Curtain for a Jester

by Frances Lockridge

  Monteath shook his head.

  “Unless it meant something more,” Pam said. “I keep wondering about the red hair.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “You do, don’t you?”

  “Well,” Pam said, turning to him. “Why the red hair, then?”

  “I don’t know, dear,” Jerry said. “I’m very sorry, but I don’t know.” Monteath looked from one of them to the other. “The mannequin had red hair,” Jerry told him, and Monteath’s face cleared. He said that, now, he remembered.

  “Well,” Pam said, “it fell out, or off. A while after you’d gone, it went by our window. I thought it was Mr. Wilmot, at first.”

  “Fell off?” Monteath repeated.

  They told him what they knew. He shook his head. He said, after a pause, that Wilmot must have been drunk.

  “I suppose so,” Pam said. “The sergeant said he was. Only—he didn’t seem drunk when we all left, did he?”

  “He’d been drinking,” Monteath said. “Perhaps he had another one or two after everybody’d gone and they caught up with him. I’ve known it to happen.”

  “Yes,” Pam said. “Speaking of people being drunk. Wasn’t it too bad—I mean, wasn’t it unpleasant—about Mr. Wilmot’s nephew? You said you knew him, Mr. Monteath.”

  “No,” Monteath said. “I said I’d heard of him. He wanted to get into the department—career service. He’d more or less trained for it. He got turned down.”

  “Why?”

  Monteath shrugged well-tailored shoulders. (Even so, his jacket did not wrinkle at the collar. It was almost exasperating.) Monteath said he didn’t know. He said that, when they decided a man wasn’t cut out for the work, they could find a hundred reasons.

  “Perhaps he went with the wrong crowd in kindergarten,” Jerry suggested. Monteath smiled faintly. He said that, nowadays, almost anything was possible.

  “Perhaps,” Pam said, “he drank too much.”

  “Perhaps,” Monteath said. “I really don’t know, Mrs. North. Because I knew, or had known, his uncle, I was asked about Parsons. Said he was all right, as far as I knew. Heard later he didn’t make it. Remembered about it when I saw him last night.” He paused. “Obviously, if he drank too much, they wouldn’t consider him the type,” he added. “Possibly, on the other hand, he merely failed the physical.”

  They ate for a time in silence. There was really, Pam discovered, a great deal of corned beef.

  “How long do these things take, usually?” Monteath asked then.

  “These things?” Jerry repeated and then said, “Oh, you mean Bill’s investigations?”

  Monteath nodded.

  “Anywhere from—oh, a day to a year,” Jerry said. “Or longer. They don’t close the files on murder. There’s no way of telling.”

  “I’ve got to get on to Washington,” Monteath said. “As a matter of fact—well, I’ve got a new assignment coming up, probably. I wondered how long—”

  “Oh,” Pam said. “Not very, I’m sure. It’s just routine for you, of course. Hardly even that. But—we’ll tell Bill, if you like. I’m sure he won’t want to hold you up.”

  It wasn’t really important, Monteath told them. Not a matter of hours, at any rate. He had merely wondered.

  “In any case,” he said, “I promised to do something about the old boy’s book. Speaking of the book—”

  He spoke of the book; afterward of other things.

  It was almost forty-five minutes later that Arthur Monteath looked at the watch on his wrist and seemed surprised. It was later than he thought. Unfortunately, he had an appointment. If they would forgive him?

  They would. Jerry, as a matter of fact, had to get back to his office. They rose together. Outside the hotel, Monteath would drop them. But he was going uptown. They must take the first cab to answer the doorman’s whistle. But it was he who had the appointment, was late for it. He acquiesced, and the doorman’s whistle shrilled. The doorman stood in the middle of Forty-fourth Street and whistled and made gestures. A cab checked itself, swung in. The Norths would not reconsider; it would be only a matter of minutes. They would see Mr. Monteath again before he left for Washington.

  Monteath got into the cab, said, “Waldorf,” to the driver. The cab pulled from the curb, the doorman resumed his shrilling. Monteath’s cab went east in Forty-fourth.

