by Frances
“But,” Pam said, “he didn’t. It’s—confused. She admits she did it—killed Jamey. But she says at the same time that Hunter was trying to make Faith believe—” Pam shook her head. Moving it, she noticed that she was being regarded by Martini, who had both eyes open. “You are falling deeply asleep,” Pam said, in automatic parenthesis. “Deep, deep asleep. You will not wake up until I tell you to. She can’t have it both ways.”
“She’s not an especially logical woman,” Weigand said. “At best. Now she isn’t at her best, of course. She didn’t seem to realize that the two things cancel out—that one cancels the other out.”
“While we’re on that,” Pam said, “what was Hunter up to? Just finding out that Faith remembered her father had had a gun? That the gun had disappeared?”
It had not been that, Bill said. At least at first; at least according to Carl Hunter. Who had, incidentally, got briefly back to his cats, but was spending most of his time holding Faith Oldham’s hand, figuratively and, it was to be supposed, literally.
“It needs it, the poor child,” Pam said. “But—what was it really? Not just because she thought Elwell was a—a wizard. Somebody from the lower depths.”
“My dear child,” Jerry said, in a tone meant to annoy. “You!” Pam said, but waited. “She had always dominated the girl,” Jerry said. “That was important to her. The most important thing in her life because, among other things, it was a way of staying young. By not being relegated, losing out. And also the deep satisfaction of having power.”
Pam looked at him skeptically, and also with enquiry.
“Not I.” Jerry said, quickly. “I speak in the abstract.”
“You’d better,” Pam told him. And looked at Bill Weigand.
“We could,” Bill said, and smiled at both of them over a cocktail glass, “keep it simple. As it will be kept for a jury. I don’t deny either of these—what? Freudian?—theories. An emotional woman’s fear of what she did not understand. An aging woman’s desire to dominate—to keep power over youth. But—simply—a greedy woman’s desire for money. Of which, remember, she hasn’t much. And it’s been clear all along she hated not having much.”
“But,” Pam said, doubtfully, “you mean she did know about the money Jamey was leaving Faith. I thought Mullins was sure—oh.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “Not that money. I don’t think she knew about that. I’m quite sure—Hunter’s quite sure—Faith didn’t know about the inheritance when she was awake. That Elwell had induced amnesia. The money—the entirely new way of life—they would both have had if Faith married Arnold Ames. Or somebody like Ames. That was the simple motive.”
And—they had heard, from Faith, that part of Elwell’s effort to free the girl from her mother’s dominance had involved encouraging her to live in her own way, follow her own feelings. Which would not, it was clear, lead her to Ames.
“You mean he really—broke that up?” Pam asked this. And Bill Weigand shrugged, and looked at his empty glass, and at his host, who rose in hostly fashion.
They would, Bill supposed, never know about that. It was not a thing on which a finger could be precisely put. Ames had already, perhaps, turned wary, partly because Mrs. Oldham seemed in rather hot pursuit. At least, Ames himself implied that. Which might be a salve to his own pride. But it did seem very probable that Elwell had done at least part of what Mrs. Oldham thought he had, and done it intentionally.
“Playing God,” Jerry said.
“For good purpose,” Pam said. “Anybody looking at her and Hunter can see that.” But, if not Ames, perhaps somebody else, equally desirable? But not if Hunter got too far. She tried to blame it on him?
She had certainly known he was at the house at approximately the right time. Sitting in her chair at the window, she had seen him leave. If the police decided he was the killer, it would amount to a bonus.
“Two wizards with one stone,” Pam said, and there was a momentary pause.
Mrs. Oldham, once her daughter had left Wednesday afternoon, had gone through the laboratory to Elwell’s office, and shot him, and returned the same way. And then gone out herself and—
“Wait,” Jerry said, “she did have a key to the laboratory then? You mean, Jamey had given her one, too?”
Not intentionally. He had supplied Faith with a key to be copied after she had lost hers—two keys, as it turned out, one being to the front door of his own house. But it was Mrs. Oldham who took the keys to a hardware store and had duplicates made. “Enough,” Bill said, “to go around. She was the one who did the errands. She made a great point of that.”
