by Frances
Pam North was on one side of the table, her hands grasping it, leaning forward—and yelling toward the microphone. Dan Beck was in a somewhat similar position on the other side, and he was swearing with a kind of horrible anger in his voice. He had just started to move around the table when the door opened. He whirled to face it and then, without pausing, he charged at Bill Weigand. Nobody ever knew what he had planned to do. What he did was crumple to the floor when Weigand’s fist caught him.
Pam still stood behind the table, her tattered dress hanging in strings from her shoulders. She continued, with a kind of terrified, mad insistence, to shout into the microphone.
But the great radio audience was no longer hearing her. The engineer at master control, after some seconds of horrified astonishment, had hurriedly pulled more levers. Probably if he had thought of it, he would have returned the Book Forum to the air. But it was no time for thought. Desperately, the engineer at master control cut in on a band from Los Angeles. It was playing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” The engineer in master control sighed in relief and slumped in his chair.
Dorian’s arms were around Pam North, who trembled convulsively in them. Dorian was saying, “It’s all right, dear, Bill got him,” when Jerry North, white-faced, burst into the room. In his excitement, he embraced both Pam and Dorian. Dorian smiled up at him and slipped from his arms. He folded them around Pam very tightly. “It’s all right, dear,” he said. “It’s all right, kid. Bill got him,” Jerry paused. “You were wonderful, kid,” he said. “And your slip shows.” Jerry thought of this for a moment. “At the top,” he said. He thought again. “Not that it matters,” he assured her.
Pam clung to Jerry. She was shaking in his arms, and crying, and laughing a little.
“He wasn’t stolen at all, Jerry,” she said. “He wasn’t ever stolen. I was all wrong. He was just—just an actor. He didn’t even know the words. Jerry. He was just—he was just Elliot’s Charlie McCarthy. Isn’t that funny, Jerry? And he killed all those people because he was just somebody else’s dummy, and so people wouldn’t know. Isn’t that funny, Jerry?”
Jerry held her very closely. When he spoke his voice was low and quiet.
“No dear,” he said. “It isn’t very funny, Pam. Not very funny.”
XV. Friday, 6:30 P.M. and Thereafter
Bill Weigand came late to the Norths and looked tired and there was a kind of hush while Jerry North measured gin and vermouth, three and one. The ice clattered in the mixer; Jerry poured and twisted lemon peel and Bill drank. Bill said something which sounded like “unh!” in a tone of great contentment. The Norths and Dorian looked at him and he smiled faintly and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “He didn’t come through. He’s going to make it hard for us.” Bill looked at Pam. “It’s too bad,” he said, “that you didn’t persuade him to confess over the radio, Pam. There was a recorder on, and that would have made things very nice. Very nice indeed.”
“Well,” Pam said. “I was busy. He was trying to choke me. Or something. In case you didn’t notice.”
That, Bill Weigand admitted, would help. Efforts to choke people before witnesses were not well thought of by the Police Department. But a confession to the murders of Ann Lawrence, Frances McCalley, Florence Pennock and John Elliot would have been better.
“Neater,” Pam agreed. “I can see that. Do you have to have it?”
Bill shrugged. He said he hoped not. He said that, on the whole, he thought not. But it would be, at best, a case of intimations—a case made up of small details, each suggesting one thing; none proving, if the jury chose to be literal, anything. Even now, Bill told them, it would be easier to convict Alfred Pierson. Even now, the case against him was simpler and more direct; more understandable.
“Only,” Pam pointed out, “Pierson didn’t kill anybody. And Mr. Beck did.” She considered this. “Which ought to make a difference,” she painted out.
Bill smiled a little and said it probably would. In the end. The end wasn’t yet; there were still the minutiae of evidence to be amassed. But now—and this was the way it usually happened—they knew where to look.