  And, from the parking garage across Forty-fourth Street, a nondescript sedan pulled out. It fell in behind the cab, crept after it; stopped behind it when, far ahead, the column was halted by red lights at Fifth Avenue.

  “For heaven’s sake!” Pam North said. “Look who it is!”

  Jerry said, “What?”

  “In the car,” Pam said. “Behind Mr. Monteath’s cab.”

  Jerry looked; Jerry shook his head. So far as he was concerned, the car held the blur of a man. The left ear, to be sure, was discernible. It was not, however, identifying. Jerry said, “Nope.”

  “Mr. Baker,” Pam said. “Of all people. Following Mr. Monteath!”

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said.

  But Pamela North was positive. Jerry knew she never forgot faces. (To this Jerry did not directly respond.) Anyway, she had had a good look. The sedan contained Baker—John Baker, the man in rompers, the employee of the late Mr. Wilmot, the co-victim with Martha Evitts of Mr. Wilmot’s humor. He was following Arthur Monteath. He had, moreover, been waiting to follow Mr. Monteath.

  Gerald North used the word “fortuitous,” but he used it without confidence. It would be unfair to Pam North to say that, at that, she snorted. She was not constructed to snort. But she made a sound.

  “If we could only get a cab,” Pam said, and joined the doorman in waving. But it was some minutes before they were in a cab, and by then it was useful for transportation, but not pursuit. It took them toward Jerry’s office.

  “We’ll have to tell Bill, of course,” Pam said. “I’ll call him when I get home.”

  “You’re sure it was Baker?”

  She was. Then she should call.

  “But there’s more, isn’t there?” Pam said. “Why the lunch? Not to talk about tennis. Not even to talk about the ambassador’s book. You saw that?”

  Jerry had wondered. He admitted that.

  “He’d found out we knew Bill. Figured we’d know what was going on. Why?”

  “Possibly,” Jerry said. “You’re guessing, Pam. As to why—he wants to get away, to Washington. Wants as much as he can to avoid notoriety. Thinks we might help.”

  “Um-m-m,” Pamela North said. “I suppose so.” She was silent for a block. “You know what we forgot?” she said, then. “We forgot to ask him if he knows a man with red hair.”

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “Everybody knows at least—” The cab stopped. “Keep your flag down,” Jerry told the driver. “The lady’ll keep the cab.”

  The lady did, and went home in it. But, when she telephoned, Acting Captain William Weigand was not available. Nor was Sergeant Mullins.

  “Never when you want them,” Pam told Martini, who answered briskly, if not directly to the point.

  They had the contents of the late Mr. Wilmot’s filing cabinet, and it was not clear that it got them anywhere in particular. It appeared that Mr. Wilmot’s home had been to some extent a second office—most of the filed correspondence had to do with the business of the Novelty Emporium. It had to do with orders for Mr. Wilmot’s somewhat peculiar merchandise, with offers of merchandise suitably novel, with orders for the raw material of such merchandise. There were carbons of several letters in German and three in French.

  They had the “wad” of drawings, which was actually an orderly enough sheaf of blueprints. The drawings appeared to be designs of—well, “gadgets” was the word which jumped to the mind, and lodged there. Technical men no doubt would come up with something more precise, given time. They would be given time.

  They had twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars in bills of various denominations. It was, Sergeant Mullins remark
ed, a nice round sum. It was also a considerable sum to find in anyone’s wall safe. It was of especial interest to find it in the safe of a man who had just been murdered.

  Which of course did not, Acting Captain William Weigand reminded himself, as he drove his Buick into the tunnel to Queens, mean that the contents of Byron Wilmot’s safe had necessary connection with the fact of Byron Wilmot’s murder. The simple fact was that, when a man was murdered, everything about him became, for the time being, of especial interest. The interest was, at first, distributed—spread thin. That Mr. Wilmot had written letters in German to, apparently, a manufacturing company in West Germany might prove as interesting as the fact that he had died with twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars in his wall safe. It was true that, from a quick glance by a man who knew German only moderately, the letters were concerned with arrangements to have manufactured in Germany certain articles which Wilmot had proposed to sell in the United States. Unless Wilmot had been killed by a rival manufacturer, one who carried free competition somewhat to extremes—

  “Of course,” Sergeant Mullins said, from his seat beside Weigand, “it could be payoff money.”

