They waited.
“I was going to have lunch with him,” she said. “At the inn at Forest Hills. I drove in from Southampton to have lunch with him. He—he didn’t come. I tried to get him on the telephone and then—then asked people at the club. He’d been going to umpire a mixed doubles match and hadn’t showed up there, either. I tried again a couple of times on the phone and then watched the finals—the men’s finals. Then—well, then I drove in to see if he was all right. I said he’d asked me to come in for a drink but that was—just something to say. The first thing that came into my mind.”
That didn’t matter, Bill Weigand told her. Had she any particular reason to worry about John Blanchard?
She was quick on that. He’d invited her to lunch. He had agreed to umpire a match. He had kept neither appointment. Which was unlike him.
It was only that? Nothing more specific?
Greenish-blue eyes went very wide open. Specific? What did Captain Weigand mean, specific?
“I don’t know,” Bill said. “Were you afraid he’d been taken suddenly ill? A heart attack—something like that?”
“I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “Of course—I’ve said I was worried. That that’s why I came in. When nobody answered the telephone—not John or Sandys or anybody—of course I was worried. John isn’t—I mean wasn’t—a young man.”
“But a healthy man? So far as you knew?”
“Completely. So far as I knew. As he ever said.”
“You saw a good deal of him?”
“Not a good deal, really. I’d stay over at the apartment—oh, perhaps once every two weeks. Oftener in the winter. Now and then he’d spend a weekend with us. He was daddy’s friend, really. And mother’s.”
She didn’t, she told them, know much about John Blanchard’s other friends, associates. “Of course, he was a lot older.” She knew of his interest in cats; she supposed he knew a good many people who also were interested in cats—as breeders, showers of cats. About them, she knew nothing. He was a member of the West Side Tennis Club, and still played now and then. She played there too, now and then. She wasn’t good—not really good. She’d found out “years” ago she wasn’t going to be. Her father was a member of the club. She supposed that John Blanchard had known a lot of people through his interest in tennis, his membership in the umpires’ association. A good many of the men he probably knew she knew by name; some to smile at, nod to. Of course, most of them were older. “His age.”
A friend of the family—that was the picture. A much older man; a man like an uncle; a man who let her stay when she liked in an apartment too large for one man. She had been fond of him; very fond of him—as a pretty young woman may be fond of a man like an elderly uncle. That he should have been—killed! Who would want—?
They were trying to find that out; that was what it was all about. She couldn’t help there? Blanchard had said nothing to her which now, in the light of what had happened, took on meaning—meaning it had not had when he said it?
She shook her head, the red hair swaying about her pretty face.
He had not spoken of anyone with whom he had had—call it a disagreement? Had not seemed worried when she saw him last?
Again the head shook, the hair swayed.
She had had her chance; had not taken it. Bill Weigand’s tone was just perceptibly different on the next question.
“Miss Latham,” he said, “you haven’t mentioned the incident at Forest Hills yesterday. In the garden bar. You don’t think that was germane to what I asked?”
Her eyes widened at that; their expression changed momentarily.
“How did—” she began, and caught herself. “Oh,” she said, “that.” Her tone dismissed “that.”
“That was nothing. Doug Mears sort of—flies off the handle, as daddy says. I’m sure he was sorry right away afterward. Probably apologized. In matches the boys—and the girls too, sometimes—get so keyed up that—” She stopped. “It didn’t mean anything,” she said. “It never occurred to me that you would think it was—what you said. Germane. Just an excited kid.”
“Mears is—what, Jerry?”
“Twenty-four,” Jerry said. “About that. Twenty-three or twenty-four.”
“Just a kid, anyway,” the girl said. “Younger than you make it sound. A tennis-playing kid.”
“A friend of yours, Miss Latham?”
“Not especially. I know a good many of them—the tennis-playing kids and—”
“Miss Latham,” Bill said, “more or less by accident, we’ve learned quite a bit about this—incident. You spoke to Mears as if you knew him rather well. As if you were—cautioning him. And Mears said something about—” He looked at Pam North. She hesitated.