Hope had thought that, with Elwell dead, she would have no difficulty in reassuming dominance over Faith, redirecting her toward a profitable marriage. But, with Elwell dead, Faith had turned not to her mother but, more fully even than before, to Hunter. And the police did not seem to accept Hunter as the killer. “She blamed us for that,” Weigand said. “Pointed out that if we’d been up to the mark we’d have seen he was the obvious one. If she’d succeeded in eliminating Hunter, it would have been our fault for not having him safe in jail.”
“Hunter knew she was the one who shot him? That was what put him oh the right track? And then—that was why he hypnotized Faith. To find out about the gun and—”
But Pam stopped, although she had been reasonably triumphant. Bill was shaking his head.
“At one stage,” Bill Weigand said, “you had the theory that Faith might have killed Elwell. Under hypnotic suggestion. As an act of mercy. Well—Hunter got the same theory, decided to hypnotize Faith and find out. So he would know what he had to protect her from. He says, ‘So I could help her if she needed help.’ It was when he convinced himself she didn’t that he started to make the recording, and to search around in her mind—that’s the way he phrased it, incidentally—to find out what he could. And stumbled—he says it was a stumble—on the gun.”
There was a considerable silence, then. Bill finished his new drink. He said, “Well—”
“Wait,” Pam said. “Mrs. Oldham came to us—got us to go with her—why?”
She had, Bill said, been afraid that Hunter would get to Faith, would hypnotize her. Mrs. Oldham had gone to the Norths to light a back fire, plant a theory. The theory: that Hunter, himself the murderer, would try through hypnosis to make Faith believe herself guilty, bring her to confess guilt. So—
“Actually,” Pam North said, “all the time all the poor thing had to do was wait a few months. And Jamey would have died and Faith got the money and—nobody would have had to kill anybody.”
She put it succinctly, Bill agreed, and stood up. Martini, seeing movement, jumped from Mullins’s lap. Pam looked at her reproachfully; said she was a bad subject, that she was supposed to be asleep.
“Come on, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said. “These people—”
He stopped and looked intently at Sergeant Mullins, who had not responded. They all looked at Mullins. “Sergeant!” Bill Weigand said, with more emphasis. And Sergeant Aloysius Mullins slept. Then Jerry and Bill looked at Pamela North, whose eyes rounded.
“Goodness,” Pam said. “I—I really did it. But I must have hit the wrong one. Goodness! I—I was aiming at Martini and—”
They waited.
“Sergeant,” Pam said, her voice very clear and decided. “Sergeant Mullins. You can wake up, now.”
There was a moment of some tension.
Sergeant Mullins opened his eyes.
“Did the Loot-I-mean-captain tell you that this Oldham dame admits cooling the professor?” Sergeant Mullins asked.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries
1
There was, Pamela North said, no use waiting to be adopted. “Because,” she said, “of the elevator. It’s asking too much.”
She said this across the breakfast table, on a bright morning in early September. Jerry said, “Um-m-m” and, “Somebody ought to teach him a second service” and then, “W
hat, Pam?” When he said the last he looked up from the folded newspaper stretched beside his plate.
Pam did not repeat, but only waited for seepage, which she assumed to be inevitable. Momentarily, her words lay on a mind’s surface, like drops of water on dry soil. They would penetrate.
“The elevator does complicate it,” Jerry North said. “You’re ready, then?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s empty the way it is. Of course, there’ll never be another—”
He smiled at her; smiled tenderly.
“All right,” Pam said. “Take it as unsaid. All the same, it’s true.”
“Of course,” Jerry said. “Nor was there another Pete. Another Ruffy. Each one is different. It’s a matter of luck. You cross your fingers and take a chance.”
He waited for her to nod her head. She didn’t “puddle up,” any more. So it was time for the next cat.
“You’re right about not being adopted,” he said. “Sitting on a doorstep. Yes. Any cat may be expected to do that. But not coming up in the elevator.”
Pete, who was the first cat, had sat, in the rain, on a stoop in the Village, waited to be rescued, spoken of discomfort, and been a kitten then. That had been long ago, when the Norths had lived in a walk-up. Pete had been black and white.
