Payoff for the Banker (28 page)

He picked up her blue book. She printed. It was an affectation of which, for practical reasons, he strongly approved. He found it easy to read the first few sentences. He turned the page. Then, as he read on, lines formed in his high forehead, and his eyebrows drew together. He shook his head slightly, as if to shake off something, and went on reading. When he finished, he laid the book down carefully on the pile, took his glasses off and began to polish them with a handkerchief, looking at nothing, looking across the two toilers who remained, still writing anxiously, still pouring forth their ideas of hate and love, of greed and fear.

Professor Leonard did not see them, was not even impatient for them to finish. He sat for a moment, polishing his glasses more and more slowly. Then he stood up, still carrying his glasses in his hand-kerchief, and walked to the window. He looked down into the snow-covered street seven stories below. There were moving figures, indistinguishable, on the cleared sidewalk, and Professor Leonard watched them without thinking about them. He would be damned, Professor Leonard thought; it was, certainly, the damnedest thing. He had not expected anything like this.

2

F
RIDAY
, 11:15
A.M. TO
10:25
P.M.

“—subsidiary rights,” Mr. Gerald North said, finishing a sentence. “Make it ‘cordially,' Miss Corning, under the circumstances. Now, take one to Miss Wanda Wuerth, and be sure it's u, e, not o, care B and B, dear Miss Wuerth several of our readers have objected that damn that telephone I told them never mind, I'll take it—yes?”

“A Mr. Leonard is calling,” the girl at the switchboard said.

“Leonard?” Jerry said.

The switchboard girl was firm.

“A Mr. Leonard,” she said. “He says it's important. Wait a minute, please. Yes?” There was a momentary pause. “He says it's Professor Leonard of Dyckman, if that helps,” she said. “Just a moment, please.” Jerry North reclined against the telephone in his left hand and looked at nothing. “He says you ought to remember,” the switchboard said. “He says because it only sold twelve hundred and you lost your—”

“Miss Nelson,” Jerry North said, with firmness. “Please. I do remember. Just put Mr. Leonard on.”

“I have Mr. North for you now,” the switchboard said. “Go ahead, please.”

“Mr. North?” a new voice said. It was a male voice, modulated, vigorous. “This is John Leonard. You did a book of mine last year and—”

“I remember,” Jerry said. “Hello, Leonard. Another book? I'm afraid—”

John Leonard laughed.

“Don't sound so alarmed,” Leonard said. “Not that bad, Mr. North. Nothing worse than murder, this time.”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “What? You mean you've done a mystery? I thought—”

“Not I,” Leonard said. “One of my boys and girls. Potentially. Or I'm afraid so, I want advice.”

“In that case, I'm afraid our mystery list's full up,” Jerry said.

John Leonard made sounds. He said that Mr. North didn't understand. He said he would admit it was difficult.

“It has nothing to do with a book,” he said. “That's where we went off. I'm not calling you as a publisher. I really want advice.” His voice changed. “It's serious,” he said. “I have a feeling it's vital. I think a young woman in one of my classes is working up to kill somebody. I feel I've got to try to do something.”

“My God yes,” Jerry North said. He looked at Miss Corning, still poised with her shorthand book. She looked merely attentive, obedient, politely detached. “Who?” Jerry said into the telephone.

“—thought of you,” Leonard said. “Because you know this detective, know about things like this.” Now there was anxiety in his voice. “I tell you,” he said, “I'm damn serious, North. I want help. Can I come around and talk to you?”

“Now?” Jerry said.

“Any time,” Leonard said. “Better, lunch with me. Can you do that?”

“I suppose so,” Jerry said. “Of course, I don't understand this. Why don't you go to the police?”

“You would understand it,” Leonard said. “That's the point. The police—no. It's too vague. Too intangible. Perhaps, if you agree, you can take it up with that friend of yours. The chap I met. Winan?”

“Weigand,” Jerry said. “Bill Weigand.” Jerry had a sudden idea. “I'll have to check something,” he said. “A—a tentative engagement for lunch. Can I call you back? Are you at the university?”

“In my office,” Leonard said. “Do that. I'll wait.” He paused again. “I think it's important,” he said then, slowly. “As important as—death.” Then he hung up.

