Murder is the Pay-Off (3 page)

She smiled at her cousin. “Just wondering whether we ought to start feeding people.”

“Not before Gus and Janey get here, surely,” Dorsey Syms said. “I suppose they’re coming?”

“I suppose so.”

Not a ripple showed on the clear surface of her casual unconcern, but her pulse had quickened.
He works in the bank. He knows. He must know all about it. He’s trying to find out if I know, too. He’s supposed to have been crazy about Janey once.
She glanced around the playroom again. How many people there did know? Jim Ferguson certainly, and probably Martha. Orvie Rogers probably. Dorsey Syms, herself, her father upstairs—who else? There were at least thirty people there by now. If Janey and Gus didn’t come pretty soon, somebody would say something.

“I hear Doc Wernitz is leaving town,” Dorsey said. “Scotch, please.” He took a highball off the tray the boy was passing again. “Does he take that little gadget of yours over there along with him?”

“You mean the slot machine?”

She wasn’t smiling any longer. “That’s Dad’s, not mine.” Her level gaze met his and held it. “And it was a gift, not a loan. Doc Wernitz hasn’t any strings on Dad, or vice versa, if that’s what you mean. Any more than he has on—”

She broke off and flashed around. The quick light in her cousin’s eye and the delighted shout from everybody else in the playroom could only mean one of two things. A jack pot, or—

“Janey! Hi, Janey!”

A jack pot, Connie Maynard thought, or Janey.

“Hi, Janey!” Everybody was shouting it, and Janey was there on the stairs. Gus was behind her, and Connie heard somebody say, “Hello, there, Gus, how’s the boy?” But it was Janey they were glad to see and always saw first, Janey, who always just stopped and stood there, looking as if she’d just been scrubbed and had her hair ribbons tied, always surprised and eternally delighted that they noticed she’d come and really seemed to want her there. Connie Maynard suppressed a sharp flash of irritation. That was what she was doing now, just stopped halfway down the stairs, her small pointed face breaking into wreaths of happiness and delight, her blue eyes like breathless stars, just standing there surprised and excited as a child. And not even pretty. That irritated Connie Maynard. Her nose was too stubby and turned-up, her face too pointed, her eyes too big and set too far apart, all her facial bones showing, her fuzzy tow-colored hair escaping everywhere as the water she’d slicked it up with dried and it popped out of the black velvet ribbon she wore like a topknot on her head. Janey trying to look sleek and well-groomed was as absurd as her just standing there in the middle of the stairs.

“Go on, Janey.” Connie heard Gus Blake, and saw him give her a little push to bring her to.

“Hello, hello, everybody!” She came on down the stairs. “Hello, Connie! I’m sorry we’re late.” She put her hand out. It was cold, so cold Connie Maynard was startled touching it.

“Hello, Dorsey—hello, Martha!” Janey moved on. “Hello, Orvie—hello, Jim!” Janey never said, “Hi, there,” to people: Her voice was always warm and full of velvet delight, as if Connie, Dorsey Syms, Orvie Rogers, Martha and Jim Ferguson, each one of them, was the one person she’d hoped would be there without really daring to hope she could count on it. And the last person, Connie Maynard thought, in that room, or in the whole of Smith County, that anybody would think, to look at her, was responsible for the handsome sheaf of rubber checks upstairs in John Maynard’s library desk drawer. If it made any difference to anybody what Janey did, it hardly seemed likely, now, the way the Fergusons, Orvie, Dorsey Syms and all the rest of them gathered around her.

“Hi, there, Gus,” Connie said. Gus Blake was left back with her. They were a little like something washed up on the beach as Janey’s trim and sunlit craft took off to sea.

Connie shook her head impatiently. It wasn’t so at all. She could be at the other side of the room with all the rest of them, too, if she wanted to. She was here in the comparative quiet with Gus because that was the way she wanted it and had maneuvered to arrange it.
I almost sound as if I’m jealous of Janey.
It came sharply into her mind. But that was ridiculous. She wasn’t in the least jealous of Janey Blake, only irritated at the way everybody always acted as if Janey were somehow something different, not just a little climber whose father was a night watchman at the Rogers plant but something rare and precious, like a branch of apple blossoms in the show. How in heaven’s name had Gus Blake ever married her? She felt a sudden passionate impulse to scream it at him, scream it out at the top of her voice.

