by Frances
“I wish Jerry hadn’t come,” Pam said. “Dorian—even Dorian—probably wishes you hadn’t come.” She looked at the slender, dancing girl again. “It isn’t fair,” Pam North said. The girl, dancing now before the others, with the others as a swaying background of white against her exquisite darkness, rippled. “My,” Pam said. “Oh my oh my. Such a gay people. And so—direct.”
She took Bill’s arm and led him toward their table. She said, “You know, don’t you? You get a certain way.”
“I think so,” Bill said, and held out a chair for her, and then a chair for Dorian. “It seems to add.”
“A common denominator?” Pam said, and they looked at her. Very slowly, very carefully, Jerry poured scotch into their glasses; very carefully, he added ice and soda. “Between elephants and apples,” Pam said.
“Oh,” Bill said. “No. It’s more deciding what to add—what is extraneous. You see—”
He was interrupted. Respected Captain J. R. Folsom approached and looked down at them. He had entirely regained his ruddiness and seemed in enviable spirits. “Lost my lady friend,” he said. “Red-haired lady friend.” He looked at Bill Weigand. “Thought you might like to know,” he said.
“Did you?” Bill Weigand said. “Pull up a chair.”
Folsom shook his head. He continued to stand.
“Went for broke, the lady did,” he said. “Like they say.”
“She tell you that?”
“Nope,” Folsom said. “But—I heard. I don’t say flat broke. Just bent down. Maybe not that. But she dropped a wad.”
“And you,” Bill said, “made a wad.”
“Didn’t see you there,” Folsom said. “But have it your way. Baby’s in shoes.”
“And,” Bill said, “shoe boxes?”
Folsom looked down at him. The gray eyes seemed now, as they had seemed before, by far the coolest thing about J. R. Folsom.
“Never out of shoe boxes,” Folsom said, “if you want to beat around the bush.”
“It seems,” Bill said, “to be your bush. If you want to tell me something, tell it.”
“Nothing to tell,” Folsom said. “I told you there wasn’t. Only, nobody minds having a little ready cash. What with this g.d. income tax. Sorry, ladies.”
“That’s quite all right, Mr. Folsom,” Pam said. “One hears so many expressions.” He looked at her sharply. She was very innocent.
“Like I was saying,” Folsom said, giving Pam up for Bill Weigand. “If there was any little difficulty—not that there was—if there seemed to be any little difficulty, the galloping dominoes took care of it. The old s.o.b.—sorry, ladies.” He looked suspiciously at Pam North, who said nothing. “The gentleman we were talking about, he’s up the creek with his little scheme. See what I mean?”
“At any rate,” Bill said, “I hear what you say, Mr. Folsom.”
“Thought you would,” Folsom said. “Not to change the subject, you see that little dark girl?”
“Yes.”
“Wow!” Folsom said. “All I can say is, Wow. Wouldn’t go in Worcester. All the same—”
“Right,” Bill said, and then Mr. Folsom left them. He kept his hands carefully in his pockets, presumably to hold the money down.
“Meaning,” Jerry said, “that he won enough to square his accounts?”
“Which don’t need squaring,” Bill said. “Yes, that seems to be the size of it.”
“Except, of course,” Dorian said, “that he could hardly have known Saturday night that he was going to win money today.”
“Right,” Bill said.
“And,” Pam said, “elephants or apples—or good red herring?”
But Bill did not seem to hear her. The show had danced away, the lights had come up around the tables. Bill stood and looked around.
Captain Cunningham was alone at the table, where previously he had sat with the Furstenbergs. People were trickling to the dance floor, and the Furstenbergs were not among them. Barron was, again with the blond girl. But, as Bill watched, he led her to the edge of the floor, bowed to her, went off among the tables. Folsom was moving, with some resolution, toward the foyer—Bill thought it likely that he was taking his money home, and thought it was wise of him, although Havana is safer than many cities. Mrs. Macklin was not in sight, and when he discovered that, Bill Weigand frowned slightly. There were, of course, many places she could have gone—and one of them, of course, was back to the gaming room. If she had, it might account for the absence, also, of Hilda Macklin. On the other hand, they might both have gone back to the ship, although it was only—Bill looked at his watch on his wrist. “Only” was perhaps not the word to use. It was after one in the morning.
