by Frances
Bill Weigand waited. Willings seemed, now, entirely ready to keep himself going. Willings is willing, Bill Weigand thought, and rather wished he hadn’t.
“Couple of nights ago,” Willings said. “Having dinner with a man named Self. Starting some sort of magazine. Good stuff. Stuff nobody’ll want. Wants me to do something for it. Me.” He paused, apparently in wonderment. “And I may,” Willings said. “Just may. Nice kid, this Self boy. Reminds me of—” He stopped and drank and, for a moment, looked beyond the drink, at nothing—at the past.
“Anyway,” Willings said, “Payne came in with this girl—little dark girl with big dark eyes. Looking at the bastard with—” He paused. “As if her eyes saw greatness,” he said. “The poor, pretty, benighted little idiot. And Self started to stand up. Damn near knocked the table over. And then, just sat down again and looked at them. Good scene, and some time I’ll do it the way it ought to be done. Confrontation, see?”
“Right,” Bill said. “Because the girl was with Payne?”
“What else? His girl. Looking that way at this pink dome of nothing at all. Suddenly, his hands full of dust.”
“He say something to tell you that?”
Willings turned and looked at Bill Weigand, and with surprise. His look, Bill thought, is to say that I’m even dumber than he had thought. But when Willings spoke it was with resignation.
“No,” he said. “Said nothing. I see things, copper. It was the way I saw it.”
“Right,” Bill said. “This Self—James Self? I thought he ran a bookstore.”
“He runs a bookstore. Runs a bookstore. Writes reviews for—oh, Partisan Review. Gets out a magazine of his own. The poor bastard can’t write, you see.” There was a note of deep sorrow in Willings’s heavy voice, as he mentioned, with a kind of awe, this most tragic of human predicaments. “Got to do something.” He finished his drink and looked at his empty glass. He shook his head at it. He said, “You know Self?”
“Heard of him today,” Bill said. “He was at the party here.”
“Girl with him?”
Bill didn’t know.
“Didn’t see him,” Willings said. “Hell of a lot of nobodies. As you’d expect. Why does anybody give a party like that?”
“I don’t know,” Bill said, and reached the bottom of his own glass and stood up. “You’ll be in town a few days?”
“Probably. Why?”
“We like to know where people are.”
“I didn’t kill the bastard. Not worth the trouble.”
Bill Weigand said, “Right,” and went out of “The Bottom of the Well.” It was, he thought, mildly interesting that Gardner Willings had, more or less unprompted, brought up the “confrontation” scene which had involved James Self and a pretty dark girl with big dark eyes. And Anthony Payne. A small present to a deserving policeman? Present of small red herring?
Call it a night, now. Bill went out of the Hotel Dumont. On the sidewalk, Captain Jonathan Frank said, “Hey!” to him. Frank looked pleased. “Got him?” Bill said, and Frank, his voice sounding pleased, said it looked like it.
“Hiding on the roof,” he said, and pointed across the street toward the Hotel King Arthur. “Tried to make a run for it, and one of the boys had to stop him. Knocked him out, sort of. But he’ll come around, O.K.”
“Sure,” Bill said. “So that’s that.”
“Looks like it,” Frank said. “Lucky break. Find out where he ditched the gun, and we’re in.”
5
From the bedroom there came the cry of a Siamese cat in agony. “Then you feel,” Dave Garroway said, from a twenty-three-inch screen, in a tone of anxiety, “that we tend to underestimate the menace of communism here at home?” “It’s frightening,” the author of The Unseen Menace said, and Dave Garroway looked properly frightened. “Of atheistic communism?” Garroway said, getting it clear, and the author said, “I’m afraid that’s true, Dave.” Garroway looked at the camera, and it was clear to Pam North that he was scared stiff. From the bedroom the cat wailed.
Mr. Garroway’s such a nice man, Pam thought. So—she paused for the word. The word came. “Sincere.” Precisely the right word. The cat wailed. It was clear that the cat was undergoing torture.
“Here, Shadow,” Pam said. “She’s out here.”
The cat named Shadow had lost the cat named Stilts. Stilts was lying on the floor at Pam’s feet. When Shadow wailed first, Stilts lifted her head and listened. Then she put her head down again. Nothing wrong with her, the movement said. Silly cat, but not in any trouble.
