The Judge Is Reversed

by Frances Lockridge

  “All the same,” Pam said, bringing them again back to it, “he knocked Gardner Willings down. Mr. Willings wasn’t pleased. Mr. Willings isn’t used to things like that.”

  The statement was made for the record, rather than as an offer of information. They all knew Willings—knew of Willings. Every literate American knew of Gardner Willings. He hunted big game in Africa and had been photographed often with a foot on it. He had written about Africa. He had been, until recently, a sports-car racer. He had written about sports-car racing. He was flamboyant. Now and then he spoke of himself in the third person. And if he was not a great writer, he was so near it as made no difference until, as was so often said, time had told. About his influence on American writing there could be no doubt whatever.

  “Nowadays, every American who doesn’t try to write like Hemingway tries to write like Willings,” one critic had said, which was saying it flatly, and in which there was unmistakable truth.

  Gardner Willings, in short, was not a man who would like to be knocked down.

  And there was, of course, another point: Gardner Willings was a notable rifle shot. Lions and tigers without number, and a rhinoceros here and there, could be brought to testify, if ghostly testimony were admissible. (And, of course, subject to translation.)

  “All the same,” Bill Weigand said, “it sounds a bit preposterous, doesn’t it? Grant he was annoyed—”

  “Unless,” Pam said. “Before he was shot, poor Mr. Payne kept saying that Willings must be crazy. And there’s something about that somewhere—great something is—”

  “‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied,’” Jerry said. “Dryden.”

  “So terribly literate,” Pam said, fondly. “On the other hand, I thought that Willings had merely too much taken. And Mr. Payne, poor man, was a bit of a twerp, all things considered.”

  She was looked at, waited for.

  “Not evidence,” Pam said. “One woman’s opinion. And I’m not impartial. I don’t like his books.”

  Jerry sighed.

  “This new one,” Pam said. “It’s called The Liberated. It ought to be called, The Dismembered.” She looked at Jerry. “Which you know perfectly well,” she said. “Where was I?”

  “Admit a spot of torture here and there,” Jerry said. “A bit of sadism. We don’t offer it as a juvenile.”

  “Catering,” Pam said. “I won’t say pandering.” She paused to consider. “On the other hand,” Pam said, “I will say pandering.”

  “By all means,” Jerry said.

  “Please, you two,” Bill Weigand said. “Why a twerp? Only because you don’t like his books?”

  “He acted like a twerp,” Pam said. “I don’t mean by knocking Mr. Willings down. I think that was pretty much an accident, anyway. Don’t you, Jerry? And—wasn’t he a twerp? Tom won’t send it out as a release.”

  Jerry thought for some seconds.

  “All right,” he said. “His review of Willings’s book was vicious. Over and above the call of duty. Malicious and—jealous. Envious.”

  “Twerpish.”

  “If you like. And, for what it’s worth, he wasn’t precisely—intrepid—when Willings came at him. No special reason to be intrepid. Only—” He looked at Pam.

  “He wrote intrepid,” Pam said. “In I Know Africa.”

  “The Africa I Know,” Jerry said. “Yes. The conquering-hero type. Facing down enraged natives.”

  “I’ve never blamed the natives,” Pam said. “He was a twerp. And somebody asked me to tell him to drop dead.” She stopped abruptly. She had not been thinking of, talking of, the Anthony Payne of flesh and blood. Particularly of blood. An abstraction is all very well. A man, alive seconds before, dying bloodily on a sidewalk—Everything seemed, momentarily, to waiver.

  “All right, Pam,” Jerry said, and reached out and put a hand on hers. “All right, girl.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pam said. “All at once I—”

  “I know.”

  The wavering of everything ended.

  “Who,” Bill Weigand said, “said that? Asked that?”

  “A man named Lars something,” Pam said. “He—wait a minute. Lars Simon. He adapted Uprising. Made a play of it. And—he was very annoyed at Mr. Payne. Seemed to be. Perhaps it was just—theater people dramatize. I met him and—”

  She told, briefly, of meeting Lars Simon; of his, perhaps dramatized, attitude toward Anthony Payne. Bill Weigand looked at Jerry.

  Jerry had heard something about it; heard from Livingston Birdwood. Simon was not only the author of the play version of Uprising. He was also directing the play. He felt that Payne had been “horning in”; interfering not only with the dramatization itself, but with the direction. Even with selection of the cast, Simon had complained to Birdwood. He had told Birdwood that, if it kept on, Birdwood might have to get himself another boy.

  “Only a squabble,” Jerry said. “At any rate, Birdwood thought so. A case of Simon getting tensed up. As, he says, Simon has a habit of getting. He did say—Birdwood, I mean—that he was keeping his fingers crossed. He said that all producers end up with permanently bent fingers.”

  “He did get one of the actors fired,” Tom Hathaway said. “Payne did. Anyway, that’s what I’ve heard. Made a thing of it. Said this guy—name of Blaine something—was n.b.g. A row about it, and Birdwood made Simon give in. I don’t know why. You’d think if Simon wanted—”

  “Payne put some money in the play,” Jerry said. “I don’t know how much or whether—”

  “Blaine who?” Pam said. She spoke very quickly. “Smythe? With a ‘y’ and, for that matter, an ‘e’?”

  That sounded right to Tom Hathaway.

  “Because—” Pam said, “unless there are two of him, and there seldom are, of course, he and Mrs. Payne are very—anyway—”

  She told them of Lauren Payne on the sofa at the party; of her feeling that there was anxiety in Lauren Payne’s manner, and in her eyes. “He seemed—” Pam said, and hesitated. “So often,” she said, “people remember more than there was. When there’s reason to remember. I think now he was—seemed—protective. And that they seemed—close together. But I didn’t think that—I don’t think I thought that—until Mr. Payne was killed.”

