by Frances
“Now, turning to Washington, Senator Watson, Democrat of Mississippi, and head of the powerful—”
Pam turned it off. They looked at one another. After consideration, Jerry said, “Ouch!”
“Yes,” Pam said. “‘However.’ Ouch indeed. Can we sue or anything? ‘Asserts,’ indeed!”
“No,” Jerry said. “They’re much too careful. They—”
“Jerry!” Pam said. “The poor man. Do you suppose, while we were sitting there waiting for him, he was—Jerry!”
“Yes,” Jerry said, “I suppose so. It’s—” He stopped. Byron Kingsley was looking from one to the other of them, bewilderment—even consternation—on his handsome, friendly face. Jerry said he was sorry. He said it was this way, and told Kingsley, briefly, the way it was.
“Wanted to see you?” Kingsley repeated. “But—why?”
“We don’t know,” Pam said. “If we did—”
“But when he talked to you,” Kingsley said. “He didn’t say what he wanted to see Mr. North about? You’d think he—” He stopped and shook his head.
Pam shook hers.
“Not even a hint?” Kingsley said and then, quickly, “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just that it seems like—wanting to see an important man like Mr. North—he’d have—well, have—” He floundered to a stop, and, Pam thought, reddened slightly.
“I know,” she said. “But, he didn’t. Only, as Jerry said, that it was something important. We supposed it was something about his wife’s death. Anybody’d think that. But as to what—” She shrugged slender shoulders.
Byron Kingsley looked at her intently, and nodded his head as she spoke.
“Look, ma’am,” he said. “Mrs. North. I didn’t mean—” Once more he stopped.
“Of course not,” Pam said. “It was a perfectly natural thing to—to wonder about.”
“If he knew something,” Kingsley said, a little as if he were speaking to himself, “about Miss Towne’s death, I mean, why would he want to tell you about it—you and Mr. North? Instead of the police?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I suppose, because her body was found in our suite. That telephone call she got while you were there. Are you sure she said something like ‘Judd.’ Or, more likely, ‘Judge’?”
“Pretty sure.”
“It couldn’t have been, say, ‘Russ’? I suppose people called him that.”
“You mean, he was the one who was coming? And—maybe saw something? Ran into—somebody? There?”
Jerry nodded his head.
Kingsley put long, sensitive fingers to his forehead, in an attitude of thought.
“I just barely heard the last,” he said, and spoke slowly. “I told you what I thought it sounded like. But—it might have been something else. I suppose it might have been ‘Russ.’”
“When you were talking to her,” Pam said. “She didn’t say anything about her husband. About Mr. Barnes?”
“No. I thought she was a maiden lady. Calling herself ‘Miss’ the way she did. Anyway, she just asked things about me, and I answered as well as I could. I thought she was mighty nice.”
“Somebody didn’t,” Jerry said.
Kingsley put his glass down and stood up. He said he hadn’t meant to make a visit of it. Jerry stood too.
“That man who worked for her,” Kingsley said. “You ever run across him? Gray? Tony Gray, he calls himself?”
Jerry shook his head. Then he said, “Oh, the man who interviewed you first? The preliminary interview?”
“Yes,” Kingsley said. “Young chap—works for the company. The network, they call it. I got a feeling he didn’t like Miss Towne much. It wasn’t anything he said, particularly, but—you know how you get feelings about that sort of thing?”
“Yes.”
“Only one thing,” Kingsley said. “When he left I said I’d probably be seeing him. The way one does, not knowing whether it’s true. And he said, ‘That’s up to the fair lady, my friend.’ And then something like, ‘About the fair lady you can’t tell. None of us can. Any day I may be out on my ear.’” He looked at Pam. “Only,” he said, “he didn’t say ‘ear’ exactly.”
He was really sweet, Pam thought. Naïve, but sweet. She tried to look like a belle of the Old South, who probably couldn’t ever—no, evah—guess what Mr. Gray could possibly have said. Not evah.
