Death Has a Small Voice

by Frances Lockridge

  Wilson had admitted killing Hilda Godwin—admitted it in many words, sometimes rambling, sometimes violently denunciatory of the dead girl, sometimes endlessly extenuating of himself. It had not, Bill told them, been pleasant. Wilson had gloated toward the end, as he became less rational; he had told them over and over of the way his hands had felt on Hilda’s slim throat, of the way she had struggled. He had, as his life ebbed, re-lived that climax in it; savored murder.

  “It was rather as if he thought he had proved something,” Bill told them, and now, finally, he did accept a drink. “I suppose he felt he had. A kind of adequacy.”

  Wilson had admitted killing the little burglar, but about that he was dispassionate. The man had tried to blackmail him; it was appropriate that the man die. He did not seem to know, or particularly to care, how Harry Eaton had found him.

  “We don’t either,” Bill said. “Presumably, Hilda used Wilson’s name at some time. Perhaps when he first came in. Eaton was there, of course. He must have heard the name and remembered it and looked it up in the telephone book.”

  Eaton had had the record in an envelope, addressed to Mr. North, when he arrived at Wilson’s apartment Sunday evening. Money, he told Wilson; money, or the record went to the Norths. “Not to us, for obvious reasons,” Bill said. “Money doesn’t do much good if you’re in Sing Sing for life as a fourth offender.”

  Eaton told enough of the recorded conversation to convince Wilson. Wilson pretended to agree, asked time to get the money. But he had had no intention of agreeing; he followed him, planning to get the record back. He had not been quick enough; he had bungled.

  “He did all along,” Pam said.

  Bill nodded; he said, “Right.”

  Eaton, before Wilson killed him, got the envelope in a mail box. Wilson had thought of waiting for the collector from the box; had thought better of that. “The government scares people,” Bill said. “More than we do.” Wilson had decided to get the record from the Norths; he had telephoned, found them both absent, discovered that Pam would return Monday evening.

  “Mr. Mutton,” Pam said, suddenly. “There was a Mr. Mutton.”

  They looked incredulously at Pam North. She explained. “I wonder,” she said, “what name he really used? Nobody would call himself Mutton.”

  Bill shrugged. Wilson had not got around to telling that.

  He had gone, after dinner, to the North apartment house and been about ready to go in—apparently planning to use whatever method was necessary to recover the record—when Pam came out.

  “You were carrying the record in your hand, apparently,” Bill said.

  “My purse was full,” Pam said. She considered. “I really need a bigger bag,” she said. “None of this would have happened if—” She stopped. She said she was sorry.

  He had followed Pam, driving Hilda Godwin’s station wagon. He had left his own car in the country the week end before, not expecting to use it again until spring. He had followed her to the office.

  “The record was becoming a kind of obsession, apparently,” Bill said. “He had to get it. Of course, he never knew exactly what was on it.”

  He had died raving about the record. “They lied,” he kept saying, in delirium. “They lied. I’ll make them tell me where—”

  “By the way,” Pam said, “where is it really, Jerry?”

  Jerry North looked at her blankly.

  “I told you,” he said.

  Then Pam looked blank. Her eyes, already larger than they should have been, grew larger still.

  “It was really true, then?” she said. “What you told him? In the end, there wasn’t any record?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Except in your mind,” he told her. “In your memory. What was on the record, Pam?”

  Pam tried to remember. She shook her head.

  “It’s fuzzy,” she said. “He was going to kill her. He called her a snake. He wanted her to give him something, I thought, and she laughed. I remember that more than anything—the way she laughed. I think she called him pompous once and—” She stopped. “What he said doesn’t exist anywhere any more, does it?” Pam said. “All of it was about an echo, and it’s died away.”

  “The voice could have been identified,” Jerry said. “That was why he whispered when he talked to you; when, until almost the end, he talked to us.”

  “I don’t know,” Pam said. “I suppose so. But—it was a very little voice. I thought he might be British from certain words. But I heard—what was his name? The man at the cabin?” They told her. “Lyster,” Pam said. “It could have been his voice, I thought.” She turned to Bill, suddenly. “Could you really have proved anything from the record? she asked.

