Payoff for the Banker

by Frances

  “Yes, Inspector,” Weigand agreed. “I know Hardy. Did you tell him that we had a dragnet out?”

  “Have we?” O’Malley said, evidently before he thought.

  “Well,” Bill said, “I don’t know that we could call it a dragnet, exactly.”

  “All right,” O’Malley said. “What the hell are you doing? What are we going to tell the newspaper guys?”

  “We might just tell them that we’re investigating,” Weigand said. “That Mr. Merle was killed less than four hours ago. That at the moment we haven’t any idea—not even the lousiest little idea—who knocked him off.”

  O’Malley told him for God’s sake not to try to be funny. He pointed out that the tabloids had already gone in and that the Times and Trib—and the tabs too, for their later editions—had to have something. He wanted to know whether Bill didn’t know a story when he saw one. He wanted to know whether Bill hadn’t ever heard of George Merle.

  “They’re good enough guys,” Bill said. “Just tell them the way things are, Inspector. Tell them we’re—oh, tell them we are questioning several associates of the late bank president.”

  “Yeah,” O’Malley said. “I did. They wanted to know what kind of associates. Banking? Or.”

  “Or?” Bill Weigand repeated, when O’Malley stopped.

  “Just ‘or’,” O’Malley said. “You know what they meant. It was that guy from the Mirror.”

  “What did you say?” Weigand wanted to know.

  “I said there were a lotta angles,” O’Malley said. “I told them we were looking into all of them. Why don’t you arrest the girl?”

  Weigand wanted to know for what. O’Malley suggested murder.

  “What the hell,” he said. “She was there, wasn’t she? He’d come to see her, hadn’t he? What more do you want?”

  “Evidence,” Bill Weigand suggested.

  O’Malley began to rumble again. Weigand spoke before he thought, to check the rumble short of thunder.

  “I’m keeping an eye on her, Inspector,” he said hurriedly—too hurriedly. “The Norths have—” He stopped. But had not stopped soon enough.

  “Do you mean to stand there and tell me the Norths are in it?” O’Malley wanted to know. “Is that what you mean to do, Lieutenant?”

  It hadn’t been. But there was no point in insisting on discreet intentions. Weigand listened, dutifully, while the thunder rolled. After some time he was permitted to hang up, on the understanding that he had to solve the murder of George Merle within minutes—fifteen at the outside—get Mary Hunter away from Mr. and Mrs. North and Mr. and Mrs. North out of the case, and send Sergeant Mullins immediately downtown with a report of progress for the press. Weigand looked at the telephone for a moment after he replaced it and sighed. In some ways, he thought, Inspector O’Malley was getting to be altogether too much like the elder Clarence Day. Life with O’Malley was something, too.

  He got Mullins out of the detectives’ room and sent him south, into the jaws of the inspector. He went in search of Laurel Burke, known sometimes as Mrs. Oscar Murdock. It would be interesting if George Merle, when he made his last visit to anyone, had thought he was visiting Mr. and Mrs. Murdock. It would be, perhaps, even more interesting if he had thought he was visiting only Mrs. Murdock, whose first initial was “L” for Laurel.

  5

  TUESDAY, 9:30 P.M. TO 10:20 P.M.

  Mary Hunter had seemed to be moving in a dream after Joshua Merle left Charles. She had finished her drink in a dream and eaten—or moved her food in a semblance of eating—in a dream. After one or two efforts by Jerry North which brought almost imperceptible, but unquestionably negative, movements of the head from Pam—they had left her in the dream. And having dinner with a sad, if pretty dreamer, haunted by her discovery of murder—and very possibly, Pam thought, by something more—had not encouraged either appetite or conversation. So the Norths had appeared almost as dreamy as the girl; it was evidently only absent-mindedness which led Jerry to order fresh martinis after they were at their table. Presumably it was only abstraction which led him to drink his thirstily, and his prolonged gaze at Pam’s half-full glass after he had finished was evidently only the gaze of a man who was thinking of something quite different. He seemed quite surprised when Pam pushed the half-full glass toward him, but the surprise passed quickly, with the martini.

