Payoff for the Banker (24 page)

“Really, Mrs. North!” a startled, and slightly breathless, voice said. “Really!”

“I'm sorry,” Pam said. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Burnwood. How did you know it was me?”

“I see very well in the dark,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Also I have been outside for some time and my eyes have grown accustomed to it.” She paused, reflectively. “It seems to me, my dear, that you are behaving very oddly,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Or do you always?”

“Always,” Pam told her, to end discussion. “Have you seen Lieutenant Weigand? Or Mullins, the sergeant?”

“But my dear Mrs. North,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “They all went back to town. Almost an hour ago.” She paused again and patted herself, rearranging not evident disarray caused by collision. “I assumed, Mrs. North, that you and Mr. North had gone also,” she said.

Mrs. Burnwood's voice implied that this had been, on the whole, a pleasant assumption.

“No,” Pam said. “We're still here. So is Miss Burke.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Burnwood said. She sighed deeply. “So is Miss Burke.” She sighed again, even more deeply.

“Well,” Pam said, “excuse me. I've got to find the lieutenant. I'm sure he can't have gone.”

“Really,” Mrs. Burnwood said. “Really! He and the other policemen certainly drove off in a car. Of course if you don't—.”

“All right,” Pam said. “All right. Then they came back. Goodbye!”

She went off, along the terrace. It was strange what had happened to Jerry.

There were voices in the living room and she went in toward the voices and the light.

“It's not going to do you any good,” Ann Merle said to Laurel Burke. Ann stood looking down at the other girl. Ann's voice was not angry; it was merely indescribably distant and cold.

“I think it is,” Laurel said. “I really think it is.”

She seemed rather amused. She sipped her drink.

“I think,” she said, “that I will really learn to like scotch—now. Now that I can afford such good scotch.”

Pam's heels clicked on the polished floor. They both looked at her.

“He's not here,” Laurel Burke said. “I told you that. He went back to town. For God's sake.” She looked at Ann Merle. “You tell her,” she said. “Tell her that the cops have gone. Back to copping.”

She laughed; her laughter giggled.

“Yes,” Ann said. “They have gone, Mrs. North—Lieutenant Weigand and the others. Didn't you know?”

“They can't—” Pam began and gave it up. “All right,” she said. “They've gone. But I've got to find somebody. Where's—where's your brother, Miss Merle?”

Really, Ann Merle told her, she didn't know. Down by the pool? Out on the lawn—or the terrace? With Jamie? Or with Mary Hunter?

“You don't,” Pam said, “know where anybody is? Not
any
body?”

Ann Merle shook her head. She gestured vaguely. Everybody was—around.

There was no help there. Desperately, standing again on the terrace, Pam needed help. She needed Jerry—Bill—somebody certain and assured; somebody who would know what to do.

Because what she had done had been wrong; desperately wrong. That was clear now—that was very clear. From the beginning she had been wrong—wrong in theory and so wrong in action; dangerously wrong in action—perhaps fatally wrong in action. And now that she knew, there was nobody to turn to—nobody to help her undo what she had done. And it had to be undone.

Pam could not stand and look wildly into the darkness. The urgency which drove her drove her to action—to almost any action. There were people she had to find and the directions of search were almost infinite. But if she stood still, failure was final, inevitable. Now any action was better than none.

Pam, not running now—feeling her way—listening—went across the terrace, on which her heels no longer clicked. She went onto the lawn and headed away from the house.

“Here,” Jerry said, and he was whispering. “Somewhere along here. But I don't know which way she went. I thought I saw something moving over there, but it was Mrs. Burnwood. Then I went—.”

“All right,” Bill Weigand said. He was whispering, too. “She's somewhere around—in the dark. She's all right this time, Jerry. I wish one or two others were as—but don't worry about her.” He fell silent, but his fingers were on Jerry's arm. That was the way they had met, on the far side of the house when Jerry circled it searching for Pam. Out of the darkness, Bill Weigand's hand had closed on Jerry's arm and at the same time Bill had said, softly but with careful clearness, “It's me, Jerry. Bill. Don't talk.”

