Murder Is Served

by Frances Lockridge

  Then she read what was written on the unfolded paper and it all came back—the fear came back, the sense of struggle. She sat, for a second, rereading the brief message; then, for another second, she stared at the paper without seeing it.

  “Peg!” Weldon Carey said. “What is it?”

  I can’t let him know, she thought, and her thoughts raced. (As the rat had raced, seeking an unstopped hole.) I can’t let him be caught again; I can’t have him hurt by it.

  She turned so that she half-faced him, and she smiled. The smile said it was nothing before her words said it was nothing. She had never tried to act for Weldon before, but she tried now.

  “Nothing,” she repeated, and made the smile hold, made the word come easily, unstrained, out of a throat suddenly constricted, dried out. “M. Maillaux wants me to give him a moment.” She managed to make the word “give” sound as if she were quoting it from the letter. “In his office.” She smiled. “After all,” she pointed out, “I’m a kind of partner now. Or will be, I suppose.”

  “For God’s sake!” Weldon said. “Why now, Peg?”

  But he seemed to accept what she said, without question. It did not seem absurd to him, made up. It was merely, he seemed to feel, badly timed.

  It was easier to smile now; to act. It was going over. She could raise her shoulders just a little, let them fall; repeat the gesture in the expression of her face. She didn’t know. But it was not important.

  “Only a minute,” she said. “I’d better see him, don’t you think? You don’t mind, Wel?”

  “I guess not,” Weldon said. His voice minded, but not too angrily. “You won’t be long?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no, Wel.”

  He got up, pulled the table out for her, and she slid around it. Not long, her mind repeated, not long—not long, now. But she managed to keep the smile on her lips for Weldon Carey.

  Knowing that he was watching her, wanting desperately to look back at him—to run back to him—she walked with her shoulders back, her body erect, as she had been taught to walk, toward the door ahead of her. She knew where the door was; Tony had showed it to her once when, in spite of what was between them, he had insisted that she praise the changes he had made. It was inconspicuous, leading from the restaurant into the office suite; it was convenient. It was convenient now—terribly convenient. Its nearness robbed her of time.

  She walked, unhurriedly, and the words of the note, which had not been signed by M. Maillaux, went over and over in her mind.

  “Mrs. Mott,” the note had read. “Come at once to Maillaux’s office.” It had been signed with one word, “Weigand.” The brevity of the note, the curtness of the signature, told their own story. Weigand did not need to temporize further, to be polite any longer. He had the right to order her, and he wrote out an order. Well—it was better than if he had sent one of his men for her. He had been thinking, probably, of the restaurant, of avoiding a disturbance, rather than of her. Still, it was better this way. She could at least walk to it, with her head up.

  She opened the door and went through it and, by an effort of will, closed it quietly behind her. She came into the office reception-room, near the corner of the room. Farther along, in the same wall, was the door which opened into the coatroom; ahead of her was a corridor which led between the office, on her right, which had been Tony’s, and the smaller office, on her left, which was Maillaux’s. This corridor joined, at the end farthest from her, a hall which ran the length of the building, at one end to a door onto the street, and at the other a door to the kitchens. It was through that hall she had come the previous day, keeping her appointment with Tony.

  She went across the empty reception-room to Maillaux’s office and knocked on the closed door. There was no answer, and she realized that she—or Weigand himself—had made a mistake about the offices. She went back across the reception-room and knocked at the door of the office which had been Tony’s. She heard, almost at once, “Come in, Mrs. Mott,” and was opening the door before her mind formulated the thought that the voice was not the one she had expected to hear. She still kept on moving into the room and heard her own voice say, “Why—?” She heard fear in her voice.

