Murder is the Pay-Off

by Leslie Ford

  She stopped again, turning quickly to the staircase. It was not her father, as she half expected it would be, but the houseman. He was looking over the banister. “The telephone, Miss Connie. It ain’t for you, it’s for Chief Carlson.”

  “Oh.” She checked her forward movement abruptly. “Over there, Mr. Carlson—behind the stairs.”

  As he went over, she tried desperately to collect herself and think coolly. This was awful. What in God’s name could she say? He thinks—maybe he knows—there’s some connection between Wernitz’s murder and the entering business at the Blakes’. Was she going to have to tell a terrible truth, to save herself from being pilloried as an accessory to the murder of a small-time gambler that she had no connection with at all? Except, she thought quickly, that her father knew more about Doc Wernitz’s business than anybody—anybody except the bumbling, uncanny fool over the telephone under the stairs. Her mouth was dry. She tried to swallow, to secrete saliva. The taste was bitter.

  Carlson came back, moving rapidly, not in his usual torpid and phlegmatic way. He took his overcoat off the sofa and thrust his arms into it, his face even grimmer and tougher than it was when he was telling her what he thought she’d been up to. It was worried, too, concerned, and he hadn’t been concerned at all about her.

  “What is it, Mr. Carlson?”

  He went over to the stairs and started up.

  Her voice rose, high-pitched and urgent, in sudden alarm. “Mr. Carlson! Answer me! It’s Gus, isn’t it? Is he— have they found him?”

  He turned halfway up the stairs. “No, they haven’t found him, Miss Maynard. Found his car, turned over in a ditch. And a lot of blood. Out by Doc Wernitz’s, just past Newton’s Corner. They haven’t found Gus yet.”

  His eyes flickered oddly. “Why, Miss Maynard? Why’re you so worried? Did you think he was goin’ to be found, some place?”

  He went on up the stairs. She stood there for a moment, listening aimlessly to his heavy step in the hall.

  Connie Maynard sat at the dinner table, an hour later, between Jim Ferguson and Orvie Rogers, tense and alert, waiting for the telephone to ring. Running frantically up the stairs from the cellar playroom, her first impulse was to burst into the library and tell her father and Ferguson. But the door was locked. It was the first time in her life she had ever known it to be locked. Her second impulse was to grab her hat and coat and dash out to Newton’s Corner. The coat she’d left on the newel post had been taken to her room, and by the time she got upstairs and into the closet to get it she had decided not to do that, either. They’d call. They were sure to call her father when they found anything out. Until they did, she’d just keep it to herself. If her father thought she was such a fool, she’d show him she could do something rationally once in a while.

  She looked around the dinner table. It was one thing for John Maynard to tell her what he’d said when she’d got home from the paper and gone in to see him. It was quite another for her cousin Dorsey to keep glancing from one of them to the other, now, as if he knew something was wrong between them. He was watching her now from across the table. She could have slapped the maddening smirk off his stupid face. Just because he looked like John Maynard was no reason-for his always trying to act like him. If he’d been born with the Syms physique he wouldn’t have had too much to strut about. She glanced up at her Uncle Nelly Syms at the head of the table at her mother’s right. Uncle Nelly always blossomed under his sister-in-law’s tact. She was the only person in Smithville— except Gus, of course—who bothered to listen to him expand and expatiate, as if the Smith County Treasurer’s office were the Office of the United States Treasury and he was Undersecretary, instead of a doormat under Aunt Mamie’s heavy if aristocratic foot.

  Uncle Nelly was more than expanding now. Her mother must really be laying it on, Connie thought. Uncle Nelly looked ten years younger than he’d looked the night before when he horned in to talk to Gus about Aunt Mamie’s piece for the Centennial edition. In fact, Uncle Nelly looked as if he’d hit twenty jack pots all in quick succession. He even told Aunt Mamie to shut her big mouth-in a nice way, of course, but shut up she had, so Connie didn’t hear what she was going to tell Jim Ferguson about meeting Janey Blake on the way down to her mother’s. Connie noticed that Mr. Fancy Pants Dorsey had seen that, too. His eyes had opened wide in startled surprise until he saw her and winked at her. He was probably holding his breath, actually, just waiting for Aunt Mamie to get hers back.