They went back toward the door, though the devastated living room. Martini was curled on top of the painters’ midden—curled, it seemed, precariously, on paint-crusted canvas. It was an odd place for a cat to sleep except, of course, to a cat.
Martini opened large blue eyes and then, apparently on seeing Byron Kingsley, narrowed them again and laid her ears back. Then she leaped from the canvas and went away with speed, skirting Kingsley rather, Pam thought, offensively. There could be no doubt that having painters made Martini very nervous. As, Pam thought further, saying goodnight to Jerry’s so profitable author, it does me.
They did not know where Judge Roger Parkman had gone. The butler had said that; Mrs. Parkman, when Mullins had got to her—after some little persuasion—had said that.
“Gone away for a few days,” Mullins reported to Bill Weigand, at West Twentieth Street, at a little after eleven at night. “Don’t know where. Didn’t ask where. We buy that, loot?”
The question was rhetorical. They didn’t buy it, and Sergeant Mullins knew they didn’t buy it. It was not so clear, however, what they did do with it.
“A man’s wife asks,” Mullins said. “If he don’t say, she asks again. Until he says. Something, anyway. Judge or no judge.”
“Right,” Bill said. “Some time around eight, they said? Just before you got there?”
That was what they had said. They—the butler first when Sergeant Mullins rang the doorbell of the Parkmans’ house on the Upper East Side—had said it several times. Judge Parkman had gone out a few minutes before Mullins arrived, and he would be gone several days, and it was not known where he could be reached.
He had taken a suitcase with him; he had packed the suitcase himself. He had told his wife only that it was a matter of business, but had not described the business or indicated where it was to be conducted.
“You didn’t ask him?” Mullins asked Mrs. Parkman, and made no effort to mask incredulity.
“Certainly not,” she had told him. She was in her sixties; she was stiffly corseted and had carefully arranged graying hair. “If the judge had thought it important for me to know, he would have told me, sergeant.”
Would she know what clothes he had taken? What kind of clothes, for example? Mullins had been patient. If the judge were going to a city—Chicago, say—he would take business clothes. But if he were going some place for a few days’ rest—the Greenbrier, say. Or Florida, say—he would probably take the kind of clothes people wore there. Informal clothes. Perhaps a summer-weight suit, if he planned on Florida. Perhaps golf clothes. And clubs, for that matter. Did Mrs. Parkman know?
“Certainly not,” she said. (But she made it sound rather as if Judge Parkman might, for all she knew, have been carrying golf clubs in his pocket.) Her tone had implied that the question was stupid, possibly crass. As if, her tone said, such commonplace matters were any concern of hers!
“Lying?” Weigand said.
“Sure,” Mullins said. “Very high-toned lady. Lying, and not even trying to make it sound good.”
“A powder?”
“Sure he took a powder. Only thing is, why? To let this stink—this business about what he said on TV—die down? Or?”
“Right,” Bill said. “We know a lot of good questions, as always. Any good answers, Mullins?”
Mullins had not. He said, “On the teletyper?”
“Not yet,” Weigand told him. “We’ll ask around a bit first. Right?”
“O.K., loot,” Mullins said, knowing who would ask around.
VII
It is not difficult to compile a statistical summary of a life—not when there are enou
gh men to look through enough records, carry on enough interviews, in a sufficient number of places. At a little after eight o’clock Friday morning, the fifteenth of November, Weigand had the measurements of a life in front of him on his desk. The life had been so long; marked by such and such events. It had been lived by a woman five feet six inches tall, weighing one hundred and twenty-two pounds, having blond hair (rinsed) and blue eyes and teeth which had been beautifully recapped for symmetry; a woman who had died of asphyxia resulting from smothering (presumably homicidal, presumably by a pillow). Weigand could, from the information in front of him, have written a biography of Amanda Towne—if he had known anything of any real importance about her.
