Curtain for a Jester

by Frances Lockridge

  The face was thin and white and for a moment Pam thought that the man who lay there was the thin, white youth Wilmot had called his nephew. But, in almost the same instant, she realized that she was wrong. The man on the terrace floor had red hair. Through one eyebrow ran a narrow scar. It wasn’t Clyde Parsons—it wasn’t anybody she had seen before.

  Arthur Monteath looked down for a long moment at the face of the man he had shot. Then he looked, with a strange concentration, at the face of Wilmot, who was looking up at him. And then two strange things happened, or Pam thought they did.

  She could not be sure that Wilmot, just perceptibly, nodded to Monteath. But of the next thing, she could be sure—they could all be sure.

  Wilmot teetered back on his heels, caught himself with his hands, sat on the floor. And then Byron Wilmot laughed. Byron Wilmot roared with merriment.

  It was shocking for only a moment. Then it was obvious. What was on the floor was only the replica of a man. The red on the shirt came from one of Wilmot’s ingenious devices. The—

  “Ho, ho, HO!” Wilmot laughed. “Ha-ha, ha-ha, WHOAH!”

  Someone in the group who looked down at him laughed. But it was nervous laughter. Another tried to laugh, and then another. Wilmot laughed on.

  Arthur Monteath did not laugh at all. He stood, rather rigid, and looked down at Wilmot and Wilmot, red of face, leaned back on his hands and laughed up at him. He seemed, Pam thought, to laugh for Monteath.

  It lasted only a moment. Wilmot got to his feet then, and his laughter died away. After a moment he reached down and took the mannequin by the coat collar and dragged it into the room.

  In the room, except for the face, it was merely a clothing dummy. But even in the light, the face was surprising. It was not a face well-shaped and meaningless, the conventional mask of a face. It was individualized—a thin face, with slightly twisted lips. The wig which crowned the mannequin—and was now somewhat askew—was a wig of red hair, unnaturally smooth, to be sure, but losing by that nothing of its incongruity. Clothing dummies just don’t have red hair, Pamela North thought. Why would anybody go to the trouble?

  “Lifelike, ain’t he?” Wilmot said. He turned to Monteath, who had come into the doorway and stood looking down at the plastic face. “Hell, Artie,” Wilmot said. “Sure they were blanks. Think I want you banging away in my direction?” Monteath said nothing. “Hell, man,” Wilmot said, “you can take a joke, can’t you?”

  Monteath spoke then, after a further pause.

  “Why yes, Wilmot,” he said. “I can take a joke.” He paused and looked again at the mannequin’s face. “You did a very convincing job,” he said.

  “Well,” Wilmot said, “so did you, old man. So did you.” He paused. “Know what I mean?” he said, making the meaningless phrase more meaningless with a chuckle. Monteath did not chuckle in return; he did not speak. He merely nodded.

  The murder of the dummy was the climax of the evening. Mr. Wilmot did, to be sure, explain it all—how the dummy had been rigged to wires and so made movable, how Frank had been primed to turn off the lights at the appropriate moment, how Wilmot had had the blank-loaded revolvers ready to hand; how he had fired first, hoping that Monteath, thinking the man between had fired at them, would himself fire by reflex, knowing he would not kill.

  “Had to get a man who would do something,” Wilmot explained. “That’s good old Artie.”

  If good old Artie appreciated this compliment, his face did not reveal it. Good old Artie laid down the gun, moved farther into the big living room, away from Wilmot, from the prostrate dummy.

  Mr. Wilmot explained it all, being evidently pleased with all of it. He was listened to with politeness, rather than with avidity, and when he had finished, or nearly finished, his guests began to make the discovery that it was growing late. A fine party, a wonderful party. But tomorrow—no, today—was a working day. The blond girl and her Tommy were the first actually to leave, although there was nothing about either to suggest there were alarm clocks in their lives. Thereafter, there was a general collection of wraps, a series of congregations in the foyer—and not all Wilmot’s jovial assertion that it was early yet, not all his proffer of newer tricks and more elaborate treats could stay the departing guests.

