Murder Is Served (12 page)

She said that this would be different. He gestured, angrily, rejecting a difference.

“The difference won't count,” he said. “I know you, Peg. It would do something to you. It would break you up inside.”

He looked at her and saw fear in her wide eyes.

“You're afraid now,” he said. “You know I'm right. Give yourself time.” He pressed it. “Look,” he said, “we'll get a lawyer. He'll go with you, stand by you. If we have to. Tomorrow. Monday. I'm not asking you to keep on running, always. Just not to beat your brains out.”

“Where can we go?” she said. “Anywhere we go—”

“God,” he said. “It's a big city. They're not everywhere. We'll find a place—a little hotel or—wait a minute!” He broke off as he thought of something. “I know a guy down here,” he said. “An all-right guy. He's got a place—a hell of a big place. Used to be a loft floor, and he's living in one end of it. We can stay there.”

She shook her head. She said they were not looking for him.

“For all you know, they are,” he said. “Who does she know? Who does she see? A guy named Carey, somebody tells them. So they stake out Carey.” He shook his head. “You don't know them,” he said. “What did you think? That they just stood on corners and waited for people to go by?”

“Only if I'm with you,” she said. “If I'm not they don't want you.”

“You think,” he said. “That's what you think.”

She seemed to give in suddenly. She said, “All right.”

“I'll call this guy up,” he said. “See if it's O.K. See if he's got a crowd. If he has we'll wait somewhere—go to a movie, maybe—until the crowd's gone.” He looked at her, trying to read her eyes. “O.K.?” he said.

“All right,” she said. “Call him up, then.”

He went quickly, before she changed her mind. The booth was at the far end of the restaurant, wedged in between the wall and the corner of the bar. He had to look up the number in dim light, close the booth door so that the light would go on and he could see to dial. He hurried all he could, and anxiety hurried into his mind. He was afraid to leave her there; he had never known her the way she was now.

“It's all right,” he started to tell her, with a nod of the head, with the words formed on his lips, when he came out of the telephone booth and looked down the restaurant toward their table. He saw it was no use, because the table was empty. He began to swear, and one of the bartenders laughed at him.

“Walked out on you, Mac,” the bartender said. “Soon as you ducked in there, she ducked out there.” He motioned toward the door leading to the street. “You have to tie 'em down, Mac. Only way is to tie them down.”

Weldon Carey turned on him, all black fury. The bartender's eyes widened.

“Take it easy, chum,” he said. “Take it easy.”

“Look,” Carey said. “Did anybody—come for her? You know.”

“Nobody, Mac,” the bartender said. “She just waited and walked out. Nobody dragged her.”

Carey began to run toward the door. He went up three steps to the street, and looked up and down it. It was lighted, noisy. In the restaurant next door somebody was hammering a piano and people were singing; the sounds came out through the closed doors. The wind whipped down the street, but there were people on the sidewalk. They were mostly young, and in pairs. There was one group of six, two girls and four men, who were standing in a kind of huddle, and talking loudly to each other. One of the girls made a pretense of striking at one of the men and he jumped back, overdoing it, over-amused. A sailor and a girl diagonally across the street, aiming toward the restaurant Weldon Carey had just left. The sailor had his arm around the girl's waist, holding her close to him.

Then, up at the corner, on the square, a taxicab started up, cold gears strident. Carey found himself running toward the corner, trying to overtake the taxicab. He reached Washington Square South and could see the taxicab, just released by a changing light, starting up again a block away, going east. He hesitated for a moment, about to run after it, hopelessly. Then a cab came from the direction of Sixth Avenue, and he waved at it and had the door open before the cab stopped.

“Catch that guy for me,” Carey said to the driver. The driver started up, and half turned.

“Girl trouble, Mac?” he said.

“Sure,” Carey said. “She's going home mad.” He found a bill, thrust it toward the driver. “Got to fix it up with her,” he said, and managed something a little like a smile.

