by Frances
“You must understand,” he said, “that Mr. Halder was legally quite rational, entirely competent. About that there can be no question. That is understood?”
“Right,” Bill said.
“Beyond that,” Faberworth said, in the same grave voice, “I should consider him as peculiar as any man I ever met. Certainly as peculiar as anyone with thirty million dollars I ever met. And, some years ago, I knew him rather well.” He stroked the sides of his face with two fingers of each hand. “He had frequent need of legal services,” Mr. Faberworth said, with detachment. He paused again and Bill Weigand waited. “When I was a boy,” Mr. Faberworth said, “a boy in rather a small town, there was an old man who lived in a very large house. Quite the largest house on my route.” He looked at Weigand. “I threw papers,” he said. “That was what we called it. He was one of my customers and once every two weeks I had to collect for the papers. The house was full of cats.” He shook his head, toying with a strange memory. “I would have said then, a hundred cats. Probably not more than thirty. But—” He shook his head. “Most of them seemed to come to the door with the old man,” Mr. Faberworth said. “It was quite disconcerting. I have never cared properly for cats since, I’m afraid.”
He ceased abruptly to be the remembered boy; he became the middle-aged man.
“Mr. Halder often made me think of that man,” Faberworth said. “Chiefly, I suppose, because of their common addiction to animals. Of course, Halder gratified his addiction in a—a somewhat more reasonable manner. And he lived, in many respects, an entirely normal life, whatever that is. The old man with the cats didn’t.” Momentarily, memory again unfocussed the attorney’s eyes. “He must have washed very infrequently, if at all,” he said. “Mr. Halder, of course, was normally scrupulous. But neither of them cared for people.”
“In Halder’s case, how seriously should that be taken?” Bill asked.
The attorney put the tips of his fingers together and regarded them.
“This side of anything really approaching—ah—mental incapacity, quite seriously,” he said, at length. “He said once, publicly, something to the effect that people made him sick. Not a literal statement, of course. But I always felt he meant it much more than people usually do when they say things like that. He used to argue that people—the human animal generally—had proved so completely inadequate, made such a mess of things, that if it had any decency it would—ah—voluntarily withdraw.”
“Nevertheless,” Bill pointed out, “he had three children himself.”
“Quite,” Faberworth agreed. “Of course, his—ah—conviction grew stronger as he got older.”
The two men sat silently for a moment.
“Do you know of anything—any particular event, or events—which strengthened this conviction?” Bill Weigand asked, then.
Faberworth shook his head. He said he thought that convictions often grew stronger, more rigid, as men grew older.
“Of course,” he added to this, “it is perhaps as often the other way around.”
There was another pause.
“I imagine he was to some degree fond of Felix Sneddiger,” the lawyer said. “At any rate, they played chess together. Now he’s dead, too.”
“Right,” Bill said. He did not amplify.
“He always named the animals fancifully,” Faberworth said. “I’m telling you what little I know about him, always without prejudice.”
“And,” Bill said, “without witnesses.”
“Quite,” Faberworth said, and smiled. “Without witnesses. Three or four years ago they were all named out of Shakespeare, although I had never supposed Halder had any special literary interests. Then they began to get Greek names. Chiefly out of the Orestes-Electra legend. Did you know?”
Weigand nodded.
“The Scottie named Aegisthus?” Faberworth said. “The one he gave his wife? The black cat, recently, named Electra? And I think there was another cat, a Siamese, named Pylades. Orestes’ friend, you remember.”
“Yes,” Bill said.
“He called the cockers, the ones he kept in the window, The Furies,” the lawyer said. “I believe they had other names but, collectively, they were The Furies.”
“You seem to have been familiar with the shop,” Weigand said.
“I dropped in now and then,” Faberworth said. “I live in that part of town.”
“Did you gather that the names had special significance?” Weigand asked, when the attorney did not continue. “It seems a little confused. The boxer, the one who’s sick, is named Clytemnestra, for example. But Electra’s a cat.”
