by Frances
She did not speak immediately, but looked down the room at him. Then she said, “No, Mr. Self. I didn’t call you.”
“And,” Self said, “I’ve called Tony Payne a rat and you, Captain, have got it fixed in your mind why, haven’t you?”
“Go ahead,” Bill said.
“And Mrs. Payne maybe did and maybe didn’t see somebody, but if she did whoever she saw might want to keep her quiet. Only, I don’t limp, you know. Unless you want to say I faked a limp. As some sort of disguise?”
“Mr. Self, why don’t you just tell us—”
“Patience,” Self said. “And, of course, fortitude.” Suddenly he smiled as if amused. “And maybe what they call in the theater voluntary suspension of disbelief. Isn’t that what they call it, Smythe? You lying son of a—” He did not finish. Blaine Smythe might not have heard.
“All right,” Self said. “Mrs. Payne—make it somebody who said she was Mrs. Payne—called me up this afternoon. At the shop. She said—”
She had said she wanted him to come up to the house. She had given him reason enough to come.
Bill Weigand shook his head then. He said that that was not good enough. Self raised his eyebrows. “No,” Bill said.
James Self seemed to consult inwardly. He reached a decision. He said, “O.K. What she said was—”
The woman who had identified herself as Lauren Payne had asked him to come up and get a girl named Jo-An Rhodes. The woman who said she was Lauren Payne said that she had come home and found Miss Rhodes in her house, going through “my husband’s papers.” Surprised, Jo-An had become almost hysterical; was still hysterical at the moment of the call. She kept saying, “I wrote him letters. Somebody will show Jim the letters.”
“She said,” Self said, his voice level, without expression, “that she knew about Jo-An and her husband. And—that Jo-An worked for me. And that she—Mrs. Payne—didn’t want to call the police, because she knew Jo-An didn’t really plan to steal anything, but that technically, she supposed, it would be burglary and—well, a lot of stuff. And would I come and get Jo-An? So I got the car.”
“And,” Bill said, “didn’t leave a message for Miss Rhodes?”
Self looked at him and shook his head.
“She came to me,” Bill said. “Said you were missing. That it wasn’t like you to go without leaving word at the shop.”
Self said, “Oh.” Then he said, “I wouldn’t have if I thought she was up here, would I?” He looked at Bill Weigand, who nodded his head.
So—Self had, he said, got his car and driven to Ridgefield. He had stopped in the village at a drugstore for directions. At that, Pam felt a little like raising her hand.
“You drove directly here?”
Pam took down her mental hand. And James Self shook his head.
“Got lost,” he said. “I damn near always do. The kid, Jo-An, says—Anyway, I got lost. There’s this Nod Road and then, farther along, there’s a Nod Hill Road, for God’s sake. The point being, obviously, to trap the unwary. So—”
So, missing Nod Road, he had driven on several miles to Nod Hill Road, and on it for several more miles before he realized he had gone much too far, and found a house, and asked again—asked, this time, where the hell he was. He had been told; he had finally got to the Payne house.
“I started to get out of the car,” Self said, “and this lying bastard—” He looked at Smythe. Smythe was looking at him, now; looking at Self with a smile which might have been of pity, and shaking his head slowly, in a kind of baffled disparagement. “This son of a bitch,” Self said, “came rushing at me with something in his hands. I thought it was some kind of a club. Anyway, he tried to hit me with it, and I tried to take it away from him—by then I could feel what it was; it was this bloody gun—and we writhed around like a couple of extras in a Western film, and I got in a poke and then—well, then he slammed me. Next thing I knew, somebody was picking me up.”
He stopped.
“A bald and unconvincing narrative,” he said. “To which I can add no verisimilitude by corroborative detail. Mrs. Payne didn’t call me. Jo-An obviously isn’t here. This—” he paused—“animal, says I had the gun and shot Mrs. Payne with it. And, my fingerprints will be all over the gun, won’t they? And, if I know this rat, and I’m beginning to, in all the right places, won’t they? Because after he knocked me out, he could put them where he liked, couldn’t he?”
“You heard the shot? If you didn’t fire it?”