There was the quick click of cat claws on the hall’s bare floor. Shadow appeared, crying. She looked at Pam and wailed. “There,” Pam said, and pointed. Shadow ran to Stilts, rubbed against Stilts, began to purr loudly. Stilts licked her, perfunctorily. Shadow licked back with eager excitement. Stilts turned slightly and hit Shadow in the face. Shadow laid her ears back and leaped into an embrace with Stilts. It seemed to Pam, watching, that Stilts sighed. Unquestionably, Stilts pushed. Shadow began to cry on a quite different note—in the tone of a cat about to eat another cat for breakfast.
Stilts, with a sudden flowing movement, stood up and knocked Shadow down. Then she sat and began to wash behind the ears. Shadow looked at her. Shadow sat and washed behind the ears.
“You poor dear,” Pam said to Shadow, “are you going to be a kitten always?”
Shadow leaped to Pam’s lap and Pam stroked her. It was a bit, Pam thought, like stroking an eel only, of course, furrier. Shadow purred. By decibels the loudest purrer we’ve ever had, Pam thought, and said, “Nice baby.”
Stilts watched for a moment. She lay down on the carpet again, and this time put one paw over her eyes.
No two of them are ever alike, Pam thought. She pressed the proper area of remote control and Dave Garroway, still looking frightened, vanished. Which was odd when one considered how much alike these two seal-points looked. Shadow’s eyes were perceptibly larger and, for that matter, bluer. She was a long, low cat, shaped a good deal—a good deal too much, if one chose to be critical—like a dachshund. (This comparison was never made, audibly, in her presence.) Shadow was constantly losing something, usually Stilts, and mourning loudly. People who were always talking of the detached self-reliance of cats should meet Shadow. If, of course, Shadow could, on encountering strangers, be got out from underneath whatever was nearest.
Shadow was almost a year old, and at a year a cat is a cat, ready to follow a cat’s trade. In the country, that summer, Shadow had pursued, and missed, butterflies. Stilts, who was a little over two, had brought home moles, mice, chipmunks and a medium-sized rabbit. (The one, it was to be hoped, who had got under the fence and eaten the lettuce or, at the least, a near relative of the one.)
Stilts was a cat who walked tall; she was, save for slightly crossed eyes, everything a Siamese ought to be. She had been given to the Norths by a sympathetic veterinarian, who—Pam suspected with the Norths in mind—had accepted her from owners who explained that they were ordered to Argentina. All the veterinarian knew of her was that she was a pretty, friendly cat. One of the things he did not know about her was that she was pregnant and another that she had not been inoculated.
When she returned from the hospital, a wraith, after parturition and enteritis, in that order, she found Shadow—then nameless; then of a shape and texture which had almost led to her being called Cushion—under a sofa. “Larger than I would have expected,” Stilts clearly thought, “but one of my kittens.” Stilts, who had evidently been fearless from the day she was born, enticed Shadow from under, explained that cats do not need to hide from people and washed her thoroughly. She earned a slave who was sometimes clearly a nuisance, but one to be tolerated by a gentle cat. Her slave, who had been on order when Stilts was offered, had a long pedigree and quite perceptible tabby markings on her rather thickish tail.
“The baby,” Pam North said, fondly, to the ecstatic purrer on her lap. The telephone rang. Stilts jumped up instant
ly and danced away to answer it. Shadow, watching her, wailed at this new desertion.
The voice was very low, almost husky. It was carefully controlled—so carefully, Pam thought, as to have in its texture a certain unreality. Pam said, “Why, of course. Whenever you like,” and listened a moment longer and said, “That’ll be fine,” and put the receiver back. For a moment she sat at the telephone table and looked at the olive-green telephone. What did Lauren Payne want, want anxiously, to talk to her about? At—Pam looked at the watch on her wrist—five minutes before nine?
Pam went to the bedroom, followed by cats. Pam spread up both beds—and had to reopen one of them to extricate Stilts, who had got herself spread in. Pam changed from housecoat to a gray-blue dress and had just finished lipstick when the door chimes sounded. Stilts rushed to answer the door. Shadow went under one of the beds.