“Anyway,” Jerry said, “Siamese don’t adopt much. Unless?”
“Oh,” Pam said, “I think so. If we can find some who aren’t too pointed.”
She meant of face. Jerry knew she meant of face. When things have been said often enough, they go without further saying. Jerry said, “So?”
“Sampling,” Pam said. “You want to sample with me?”
He raised eyebrows.
“The fifty-third annual championship show of the Colony Cat Club,” Pam said. “All breeds. There’s a story about it in the Times. At the Burnside. The last day.”
“No,” Jerry said. “Author trouble.”
She said, “Bad?”
He shrugged.
“Lunch,” he said. “Soothing of ruffled feathers. They’re feathery beasts.”
“Whose second service?” Pam asked him, and this time he all but missed—said “Wh—” and then, “Oh.”
“Doug Mears’s,” he said. “Double-faulted eleven times in one set. Won it but—Al Laney’s very cross about it. In the Herald Trib.”
“Mr. Laney’s often cross,” Pam said. “Are we going out tomorrow? Or will there be authors in the way?”
“On Saturday?” Jerry said, in some astonishment. Pam said, a little absently, that she supposed authors had Saturdays, like anybody else. “Not,” Jerry told her, and now was grim, “on my time.”
He looked at his watch, then, and said, “Good God,” in a tone of surprise. Always, Pam North thought, he felt the same surprise, expressed it so. And always at about the same time of morning. It is pleasant, Pam thought, to be sure of things. It provides continuity.
Jerry went, leaning slightly to starboard under the weight of brief case full of manuscript. It was amazing, when one stopped to think of it, how long books were getting. Pam stopped only briefly to think of it. She poured herself more coffee, and read Mr. Al Laney, in the New York Herald Tribune, on the fourth-round matches in the national championships at Forest Hills. Mr. Laney was, indeed, very cross. He was cross not so much at Doug Mears, who had offended, as at his mentors, who let him continue to hit his second service as hard, and as flat, as his first. No good would come of that, Mr. Laney felt. If young players, and especially young players as promising as Doug Mears, were not better advised by their elders, the Davis Cup would remain in Australia for the foreseeable future. Mr. Laney evidently thought this would be very bad for it.
Pam turned from Mr. Laney to Mr. Walter Lippmann, who also was having a dark day. It was time, Pam decided, to glance at Mr. David Lawrence, whose column she habitually takes in small, therapeutic doses. A paragraph or two of Lawrence, taken with coffee, raises the blood pressure and arouses the mind, eliminating any possible trace of morning lethargy. Overdosage must, of course, be avoided, as of any counter-irritant.
Pam abandoned Mr. Lawrence when she felt the first glow of rage, said “Yah!” in his general direction, and went to clothe herself. She left a note for Martha—they would need more coffee and all the lemons in the refrigerator were naked, so they would need more lemons—and went down the elevator (which cats could not be expected to use) into the bright crispness of the September day. She wrapped the brightness around her, knowing it transient, and walked half a dozen blocks before she took a cab to the Hotel Burnside, which had a ballroom full of cats.
Pam paid at the desk, bought a catalogue, and walked among cages to look at cats. She was, in turn, looked at—looked at, distantly, through yellow eyes and green eyes, blue eyes and amber. Cats in cages crouched on cushions, nibbled from food dishes, scratched behind ears. But mostly, Pam felt, they looked at her—at her and the other people who walked between the rows of cages. Of course, she thought. The cats are attending a people show. How nice for them. Her mind checked. Perhaps, on the other hand, it wasn’t nice for them at all. A dull breed, the cats might think; a dull gray breed in monochrome.
The cats came in a variety of design, and this fact, which should not have surprised Pam North, was so dramatized by feline multitude that it did somewhat startle her. Black and white cats are to be anticipated; yellow cats are numerous enough and almost all cats run a little to tabby stripings. But these cats nevertheless dazzled. Some of the cats called “blue” were, indeed, almost blue in glossy fur; silver cats glimmered in the shadow of their cages. And the black cats wore jewels for eyes.