  And Martha Ferguson had noticed it. Connie saw her smile at John Maynard on her right. “What meat has this our Nelly et that he has grown so great?” she murmured. Connie felt a twinge of annoyance when John Maynard laughed as if it were really terrific. He always laughed when Martha Ferguson wanted him to. She was the only woman in Smithville he ever put himself out to amuse or was apparently amused by.

  Connie glanced at her watch and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. It was almost eight o’clock. They must have found out something about Gus by now. Perhaps Janey knew.

  “Why don’t you try to get Janey again, Orvie?” she asked. She turned to what the Gazette always used to call “the scion of the Rogers millions” before Gus started calling him Orval Rogers. Orvie was sitting on her left, solemn-faced and preoccupied, eating as if his father had particularly told him always to chew his meat carefully and thoroughly.

  He brightened up at once and put his fork down.

  “Maybe Gus has got home. There’s no reason she should just sit around—if he’s going to the town meeting later on, anyway. You’ll excuse him, won’t you, Mother?”

  “Surely.”

  Connie caught her mother’s dubious glance. She was like all the rest of them. They all knew it was Gus she was thinking about, not Janey. All except Orvie, who was too nice ever to think at all. But while they might be right this time, it was for the wrong reason.

  “Run along, Orvie,” Mrs. Maynard said. “I tried to get Janey before dinner, but she didn’t answer her phone.”

  “She is at her mother’s,” Aunt Mamie said. “I saw her take her suitcase in. She was with that Carlson man you’ve always had so much trouble with, John.”

  John Maynard smiled his bantering protest. “Well, now, Mamie. How you talk. I didn’t know—”

  “You know very well you’ve never had anything but trouble with that man, and so has Nelson.”

  “Hush, Mamie,” little Uncle Nelly said. “I’ve—I’ve never had any but the most cordial—anything but the finest co-operation with Chief Carlson.”

  “Sounds fine, Dad,” Dorsey Syms said. “Mother must be ghostwriting for you now?”

  His father looked severely at him. Uncle Nelly must really have been eating tiger-meat, Connie thought.

  “Use the phone in the pantry, Orvie,” Mrs. Maynard said, trying to keep the peace and help him get away.

  The poor dope, Connie thought. As he bounded up and away she caught Martha Ferguson’s eye and smiled at her. Martha looked worried, she thought, wondering a little about it—not mad, as she’d looked at the party the night before.

  “Is Gus out of town?” she asked.

  Connie shrugged. “Nobody seems to know where he is. Of course, if Janey isn’t playing the slot machines any more, maybe she won’t bother about the Sailing Club no matter where Gus is.” She raised her voice so Orvie could hear her through the pantry door. “At least I gather she thinks it’s about time for her to quit.”

  “That’s the nice thing about slot machines.” Dorsey Syms smiled at her. “People just think they’re going to quit.”

  “I’m sure Janey Blake has never played the slot machines,” Aunt Mamie said. She looked at her son severely. “Janey has too much sense and too high moral standards to throw money away gambling.”

  “But the slot machines ain’t gamblin’, Mamie,” John Maynard said blandly. “You can only speak of gamblin’ when the odds are such you’ve got at least a remote chance of winnin’.”

  “I call the slot machines g
ambling, John.”

  Mrs. Maynard looked at her daughter. Why on earth did you bring this up? she was asking silently. She was not an irritable woman, but this was very irritating. Among other things, how on earth was she going to keep Aunt Mamie from knowing there was a slot machine in the basement playroom if they all went on talking about and around it?

  “Janey won last night,” Jim Ferguson said. “So it would be gambling for her, John. She might want to try her luck again tonight. It runs in streaks, you know.”