They had not talked, but they had whispered enough—Bill speaking for Mullins and Sullivan, merely darker patches in the darkness. They had driven away. A mile from the house they had driven into a field. They had walked back only when it was dark, coming over the rise on which the house stood. It had taken a long time to get dark.

“The old game,” Bill whispered. “Let them think it's a set-up. Walk in on them. Catch them at it.”

“At murder?” Jerry said.

Bill Weigand hoped not. But if it were, it wouldn't come off. He spoke with assurance.

“It sure as hell better not come off,” Sullivan said, out of the darkness.

“It won't,” Bill said. His voice sounded confident. But Jerry, who knew it, had heard it sound more confident. “After all,” he said, “it isn't as if we didn't know—it isn't—.”

He broke off, listening. They all listened, in the quiet night. But now the night was completely quiet.

“The pool, I think,” Bill said. “Somebody splashed—dived, probably. That's the likeliest, anyway. We'll take—.” He broke off again and started afresh. “Jerry,” he said, “you and I will take a look at the pool. Captain—suppose you have a look at the beach cottage. Mullins—see if you can get in the house and have a look. You know who you're looking for.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “O.K., Loot.” He considered. “It don't look to me like we got so much,” he said. Thereupon he vanished. After a moment, the solidified darkness which had been Captain Sullivan was also the more rarefied darkness which was merely night. Jerry and Bill Weigand left the terrace where they had been standing and started across the grass.

There was no use in pretending that Stanley Goode was an ideal companion for a girl in a sketchy bathing suit, reclining deep in a deck chair with the night warm all around and fragrant. Mr. Goode was not, at any rate, the ideal companion for Mary Hunter. He was polite, but he was abstracted. No, he hadn't been playing much tennis lately. Yes, he thought he would play a bit later. No, it didn't look like much of a season with so many men in the service. Yes, he—

He stood up.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Hunter,” he said. “I've got to find Ann. If you'll excuse me?”

Whether she would or not—before she had had a chance to—he was gone. He swung off to the left, circling toward the house—hoping, it was clear, to find Ann Merle in some place they knew of; eager to find her anywhere. Mary leaned back and drew the coat around her and looked at nothing across the pool. In a moment, Josh Merle's long body would arch into the pool, diving as he had dived so often during those few weeks of another summer, cutting the water as he had cut it then.

She did not, she told herself, want to see Josh Merle do remembered things, because it brought back the memory of other things—of the failure of his trust in her, of the long, long weeks she had waited for him to come, of the deep hurt. Those things came back too clearly; they seemed to wipe out the interval between—the interval which Rick had made bright. The sight of Josh Merle arching into the pool would bring back memories older than any of her memories of Rick. And that realization was a slow, frightening pain.

She did not go and escape the memories she feared. She waited, knowing that to see Josh again would hurt, and not being able to move to avert the hurt. She thought of ordinary things—of Stanley Goode and his patient, probably futile, devotion to Ann Merle; of the Norths, who had brought her to Elmcroft for reasons which were not clear at first and had since grown less clear; of the long time it was taking Josh to change and dive. And then she thought, with an odd kind of alarm, of Josh's face and his words the moment before Stanley Goode had come and broken the spell between them. There had been a new force in Josh Merle at that moment; a force which was not part of her memories of the summer—a force that might change a great many things; a force which was curiously frightening.

And then, very surprisingly, she heard his steps coming back, and knew them by the slight irregularity, the faint impediment, which now, she found, was a new way he had of hurting her. Because he had been hurt—

She did not look up when he came up beside her chair. She said: “Did you give the idea up?”

“What idea, Mrs. Hunter?” he said. “I seldom give up an idea, once I have it.”

At the voice she turned quickly and said, “Oh.”

“I thought—” she said. “I thought you were—.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. I suppose we—walk alike. Now. I don't know where Josh is. I suppose he went back to the house. I saw him going that way, as a matter of fact.”