The trouble with the long-hairs, Pam found herself thinking, is that they are a little showy. Beautiful but—unrestrained. This one, she thought—pausing to look into a cage at a red tabby—really carries things too far. “Pretty kitty,” Pam said, absently, to the red tabby, who reclined on what appeared to be velvet. Pretty kitty turned away her head. Or his head. Number 181, pretty kitty was, and Pam looked the number up in the catalogue. She read, “Morland’s Enchanted Lady of Purrland, Dbl.Ch. Kute Kit Monarch of Purrland ex Lady Four Paws Beautiful of Purrland. Br-own Miss Rebecca Wuerth.”
“Goodness,” Pam North said, aloud but not especially to Enchanted Lady of Purrland. It had to be said to someone. “Poor Kitty,” Pam said, this time to the red tabby. What cats must think of people who named them so!
“If you please,” a thin voice said and Pam turned. The voice came from under a hat made of pink flowers. It came from between colorless lips in a sallow face. The woman who spoke wore a long black dress with—with fringe. Pam felt that she had wasted her “Goodness.” This, if ever, was the time for it. “If you please,” the woman said again and, assuming that to be desired, Pam moved away from Enchanted Lady’s cage. The woman in black and pink—and fringe!—opened Enchanted Lady’s cage and took the cat out of it. The woman found a stool and, from somewhere in the black dress, a brush and a comb. Without speaking to the cat, she began to brush her. The cat was equally without comment.
There couldn’t be much fun in it for anybody, Pam North thought, and smiled at the sallow woman in the pink—my God, why pink?—hat and was looked through. Pam went on, seeking Siamese. Siamese would, without doubt, have something to say.
She found them presently—a long row of Siamese. She spoke to the nearest, and was instantly spoken to. Thata-cat, Pam thought, and looked closer. A seal point, beautifully marked, sinuous even in repose, with a tail like a long brown whip—and, with a face that came to a point. “You poor thing,” Pam said, and sighed.
You spoke to cats and people also answered.
“Why?” a woman asked Pam North. “Why poor thing? A double grand champion. Why a poor thing?”
This woman was much younger and wore no hat at all; she wore a tweed suit of soft brown; she had pale hair and a pink face. And she was too large, too sturdy a woman for a tweed suit. Which was her business, not Pam’s.
“Oh,” Pa
m said. “A prejudice. I know they’re bred for pointed faces nowadays. I just wish they weren’t.” She looked down the Siamese row. “And they all are,” she said. “It makes it very difficult.”
The woman in the tweed suit repeated the last word. She had a robust voice.
“I’m sampling,” Pam said. “Mine—ours—” She paused momentarily. “Died,” she said. It still wasn’t easy to say. “She had a round face,” Pam said. “A baby face.” She looked again at the lithe double grand champion. “She looked like a cat,” Pam said. “I think they should.”
“They’re supposed to have wedge-shaped faces,” the woman in tweed said, and was somewhat impatient.
“A wedge,” Pam North said, with conviction, “isn’t a cone.”
It was a last word. Pam was not sure it was precisely the word she wanted, but there is no use arguing with people who—presumably—show cats. “Anyway,” Pam said, as one more word, and started to move down the row of cages.
“You’re looking for a cat,” the tweed woman said. “Perhaps I can help you. Sometimes they—revert. Even in the best lines—I’m Madeline Somers.”
It seemed to Pam that the expected answer to that probably was “Not really?” She could not manage it. She said, “I’m Pamela North,” with no thought that Madeline Somers would care particularly. It was merely a matter of fair exchange.
“Not really!” Madeline Somers said, heartily. Pam looked at her with widened eyes.
“The Mrs. North,” Madeline Somers said, and this time with triumph. Pam blinked her eyes, involuntarily. “The—” Madeline Somers said and stopped abruptly. “The—” Miss Somers repeated, but with obviously less confidence. “Wait,” Miss Somers said, and Pam waited. “Criminologist!” Miss Somers said, triumph regained. And to this Pam, after a little shuffling of her mind, could only say, “Oh.” She shuffled further. “Not really,” she said.