by Frances
“I met Faith last spring,” he said. “Or late last winter. At some sort of party. She’s an attractive girl, in an off-beat sort of way. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” Bill said.
“For one thing,” Ames said, “she can make you feel like a protector. Not by anything she works at. Just by being the way she is. Actually, I doubt if she needs much protection. Don’t you?”
“I’ve only met her,” Bill said. “Asked some questions when she was under stress. No doubt you’re right.”
“And, it doesn’t have anything to do with Professor Elwell’s death.”
“Probably not. However—”
“We went around together for a few weeks. Cocktails, dinner, dancing a little. Not precisely a thing, you understand, but something that could have got to be a thing. Maybe.”
“And didn’t because?”
“Mostly,” Ames said, “because a man named Hunter came along. He’d been around for some time, I gather, but all the same he—well, came along is good enough. Sort of thing they write songs about, I guess. Hasn’t happened to me so far, but there you are.”
It was not, at a guess, the sort of thing too likely to happen to Arnold Ames. But that was only a guess; the most polished surface may, presumably, cover great surging.
“It doesn’t,” Bill said, “seem to have upset you much.”
“Now I don’t know I—” Ames began, with surface slightly riffled. But then he said, “O.K. No, it didn’t. Nice little thing. But there are a good many nice little things about, aren’t there? Without mothers who—”
He stopped abruptly. And Bill waited.
“All right,” Ames said. “Between us?”
“If it hasn’t any bearing.”
Weigand could be sure it hadn’t. Between them, then—
“I said it was a little embarrassing,” Ames said. “Well, Mrs. Oldham—Faith calls her Hope all the time—she—well, got notions. You know what I mean?”
“That there was more between you and Miss Oldham than there was?”
He could call it that. More than there was at the time, or was at all likely to be. “Although,” Ames said, “I don’t argue it was as clear to me then as it got to be later. Faith’s a damn nice little thing. The thing was, we hadn’t—” He paused again. “Put it this way,” he said. “Mrs. Oldham jumped the gun by—by a hell of a long way. Probably there wouldn’t ever have been a gun, even if Hunter hadn’t showed up—across a crowded room, for all I know. And—well, that sort of thing makes a man shy off. Me, anyway. Especially when it’s so damn clear—”
He looked at Bill with the expression of a man who has made it clear. Bill shook his head.
“All right,” Ames said. “I said it was embarrassing. My family’s got a bit of money. I’ve—oh, never been in jail. Or in the tabloids or—been notoriously feebleminded or got myself into jams and that sort of thing. Gives mothers of pretty young daughters ideas, sometimes. Hell of a thing to have to explain, but there it is.”
Bill said he saw. He said that it was evident, then, that “you and Miss Oldham don’t—contemplate marriage.”
“Never did,” Ames said. “Could be it—what there was of it—was cooling a bit even before Hunter showed. And, Mrs. Oldham got—possessive. And got pretty obvious. And—”
Bill waited.
“All right,” Ames said. “Took the edge off a bit. Also—how could I tell how much of—well, of Faith’s seeming to take to me was Faith and how much mama? See what I mean?”
Bill saw. He said, “Mrs. Oldham has a good deal of influence over her daughter, you think?”
“A lot,” Ames said. “Anyway, I thought so until—well, until Hunter showed up. Faith must have made a break then because—well, from all I hear, Hunter hasn’t got any money. And mama—” He shrugged again.
Again Bill said he saw. There was one other point: During the time he had known Faith Oldham had Mr. Ames felt that Professor Elwell also had a good deal of influence over her? That she relied on him?
Ames said, “Well—” on a note of consideration. Then he nodded his head.
“She seemed to admire him a lot,” he said. “Her own father had been dead since she was a child. And Elwell had, I gather, been kind and—well, I suppose he may have more or less taken her father’s place. This is all guessing, you know. And it’s not the sort of thing I know much about, or think much about. And I certainly can’t see it has any bearing.”