  Bill and Sergeant Mullins had not come back. But a page boy had come across the room from the restaurant foyer—a boy wearing a tightly fitting jacket, a tilted pill-box hat, a boy who almost, in the perfection of his costume, burlesqued a page—and headed with confidence for their table. Pam looked at him, and, seeing her intentness, Jerry turned his head, and Dorian twisted in her chair. The page boy stopped and, with an air of accomplishment, produced a folded note. He said, “Mrs. Weigand, please?” and Dorian held out her hand. Jerry tipped the expectant boy, who wheeled, military in his exactitude, and went off. Dorian read the note and held it out to Pam.

  It was brief. It read: “Have to go to office after all and may be an hour or so. Get P & J to take you home with them and I’ll collect you there.” It was signed “Bill.” Pam read the note and handed it to Jerry, who read it and at once beckoned to the waiter.

  “He sort of wishes me on you,” Dorian noted. “I hope—?”

  “Nonsense,” Jerry said. He looked at the check, remained nonchalant—with some effort—and put bills on top of it.

  “My,” Pam said. “My!”

  Jerry grinned at her and said, “All right now? You see, there wasn’t anything to jitter about.”

  “Well—” Pam said.

  But apparently Jerry was right. Apparently she had been imagining things—imagining a tension, a trap set. Apparently Bill was not, after all, ready yet. It was even, since she had been mistaken about that, possible that she had been mistaken, also, in her unhappy certainty that Bill had made up his mind, closing it, finally, against Peggy Mott’s innocence.

  Jerry North got back change on a tray, left most of it on the tray, smiled at them and said, “Well?”

  “Let’s,” Pam said, and pushed back her chair. The three of them stood up, dropping napkins on the table, accepting bows from their retinue. They started to make their way toward the front of the restaurant, and Pam took one last look—for reassurance—at Peggy Mott and Weldon Carey. And then, as quickly as it had left, her sense of tension returned.

  Weldon was just sitting down again at the table. But he was alone. And Peggy Mott, with a kind of stiffness in her movements, looking straight ahead, with her face set, was walking in front of the banquettes along the far wall. Pam stopped, involuntarily, and then, feeling Jerry’s nearness behind her, went on. But she saw Peggy Mott go on, in front of the banquettes, until she came almost to the corner of the room. Then she turned to her right and opened a door and, without looking around—without looking back at Weldon Carey, who was watching her—went through the door and closed it behind her.

  It was an ordinary movement and yet, to Pam, there was a kind of hopeless finality about it.

  The door could, Pam thought, lead only to the restaurant offices. And Peggy Mott had been summoned there, had gone through the door and the door had shut behind her—shut like a trap!

  Oh, Pam North thought. Oh! Oh, it’s happening! I wish it weren’t. I wish I—I could do something. Because it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.

  But I don’t know it’s wrong, she thought, and moved on toward the door. I just want it to be wrong; I’m—what does Jerry say?—thinking with my emotions. And, anyway, I can’t do anything. There isn’t anything I can do.

  The thought brought a kind of numbness. She walked on, behind Dorian. She felt, somehow, as if the bottom had dropped out of things. I don’t want it to be this way, Pam thought; I don’t want it to be this way. But she realized, at the same time, that she was no longer convinced it was not this way. Bill would not move until he was certain; he never did. And when he was certain, he was almost always right.

  Pam North saw Leonard again. He was standing, where he had several times stood before, at the top of the steps leading to the bar. When she first saw him, he was looki
ng off toward his left and, after a second or two, Pam became sure that he, also, had been watching Peggy Mott go through the door, into the trap. It did not, at once, seem significant. Then Leonard turned his head, momentarily looked down at Dorian and the Norths, without appearing to see them, and turned back toward the bar. There was a quickness about his movement, now. It was a nervous quickness.

  Dorian walked on toward the foyer, and Pam North walked behind her, although she did not want to be doing this. It was wrong to be leaving, Pam thought; there was an alternative action, a necessary action, they were leaving undone. They were walking away from something, deaf to it, blind to it, and Pam walked reluctantly. She felt, in addition to reluctance, to incompleteness, something against Dorian and Jerry which was almost resentment. It was as if they were, merely by being there, merely by accepting, without protest, this course of action, forcing her to do the wrong thing. She wanted to say, “No, it’s wrong!” but the wrongness was too intangible for so direct and strong a statement. And, in any event, she did not know what would be right.

