Death of a Tall Man

by Frances Lockridge

  Jerry went on mixing new drinks for a moment. He poured them carefully. Then he turned around.

  “She seemed excited,” Pam said. “Do you think we ought to do something?”

  Jerry thought and nodded. He said they ought to call her back. Pam started it. It was slow—information, the operator, another operator, a sound as of a telephone ringing far away. But then—nothing. Jerry delivered drinks; Pam sipped and waited. She thought she heard a voice and said, “Hello?” quickly, but nobody answered her. She waited again and then the operator came on and asked what number she was calling. Pam told her. There was another pause.

  “I’m sorry,” the operator said, “that line seems to be temporarily out of order. Shall I try again later?”

  “I don’t know,” Pam said. “Yes, all right.”

  She put the telephone back.

  “Something happened,” she said.

  “Country telephones,” Jerry said, swallowing. “Too much vermouth?”

  Pam swallowed.

  “Not for me,” she said. “It’s not strong at all.”

  Jerry smiled. He started to say something and decided against it. The more vermouth, the stronger. That was Pam’s belief, amounting in intensity to a faith.

  “I wonder what she wanted,” Pam said. “It must have been important. But what was it? What is it that Mr. Oakes wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I’ve no idea. Wasn’t really Mr. Oakes?”

  Pam shook her head.

  “Everybody says he was Mr. Oakes,” she said. “They couldn’t all be wrong. Maybe—” She paused. Then she spoke in a different tone. “Jerry!” she said. “Maybe—‘wasn’t the man who was there yesterday.’ Do you think?”

  Jerry considered it. He lifted his shoulders and let them fall again.

  “Nothing to think on,” he said. “Possibly. Maybe ‘wasn’t the man who killed Dr. Gordon.’ Maybe ‘wasn’t the kind of man to kill himself.’ Maybe—” He ended it and finished his drink.

  “Jerry,” Pam said, “I’m—I’m worried.”

  Gerald North put his glass down firmly.

  “Listen, Pam,” he said. “We’re not going out there to find out. Not tonight. We’ve just started our drinks and dinner’s—”

  Pam did not seem to be listening. She looked at the telephone. She reached for it, and dialed. She said, “Lieutenant William Weigand, please,” and waited. Then she said, again, “Lieutenant William Weigand, please,” and, after a moment, “Oh” in a disappointed voice. She listened again. She said, “Well, who is there?” and then, “Can I speak to him, please?”

  “Mr. Stein,” she said, then. “This is Pamela North. I want to talk to the lieutenant. Do you know where he is? Or Sergeant Mullins?”

  She listened, said, “Both?” and after that, “No, I guess not.” Then she hung up.

  “They’ve gone to North Salem,” she said, and in a moment she was standing. “Jerry! Something’s happening!”

  “But—” Jerry said, and looked over his shoulder at the cocktail chest. “We’ve just—”

  Martha, the maid, was resigned. She spoke to Martini and said, “Those folks of yours, cat” and Martini looked at her, enquiringly, with round blue eyes. Martha unmade the table; she took the roast out of the oven and put it on a kitchen shelf. Then she looked at Martini. “Even if it is too hot, cat,” she said, and put the roast in the refrigerator. Martini made a low sound in her throat, but it was impossible to tell what she meant. It was probable, of course, that she was protesting the confinement of the roast in a place which she could not—as yet—open single-pawed.

  The wind tore at the top of the convertible; clouds hurried across the moon. Far away, to the north and east, there was the flicker of lightning.

  “We do pick the damnedest nights for little trips to the country,” Jerry said. “The damnedest nights.”

  But there was no mist; the wind took care of that. So they went fast. They did not drive into rain until they turned off the Hutchinson River Parkway and started north.

  10

  TUESDAY, 6:20 P.M. TO 8:45 P.M.

  The trees Debbie could see from the study window were bending low before the wind; their small leaves, so newly out, must be hanging on for dear life. But it was too dark to see the leaves, except as a softness on branches which had been, only a few weeks earlier, bare and hard. The window rattled and cool air came in around it. Then there was a flash of light and, some seconds after it, the heavy roll of thunder. Summer was coming back; this was a foretaste of summer. It was like a summer storm.