  “I know,” Bill Weigand said. “It happens that way. Still—”

  “From what I heard,” Tom Hathaway said, “Lars Simon thought this Smythe was very good in the part. And Payne didn’t make his pitch until—well, until pretty well on. They’ve been rehearsing for quite a while. Lot of rewriting, apparently. Which louses things up.”

  “Anxious?” Bill said. “Mrs. Payne?”

  “Well—any word, I guess. Jittery. Perhaps even—” Pam hesitated. “Perhaps even frightened,” Pam said. “She’s very sensitive, I think. When I—when Jerry made me be the one to tell her—” She stopped again; looked at Jerry.

  “I thought a woman,” Jerry said. “There didn’t seem to be anybody else.”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “I know the convention. Anyway—it hit her very hard. Terribly hard. It was as if—as if everything had fallen away. So if you—all right, all of us—are drawing inferences about her and this Blaine Smythe—when she was told her husband was dead things fell apart for her. I’m sure of—” But, suddenly, she paused. “Of course that’s what it was,” she said, very firmly—very firmly indeed.

  “Unless,” Bill Weigand said, and spoke gently, “she thought Smythe had killed him.”

  “You were the one who said it, Bill,” Pam said. “That he was—was a target. Not Anthony Payne.”

  “That that seemed probable. It still does. Simon wished Payne would take a trip around the world. Or, drop dead. You felt there was a—call it relationship—between Payne’s wife and this actor named Smythe. What else, Pam? In case Payne wasn’t merely a target?”

  “It’s all—trivial. It all seemed trivial. There was a man named Self. Very contemptuous of Mr. Payne. Works in—”

  “James Self. Runs a books
tore,” Jerry said. “Does a little criticism on the side. Very select criticism for very select readers. Very—superior. Particularly to authors who sell. Harmless, so far as I know. Anyway—I can’t see him criticizing with a rifle.”

  “There was the first Mrs. Payne,” Pam said. “Faith Constable she is now. In the play—the one Mr. Simon’s doing. She said Mr. Payne had a ‘dear, dirty little mind.’ But not as if she cared.”

  Hathaway laughed, briefly. He had done publicity for Faith Constable a few years before. He doubted very much whether she minded the condition of Payne’s mind, or ever had.

  “Married years ago,” Hathaway said. “Not for long. Perhaps two years. She divorced—Reno type. I’d guess because she thought Payne wasn’t going anywhere. Thirty years ago he wasn’t.” He turned for confirmation to Jerry North.

  Thirty years before, Payne had shown no great indication that he was going anywhere. He had written one novel, about life—his life, too obviously—in a small Ohio town. Published; sale of possibly two thousand. He had, after several years—and after Faith—written another, about an actress married to a struggling young writer, and throwing him aside as an impediment. Quite bitter, in a still childish fashion. Sales not quite as good as the first. North Books, Inc., had published neither, not then being in existence.

  Payne had then, for some years, worked on a magazine staff, with a few by-lines; setting no pages afire; proffering no more novels. He had gone to Africa on an assignment; he had discoverd Africa. “Sometimes,” Jerry said, “he seemed to feel he’d invented it. Or, at least, staked it out. Willings had an earlier claim, of course.”

  “And,” Pam said, “wrote better books.”

  Nobody denied that.

  “All the same,” Jerry said, “Payne’s first African book helped when we could use help. So—”

  “He married again, along there some time,” Hathaway said. “At least, when I was getting stuff a while back for a new biography, he said something about his second wife. I thought he meant Lauren, and said something which showed it, and he said, ‘No, I don’t mean Lauren. My second.’ I waited and he said, ‘Skip it.’ So I skipped it.”

  They were finishing coffee by then. They were, by then, almost alone in the Oak Room.

  Bill Weigand regarded his empty coffee cup, without seeing it. It did appear that, at the party, there had been several people who shared Pam’s view that Anthony Payne was something of a twerp. A man who was merely “contemptuous.” A man who thought it would be pleasant if Payne dropped dead. A woman who thought Payne had had a “dirty little mind,” but had not seemed concerned about this. A woman who had appeared to Pam to be upset, possibly frightened. Of her husband? A writer who had wanted Payne to eat his words, in indigestible form, and been humiliated, made to appear ridiculous. Still—still the chances were high that a target had been hit, only incidentally a man.

  “Jerry,” Pam said, “did you do something to a busboy? To make him hate you?”

  “Busboy?”

  “Thin. Dark. Picking up used glasses. In a white jacket with a dark patch on the shoulder. From trays. A—”

  “Do something to?” Jerry ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. “What on earth would I do to a busboy?”

  “There’s that,” Pam said. “So it must have been Mr. Payne. You were together—it was before Willings—and he—the busboy—stood and glared at you. At both of you, that is. As if he hated.”

  Briefly, she gave details. Jerry shook his head. Jerry hadn’t noticed, hadn’t felt a glare. So far as he could remember, Payne had showed no consciousness of being glared at.

  “Of course,” Pam said, “it could be he didn’t like any of us. That all of us were just a bunch of dirty glasses. If I were a busboy I’d feel that way, I think. With other people having fun. But still—”

  They separated outside the Algonquin, the Norths going downtown to their apartment; Tom Hathaway uptown to his.

  It was, Bill Weigand thought, now more than time to call it a day. But, since he was only a few blocks from the Dumont, since things would still be going on there, he might as well see what had gone on. Not that anything was expected. But still, as Pam North had said.

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  Copyright © 1961 Frances and Richard Lockridge

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  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3144-8

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