The things of no real importance had, of course, to be known, and so had been found out. Born, Hot Springs, Arkansas, September 10, 1913. (Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Towne; second of two children; brother, Vincent Towne, Jr., now living in Seattle. Contact made.) B.A. from the University of Arkansas, 1934. Briefly employed on a Memphis newspaper—June to October, 1934. On staff of the Chicago Press-Bulletin, November, 1934, to August, 1942. Married to Russell Barnes, reporter and war correspondent, February 28, 1936. No record of divorce. Transferred to New York by Continental Broadcasting Corporation in 1946. Radio show expanded to an hour; given title “People Next Door.” (Title owned by the corporation.) Show switched to television in 1951, but heard also on radio until early 1953. Residence since 1953, Hotel Breckenridge.
All very interesting, possibly in the end all very important. But who was she? What was she like? Why, now, was she dead? There were no convenient statistics to cover such matters. Oh yes—died, November 13 of the current year, probably between seven and eight P.M.
She had gone about a good deal, with a good many people—she had attended parties, and given parties, and gone to theaters and eaten at restaurants—at the Algonquin, at Sardi’s, at “21.” (And probably at Automats, and at drugstore lunch counters, and at restaurants in the country.) She had owned a Chrysler Imperial, 1957. (Hardtop.) In 1956, she had rented a house in Westport.
Other things remained to be found out. She had had men friends, presumably—she had been a reasonably young and very pretty woman, and she and her husband had been separated for years. (Why? For how many years? With what kind of relationship remaining between them?) If there had been one man closer than others, that did not yet appear. It would be found out; such things are not often hidden.
She had a business manager named Alice Fleming, and an agent named Orson Bart. She had recently signed a new two-year contract with CBC. It was to be presumed that her brother in Seattle would inherit what money she left, which it was to be presumed might be a good deal. (Unless she had been less prudent as a business woman than anything in the statistics—including the figures on her new contract—indicated.)
All he needed to know to write a biography, Bill Weigand thought—all except a woman to put into it. Things about a woman—obviously. Many and more to come. The woman herself? A wax figure in a store window, brightly lighted now, no more than that as yet.
Seattle had been asked to help; Hot Springs was checking back; in Chicago men made additional enquiries. Mullins and Detective Frankel, teamed for the time, asked discreetly about one of the men whose life hers had touched. Detective Hanson would check out on the Norths and Bleeck’s. (Which was a waste of Detective Hanson’s time and abilities.) Three men worked patiently at the Hotel Breckenridge. A Mr. Lovelace, who had been the previous occupant of the Norths’ suite—and who might have carried a key off with him, and come back to use it, or given it to somebody to use—would be interviewed in Galveston, when he got there. He appeared to have stopped off somewhere.…
Alice Fleming was not at the Continental Broadcasting Corporation’s building on Madison Avenue—a building, Weigand thought absently, somehow too substantial to be held up only by words, by light patterns. (Which was manifestly absurd.) Her address would be provided. A man named Tony Gray, who had worked with, Amanda Towne for the past year, interviewing guests for her, would not be in until six in the evening, when he would be one of several who got the late news reports together. Who else would Captain Weigand like to talk to?
“Anybody who knew her well,” Bill Weigand told the young-old man at the wide desk; the man in the narrow suit. “Did you?”
“Businesswise,” the young-old man said.
“Characterwise?” Bill said, gravely. The young-old man grinned, and looked younger.
“No,” he said. “Fact is, I just switched over from CBS. Oh—I knew a lot about her. Everybody on the street knows a lot about ‘Mandy’ Towne. Ratingwise—” He paused. Then he said, “Hell, why not? As good as most words. Ratingwise she was terrific. For an afternoon slot.”
“I know a good deal about her,” Weigand said. “Who knew her?”
That required telephone conferences—most of which wandered into other fields, and tended to remain there. Bill was patient.
“Jimmy Fergus knew her in Chicago,” the young-old man said. “Old voice of doom.” A telephone rang and he listened and said, “O.K. Be right along,” and hung up. “Came east with her,” he said. “She brought him along, as a matter of fact. He might be your man.” He looked at his watch. “On the air now,” he said. “Eleven o’clock newscast. You can catch him down on the eighth floor.”