Faberworth shrugged. He said he did not suppose the analogy, if there was one, was supposed to go quite on all fours. “Except literally,” he added. “As a matter of fact, of course, the name is given to a female dog, you notice. And the lady was, one gathers from Aeschylus, something of a—” He paused, with unnecessary delicacy.
“Did he sell the animals?” Weigand said.
Again Faberworth shrugged. Not, he said, when it could conveniently be avoided; avoided without too much appearance of eccentricity. He preferred to give them away.
“Do you know if he planned to give the boxer to anyone?” Weigand asked. “Before she got sick.”
“No,” Faberworth said. His voice was flat, not encouraging.
“Was there ever an animal named Orestes?”
“He said something about getting the cat, Electra, an—ah—companion,” the lawyer said. “I don’t know whether it would have been—ah—”
“A brother?” Weigand asked.
“Really, Lieutenant,” Faberworth said. “Aren’t we—ah—carrying this a little far?”
“Probably we are,” Weigand said. He paused. “You have no idea what he planned about his will?”
“As I said,” Faberworth said. “Nothing. Except that he planned to change it, as you see.”
“So anyone might have gained?”
“Quite. But someone else would have had to lose.”
“And you’ve no idea whether one of the family had annoyed him? Or, rather, which one had, if any?”
“No idea at all,” Faberworth said, and moved his chair back from the desk. Weigand pushed his own back and stood up.
“But some trivial thing might have annoyed him?”
“Oh yes,” Faberworth said. “Some quite trivial thing. Again, I speak without prejudice.”
“And you have no idea at all, Mr. Faberworth? Not even something that—wouldn’t be evidence?”
“None whatever, Lieutenant,” the lawyer said, and smiled and held out his hand. “None whatever. Without witnesses. Or not. No idea at all.”
8
Wednesday, 2:15 P.M. to 6:10 P.M.
After Weigand left, Liza O’Brien had sat for a time looking at nothing. Pam North had poured her fresh coffee and, hardly tasting it, Liza drank. She tried to make the confusion in her mind stand still, tried to make turmoil fall into pattern.
“It’s all bits and pieces,” Pam said. “I know. It will come right.”
But the words were meaningless to Liza, the optimism without substance. Serves me right, Pam thought, looking at the girl, seeing her words rejected. Talking like God’s in his heaven. Pollyanna passes. How do I know it will come right? Because, Pam thought—still looking at the girl—her young man isn’t what you’d expect; he’s so much more everything. And, of course, he hasn’t told all of it, particularly not what he thinks. And he’s so fond of his mother. As if—
But that was reasonable, Pam North had thought, continuing. A young wife with a young child, a much older husband; step-children older than she. Turning to the child, and he turning to her as he grew, because they were both so young for what they were, she as wife and step-mother, he as half-brother to a man and a woman already grown. Almost another generation, Pam thought; almost as if they were the same generation, somehow. Would he hate his father?—or fear him, resent him? Could that resentment lead—Pam rejected the train of thought. S
he felt somehow that it might leak from her mind into that of Liza, herself so young, trying so hard to make things fit as she wanted them to fit. The poor baby, Pam North thought.
Martini resented Pam’s preoccupation; people were made to think of cats. Martini, sitting in front of Pam, looking up at her, spoke in a voice of anger. Pam did not notice and Martini spoke again. When, still, human attention was improperly directed toward merely human concerns, Martini reached up a dark brown paw and touched Pam’s knee. Then, slowly, Martini permitted her claws to emerge. “Ouch!” Pam said. That was better. Martini spoke again, with command.
“Well, come up,” Pam said.
Martini went up. She looked into Pam’s face, still with insistence, still with something like anger in her round blue eyes. “Good girl,” Pam said. “Nice Martini. Martini is the major cat.”