“All right,” she said. “My husband and I happened to be there, Miss Latham. Mr. Mears said something about Mr. Blanchard’s having got what he wanted and then—” Pam closed her eyes; concentrated. She opened them.
“That it was—was sitting right there,” she said. “Wasn’t that it, Jerry? About it? And—you were sitting there with Mr. Blanchard, you know. It sounded as if—”
“No,” the girl said, and spoke quickly. “There wasn’t anything like that. I don’t know why you say—I was a little embarrassed, because all at once everybody was looking at us and—there wasn’t anything like that.”
Pam looked at Jerry.
“That’s the way I remember it,” Jerry said. “You said ‘Doug’ a couple of times as if—as if you were asking him to—call it behave himself. As if how he behaved concerned you.”
“Doug Mears?” she said, in apparent astonishment. “Why on earth should what he does—oh, I didn’t want to be part of a scene. Nobody does. Perhaps I did say something to—to stop him. Said ‘Oh, Doug’ the way one does, meaning—” She stopped again. She looked at Bill Weigand. “That was all,” she said. “If Doug said anything about John’s having what he wanted I don’t know what he meant. And, I don’t remember anything like—”
The doorbell rang. Jerry went to the door. Two men were outside it—a rangy young man, hatless, with blond short hair; a heavier and somewhat older man, who wore a hat.
“Compliments of Detective Shapiro,” the heavier man said. “A Mr. Doug Mears. Showed up at the apartment, Shapiro says, and—”
“Hildy!” Doug Mears said. “What the hell are you—” He did not finish. When he first saw the girl, Pam thought, there had been light in his face. The light went out.
“Come in, Mr. Mears,” Bill Weigand said. “We were just talking about you.”
Mears hesitated.
“I’d do what the captain says, Mr. Mears,” the heavy man said. “Hiya, Al.”
Mullins had moved closer to the door. He looked very large. He said, “Hiya, Jimmy. How’s tricks?” but not as if either remark were a question, requiring an answer.
Mears came in. He stood in the room as the heavy man closed the door on them.
“What about me?” Mears said. He didn’t look particularly like a kid. His face was young enough. His expression was not. He spoke, not to Bill Weigand, or to Mullins or the Norths. He spoke to Hilda Latham. “You’ve been doing the talking, Hildy?”
“Nothing,” she said. “They’ve got some crazy idea. I was just—just telling them how crazy—”
Mears did not wait for her to finish. He looked now at the others. He said, “What kind of a deal is this, anyway? Seems to me I’m being pushed around. What’s the idea?”
“Not pushed,” Bill Weigand said, and spoke pleasantly, without insistence, without rancor. “I’m a police captain. Investigating a murder. John Blanchard’s murder. This is a police sergeant. Mr. and Mrs. North are—friends of mine. Things happened to work out so that—” He paused; momentarily he blinked. When he told Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley how things had “happened” to work out—And, until that moment, the course of events had seemed so natural. Momentarily, in his mind, Bill listened to the explosion of Deputy Chief Inspector Ar
temus O’Malley.
“You don’t need to say anything unless you want to,” he said, mildly, to the tall, the rangy—and most obviously the angry—tennis player.
“You’re damned right,” Mears said.
“Only,” Bill said, “I could take you in for questioning. To a station house. Even hold you for a while as a material witness. You could have a lawyer and—”
“What’s she been telling you?” Mears said.
“Nothing,” Hilda Latham said. “Nothing, Doug. Because there’s nothing—”
“You’re damned right there isn’t,” Mears said. He was, evidently, a man who did not wait for the obvious to be completed. “Johnny Blanchard said to drop around for a drink if I was going to be in town this afternoon and when I get there—”
“Doug,” the girl said. “They do know about yesterday. Not only what was in the papers. Somehow—these people—” She indicated the Norths. “They happened to be having a drink when—”
“So what?” Mears said. He looked now at Bill Weigand. “You don’t for God’s sake want to try to make anything out of that?” He looked at Hilda Latham. “And you,” he said. “Are a sweetheart. Really and truly a sweetheart.” His tone was bitter.
