Payoff for the Banker

by Frances

  “No,” Jerry said. “Sit down. I realize you’re an expert, that your experience and training carry weight. Bill Weigand would realize that. You say she’s not just one of thousands of hysterical young women. I see that. Bill would see it. Because you say so, and you know about these things. And still—what’s Bill to do?”

  Leonard did sit down. He sat down and regarded his still empty glass, but not as if he saw it. After a time he shook his head slowly.

  “However,” Jerry said, “I will tell him. We’ll both tell him. We’ll put your case—your fear. It’ll worry him. It worries me. I guess it worries Pam. And—if this girl’s really going to murder somebody, we won’t stop her. Bill won’t stop her. There’s nothing he can do. He can’t arrest her. He can’t have her followed around. If he talks to her she’ll merely be—well, more careful. If she really means all this.” He stopped, suddenly. “Aren’t you going to talk to her yourself?” he asked Leonard. “Wouldn’t that be a normal step? An expected step?”

  Leonard looked at him for several seconds. He looked at Pam, more directly this time. But then he said only, “I don’t know. I’ll—think about it. It might help.” He paused again. “But I still wish you’d tell your friend,” he said. “Tell him—tell him anything you like. That I’m a neurotic scholar, disturbed by fantasies. But—tell him. Yes?”

  “Oh yes,” Pam said. “Oh yes, Professor.”

  The Weigands had listened. Dorian sat in a big chair with her legs curled under her, and looked into the little fire which darted, needlessly, pleasantly, among the logs in the Norths’ fireplace. But she listened. Bill Weigand, detective lieutenant, attached to the Homicide Squad, sat at one end of a sofa, with Pam North at the other end. Jerry sat beyond Dorian, nearest a chest with bottles on it. The Norths told it together, filling in, amplifying, commenting, and from time to time Bill Weigand nodded. As one of them emphasized a point, Bill looked at the typed sheets which lay on the sofa beside him—lifted them, looked at them, put them down again.

  “And,” Pam North said, “we’ve told you.”

  For a few moments, Bill Weigand said nothing. He looked at his slender wife, curled like a young cat in front of the fire. She seemed to feel his eyes on her, and turned and smiled, but merely waited.

  “He knows his business?” Weigand said, then. “This professor of yours? This Leonard?”

  Jerry North nodded and said he thought so. He said others thought so, others better trained to form an opinion. “Special readers,” he said. “Before we brought out his book. They thought he was good.”

  “And he takes this seriously,” Bill said, as if he were talking to himself.

  “Oh yes,” Pam said. “He says so.”

  There was something in her voice. The Weigands and Jerry North looked at her, Dorian twisting in the chair by the fire. Pam looked back at them and seemed a little puzzled. “That’s all,” she said. “He says he takes it seriously. So I suppose he does.”

  “And?” Jerry said.

  “No ‘and,’” Pam told him. “He knows the girl. So it isn’t just words on paper. It’s words plus the girl.”

  “Look,” Jerry said. “You’re arguing. With whom? Why?” He waited. Then he told her to come on.

  “Because he knows her,” Pam said. “And she’s his student. Why didn’t he ask her? Why didn’t he say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is—’”

  “Mott,” Bill said.

  “‘Oh, Mrs. Mott, about this paper of yours. Are you really going to kill somebody you hate? Or is it just fun and games?’ Why wouldn’t he do that?”

  Dorian Weigand looked at her husband and nodded.

  “If he was worried,” Pam said. “If he took it so seriously. Unless—”

  She paused there and, when Jerry’s eyebrows invited her to go on, she shook her head.

  “That’s all I think,” she said. “Why? Why come to us? To come to you, Bill? Without talking to her?”

  “I haven’t the answers,” Bill Weigand said. “I haven’t anything. How did it sound to you, Jerry?”

  Jerry North thought a moment.

  “I accept it,” he said. “I think I do. It—worries me. And I don’t know why he didn’t go to the girl. Why, when I suggested it, he seemed—oh, hesitant, doubtful.”

  Bill Weigand nodded, and said, “Right.”

  Pam had been looking past Dorian, at the fire.