  But Pam and Jerry North, although they had been among the first to think of leaving, were not among the first to leave. Jerry had, at what should have been a final moment, managed to get himself entrapped in conversation (with the gray-haired woman who had dropped so quickly behind a chair and who seemed to have been startled into complete wakefulness) and even after Pam had retrieved her stole (quite enough wrap for the rigors of the elevator) he had still not fully edged away.

  So they, and Jerry’s conversationalist and Arthur Monteath—who had been drawn aside by Wilmot himself, and who had listened rather than talked—and Baker in his romper suit and Martha Evitts in her weeds were on hand for the final act of the evening. The act was brief, and not pleasant.

  Clyde Parsons came from some shadow. He came staggering. His too narrow tie was pulled to one side, his too pale face was now almost frighteningly white. He swayed as he stopped in front of his uncle and Monteath, as he—with drunken emphasis, looked Wilmot up and down.

  “You’re a bloody old fool,” he said then, and said it loudly. “You can take your lousy money and—”

  Wilmot stopped him, or at any rate drowned out his voice.

  “You’re drunk, Clyde,” Wilmot said, his voice booming. “Drunk as usual.” He smiled still, but there was no smile in his voice. “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Frank!”

  But there was no need for Frank. Clyde Parsons got himself out of there and his destination, Pam thought as he wavered past her, might well be that indicated. There was hell enough in his thin, pale face. He wavered into the foyer.

  He was at the outer door when the gray-haired woman caught up with him, detained him momentarily. She turned back to look at Wilmot, and she said, flatly, “You do things well, don’t you Byron? Nobody does them better, do they?”

  And then she went, with Parsons.

  “Good night,” Baker said then, and said it abruptly, and Martha Evitts said nothing, and did not look at Wilmot and went with Baker. “Sorry about that,” Wilmot said. “We’ve had a good deal of trouble with Clyde. Nice boy, but he will—”

  “It’s been,” Pam North said, “a very interesting party, Mr. Wilmot.” She paused. “So much going on,” she said, and then she went and Jerry after her.

  The elevator door closed when they were just in sight of it. The elevator carried downward, presumably, Parsons and the woman with gray hair, Baker in his rompers and Miss Evitts in dusty black.

  “Who,” Pam asked, while they waited, “was your talkative friend?”

  “Talkative?” Jerry said. “Oh. You didn’t meet her?”

  “Anyway,” Pam said. “She didn’t stick. I mean—”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “Well, that was Mrs. Wilmot. The Mrs. Wilmot who used to be. She divorced Wilmot because he put a snake in her bed.”

  “Annoying,” Pam said. “But still.”

  “It wasn’t rubber,” Jerry said. “It was—”

  “Good heavens!” Pam North said. “A snake snake?” Jerry nodded. “Divorce was too good for him,” Pam said. “It’s coming now.”

  It was, by its rumble. There was only the sound to prove its progress; the indicator arrow pointed stubbornly to the fifth floor, as it had for a week or more.

  Arthur Monteath joined them while they still waited. He said, “Quite a party.” He looked, Pam North thought, tired, and older than he had looked a few hours before.

  “Phew!” Jerry said.

  The elevator door opened and they went into the little box.

  “Why,” Pam said, when the elevator started down, “don’t you stop in and have a drink? Now, I mean. Unless you don’t like cats, of course.”

  “I do like cats,” Monteath said. “But isn’t it rather—”
r />   “Not really,” Pam said. “And how can anybody sleep after—after all that? Can you, Jerry?”

  Jerry North thought he might; thought he very easily might. But he did not say this. Monteath hesitated. Then he said, “I’d like to. For only a few minutes, I promise,” thus somewhat surprising both of the Norths.

  They stopped. Drinks were suggested, coffee was agreed upon. The cats awoke; they smelled Arthur Monteath, who put a hand close to the floor so that it might be smelled conveniently; who was accepted at once by Sherry, partially accepted by Gin, rejected—but without undue prejudice—by Martini who, when Pam finally sat down (humans wasted more time) occupied Pam’s lap, from that safety to stare at Monteath with the roundest of blue eyes.

  Conversation was not active. Monteath was in New York for a few days only, going then to Washington. He would telephone Jerry before he left and arrange an appointment to discuss the ambassador’s book. Where the world went from where it was, no good place, was anybody’s guess. Monteath was abstracted, the major part of his mind clearly elsewhere.

