Payoff for the Banker (18 page)

And if Mrs. Burnwood's tone was distant, Miss Burke's tone was assured—utterly assured. If Miss Burke was lying, she lied like an expert.

“Lieutenant Weigand,” Mrs. Burnwood said, across almost as great a distance, “do we have to accept this, Captain Sullivan?”

“No,” Sullivan said. “You can order her off your grounds. She's trespassing.”

“Yes, Mrs. Burnwood,” Bill Weigand said. “You can do that. If you want to.”

“Oh, Lieutenant,” Laurel Burke said, “how nice to see you again.”

“Is it?” Bill Weigand asked her.

“Lieutenant,” Ann Merle said. “Do you know Miss Burke?”

Weigand nodded slowly. He said he had talked to her.

“About your father's murder, Miss Merle,” he said. He let it lie there.

“Then,” Ann said, “she did know father. She was—what she says she was?”

“She knew your father, Miss Merle,” Weigand said. “She may have been.” He paused a moment. “I'd talk to her, if I were you—all of you. Although, as Sullivan says, you can throw her out.”

“I think the lieutenant is so intelligent, don't you?” Miss Burke said, to nobody in particular. “And those drinks you all have do look so refreshing on such a warm afternoon.”

Mrs. Burnwood turned and walked, without hurrying, with the stiffest of possible backs, across the terrace and through one of the French doors. Only after she had gone did anyone speak. Then it was Ann Merle.

“Meggs,” she said, “Miss Burke would like a drink.”

“Rye,” Miss Burke said. “And soda if you've got it.”

“Yes'm,” Meggs said. He said it reproachfully. The very notion, his voice said, that the Merle establishment would be at any time, under any conceivable circumstances, without soda! Meggs, Bill Weigand decided afterward, was the only person who really got under Laurel Burke's skin throughout that long afternoon and evening, during which so many people tried to. Meggs convicted her of ignorance and of gaucherie with what, in his mouth, was a single syllable.

With a drink, Laurel Burke became a guest. It was interesting to watch the change. With a drink, she got a chair. With a chair, she became part of the group on the terrace, entitled to all privileges appertaining. Men stood until she was seated, Meggs moved a small table within reach of her hand, Meggs opened a box of cigarettes and put it by her drink. When she took a cigarette, Josh Merle, although his face was still dark and angry, bent toward her with a light.

“Thank you,” Miss Burke said, politely. She considered. “You are all very kind,” she told them.

Mr. Potts was back from wherever he had been, Bill Weigand noticed. He looked at Miss Burke with interest but without surprise.

“Weigand,” Joshua Merle said.

“Yes?” Bill Weigand said.

“You say this—this Miss Burke could have been what she says she was?”

“She could have been,” Weigand said. “I don't know that she was.”

“You think she was?” Merle wanted to know.

“I think she could have been,” Weigand said. “Naturally, I don't know that she is going to have your father's child, Mr. Merle. I don't know that she's going to have anybody's child.”

“Ask my doctor,” Laurel Burke said, shortly.

“I imagine they will, Miss Burke,” Bill Weigand said. “I imagine they'll do just that. I suppose you are thinking about a paternity suit? Against the estate?”

“If they want it that way,” Laurel Burke said. “I don't insist on it. I don't mind it.”

“In spite of the fact,” Bill reminded her, “that you lived in the Madison Avenue place as Murdock's wife?”

She could, Laurel Burke said, get around that all right.

“Plenty of people knew that was a gag,” she said.
“Plenty
of people.”

There was, Bill Weigand thought, a definite meaning in her emphasis on plenty. She might mean that some of them were in the group which heard her. It sounded as if she did mean that.

Bill Weigand looked at the group—Jameson, Merle, Ann Merle, Potts, Sullivan and himself and Mullins—who had also come back from wherever he had been—and Stanley Goode. And, of course, Meggs, circulating again with drinks. Everybody took drinks; almost abstractedly, Bill Weigand took one himself.