  “Of course,” she said, “we didn’t see all of it, all she wrote. Just—that.” She motioned toward the typed pages. “Excerpts he typed out. He copied from—” Then she stopped again and her eyes widened.

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s what he says. Again. It’s what he says.”

  There was the faintest possible emphasis on the last word. Dorian was the first to pick it up.

  “But why?” she said. “Why would he make all this up? What reason would he have?”

  “Look,” Jerry North said. “We just ask each other questions. The point is, we haven’t enough to go on.”

  Bill Weigand nodded at that.

  “Right,” he said. “Or—any place to go. If he’s worried, if we’re worried, if it’s all what he says it is, still there’s no place to go. You realize that.”

  They realized it. Their expressions said so, the movement of their heads.

  “Not now,” Pam said. “Unless—it’s part of something else. A beginning of something else. A—a string we’re supposed to pull, which pulls a bigger string and then—then something falls down. Like a Goldberg. Which reminds me, shouldn’t we let out the cats?” She looked at the others. “String, you know,” she said.

  Jerry went in and let the cats out of the bedroom. They came in single file, Martini leading, blue eyes round and, somehow, doubtful. The other seal-point came after her and had an anxious, puckered face. The blue-point, which had been so unexpected and still looked so surprised, came last, with her head on one side.

  Martini sat down and flicked the end of her tail and the seal-point jumped on it.

  “Gin,” Pam said. “Watch out. You ought to know how your mother—”

  Martini whirled, made a kind of clucking sound in her throat, and bit the ear of the seal-point kitten. The kitten ducked its head and waited for the storm to pass. The blue-point made an odd, irregular leap over her sister and landed on her mother’s head. Martini wrapped forepaws around the blue, wrestled the smaller cat to the floor and, apparently, began to devour her. The other kitten, clearly pleased at this development, leaped on Martini’s tail again, worrying it happily. The blue-point struggled loose, jumped backward, ran furiously halfway across the living room and stopped, sat down and began to scratch an ear all in one movement.

  “There’s no doubt,” Pam said, “that three cats are a lot to watch. Of course, if she’d had all five, we’d only have had two—her and one. But when there were only two we had to have three. Because they were so fond of each other.”

  “What?” Bill said, and then said, “Never mind.”

  “Five kittens we couldn’t have kept,” Pam said, ignoring the last. “So we’d have given away four. But three is just possible.” She looked at the cats, which had merged again and seemed to be engaged in a battle royal. “I guess,” she said. “Sherry!” The blue-point had suddenly disentangled herself, rushed across the floor and bumped, at full run, into the leg of a chair. She bounced, sat down and looked dazed.

  “She’ll knock her brains out,” Bill said, judicially.

  “It’s only because she’s so cross-eyed,” Pam said. “They both are, but she’s cross-eyed and one of her eyes goes up. So she never knows, poor baby. Do you, Sherry?”

  Sherry got up and advanced toward Pam with a slight lurch. She jumped and came down in Pam’s lap.

  “Always,” Pam said, “she overjumps. I think she sees too far up.”

  They digested this. The blue-point purred on Pam’s lap. Martini lay down on her side and the seal-point kitten began to nurse her. Both the Norths spoke at once, Jerry saying “Gi
n!” and Pam, “Martini!” Neither cat paid any attention.

  “She hasn’t had any milk for weeks,” Pam said. She looked at the cats. “You’d think they’d know,” she said. “Anyway, you’d think the kitten would—miss something. Wouldn’t you? But the vet says, so what, everybody’s happy, and that it won’t go on forever.”

  Martini stood up suddenly. She backed away from her kitten, crouched, and leaped at it. The two rolled over and over, a swirl of brown ears, of waving brown tails. Then the kitten suddenly shot out of its mother’s embrace and dashed madly from the room. Martini bounded in pursuit. They disappeared and the blue-point on Pam’s lap suddenly wailed. She looked up at Pam North, weeping, and then slid from the lap and went after the other two at a gallop. There was a sound from the front of the apartment of something falling. It did not sound like a cat falling; it sounded, as Jerry North pointed out, more like a table.

  “So deft,” he said. “So catlike. So precise in all movements. Good God!”

  Pam was looking at the fire again and she spoke in a different tone.

