A Key to Death

by Frances

  In the street below, a truck backfired with violence, and somebody leaned on a car’s horn. Ingraham reached back and closed the window. They would never imagine, he said, that the office was sound-proofed. With the result that people could shoot off firecrackers in the hall outside, or yell their heads off for help, and he’d never hear them. But the traffic four floors below might as well be in the room. If—

  The telephone rang, softly. Ingraham answered it in his soft voice. He said “Yes,” and again said “Yes.” He said, “In about five minutes,” and put the telephone gently back in its cradle. The Norths were standing by then, and Ingraham stood too, and came from behind his desk. But his movements were unhurried. He helped Pamela with her coat; he said, looking out a window, that he envied them their trip south. He walked with them to the door, and through the library to the reception room.

  A slender woman in her thirties sat on the leather sofa, in the company of a mink coat. She smiled up at Forbes Ingraham when he appeared behind the Norths, and crushed out a cigarette in an ashtray. She gathered the mink toward her and Ingraham said, “Hello, Nan. With you in a minute,” and crossed the reception room with the Norths to the door. He said, “About noon, then,” and opened the door for them and saw them through it. Outside, Pam said, “Such a nice man” and, “that mink must have cost thousands.” Gerald North, no man to arouse sleeping minks, rang for the elevator.

  The rain had stopped; the wind blew gustily through Forty-fourth Street, but now from the northwest. It bustled the Norths toward the east; when a cab stopped for them, it bounced them into the cab and, down the avenue, toward home, the cab seemed to scud with the wind. They were safe inside the apartment, and had greeted the cats—Pam assured the cats that it was being arranged for them to be taken care of if “anything happens”—before Pam reminded Jerry that they were not destined to remain there.

  “Margaret’s cocktail party,” she said and then, “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten,” just as Jerry was about to. Jerry said, “Oh, no, Pam,” and was told that they had promised. “And,” Pam said, “it isn’t raining any more,” to clinch matters.

  “Not one of those,” Jerry said, seeming to beseech higher power than Pam. “Why? What’s she celebrating?”

  “I suppose,” Pam said, “the arrival of five-thirty. Or six, really. You’ll like it, once you’re there.”

  He liked Margaret, Jerry said. They would not see Margaret, except for an instant on arrival, perhaps another on departure. But these parties of hers—

  “They,” Jerry said firmly, “constitute unlawful assembly. Or loitering with intent. Why can’t we—”

  “We promised,” Pam said. “Also, it may be fun—sometimes they are. Everybody’ll be there.”

  “God knows,” Jerry said, morosely.

  “Well,” Pam told him, “that’s who she knows—everybody.” She considered this. “Everybody we know, anyway,” she said, compromising.

  “That man she has,” Jerry said, “makes martinis in advance. Pours them out of a bottle. Listen—once I got one with an olive and lemon peel.”

  If this would not dissuade Pam from party going, nothing would. It did not …

  Margaret lived on Park Avenue, in an inflated apartment. She had been, for twenty years, the dutiful wife of an older man who shared—who exaggerated—Jerry North’s distaste for social gatherings. He referred to them as brawls, and considered them blessed neither to give nor to receive. He had died—rather appropriately, alone in a hotel room while on a business trip—and his wife, after a decent interval of regret, had begun to make up for lost parties. She was pretty and blond—rather like a fluffy kitten—and in her middle forties. When the Norths arrived a little after six, she greeted them as “darlings!” and assured them that they would know everybody and gently brushed them into a tremendous room which reminded Jerry of Grand Central at five-ten, except that nobody was running.

  They did not know everybody. At first, indeed, it appeared that they did not know anybody. Bereft of hostess—who could be expected to return, but was now saying “darlings!” to an arriving group of four—the Norths stood, wearing party smiles which fitted a little tightly, and watched strangers drink. In the distance, to be glimpsed as if in a forest, a man in a white jacket moved slowly, carrying a tray. He did not seem to approach.

  “What it is,” Jerry said, after several minutes—“what it is, we’re in a dead spot. Come on.”