  It could, Bill Weigand agreed, coming out of the tunnel to Long Island. It could also be a sum kept available to satisfy demands for compensation by those joked against. It could be, merely, money that Byron Wilmot had kept around so that he wouldn’t run short over weekends.

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “So we don’t know.”

  “Payoff for what?” Weigand asked, going around a truck.

  “Maybe he had a lot of guys working for him,” Mullins suggested. “Maybe he handled hot stuff. Maybe he was a bookie.”

  There was no end to the possibilities. Weigand agreed to that. At this stage, there seldom was—particularly in the screwy ones.

  “Jeeze,” Mullins said. “This sure is. Dummies falling off roofs, men in rompers, women screaming on phonographs. And the Norths.”

  He was beginning, Bill told him, to think like Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley. It was a tendency to be discouraged. So far, at any rate, the Norths had merely gone to a party.

  “And found a body,” Mullins said.

  “One thing leads to another,” Bill told him, and drove toward Forest Hills, toward the home of Mrs. Gertrude Wilmot, former wife of Byron Wilmot and one of a good many people to be seen. At the moment, a person to start with.

  Mrs. Wilmot lived in a comfortable house in a row of comfortable houses on a pleasant street which would, by June, lie in the shade cast by great maple trees. They walked up to the house along a cement walk, hedged by pruned hemlocks. Mrs. Wilmot herself came to the door when they rang the bell.

  All over the country, Bill Weigand thought, such pleasant women in their middle years come to the doors of such houses when bells are pressed. They look up, ready to smile, at men who may be friends of friends, who may be selling brushes or vacuum cleaners. They look down, smiling already, on small boys collecting for newspaper deliveries, offering to mow lawns. They speak with a variety of regional accents, their clothes are different in cut and color. They are pleasant women, not easily perturbed.

  Mrs. Wilmot seemed unperturbed. She looked up at Bill Weigand and smiled and said, “Yes?” in a voice without perturbation—and with not much expectation, either—and looked only a little puzzled when Weigand introduced himself. She had not, it appeared, been listening to radio news. A voice came through the opened door, from a living room. “In a moderate oven,” the voice said, with cadenced enthusiasm. Not, at any rate, to radio news of murder.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mrs. Wilmot,” Weigand said, and then her round, rather pretty, face did change. Her eyes widened and anxiety showed.

  She said, “Not Clyde? Something’s happened to—” Her voice was thin. She stopped because Bill Weigand shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “not Mr. Parsons. We’d better come in, Mrs. Wilmot.”

  She stepped back. They went through a small entrance hall into a living room of chintz. On a television screen a young woman in an afternoon dress, with a frill of apron, bent to remove something from an oven, no doubt moderate. She murmured of golden browns; faded into nothing as Mrs. Wilmot turned a knob.

  Mrs. Wilmot turned to face them. She was of medium height, rounded comfortably, but only plump. Her gray hair had been arranged by accomplished fingers. She had blue eyes, and they were wide as she waited.

  “It’s about Mr. Wilmot,” Weigand said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you—”

  But she interrupted.

  “Byron,” she said. “Oh.”

  It was as if she had come upon an anticlimax. It was then as if she caught herself. The expression of anxiety did not return to her face, but it reflected what might be regarded as concern.

  “Oh,” she said, “I do hope nothing—”

  “I’m sorry,” Bill said. “Mr. Wilmot was found dead this morning. In his apartment. I’m afraid someone killed him, Mrs. Wilmot.”

  She said, “Oh! How dreadful!” She said, “How really dreadful!” She sat in a chintz-covered chair, and motioned to other chairs gay in chintz.

  Bill Weigand re-expressed regret at the news he brought. She nodded her head as he spoke. She said, then, that it was a shock, of course. But then she straightened.

