Murder Is Served (20 page)

When they caught Peggy Mott again. Bill Weigand ground out a cigarette, almost instantly lighted another, got up from his desk and walked to the window. Looked out it a moment at a wall and another window, walked back to his desk. Angry impatience boiled up in him and subsided. The machine was functioning; it would turn her up. He could only wait and try not to simmer; wait and hope the newspapers did not get wind of the escape. O'Malley was hot enough already. He rumbled of departmental charges against Stein, against Weigand himself. Presumably O'Malley would calm down—if the news didn't leak, if the girl and her dark, annoying knight were turned up soon enough. Bill would fight for Stein; probably, with luck, win out. It wouldn't happen again to Stein, whose sensitive face was sombre, and also a little swollen. It was one of those things. It was also, admittedly, a hell of a note.

Bill Weigand went back to the dossiers. He had come to the women, now, and there were a good many. A tomcat, Tony Mott. An agile goat. “STOCKTON, Mary.” “FRAWLEY, Katerine.” “WOODS, Adelaide.” “D'ALIA, Dolores.” (There was fiction for you. There was a name chosen to become well known, to fall smoothly from many lips. Bill Weigand could not remember that he had ever heard of Dolores D'Alia; apparently it had not worked.) “FRANSWORTH, Anita.” (There was another, in all probability.)

He skimmed the dossiers. FRAWLEY, Katerine, had married Mott and it had lasted three months. WOODS, Adelaide, had told the newspapers she was going to marry Mott, and Mott had said it was the first he had heard of it. FARNSWORTH, Anita—

She had been unlucky; it appeared she had been more earnest, more deeply involved, than Katerine Frawley, than Adelaide Woods. She had not married Mott and had not told anyone she planned to. But, three years before, she had been much with him; Winchell had said she was “that way” and apparently she was. She had been a young actress, for a time a protégée of Mott's. And then, rather publicly, in a restaurant, when he had been drinking, he had said to her, “Scram, baby. We're washed up.” And then he had laughed, and several others had laughed. And Anita Farnsworth had disappeared, very suddenly, from the people who had known her, very completely. The machine ground at her disappearance and cleared it up. She had had a “nervous breakdown.” The words were quoted in the dossier. She had been taken by relatives to a private sanitarium; she was still there. The physician in charge was hopeful; possibly, Bill Weigand thought, he was always hopeful. That would be part of his job. The kid had been unlucky. And Tony Mott had been—well, Tony Mott. There was no point in calling him names. That had been taken care of.

Bill found he was reading the dossier again, more carefully, wondering about it—wondering what the story sketched here, in terse words, in abbreviations, had been in its entirety. “Farnsworth, Anita, age about 23—” And then he stopped, suddenly, and read what his eyes had slid over a few moments before. “(Real name Leonard; changed for stage purposes.)” Bill Weigand looked at the words; the name repeated itself over and over in his mind.

Leonard. Leonard. Leonard. Coincidence? It could be, obviously. The long arm, reaching out—phooey! Bill Weigand did not believe it. He looked at the dossier, or seemed to, but he did not see it. He saw Professor Leonard, of Dyckman; tall and rather angular, in his middle forties. He could have had a daughter of twenty-three. Or, for that matter, a sister—a pretty girl named Anita who had been slapped down and laughed at, and who hadn't been able to take it. Bill Weigand lifted his head and looked at the wall opposite, and did not see it, and the fingers of his right hand tapped on his desk. Wrapped up, finished off. Was it, after all? He got Mullins in, told him to sit on it.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He looked at Weigand and nodded. “Shuteye,” he said. “That's what you need, all right. No use killing yourself, Loot.”

But Weigand shook his head.

“There's a guy I want to talk to,” he said. “A guy named Leonard. Remember Leonard?”

Mullins looked momentarily puzzled. Then he nodded, and said, “O.K.”

“Just the same,” he said, reasonably, “you gotta sleep sometime, Loot. You know that.”

Bill Weigand said, “Right,” but there was no conviction in the word.

9

S
UNDAY
,
12:05
P.M. TO
2:35
P.M.