“Sure,” Self said. “Only, I didn’t realize what it was until I knew we were fighting over a gun. I had the windows of the car closed and it was before I opened the door and—well, it sounded a long way off. Anyway, you hear the damnedest things in the country.” He looked at Weigand. “And I suppose that sounds thin, too,” he said.
“You saw Mrs. Payne? Saw her fall after she was shot?”
“Movement,” Self said. “A vague feeling there was somebody on the terrace. I was pulling up behind this other car. There was fog all over the windshield.” He spread his hands. “I don’t make it any better,” he said. “It’s true, but I don’t make it any better. It—well, it all happened so damned fast.”
“My God,” Smythe said, in a tone of astonishment and of contempt. “Of all the—” He shook his head, apparently being unable to think of a word for such an enormity. “I hide behind a hedge and shoot a girl I came to take care of, and just at that moment—just at that moment, by God, Self drives up and I try to make him take the gun—my God, Captain!”
“It would be quite a coincidence,” Bill said. “By the way, Mr. Smythe, how’d you get here?”
“Get here?”
Bill waited.
“Oh, see what you mean. I parked my car down on the road, and walked up. The idea—well, the idea was to catch anybody who might try to hurt Lauren. Not scare him away.”
“You seemed pretty sure there would be someone. Why?”
“I was right, wasn’t I? I don’t know—don’t you ever have hunches, Captain? Just—feelings? Anyway, after Lauren called me—” He stopped; looked at Lauren Payne.
“I telephoned him,” Lauren said. “At the theater. I—I asked him to come up. I—I was afraid to be here alone. I thought—oh, I got to imagining things. When the car came up—Mr. Self’s car—I thought it was Blaine. That’s why I went out.”
It’s not coming together, Pam thought. It’s coming apart. She said she wasn’t expecting anyone—Pam interrupted herself, called herself a ninny. Lauren would hardly tell three other women that she had invited a man to a lonely, house, in which she was alone, the night after her husband’s murder. She, Pam, thought, hoped we would go away before he came.
“After Lauren called me,” Blaine Smythe said, “I—well, I got to worrying. I thought, maybe she knows something. Maybe—And I knew about young Mason here. Tony had told me. Said the kid was nuts. That there was no telling what he’d—Anyway, I checked at the hotel—I know them there—and found the kid hadn’t showed up for work and—” he spread his hands. Said that there they had it. And added that he was damn glad he had come, even if it wasn’t the kid.
Bill Weigand merely listened. It seemed to Pam that he was merely waiting for Smythe to finish, waiting politely. Well, Self’s story was as thin as he said it was—said it was before anyone else could, as clever liars do. Now Bill would say to the Connecticut policeman that he thought they had what they needed, and that he’d better take Mr. Self along for the time being and—
“Mrs. Constable,” Weigand said, “you left the rehearsal of Uprising this afternoon after you had got a telephone call. Who called you?”
“Why,” Faith said. “Gladys.” One sensitive, expressive hand flickered toward the woman in dull black. “She wanted me to help her. Wanted somebody she could—somebody who could advise her. Why?”
“And you, or she, called Mrs. North, and she joined you and then—then you came up here? To see Mrs. Payne? Perhaps to warn her? And, hoping you could—intercept
Robert before he had a chance to do harm? If he meant to do harm?’
“Yes. To do what we could.”
“Mr. Simon didn’t object to your leaving the rehearsal?”
“Lars?” There was surprise in her modulated voice. “Dear Lars?” Lars Simon, her voice said, would not do anything so preposterous. There was, Bill thought, the further suggestion that Lars had better not try. “Why do you ask that?”
“Oh,” Bill said, “curiosity. Do you mind telling me something about the play, Mrs. Constable? When I went into the theater, Mr. Smythe here was sitting at a table, near the center of the stage. Mr. Simon—he was filling in for you, he told me afterward—came on and said—well, a sentence apparently ending, ‘it was you who began it.’”
“Cues Blaine,” Mrs. Constable said. “Second scene, second act. Yes?”
“You mind telling me something about the situation?”
She said, “Good heavens, man!” She looked around at the others; she shrugged her shoulders, deftly. Her hands flickered for a moment, registering incredulity and surprise.
“Please,” Weigand said. “It may have bearing, Mrs. Constable.”