  They went, slowly, smiling the smiles of those who are co-guests without being acquaintances, feeling like new members of a country club, in the direction taken by the man in the white coat. Progress was tentative, of necessity somewhat apologetic, wary of jostling. Eventually, seeming to have got no place in particular, it stopped.

  “We seem to be hemmed in,” Pam said. “We—”

  “The Norths,” a softly pleasant voice said behind Jerry. “Still alive, I see.”

  “Well,” Pam said. “Such a small world.”

  “It is,” Forbes Ingraham said, “part of the service of the firm. Can’t have you dying before you sign, you know.” He looked at their empty hands. “Of thirst, apparently,” he added. “He went thataway.” He indicated, with a movement of his handsome head. “He—”

  “Darlings!” Margaret said, emerging in a small clearing nearby. “You haven’t anything to drink!”

  “No,” Jerry said.

  “We’ll have to do—” Margaret said, but then the clearing closed around her and she vanished.

  “I can’t,” Pam North said, “remember ever seeing so many tall people.”

  “These are the Norths,” Forbes Ingraham said, and pulled a slender woman from between two masculine backs. The woman had warmly brown hair and through it a streak intensely white. Her smooth skin was deeply tanned. She said, “I know they are.”

  “Mrs. James,” Forbes said. “Phoebe James.”

  “At,” Phoebe James said, “one of those terrible do’s in Pittsburgh, wasn’t it? I mean, very nice do’s, actually. Book and author.”

  “When you were an author and we were a book,” Pam said.

  Phoebe James grinned at her. The grin was widely white in her tanned face.

  “Darlings!” Margaret said, emerging from a new direction. “I’ve got somebody coming.” She beamed at the Norths, at Forbes Ingraham and Phoebe James. “So nice you’ve all—” she said, but was submerged again.

  But then a man in a white jacket broke through, and offered drinks. The Norths took martinis—which this time contained no added oddities. Forbes Ingraham exchanged an empty highball glass for one not empty; Phoebe James, whose last historical novel had perched in eminence, and for months, near the top of the list, shook her white-streaked head.

  Jerry raised his glass, thankfully, and his elbow was bumped from behind by someone who was “Terribly sorry,” and with that was gone. The tipped glass spilled half its contents down Jerry North’s sleeve. It was, under the circumstances, no consolation at all to discover that, this time, the drinks had been made cold enough.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “You shouldn’t talk that way.”

  Jerry North drank what remained in his glass. He drank it too quickly. He choked.

  II

  Tuesday, 12:35 P.M. to 2:55 P.M.

  “Then,” Pamela North said. “One thing led to another. But—do you want all this?”

  She looked down at her hands. They were shaking a little. She clasped them together to stop the shaking. Jerry put a hand briefly on her shoulder, and said nothing. She turned, and managed to smile, and to nod her head in a way which meant that she would be all right, was all right.

  “I don’t know, Pam,” Bill Weigand said. “I don’t know what I want.”

  “It—it happened today.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “It happened today. But—things like this don’t happen only at one time, at one minute of one day, between ten minutes of eleven and ten after. They happen yesterday—and a week ago yesterday, and a month before that.�
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  They sat in a small office, with one large window on a court. The wind, more gusty even than it had been the night before, swept down into the court, found itself trapped there, swirled angrily in an attempt to escape. The wide window rattled in the fury of the trapped wind.

  “Well,” Pam said, “the four of us—Jerry and me, Forbes and Mrs. James—we—”

  They had begun to edge their way out of the center of the crowded party, seeking some zone of quiet, some more placid backwater. They had made slow going of it, but it had been managed. They had met, along the tortuous way, people they knew, people to be greeted across intervening strangers, waved at from a distance.

  “Mr. Ingraham too?”

  Ingraham too; Phoebe James more than any of them, which was to be expected. She was a person it was gratifying to know, by whom to be recognized. But the four of them had more or less stayed together, and in the end had found haven.

