Payoff for the Banker

Payoff for the Banker

A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery

Frances and Richard Lockridge

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

1

T
UESDAY
, J
UNE
13, 5:40
P.M.
TO
6:05
P.M.

For the first time in more than a year—in fourteen months and some days and some hours—she felt young, as if things were beginning over. So they were right after all; the obvious was almost always right; the old saws came true. You did not believe they would—you knew they never would. Because the experiences other people had—the worn, accustomed experiences—were not the experiences you would have. And then, in the end, they were. In the end you went on living and things began over. In the end you felt young again. And after a while, she realized, she would not even be surprised that this was so.

They had told her, some of them gently because they remembered when they had believed otherwise, that it was not so hard when you were young—or that it was not so hard for so long. If she and Rick had had more time it would in the end have been harder, although that was difficult to understand. If it had worked out, of course, since otherwise the problem did not come up—it was another problem and part of the chance everyone took. If they had had even a year and then it had happened it would have been harder; if they had had five years, and it had worked out, it would have been desperately hard. And beyond that the old saws did not work, because they worked only on averages and beyond a certain number of years there were no averages. You grew together—and that almost without regard for the quality of your feelings for each other—and you were not as individuals, predictable. That, at any rate, was what they had told her, some of them.

But she and Rick had had quite a bit less than a year and it had not gone beneath excitement—a very beautiful excitement. Before there had been only the beginning of exploration and then there had been the beautiful excitement and then, as if a knife had cut, there had been nothing. Then people had told her comforting things which did not comfort and a lieutenant-commander who headed Rick's squadron had written a letter about what a great guy Rick had been and it was as if he were writing about another Rick altogether. As probably, she realized now, he was. He was writing about a Rick who had taken a Wildcat roaring off a carrier deck and she had never seen Rick fly. He was writing about a Rick who had come back toward the carrier one afternoon and circled to land and had been talked off because Zeros were following him to find the carrier and had turned away and headed out for nothing, with the Zeros turning too, and had said, “I'll be seeing you,” when he knew he would never be seeing any of them again. That was Rick, but it was not really the Rick she knew. Now, after fourteen months and some days, she could not remember how his voice must have sounded as he said it. And she had never been sure. They hadn't had long enough.

So Rick was dead. She had never fooled herself about that, and nobody had tried to fool her. It had ended as if a knife had cut it. And she hadn't ended, in spite of what she thought. Now she was beginning over.

She was taking up ordinary things again. She was walking along Madison Avenue, on the shady side of the street, and she was carrying a tall paper bag. It was so tall that, as it rested in the crook of her right arm, the top of it—with the loaf of bread sticking out—was at the level of her eyes. She was coming to the corner of Madison and Seventy-third Street and waiting for the lights to cross to the sunny side because she lived on the sunny side. She was a girl who worked in an office, going home to a three-room apartment she had sublet, furnished, and taking lamb chops and other things so that she could cook herself dinner—lamb chops and salad—and eat them by herself with a book propped up against an ugly, but solid, brown vase. All the rest of it was ended, and this was another beginning. She was twenty-three and she was going home to her apartment after work with all the things, in addition to the lamb chops, that you need when a kitchen is just beginning. It was not exciting, but it was satisfying. She was not ready yet for new excitement, but now she knew that she would be ready for it—some time. There was no hurry—it was an unimmediate part of a future which might hold anything and so might hold even that. Because now a hurt was a memory.

In the future, and this realization was part of the new beginning, she might be hurt again—and might be happy again in that bright way you could be happy, so that you knew consciously you were happy. But not now, and not tomorrow and not next month—probably not next month. Tonight and tomorrow, and the days after, until Saturday and Sunday at Beth Arnold's outside Chappaqua, and through Saturday and Sunday and for another week at the office—for that time she would merely be safe and comfortable, and only little things would happen.

It was time she had weeks and months like that, Mary Hunter decided. For a girl of twenty-three there had been plenty that was not restful. Even before Rick; back when she was nineteen and had hated a man because of what he had done to her through another man. And that, of course, should have shown her that things do not last forever, even including hate and love. Because now it was absurd that she had ever hated the old boy and thought he had destroyed her. That was how she had thought of it then—that he had destroyed her. It appeared now that healthy young women were not “destroyed” at nineteen, or even at twenty-three. It was even possible that he had done her a good turn, without intending anything so benevolent.