“Like,” he said, “at Beck’s old scripts, enough of which we’ve found. All written on Elliot’s typewriter. Like the story Beck’s servants will tell, once we persuade them it would be a good idea to tell. They’ve told part of it already—they’ve told that Elliot used to come every day; that he was always with Beck during the time that Beck was supposed to be writing his broadcasts. And they’ll tell, because they know, that Beck did go out the night that Ann was killed, instead of staying innocently at home. They won’t be able to tell where he went, but it will give him something to explain—and the jury something to guess about.”
“Were they in on it?” Pam wanted to know. “The servants, I mean. The nice old couple?”
The couple was older than it was nice, Weigand said. Were they in on it? That would be hard to say; they wouldn’t be charged with anything, if they talked up properly. They were not in on the murder; it was not even certain that they knew about it. They were in on Beck’s ramp, to the extent of knowing about it. But that was not criminal. There was, he pointed out, nothing criminal in hiring a ghost. If there were, half the public speakers—
He broke off and corrected himself.
“More than half,” he said. “There’s no law against it.”
He paused again, thinking it over. He said that that was what made it so odd. There was no law, there was not even custom, against a man having his speeches written. And that was all Beck had done—unless you went below the surface. And that was what it was going to be difficult to make a jury understand. That was all Beck had done, except to kill four people to prevent a fact coming out which, in the case of another man, would be no more than a pinprick to vanity. The fact that Beck—the great Beck—was only a voice.
You could begin to see how it was, Weigand said, when you talked to Beck. Because in a way, when you talked to him, it turned out that Beck was mad.
Pam nodded.
“He’s crazy,” she said. “It’s—it’s frightening. I never met one before—a—a leader. If that’s what he is. A man trying to be God. And believing it.”
A megalomaniac, Bill Weigand said. Probably actually on the border-line—that mystic, blurred line which lay, perhaps, between what was called insanity and what wasn’t. A mania shared by most of history’s villains, and by not a few of its saints. A mania which became most dangerous, perhaps, when it distorted a mind which was not essentially a very good mind. Like Hitler’s. Like Nero’s. Like Dan Beck’s. The comparisons were not absurd. Beck was probably as efficient an agent of retrogression, and of terrorism, as Hitler. The danger from Beck had remained, so far, chiefly potential. But there was no reason to think that, given the right time and place, he might not have been as devastating as Hitler—as good a figurehead for tyranny. His mind was as good; if anything, he was slightly more coherent, a little more plausible. And he had the same delusions. He saw himself as a man on horseback.
“Not, I think solely for what he could make out of it,” Bill amplified. “It isn’t as simple as that. Unless you broaden the term—make it mean what he could be out of it. He isn’t insincere, any more than any madman is insincere. Probably he would argue—although not very well since he killed Elliot—that he is really heading, or preparing to head, a great movement to make people happy. But the arguments would be merely window-dressing. Because what made his ideas great, to him—what would have made any idea great—was that he represented it. He was what was tremendous. The greatness lay in him. And I suppose he thought of himself—thinks of himself—as somehow sacred. To stand in his way is—oh, I don’t know. Standing in the way of Man, or something.”
“Did you,” Jerry wanted to know, “get all that out of talking with him today?”
Bill Weigand started and then grinned.
“Right,” he said. “It’s pure interpretation, based partly on what has
to be true. Because he admitted to Pam that he murdered Ann Lawrence, and that was why he murdered her. There wasn’t any other reason.” Bill turned to Pam. “Incidentally, Pam,” he said, “you’ll have to testify to that. It will be admissible. And you’ll have to stand a lot of cross-examination and—and slurs.”
“All right,” Pam said, equably. “I don’t think people ought to kill people.” She thought this over. “I never did,” she added. “And you’re right about the way Beck feels about things, Bill. You make it very clear.”
Or, Bill qualified, very turgid. But that, or enough of that to go on with, was what the jury would have to understand. Because once they understood that, the rest would be simple. They would still have to use their imaginations, but they would have something for imagination to stand on. They would have to make the assumptions which followed logically—the assumptions to which the State would point.