He waited for Ann or Josh Merle to deny—perhaps to deny heatedly—that their father was capable of living the kind of life Laurel Burke was saying he had lived; the kind of life which implied a surreptitious relationship with a girl such as Laurel, carried on under the cover of his secretary's name; all of which implied, in essence, a series of mean assignations in a hide-out—a life lacking entirely in the dignity George Merle had otherwise seemed to prize. But neither Ann nor Joshua challenged the girl on those grounds. These, he concluded, were wise children.

“What is going to be your story, Miss Burke?” Josh Merle asked. “Why should we pay off? I gather you want us to pay you off?”

“I want you to support your father's youngest child, Mr. Merle,” she said. “I hoped you would want to.”

Merle told her to come off it. He said she wanted them to support her. Because of her nuisance value. She opened her eyes wide in apparent astonishment and said that she thought he was taking a very unkind attitude. She said he wasn't at all like his father.

“Your father was always terribly sweet to me,” she said.

Merle said, “Hell!” with emphasis and looked at Weigand.

“He used to take me to the most interesting places,” she said, as if Merle had not spoken. “To night clubs like—like the Zero Club.”

Again there was an odd emphasis. It was on the name of the club, which Bill Weigand knew, it being a part of his business to know them all. The Zero Club was in a basement and it was so dimly lighted that the face of a companion floated dimly across a table. It was a place where the chances of running into people—save in the purely physical sense, which was always probable—were reassuringly slight. If you wanted to be reassured, as George Merle must have. But there seemed no clear reason why Laurel Burke had gone to the trouble of mentioning it.

“Do any of you know the Zero Club?” she asked, “such an
in
teresting place.”

She looked around. Weigand could not see that her glance lingered on any of them.

“Yes,” Mr. Potts said, unexpectedly. “A very odd place indeed, Miss Burke. Why?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just wondered. You'd like it, I'm sure—all of you. Mr. Jameson—you'd like it. Mr. Merle.”

The two men looked at her. Joshua Merle said he doubted it.

“As a matter of fact,” Jameson said, “I don't like it particularly. Any part of it.”

“Really, Mr. Jameson?” she said. “Really? Do you like it, Miss Merle?”

“I like to see the people I'm with,” Ann said. “I'm not afraid of people's seeing me.”

“Why, of course not, Miss Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Why should you be?”

“What is your story?” Joshua Merle insisted. “If you've got a story.”

“Why,” Laurel said, “just what you suppose, Mr. Merle. Your father met me and was attracted and—things just happened. He rented me that dear little apartment and—”

“Under Murdock's name,” Bill Weigand said. “So you could pose as Murdock's wife?”

“Your dear father was so careful, Mr. Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Of course he was such an important man.”

“Did Murdock—find you for Mr. Merle?” Weigand asked.

She looked at him.

“I think that's a terrible thing to say, Lieutenant,” she said. “So exactly what a policeman would think.”

“It's what I think,” Joshua Merle told her. “I knew Murdock. He—did things like that for Father.”

He spoke bitterly. He was without illusions about his father. At some time, when he had found out things first, and the illusions first began to go, he had been bitterly hurt. Now the bitterness was dry and old.

“My dear boy,” Laurel Burke said, with a kind of awful archness, “you make Mr. Murdock sound like—what is the word—a pimp. And your father—really, Mr. Merle, I can't have you saying things like that about your dear father.”

“You—” Merle began. Then he stopped. His voice grew quieter although his face did not change. “We'll have to talk this over, Miss Burke. We'll have to go into it.”

“Of course,” Laurel Burke said. “That's why I came. So we could all talk it over like friends.”

“Of course,” Mr. Potts said gently, “Mr. Merle—Mr. George Merle—was over sixty, wasn't he?”

Laurel Burke looked at him. She said, “Why, Mr. Potts!”

She stood up.

“You know,” she said, “I'd really
love
to wash my hands.”

They watched her go across the terrace, guided by Meggs, and through one of the French doors. And then they turned and looked at Bill Weigand and waited, the question evident but unphrased. Slowly, with regret, Bill Weigand nodded.

“As I said,” he told them, “I am inclined to believe she was your father's girl. The girl he kept. Whether she is going to have a child by him I haven't any idea. Naturally. She may be. If she is, she'll probably be able to collect, unless—”

He paused and looked around at them.