  The girl had merely acquiesced to their suggestion that a hotel on lower Fifth Avenue would be handy to where they were, and when she walked between them—the necessary block or two—she might have been a sleepwalker. Only after she had registered and turned to the Norths from the desk did she make an effort to shake the mist from her mind.

  Then she tried to make her voice casual, or seemed to try. She said they had both been wonderful.

  “It was an amazing thing for you to do,” she said. “You must have thought I was crazy—to call that way on people I didn’t know. To drag you into—into my mess.”

  Jerry said it wasn’t anything. The girl said oh, but it was. Pam looked at both of them. She spoke suddenly, with no abstraction at all in her voice.

  “Do you know,” she said, “you talk as if we’d filled in at bridge. Or paid your bill at a restaurant because you’d left your purse at home. Or told you that Commerce Street is two blocks down and one to the right.” Pam paused. “Only it isn’t, of course,” she said. “It’s—where is it, Jerry?”

  “Well,” Jerry said, “it’s not really down at all. It’s straight across, just about where Fourth Street and Twelfth Street cross.”

  “You,” Pam said, “are thinking of Bank Street. Not that it isn’t perfectly natural—Bank—Commerce. But I meant the Cherry Lane Street. That’s Commerce. And it’s downtown, with a theater on it. Or used to be.”

  Jerry North ran a hand abstractedly through his hair.

  “Look, darling,” he said. “Who gives a damn where Commerce Street is? Except the people who live on it.”

  “What?” Pam said. “I don’t understand. What makes you dislike Commerce Street? Except that you don’t know where it is. Which is your own fault, if anybody’s.”

  “Listen,” Jerry said. “Listen, Pam. I like Commerce Street. I also like Bank Street, except when it runs into the stables, which it probably doesn’t any more.” He looked at her anxiously. “What on earth,” he wanted to know, “are we supposed to be talking about?”

  That, Pam told him, was just it. That was precisely it. What were they talking about? That was the whole point, and what she was saying. They were talking, as far as he could tell, about something casual—something entirely trivial. Like the whereabouts of Bank Street.

  “And really,” she said, “it’s murder. We weren’t filling in for bridge. We were—we were attending a murder.”

  She looked at Mary Hunter.

  “On,” she said, “invitation. Your invitation, darling. So now you have to decide.”

  The slender girl looked back at Pam North. She stood motionless, and her face was almost motionless.

  “Decide what, Mrs. North?” she said.

  “We can’t talk here,” Pam said. “Not really. We’ll sit down some place.” She looked at Jerry, who nodded. “In the bar,” she said. “Because it’s convenient.”

  She started across the lobby toward the bar. The girl hesitated, and Jerry seemed to hesitate with her. But his hesitation was not uncertain; it suggested. Mary Hunter followed Mrs. North. She sat down with them, but with no air of permanence.

  “What you have to decide,” Pam said, as if nothing had intervened, “is whether we’re to drop out. As of now. And if we are—why did you call us in? Because it wasn’t what I’d expect—what anyone would expect. Unless you knew us better.”

  The girl seemed withdrawn. She said she was sorry.

  “No,” Pam said. “It isn’t that easy. As if it were a—a case of mistaken identity. You called us in because you were frightened—terribly frightened. And you were frightened because of more than merely finding a body. Y
ou were—you were frightened for yourself. Because it all meant something about you.”

  Mary Hunter shook her head. Her voice was low and she seemed to have trouble keeping it steady.

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I do, now. It was an imposition. And it was unnecessary.”

  “Why was it unnecessary?” Mrs. North said. “Because now you’re out of it?”

  The girl didn’t say anything, in words. Her eyes said something. Pam looked quickly at Jerry and watched him shake his head slowly. She waited for him to speak. He spoke gently.

  “I’m afraid, Mrs. Hunter, that it isn’t going to be that way,” he said. “Pam’s right.” He paused and looked at her. His voice was even more gentle when he went on, but his words were very slow and clear.