Ann Lawrence had been telling Elliot that he had to give something up. They could prove that from Mrs. Pennock’s statements, which were part of an informal record—admissible, they could hope, on the testimony of members of the police force who had heard her make them. What the jury would have to believe was that Ann was telling Elliot he had to give up writing for Beck. The State could suggest—would suggest—the reasons she must have had. She thought the work Elliot was doing, cynically, was a dangerous and anti-social kind of work. They could prove without much trouble that she had strong views about things like that. She thought, the State would further suggest, that Elliot ought to be doing his own work—that, even if not a “wrong” thing, writing all Beck’s speeches for him—writing for Beck everything attributed to Beck—was an unwise thing for Elliot to do. Unwise from the point of view of his own future. The State would suggest that Elliot had come up against a choice between Ann—who could give him not only love but the money and more than the money he made from Beck—and Beck himself. Fighting for Elliot, Ann probably threatened to tell what she knew of the Elliot-Beck collaboration, exposing Beck.
“Which,” Weigand said, “would have ruined Beck if it had been believed. Because Beck, to his followers, wasn’t just a man who said things on the radio. He was the Great Man. And he couldn’t be just part of a great man—just the voice of a great man. Which was what he really was. Elliot, and the scripts we have show it, was more than a ghost. Elliot was the brains of the whole affair. Probably that knowledge, as much as the money, kept him at it. Elliot had power of his own—and loved it. That’s why, even when he began to suspect Beck, he didn’t come to us, but tried to work it out on his own. He wouldn’t stand for murder, and that in the end killed him. But he would stand for a good deal to keep the Elliot-Beck game going. It was a game he enjoyed. He wasn’t, evidently, very scrupulous.”
The night of Ann’s murder Elliot, as they would try to reconstruct it for the jury, had listened to the girl and been to a degree swayed. Probably he was easily swayed—and if he was, Beck knew it. Beck was shrewd. Probably the girl’s effort to get Elliot away from Beck had been going on for some time, and recently intensifying. After he had left the girl, Elliot had called Beck. (This was assumption, but it fitted.) He had indicated that he was thinking of calling the collaboration off. And Beck went at once to Ann’s house for a showdown.
He did not, Weigand thought, go with the explicit intention of killing her. Probably he hoped to persuade her. But if he did he failed. And if he failed, his whole megalomaniac world-structure fell apart. Perhaps the last straw was when she threatened to expose him. And then—
“Well,” Weigand said, “then she was an obstacle and invited—well, invited the thunderbolt. It fell.”
That was the first murder. The second—the murder of Frances McCalley—they could only guess about. (But Beck would not be on trial for it.) During her conversation with Beck, Ann undoubtedly let fall something which revealed that she was not the only one who knew that Beck was really only a voice with Elliot’s mind directing it. She let it out that Frances McCalley knew too. And after killing Ann, Beck realized that this knowledge in Frances McCalley’s mind would, if she was allowed to reveal it, be a signpost pointing directly at his guilt. So he had to kill her. So he did kill her.
Mrs. Pennock was killed because she had seen Beck come to the house after Elliot had left. But she had also seen Pierson there—Pierson had gone there between Elliot’s departure and Beck’s arrival. Mrs. Pennock wasn’t sure that Ann had not been dead when Beck arrived—she wasn’t sure whether Pierson or Beck had killed the girl. (She knew Elliot hadn’t; Elliot was a shield set up to protect the other two men to keep them safe for blackmail.) So she had tried to blackmail them both. And there Pierson would come in. Already, twisting this way and that to get out of his own trap, he had hinted that he would admit that Mrs. Pennock had been talking to him when she was killed. He might even, Weigand thought, say that he had heard Mrs. Pennock speak to Beck before Beck killed her.
“And if he does,” Bill said, “I think he’ll be lying. To save his own skin. Which it won’t—he’s going up for larceny, whatever he does.” He smiled slightly. “Of course,” he admitted, “the length of time he goes up for may—but you wouldn’t want to hear about that.”
“No,” Jerry said gravely. “We couldn’t bear to.”