“I don’t,” she said, “have any idea how much you want, Captain. Not the whole play?” He shook his head. “I thought not,” she said. “And thank heaven not. Well—at that moment. There’s a native uprising, you know. White settlers in peril. All that. They attack—the natives, that darling Tommy so fearsome with his sharp teeth—at the end of the first scene. Curtain. The second scene, it’s the next morning. I come in and tell Blaine—who’s George Silcox in the play—that he began it. Then—”
“Right,” Bill said. “He’s sitting on a chair by a table. He has his right leg up on another chair. Why?”
“Why? Oh, the leg. Because he was shot in it, of course.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “I guessed it was something like that. This afternoon. Lars Simon didn’t like the way Mr. Smythe moved when you—that is, when he—cued him. He said something like—” Bill paused, remembering words. “Like ‘you’ve got to start wearing it. Otherwise you’ll be skipping all over the place.’ Wearing what, Mrs. Constable?”
But he did not wait for her answer. He turned, abruptly, toward Blaine Smythe, who now sat facing him, leaning a little forward in his chair.
“Perhaps I’d better ask you,” Weigand said. “Wearing what, Mr. Smythe?”
Smythe looked at him for a moment, and then smiled; seemed to chuckle. He said, “Man, are you thorough! The bandage, of course. It’s a—” He hesitated. “A sort of snap-on,” he said. “The prop man ran it up. There’s only a few minutes between the scenes. Just time for me to snap the gadget on my foot. Looks like a lot of bandaging from out front.”
“That’s all?”
“Sure—hell, you want me to draw a picture of it? Oh, the bandaging goes a good way up my leg. I’m wearing shorts, of course. Rough sort of splints—the old doc’s had to make do with what he could, you see. And—well, there you are.”
“You haven’t been wearing it, I gather? During rehearsals?”
“Not when I can get out of it,” Blaine said. “It’s damn uncomfortable. Hot as hell and—”
Then he stopped, and the smile faded.
“What are you getting at?” he asked Bill Weigand.
“A man who limped,” Bill said. “Used crutches, I think. Mrs. Payne?”
Lauren was no longer leaning back on the sofa. She was sitting straight, she was looking at Blaine Smythe, watching him. She turned, slowly, toward Bill Weigand.
“You didn’t see who shot at you this evening? Or—did you? And, was it Mr. Self?”
She seemed surprised at the question; there was a vagueness on her face, an instant before intent.
“Why,” she said, “no—not really. The fog—the terrace light seemed to bounce back from the fog. I saw the car and then—then something hit me. Like a hand hitting me, almost. I started to fall and heard a—a cracking sound. No, I didn’t see who—tried to kill me.”
“No,” Bill said. “Do you want to tell me now, Mrs. Payne?”
She seemed, Pam thought, to know precisely what Bill meant. But she hesitated. She said, “Not yet.”
“Mr. Smythe,” Bill said, “I asked one of our men—Sergeant Mullins—to find this trick bandage. Took him a bit of time—Simon was out somewhere. But he ran it down. At the theater.”
“I could have saved you—” Smythe began, but did not finish.
“Probably,” Bill said. “Or—but never mind. A rifle is a rather awkward thing to carry around, of course. Even a light rifle. A long suitcase of some kind. But, we’d be looking for something like that, of course. Have been. On the other hand—you can put a rifle down inside a trouser leg. Strap it to the leg. But, the leg’s stiff then, isn’t it Mr. Smythe. However—if you have a bandage you can, as you say, snap on—and snap off, of course—the stiffness is explained, isn’t it? Bandaged foot shows. Poor man’s been in an automobile accident. Or broken his leg skiing. And—”
Smythe laughed. “You.” he said, “ought to be writing plays. You’re better than Lars.”
“No,” Bill said. “I didn’t think of it, Mr. Smythe. And Lars Simon didn’t. You did, didn’t you?”
Smythe looked confident still. He said, “You’re nuts, Captain. That’s your trouble. You’re—”
“No,” Bill said. “I told you we got hold of this trick bandage of yours. There’s a streak down it, Mr. Smythe. Narrow, but very straight. Straight as the barrel of a rifle. Streak made by oil from a rifle—a rifle carefully taken care of.”
