Hanged for a Sheep (30 page)

Mr. Victor Leeds Sproul was no longer breathing noisily. He was not breathing at all.

2

Thursday, 8:45
P.M.
to 9:10
P.M.

For an instant after he realized this, Mr. North's inviting hand remained extended, mutely inviting Mr. Sproul to arise and lecture. Then Mr. North became conscious that his simple gesture had become grotesque. He let his arm fall. His eyes left the flushed face of Mr. Sproul and went to the face of Mrs. Paul Williams, who had left her chair and was standing beside him. Mrs. Williams' face was white and horrified.

“He's sick!” she said. She spoke in only a normal voice, but it carried through the auditorium, grown suddenly silent. “Isn't he sick?” This was to Mr. North. He looked at her.

“I don't think so,” he said. “Not any more. A few minutes ago he was—sick.”

She stared at him, and there was horror in her eyes.

“Yes,” Mr. North said. “I'm afraid so.”

His voice was lower, but not too low to carry. There was an odd sound from the audience; it was as if the audience sighed. And then, somewhere in the rear, a woman screamed. It was not a loud scream; it lay between a scream and a sob. And then the silence broke into fragments and the audience was alive, moving, uneasy. And Mr. North turned to it.

“I'm afraid Mr. Sproul is—unwell,” he said. “If one of you is a doctor—?”

A middle-aged man rose in the third row and sidled toward the aisle. Mr. North caught his eye and the man nodded and came to the platform. There were no stairs, but it was a low platform and the man put one hand on it and half climbed, half vaulted up. He went over to Sproul and bent over him and felt his wrist and stared into his eyes. He leaned down and sniffed at the full, parted lips and stood up and looked at Mr. North.

“He's dead, you know,” the man said. He looked at Mr. North, feeling evidently that there was more to be said. “Klingman,” he added. “Dr. Klingman.” It was obviously self-identification. Mr. North nodded.

“What—?” he began. Dr. Klingman shook his head.

“I'd have to examine him,” he said. “Asphyxia, from his appearance. But what would asphyxiate him? Poison. A drug—opium. Or cerebral hemorrhage. Or something the matter with his brain. You'd better call somebody. Somebody in authority. I—”

A high, angry voice broke in. It came from the door leading to the stage from the speakers' room, and it preceded a tall, evidently angry man. He was a high, lean man and apparently about seventy, and his voice crackled in the upper register.

“Well!” he said. “What's this? What's
this?
Something the matter with him?”

The tall old man was obviously annoyed. He seemed to be addressing, chiefly, Mrs. Williams. At any rate he was looking at Mrs. Williams. He was looking at her angrily.

“Mr. Sproul seems—seems to have been taken ill, Dr. Dupont,” Mrs. Williams said. “The doctor”—she gestured vaguely toward Dr. Klingman—“the doctor thinks he's dead.”

“I don't think it,” Dr. Klingman said. “He
is
dead. Completely.” He looked at Dr. Dupont, whom he evidently knew. “Very unfortunate, Doctor,” he said. “Very irregular.” There was, in spite of everything, the faintest touch of raillery in the physician's tone. The tone accepted and lightly ridiculed the older man's annoyance at so improper an interruption to orderly procedure. Then Mr. North placed the tall man. Dr. Dupont, scholar not medico, was president of the Today's Topics Club. He ran it, Mr. North remembered hearing, on the highest plane of the intellect, and with notable asperity. He was not, Mr. North supposed, a man to countenance such extravagances as seemed to have occurred.

“Irregular?” Dr. Dupont repeated. “Unfortunate!” He glared at the physician.
“Irregular
!” He spluttered slightly. He turned his glare to Mr. North.

“Have to get him out of
here
,” he said. Mr. Sproul became, ludicrously, matter out of place, through the fault of Gerald North, who had put him there. Mr. Sproul became, it was clear, a responsibility solely of his publishers. Of Mr. Sproul, as such, Dr. Dupont washed his hands. He looked severely at Mr. North. Mr. North was conscious of annoyance.

“We'll have to get the police,” he said. “It will have—to be looked into.” He was conscious of a certain inadequacy in the words. “The doctor says it may have been poison,” he added. “You can't move him around.”