  The rain increased with sudden fury. Big drops splashed against the glass of the window, spotting a thin film of dust. Then it was as if someone, maliciously, had hurled a pail of water against the window. Debbie moved across the room to the window on the side. It was only splattered; she could see out of it across the lawn on the east. Rain was slanting through the air; the air was almost solid with water. Then lightning flashed again, and, for a second after, it seemed to rain harder than ever. Then the rain slackened a little, so that she could see the bending trees along the far’wall. One of them, a poplar, was sending out a rain of its own—a fleecy rain of cotton-supported seeds. But the real rain beat down the cottony particles remorselessly.

  The storm was exciting; the world was suddenly tumultuous and unrestrained. Nature had abandoned all the conventions of good behavior and was having a fling. The wind was blowing everything away. There was a kind of savage gayety in the storm; it made Debbie feel excited and almost frightened, and at the same time almost gay. It was like other storms—like the storm she and Dan had been caught in, once, on a golf course, and had run through, wet and uncomfortable, with the rain molding their clothing to them. She had been wearing a thin blouse and slacks, and the soft, wet material of her blouse molded itself to her body and she had been embarrassed and at the same time glad—and had known how she looked, after they found shelter finally, and had not cared. Dan had looked at her and smiled and then, because they were alone—and wet and young and happy—had held her close to him a moment and kissed her, very hard. He had let her go and stood for a moment looking at her and then she had looked down at herself in the wet blouse and said, “oh,” as if she were surprised, and had pulled the clinging material away from her body. She smiled, now, remembering. Always, she thought, I will remember that when there’s a storm.

  But now Dan was not with her; he was in the storm alone. Perhaps he was under shelter somewhere; surely he was under shelter. But he might merely be walking through it, head down, and if that was it she wished she could be with him. Always, until recently, he had wanted her to be with him; even when he first came home, although from the first he had been strange and nervous. It was only recently, since he had grown so angry because Andy wanted them to wait, that he had taken to going off by himself.

  She turned from the window. Nothing would happen to him. A girl could walk through the storm, and nothing would happen except that she would be wet and cold and blown about. She had lived too much in the country to be afraid of the weather—at any rate of spring and summer weather. And Dan was strong and tough, and had been through a lot worse than this; had been through things which made all this fury of nature almost gentle. He would walk through it. Or he would find shelter. He would be all right.

  She told herself this, knowing it was reasonable and true. But even while she reassured herself, the gay feeling which the storm, and memories of other storms, had brought, left her. It did not leave slowly, reminiscently. It went quite suddenly and, looking out at the driving rain and the driven trees, she shivered. The storm, instead of seeming an adventure, seemed all at once but another part of the turmoil which was in her mind—the turmoil which had filled the day. Uneasily, unexplainably, she was afraid—afraid for Dan, afraid for herself.

  She turned quickly back to the telephone, dialed and listened for the sound which would mean that a light was flashing in front of the local operator. There was no sound.
She replaced the telephone, put it to her ear again and listened. The hum which should have been in her ear—the “dial tone” they called it—was not there. There was an odd, subdued scratching sound, and nothing else. The telephone was still dead. But she had told Mr. North and Mrs. North—

  Then she stopped, with her hand still on the telephone. Had she told Mrs. North? Or—had Mrs. North heard her? She had talked for a moment, as soon as she had explained herself to Mrs. North, and had told her about the mistake, and then something—the cessation, perhaps, of some sound so familiar that you knew of it only when it stopped—had made her feel that she was alone. Then she had said “Mrs. North? Do you hear me? Mrs. North?” and there had been no answer. While she had been talking, something had happened to the telephone. But how much had Pamela North heard before the telephone went dead?

  Debbie realized then that she had merely assumed that her message had been heard, and that this assumption had given her some sort of reassurance. It was not that the message was important, because she was not sure that it was important. It might be. But the thought that she had shared this information—the only information she had which might help—had somehow freed her mind, given her a sense of release. Perhaps it was the beginning of her present doubt, as much as her uneasiness about Dan, which had erased the gayety from her mind.