“Miss Latham,” Bill Weigand said, without emphasis, “also has told us there is nothing to be made out of that. If there isn’t, we won’t make anything. When you went around for a drink, you didn’t know Mr. Blanchard was dead?”
“That,” Mears said, “is a hell of a damned fool question. If I knew he was dead, how the hell’d I think he could give me a drink?”
“Bill,” Pam North said, “he’s really got something there, hasn’t he? What would you like to drink, Mr. Mears? Or are you in training or something?”
Mears stared at her for a moment.
“Because,” Pam said, “all the rest of us are.” She looked around at the glasses. “Were,” she corrected. “If you don’t drink we’ve probably got some—”
“Two hours ago,” Mears said, “Nellie and I lost the silliest damn match you ever—So.” He looked around again. “This is the damnedest setup,” he said. “Scotch, if it’s handy.”
And he looked around for a chair. It appeared that Mr. Doug Mears had decided to play along. When Jerry had made his rounds, Mears did, to a degree, play along. Now and then, his tone sharpened, his ever-ready temper showed through. But as an exasperated young man, and one who had had a disappointing tournament, he seemed to be doing what he could to play along.
He did not deny that he had been sore as hell at John Blanchard. But he pointed out that that was yesterday. So, he’d made a fool of himself. It wasn’t the first time. “I needed that match,” he said. “Might have made a hell of a lot of difference. Water under the bridge, now.”
He’d calmed down after the scene in the garden bar. Toward evening he had run into John Blanchard at the Forest Hills Inn and apologized. They could prove that, if they wanted to. Plenty of people had heard him.
What had he meant, Blanchard had got “what he wanted”?
How did he know? He was sore. He’d said the first thing that came into his head. He supposed—got him beaten. It was a damn silly thing to say.
About what Blanchard had wanted being seated at the table?
“Don’t remember anything like that,” Mears said. And if he looked at Hilda Latham quickly, was not looked at, looked away again, what did that mean? The question was Pam North’s, to herself. He had to look at somebody. Hilda Latham was a rewarding somebody to look at.
It had been during his meeting at the inn, during his apology, that John Blanchard had invited him to drop by the next afternoon—this afternoon—for a drink? If he happened to be in town?
“Yes,” Mears said. “Sure. I said I still didn’t get the foot-fault business, and what was I doing wrong? He said, drop by and he’d try to explain. He was with some other people then and I was meeting a couple of guys myself. So—”
So, having been eliminated from the mixed doubles early in the afternoon, having watched the finals of the men’s singles—the Australian had won, in straight sets, to nobody’s surprise—Doug Mears had driven into town, and up to the apartment in Riverside Drive. He had rung the doorbell and—
“Things sort of blew up in my face.”
He guessed that, when he had first come into the apartment, this apartment, he had blown up himself. O.K., he’d said he did sometimes. O.K., he was sorry.
He said this to everybody. He looked at Hilda Latham. This time, briefly, she looked at him. Her expression didn’t, to the watching Pamela North, reveal anything. My intuition must be slipping, Pam thought.
So?
Where had he been at, say, around nine that morning?
He flared briefly at that. What the hell—? O.K. He had been at the inn at Forest Hills. He’d either been just getting up, or eating breakfast, having just got up. Alone? So far as he remembered, he hadn’t seen anybody he knew. So?
That was about all, for the moment, Bill told him, told Hilda Latham. Mears stood up; the girl did not.
“Come on, Hildy,” Mears said. “Unless you’ve moved in here?”
She hesitated.
“For God’s sake,” Mears said, with impatience. “For God’s sake, come on!”
She stood up, then. She said, “I—”
The telephone rang. Jerry looked at it with reproach. “One of you,” he said, and Mullins answered. But it was Bill Weigand who spoke to Nathan Shapiro, on Riverside Drive, and a long, long way from Brooklyn. Bill said, “Yes, Nate?”