“Probably not,” Bill said. “But—I’d better ask you this, Mr. Ames. Have you any reason to think that Professor Elwell may have influenced Miss Oldham in favor of Mr. Hunter? Hunter seems to be by way of having a protégé of Elwell’s and—”
And Arnold Ames laughed across his polished desk. He laughed so heartily that two polished men at nearby polished desks looked at him in surprise, even, Bill Weigand thought, in reproof.
“Being a cop must be the damnedest thing,” Ames said, when he had finished laughing. “Have to think of the damnedest things. Did Elwell alienate Faith’s affections from me, to Hunter? And did I, surging with unrequited passion—for God’s sake, captain!”
“We have,” Bill said, “to look at all conceivable sides of a question, Mr. Ames.”
He certainly did, Ames said. He sure as hell did, apparently.
“At three o’clock yesterday afternoon, captain,” Ames said, “I was showing a charming couple through a charming apartment in the Sutton Place area—a very out of this world duplex, completely air-conditioned yet with wood-burning fireplaces and a view of the East River. From two-thirty until almost four. Charming couple will so depose and—” He shrugged under the perfectly fitting jacket.
“Good,” Bill Weigand said. “Did you rent the apartment, Mr. Ames?”
Ames began to laugh again, and Bill thanked him and left him laughing. It seemed altogether probable that what Arnold Ames was having was the last laugh.
Driving back to West Twentieth Street, Bill nevertheless felt that he had been touched by the feathery suggestion of something. Whatever it was had, however, fluttered away. It was to be hoped it would, in time, flutter back. He would merely have to wait.
Pamela North returned to her apartment at around three-thirty, and was somewhat heavily laden, having stopped en route at the offices of North Books, Inc. She brought with her a copy of Hypnotism in the Modern World, by Jameson Elwell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Dyckman University, a new cookbook, two mysteries and a volume of modern poetry, if here a distinction may be made. She riffled through the cookbook to see what was new, read one of the modern poems three times and settled with Hypnotism in the Modern World. Martini sat on her lap and, as time passed, was now and then read to.
“Listen to this, Teeney,” Pam said. “‘The technics used in inducing hypnotism can, with practice, be learned by almost anyone. Neither a dominating personality nor a glittering eye is in any way essential.’ Think of that, Teeney.”
“Mrrr-ow-oo!”
“You may well say that,” Pam said, and scratched Martini under the chin, at which Martini swished her tail.
Pam read further, only now and then sharing her discoveries with her cat. It was, she thought, odd that, while almost anybody—if Professor Elwell was right—could learn to hypnotize, only a rather small minority could learn to be hypnotized.
“Think of that,” she said to Martini at one point, “a good operator can condition a good subject so that, after he has hypnotized him enough times, and reinforced a posthypnotic suggestion, all he has to do to put him back in hypnosis is to snap his fingers.”
“Um-ow?” Martini said.
“The operator’s fingers,” Pam said. “You sound like Jerry.”
She learned that—always assuming Jamey had known what he was talking about, which she was entirely ready to assume—a hypnotic subject may indeed be purged of all memory of any trance and may, further, be convinced that he is impervious to hypnotism. She read also that a good operator can make even the best sub
ject insusceptible to being hypnotized by anyone else. She read a good deal, in small takes, using the thick volume as if it were Little Jack Horner’s Christmas pie.
But what she sought, and what she did not find, was a flat statement that a person hypnotized could be directed to commit a major crime. She found “perhaps”; there was no dearth of “it-may-bes.”
“The trouble with professors,” Pam told Martini, “is that they qualify. If only they would come right out and say so. Or, of course, not so.”
Martini did not reply, having fallen asleep. Conceivably, it occurred to Pam, into a hypnotic trance. There is not much she puts beyond Martini.
“You are falling sound asleep,” Pam told Martini. “Relax. You are falling sound asleep. Deeper and deeper asleep. Listen to me. You are falling sound asleep. Asleep, asleep—fast, fast asleep. Listen to me—”
“Mrrow-ow-oo,” Martini said and got down and sat on the floor and looked at Pam. “Owr,” Martini said, shortly. “Owr. Owr. OO-row.”