Jerry held the telephone receiver off and looked at it and shook his head at it. He looked at Miss Corning, who raised her eyebrows in polite attention and waited.

“The damnedest thing,” Jerry said. “Where was I, Miss Corning?”

“—our readers have objected that,” Miss Corning said, “to Wanda Wuerth, care Brandt and Brandt.” She hung her pencil in the air over the page of her notebook.

“Never mind,” Jerry said. He pushed the telephone instrument to her end of the desk and said, “Here.”

“Get me Professor John Leonard at Dyckman University, will you?” he said. “Be sure it is Leonard.”

“Certainly, Mr. North,” Miss Corning said. She repeated her instructions to the switchboard girl. She waited. After a time she said, “Professor Leonard?” Then she looked at Mr. North and he shook his head. “One moment, please,” she said to the telephone, and pushed it toward Mr. North. She held a hand over the transmitter end but she did not say anything. She merely nodded.

“Mr. Leonard?” Jerry said and listened. There could be no doubt about the voice; there could be no doubt that there was sudden relief in it. There was even a kind of eagerness.

“North!” John Leonard said. “Good! You can make it?”

Jerry decided then.

“Yes,” he said. “Around one o'clock all right? The Oak Room of the Ritz? Meet in the Little Bar?”

“Good;” Leonard said. “Anywhere you say.”

“See you then,” Jerry said. He decided something else. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I think I'll try to get my wife to join us. All right with you?”

There was, perhaps, the faintest hesitancy. Then John Leonard said, “Fine, perfect.”

“One o'clock, then,” Jerry said. He put the telephone back in its cradle and looked at Miss Corning.

“—our readers have objected that,” Miss Corning said. “To Miss Wuerth.”

“Later,” Jerry said. “Will you see if you can get me Mrs. North?” He pushed the telephone toward her. He left his desk and walked to a window. In the street, many stories down, a dwarf Sno-Go was turning a soiled gray pile into a stream of white dust, spraying it into a truck. “Mrs. North,” Miss Corning said. He went to his desk in two long steps.

“Pam,” he said. “Are you tied up for lunch?”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “How nice. But—yes. Hair, you know. I told you.”

“Cancel it,” Jerry said. “I want you to—to see a man. A man who thinks he's stumbled on a murder. Or—a potential murder.”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “Not you!”

“Of course not me,” Jerry said. “A man named—”

But Pam North said, “No.”

“Getting us into something, I meant,” Pam said. “I realized it was another man. I suppose I can, but it looks terrible.”

“It?” Jerry said.

“My hair, of course,” Pam told him. “And tomorrow's Henri's day off and I'll have to take just anybody. Where?”

“Oh, the Ritz,” Jerry said. “One o'clock. The man's name's Leonard. He's a professor at Dyckman. He says a girl in his class is going to kill somebody.”

“Good,” Pam said. “The Ritz. One o'clock.”

There were always a good many people you knew in the Ritz Little Bar. Publishers took authors there to explain why present conditions required shares of subsidiary rights, and authors, softened, sometimes grew meek. Agents took publishers there and extolled authors over scotches; radio writers went there with producers, dutch, and told them sure it would work, see? Jerry North went down the stairs and discovered that he did recognize Professor John Leonard, who was folded in a small chair by a tiny table in the no man's land between bar and restaurant. Professor Leonard unfolded himself and made greeting sounds. A look enquired as to the whereabouts of the rest of the Norths.

“We'll wait in the bar,” Jerry told him, and led the way. George said, “How're you, Mr. North” and jerked his head toward the nook. Jerry North smiled and nodded to two publishers, noticed that one of them had in tow Helen Langford, and that Miss Langford looked embarrassed on seeing him—and made a note in his mind to check the latest Langford sales figures, to see whether she was worth fighting over. He preceded Leonard into the nook and said, “Well!”

“Late,” Pam North told them, incorrectly. “I've been waiting hours.” She indicated a half-empty martini glass in front of her. “Hours,” she repeated. She slid into the corner and looked up at Professor Leonard. It was a long way up. Jerry North made introducing sounds. Pam looked again at Leonard, who smiled suddenly.