  “At least,” Pam said, “we got into a corner, sort of. And a man did come with drinks again, and another man with canapés. I had a cigarette and a glass and then, because he poked them at me, a canapé, all at once, and—”

  “You met Mr. Ingraham’s partner there? Reginald Webb? And Mrs. Schaeffer? You were with them when Mr. Ingraham got a telephone call?”

  “Was there something special about the telephone call?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “Webb seems to think there was. He said that Ingraham appeared to be startled. Did you think that?”

  “Not then so much as earlier,” Pam said. “At least—didn’t you think so, Jerry?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry North said. “I wasn’t thinking about much of anything, except how to get the hell out of there. That is, I didn’t think so then. When Pam and I were talking later, it did come back that Forbes’s attitude had changed before the telephone call. But—it’s not very tangible, Bill.”

  Forbes Ingraham had been as soft-spoken, as unaggressively assured as always, when the four of them first stood in the corner of the room, the party swirling before them. He had held a long cigarette holder in white teeth and, with the rest, talked easily. They had talked primarily of books, as became a famous author, a publisher and an attorney who specialized in the affairs of authors fortunate enough to have affairs, and of publishers successful enough to afford him.

  “Mrs. James is one of his clients,” Pam said. “Only—it occurred to me, more than that. From something in their attitudes toward each other. Was I right?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Bill said. “It’s quite possible, of course. She’s divorced. Ingraham never seems to have married. Go on, Pam.”

  But, saying something about the vagaries of libel laws, telling a story about them, Ingraham had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and looked off into the crowd. “As if,” Pam said now, “he saw something that worried him.” But the interruption had lasted only seconds; he had taken up the story again. It was after that that Webb and Mrs. Schaeffer had joined them, and been introduced.

  “That is,” Jerry said, “Mrs. Schaeffer was. We’d met Webb before, of course—or I had. You had too, hadn’t you Pam?”

  “Once or twice,” Pam said. “At first, last night, he was just a quite tall man with a brush hair cut. Very well dressed. But with hair getting a little thin at the top. All the other hairs very—aggressive. To make up for the deserters. We’d seen Mrs. Schaeffer too, of course. But not to speak to.”

  The Mrs. Schaeffer of the cocktail party had been the beautifully groomed, slender woman who sat with mink on the sofa in the reception room of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb—the widow of Samuel Schaeffer.

  “Who,” Pam said, “died accidentally a while back. Forbes—Forbes was telling us.”

  “Webb and Mrs. Schaeffer were together? I mean—obviously they were then. Did you have—” Bill Weigand paused. He looked at Pam, as if in doubt about a word. “Any intuition about them? As you had about Ingraham and Mrs. James?”

  “If there’s one word I hate,” Pam North said. “People just use their minds and people talk about—intuition.”

  Bill Weigand waited.

  “No,” Pam said. “I didn’t notice anything especially. What do they say? And what would it have to do with—with this, anyway?”

  “They haven’t been asked,” Bill said. “I don’t know that it has anything. There were six in a group, then, when Mr. Ingraham got this telephone call?”

  It had not been, exactly, a telephone call. A man—one of the men in white coats—had come through the party to Forbes Ingraham and spoken to him and, after listening, Ingraham had said, “The hell he does.”

  “And seemed annoyed?”

  For a moment, possibly. Phoebe James—“she has the loveliest voice, Bill”—Phoebe James had been telling about something that had happened when she was lecturing in Kansas City, and they had all been listening, amused. The servant’s message had been an interruption. But, if annoyed at the interruption, Ingraham had recovered himself quickly. He had thanked the man in the white coat, and had picked up Mrs. James’s story and handed it back to her. Only after she had finished had he said that he had to make a telephone call, and gone off to make it. He had been unhurried, suave, not then “startled.” He had been gone about five minutes, perhaps ten, and had rejoined them, and made no further mention of the call.

  It had been some time later—perhaps half an hour later—that Nan Schaeffer had looked at the watch on her wrist and had said, “Goodness. I’d no idea. I’ve really got to get away.” There had then been such mutual, and conventional, expressions of esteem as are used at partings, and Nan Schaeffer had gone, Webb with her. But, as they discovered later, while themselves looking for a hostess to thank, with her only toward the door, not through it. Webb was still there, drink in hand, talking to two women and another man. Catching their eyes over the heads of others—“he’s the height people ought to be in crowds,” Pam said—Reginald Webb had lifted a glass toward them. He had been there when, finally, they left, to a reproachful “Darlings! Must you?” from Margaret.