“I don't think so, Mr. Jameson,” she said. “He went to change. He was going to have a swim.”

“Well,” Jameson said, “he went up to the house. I guess he changed his mind. Josh changes his mind easily, you know.”

“Does he?” the girl said. “I don't know him very well—now.”

“Don't you?” Jameson said. “I thought you did. Because, you see—he's still in love with you. I thought you knew that.”

His voice seemed gentle.

“No,” she said. “I didn't know that. Is he?”

“Oh, yes,” Jameson said. “Oh, yes. It's too bad, in a way.”

“Why?” she said. “Why is it too bad?”

“Why,” Jameson said, “because you don't feel that way about him. Or do you?”

His voice was still gentle. It was the voice of a man sorry that two friends were at cross purposes. It invited confidence. And it was that invitation which made the hesitation evident in Mary Hunter's voice. She said, “No,” but her voice hesitated on the word.

Weldon Jameson waited a rather long moment before he answered. When he did speak his voice had a note in it that, at first, Mary Hunter could not understand. But what he said, although not what she expected, was in itself quite simple.

“I wish I could believe that, Mrs. Hunter,” Jameson said. “I really wish I could believe that. But I'm really afraid, you know, that you feel about poor Josh just as he feels about you.”

Pamela North was more than halfway to the pool when she heard the sound. It was a harmless sound. It was the sound of water splashed suddenly, and the splash had obviously been made by someone diving into the pool—someone swimming on a warm June night. There was nothing frightening in it; nothing to make Pam North's breath catch in her throat or to change her quick walk suddenly into a desperate run. Afterward, Pam was not able to explain to herself why the sound had frightened her, and in the end she admitted that, as she felt then, probably any sound would have frightened her. But at that moment, she did not stop to think about it, but only ran through the darkness, on the yielding turf, downhill a little.

She ran toward the sound. In the darkness near her, someone else was running toward the sound—running more heavily than she was, and running faster. Instinctively, she sheered away from the other runner. The splashing repeated itself in the pool, and now it was more than the sound of someone swimming on a warm June night. It was a thrashing noise, as if more than one person were—

Then, without any warning at all, Pamela North crashed with all the force her slender, pushing legs could give her into something which was hard at first, and then yielded a little and then said something which sounded like “Uh!” with some of the overtones of “oof!” Then the obstacle gave entirely and Pam pitched over it and landed partly on her outstretched hands and partly on less ready portions of her anatomy. She landed on the grass and skidded on hands and knees and then, impetus not being entirely spent, she rolled head over heels and stopped in an odd and, she hurriedly thought, revealing tangle of arms and legs.

She was rolling herself into a ball and shaking her head to clear the surprise out of it, when suddenly lights over the pool went on glaringly. She was on her feet at what she saw in the pool and had started to scream a warning—although clearly things were past the stage of warning—when Jerry came to his feet behind her and Jerry's hands closed on her shoulders.

“Jerry,” she said, “I ran into you! Look!”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “I was looking for you—thank God!”

The last came because now Bill Weigand and Sergeant Mullins were running toward the pool, and toward the two struggling in it—struggling now in the full glare of floodlights—mercilessly transfixed by the light.

The two were at the deep end of the pool and close to the tiled wall of the pool. The man was clothed and his shirt clung to him and the girl did not seem to be clothed at all. They were struggling together in a kind of desperate confusion. The man had an arm around the girl and was swimming with the other, and even as they watched he seemed to dive, carrying the girl under with him. Then he came up again, and he was pulling—or pushing—at something in the water. And then—only then—he seemed to become conscious of the light and he turned a strange, distorted face toward them.

The girl did not come up. The man dived again as they watched and then—and still Weigand and Mullins were running toward the pool, from toward the end more distant from the struggle in the water—another man appeared out of nowhere and ran across the narrow strip of grass between bathhouse and pool and, without pausing, threw himself into the water. He threw himself on top of the other man and both disappeared.