The Siamese, mollified, turned, arranged herself on the roundness of Pam’s leg, hooked gently just at the knee to stabilize herself. She then, from a point of safety, regarded Liza O’Brien, who now was looking at her.
“All Monday night I tried to get her out,” Liza said. “You know. Practically the whole night. Does she know that now I haven’t anything to draw with?”
“Probably,” Pam said. “It’s a way they are. One of the ways.”
The girl and the cat regarded each other.
“Mrs. North,” Liza said, “I ought to know. I almost do know. But, precisely—the Greek tragedies? Clytemnestra was killed by her children. I know that. But—”
“Agamemnon came home,” Pam said. “He was a king of—of I’ve forgotten where. He’d been to the wars, oh for years. His wife was Clytemnestra and she had been ruling. But it was one of those things—there was Aegisthus.” Pam paused. “It happened to a lot of GI’s,” she said. “We don’t seem to get better, do we—more honest, more loyal? Aegisthus and Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. Then they abused Electra, Clytemnestra’s daughter—and Agamemnon’s, of course. Then Orestes, Electra’s brother, came home from somewhere and the two of them killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in revenge. Then they were pursued by Furies.” Pam paused, considering this. “Aeschylus gives rather more detail,” Pam said, “but that’s the gist of it. Somebody’s pointed out that it’s a police court story at bottom—maybe a lot of people have pointed it out.”
“I remember, now,” Liza said. “A horrible story.”
“Yes,” Pam said. “But actually, there isn’t any parallelism, except the name of the dog.”
But Liza merely looked at her.
“Well,” Pam said, “of course Mr. Halder is dead. Only it’s probably simpler than we think. Things are, usually.” She paused. “Well, usually,” she said. “Sometimes, of course, they’re more complicated.”
Liza smiled, faintly. Then she put her coffee cup aside and said it was time she went home. “I can never thank you,” she said, and stood up. “And can I come back later—in a few days, maybe—and finish the cats?”
“Don’t try,” Pam said. “Of course. And don’t go unless you want to.”
But Liza had gone. She had walked uptown, crossed through Madison Square, where the benches were filled with people sitting in the sun, collected mail at the desk of her apartment hotel, carried it up to her rooms and then, after riffling through it, tossed it aside unread. She threw open the single window of the living room and leaned out of it, looking down at the strangely distorted people so far below, moving so oddly, seeming to consist so primarily of outflung legs. She got out her drawing pad, then, and went over the sketches, now and then changing a line, deepening or lightening a shadow. But she got no feeling out of the sketches; they might have been by someone else, and after a few minutes she put the drawing pad aside. She showered again, after a time, and changed to a print dress and after that she merely waited for the telephone to ring. She waited a long time, and each new minute was more difficult to endure than the one just lived through.
It was after four when the telephone finally rang, when she finally heard Brian’s “Liza?” and said, “Yes, Brian.”
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said. “Shall I come around there?”
“Of course,” she said, but then she looked around the apartment. It had grown, during the two hours and more she had been waiting in it, intolerably cramped. “Some place else,” she said.
“My place, then?” Brian said and then, oddly, hesitated. “That is,” he said, “if you’re not—not afraid of me, Liza?”
“Oh, Brian!” she said. “Brian! How awful!”
Then he would meet her there, he told her. Now he was in a telephone booth. He would get there about the time she did, say in twenty minutes? She agreed, replaced the telephone, refreshed lipstick and powder, leaning forward to peer into a mirror over the bedroom chest, indignant, as always, at the lack of light. She carried a light coat over her arm and found a cab quickly and something inside her kept saying over and over, “I’m going to see Brian. I’m going to see Brian, and I’m not afraid.” For the moment, that was enough. She could make herself believe it.