  It was dark in the room and she was suddenly lonely, “bereft,” she thought; this was what “bereft” meant—loneliness in a dim room at evening. She switched on the lamp on the desk, but that merely deepened the shadows around her. She shook her head, as if she had been arguing with herself, and, abstractedly, picked up her cocktail glass. It was empty. She looked toward the hall and, beyond it, could see the light in the living room. Now that she listened, she could hear voices. Perhaps Dan—

  She went quickly across the hall and into the living room. Evelyn Gordon and Lawrence Westcott were sitting close together on a sofa and they had started a fire. Westcott’s arm lay along the back of the sofa behind Eve; and Debbie felt, without knowing, that he had just at that moment lifted it from her shoulders. With the other hand, as she stood there, he reached out to the coffee table in front of them and filled their glasses from a shaker. There was nobody else in the room and now they were not talking. But she felt as if they had just been talking, as she felt that Lawrence Westcott had just moved his left arm from around Eve.

  Westcott filled the glasses and then, unhurriedly, looked back over his shoulder at Debbie. So they had heard her. He smiled at her.

  “Come in by the fire,” he said. He looked at her and seemed to be studying her face. Then he smiled. “Dan’s all right,” he said. “Come in and have a drink.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I was just—watching the storm. From the study window. It’s—quite a storm.”

  She walked across the room and stood for a moment in front of the fire. Then she sat on one of the chairs across from the sofa and stretched out her legs. She looked at her glass and tried to be careless, casual.

  “Empty,” she said, in a carefully plaintive voice. “Entirely empty.”

  They took care of that.

  “That stepson of mine will be getting pretty wet,” Eve said. Something in her tone, in the way she described Dan, underlined the absurdity of Dan’s being her stepson. It made her sound, if anything, younger than Dan.

  “You can say that again,” Debbie said. And as she said it, she thought how strange familiar talk—the clichés of familiar talk—could sound when you thought of it, how far away, sometimes, the words you used were from the things you were saying.

  “He’ll get under something,” she said. “He always does.”

  “Well,” Lawrence Westcott said, “he’s had practice.” He said it in a dry, meaningless voice; too dry and meaningless. Eve suddenly patted his hand.

  He smiled at her.

  “All right,” he said. “All the same, a man felt funny going around in—” He paused. “As if you didn’t belong to anything,” he said.

  He means about the war, Debbie thought. He wasn’t in it, for some reason, and he’s—hurt about it. Inadequate. Even now. And it’s made him, for some reason, not like Dan. She was embarrassed, and did not know what to say.

  “He’ll find some place,” she said. “Definitely.”

  There was strain in the room; it had come into the room with her, Debbie thought. It had not been there before, when the two of them were sitting in front of the fire.

  Eve looked at her watch.

  “Almost seven,” she said. “You’ll stay to dinner, Larry.”

  Lawrence Westcott turned his head so that he could look out of a window at the rain.

  “I’ll have to, I guess,” he said. He smiled. “Which is very convenient, since I’d like to. Only—”

  He looked at Eve Gordon. She shook her head. What that meant, Debbie did not understand. Perhaps Lawrence Westcott thought he ought to go, even in the rain; that he had called long enough on a woman so recently, and publicly, widowed. Perhaps he was thinking about the neighbors. He had cause, Debbie reflected.

  She sipped her drink and looked into the fire and remembered Andy. Her sadness about Andy came and went; her sense of loss came and went. He had been very good to her; he had been very kind and gentle, like a very good kind of uncle. But it was hard, precisely because his death had been so unreally dramatic, to think of him as Andy, dead. He was a—a “murder victim.” It was sometimes hard to remember that he was also Andy, who had been like such a good kind of uncle. Sitting now, drinking slowly, she thought of him. The other two talked about nothing, leaving her out.