“Certainly you can't leave him
here
,” Dr. Dupont said, with asperity. “In front of all these people.” He looked at the people. “Most of them members,” he added. His tone was accusing.

They couldn't, Mr. North repeated firmly, do anything else. It was a matter for the police; it was a matter to be left in abeyance for the police. If Dr. Dupont liked, Mr. North would notify the police. Or Dr. Dupont could. But somebody had better. Then Mr. North thought of something and started for the door leading to the speakers' room. Halfway he turned.

“Nobody should touch it,” he said. He said it loudly, so that the restive audience could hear. “It's a matter for the police.”

That, he thought, ought to give Dr. Dupont pause; it ought to make an auditorium full of people sentinels over the body of Victor Leeds Sproul, protecting it from molestation by the weight of public attention. Assuming that anybody wanted to molest it. Meanwhile, Mr. North wanted to get into the speakers' room.

He entered by the door from the stage as Y. Charles Burden, elegant and saturnine as always, but now evidently in a hurry, entered by the door leading from the corridor. Mr. Burden confronted Mr. North.

“What the hell?” Mr. Burden inquired. “What the bloody hell?”

“Our man's dead,” Mr. North told him. “No tour. No more books. No more Sproul.” Mr. North looked intently at Mr. Burden. “Probably,” Mr. North added, “somebody killed him. In front of all of us.”

As he spoke, Jerry North was looking quickly around the room. He knew what he was looking for, but he did not see it. There should be a glass. Or glasses. Sproul had put down a glass as Mr. North entered, before they went onto the stage. He had been drinking something out of it. Had he been drinking alone? Mr. North's memory gave no answer.

“Damn!” said Y. Charles Burden, emphatically. “Booked through to the coast, too.” He looked at Mr. North, and his glance, too, was accusing. “And back again,” he added. “To the coast and back again.”

“All right,” Mr. North said. “And we had him under option. For the rest of his life.” He looked at Burden and half smiled. “Which ought,” he said, “to let us out—you and me, I mean … when the police come.”

“Police?” Burden repeated. He thought it over. “Naturally,” he said. He appeared to think. “Make quite a story,” he said. “I wonder—” He did not wonder audibly. Mr. North could follow without words.

“Grist,” he pointed out, “in its fashion. Grist for the Burden mill. Lend a certain touch of drama to the lecture business, in general.” He paused, reflecting in his turn. “Start quite a run on the bookstores, too,” he added. He looked at Burden, and was horrified at both of them.

“Can't help thinking of things,” Burden said. Even he sounded defensive. “Got livings to make, both of us. Sorry about the old boy, of course. Still—there you are.” He looked at Mr. North reflectively. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I used to know him pretty well at one time. In Paris. A funny sort of bloke, really.”

“Was he?” Mr. North asked. “Funny enough to get murdered? That kind of funny?”

Slowly Burden nodded.

“I shouldn't wonder,” he said. “I shouldn't wonder at all. However …”

He adopted an expression of worried decorum and went past Mr. North and through the door leading to the stage. After a moment, Mr. North followed him. The moment convinced Mr. North that there were no drinking glasses in the room, and that there was nothing apparent in the room to put in glasses if glasses were at hand. Mr. North went back to the stage.

There were more people around Sproul now. The physician and Dr. Dupont were still there, and Mrs. Williams was sitting in a chair, looking as if she were near to fainting. And there were several new men and a new woman on the stage. These were, it could be assumed, other officers of the club, sharing Dr. Dupont's perturbation loyally. And in the auditorium the members of the audience were, for the most part, standing up, and moving toward aisles. Without asking anybody, Mr. North went to the lectern and struck it with the little wooden gavel Mrs. Williams had used when first the audience was invited to come to order. There was a pause in the movement of the audience.

“Mr. Sproul is dead,” Mr. North said, astonished instantly at his own bluntness. “He died here on the platform and it will be necessary to call the police.” He waited. They were listening, now.

“I don't know any more about such things than any of you,” he went on, not altogether truthfully. “But I imagine that the police would like everybody to remain here until—until they've looked into things. You'll have to decide for yourselves, of course. But I think you should have in mind that that would be what the police would want. Dr. Dupont is going to call the police now, and they should be here almost at once.”