She clutched one fist in the green taffeta folds of her skirt.

Stop it, Connie, stop it! she told herself angrily. Just stop it. Don’t be a fool. Remember you’re the girl that has brains.

She forced herself to smile as she looked up at Janey’s husband.

“How’s the boss man tonight?”

“Pooped,” Gus Blake said briefly. “Here comes a drink, and boy, can I use one. I’d like to throttle whoever it was got the big idea for a Centennial edition. Thanks, Lawrence, and how about you, Connie?”

Before she could remind him the Centennial edition was his own idea, originally designed to keep her busy, or even say she didn’t want another drink, Jim Ferguson had disengaged himself from Janey’s entourage and was over with them.

“Hi there, Gus! How’s the boy?” He gave Gus an enthusiastic slap on the back and pumped his hand. “Swell seeing you, boy. Swell party, Connie. Here comes chow. Well, be seein’ you, boy.”

He headed off for a table, calling Janey and Orvie Rogers to share it with him. Gus Blake looked at Connie, one brow quizzically raised.

“What’s the matter with our banker?” he inquired. “Vine leaves? Or is my account overdrawn? Last time Fergie was that glad to see me was just after he turned me down on some dough I wanted to borrow from his blasted bank.”

Connie held her breath for only an instant. There was no meaning in what he’d said. No meaning that he was aware of—yet.

“Vine leaves, I expect. Or isn’t it barley they make Scotch out of? Here’s food. Why don’t we go back here and sit in peace if you’re pooped?”

She moved around to a small table set for two just outside, the dancing fan of firelight. Janey was across the room, but Connie could see the blank blue eyes following her and Gus as they got around there, away from the yellow sofas that were filling up with people bringing their plates to eat by the fire.
Janey’s the one who’s jealous, not me.
It flashed into her mind. Her pulse quickened. Jealousy was stupid. Jealous people did stupid things. And why should Janey care, anyway? She had Orvie, Jim Ferguson, and Dorsey Syms at her table.

Connie saw suddenly to her irritation that she herself had her uncle Nelson Syms. Uncle Nelly was drawing up a chair to talk to Gus.

“I expect you two see plenty of each other at the paper all day, and I want to ask Gus about that piece Mamie wants to write for the Centennial edition. Her brother said it sure ought to go on the front page, but Mamie’d have to ask you, Gus. John always says he doesn’t have any say about the paper, you run it. It’s up to you.”

Connie bit her lip in sharp vexation. There was nothing she could do. Poor Uncle Nelly. Thin and stoop-shouldered, he looked as if he’d been brought up in a potato cellar before a steam roller had permanently shaped him. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened to Uncle Nelly if Aunt Mamie hadn’t married him and forced him to live their kind of life, moving him from job to job until John Maynard got him the one he’d had for ten years now, as a clerk in the County Treasurer’s office. He’d probably have been a lot happier and never had the stomach ulcers that put him in the hospital a couple of weeks out of every year.

He was going on about Aunt Mamie’s article, and Gus Blake was listening, not irritably or even patiently, but with a friendly interest that apparently was quite genuine, sipping his highball, nodding his head, as serious about this nonsense, apparently, as Uncle Nelly himself. Anybody would think Uncle Nelly was one of his closest friends and most astute advisers, the way he was listening— or think he was glad to have Uncle Nelly there so he wouldn’t be alone in the corner with her. But that was nonsense, too.

I wonder if I’ll ever really understand the guy,
Connie Maynard thought, trying to blot out her uncle’s voice. It had the unbearable monotony of a tap dripping in a basement laundry tub. She lowered her eyes and looked through her long, darkened lashes at the man across the table from her, the editor of her father’s paper, her boss whose job she could take any time she decided she really wanted it—even if she and everybody else knew she couldn’t do it as well as he did. He had a flair for it that she didn’t have, even if he didn’t have courage enough to say nuts to the local customers and take their obituaries off the front page and put them over on page ten where they belonged. That was the first thing she’d do. And she’d get along. She’d keep Ed Noonan as city editor, just as Gus had done. She brought herself up sharply. That wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want the paper. She wanted Gus Blake and the paper. The paper was hers any time she wanted it. Her father could give it to her with sound financial logic, saving on his income tax now and estate taxes later, since the
Gazette,
tottering on its last moribund typestick when Gus took it over, had showed a very neat profit for three years running. But it wasn’t the paper. It was Gus Blake.