Captain Cunningham stood up and looked around. He saw Bill standing, and briefly raised his glass in salute. Then Cunningham walked toward the wide stairs. The Buckleys from Kansas stood at the top of the stairs and looked into the patio, and, even from the distance, there seemed to be a kind of delighted wonder in their young faces. Then, hand in hand, they walked toward the dance floor. The North American orchestra was back, swinging through “The St. Louis Blues.” The dance floor filled and the night was young, dressed in gay colors for youth.
And, over the music, over the voices, someone screamed. The scream was wordless—high pitched, rising higher. It seemed to come from a distance and from the air.
In the instant, as the scream ended, everything stopped. The music stopped, and the voices stopped. It was, oddly, as if someone had switched off all the lights, although the lights burned. Then the scream came again.
People around the tables were standing, by then. On the dance floor, people were frozen for a moment, then broke from the postures of the dance and looked around and looked up. One man on the floor held his hand up to his forehead, as if to shield his eyes—as if he were trying to see something in the sun.
“There!” Jerry North said, and pointed, but by then Bill Weigand had seen, and had started to run among the tables toward the castle tower—the make-believe tower, which had seemed pleasantly ridiculous, and did not now—not now with two figures swaying, struggling on the narrow observation platform, against the platform’s low rail—fifty feet above the flagstone pavement around the tower.
The scream came again. It was impossible to tell which of the two struggling at the top of the tower was the one to scream. It was impossible to identify the two. They swayed, grasping each other, in the soft green light which washed the tower. Their shadows elongated, struggled against the glass housing the platform circled.
Several were running toward the tower now—dark figures racing among the tables, then among the dimly, prettily colored palm trees. Someone knocked a chair over, and it clattered on the paving of the patio. And someone dropped a glass, and the sound was shattering.
Tenuous in the pale light, the two at the top of the tower seemed, from below, to be locked in a grotesque dance. There was a kind of unreality about their movements, as if theirs were the pantomimed struggle of ballet. But then one of them—it was impossible to tell which—screamed again, and the scream was real—hideously real. It seemed to shatter the night. It was a woman’s scream.
Then, from somewhere in the area of the dance floor, a shaft of light leaped into the air and went questing over the top of the tower. It lost itself in air. It dropped to a point midway of the tower’s column and climbed up—climbed slowly, as if climbing were an effort.
By then many had reached the paved area beneath the tower and stood there, staring up, reflected greenish light on their faces. A man shouted. “Watch out!” he shouted, meaninglessly. “Watch out!”
The shaft from the light climbed to the platform and held there, and held the figures in it. One was shorter than the other—the shorter was a woman, bent back against the low railing now, arched over it; hair hanging down. She screamed up at the sky, and now there was a strange note in the screaming, as if it came through water.
She clutched at her adversary—taller, s
lender, clad also in white. The light steadied, and the taller, the one who struggled silently, seemed to move like a woman too. But she was shadowed, as the light rose from beneath them, by the one she struggled with. And who held, who thrust away, that was concealed by their swaying bodies.
One of those who looked up from below—this one a woman—gave a shuddering cry—a long, shaking “Ahhhh!” of terror.
The woman pressed against the rail seemed to lean farther back, seemed to teeter on the rail. As if a signal had been given, those nearest the tower’s base backed from it—backed into those behind them, so that the whole increasing crowd of those staring up swayed back, in a motion like a wave’s.