  And Bill Weigand shook his head.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “I doubt that it could even have been got into evidence. The assistant D.A. thinks not. But—it would have told us where to look for evidence we could get in. Like the shovel.”

  They waited. He did not immediately continue. He seemed, in fact, about to drop off to sleep.

  “The shovel,” Jerry repeated.

  “What?” Bill said. “Oh—yes. The shovel. It was broken, of course. He had been trying to mend it. It was a little thing to—” He broke off. He looked at Pam. “To save a life,” Bill said. “Yours, my dear.”

  “A broken shovel?” Pam said. Then she said. “Oh. That was why?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “He was digging a grave—a large grave. For Hilda. And, if it came to it, for you, Pam. And, he broke the shovel. He was awkward about physical things. You wouldn’t have pushed him back into the closet, got the gun, if he hadn’t been. So—he broke the shovel, digging. He took it home to try to mend it. The handle was broken. He was trying to wire it together. We found it—the State Police found it—on a bench in the basement of his house.” Bill finished his drink; shook his head when Jerry glanced at the shaker. “He wasn’t doing a very good job,” Bill said, mildly. “I suppose he was still working on it when we showed up and then, naturally, he had to find out what was going on.”

  “But,” Pam said, “just a broken shovel.”

  “And,” Bill said, “the manuscript, of course. They found that, too. A copy of the first draft; one of the final draft. Probably the last was the one Wilson took from the publisher’s after he had returned it for the record. If there were others, he destroyed them. But he couldn’t, apparently, bring himself to—wipe out the book entirely.” Bill paused again; lighted a cigarette. “After all,” Bill said, “he was a—what would you call it, Jerry?—a man of letters.”

  Jerry nodded. They waited.

  “Oh,” Bill said, “the book’s about Wilson, all right. A wicked, ugly story about a man like Wilson. Very witty, very cruel. He’s a lawyer, in the book. He makes love to the girl, who is pretty obviously Hilda herself. It’s the story of her finding him out, so that in the end she ‘comes up smiling.’ We’ve been finding out more about Wilson, and the character fits him. Plenty of people would have identified this man—she called him Benjamin Watson, just to make it easier. In the first draft, she identified him as a professor and all but named Dyckman. Somebody, I suppose, persuaded her that that went a little too far. She went far enough, without it.”

  He paused. He finished his drink.

  “But still—” Pam said.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Only a megalomaniac would carry it to murder. Not that anybody wouldn’t—well, like to wring her neck. She made her identifiable Benjamin Watson a pompous ass. She also hints that he was a—well, an inadequate one to boot. The gossip columnists would have had fun with it. Probably, in the end, the famous professor, the widely known lecturer and radio figure, would have been laughed out of existence. More specifically, he’d probably have been dropped by Dyckman.”

  They waited.

  “The crux of it, probably,” Bill said. “He’d have lost his job—the job the rest hinged on. You see, Hilda was an undergraduate when they first met. It’s pretty evident
they had a love affair. Well—universities don’t much favor faculty members who—seduce pretty young undergraduates. As a matter of fact, they fire them.”

  “‘Seduce,’” Pam said. “I’d almost forgotten the word.” She looked at Bill, with directness.

  “Was that how you guessed?” she asked. “You named him, through the door.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “If the rest was right, it was Wilson. Because—he had a specific thing to lose. His whole profession. Lyster didn’t; Shaw didn’t. People would have laughed at them. They’d have laughed at Rogers—and he’s a violent young man and wouldn’t have liked it. But, he was, it seemed to me, still in love with Hilda, and sure she was with him. That pretty much let him out. Anyway, laughter doesn’t kill.”

  There was a little pause.

  “Oh,” Pamela North said, “but I think it does. I really think it did.”

  They waited for her to continue, but she seemed not to think it necessary. She sipped her drink. Then, holding the glass, she appeared to listen to something. Then she looked at the slim legs extended in front of her. Experimentally, she rubbed the heel of her left slipper against her right ankle.

  “Well,” said Pamela North, “I’ve got it, all right. Whether it’s time or not.” She reached down and scratched the ankle, without pretense. “Life,” said Pam North, “is ridiculous.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries

  I

  Wednesday, April 1: 8:45 PM. to 11:46 P.M.