  They had gone up the three steps to the foyer now, and Jerry had moved a little away from Dorian and Pam. He was standing behind another man at the check stand, waiting to turn in the little disk which would lead to the recovery of his hat and coat. And then Dorian saw someone she knew and smiled at whoever it was and took a cordial, formal step toward this other person. For that instant, Pam was alone. She felt that the others had gone away. She thought of it, in that second, in those words—gone away. And then she knew what was wrong.

  Bill had gone away. That was what was wrong. Bill had gone to the office; he was not at the restaurant. But, although he was gone, the trap had been sprung. And that was wrong. That was not the way it would happen, could happen. Bill had given up whatever he had expected to happen. But now it was happening. Then—this was not the same thing. If Peggy Mott had walked through the door into a trap, it was not a trap of Bill Weigand’s setting. And that was frightening.

  Pam acted then. Afterward, she could not ever clearly explain why she had acted as she did. It was, in all logic, an absurd and dangerous way to act. That it did not, at the moment, seem so was, she tried to make clear, because of the tension she had been under, and because out of that tension there had grown this irrational resentment of Dorian and even of Jerry, this feeling that they were on the other side. (“Impulse,” Jerry said to this. “It boils down to impulse,” and looked at her and shook his head as if he were worried about her.) It was, of course, also true that at the precise moment Jerry and Dorian had, in a fashion, gone away.

  Pam herself went away. She went very rapidly back into the restaurant, turned to her left, walked as quickly as she could without running toward the door through which Peggy Mott had gone. When she reached it, the door was unlocked and Pam opened it unhesitatingly, and went through and closed the door behind her. Then, only then, she paused.

  She had hurried into an empty room. It was as if, late for an appointment, she had hurried with all her might and then found, on arriving, that the other person was not there. There was certainly nobody in the room. It was lighted, not brightly; there were several chairs along a wall, between the door she had come in by and another door to her left; there was a desk facing the chairs and, beside it, a typewriter table with a covered typewriter on it. It was an office, a reception office, after quitting time, with the light left on for a cleaning woman. It was utterly commonplace, entirely an anticlimax.

  Pam felt this only briefly. Then she realized it would not be happening in the reception-room, but in one of the offices. The door to one of the offices was in front of her, a little to the left, behind the desk. There was another door in the wall to her right. She advanced, quietly now, into the middle of the room and stopped there, and held her breath. Then she heard a voice.

  It came from behind the apparently solid door which had been to her right when she came in. At first she could not understand why she could hear the voice at all, even, as she did hear it, dimly. Then she saw that, in the lower panel of the door, there were two hooded slots. They were for ventilation, of course. It was through them that the voice seeped out of the room.

  Very quietly, now, she moved over to the door. She could hear a little more plainly. She crouched to get nearer the slots and then, because it was simpler, she sat down on the floor. She felt defenseless, and a little absurd, sitting so, but it was the only convenient way.

  She realized at once that there were two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. The man was speaking when she began to understand the words.

  She came in on the middle of a sentence.

  “—very simple,” the man was saying. “The police have proved to be fools. It is impossible to predict what they will do.”

  There was no immediate answer, although the silence was that of an answer awaited. Pam tried to identify the voice and realized, with perplexity, with uneasiness, that she could not. It was not Bill Weigand’s voice, or Mullins’s. Of that she was certain. By that she was not surprised. There was no accent, hence it was not André Maillaux’s. Then it ought to be John Leonard’s; almost had to be his, unless, during all this, they had all been hopelessly lost. But she could not identify it as Leonard’s. It might be, but she could not be sure.

  “You want me to make it easy for them,” the woman said. “You think that would be simple.”