They caught up with the other taxicab at Fourteenth Street and University Place. Its passengers were a sharp-faced man and a girl, embraced. Carey's cab took him back to Washington Square. He was swearing, under his breath, hopelessly. She was going to walk into it.

She had not planned it; until she saw Weldon go into the telephone booth, she had not known what she was going to do. She had only known, all through the evening, that she had been wrong in getting him into it; that he had had enough, that war rawness still acerbated his nerves, that she couldn't load this on him. It had been weakness which had made her hunt him out, weakness and fear which was like a child's fear. She had groped for a hand she knew, was sure of. But it had been cowardly and unfair.

If she went away from him, went on her own, they could not do anything to Weldon. He had not had any part in it, except to know her and, now, to try to help her. But if he ran with her, tried to help her hide, he would be in it, and in the end hurt by it. You took enough advantage of people you loved without that.

She went out into MacDougal Street and walked toward the square, the wind trying to push her back. There was a cab at the corner, its motor turning over slowly, but she shook her head when the driver looked at her. She didn't need a cab, she thought, for what she was going to do. There would be a policeman at Eighth Street and Sixth; there almost always was. She would go up to him, she would say, “You're looking for me. I'm Peggy Mott.” Then it would be over, and Weldon wouldn't be in it, wouldn't be hurt by it.

The northwest wind was more furious, more bitter, as she walked down Fourth Street toward Sixth. It snatched at her breath. Once she had to turn, back against the wind, to catch her breath. When she was breathing again she turned back and went into it, her head down, the wind tearing at her skirt, rounding it close against her long legs. The cold and the wind seemed to blow tears into her eyes, and she walked along, head down, and thought she was crying.

It was farther to Eighth Street, against the wind, than she had thought and when she reached the corner she did not see the policeman she expected. And she was shivering uncontrollably. A drugstore on the corner was open and she went into it, and the warmth was almost choking after the cold outside. She sat down at the counter and ordered coffee and when it came drank it, scalding hot and black.

There was a man two seats from her who was, simultaneously, drinking coffee, listening to a kind of miniature juke box on the counter, and reading the early edition of the
Daily News
. She could see the front page headline and it said: “Tony Mott Slain, Wife Sought.” Below the headline the rest of the page was a picture, as nearly as she could make out, of Tony's office. She thought it was a picture of Tony sprawled across his desk, but she could not make it out clearly because of the angle at which the man held the paper.

Then he opened the paper, and the whole of the third page was devoted to Tony's murder. “‘Playboy' Tony Mott Stabbed at Desk,” the top headline read. “Police Seek Pretty Wife for Questioning.” There were two pictures occupying a large part of the page. One was of Tony, as he had been alive. The other was of her. She knew the picture; it had been taken for publicity when she was in summer stock, before Tony started pulling those wires of his.

Then, seeing it printed so, knowing it was real, she began to tremble again, so that she could hardly lift the cup to drink what remained of the coffee. She bent her head, and knew that she was bending her head to hide her face—and knew that she was now, again, only afraid. She was afraid as the rat had been afraid when it found all its holes blocked; she was unreasoningly, mortally afraid. And she knew that she could not, as she had thought she could, walk up to a policeman and say, “You are looking for me. I am Peggy Mott.” She could have done it before she saw the newspaper, but now she could not do it. There had been some kind of a film over reality, over terror, and seeing the headlines in the newspaper, seeing her picture in the newspaper, had torn the film away. She felt that she was crouching at the counter, that she could leave it only to run, wildly; that there was nothing she could do but run, as the rat had run.

All the rest had been unreal, the subterfuge of the mind. Her decision not to involve Weldon, her determination to give herself up and face it—those had been the mind's pretense, the mind's boasting that it controlled. But the nerves controlled, the shrinking muscles, the flinching skin. Fear controlled. She must run and, first, she must find Weldon again. It was as if Weldon Carey, the existence of Weldon Carey, were a small fire somewhere in a world of ice; a fire she had insanely quitted, to which, if she were to keep on living, she must return.