  A maid came to the door of the dining room and stood as if about to speak. But just as she was beginning, the doorbell rang and, at a nod from Evelyn Gordon, she went across the room and out into the hall. Eve and Lawrence Westcott went on talking, but as if they were listening. Debbie stood up, thinking it was Dan, and then, although almost at once she realized that Dan would not need to ring, she continued to stand, looking at the door to the hall.

  There was the sound of the outer door closing and then the maid’s voice saying something which ended “—don’t believe so, sir, but Mrs. Gordon is in” and then a man’s voice which she did not at once recognize, except that it was not Dan’s. “Wet night,” the man’s voice said, and there was the sound of a hat being slapped against something. Then the maid came to the door and said, “Mr. Smith, ma’am,” and went on across the living room and out into the kitchen. Nickerson Smith came to the door, looked at them and then looked down at his trouser legs, which were wet.

  “Quite a storm,” he said, mildly. “Young Dan around?”

  Lawrence Westcott stood up and Eve turned to look across the back of the sofa.

  “Hello, Nickerson,” Eve said. “No, he doesn’t seem to be.” She looked at Smith. “You’re wet,” she said. “Come over and dry out.”

  Nickerson Smith, deliberate, at ease, came across the room and stood in front of the fire.

  “Turns out Dan’s got to sign something else,” he said. “Decided to bring it out myself.”

  “He went for a walk,” Eve said. “He ought to be in eventually. Larry, give Nickerson a drink.”

  Nickerson Smith took the drink, raised it slightly toward Eve, raised it to his lips. He stood with his back to the fire, teetering gently from heel to toe to heel.

  “Lovely night for a walk,” he said. “Fit of sulks, I suppose?”

  “Of course not,” Debbie said. “It was nice when he started. He—he’s not built just to sit around.”

  “My dear,” Smith said. “My dear Miss Brooks. I didn’t mean to imply—” He let the sentence finish itself.

  “Anybody’d think there was something funny about Dan,” the girl said. “Something—peculiar.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Smith began, but Eve Gordon cut in.

  “There is, Debbie,” she said. “Why don’t you face it? It’s only just now, of course. He’ll be all right. But there is somethin
g—well, funny, about him now. Naturally.”

  “Dan’s all right!” Debbie said. She was defiant. Her cheeks flushed.

  “Debbie,” Eve Gordon began. Then she saw the maid standing in the door to the dining room. “All right, Susan,” she said. She turned to the others. “Dinner,” she said. “You’ll stay, Nickerson? I’m sure Dan will be along.”

  Nickerson Smith hesitated. He had, he said, planned to drive back at once, getting a sandwich on the way. Later he was meeting—He looked out at the rain.

  “However,” he said, “it’s rather important to get this signed. I suppose I can give him a ring and—”

  “Of course,” Eve said. But, at almost the same time, Debbie said, “No.” They looked at her. “Because I’m afraid there’s something the matter with the telephone,” Debbie said. “I tried to call and I was—I couldn’t get through.” She did not know why she changed the sentence.

  “Really,” Eve said. “Telephones in the country! When was this, Debbie?”

  “A little after six,” Debbie said. “I’d just heard the news and I—I wanted to make a call.”

  It was lame. It sounded lame. It said too much—and too little. But nobody picked it up.

  Perhaps the trouble was corrected, Nickerson Smith said, and he went across the hall to the study. But he came back in a moment, shaking his head, and said, “Nope. Still dead.” He went back to the fire, stood in front of it for a moment and then shrugged. “In any case,” he said, “I’d better wait for Dan. I’ll just have to explain tomorrow.”

  They went in to dinner a few minutes later. The storm, which had seemed to lull, increased again. They were eating grapefruit when there was a sudden, very close, flash of lightning, with thunder almost on the flash. The lights went very low, came up for a second, went out.

  It was a routine thing, an ordinary thing. There was no reason why anyone, knowing the way of electric storms with country power, should sit holding herself tight, trembling uncontrollably, while the maid brought candles, flickering in the semidarkness, throwing moving shadows which grew quiet as the candles began to burn steadily on the table. It was an ordinary thing.