Murder is the Pay-Off (2 page)

“I don’t blame him.”

“Neither do I.”

Connie looked down at the checks again. The clock on the mantel ticked on toward seven o’clock. Upstairs a door opened and closed. Her father put out his hand.

“I still don’t get it, Dad,” she said. “Look at these dates. Here’s one to the Sailing Club on June twelfth. This one’s July fourth. It’s November now. Why—”

“They were coming in too thick and fast, I expect. Doc Wernitz cashed a hundred or so a month and hung on to the rest. It’s a deal the clubs have with him, honey. He usually cashes checks when the banks are closed and the clubs run out of silver—but he takes checks a lot of times if there’s some question the clubs might have trouble collecting.”

John Maynard shrugged. “He can collect without anybody’s feelings getting hurt, or just write the loss off to public relations. Like Gus. If Doc Wernitz was sticking around Smithville he wouldn’t want to antagonize the editor of the local paper. He’s torn up a lot of checks in his time—influential people, and people he might scare into stopping play if they realized the hole they’d got themselves in. But he’s pulling out of Smithville now, selling out and going South, so he don’t care about editors and people with influence any more. I expect there’ll be a lot of headaches in town tomorrow. Seems like it’s powerful easy to write a check at the bar when you’re playing the slot machines and forget to put it down when you get home with nothing to show for it. I bet Janey hasn’t any idea of the amount that’s out against her. That’s why Ferguson let me take these this afternoon, to see if I could figure out some way to break the bad news. It’s too bad Doc Wernitz decided to cash in and pull out all of a sudden like this—if you can say cash in.”

He listened a moment. “Better give ’em to me, honey. Here comes your mother.”

He put them back in the desk drawer and turned the key in the lock. Connie watched him silently. When he turned back she said, “Who else knows about this, Dad?”

“That Janey plays? Why, everybody in town, I expect, honey. Except Gus.”

“No, no. I mean about those checks. Who’d dare tell Gus, I mean.”

Her father shrugged. “Doc Wernitz, of course. Then there’s Nate Rogers. Jim Ferguson asked him to stop with me, after the board meeting. His boy Orvie’s always been so nice to Janey, maybe Fergie figured he’d help out, if Gus Blake happens to need a quick loan or something. Or maybe Nate Rogers would pass the word to Orvie and Orvie could say something to Janey. They all like Janey, and, anyway, it’s the sort of thing a bank president in a town like this don’t want any hard feelin’s about.”

“Orvie,”
said Connie Maynard. “It’s too bad she didn’t marry Orvie and be done with it. He’s the one that picked her up and stuck her down everybody’s throat. Her father was a night watchman over at the plant and her mother took in roomers. If it hadn’t been for Orvie’s father’s dough she’d still be on Main Street selling peanuts in the dime store.”

“Just dry up, honey.” Hs voice was still soft, unchanged, but Connie Maynard knew he meant it. “If it hadn’t been for your great-granddaddy’s dough, I’d still be back in the Kentucky mountains, jumpin’ gullies to keep ahead of the revenooers.”

“Not you, Daddy.”

“Maybe not Janey, either, honey. Here comes your mother.”

Connie tilted her elegant tawny head, listening. “No. She’s stopped to check the bathrooms—see if the towels are right. You know Mother.” She took hold of her father’s arm. “Look, Dad. Tell Mr. Rogers and Fergie it’s all settled, will you? Tell them you’ll talk to Janey. Because listen. Aunt Mamie was in the office again today. She’s starting one of her crusades. It’s slot machines, this time. She’s been driving Gus nearly nuts. He’s going to fox her. He’s coming out with a blast tomorrow, or next day—pro-slot machines, not anti. And if I stop him from—you know, making an ass of himself—”

“Why stop him, honey?” John Maynard asked.

She looked at him blankly, her red lips parted. “Why, Dad! No man wants to look like a damn fool—”

“That’s what I mean, honey. No man wants to look like a damn fool, but if he makes one of himself he’s got to put up with it. What he don’t want and can’t stand and
don’t
have to put up with is his wife makin’ a fool out of him.”

Connie Maynard dropped his arm and looked straight ahead of her for a moment. “Oh,” she said softly. “I see. Now I see.”

“Anyway, it’s no business of yours to go interferin’ in the editorial policy of Gus’s newspaper,” John Maynard said. “I promised Gus that when he took you on.” He smiled at her, listening to his wife’s light tread as she crossed the hall toward the library door. He drew Connie’s arm into his and patted it affectionately.