“Yes, Mrs. North,” he said. “Don't I?”

“What?” Pam said.

“Look like a professor,” Leonard said. “You were thinking that, weren't you?”

“No,” Pam said. “Oh no. I didn't have to think about that. I was wondering whether I was right. To save time, I mean.”

Jerry North looked at Pam, who was guileless, who appeared guileless. She had on a cherry-red dress and a small hat which seemed to have been made out of part of a leopard. She looked at him without a flicker in her eyes.

“I'm afraid—” Leonard began. He looked a little afraid, Jerry thought, like a psychologist who has slipped on something—a semantic, perhaps. He and Pam North ought, Jerry decided, to be rather interesting together. It would be interesting to watch a professional approach to the Pam North mind. At the moment, however, Professor Leonard did not seem to be approaching. Jerry motioned him to sit beside Pam; sat opposite them.

“Cocktails,” Pam said, as if it were obvious. “I took a chance and—oh, all right George. But I'm afraid I was wrong.”

George had brought in two martinis.

“However,” Pam said, “it works out. I'm almost ready for another, and Jerry wants one, and we can send George back for something else. Scotch?”

“To save time,” Leonard said. “Oh!” He looked at Pam North, who remained guileless. “Of course,” he said. “A martini's all right. Fine. Unless you?”

“Oh, I can wait,” Pam said. They drank. And waited.

“Well,” John Leonard said, “it's a funny thing. A frightening thing, in a sense.” He looked at his cocktail, drank half of it. He turned to look at Pam North.

“Did Mr. North tell you anything?” he asked. Pam nodded, amber earrings nodded.

“A little,” she said. “You've stumbled—he said ‘stumbled'—on a potential murder. Or murderer?”

Leonard nodded. He said, “Good. A potential murderer. I keep thinking I must be wrong. Then I read it again. I'm not wrong. Do you see?”

Both the Norths looked at him, and both waited.

“The uncertainty,” he said. “The feeling it's all—all imagination. My own. That I'm reading things in. It's one of my students, you see. A girl—rather beautiful, in her—oh, her mid-twenties. She's an actress. I don't know how good, how much she's really worked at it. Summer stock, I think, and a few parts in town. She's taking dramatic courses chiefly. Working in the experimental theater, reading plays. We have courses like that, you know. Play writing, even. I don't know why she's interested in psychology.”

“It's reasonable,” Pam said. “Understandable.”

Leonard said he supposed so. At any rate, she was in one of his classes, listening to lectures on psychology, reading psychological treatises, trying to find out how the mind works.

“The normal mind, you know,” Leonard said. “What we call the normal mind. Why it acts as it does. An elementary course, naturally. Designed to give them—oh, an inkling. A little familiarity with terms. I don't know what good it does them.”

He paused with that, and finished his drink. Jerry leaned back, caught George's eye at the other end of the open room, and gestured. George nodded.

John Leonard turned his cocktail glass slowly round and round in long, thin fingers.

“Anyway,” he said, “I had them write this term paper. In class.” He looked at Jerry North. “It's the end of the winter term, you know,” he said. “They have to have grades. I have to find out which have been listening, or even thinking. So they write these papers.”

“I remember,” Jerry said.

Leonard nodded gravely. He said of course. He described the nature of the assignment—to write, to discuss, the way one of the dominating emotions affected the normal mind. The idea being that they would reveal what they had learned, what they had thought.

“They're all kinds, of course,” Leonard said. “From kids just twenty to a few middle-aged people. It's an extension course, you see. Naturally, I got a—a variety in the papers. You can imagine it, probably. ‘I think love is the most important emotion affecting the normal human mind because it is so universal.' That sort of thing. ‘Looking around at the people I see every day, I am afraid that a great deal of human activity is motivated by the emotion of greed.' You can imagine. And some very different. A G.I. named Carey, for example—one of the ones who went through it. Did you ever think very much about fear—just plain, animal fear of being hurt, of being killed? Of—of ceasing to be? Of, as he said, having your guts spilled out? Carey has. A good deal, apparently. He wrote quite a paper.”