Mr. North paused and regarded the audience, which regarded him. There was no telling what the audience would do; probably it would merely go home, except for its more curious members. And it was not, certainly, his responsibility. He had, he was pleased to think, put it up to Dr. Dupont.

It was evident that Dr. Dupont also thought so. He looked at Jerry North without affection.

“High-handed,” he said. Mr. North was surprised and oddly pleased. It was an apt way of putting it. He smiled at Dr. Dupont.

“Somebody,” he pointed out, “has to do something, Doctor. I thought you wanted me to get him out of here.”

Dr. Dupont made a noise. It was partly a snort and partly a sound which might be spelled “grumpph!” It was pleasingly old school; it sounded like the Union Club on the subject of the man in the White House.

“Well,” Mr. North said, “are you going to call the police, Dr. Dupont?”

“He doesn't need to,” Pam North said. She was standing just below the platform, where it met the auditorium. “We did it. Or Dorian did, really. Because of Bill. I thought she was the one, really, because he's her husband. After all.”

Everybody looked at Mrs. North, who was pleasing to look at. She wore a red woolen dress and a black felt hat with a red feather, and she was carrying a black fur jacket affectionately in her left arm. She held her right hand up to Jerry.

“Pull, darling,” she suggested. She smiled at him. “You were very good, Jerry, really and you needn't have worried at all. Only it was sort of wasted, wasn't it?”

Jerry reached down a hand. Pam rose to the low stage. Dr. Dupont stared at her, with a slight air of unbelief.

“The speech, Doctor,” Pam explained. “Jerry's, I mean. Because of Mr. Sproul.” She looked at Mr. Sproul. “He doesn't look awful, does he?” she said. “You can't believe it, really—It's not as if he were hanged.”

“Pam,” Jerry said. “Quit it. You're—”

“Jittering,” Pam said. “Of course. I keep thinking—”

“Don't,” Jerry told her. But he thought, too, of a man they had both seen slowly turning at the end of a rope and the nerves tightened in the back of his neck. He shook himself and tried to shake off the thought.

“Dorian called the police?” he asked, bringing them back to the concrete. “Just now—oh—”

Dorian was coming down the center aisle. She didn't look like the wife of a policeman. And she looked puzzled.

“They're coming,” she said, when she saw Jerry North looking at her. “Only—they already knew. Bill had left to come up. Somebody had telephoned before. Somebody with a funny voice, Mullins said. Mullins was rounding up the squad. A high voice and rather strange English. The—the voice reported that Mr. Sproul had been murdered.”

She was at the platform now. She did not offer to climb up.

“Has he?” she asked. “Been murdered?”

She looked intently at Jerry North and the others on the stage.

“Nonsense,” Dr. Dupont answered. He looked with determination at those around him, and then at the restive, puzzled audience. “A sensational rumor,” he announced. Everybody stared at him. He stared them down, or tried to stare them down—first those on the stage, then those in the audience.

“Mr. Sproul is merely unwell,” he said, in his high, cracking voice. “Dr. Klingman will bear me out.”

He gazed at Dr. Klingman; his gaze held command. Dr. Klingman's face held a slight smile.

“Unwell?” he repeated. “Really, Dr. Dupont—that is a matter for a metaphysician. On our—plane—on our plane, he is dead. Quite possibly he has been murdered.” He looked with a barely more perceptible smile at the tall president of the Today's Topics Club. “I am sorry,” he said. Again his voice held a note of raillery. “It is an annoying fact.”

Dr. Dupont looked disappointed in Dr. Klingman. He shook his head sharply, admonishingly.

“Natural causes,” he commanded. “If he is—
very
unwell, it is obviously from natural causes.”

Pam and Jerry stood side by side and looked at Dr. Dupont. Everybody looked at Dr. Dupont. Then, from the audience, there was an unexpected sound. Somebody had laughed, nervously. Pam saw that Dr. Dupont's tall, spare figure was shaking. His hand, half raised in what might have been a gesture of command to somebody, shook perceptibly. Pam spoke, and her voice was unexpectedly quiet and steady.

“Doctor,” she said. “Sit down, please. This has been a shock. You must—catch him!”

Others had seen it almost as quickly. Dr. Klingman, who was nearest, caught the tottering, tall old man and eased him gently down to the floor of the stage. Dr. Dupont's eyes closed and almost immediately reopened. They looked up at Dr. Klingman.