  “You see, Mrs. Hunter, you’re not out of it,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain—you shouldn’t have brought us in, perhaps. We’re not detectives and—I hardly know how to say this—we—we aren’t casual about murder. People can’t be. People can’t pick it up, find out things—too many things—and drop it. And walk away. If you hadn’t called Pam—if you hadn’t brought us into it all—that would be different. We wouldn’t have any responsibility.”

  “And now,” the girl said, “now you feel you have?”

  It was hardly a question. It hardly needed an answer.

  “You see,” Pam said, “you’ve told us too much. By calling us—by things you’ve said—by—by the way you looked.”

  “When I saw Josh,” the girl said. There was a kind of resignation in her voice. “I tried not to.”

  “When you saw Josh,” Pam said. She hesitated. “You see, my dear,” she said, “I had to tell Bill about that. You see I had to.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Perhaps you did. It’s all—it’s all wrong. I don’t know what I thought—why I called.”

  “You called because you were frightened,” Pam said. “You sounded frightened.” Pam looked at her a moment intently. “And now you aren’t,” she said. “Or you’re frightened differently.”

  “I’m not frightened,” the girl said. “It was a shock—it would be a shock, wouldn’t it? To find Josh’s father there, dead—to find anybody in your apartment, shot, when you—when you just came home in the evening by yourself.” She paused. “And what was he doing there?” she said. “Why there?”

  Pam looked at Jerry, who lifted his shoulders slightly and said, “Precisely.” He said nothing further. Mary Hunter and Pam waited a moment, and he still said nothing further.

  “Anyway,” the girl said, “maybe I was frightened. Just at first. I knew him—I used to know him, anyway. It was my apartment. I found him. I was afraid—I was afraid the police wouldn’t understand.”

  “Precisely,” Jerry said. They both looked at him.

  “There’s only one other thing they would want,” he added. “A motive. Did you have a motive, Mrs. Hunter?”

  The girl spoke quickly and said, “No—no, of course not.” She said it so very quickly that Pam looked at her oddly, and then looked at Jerry. He, also, was looking at Mary Hunter, and he seemed to be waiting. The girl looked at Pam North and then at Jerry North and said the obvious.

  “What motive could I have?” said she.

  There was another little pause. There seemed, Pam thought, to be more pauses in the conversation than conversation. It was a pause—an uneasy pause—marred a little by words.

  “Precisely,” Jerry said. He seemed, Pam thought, to have taken a fancy to the word. She was sorry; it was not a word she much cared for. But she was not surprised to see that Jerry was looking at her with an evident inquiry in his glance, or that he was moving as if to rise. She picked up her bag.

  “And since you haven’t,” Jerry said, “you naturally aren’t frightened. Since you aren’t frightened, you don’t want us to—you don’t want us as seconds, or whatever you had in mind. We’re bound, as I said, to tell Bill Weigand what you’ve told us—and suggested to us. We don’t have to go on with it.”

  He pushed the table a little aside and stood up.

  “And,” he said, “you probably want rest and quiet. And won’t mind if we get along. All right?”

  “I—” the girl said.

  Pam stood up too. They waited a moment looking down at her. She looked up at them.

  “I didn’t mean—” said she, and broke off again.

  “There wasn’t anything to mean,” Jerry told her. “You—you called a doctor. An amateur doctor, as it happens. You got well before the doctor came.”

  Pam laid a hand on his arm. He looked at it a moment and then looked back at the girl. And for a fraction of a second longer he waited.

  “Are you well, Mrs. Hunter?” Pam said, beside him.

  The slender girl looked up at them for a moment longer, and then she—very slowly—shook her head. And her eyes had tears in them—painful tears.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I swear I didn’t kill him.”

  “But,” Jerry said, “you had a motive. Or something the police would call a motive, if they wanted to.” He did not put the words as a question.

  The girl nodded.

  “Josh,” she said. “Josh and I—”

  But Pam was shaking her head.