  “I won’t pretend,” she said. “It’s just a—a shock. You don’t have to be upset, captain. We weren’t—we hadn’t been together for several years, you know. I’m terribly distressed that such a dreadful thing should have happened—that poor Byron—” She finished with a small movement of well-shaped hands. Then she said, “But—” and let the conjunction suffice.

  It made things easier.

  “We have to try to find out what happened,” Bill told her. “Your former husband was murdered. We have to find out why, by whom.”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I don’t know. I hardly knew anything about him in the last few years.” She paused. “Perhaps I never did,” she said. “He was a strange man. A strange and—” She stopped. She seemed to consider. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” she said. “Particularly, I shouldn’t. I was his wife.” She paused again. “Actually,” she said, “I’m not really so much surprised that somebody—killed him. He was a cruel man.” She nodded her head. “A very cruel man,” she said.

  “Cruel?” Bill said. “How, Mrs. Wilmot?”

  “Every way,” she said. “Those dreadful—he called them jokes. But always they hurt people. I know, captain. Take what he did to Clyde—” She stopped abruptly. “But Clyde wouldn’t hurt anybody,” she said then, quickly. “Anybody but himself.” She paused for a moment. “Clyde’s my husband’s nephew,” she said.

  “I know,” Bill said. “I’ve talked to Mr. Parsons. He told me about Mr. Wilmot’s little—joke on him last night.”

  “A malicious thing,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “Byron did so many things like that. But Clyde wouldn’t—”

  “I haven’t suggested Mr. Parsons did anything,” Bill told her.

  “Never,” she said. “He never would. But—but Byron was cruel to so many people. Those poor young people last night. The awful thing he did to poor Arthur.”

  “Monteath,” Bill said, and she nodded.

  “Making him think it had happened again,” she said. “Think how—how awful that would be for anyone. And there were—oh so many other people. So many people must have hated Byron.” She looked up. “Sometimes I hated him,” she said. “I didn’t kill him, though.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Tell me about last night, Mrs. Wilmot. What you remember.”

  She told him. She had remembered a good deal, little of it he had not already heard from the Norths. Her interest, he felt, had been centered on her nephew. There was anger against Wilmot when she spoke of Clyde Parsons. “Always he did that,” she said. “Played on Clyde’s weakness. I know it’s a weakness. Everybody does. Everybody else has tried to help. But Byron—it wasn’t the f
irst time. When Clyde was going up for that interview—” She stopped. She said, “But that hasn’t anything to do with it.”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “We never know, at this stage, what’s important. Tell me what you were going to, Mrs. Wilmot.”

  “Nothing,” she said. But then she appeared to reconsider. “I suppose I’d better,” she said. “You’d think it was something important if I didn’t, wouldn’t you? It was when Clyde was trying to get into the diplomatic service. Like Mr. Monteath—the career service?”

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  “It was several years ago,” she said. “Clyde wanted it so much. He was so keyed up. He hadn’t had a drink for—oh, months. We were all so pleased and—and hopeful. And then there was this interview.”

  She was not specific; she probably was not, Bill thought, a specific woman. There had been “this interview” with someone who would decide whether young Parsons could get into the service or stay out of it. Parsons had been nervous, wound up. And it had been Byron Wilmot who had suggested, who perhaps had even urged, that it was at such times that one particularly needed a drink. It had been Wilmot who had worked on Parsons’s pride—told him to ignore all the old women who treated him like a baby; assured him that he could take a drink when he needed it, perhaps even a couple if he needed them, like anyone else. Like any other grown man. So, to steady himself, for the crucial interview, Parsons had taken a drink.

  “He knew he shouldn’t,” Mrs. Wilmot said. “But Byron—Byron taunted him. And so—”

  And so, it appeared, was not specifically said, young Parsons had turned up for the interview a little drunk, perhaps a good deal drunk. And that, not unreasonably, had been that. “A dreadful thing for Byron to do,” Mrs. Wilmot said.

  Bill nodded. He thought, but did not say, that perhaps Wilmot had, without too much intending it, served the larger good. A diplomat ought, surely, to be able to take a drink—to take even a couple of drinks.

  “Go on about the party,” Bill said, when Mrs. Wilmot stopped.