“Another one’s showed up,” Nathan Shapiro said, deep depression in his voice. “Guy named Ackerman. Starey-eyed sort of man. Teddy opened the door and he said, ‘Where’s this man Blanchard?’ sort of as if he’d come to shoot him. So do you want we should send him down too or—”
“No,” Bill said. “I’ll come up, Nate. Put Mr. Ackerman in storage for now.”
He hung up. He told Hilda Latham and the tall tennis player that he hoped they wouldn’t get lost, not go too far away. They both, a little unexpectedly but most politely, thanked Mr. and Mrs. North for the drinks, and for a moment it appeared that Hilda might go further, might thank them for such a nice party. “Come on,” Mears said, and they went on.
“Did you say Ackerman?” Jerry said, and then explained Ackerman. Bill said, “Well—well.”
“Will Kleenex be all right?” Pam asked, and Bill said it would do, and they wrapped in tissue, carefully, the cocktail glass Hilda Latham had used, the highball glass from which Mears had drunk.
“So nice you could drop in,” Pamela North said, as William Weigand and Sergeant Mullins dropped out, taking wrapped glasses with them.
7
The Norths went out to dinner. They went to Mario’s, which is nearest of the places they find permissible and which has other advantages, not the least of them that it is open on Sunday evening. “Mr. and Mrs. North,” Mario said, when they had gone down three steps from the sidewalk into the big, dimly lit room with red tablecloths. “Very cold, very dry, with lemon peel.”
“Sometimes,” Pam said, as they followed Mario to a corner table, “I feel as if I ought to be worried by that sort of greeting. Are we getting in a rut, do you think?”
“Do we want to run the risk of olives?” Jerry said, and spoke rhetorically. Whereupon, as rhetorically, Pamela North shivered.
They had a corner table; presently they had the cold and dry ones, with lemon peel. Sipping, looking, Pam said, “Do you see what I see?”
“Obviously,” Jerry said, “not. Since you’re looking one way and I the other.”
“Look in the mirror,” Pam said, with forbearance, and Jerry looked into the mirror behind his wife. He said, “I suppose so. What, in particular?” But then, before Pam answered, bothered to answer, he said, “Oh.”
“Of course,” Pam said, “since it was nearest for us, it was nearest for them, too. And why should they go off and eat separately—He’s talking a blue strea
k, isn’t he?”
Doug Mears, facing the girl with dark red hair at a table for two in the most distant corner of the dim room, did appear to be talking a blue streak. He seemed to be talking earnestly; he leaned forward over the table to talk. They could see only the back of Hilda Latham’s head. She was, also, leaning a little forward, apparently to listen. Once she shook her head; a little later she nodded her head.
“Attentive,” Pam said. “The story of his life, do you suppose? Or—of theirs?”
Jerry North abandoned the mirror in favor of his wife. He said, “Huh?”
“I thought so when he first came in,” Pam said. “Then I wasn’t sure. But of course you don’t get mad at somebody you don’t like.”
Jerry thought of saying “Huh?” again, but decided against it. He knew what Pam meant. He guessed. This is a condition with which he is familiar.
“If he was jealous of Mr. Blanchard,” Pam said, “it would be a very different dish of tea, wouldn’t it? Or possibly of arsenic. Poor young man in love with a rich girl. Proud, of course. Wouldn’t dream of living on his wife’s money.”
“The more fool he,” Jerry said. “You think if you’d had money, I’d have had qualms?”
“I think,” Pam said, “you’d have brought the subject up weeks before you did.” She considered. “Except then we hadn’t met then, had we? I mean, when I say weeks—”
“I know,” Jerry said. “Go on with the synopsis, Pam. Poor but reasonably honest young tennis player—”
“Loses a match which would have got him a professional offer,” Pam said. “Meanwhile, back on the farm.”
“Huh?”
“The corn grows,” Pam said. “All the same—it does, you know. He would have had enough money to propose. But—while he waits, Mr. Blanchard is making hay. On the same farm.”
“To roll in,” Jerry said, gravely.
“What a mind,” Pam said. “So the wounded tennis player—why do I say ‘wounded’?”
“Somebody,” Jerry said, “wrote a book about one. With a title like that, as I recall. Years ago. So Mears?”
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