Pamela North would never have denied that, in almost all things, she was partisan. Sometimes her mind guided her; almost as often her mind was by-passed, now and then, over its indignant objections. Her partisanship was catholic. Beginning with Jerry, it included a sometimes bewildering diversity of persons and objects. Franklin Delano Roosevelt she had been for, partly on a basis of conviction. But, in the end contradictorily, she had been also a partisan of Al Smith and, in a more moderate fashion, of Jim Farley. As far as she could ever determine, when she tried to analyze such matters, she thought General Eisenhower was a great man because he had a sunny, encompassing smile. She was also a partisan of cats, holidays in hot places, martini cocktails, the poetry of Conrad Aiken, trains, Beatrice Lillie, overcooked bacon and Maxwell Anderson. She was, further and in general, for all people who seemed to be having a tough time, whether they deserved it or not.

About Peggy Mott and Weldon Carey she had hoped to retain an open mind. But when they came into the apartment, when they stood there—the girl, for all the poise of her body, the assurance of her grace, so uncertain, so evidently afraid; the black-haired young man, for all his truculence, so uneasy and baffled—Pam North's hope vanished. Her first thought was, almost in words, “How ridiculous of Bill!” Her mind tugged at her, saying, “Wait now. Wait!” Pam turned her back on her mind.

The girl was beautiful; the man stood close to her, as if to surround her, protect her from danger. He did not touch her, but he seemed to have her in his arms. Pam looked at the girl, saw that she was beautiful, and looked instantly at Jerry. Jerry was also looking at the girl, which was proper and inevitable. Pam smiled, without showing it, and wondered how firm Jerry was going to be now. And Paul Foster, coming in behind them said, “Well, here they are.”

Pamela North crossed the room to the girl, with her hand out, and said she was Pamela North. Her smile said more, and the girl answered it with an uncertain smile of her own. Weldon Carey nodded, and looked dark and angry, and Pam told them to sit down, realizing as she spoke that it would be a little difficult.

“Really, Jerry,” she said, “we do need a larger apartment. See?”

They did. Two Norths, two Fosters, Peggy Mott and Weldon Carey, even without three cats and the Sunday newspapers, filled the small white-and-yellow living-room. Jerry said he saw. Pam sat down where she had been sitting and Peggy Mott sat in another chair. The Fosters sat side by side on the sofa. Weldon Carey did not sit anywhere, but stood, facing Jerry North. He said, “Well?” There was still truculence, hiding embarrassment. Then Martini, unexpectedly to everyone, reared herself against his right leg, hooking gingerly with claws and explained, in a throaty growl which was supposed, by her, to be an ingratiating murmur, that she would like to be taken up. Carey looked down at her, and suddenly smiled and said, “Hullo. What do you want?” Martini repeated her request and, for emphasis, extended her claws so that they delicately touched skin under the trousers. Carey said, “Hey!”

“She does that to Jerry,” Pam said. “She wants to sit on his shoulders, only now yours. She doesn't usually, except Jerry.”

Carey looked at her, apparently started to say, “What?” and changed it into “Oh.” He bent, scooped up the small cat, held her out to look at her, and put her on his shoulders. She extended herself and swished her tail.

Somehow, Jerry North felt, the situation was slipping away from him. It was a feeling to which he was not unaccustomed. Irrelevance, that was what was the matter with things, Jerry thought, as he often thought. But on the other hand, irrelevance frequently seemed the underlying structure of almost everything. Chekov, he thought, and was momentarily baffled. It was even in your own mind.

“Well?” Carey repeated, but less truculently. With a cat on his shoulders, he seemed to have lost the conviction that events would be clarified by the direct approach. Martini, turning to investigate the source of this new sound, breathed into Carey's left ear.

“Take her down, Jerry,” Pam said. “She's disconcerting. Put her somewhere.”

Jerry took her down, put her somewhere. The young cats trotted after, their tails in the air. Jerry returned. Now Weldon Carey was sitting on the arm of Peggy Mott's chair. His left arm was along the back of the chair, as if around the girl.

“We've barged in,” Weldon said. He had regained some, but not all, of his attack. “They made us—the Colonel here, Mrs. Foster. It was decent of you to let us.” He said the last as a formality. Jerry took it as one and ignored it. He looked at Peggy Mott.

“You've got good friends,” Jerry said. “Persuasive friends.” She looked up at him.

“Weldon's,” she said. “I know I oughtn't to be here, Mr. North.” She looked at Pam and smiled again, uncertainly again, including her.