Because I’m absolutely nuts about this guy,
Connie Maynard thought.

Her pulse quickened
again as she glanced across the table at him. The sound of his voice, the half-sardonic twist of his wide mouth when he smiled, the sudden subrisive humor that lighted his gray eyes without apparent reason a hundred times a day—all of it added up to something that set up jet pin points of flame inside her far more exciting than anything else she’d ever known. And infinitely more exciting now she was back home after her own trial fling at marriage, with Janey a barrier between them, than he’d ever been when she was engaged to him, and could have had him simply by being a little less willful and impatient.

I was a fool, she
thought.
No. I wasn’t. This is a lot more fun. There were things I had to learn.

As she looked at him again, pushing his plate away and getting a cigarette out of his pocket, squinting as he took the candle from the middle of the table to light it, Connie smiled to herself.

Maybe it’s just the old Oedipus complex, after all. I could get it psyched out of me and save a lot of trouble.

He was very like her father, except that his hair was a crisp sandy ginger instead of iron-gray. He was as tall and strongly built, his shoulders had the same slight stoop, he moved in the same relaxed and easygoing fashion and with the same deceptive calm, concealing both power and energy, different in kind and perhaps used for different purposes, but the same in quality and latent reserve. Nobody would ever shove either of them twice. She knew that about her father. Jim Ferguson had proved it about Gus by passing the buck to her father in the form of Janey’s checks. Other people would get a routine notice in the morning mail. Or Doc Wernitz would have got the checks bounced back to him, like a lot of others he’d got back from Smithville’s slot machine addicts, written in their avid search for fool’s gold. Fergie had done neither to Gus, whose bank balance was always precariously low and a matter of apparent indifference to him. And there was something odd somewhere—something odd about all of it that she couldn’t quite put her finger on at the moment.

She shrugged it off. Gus’s bank balance wasn’t precariously low now. It was nonexistent, with three hundred and twenty strikes on it in the form of Janey’s checks in her father’s drawer. And it was her father’s fault, in a way. She knew Gus was paid about half what he was worth, in terms of what he had made the paper pay or what her father would have had to pay anybody else as good, or not as good. There must have been some sort of a deal. She suspected that without knowing, but she knew one thing for sure. Gus, not her father, would be the one gypped in the end. That was one thing about John Maynard’s deals. Like the slot machine over there in the corner. If the twenty-five per cent—and it was a lot nearer forty—that went to the League for Civic Improvement hadn’t come out of their friends’ pockets, John Maynard would have had to put it up out of his own, just to keep Aunt Mamie out of his hair. It was all good, clean fun, and it was still a gyp.

Connie pushed her chair back and looked over at the corner. The machine was rattling away again now that people were through supper. Janey was still at the table with Orvie Rogers and Jim Ferguson. Martha Ferguson was at the slot machine with Dorsey Syms, Martha putting in the quarters and Dorsey pulling down the iron arm. It came down then, with the tinkle of a coin and an empty metallic sound, and suddenly both Martha and Dorsey Syms thrust their arms out around it.

“Hey, Janey! Come on, Janey!” Both of them were calling her. “Come on, Janey! We know this machine—it’s ready to give! Come on, Janey!”

Connie Maynard had never heard Martha Ferguson so excited before. Her cheeks tingled.
My God,
she thought,
they’ll even stand aside for her to take their dough in a thirty-dollar jack pot.
She was aware that she had got up abruptly and was standing gripping the back of her chair, watching everybody crowd forward, everybody shouting, “Come on, Janey, it’s your turn at the jack pot!” Everybody but Gus Blake. She looked around at him. He was still lounging lazily there on the seat in the corner behind the table, his wide mouth twisted in his semi sardonic smile, relaxed and waiting for the tumult to die down.

“Come on, Janey!”

Janey had not moved. She was sitting bolt upright at her table, shaking her head, shaking out what was left of the mop of tow-colored fuzz tied with the velvet bow.

“No,” she said. She shook her head again. “I’m not going to play.”

“Oh, come on, Janey. Come on, be a sport. Just two quarters, Janey. Look, nobody’s won it for three weeks.” Jim Ferguson was pointing up to the framed cardboard bulletin behind the bar. “Look, Janey, the last jack pot was in October. Nelly won it in October.”