  Pamela North came from her bathroom and said, “Rubber spiders.” For a moment, Gerald North continued to look, with reproach, at the reflection of a black bow tie. He sighed; he pulled a tie end, prepared to start over. He said, “At least rubber spiders,” and Pam moved so that she too was reflected in her husband’s mirror. Jerry turned with pleasure, regarded her and said he could see she was all ready for the party. “I am, really,” Pam said. “Everything that takes time’s done. Putting on clothes is nothing.”

  She sat on an ottoman in front of her dressing table and began to put on stockings. “Snakes, too, with springs in them,” Pamela North said, clipped the stockings to a garter belt, put on spike-heeled slippers and, teetering on first one foot and then the other, stepped into white silk pants. “You’ve got to start with the ends even,” she said. Jerry, who had started with the ends even, said, “Um-m-m,” looped, pulled through and straightened. “You’re sure Mr. Wilmot was the one about the windowpanes?” Pam said, and put on a bra. “I remember it as somebody else.”

  “Somebody helped him, of course,” Jerry said. He decided the bow would do, and turned from the mirror. “Even with two, it must have taken most of the night.”

  “The trouble people will go to,” Pam said, from under her dress. She came out the top of the dress. “Just to embarrass people. Turning mirrors inside out.”

  It had not, Jerry told her, been done with mirrors, although Wilmot had been, in his day, quite a man with mirrors. It had been done with special window glass—panes of glass through which one could look without being looked at, from one side normally transparent, from the other opaque. Wilmot and his associate, working at night—after bribing a watchman—had reversed three such panes in the steel frames waiting to be installed in a building under construction. The building was a dormitory at a New England college for women. The windows had been planned for, and were duly placed in, a communal shower room on the first floor. It had been some days—some sidewalk-crowded days—before the prank was discovered.

  “Still a lot of trouble,” Pam said. “And what have you got? Zip.”

  Jerry moved to his wife’s back. He zipped. He found the two tiny hooks, the incredibly fragile loops of thread, and joined two and two, feeling his fingers monstrous. “A joke,” he said. He kissed the back of Pam’s neck, lightly. He said, “Zipped,” and was thanked. “Of course,” he said, “they were both young then. Wilmot and whoever it was.”

  “It’s not enough,” Pam said, and moved to look at herself in the mirror in the door. She turned from side to side, looked over the left shoulder, over the right. “You still like it?” she asked. Jerry nodded. “They do go to more trouble when there’s a man along,” Pam said. “Although Miss Shapiro is wonderful even if there isn’t.” She faced the mirror again. “It doesn’t too much?” she asked. “I mean, I’m not on television.” She was told it was fine.

  “I do keep thinking of rubber spiders,” Pam North said. “I like you in a dinner jacket. Your tie’s a little crooked, though. Right ear, just a touch.” Jerry straightened the tie, while Pam sat at the dressing table, twisting bright hair into final arrangement. She said, “Um-m-m” and, with tissue, adjusted lipstick. “I still don’t see why he invited us,” she said, and turned her back on the mirror. “Don’t really see. Or quite why we’re going.”

  “Because he’s long wanted to meet us, and I quote,” Gerald North said. “Because it’s the sort of party that we, especially, might find interesting. Because you want to wear the new dress.”

  “Why we especially?” Pam said, not denying the new dress. “Do you suppose, authors?”

  She made them, Jerry told her, sound a little like rubber spiders. She might be right, of course. It was conceivable that Mr. Byron Wilmot, tenant for some months of the penthouse which topped the apartment building in which the Norths also lived, thought that party association with authors might be especially interesting to a publisher. Or, obscurely, Mr. Wilmot might be having one of his little jokes—his famous little jokes. They had, Jerry mentioned, been over it already.

  To that Pamela North agreed, although noting that going over it was one thing. They had been going over it, at intervals, since Mr. Wilmot’s polite note of invitation had arrived three days before. A party to be given, honoring All Fools, on the night of the Day of All Fools. And Mr. Wilmot thought that the Norths, of whom he had heard so much, might find it the kind of party in which they would be especially interested. Before they accepted, and afterward, they had still gone over it. It was conceivable that Mrs. North’s new dress had been the deciding point. But curiosity had undeniably entered in.