Elliot probably suspected Beck from the first; presumably he had gone to the considerable trouble of escaping because he wanted to get to Beck and find out. Probably Beck talked Elliot out of the idea—or almost out of the idea—for a time. And he gave Elliot the alibi, which was at the same time an alibi for Beck. It was easy to half-persuade Elliot of Beck’s innocence, because Elliot wanted to believe him innocent. He wanted to keep the collaboration going. But that half persuasion became a good deal less than half when Elliot heard of Frances McCalley’s death. Here were the two people who were linked, chiefly, through him—and the two who knew he was more than half the great Beck. It must have become pretty clear to Elliot then, and it must have become clearer the more he thought about it. Until—
“Until he went to Beck again,” Pam said. “And accused him. And then Beck got violent again. And killed him. Because by that time there wasn’t any choice, even if he did lay the golden eggs. Because you have to kill even that kind of a goose if it can—can—What can geese do, anyway?”
“Hiss at you,” Dorian said. “Fly at your eyes. I don’t know.”
This one, Bill pointed out, could send Beck to the electric chair.
Bill Weigand discovered, with faint surprise, that his cocktail glass was full again. He noted, with pleasure, that he had neglected to keep any sort of count. He put the cocktail where it belonged.
“And so, I think, can we,” he added. “With a little here and a little there, and the right kind of hints and things.” He looked at his empty glass reflectively, holding it not quite out, but so that a really ardent host might think of it as being out. Jerry North obliged.
“I hope we can,” he said. “It will please the commissioner very much. The commissioner doesn’t like Mr. Beck.”
Pam considered this. She thought of Beck on the other side of a very frail table, and of what she had seen in Beck’s eyes.
“Do you know,” she said, “I think the commissioner and I will get on fine. When we meet, of course. He seems to dislike the most—the most unlikeable people. And Mr. Beck was, wasn’t he?”
It was interesting, Bill Weigand thought, to notice that Pam North used the past tense in speaking of Mr. Beck. Now if the jury could be brought to see with Pam North’s eyes. He thought this over and sighed. There would have, he decided, to be an easier way than that.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries
1
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11: 5:30 P.M. TO 10:55 P.M.
Miss Amelia Gipson presented a firm front to the world; she stood for no nonsense. For the conscious period of her fifty-two years she had stood for no nonsense in a world which was stubbornly nonsensical. The nonsense in the world
had not been greatly abated by her attitude, but Miss Gipson’s skirts were clean. What one person could do, she had done. If that was inadequate, the fault lay elsewhere; there was a laxity in higher places. Miss Gipson often suspected that there was.
She wore a gray rayon dress on this, the last evening of her life. It was fitted smoothly on her substantial body, which, although Miss Gipson was not notably a large woman, was apt to give frailer persons an impression of massiveness. It followed her firm bosom—a meticulously undivided expanse—with discretion; it was snug over her corseted hips. There was a touch of white at the throat; there was a little watch hanging from a silver pin on the left side of the central expanse. Above the touch of white at the throat, Miss Gipson’s face was firm and untroubled; it was a face on which assurance rode, sure of a welcome. Miss Gipson did not know that it was the last evening of her life. Nothing was further from her thoughts.
The colored elevator man in the Holborn Annex greeted her with docile respect and rather as if he expected her to smell his breath. She had complained to the management on one occasion that there had been, in George’s car, an unmistakable odor of liquor. She had indicated a belief that it might have had its origin in George. She had pointed out that an elevator operated by a person under the influence of alcohol was a menace to the tenants. The management had listened, nodding agreement, and had taken it up.
“Beer ain’t liquor,” George had insisted. “I had me a beer. A beer ain’t liquor.”
Anything was liquor to Miss Gipson, the management thought, fleetingly, and as it thought of Miss Gipson had a sudden, unaccountable longing for a drink. But the management merely cautioned George, a little vaguely, not to let it happen again. He hoped, this evening, that Miss Gipson would not detect that it had happened again.