It depended, Weigand said, on when Bruce McClelland had made the shift, if he had made it. Supposing he was still in love with Clem, or thought he was, at the time of Anthony's murder, he had a motive—protecting her from a blackmailer. Otherwise, he shared the motive that everybody else had—a desire to silence Anthony before Anthony had a chance to expose him. “Even your aunt has a motive for Anthony,” Weigand pointed out, and explained the possibility he had already outlined to himself. Pam and Jerry looked doubtful, but Jerry finally nodded.

“She might, at that,” he said. “She's quite an old girl.”

Pamela was silent. She was stroking the cat abstractedly and staring off into space.

“As for Perkins, to round it off,” Weigand said, “the motive is obvious. He knew who had attempted one murder or accomplished the other, or who had done both.”

“How did he know?” Pam asked. She was still staring across the room, seeking advice, it seemed, from the panels of the closed door.

“Oh,” Jerry said. “Saw or heard something suspicious. Perhaps he was around somewhere when—”

“Not
Perkins,
” Pam said. “It doesn't matter about that. That wasn't what I was wondering about. I knew something was wrong and it kept going around in my head and that's it. How did he
know?
Because nobody had told him, and he couldn't
see
.”

They all looked at her, now. She turned toward Jerry.

“The fingerprints,” she said. “He couldn't have just seen how many there were because Bill says he only glanced at it. And nobody had told him. And yet he knew. But if it was the way he said, he couldn't know they were the
only
ones. Because you can't see them until they're developed, can you, Bill?”

She turned to Bill.

“Not usually,” he said. “Not on the bottle, Pam.”

“Then he must have known somehow before,” Pam said, “and that means—
Jerry! You didn't really close the door!
”

“But I did, Pam,” Jerry said, and then, with the others, he half turned to stare at the door. It was not entirely closed, and now it was opening wider.

There was a frozen moment while they stared. And then Benjamin Craig stood in the door. He still looked unaccountably placid, but now he had a gun in his hand. It was pointed at the two detectives and the Norths, and it was moving slowly from side to side. It occurred to Pam North, rather horrifyingly, that Benjamin Craig looked like a suburban gardener with a hose, abstractedly spraying water on the lawn. And she felt—and this was more horrifying still—that Benjamin Craig would, if it suited him, spray bullets from the automatic in his hand as casually as the gardener he so grotesquely represented would spray water from a hose.

Craig spoke, and his voice was unhurried and almost friendly—and the friendliness of the voice was most horrible of all. He nodded at Pam, and then the gun, pointing at her, hesitated in its regular movement.

“I made a mistake, Cousin Pamela,” Benjamin Craig admitted. “I shouldn't have known about the fingerprints. You are quite right about that, cousin; sometimes you are really rather bright. He told me that before I shot him—just before. It was the last thing he said, as I remember. He said: ‘Now yours are the only prints—' and I shot him before he finished.”

He broke off and looked down at the gun.

“This goes off so easily,” he said, pleasantly. “So very easily. You hardly realize that you have pulled the trigger. Because really it was an argument for not shooting him, wasn't it? But the gun had gone off before I thought of that.” He let the gun move on, covering Jerry North, covering Mullins, covering Bill Weigand. “Not that it matters,” he said. “Probably I would have shot him anyway.”

It was unreal; it was, to Pam, like something seen on the stage, beyond the footlights; something safe and far away, on the little lighted platform of illusion. Ben Craig spoke the words as if someone else had written them for him to say; you felt that the automatic must hold blanks; that if Ben Craig pulled the trigger it would make a loud, harmless noise; that if one of them pretended to be hit and to die, he would afterward get up and walk away and go back to a dressing room and take makeup off with cold-cream and tissue. But Stephen Anthony had not got up and walked away.

“If only because he made me poison mother,” Craig said. “I think I would have shot him for that, finally. I—” He broke off, and after a moment began again.

“But now I must get away, of course,” he said. “I must bother you to arrange that, Lieutenant. Because your men are very stubborn. They say I can't go for a walk without your permission, Lieutenant. And of course I must go for a walk.” He smiled at them. “A long walk,” he said. “I came up to arrange it with you, really. I brought this along—in case.” He moved the gun up and down to indicate the identity of “this.” “It makes it a little awkward, so many of you,” he admitted. “I had not planned on that—or on Cousin Pamela's brightness.” He looked at Pamela closely. “I really hadn't realized, cousin,” he said. “I really hadn't.”