Weigand went down from the twelfth floor to the eighth. “Studio G,” a girl with copper hair told him. “Down that way.” He went down that way, along a corridor through which many moved, for the most part at high speed. A sign glowed red at the door of Studio G. It said, “On The Air.” Bill waited. After a few minutes the sign went off. He went into Studio G, which was small and hushed. A gray-haired man in his sixties sat at a small table, behind a microphone. He supported a heavy head in his hands. He looked up and Bill Weigand said, “Mr. Fergus?”
The man nodded his head, without removing it from his hands.
“The Middle East gets me,” he said, morosely.
“It seems to get everybody,” Bill said.
The heavy gray-haired man took his hands down and looked at them and said, “Oh. That. I suppose so. It’s those damned names. French names, German names, Italian names—now Arabs. You’re a new one, aren’t you?”
“I—” Bill began.
“Producer?” James Fergus said. “Assistant producer? Director? Assistant director? Or—a vice president?”
Bill told him who he was, and what he had come about.
“A great girl,” Fergus said. “Wonderful. They won’t find another one like Mandy. This Casey girl they’re talking about. Not that the Casey girl isn’t good. But ratingwise—”
“Casey girl?”
“To take over the show. Maureen Casey. Been doing five-minute breaks for—what difference does it make? She’s all right. Not Mandy but—What do you want to know about Mandy?”
The answer was “Everything.” Weigand did not make it. He said, “Whatever you can tell me.”
“Nothing that’ll help,” Fergus said. “However—you feel it is too early for a drink?”
For the first time, Weigand thought, he spoke like an announcer. Possibly because he spoke of an important matter.
It was too early for a drink, at eleven-thirty. Much too early. But detectives cannot be slaves of habits, even of the best of habits.
“Right,” Bill said. “If you like.”
Fergus liked. In a small restaurant off Madison—where a surprising number did not, it seemed, feel eleven-thirty too early for a drink—they sat at a corner table, and Fergus drank bourbon on the rocks. He drank thirstily; said he needed that. Then he said, “I don’t mind telling you, it’s knocked me. Mandy. And then poor old Russ.” He drank again. “Poor old Russ. Poor old Carl. Poor old—The hell with it.” He raised his glass, and a waiter saw it. The waiter knew what to do about it—from experience, Bill Weigand assumed. The waiter looked at Weigand’s almost untouched martini glass. Weigand shook his head.
“Last time I saw her,” Fergus said, “after the show Wednesday. No different from any time—keyed up, like she always was. Wouldn’t have been any good if she didn’t get keyed up. Jumped Tony because a woman she interviewed froze on the air. Thought he should have tipped her off. Scratchy with the Fleming a little, but the Fleming’s used to it. Said I made everything sound like a funeral.”
“This was unusual?”
“I just said—Good. I can use that.” The waiter had brought another drink. “I just said, standard order of procedure. She got keyed up. She got unwound. On top of the world when she left.”
“She was—difficult?”
“No more than most. Less than most. Look, I can’t tell you anything that’s any good. Saw her three times a week, read what they gave me to read.”
“I gathered,” Bill said, “that you knew her well. Had known her for a long time.”
“Twenty years ago,” Fergus said. “You can call that a long time. Yes. You can call that a long time. But, what’s it got to do with—what you want? With who killed her?”
Bill didn’t know. He said the obvious—the obvious that always needed saying. He did not know what anything had to do with it. He said, “You knew Barnes? I gather you did.”
“In the old days,” Fergus said. “Oh, ran into him now and then these days. Nothing to talk about any more.”
“Did Miss Towne see much of him?”
Fergus drank. He shrugged heavy shoulders. He said, “How would I know?” and then, “I shouldn’t suppose so. Who was poor old Russ?”
“Her husband. She gets killed. He gets killed.”
“Not working at it,” Fergus said. “I don’t know why either of them got killed. Why would I?”
“Listen,” Bill said, and thought, from the effect of a swallow of a second drink, that James Fergus might have had a first, at least, even before eleven-thirty. “Listen, Mr. Fergus. All I’m trying to find out is what sort of person Amanda Towne was. It may explain something.”