A question tinged with something very like despair seemed to flicker through the gray eyes of the frail woman standing in the doorway as she saw the two of them together there.

“Lucy,” John Maynard said, “I’ve been tellin’ Connie she’s to keep her mouth out of Gus’s editorials. If she starts tryin’ to dictate to him what he’s going to write or not write, I think he ought to fire her.”

Lucy Maynard looked at her husband. “I think perhaps he ought to fire her, anyway, John. That’s a stunning dress, Connie. Superb theater. Sometime we must have caviar and pressed duck to match it. Everything else is ready, John.” She turned her head, listening to the first car coming into the drive. “Please try to keep your sister Mamie from making a speech, John. I’ll keep her up here out of the playroom if you’ll just keep her from drinking too much. I don’t know how she became convinced champagne is non-alcoholic. Mamie’s temperance lecture when she’s hiccuping never seems the least amusing to me.”

As the party
was still just beginning, Connie Maynard, balanced on the arm of one of the deep-yellow leather sofas that flanked the log-burning fireplace, could still hear herself think, and speak without having to scream to make herself heard. And still watch the stairs, smiling, to see Gus and Janey when they came. The cellar of the old house, converted into a playroom, was bigger than the Parish Hall and much more comfortable. The sofas in the recesses formed by the arched brick foundations were secluded and cozy, the juke box was still playing sweet and low over in the corner where the bar and games were. The room was slowly filling up now as the crowd divided itself into the older sheep staying soberly upstairs with her father and mother and the younger goats skipping about down where the fun and noise was.

Connie saw that Orval Rogers was one of them. Not that Orval ever skipped, singly or in pairs. Coming down alone now, his black tie neatly tied, his blond hair neatly brushed, he looked very like a young but sober owl behind his neat steel-rimmed glasses. Halfway down the stairs he stopped, searching the room earnestly for a moment before he came on.

“Poor Orvie—”

Connie started a little and looked around. It was Martha Ferguson, wife of the bank president.

“Oh, Martha. You took the words right out of my mind, dear.”

It was not quite true, because in her mind they had none of the affectionate warmth and bubbling amusement they had as Martha Ferguson spoke them.

“Hi, Orvie,” she said.

“Hi, Connie. Hi, Martha. Dad couldn’t come, Connie. He says he’s sorry, but he’s too old for these routs.”

He looked around earnestly again.

“Janey isn’t here yet,” Connie said.

“Yeah. She said she didn’t know whether she could get a sitter for little Jane.”

Orvie Rogers wandered over toward the bar. Connie looked around at Martha Ferguson again. “I wonder why we always say ‘Poor Orvie,’ ” she said abruptly. “He’s got an awful lot more dough than any of the rest of us.”

Martha Ferguson laughed. “Oh, he’s so serious and his father makes him work so hard. Poor Orvie—I don’t think he’s really ever had any fun, or busted out all over. I’m devoted to him. He’s really sweet.” She took a Manhattan off the tray the colored boy held in front of her. “Now what I wonder—I mean if we
are
wondering—is how long, for heaven’s sakes, we’re going on always telling Orvie that Janey hasn’t come yet, or Janey’s over there, or Janey’s upstairs or out in the garden. It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

Connie took a sip of the cocktail in her hand. Martha Ferguson glanced at her, her brown eyes kindling a little. “Oh, Connie, don’t be a stinker and a louse! You know damn well you’ve no right to be.”

“Darling! Who’s being a stinker and a louse? You asked me a question and I asked you another.”

“Okay.” Martha Ferguson tossed off the rest of her cocktail and put the glass down. “It’s not manners to quarrel with your hostess, so I guess I’ll move along. I’m a bit tense tonight myself. I
like
Janey.”

She let her eyes rest on Connie’s plunging neckline and bare, smooth shoulders for an instant. “That’s a divine little twelve-ninety-eight job you’ve got on, Connie. Nice for a working girl, I mean. I hope Janey can’t find a sitter, if you don’t mind my saying so. Though I don’t suppose that would keep Gus home.” She glanced across the room. “There’s my husband wasting his dough on Aunt Mamie’s slot machine. I’d better grab him quick, before the rumor starts it’s the bank’s money he’s stuffing down the iron maw.”