It appeared not to work with cats. At any rate, not at what a cat regarded as dinner time. Martini went toward the kitchen. “Tell Martha,” Pam said and Martini went on, telling Martha—and anybody else listening—with each step.
Pam returned to Elwell. Jerry had said he might be late; that he was sitting up with a sick manuscript. He was; it was almost six-thirty when he let himself in, and he said, “Wow!”—sounding rather like Martini. He said also that he was pooped and sat deeply in a chair and said, “Where is it?”
It was coming right up. It came up.
“Although of course,” Pam said, sipping her own, “it isn’t as good as when you make it.”
“It’s fine,” Jerry said. “You can do them always.”
“You do a kind deed,” Pam said, “and it bounces back on you. You look tired.”
“I am,” Jerry said. “Parsons has only a smattering of English.”
“But you say yourself he sells well.”
“The connection,” Jerry said, dreamily, “escapes me entirely.” He then held out an empty glass. He was told he shouldn’t gulp. He waggled the glass and Pam took it, and retired toward the bar. Jerry leaned his head back; closed his eyes.
“You are falling sound asleep,” Pam said, tenderly, from across the room. “Sound, sound asleep. Deeper and deeper asleep. You must relax completely. You are falling sound, sound asleep.”
She paused. Had he not, visibly, relaxed? The chair, perhaps. Or, conceivably, the rapidly consumed martini. Surely not—
“Sound asleep,” Pam said, more or less on momentum. “You are falling—”
She stopped herself, poured water out of the martini pitcher, put ice in, added other ingredients, stirred. There was the engaging rattle of ice within glass. She looked at Jerry. He certainly did look asleep. Which was, of course, nonsense.
She poured his drink into a freshly chilled glass. She twisted lemon rind, as she had been taught. She carried the glass across the room. And Jerry slept. She put it down on the table beside his chair, and put it down with a click louder than was called for. Jerry slept.
“Jerry?” Pam said.
He slept.
“Jerry?”
And nothing happened.
But this was absurd.
“Jerry!!”
Professor Elwell said, without qualification, that there was no need to fear that a hypnotized person would not awaken, when instructed. He said it emphatically.
“Wake up,” Pam said. “Wake up, Jerry.”
“Nice doggy,” Jerry said. “Here, fella. Nice dog.”
He reached down. He began to pat—nothing. But it was precisely as if—
“Jerry!” Pam said, and now there was a wail in it. “Jerry. Darling. Wake up. There isn’t any dog. And I didn’t—”
She stopped abruptly. He wouldn’t be patting a nonexistent dog unless she had—
“You!” Pam North said. “Of all the things—”
Jerry North opened his eyes.
“You!” Pam said.
She reached down. She picked up the martini from the table beside Jerry’s chair and carried it to a table beside her own.
“You’re strong enough,” Pam said, firmly. “Make your own drink, my ever playful friend.”
9
If I had gone on at Columbia, Bill Weigand thought, patiently, not happily, driving his Buick through the clotted traffic of late afternoon—if I were a lawyer now, it would be almost time to be leaving the office, going home. Or if I were an accountant, or an office manager—or, for that matter, a shoe salesman, a bookkeeper. I would be going toward home now, instead of away from it; toward Dorian instead of Sergeant Aloysius Mullins. I would be flicking the job off my hands, dusting it off, saying sufficient unto the day. There would be glasses chilling in the refrigerator, and Dorian curled waiting in a chair and all as right as right could—
On the other hand, Bill thought, stopping behind an out-of-town car which had, unexpectedly, decided to turn left—on the other hand, would I, if I had turned out to be—say—a shoe salesman, ever have met Dorian? Would she have come in to buy a pair of shoes and would we have gone on from there? It seemed somewhat doubtful. For one thing, as a shoe salesman—settle for that—it seemed unlikely he would have met Pamela and Gerald North, because what would it have mattered to him that they had found the body of a naked man in a bathtub? And if he had not met them, then how Dorian at that odd, attractive colony the Norths had frequented in other, earlier years?