Mechanically, she paid for the coffee and found her way out of the drugstore. On the street she got, as quickly as she could, away from the corner, where light spilled out through the windows of restaurants and lunch counters. Walking uptown, she found she was keeping as closely as she could to the walls of buildings, except when there were windows with the light streaming out. She walked for a time with no purpose, thanking the harsh wind which gave her an excuse to keep her head bent and her face hidden; thanking the cold which kept most people off the streets and made the few there were walk, as she walked, with heads bent, their minds only on the goal of warmth.

She thought of Weldon Carey, of his dark, violent, angry strength, and the thought warmed her a little. Then, thinking of him, she became uncertain, losing faith. She had walked out on him; she had promised to do something and, as soon as his back was turned, had broken the promise. It did not matter why she had done this, and now she became uncertain even of her own motives. Consciously, she had left the restaurant to keep Weldon out of it. But she began to wonder now whether there had not been also in her mind, below the surface, a desire to escape the compulsion of his strength, to get away from his force, his possessiveness. That, probably, would be what he would think, and he might well decide not to bother with her. Wash his hands of her. He'll wash his hands of me, she thought and she had, in the kind of subdued hysteria which gripped her, an oddly clear picture of Weldon's doing just that: somehow physically washing his hands of her.

The absurdity of that picture overbalanced her mood and brought back a kind of sanity; made it possible for her to say to herself, “Peg, you're a fool. You're dramatizing.” Because, she found, she could dramatize even this. The thing to do was to find Weldon again. That was the first thing. Nothing I could do, she thought, would really make him quit bothering with me.

But it was hard to decide how to get into touch with Weldon. He would have left the restaurant after he found she was gone; left it in fury, in that somehow plunging way of his. Where would he have gone then? To look for her? That was probable; it was probable that, at this moment, he was walking some windtorn street in the Village looking for her, walking with his head bent against the wind, as hers was, but looking up at women he passed, looking for her.

She began to look up, now, and for a moment was absurdly sure that she would see him coming down Sixth Avenue. But that mood, that childlike confidence that things were going to come right, lasted only until the first man was not Weldon Carey. Then the mood broke. There was no reason to think she would meet Weldon if she walked aimlessly against the cold wind. There was every reason to think she would, in the end, meet somebody who would recognize her. If he did not find her, she decided, Weldon would go to her place to wait for her. Then she realized he could not do that, because that was the one place they would certainly be guarding. That hole, of all holes, would be stopped. Their points of contact were not many; she had more with half a dozen people—Sardi's, when the others had the money; the drugstore at Forty-fifth Street; even the Astor lobby or, more often, the Algonquin. But she did not meet Weldon Carey at any of those places, nor did she know where he went or what he did when they were not together. The existence of the friend downtown, with the flat which had been a loft floor, had come as a surprise, had been almost an incongruity. Perhaps, when she had run, he had gone there. But that was no good, because she did not know where it was. Her place, his place, the University—it came down to those. And the hole was stopped at her place, in East Forty-eighth Street. And the University, this late on Saturday night, would be closed, she thought. If it were not closed, it would be another hole they would watch.

She was at Fourteenth Street when she decided that there was only one useful thing to do. She would go to Weldon's room, far uptown, beyond even the University, and wait for him there. What he had said about a watch on that place, too, she did not really believe. It would be too preposterous, too efficient. There was no reason to think they even knew of Weldon.

She went down into the subway at Fourteenth Street and got on the first uptown train. It was a Queens express, and at Fiftieth Street she changed for a Washington Heights train. She bought a
Daily News
as she changed and sat with the paper in front of her face, reading about herself—seeing herself look out at her from the page.

The story was more circumspect than the headlines. It told of Tony's murder; it said:

“According to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley, in charge of Manhattan detectives, the police expect to question Mott's estranged wife to determine whether she can throw any light on the crime. Mrs. Mott, formerly Peggy Simmons, a youthful actress, has been living apart from her playboy husband for some months. It has been rumored that she planned to divorce him.