Lauren Payne wore a woolen sheath, and was a woman who could wear a sheath. She wore mink over it, and Pam, admiringly, thought “Phew.” She was a slender, graceful woman, a little taller than Pam herself. The color of the sheath was a little deeper than the copper of Lauren Payne’s hair, the flickering copper in her greenish eyes. Very lovely, as Pam remembered her. Her low-pitched voice very steady, as it had been on the telephone. She was afraid she was being a nuisance. Her lips smiled. Her eyes did not. There was strain in her eyes.
Seated in a deep chair in the living room, Lauren Payne hardly knew where to begin. It would seem to Mrs. North—“What a pretty cat. A Siamese, isn’t she? Such very blue eyes. A really beautiful cat.”
“We think so,” Pam said, giving all the time needed. “Some people like them fluffy, of course. We feel that fluff hides cat. And there are the knots and—”
Lauren Payne was not listening. Pam North let cats drift away.
“When you came to tell me Anthony was—had been shot,” Lauren said without looking at Pam, and then did look at her. “It was kind of you. It’s a hard thing to do.” She paused. “What did I say, Mrs. North?”
“Why—” Pam said, and paused to remember.
“I’d taken something,” Lauren said. “A sedative. I was—groggy, I guess. And then, afterward, the doctor gave me something else. The thing is—in between it’s rather like a dream. A dream I half remember.”
“Why—” Pam said again. “You were lying down. You said to come in and—”
“Just you. There wasn’t anybody else?”
“Not right away. Then the doctor came. I said I was afraid I had bad news—I said something dreadful had happened. I don’t know the precise words. Then—well, then I merely told you. That Mr. Payne had been shot and that he was dead. And you—”
Lauren leaned forward in the deep chair. It seemed to Pam that her eyes said, “Hurry. Hurry!”
“For a moment,” Pam said, “I thought you hadn’t heard me. Then you said—I’m not sure I remember it precisely. You said, ‘Anthony? Not Anthony?’ and I said something meaningless—that I was sorry. Something like that. You looked at me for a moment—you don’t remember this?”
“No. Go on. Please go on.”
“But,” Pam said, “there wasn’t anything—not really anything. I think you said, ‘No. Oh—no!’ Something like that. And put your hands up to your forehead. You’d been lying down. You were sitting up by then. I don’t remember that I said anything. I think I put my arm around your shoulders. Then you said, ‘Shot? You said he was shot?’ It was something like that. Not really as if you expected me to say it again. Then you said—asked if we—no, ‘they’—‘knew.’ I supposed, who had shot Mr. Payne, and I said, ‘No. Nobody knows yet,’ and then that the shot seemed to have come from above somewhere. I think I said it was probably a sniper. One of those insane—”
“I know,” Lauren said. “That was all I said? Nothing about—anybody?”
“Why,” Pam said, “you said his name—your husband’s. As if you couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what—”
“Nothing else?”
Pam went through her mind. She didn’t remember anything else. After Lauren had covered her eyes, after Pam had moved beside her and put a steadying arm around shaking shoulders, Lauren had made only low, wordless sounds, moaning sounds. “I’m sure that’s all,” Pam said. “Then the doctor came and gave you something and—got somebody to be with you for a while. A nurse—somebody.”
“Not a nurse,” Lauren said. “One of the housekeepers. An assistant housekeeper, I think it was. A woman—a very nice woman—named—” She shook her head. “Mason,” she said. “Something like that. It doesn’t matter. I went to sleep quite soon, I think.” She leaned back in the deep chair and closed her eyes. “You’ll think—I don’t know what you’ll think,” she said, and spoke slowly, from a distance, in a voice which no longer, to Pam’s ears, sounded so carefully guarded. “To come to a complete stranger this way. Ask about what I ought to remember myself.”
“It was a terrible shock,” Pam said. “A terrible thing to happen. I don’t wonder you—”
“You see,” Lauren said, as if Pam had not spoken. (As I might as well not have, Pam thought. Since I said nothing.) “You see, I—with Anthony gone—there isn’t anybody. I’m—I feel terribly alone. That’s it, really. I—I couldn’t just sit in that awful room. The room I’d—I’d heard it in. I had to—well, just talk, I guess. To somebody. And you—you were kind last night.”
“Nothing,” Pam said. “I only—”
“That was all it was,” Lauren said. “A—just an inpulse.” She leaned forward in the chair and smiled again—smiled again with lips, still did not smile with eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me.”