But it had been exciting and turbulent and she had not much more than got over it when there was Rick. And now, comfortably, there was nothing but a three-room apartment, furnished, certainly, with a minimum of excitement, and two lamb chops. At their best, which she gloomily supposed hers would not be, lamb chops did not furnish much excitement. They were merely appropriate—dull without being completely enervating.

She walked up four steps and into the hall which ran along the side of the antique shop and passed the door which said: J
AMES
S
ELDEN
, A
NTIQUES
. The old man who ran the elevator was sitting in a wooden chair propped back against the wall at the end of the corridor and he did not move until she was at the elevator door. Then he brought the chair down with a tired plunk and groaned a small, obviously conventionalized groan and stood up. His standing was an indication that the elevator was in operation, that he would consent to operate it and that Mary Hunter, widow of Lieut, (j.g.) Richard Hunter, U.S.N.R., missing and presumed dead in action in the Pacific, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross and, posthumously, of the Navy Cross, might enter and ride.

Mary entered, balancing the tall bag of things she had bought at the delicatessen which was really a grocery, and the old man sighed.

“Four, ain't it, Miss?” he said, proving that he already knew her. And she had only rented the apartment on Sunday and had slept in it for the first time on Monday night, and now it was Tuesday and she was ready to cook in it for the first time. She smiled at him, because he, also, was appropriate to the worn peacefulness of her new life. So was the pace of the elevator, which trundled upward as if its mind were elsewhere.

It had stopped with what amounted to a sigh of relief at the fourth floor and Mary Hunter smiled at the old man, who merely looked at her, and went down the corridor to her door.
Her
door, which she could close after her. She passed the head of the narrow flight of stairs, with the metal treads of fire resistance, which offered an alternative—probably frequently necessary—to the elevator, and put the bag down in the corner by the door while she got the key out of her purse. She opened the door, pushing it away from her, and picked up the heavy bag again and went into her own hall, which was short and opened into the living room. She took three or four quick steps down the hall before she noticed.

And then she stopped and the bag fell from her arm and there was the crack of glass breaking in it and she stared into the living room. She did not move for a moment and she did not say anything, but merely looked into the living room. And then she said, in a voice which was higher in pitch than her own, but not louder, “No. No! Not you again. Not
again!”

And then she went on into the living room.

She did not scream. The old man in the elevator was certain that he would have heard her if she screamed, because he had waited—out of sheer inertia, so far as a motive could subsequently be ascribed—until she had entered the apartment, before he started down in the car. So he would have heard her scream, if she had screamed. She could say only that she did not know whether she had screamed or not, and that the elevator man probably was right. She had to say this a good many times, to a good many people, all of whom were certain she would have screamed if things had been the way she said they were. The argument was that since she did not scream, things were not as she said they were. This argument was advanced in words and reflected in faces.

Pamela North turned off the shower, pulled the bathing cap—which was made of plastic, apparently—off her head and discovered the telephone was ringing. It was ringing as if it had been ringing a long time. Pam North said, “Damn!” with feeling. “Alexander Graham Bell,” Mrs. North said, angrily. “Damn! Or Thomas Edison, or whoever.”

The telephone rang again. It was not to be vanquished.

“All
right,”
Pam said. “And when I get there you'll have gone away.”

She opened the curtains and the telephone rang again. It was insistent, and Pam decided it probably was Jerry.

“He ought to know I'd be taking a bath,” she said. “I always am.”

The presence of Ruffy in the hall, indignant at being shut out, kept Pam North from the appearance of talking to herself. Obviously she was talking to Ruffy. Pam reached for her robe and the telephone bell interjected commandingly.

“After all,” Pam said, “it's Jerry. So it's all right. I don't
need
anything on.”

She went to the telephone, without anything on, and dripping. She was too wet to sit down and she had already left wet footprints from bath to living room. She lifted the telephone out of its cradle and said, “Yes, dear.”

The voice was strange. It was not Jerry's voice, and it was strange for any voice.

“Pamela North?” the voice said. It was a woman's voice. “I want to speak to Pamela North,
please.”

There was urgency in the “please.”

“Yes,” Pamela said. “You are. This is—”

A key was in the lock and the door opened. Jerry came in and stopped just inside and looked at her. He nodded and smiled.

“Very nice, too,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Pam said to the telephone. “I thought it was you, or I'd have put something on,” she said. “It isn't you.”