As she moved away, Connie was alone for a moment in a dancing pool of firelight, her hand resting idly on the back of the yellow sofa, a witch woman smiling quietly as she watched Martha take her husband’s arm to pull him away from the slot machine. She watched her cousin Dorsey Syms move in, drop one quarter, and move away for somebody else.
If you play the slot machine, that’s the way to do it,
Connie thought. Take a chance—what was it? 2400 to one on the jack pot, somebody had told her—and not take the second chance that was still 2400 to one. She glanced up the stairs. She could hear her Aunt Mamie’s vigorous, strident voice and see her in her mind’s eye, a champagne glass in one hand, the other firmly pinioning some polite unfortunate, the rector probably, or the judge, vocally bludgeoning him on the decay of manners and morals in Smithville, while her son and her husband put their quarters in the machine. Aunt Mamie’s slot machine, Martha Ferguson had called it. That was because of the printed sign over it.
This machine is for your amusement. It pays off
75
per cent to you and 25 per cent to the box in the corner for the League for Civic Improvement. It does not pay for the liquor you drink here. That’s free.
It was signed with John Maynard’s vigorous scrawl.

Connie turned, smiling, to look up the stairs. The League for Civic Improvement was the banner under which John Maynard’s sister Mamie, otherwise Mrs. Nelson Syms, its founder and president, carried on all her whirlwind crusades. Connie could hear her voice now, rising above the clang of the machine—which must be paying off very well tonight, she thought, the way everybody was crowding in to play it, and judging by the crescendo of the laughing chatter around it.

“… clubs can’t exist in this town without slot machines,” Aunt Mamie was saying, “then the clubs will have to fold, my dear Commodore. Bingo is an entirely different matter. The League made twelve hundred dollars on Bingo last year. I myself won an electric mixer, and a very respectacle woman I know won a washing machine she very badly needed. That is hardly what I call gambling, Commodore.”

Poor Commodore,
Connie thought. She could see him, too, in her mind’s eye, a pleasant little man who was certainly no match for Mrs. Nelson Syms. But the commodore and Aunt Mamie, Aunt Mamie’s son Dorsey Syms, whom she’d just seen at the slot machine, Aunt Mamie’s husband—Uncle Nelly, he was usually called—and her father’s slot machine itself, the gift of Doc Wernitz, there for Amusement and Civic Improvement, occupied only the periphery of Connie Maynard’s active mind and smiling, attentive eye. Janey and Gus Blake occupied the center and core of both as she watched the stairs, waiting for them to come.

And if they didn’t? If Gus hadn’t heard about the checks, he’d certainly come. If he had heard, then he’d have to come, and make her come, just to show, to keep face in front of all their friends. Unless— Connie dismissed that. If Janey had been going on month after month, getting deeper and deeper into the hole she’d dug, she wasn’t likely to choose tonight to try to crawl out of it, not with Gus so busy trying to get out a Centennial edition of the
Smithville Gazette
that he was hardly civil to his own staff—Gus who by nature and circumstances was never more than six jumps from the sheriff anyway. She could dismiss that.

Janey wouldn’t tell him tonight even if Janey knew it herself, and nobody else would. Martha Ferguson, maybe— if her husband had told her. Martha might blurt it out for his own good.

Connie looked across the room. The Fergusons were standing at the bar talking to the colored boy behind it, Jim Ferguson’s arm around his wife’s shoulders. Connie shook her head. Martha talked a lot, but not when Jim told her, to shut up. As president of the town’s leading bank, this was one time he’d be sure to tell her. No, Gus could go on a long time without knowing anything about it. It was one of the things about a town like Smithville. The Conspiracy of Silence, John Maynard called it. Like Aunt Mamie not knowing she used money from a slot machine, and the people who came and lived there for years not knowing that Judge Dikes hovered so solicitously around his sister because she’d pick up any small movable object if he didn’t, and not knowing, for instance, that another of the guests upstairs had shot his wife and been acquitted without the jury’s so much as leaving the box to make up their mind.

“Waiting for somebody?”

Connie started. She hadn’t noticed her cousin Dorsey Syms move around behind the masonry piers to join her. He was smiling, the Maynard smile. There was very little Syms in Aunt Mamie’s son. He had the Maynard height, the Maynard confidence, the black hair, brown eyes, straight nose, and slightly cleft chin. And a good deal of his Uncle John Maynard’s charm. The Syms family had nothing much to distinguish them except an ancestor who’d conducted the Siege of Smithville against Cornwallis and whom Aunt Mamie had brevetted from ensign to colonel. Except Nelson Syms, of course. He had Aunt Mamie, and the job her brother John Maynard had got him in the County Treasurer’s office. And his son Dorsey Syms, whose most attractive quality was his obvious fondness for his father. Neither of them could have survived Aunt Mamie if they hadn’t formed a “league” of their own, Connie thought, hearing the voluble, determined voice beating on upstairs.