  “Then?”

  Then the four of them—Ingraham and Phoebe James; the Norths—had stood in front of the apartment house and waved at taxicabs, and while they waited for a cab to condescend, it had been Ingraham who had said, “Why don’t we all have dinner together. Unless you’re tied up?” The last was to the Norths.

  “We weren’t. We’d been going out somewhere anyway, because you never know about cocktail parties and it isn’t fair to Martha. And we’ve always liked Forbes—not just as a lawyer—and Mrs. James is charming and—”

  “And,” Jerry said, “we’d got started. You know how it is.”

  They had gone to a mid-town restaurant suggested by Ingraham; described by him, during a short cab ride, as a place he often lunched, but which he thought even better at the dinner hour. “Also,” he had said, “it won’t be crowded.”

  It had not been. Perhaps a dozen tables, out of several times as many, had been occupied. But, the restaurant had not seemed, as restaurants sometimes do under such circumstances, at all deserted, at all dreary. The atmosphere had been relaxed, leisurely.

  “For one thing,” Jerry said, “the tables are far enough apart. Some of these places—”

  They had had new drinks, and better ones. “The whole damn time at the party,” Jerry said, “I got two and a half cocktails, not counting the half down my sleeve.”

  Pam realized, now thinking back to the evening before, that she had noticed the couple at a side table, half way back in the restaurant, as the four of them were being seated near the front. But she had noticed them only absently, during that hardly conscious survey most people make on entering an unfamiliar restaurant. She did not think that Ingraham, who was first screened from them by the maitre d’ and afterward sat with his back to the couple, had at first noticed them at all.

  Certainly he had seemed surprised, and oddly intent when, while he and the Norths and Mrs. James sipped drinks, waited
for oysters, the two had left the restaurant and, leaving it, passed close to the four at the table. Ingraham had been speaking, he stopped in mid-word. They all, as he did, looked at the backs of a slight blond girl, whose hair was a silvery cap, and a tall, thin man with black hair who walked close behind her and, as he followed her, appeared to continue a conversation which, if to be judged by his attitude, was of importance. The girl, assuming she listened, gave no sign of it, but walked away steadily, with the man behind her. She walked stiffly.

  It looked like the end of an argument, or perhaps like the middle of one and Pam thought, “They’ve had a tiff; they’re both upset” and then became conscious of the intentness with which Forbes Ingraham was looking after them. It was several seconds before Ingraham appeared aware of the silence he had caused, and then that Pam, and Mrs. James too, had turned to look at him.

  “People from the office,” he said. “Didn’t realize they were—” But that he did not finish. Instead, he took up what he had been saying previously—seemed, indeed, to resume with the half finished word, so smoothly was the transition made.

  “Tall, dark man,” Weigand said, when he had heard this much. “Blond girl. That’d be Cuyler—Francis Cuyler. The girl’s a stenographer—Phyllis something.” He turned to Mullins in a corner of the office.

  “Moore,” Mullins said. “Haven’t talked to her yet.”

  “We’ve talked very little to any of them,” Bill Weigand told the Norths. “Starting with you, since you turned up.” He gestured around the office in which they sat, with the furious wind rattling at the window. “This is Cuyler’s,” he said, of the office. “Go on, Pam.”

  “I could see the table they’d been at,” Pam said. “A waiter came up with cups and a pot of coffee, and looked surprised. Then he looked at the door, but they’d gone, but apparently they’d left money for the check so he shrugged. You know how waiters shrug?”

  “I never noticed that they—” Bill Weigand began, in spite of himself, and then achieved resistance. Some time it would be interesting to learn, from Pamela North, how the shrugs of waiters differed from other shrugs, as presumably they did. This was not the time. “Yes,” Bill said. “You felt they had left suddenly. Without finishing?”