“Unless she killed your father, or was mixed up in it,” he said. “Because you may as well know—if you don't know—Murdock didn't kill him. And Murdock didn't kill himself. He didn't, so far as I know, kill anybody. But somebody killed him.”

He looked for surprise and found none of it.

“Of course,” Mr. Potts said, gently, “we guessed that, Lieutenant. Because otherwise, why would you be here?”

Weigand looked at A. Wickersham Potts and smiled faintly.

“I didn't expect you to be surprised, Mr. Potts,” he said.

“Do you think she killed him?” Joshua Merle said, and there was something like hope in his tone.

Weigand shrugged slightly. There was a chance, he said. If, say, he suddenly told her he was finished and that she and the child—if any—could whistle for their support. Then she might have killed, either in rage or with consideration, after weighing one thing against another and deciding that Merle's family was a better bet than Merle. But there was, at the moment, no evidence.

“There are alternatives,” he said. “Several alternatives. Miss Burke and Murdock and whatever they had cooked up may have had nothing to do with it.”

“You mean,” Mr. Potts said, “that there was an understanding between Murdock and Miss Burke—an understanding to defraud Mr. Merle? That he was—a victim?”

Wickersham Potts was shrewd. He was very shrewd. But Weigand contented himself with the non-committal remark that such things happened. In, he pointed out, a variety of ways—variants on the “badger game.” Murdock as the outraged husband, for example.

Mr. Potts shook his head. He thought it would not have been that. Knowing George Merle, having met Mr. Murdock, he thought it had not been that. Not in those terms.

“Mr. Merle and Mr. Murdock knew each other quite well,” he said. “Much too well for that, I should have thought. But if Mr. Murdock had—found Miss Burke for Mr. Merle and then had arranged with her to share the proceeds of—er—her pregnancy—that would be more likely. And the Mr. and Mrs. Murdock arrangement may not have been so—how shall I say it?—so completely a formality as we are asked to suppose. What do you think of that version, Lieutenant?”

Weigand thought that Mr. Potts was very shrewd indeed, and very observant. It occurred to him that Mr. Potts might some day be too observant for his own good. But he merely said that Mr. Potts's idea was, indeed, an idea.

“It was interesting about the Zero Club,” Mr. Potts said. “Very interesting. I don't care for the place, myself. But of course every man to his taste. Don't you all agree?”

Then Mr. Potts got up and went off, not as if he were going any place in particular. And after that, for a long time, Weigand was not sure where Mr. Potts was. He was not, for several hours, sure where anybody was.

There had been a general tendency to break up when Mr. Potts departed; and Mullins, reappearing from the direction of the swimming pool, had looked inquiringly at Bill Weigand. Weigand shook his head. They were not leaving; they were waiting. Because it had occurred to Bill Weigand that it was not so necessary now for him to go to New York. It looked as if the part of New York he was interested in might be coming to Long Island.

He detained Joshua Merle when Merle started to rise, with an “Oh, Mr. Merle. If you've got a moment?” Merle sat down. Weigand's attitude did not encourage the others to remain. Captain Sullivan was already gone; now Stanley Goode and Ann went off together, stopping by the table which held only bottles and glasses again, going together into the shadows of the big living room. Jameson limped off after them, and Joshua Merle's eyes followed him. Bill Weigand's first question brought them back.

“At one time, Mr. Merle,” Weigand said, “I gather you knew Mary Hunter—Mary Thorgson she was then—quite well. Is that correct?”

Merle shook his head slightly as if to clear it.

“What's that got to do with it?” he said. “With anything?”

It was, Weigand told him, merely something he wanted to know about; he wanted to know about it because he was investigating a murder—the murder of Mr. Merle's father. Merle was under no obligation to answer, unless he wanted to help.

“I don't get it,” Merle said. “Mary doesn't come into this. She—got out fast enough after she got what she wanted. But—yes, I knew her at one time. I thought we were going to get married. Does that surprise you?”

“No,” Weigand told him. “What happened?”

“My sainted father,” Merle said. “And a check. If you knew Mary and I were engaged, you must have known it from her. But I suppose she didn't tell you all of it. I can see why she wouldn't.”