  “About the other,” she said. “About the—the hating girl. We just wait?”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “And probably for nothing.”

  But to that, nobody said anything.

  3

  SATURDAY, 11:30 A.M. TO 2:50 P.M.

  André Maillaux, moving softly, seeing everything, came past the checker’s desk and his pleasing plumpness intercepted an invisible ray. The door in front of him opened widely so that if he had been balancing a tray, even the largest tray, there would have been no excuse for accident. André Maillaux was not, to be sure, balancing a tray; it had been upward of fifteen years since André had balanced a tray. Even the lightest tray, occupied by the most special cocktails, prepared under André’s own instruction for the most special of guests, was carried after André by another and lesser as André progressed, triumphantly, from service bar to honored table. The tray was held for him while André, with the deftest of fingers, conveyed the glasses; delicately one by one, from napkin-covered chromium to waiting service plates. But now M. Maillaux conveyed only his own pleasing plumpness from kitchen to dining-room.

  He walked lightly, slowly, his eyes everywhere. A busboy filling a saltcellar, his back to Maillaux, spilled a few grains on the tablecloth and brushed them away with his fingers. Maillaux spoke from half across the room. The busboy stiffened and shuddered, and dusted with a napkin where his naked fingers had profaned. Maillaux moved on.

  The busboys wore dinner jackets, black ties. The jackets did not fit so well as to encourage confusion between busboy and patron. The waiters wore red coats with yellow piping and white ties and were a vastly superior breed. Since they could be confused only with one another, their coats fitted very well indeed and their stiff collars held their chins high. The captains, again, wore dinner jackets, and were to be distinguished from dinner and supper patrons only by a kind of enhanced elegance, a certain air of being in costume. There were gradations in captains, and the two who were superior to the others were, by the narrowest of margins, easier in their elegance, wearing it more casually. Now the captains watched the waiters, who laid silver, folded napkins and watched the busboys. André passed among them, watching everybody. The most superior of the captains stiffened under André’s gaze, and watched the waiters with new, more worried, intensity. When André looked at a table, taking in its silver, its napkins, its place plates, the captain responsible looked at it with sudden, acute anxiety and, with a kind of desperation, counted the number of forks displayed, the alignment of the knives. The waiter who had placed the forks, aligned the knives, stiffened under the redoubled scrutiny and wished himself elsewhere, possibly in another trade.

  The lesser captains bowed slightly to André Maillaux, and the greater captains bowed also but permitted themselves a gently breathed “M’sieu,” one to each. To these, André nodded; he said, “Good morning, Henri” to one and, “Good morning, Armand” to the other. He spoke without accent to his staff, and usually in English. To the patrons, who naturally expected it, he spoke the easier words in French and the others in accented English. André, who was a man of intelligence, precision of mind and well-established instincts, had no difficulty in remembering, and reproducing, the accent he had brought to the United States twenty years before, from Paris. He gave attention to such details, and to others.

  William, who was greater than the greatest of the captains, who was only lesser than André could not have been distinguished from any other good-looking man in his early forties who happened to be wearing striped trousers in a deserted restaurant at eleven-thirty in the morning. He was sitting on a stool of the customers’ bar, off the foyer, conversing with Hermann, the head bartender, their conversation being partly professional and partly social. Hermann drew himself up slightly when André, near the end of his progression through the dining room, approached the bar. He said, “Good morning, Mr. Maillaux.”

  William slid from the bar stool, his striped trousers instantly assuming the drape of trousers perfectly disciplined by their occupant, and said, “Morning, André.”

  “That Nick,” André said, without preliminary. “He continues to speak Italian to Fritzl. It is possible—it is even probable—that he does so within earshot of the patrons. I am distressed, William.”

  A shadow of reciprocal distress crossed the face of the maître d’hôtel. William shook his head; he made soft clucking sounds.

  “I know,” he said. “I have spoken to him. He promises. It appears that he forgets. It is, of course, true that he is Italian, and that Fritzl is Hungarian and—”

  “At the Restaurant Maillaux there are no waiters who are Italian,” André said. “There are no waiters who are Hungarian. All are French. If they speak among themselves, they speak in French. Many of the patrons can tell when waiters are speaking in French and when in Italian. It is a flaw, William. A serious flaw. It is undermining.”