Brian Halder lived near Gramercy Park, in an old building converted into “studio” apartments. The “apartment” was almost entirely one room, but the room was large. Liza had been in the apartment only once and then briefly. “Want to see where I live?” Brian had asked, oddly diffident, when they were on their way somewhere and had a few minutes too much time. But they had stayed only a moment or two; he had been careful not to touch her, not even to stand close to her; his awareness of her and the awkwardness which went with it, had communicated itself to her, so that the time had had a strange quality, at once disturbing and exciting. Why, she thought now, as she hesitated before she pressed the bell at Brian’s door, it must have been then that we both knew how we felt.
This memory, a sudden nostalgia for those moments (only ten days in the past, two weeks at most) filled her mind and she felt, for an instant, a kind of resentment that things could not be as they were then and, feeling that, realized how far she still was from recapturing the assurance about herself and Brian she had so briefly, as time went, attained. Now that she was here, she did not want to go into Brian’s apartment; even shrank from going in. Yet, she told herself, she was not afraid. It was not so simple as that. Finally, she pressed the bell button.
Brian opened the door almost immediately; he must have been very close to it, almost with his hands on the knob. He opened the door and stood, unsmiling; looking down at her, his eyes searching her face.
“You came,” he said. “After all.”
“I said I would,” Liza told him. But that he seemed to brush aside; that was unimportant.
“I thought you’d be afraid,” he said. He continued to search her face.
“No,” she said. “I’m not afraid.”
But then, only then, she knew that what she said was not entirely true—was not yet true.
“You are a little,” Brian said. He spoke slowly, as if, even while he uttered the words, he fought against their truth. “Liza.”
She made herself smile up into his set face, then. It was not much of a smile; she knew it was not much of a smile.
“Not now,” she said. “Not—not when I see you.” And that was true; almost true. “Aren’t you going to let me in?” Her tone, then, invited lightness. But Brian, his face unchanged, merely stepped back. “Come in, Liza,” he said.
The room was very large; there were two tall windows at the far end, and they were open, curtains moving a little in the breeze. Brian closed the door behind them. Liza walked a few steps into the room and then, because he did not seem to be coming with her, stopped and turned so that, again, she faced him.
“You can turn your back on me,” Brian said. “It’s safe.” And his tone was very bitter.
She merely spoke his name in answer; spoke it incredulously, her shock reflected in her tone.
“You stand there,” he said. “I love you very much. You think that last night I tried to kill you.”
It was a statement; there was no note of question in his voice. And yet all he said, all at that instant he was, put a question, demanded a decision. Liza stood, her lips just parted, her head back so that she could look up at him across the few feet between them. And now it was she who searched his face. But more than anything, Liza searched herself. Whatever happens afterward depends on now, she thought.
But when she decided, the decision did not seem to come from her mind, did not form itself into words. Her body made its own decision, acted for itself—of itself laid aside (for that moment) whatever remained of fear. Liza stepped toward Brian, her head still back, her eyes still seeking his, but now not searching. As she moved, she lifted her arms, only a little. But it was as if she, with even so small a gesture, abandoned all defense.
For only an instant did Brian hesitate, still seek something in her face. And then his arms were around her, she was held close to him. And then she was crying.
“I didn’t—” he began. But she shook her head against his chest and said, the words muffled, “Be still. Oh Brian, be still.” Then he only waited, his arms close around her. After a time she was no longer crying; after rather a long time it was she who moved, stepping back.
“I love you very much,” she said then, using the words he had used, the same gravity in her voice there had been in his.
“And you’re not—” he began, but she reached a hand up and then he kissed her.
“You do me good,” he told her, gravity still in his voice but not, for that instant, in his dark eyes. “You’re very good for me. I was a fool.”
“How?” she said.
But he told her not to mind for the moment, and took her down the room to chairs and a low table near the windows and then said, “We need a drink on this,” and suggested a variety of things they could have. They had Scotch on the rocks. For a moment, the sun came out; for a moment they were merely young, together, at a good hour of the day. But then he put down his drink and, bending forward in his chair, looked at her.
“A fool to try to keep you out of it,” he said. “To think I could just—well, put you to one side, go on with it. Come back afterward and pick you up. But it made sense.”