  “Mr. Wilmot certainly goes to a lot of trouble,” Pam said at one point. “Why a special face on the dummy?”

  “Why any of it?” Jerry said. “What an evening!”

  “An—an inventive man,” Monteath said, of Wilmot, but let it drop there. Sherry rubbed against his leg and he stroked her, absently. Then he stood up, quite suddenly. He would, he said, be getting along. He appreciated the coffee. He smiled, then, and the smile changed his face.

  “The fact is,” he said, “I’m keeping us all up.”

  The protest was only polite. They went with him to the door, waited until the elevator came, the door closed and the mechanism ground.

  “There wasn’t much point to that, was there?” Jerry enquired, and yawned and undid his tie. “What was all that about not being able to go to sleep?”

  Pamela said she didn’t know, and yawned too. It had been an idea, only an idea; not a good idea. Of course, she added, there was always the ambassador’s book. But to that Jerry, coat-less, removing studs from his shirt, said only, sleepily, “Huh,” dismissing all books by all ambassadors.

  Yet they were too sleepy, too tired, to hurry into bed. In robes, they drifted back to the living room, sleepily they drank more coffee, which did not arouse them. The cats suggested activities. Martini brought a battered catnip mouse, urging that it be thrown, and Jerry threw it, feebly.

  “Why don’t we go to bed?” Pam asked. “Wake up and go to bed?” and absently poured herself the remaining half cup of not hot coffee. Jerry didn’t know; he said he didn’t know, and did not move. Then nobody said anything and then Jerry began to breathe deeply.

  That sufficiently aroused Pam, who sufficiently aroused Jerry. But they still went to their beds without opening the window and Pam was just experiencing a pleasant blurring of thought when she remembered.

  She went to the window, from which one could look down to a quiet street, and raised it wide.

  And then, because of what she saw, she drew her breath in quickly and then cried out, “Jerry! Jerry!”

  “Wha—what!” Jerry said, coming out of sleep. “What!?”

  “Something just fell by,” Pam said. “Something—Jerry, it was a man! Jerry—somebody fell out!”

  She had turned from the window.

  “Jerry,” she said. “I think it was Mr. Wilmot!”

  There was a group already there. The superintendent of the building was there, with his wife, who hugged around her a robe she filled without shaping. Several people had come out of nowhere to form a circle, and more came. Then the police came in a prowl car. They came simultaneously with the Norths, who had had to dress—who had hesitated to come at all, being people who gave wide berth to street accidents, hurrying past them, with Pam always a little white. But if it is callous to stare in curiosity it is also callous to say, in effect, “Oh, Mr. Jones just went by” as Mr. Jones falls past your bedroom window. “Particularly,” Pam North pointed out, “if he’s just been your host.”

  Why she was so certain the man who had fallen was—or now, more accurately, had been—Byron Wilmot, Pam could not explain to Jerry as, after waiting a moment for the elevator, they ran down the stairs. “I know there wasn’t time to tell,” Pam said. “But—who else would it have been?”

  One of the policemen looked at what was on the sidewalk. The other said, “All right, now. Stand back,” and then, “Anybody here named North?”

  There was, Jerry admitted.

  “You made the squeal? That is, you telephoned?”

  “Yes,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah,” the policeman said. “You telephoned. Said a man had fallen.”

  “Somebody,” Jerry said. “My wife thought it was a man.”

  “Oh,” the policeman said. “She did, huh? You his wife?”

  “Yes,” Pam said.

  “O.K.,” the policeman said. “So you’d better have a look. Let these people through there.”

  But Pam shrank back, shaking her head. Jerry, feeling a little sick, went through the circle. He looked at what was on the sidewalk. He said, “My God!”

  The dummy was fragments, strewn widely. There was nothing left of the face over which someone had taken such pains. If the red wig had not been among the shards, if one arm had not escaped disintegration, it would have been difficult to tell what had been shattered on the sidewalk.

  “Quite a joke, mister,” the articulate policeman said. “Very funny joke. Ever think it might have hit somebody? Ever hear there’s a law against throwing things out windows?”

  It wasn’t, Jerry explained, their joke. They had reported only what had happened, or what they thought had happened.