  William, who had come from England two years after André had come from France and had an accent in English, French and, when he chose to speak it, German, which was completely unidentifiable, nodded agreement and permitted his face to show pain.

  “I have explained,” he assured André. “I have said, ‘At André’s we are all French.’ I have said this in English, Italian, German, Polish and even, on occasion, in French. They all know. Even the busses.”

  “A bus does not speak,” André said. “That is understood.”

  The thought of busses appeared to cause him pain. “Not even to another bus,” he said. “That I cannot permit. You will arrange it, William.”

  “O.K.,” William said. “You’re the boss.”

  “Naturellement,” André said. He looked at the slim white-gold watch on his wrist. He compared it with the discreet clock behind the bar. He motioned toward the coatroom.

  “He has arrived?” André said.

  “Early,” William told him. “You said early, Hermann?”

  “At ten-thirty,” Herman said. “A few minutes after. I had just arrived.” He nodded. “It is my day to check the bar, you understand,” he said. “To prepare my—requisition.” He paused momentarily before the last word, and said it with a certain care.

  “For lunch also, then,” André said. “It is—” Now he hesitated. William looked at him. “Admirable,” André finished. “An admirable example.”

  André looked at his watch again, and noted it was nearing noon.

  “Soon,” he said, “they will begin. The visitors. The little ones. You will see to them, William. I shall consult.”

  William merely nodded, this time. Daily, at a few minutes before noon, André presented to William the task of taking care of the “little ones”—the odd people, the tourists, the hesitant explorers of the great world, the people who thought noon was a time for lunch at the Restaurant Maillaux in East Fiftieth. Among them there were none who could merit attention from André Maillaux himself, who could merit even a glimp
se of André Maillaux himself. Even William was beyond their deserts. One of the greater captains would have done as well. Who were they to know the difference? There was, however, an issue of noblesse oblige.

  William did not return to the bar stool. He walked to the head of the three wide steps which descended from the bar to the main dining-room and looked out over what was, for the time, his domain. The tables were set; the waiters were waiting, the bus boys were inconspicuous; the captains, minor, were circulating slowly; the captains, major were at their stations, Henri a little to the right, Armand a little to the left. All was in readiness. William returned to the foyer, realigned the bar stool which he had imperceptibly disturbed, and looked at the clock behind the bar. It was now five minutes past noon. The little ones were late; there had been a time, only three weeks ago, when two of them had appeared at eleven-thirty. Noblesse oblige had been under strain.

  When he left William in command, André Maillaux crossed the foyer to the cloakroom and disappeared within it. Cecily Breakwell, the advance guard of the hat-check girls, was sitting down. She stood up and said, “Good morning, sir,” as she had at about this hour each day for the past two weeks. André looked at her and said, “Good morning, my dear,” as he had each day except the first, when he had said, “What is your name, my dear?” and had not, so far as she could tell, listened at all to her reply. He was, Cecily thought, a funny little man. He looked so foreign.

  André Maillaux would not have been displeased by this, nor would he have been surprised. If he did not look foreign—distantly foreign, foreign at several removes—there would have been a failure in technic, and that was inconceivable. It took doing, after twenty years, particularly for a man not physically of a type. Not tall, to be sure, a little plump, but there it ended. There nature ended and art began, the delicacy of art. It had taken skill to find a tailor who could, without ever overdoing it, without any suggestion of burlesque, give to André’s clothes the faintest suggestion of a Parisian cut—of, in effect, a reformed Parisian cut. It had taken considerable explanation, a good many years ago. One of André’s minor worries was that this admirable tailor would not prove of long life, that the explanation would have some day to be repeated. “The effect,” André had said, those years ago, “the effect, you perceive, it should be that I make every attempt not to appear French, that I pattern myself—you perceive?—after the Americans. But that the clothes, these admirable American clothes, unavoidably—you perceive?—take on the appearance of the boulevards because it is I who wear them.” He had looked at the tailor, almost as if he were a busboy undergoing final examination before being graduated, and had been stern. “It is subtle, no?” André Maillaux, building toward success, had said. “You perceive, yes?”