  “If you’re going to tell us any more, you’ll end by telling us everything more,” she said. “And not here—perhaps not anywhere. What we know, Bill knows. At least—”

  “Unless Pam decides it would confuse him,” Jerry filled in, and he smiled faintly. “Which has happened.” He sobered. “But if Pam means that we’re not on anybody’s side, as she does, she’s right,” he said. “If she means we’re not protecting anybody.”

  “Except,” Pam said, “if they didn’t do it. And then, of course, we would be. Unless we were wrong, of course.”

  The girl looked at both of them, and shook her head again. She said she didn’t need protection.

  “For myself,” she said. And then as if this might be misleading, she added more hastily. “Or for anybody,” she said. “And there isn’t much to tell. But—I’d like to tell you what there is. And you can tell me—well, if I ought to be afraid. And if I ought to tell your Bill—Lieutenant Weigand—about Josh and me and Josh’s father.”

  “Still,” Pam said, “not here. We’d better go up to your room, if you want to tell us anything.”

  “Without prejudice,” Jerry said.

  The girl smiled up at him.

  “Without prejudice,” she said.

  The girl’s room had one chair that was supposed to be comfortable, and one about which no one had supposed anything, except that it was a chair to put by a table and to be sat on by a guest who wanted—for whatever obscure reasons of his own—to sit by a table. There was a bed, with a reading lamp on the headboard, artfully placed so that a bed-reader’s head would inevitably shadow his book; there was a telephone and there was a window from which one could look down on Fifth Avenue. Mary Hunter sat in the straight chair and Pam North in the other. Pam tried to sit on her foot and be comfortable, but there was no room in the chair. She tried it twice and gave it up. Jerry sat on the window-sill. He looked down at the street and it was a long way down, so he looked instead at Mary Hunter. She had very wide-spaced eyes; her cheekbones made her face a soft triangle. She would, Jerry thought, photograph beautifully.

  She talked with many little pauses between her sentences and she talked more slowly as she went on, but also with less hesitancy. She remembered as she talked.

  It had been—what there was of it to be—in the summer before the war. “The strange summer,” she said, and Pam nodded. She remembered it as a strange summer—a restless summer, in which all that one did seemed tentative and merely a part of waiting; a summer in which nothing could be started that would outlast the summer; a time in which no one could keep his mind on anything that was, because it was so clear what was to be. And yet it had not been clear what was coming—not clear to the mind
. There was a kind of disbelief in everything and nothing was quite real, even the approaching—the almost certainly approaching—reality of the future which was to change everything. (And which had, actually, changed only some things, and those only for some people.) But perhaps this was only, Pam thought, the way one remembered the summer; perhaps, for the most part, it had really been like any summer, no more desperate—except that now, knowing more clearly that it was the last summer of its kind, one felt it should have been desperate, and so remembered that it was.

  And it could not have been so very different for a girl of nineteen—blond and pretty and living pleasantly on Long Island. Living only pleasantly, not extravagantly. “It was just a little house, really,” Mary said. “Not like the Merles’. Dad didn’t have money like that—he didn’t have as much money as he used to have.” But there had been the big car—the reasonably big car—and the station wagon. It had, Jerry North gathered, been more than suburban.

  “Two or three years before that,” the girl said, “Dad was—I think he was—making quite a lot of money. When I was about sixteen. Everything felt like he was making a lot of money. I guess I just took it for granted. Then, just before I was nineteen—that was in February—he told mother they’d have to pull in their horns. But when she looked worried and said, ‘You mean really, Frank?’ he smiled and shook his head and said, ‘Not really. Just a little.’”

  They waited, because she paused then.

  “This has something to do with the rest of it,” she said. “It’s not—not just reminiscence.”

  They accepted her statement without words. She went on.

  It had been that spring—the spring she was nineteen—that she had really met Joshua Merle. She accented the word “really” and explained. It was not, really—she smiled slightly at her repetition of the word—not really the first time she had met him. She must have met him a dozen times when they were both growing up, he a few years ahead of her in the process. The families had known each other—casually. “Or I thought casually,” she said. “Now I don’t know. Because Dad and Mr. Merle had some sort of business contact.”