  “Look, Ben,” the cop who had been staring at the remains said, “whata we do with it?”

  Ben pondered this.

  “Of course,” he said, “the ambulance boys’ll be along.” He did not say this with confidence. He offered it with doubt.

  “Trouble is,” the other policeman said. “It’s not a body, is it? But on the other hand, it’s something like a body.” He looked at it. “Was,” he said.

  “I tell you,” Ben said. “It’s litter.” He looked around the circle, which was by way of becoming a crowd. “You!” he said. “You the janitor?”

  “Superintendent,” the woman in the robe said. “Tell him, Lennie. Don’t let him push you around.”

  Lennie was a small man.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Superintendent.” He paused. “Officer,” he added.

  “You know what this is, don’t you?” Ben demanded, in the voice of a policeman. “What you got here’s a violation. Ordinance—what’s the ordinance, Charlie?”

  “Littering the sidewalk, multiple dwelling,” the other patrolman said. “Number—I don’t know the number offhand. Also, throwing things out of windows to the public danger. Also—”

  The ambulance came then, its lights red. It stopped and panted and an interne came out on one side and the driver on the other.

  “We live in the basement,” Lennie said, and his voice quavered. “This came down from up.”

  “What the?” the interne said, looking at the remains of the dummy. He waved his hand at it. “What the?”

  “That gentleman,” Ben said, and looked at Jerry North with sternness. “Said a man jumped or fell.”

  “Defenestration,” Pam North said, unexpectedly, her voice rather high. “If people would just be quiet, we’d tell you. It’s Mr. Wilmot’s.”

  The patrolman named Ben took his cap off. He rubbed his head. He replaced the cap.

  “Listen, lady,” Ben said. “That’s Mr. Wilmot?” He shook his head. “Friend of yours, probably?” he said. “Friend of hers, Charlie.”

  “Ha,” the other patrolman said.

  “Mr. Wilmot’s,” Pam said. “He lives in the penthouse. There was a party and somebody shot—this.” She pointed. “It was his idea of a joke.”

  “His?” Ben sai
d, and indicated the fragments.

  “Listen,” the ambulance interne said, “what the? You expect us to take this?”

  “Put a D.O.A. tag on it, doc,” the driver of the ambulance said. “That’s what they want. D.O.A. tag. Then we go get some coffee.”

  There was a siren around the corner. A prowl car came around the corner behind red lights. It joined the ambulance and the first prowl car. Two men, one of them rather drunk, came around the corner after it. Across the street, several people opened windows. A sergeant got out of the new prowl car and said, loudly, “All right. What’s going on here?” He looked around. “You, McGillicuddy,” he said. “What’s all this?”

  “You got me, sergeant,” Ben McGillicuddy said. “This was supposed to be a man.” He pointed.

  “By whom?” the sergeant said, in a voice heavy with skepticism.

  “I’ve been trying—” Pam said.

  “Always push you around, Lennie,” the superintendent’s wife said.

  “Those two,” Patrolman McGillicuddy said, and pointed. “They made the squeal.”

  “Leave us get the hell out of here, doc,” the ambulance driver said. “We can’t take that in.”

  “All right,” the sergeant said. “What’s it all about, lady? What’s the name, lady?”

  “North,” Jerry said. “If you’d let us—”

  “Listen,” the sergeant said. “Gerald North? Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North?”

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Yes.”

  “My God!” the sergeant said.

  “I’ve been trying to tell this—this officer,” Pam said. “It belonged to Mr. Wilmot. He must have—have dropped it.” She paused. “After all,” she said. “It’s April Fool’s Day. Or just was.”

  “Wait a minute,” the sergeant said. He said, “All right, doc, nothing for you.” He said, “Get this broken up, McGillicuddy.” He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “Go ahead, Mrs. North.”

  Pamela North went ahead.

  All manner of things happen to policemen. Sergeant Fox thought this, getting out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, searching for and finding the flight of stairs to the penthouse. At two-thirty in the morning (not even of April Fool’s Day) he was required to ask a man named Wilmot why he had dropped a clothing dummy thirteen stories to a sidewalk, to the hazard of pedestrians—to ask him what kind of joke he thought that was. It seemed rather silly.