And would I, Bill wondered, turning, finally, right into Twenty-first Street, have been contented as a nine-to-fiver, without a revolver in a shoulder holster—a revolver I haven’t, actually, used in years? Without wondering whether—say—a man named Arnold Ames is really as amused as he seems to be; a man named Carl Hunter as straightforward? And, whether—say—it is really possible to arrange, by means of hypnosis, one’s own death when one decides it is time to die and, dying, resolve a long-moot question?
Bill Weigand parked his car and climbed stairs to the squad room and nodded to Mullins, who got up from behind a desk, carrying papers, and followed into the cubbyhole which was Weigand’s office at Homicide, Manhattan West.
“Ames thought it was all quite comical,” Weigand told Mullins. “He may have been right. Do you bring in any choice sheaves? Oh—and did you remember to bring the professor’s book along?”
Mullins had. He laid it, with every evidence of distaste, on the desk in front of Bill Weigand. He also said, briefly, what he thought that whole business was a lot of. “Now sergeant,” Bill said. “Further?”
“Ballistics says yes,” Mullins told him. “Same gun. Thirty-two Smith and Wesson. The professor’s was a little nicked, on account of a rib, but there was enough. Hunter’s was nice and clean. Of course, it figured.”
It had. More than one .32 would have been superfluous.
“The Connecticut boys sent the dope along,” Mullins said. “Nothing in it we didn’t know, far’s I can see.”
The dope was a copy of an accident report—the report on the fatal accident of 26 April, resulting in the deaths of Elizabeth Elwell, 24; Ernest Bainbridge, 58, and Doris Bainbridge, spouse, 54. Weigand skimmed through it and put it on the desk.
The lawyer of the late Jameson Elwell confirmed—after some legal hemming, and ethical hawing—that the provisions of his client’s will were as stated by the decedent’s brother. In all that was important. After thises and thats, residue in equal shares to two nephews, a niece, and Faith Oldham, spinster. The will was dated two months earlier; it superseded a testament of some years’ standing, in which Faith Oldham was not mentioned.
“Looks,” Mullins said, “as if he had seen a doctor, don’t it?”
It suggested that. It need not prove that. Wills are changed otherwise than in the immediate expectation of death.
“Sure,” Mullins said. “So I went to see Miss Oldham and her mother. Want to read about it or—?”
“Tell me, sergeant,” M
ullins’s official reports are sometimes a little rigid.
“The girl says she was at the house,” Mullins said. “Waiting for her boyfriend to show and take her out to lunch. Mrs. Oldham wasn’t. She—”
Mrs. Oldham had left the house at about a quarter after eleven to do the marketing. “Somebody has to,” she said, and looked at her daughter, who sighed slightly, as one who encounters a too-familiar remark. “Somebody has to do the errands,” Mrs. Oldham said, in case she had left doubt in the mind of Sergeant Mullins. Mullins said, “Yes’m.”
She had not, walking up the street in the direction of Broadway, seen “that” Mr. Hunter. She had gone to a chain store and carried groceries home. “Somebody has to,” she said. “They don’t deliver for nothing, whatever they pretend. It just gets added on.”
“She’s not a very nice woman,” Mullins said, in parenthesis, to Bill Weigand. “Way she looked at the girl, I mean.”
Faith had got home a little after noon. When some time later, Carl Hunter had failed to arrive, she had first called his apartment and, getting no answer, gone to the front door and looked up and down the street. The patrolman still on guard outside the house next door had come down the street and said good morning and then, “Man just got shot up the street, miss,” which was the first she had known of it. When she found out who the man was she had gone to the hospital. Hunter was still in surgery and she had waited until he came out of it—until he regained consciousness and could smile at her; until she had been told, several times, that he was not badly hurt.
Her mother had returned when Faith got home and said, on being told what happened, “I never did trust that Mr. Hunter. And your rushing off to the hospital that way!”
“That,” Mullins said, “is what she said she said. And the girl said, ‘Oh, Hope.’”
Mullins had said that his questions were formalities to be gone through; that in such cases as this there were a lot of forms to fill out. “Which,” he said, a little moodily, “God knows there are, Loot.” With the formalities observed, he had stood and then said, “Oh, by the way. Congratulations on the silver lining, Miss Oldham.”