  They had seen Mr. Wilmot only once, and then had merely smiled in the vague manner of tenant meeting tenant in an elevator. The Norths had been in the elevator—which Pam considered semi-automatic, since it had an operator by day—except when tenants called him to other duties—and was tenant-manipulated by night—and a plump man, who was about to become a fat man, entered. He beamed impartially; the operator said, “Good evening, Mr. Wilmot.” The Norths smiled noncommittal smiles. This association continued to the fourth floor, where the Norths seeped around Mr. Wilmot, who obligingly pulled himself in, or made motions of doing so. The elevator then bore Mr. Wilmot to more remote, and expensive, heights.

  “So that’s Wilmot,” Gerald North had said, putting key in lock. “Wonder if he’s ever thought of writing a book?”

  As a publisher, Gerald North was interested in people who might consider writing books. They at once attracted and repelled him.

  “Why?” Pam asked, when they were in their apartment, when she was crouched on the floor, surrounded by Siamese cats who had been left too long, and wished to talk clamorously of a lonely afternoon. “Th’ Teeney, th’ Gin, th’ Sherry. Th’ babies! What about? Teeney! Leave her alone!” (The cat Martini hissed moderately and slapped her blue-point daughter on the right ear, for impenetrable reasons of her own. Sherry drew back, remained bland.)

  “If it’s the right Wilmot,” Jerry had said, “and I did hear some place he’d moved in here, he’s a legend. Byron Wilmot. The life of the party. Remember?”

  Pam remained among the cats, but looked up. It came to her, then. She said, “That Wilmot.” She considered. “You mean,” she said, “he’s still alive?”

  He appeared to be, Jerry told her. Alive, and in good flesh. He granted that it was as if a myth walked.

  “Because,” Pam said, “it’s all so—I don’t know—twent
yish? Was he the ditch across Fifth Avenue?”

  Jerry thought he was not, but that he must have envied those gay spirits who, in the gayer past, had procured barricades and “Men Working” signs and suitable clothes and tools, and had dug a trench at least part way across upper Fifth Avenue, while a cooperative policeman diverted traffic around them. Wilmot had been, no doubt as he grew older and less inclined to jokes so physically strenuous, one of the busiest employers of comic waiters, famous spillers of soups, quarrelers with guests. It was Wilmot, notoriously, who had briefly transformed a bootblack of his acquaintance into an Italian nobleman; he who, with an accomplice and a life-sized doll, had so realistically simulated baby snatching that, in the ensuing turmoil, his accomplice had been slightly shot.

  Since a certain tolerance surrounds the practical joker—a tolerance most evident, of course, in those not butts of his jests—Byron Wilmot had achieved that affectionate, if wary, regard commonly bestowed on large puppies. He was, it was widely considered, always good for a laugh. What that Wilmot would be up to next was beyond anticipation. (That it was also very nearly beyond tolerance was the conviction of only the dourest of spoil-sports.) It was by many considered the cream of the jest that Byron Wilmot had not only had his little jokes, but in the end had made them pay. Beginning in his college days as the purest of amateurs, he had subsequently turned professional. Mr. Wilmot, increasingly jovial as he grew older (and increasingly rotund), became also “The Novelty Emporium.” The motto of the Novelty Emporium was “Anything For A Laugh.”

  And for those who laughed at boutonnieres provided with cold running water, explosive cigars—Mr. Wilmot did not hold himself superior to the obvious—highball glasses which leaked, and others which, on being touched, subsided disconsolately into wrinkled monstrosities, toilet-paper holders which played tunes as they turned, simulated ink spots, fountain pens which spit back, hideously lifelike tarantulas of rubber and snakes which writhingly propelled themselves, daggers with retracting blades and bladders of a fluid which uncomfortably resembled blood, toy pistols designed to frighten the innocent, toilet seats contrived to embarrass the modest—for such devotees of the authentic belly-laugh, the Novelty Emporium did provide everything. Amateur magicians could find there numberless devices of illusion. Those who fancied alarming facial masks could make of themselves monsters to terrify the young, and costumes of repulsive grotesqueness were available for purchase, or might be rented.