But then the two swirled away from the rail, still in their strange dance. They swayed on the narrow platform which circled the light housing—the housing in which, it appeared, there was no light. It seemed now, from below, that the taller of the two tried to push free. They moved part way around the top of the tower, and, momentarily, the light lost them.…
Bill Weigand and Jerry North ran among trees. They ran on grass, then on the circle of flagged pavement around the tower. Jerry led, because he knew the way. But when they reached the door into the tower, Bill Weigand checked him, and Bill went first.
The lights which circled upward with the staircase were dim. They plunged into dimness and began to climb. The stairs were steep and narrow, and turned sharply in the cylinder of the tower. They clutched rails on either side and pulled themselves up. But their climbing seemed unbearably slow.
The heavy walls of this mimic Morro Castle shut out sound, as they shut out all light save that provided by the dim bulbs. It was like climbing, laboriously, inside a dark pipe. And if one of the two struggling above fell—fell fifty feet to unrelenting flagstones—or if both fell, the climbing men would hear nothing of the falling.
They were gasping for breath when they reached the platform—climbed into the merciless white light—reached out for the swaying two, now again against the rail. Olivia Macklin’s red hair streamed about her face, and she had her hands at Hilda Macklin’s throat. The girl’s white dress was torn from one shoulder, and on the shoulder and upper breast there were long welts of red, from one of which blood seeped.
Jerry had Hilda, pulled her back against him, and she did not resist, although her body trembled against his. Mrs. Macklin’s struggles did not end so quickly; for a moment she writhed in Bill Weigand’s hands, seemed not to know that he was not still the adversary with whom she struggled. But then, very suddenly, her body quieted. But she spoke, wildly—still almost in a scream.
“Tried to kill me!” she said, and momentarily swayed toward the younger woman. “You tried to kill me!” Hilda merely looked at her.
“She followed me,” Mrs. Macklin said, and spoke somewhat less violently, but still violently enough, venomously enough. “To push me—off!” She pointed at the rail. “You murdering—” She had turned again on Hilda. She went on. She used a good many words in telling Hilda Macklin what she was. But Hilda merely listened. As she listened, she pulled her torn dress over her shoulder. She put a hand up and smoothed her disordered hair.
“I found out what she was,” Mrs. Macklin said, again twisting in Weigand’s grasp so that she could look up at him. “So she tried to kill me—too. The way she—”
Hilda spoke, then.
“She’s crazy,” she said, and her voice was not raised. “No wonder they wanted to—she’s crazy as they come. She’s—”
It was all Weigand could do, then, to hold the struggling red-haired woman. She wrenched herself toward the girl, and for a moment almost pulled Bill with her. Then, whirling, she seemed to try to drag both of them to the low railing. But Bill had recovered his balance then, and held her.
“Be quiet,” Bill said. “Do you hear me? Be quiet.”
Unexpectedly, she obeyed. She became a heavy weight in Bill Weigand’s supporting hands.
Then she began to say, over and over, in a kind of babble—“Not crazy, not crazy, not crazy.”
“She meant me to follow her,” Hilda said, and spoke evenly, her voice without inflection. “She—when I got up here, she was waiting. To push me off—to kill me. The way she tried before. We were fools not to have—” She stopped, then. She stopped abruptly.
“Yes,” Bill said. “More than you bargained for, wasn’t it? And I suppose it looked so easy.”
Hilda looked at him. She looked at him steadily.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, captain.”
“—say I’m crazy,” Mrs. Macklin said. “Can’t say I’m crazy. My mind’s as good as—” She stopped. She looked at Bill.
“You see how it is, don’t you?” she said. “With everybody against me—my own children trying to prove—” She was shaking, now. And the worst thing, or almost the worst thing, was that her rigidly drawn face was unchanged—remained smoothly impervious to the anguish in her voice, the anguish which burned in her eyes. “Do you think I’m crazy?” she said, and now her voice had an odd, strange note of hope in it.
“No,” Bill said. “No. But, now, it might be better if you were, you know.”