“I still say—” Smythe said, but he looked around the room, and did not say at all. Sergeant Jones had put the rifle they were talking about down on the chair, and stood up, and was walking slowly down the room.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Payne,” Bill said. “I think it’s now, don’t you?”
“Now?” she said, and then breathed deeply and leaned back in the sofa again and looked across at Weigand, only at Weigand. “I wanted it to be a dream,” she said. “You guessed that, didn’t you? I—I prayed it would be a dream. Made myself—almost made myself—believe it was. You see—I had taken this stuff—everything was getting vague and—it could have been a dream, couldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bill said. His voice was gentle.
“I wanted so much—” she said. “But, it’s no good. I guess—I guess it’s never going to be any good. I thought he—if he had—it was because—” She stopped again, for a moment closed her eyes, as if against pain. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “In the end he tried to kill me, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Last night,” Lauren Payne said, “after I had gone to my room, I looked out the window. This must have been—oh, about half an hour before my husband was shot. Perhaps longer. I saw Blaine Smythe walk into the King Arthur Hotel. That’s the hotel directly across the street. He was using crutches and he had a white bandage on his right foot.” She stopped. Then, suddenly, her slender body began to shake with sobs. “I—” she said, and her voice shook, was almost inaudible. “I couldn’t be the first to say it, could I? Did I—did I say it right? So that it’s clear and everybody—”
Her head was back against the sofa’s back. Her face was very white, and her body shook.
Blaine Smythe was standing—a tall, lithe man. He turned—started to turn—away. It was as if he meant to run.
Sergeant Jones put heavy hands, from behind, on Blaine Smythe’s arms. “Wouldn’t try anything if I were you,” Jones said, and his voice was as heavy as his hands.
Gladys Mason was across the room, on the sofa beside Lauren Payne. She put an arm around Lauren’s shaking body. She said, “There, child. There. It’s over now.”
16
The Siamese cat named Stilts lay on the carpet in front of the fire. She looked as if she had been scattered there. Shadow approached, enormous blue eyes all innocence. She sniffed Stilts briefly and bit her left hind foot.
With no preliminaries whatever, Stilts went three feet into the air, straight up. At the top, she turned, walked briefly on air, and came down on top of Shadow. Shadow flattened, and breath went out of her with a small sound like “uff.” She turned on her back and began, furiously, to kick Stilts in the face. Stilts put both forelegs around Shadow’s neck and began to bite her left ear.
“They do love each other,” Pam North said, to anyone who cared to listen. “Don’t you, babies?” she added, to the cats.
“It is,” Dorian Weigand said, “impossible to jump like that. It is clearly impossible.”
The sound of Dorian’s voice distracted the cat named Shadow, who abandoned her obvious effort to kick Stilts to death and looked at Dorian. Stilts bit Shadow’s tail. Shadow leaped three feet into the air, turned in flight, and came down on Stilts.
“All right,” Dorian said. “Excuse it, please.”
Dorian Weigand was curled, rather as a cat might herself curl, in a big chair in the Norths’ apartment. It was a little after six on Thursday evening, and Dorian and the Norths had drinks and Bill was overdue for his.
“Here he comes now,” Dorian said, uncurling. “Hear him?”
Pam and Jerry heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They sounded like any footsteps. But neither Pam nor Jerry really doubted; neither was surprised to hear a characteristic tapping on the door. Dorian let him in, looked at him carefully before kissing him. He didn’t look any more tired than he usually did. He looked as if things had gone all right.
Things went well enough, he told them—told them after he had been supplied with a drink, and had swallowed half of it. Blaine Smythe was in the Fairfield County jail, charged with felonious assault, and with more to follow. He could fight extradition if he wanted to waste the time; if his lawyer thought it worth wasting. He denied everything and thereupon closed his lips, which was wise of him. But things went well enough.
A bell-man at the King Arthur, shown several photographs, had picked one of Smythe as resembling a man on crutches who had checked into the hotel late Tuesday afternoon, and been given—at request—a room on the third floor front. A cartridge case, ejected from the rifle which, in due time, would be described in newspapers as the murder weapon, had been found in grass behind a hedge. This had taken doing. From now on the things to be done would, for the most part, take doing. But they would get done. Things went well enough.