“Obviously,” Pam said, “you ought to be in jail. Jerry and I both think that. He thinks you ought to give yourself up.”

Peggy Mott looked at Weldon Carey and nodded. “See?” she said. “Oh—Wel—”

“Is that the point?” Weldon said, looking at Jerry. “The main point? She had nothing to do with it, you know.”

“Not the main point,” Jerry said. “The immediate point. Weigand's a friend of ours. Even if he weren't, we don't help—fugitives.” He looked down at Weldon Carey. “For God's sake,” he said, “Bill Weigand's a fair guy.”

“He's a cop,” Weldon said. “He thinks Peggy killed this bastard Mott. He'll try to third-degree it out of her.”

“Not Bill,” Pam said. “But let it go for a moment. Mrs. Mott, can you prove you didn't?”

“I can say I didn't,” Peggy said. She looked for a long moment at Pam North. “Is it any good?”

What remarkable eyes she has, Pam thought. They must be inches long.

“Yes,” Pam said. She was surprised, momentarily, at hearing herself speak the word. “You know why?” she said then, and now she included all of them. “Because nobody could be as guilty as she looks. You see, Jerry?”

“Listen,” Jerry said. “I—”

“Everything in one direction,” Pam said. “Too perfect. Instead of this way and that way, but mostly this way—all this way. It's—organized.”

“Pam!” Jerry said. “Wait a minute.” He ran a hand through his hair. He spoke slowly, carefully. “Suppose we admit she didn't do it,” he said. “For the sake of argument. Leave that open. But what you say is that she didn't do it
because
all the evidence points toward her. All the logic. What you say is that—that
logic
is wrong. You can't say that.”

“Why?” Pam North said. “If it's too logical?”

Jerry shook his head, quickly, involuntarily. He looked at Weldon Carey, but Weldon was looking at Peggy Mott. Jerry's eyes sought Foster's, and Foster was smiling. “My sympathies, sir,” Foster said. Then Jerry smiled.

“If it's easier,” Pam said, “I'll put it this way. I think it's been planned. Planned too perfectly. I think things aren't usually so—so neat—unless somebody is making them that way. Look—”

She paused.

“The police find only one person with a motive,” she said. “That person has, in effect, announced in advance that she had a motive—anyway, that she hated somebody, presumably the man who was killed. She was there, and we don't know that anybody else was. A man who could testify against her and not against anybody else, so far as we know, is stabbed. A girl—the little mink, poor thing—can testify that this person was there. The mink wasn't dangerous to anybody else, so far as we know. And she gets killed. And then, after hiding out all day, and finally getting caught, this girl—you, Peggy—has somebody knock out a policeman so she can get away. And all this time, there's nothing against anybody else; no suspicion pointing to anybody else. Well?”

“But—” Jerry started.

“She didn't
have
anybody knock—” Weldon began.

“It's too easy,” Pam North said. “That's what's the matter with it. It's—it's the way Inspector O'Malley thinks things are. But they aren't that way, because if you stir things up there are always pieces left over. Things that don't fit. When things are natural. Like vegetables.”

“What?” Jerry said.

“Weeds,” Pam explained. “Things that don't belong. It's just an example, Jerry.” She paused and looked at her husband. “I wonder, sometimes, why you're always so difficult about examples,” she said. “They're just put in to make things clearer.”

“Oh,” Jerry said.

“Anyway,” Pam said, “what we have to do is to disorder things again. Because somebody has made them orderly. Don't you all see?”

Peggy Mott was leaning forward a little, her eyes on Pam.

“But,” she said, “that means you think—you don't think I did it! You're—”

She stopped, because she couldn't go on.

“For God's sake,” Carey said, “don't cry!” He took his arm from the back of the chair and put it around Peggy's shoulders and held her close and looked down at her with an amazing expression of tenderness on a face not built for tenderness. “Stop it!” he told her, in a voice which sounded angry, and pulled her toward him. “Peg!”

“For heaven's sake,” Pam said, with, obviously, incredulity in her voice. “What's this all about, if we don't start with that?”

“But—” Jerry started, in a faintly agonized tone and then abruptly broke it off because, he was astonished to discover, he had never, during years of agreeing with Pam, agreed with her more completely than at this moment. It was an entirely upsetting discovery.…