“Oh. As for that? You mean, literally, you haven’t anybody to turn to?”
“Literally,” Lauren said. She smiled again. “It’s not so terrible,” she said. “I’m a grown woman. Just at the moment, with Anthony gone—I feel—I suppose the word is bereft.”
It seemed to Pam that, now, manner had returned to the voice; that voice was too carefully considered, words (for all the seeming stumbling over them) most carefully chosen. And Pam found that she did not think that “bereft” was, really, quite the word. Not the word to use of one’s self. Still, of course—
“But,” Pam said, “you must have friends.”
Lauren shook her head. She said, “Acquaintances. Anthony is—was—always so busy. And so often away getting material. We had very little—” She ended with a shrug of delicate shoulders.
And in Pam’s mind, in spite of her best intentions, three words formed—“Oh, come now.”
“That Mr. Smythe,” Pam said. “Blaine Smythe? I thought he seemed—”
Lauren said, “Oh,” in a certain way—a way which dismissed Blaine Smythe. “A friend of Anthony’s,” she said. “Not of mine, really. One of the actors in Anthony’s play. Anthony met him at rehearsals, I suppose. I hardly know him.”
This time Pam almost spoke the same three words. She remembered Lauren and Blaine Smythe sitting on a sofa in the Dumont’s Gold Room, of Smythe leaning toward the slender and lovely (and strangely nervous, uneasy) woman and talking, with what had looked like intent earnestness, to her.
“I’ve bothered you long enough,” Lauren said. “I’m sure you have things to do.”
“No,” Pam said. “Oh—things. Not really things, though. You know.”
Lauren Payne did not look as if she did.
“Mrs. Payne,” Pam said, “what did you think you might have said. And forgotten saying?”
(What were you afraid you might have said? And fogotten saying?)
“Goodness,” Lauren said. “I didn’t have the faintest. That was it. I thought you understood that. I just—there was a gap. It disturbed me a little. That was all.”
(Oh, come now.)
“And,” Lauren said, “it’s been dear of you, and I feel so much better, just having a chance to—to talk. Even if I didn’t make much sense.”
She got out of the deep chair. Her movement was without effort, rem
arkable for grace. Not frail at all, obviously. Whatever one thought on seeing her first. Lithe, if one came to that.
“The more I think of it,” Lauren said, and smiled again and this time held out a slender hand, “the more I think my barging in this way was quite unforgivable.”
Pam shook her head. Lauren Payne’s expressive face changed suddenly. It seemed to droop, to lose contours.
“It’s all so meaningless,” Lauren said, and spoke slowly. “So—so horribly without meaning. Somebody—somebody half crazy—shoots a gun, just—just to shoot a gun—and kills somebody like Anthony.” She put both hands to her forehead, covering her eyes. She held them there a moment, took them down, said, “I’m sorry. But it would almost have been better—” She broke off. “The police do think it was that, don’t they? What they call a sniper?”
“I suppose so,” Pam said. “At least—yes, I suppose they do.”
“Somebody they’ll never catch. It’s all so meaningless.”
Pam thought of several things to say. What she said was, “Yes.”
Stilts accompanied Mrs. Lauren Payne to the apartment door, and would have gone farther with her if Pam had been less quick. The door closed, Pam put the dancing cat on the floor and spoke to her.
“What,” Pam asked her dancing cat, “was she afraid she had said? Doesn’t she know her husband got Blaine Smythe fired, and that I can tell casual acquaintance from something else whatever the direction of the wind? And if she wants to know what the police think, why doesn’t she ask the police? Because she knows we’re friends of Bill Weigand?”
“Yow-ough?” Stilts said.
“You may well ask,” Pam North said.
There was no point in wasting further time on the case of Anthony Payne, deceased. There were, certainly, aspects of interest. Mr. Payne had, it appeared, given several persons cause to dislike him, most obviously a burly man with a red beard; quite probably a man—undescribed—named James Self; possibly a wife or two; avowedly a harried playwright-director. Which had nothing to do with the case. A man may be hated by hundreds and die, quite by accident, under a ten-ton truck. Or, as is always more likely, quietly in bed. Or, which was more apposite, as the chance target of a madman. In the mind, write “Closed” to the case of Anthony Payne.