She stared at him. Then her eyes went blank.
“She was the one,” Mrs. Macklin said. “She tried to kill me. That’s the way it was.”
But Bill shook his head.
“No,” Bill said. “You’d be no good to Mrs. Barron dead, would you? You realized that. That’s how you knew she’d follow you up here. To see that you didn’t—harm yourself. I suppose you hinted you—”
But he stopped. Mrs. Macklin was not listening. She was looking again at Hilda, who held her torn dress up to the shoulder nails had clawed.
“You won’t get away with it,” she said. “You. Or that husband of yours.”
She turned to Weigand.
“You know who she is?” Mrs. Macklin said.
“Oh yes,” Bill said. “We know she’s Mrs. Barron. And what they were up to. And—that they weren’t up to murder. Not tonight, or any time. Why did you use the sword, Mrs. Ferris?”
Winifred Ferris did not answer. She did not even seem to hear.
13
The sun sank behind the Carib Queen, and she sailed for Nassau. Cuba was no longer a dark outline on the water; as far as one could see, the western water sparkled empty in the sunlight. But they were not looking at the sea; they were sitting in the coolness of the smoke room, and three of them were looking, not without resentment, at the other. It had not, they told Bill Weigand, by expressions on their faces, and also in words, been fair. He had known something they did not know; he had deliberately kept from them what he knew.
Bill was tired, and looked it, but he did not seem perturbed. He said that, as for the last, he had felt entitled to some pleasure during what was, by intention, a pleasure cruise. As for what he knew that they did not—he had asked questions and been answered. At least one of these questions, he thought, stood out. After he knew, from Stein (who knew from the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts), he would have been glad to tell any of them who asked. None of them had asked. They had, he said, as much reason as he had to see the question sticking out. The question was a simple one: Where was the motive for murder?
“Not,” Bill said, “the motives for snooping in other people’s staterooms. Not for trying to peddle jewelry, which was not yours, for your own profit. Not for, as Folsom admits, having a showdown with Marsh.”
That, he said, was what he had stuck on, not realizing he was stuck on that. That Marsh was looking into a possible—but not admitted—shortage in Folsom’s accounts was, certainly, inconvenient for Folsom. But Folsom did not appear to be a man to jump out of the slow simmer of embezzlement, even supposing it could be proved, into the hot fire of murder. And, one had to take into account the appearance of people.
As for Hilda Barron, who had posed as Hilda Macklin, and been paid to, and for her husband�
�admit they were crooks, mulcting an elderly woman and, toward the end, advancing to blackmail. But they were crooks, not thugs—they were not small-time robbers, losing their nerve at a crucial moment and losing it enough to kill.
“Admit?” Pam said. “Do they?”
They did not. Emphatically they did not. They were, ostensibly, shocked at the very suggestion, which Bill had made. But they were not indignant; if they were anything, they were amused—or as amused as a couple on the make is likely to be after the bottom has fallen out of a plan which seemed to be progressing far better than anyone could have hoped.
“Because how,” Bill said, “could they hope that their victim would put herself on the spot by killing someone else? Someone they had never heard of?”
“I wish,” Dorian said, “that you would start over. Mrs. Macklin—I mean Mrs. Ferris—killed Mr. Marsh because she was afraid he would manage to take her back—back to her son and daughter, and the house in Cambridge. She was afraid because she thought they were going to have her committed to a mental institution. You thought of that, and radioed Stein to find out, and he did and they were. You didn’t tell us about it because you thought it would be fun and games not to. Or—because you didn’t want to go out on a limb?”
“Well—” Bill Weigand said, and sipped from his glass.
“I,” Jerry said, “opt for the limb. You were looking for a motive—I’ll give you the weakness of the others—and you thought: Wouldn’t it work out fine if Mrs. Macklin was Mrs. Ferris, scared out of her wits, assuming she wasn’t out of them already, by the threat of the booby hatch. Terrified at the thought—”