  There was no doubt about this voice, no perplexity. The other person in the room was Peggy Mott. And in Peggy Mott’s voice there was an odd kind of deadness; it was as if she were reading lines written for her, but reading them without understanding.

  “I want you to make it very plain,” the man said. “So plain, and so clear, that even they will not look any further. You understand?”

  “You don’t give me any reason,” the girl said. “You ask this—ask me to write this. Why should I?”

  “The reason—” the man said, and did not continue. “Don’t be a fool.”

  “But you’re a fool,” the girl said. “It’s you who—are a fool. Don’t you see? What good will it do?”

  Pam bent closer to the ventilating slots; she flogged her mind. The man—who is the man?

  “Leave it to me,” the man said. “Only write it. ‘I killed Tony Mott.’ I don’t care what else you say. Write that much and sign your name.”

  “I won’t,” the girl said. “Don’t you’ see I won’t? Why should I?”

  There was something strange and frightening in the deadness in Peggy Mott’s voice—and in what she did not say! Pam waited, waited with an increasing, deepening anxiety, for the girl to say the one thing, “I didn’t kill Tony.” But she did not say it.

  “Because you’ve no choice,” the man said. “Don’t you realize that?”

  There was no answer in words. There might have been one in a gesture, in a shaken head.

  “Time,” the man said. “What else is there?”

  That was not clear to Pam. If only she could see, as well as hear! Still the girl did not speak.

  “Count on a mistake,” the man said. “Hope for anything you want to. What do they say? While there’s life. It’s something everybody believes. Maybe something might happen.”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Make it longer,” the man said. “Explain. Extenuate, if you want to. It will give you time. Five minutes—half an hour—who knows?”

  “It’s not good enough,” the girl said. “You see that.”

  “I do not lie to you,” the man said. “I do not pretend it is very much. But people will do anything even for half an hour.”

  “No,” the girl said. “It’s still not good enough.”

  The man laughed, shortly. Pam could not identify the laughter, and sometimes it is more easy to identify a man from his laughter than from his voice in speech. When the man laughed, even the faint, the haunting, sense of familiarity the voice gave her vanished. If I had heard him laugh before, she thought. Is it someone I’ve never heard?

&nb
sp; “While you say it, you’re thinking of time,” the man said. “Of the little hand going around on the watch—the sweep hand. ‘Thirty seconds,’ you say. ‘While I speak. Half a minute, while he answers.’ And you’re still alive. While there’s life—”

  “Stop it!” the girl said. “I won’t!”

  Life had come back into her voice; awareness had come into it, and terror.

  “Oh yes,” the man said. “You will, you know. When the time runs out. Now!”

  The last word was sharper, commanding.

  “I killed Tony Mott,” the man said. “Write that first. Then what you want to say. To explain. For Mr. Carey, if you want. So he will understand.”

  “No,” the girl said. “There couldn’t be a good enough explanation. Not for that. You still don’t—you still—”

  But now the girl’s voice was faltering. Her will was faltering, her determination. Under what pressure Pam could not guess.

  “For time,” the man said. He was inexorable. “For a little time. For another revolving of the little hand. For—”

  But it can’t be, Pam thought. It can’t be. That isn’t right! There wouldn’t be any reason. But even as she thought this, she had no longer any doubt.

  There was a longer pause behind the door.

  It was the girl who ended the pause. And now her voice was strong again. It was no longer dead. Fear was in it, and hopelessness, and with them a kind of pride, almost exultation.

  “No,” the girl said. “I’ll never do it. Never, do you hear? Never—never—You can’t—”

  And then suddenly, with horrible violence, the man began again. Words poured from his mouth as if he were spitting them out. They were vicious, furious words. They blurred together too rapidly for Pam’s hurrying, baffled mind. Only the fury behind them, the almost inarticulate rage of the man, was clear. The man was beating the girl with words, using them like—like knives! And he was speaking French.

  Pam North did not think and did not hesitate. She was on her feet, pushing at the door, throwing herself against it before she realized it was opening. She almost fell as the door opened.