  “And don’t forget she got that lucky piece, too,” Connie said. She smiled at her mother.

  “There is no such thing as a lucky piece,” Aunt Mamie said.

  “Oh, yes, there is, too.” Connie smiled at Jim Ferguson. “You saw it, last night. It was a gilded quarter, didn’t you say?”

  “That’s what it looked like,” Jim Ferguson said briefly. “Did you get her, Orvie?”

  He was anxious to change the subject, too, apparently, and with reason, Connie thought. If Aunt Mamie should get the notion that her banker was interested in slot machines and believed in lucky pieces, Aunt Mamie was just the girl to take her accounts somewhere else, and her own plus those of her organizations was a sizable amount of business as well as advertising prestige. She was looking at him over her champagne glass like an outraged thoroughbred. Aunt Mamie, Connie thought, always looked like a handsome horse when she was aroused.

  “Can Janey come, Orvie?” Jim Ferguson was bent on getting away from the hole yawning in the ice.

  “‘Well, she didn’t want to, very much, but I persuaded her,” Orvie’ Rogers said cheerfully. “Thanks, Mrs. Maynard.” He settled back to his roast beef enthusiastically.

  “Did you tell her to bring her lucky piece?” Connie Maynard inquired maliciously. She glanced at Jim Ferguson out of the corner of a bright and wicked eye. She’d forgotten about Gus for an instant. If she could get Aunt Mamie really started, the fireworks ought to be wonderful to watch.

  “No,” Orvie said. “Her—” He looked puzzled. “Oh, I know what you’re talking about. Last night. No. I don’t suppose she kept it, anyway.”

  Connie smiled at her mother again. “I don’t suppose other people’s lucky pieces do you any good,” she said lightly. “I wonder whose it was? Has anybody asked about it, Daddy? If anybody took all the trouble of having a quarter gilded to carry around with him, I should think he’d miss it and try to figure out where he lost it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, honey,” John Maynard said, smiling. He shook his head at her.

  “It was a lucky quarter that popped out of you-know-where, Daddy.”

  “All that glitters is not gold.” Aunt Mamie put down her champagne glass. “It is an evil and adulterous generation that seeketh after signs.”

  “That’s right, Aunt Mamie,” Connie exclaimed. She flashed her sparkling eyes round the table. They were all really delightfully annoyed. Poor Uncle Nelly was turning a pale green, and Dorsey could have shot her. She laughed happily. The back of Jim Ferguson’s neck was getting red-hot above his coat collar to where his blond hair could easily have stood a barber. Even Orvie Rogers was solemn-fated again. He chewed steadily away at his last piece of roast beef. “You’re absolutely right, Aunt Mamie. That’s us! We’re an evil and adulterous generation. The lucky quarter’s a symbol. It’s a symbol of the slot machines we waste our substance on—the gilded stream emptying our pockets and filling Doc Wernitz’s. Doc Wernitz is the one should have carried the lucky quarter!”

  She stopped, laughing delightedly. “That’s a wonderful idea, isn’t it? Maybe it did belong to him! Maybe he made a mistake and put it in the machine himself. When was he here last, Daddy?”

  “Mr. Wernitz never played the slot machines,” Aunt Mamie said vigorously. “If it was in a slot machine, somebody else must have put it there.”

  “Oh, then it’s a clue! Maybe it’s a clue!”

  She said it only because she saw her mother was getting ready to end this subject. The instant the words were out of her mouth she caught her breath suddenly. It was as if someone had struck her a blow in the face. Something seemed to snap and crackle in the atmosphere around the table. She had been so involved in the scene she was creating for Aunt Mamie to take over an J develop in Aunt Mamie’s style that she hadn’t noticed till then that there was more than annoyance there in the room. There was tension, sharp and acrid as the smell of a burning light cord before the fuse blew. She straightened up in her chair, her mind working coolly in the sudden icy chill of her body. What if that was really it? What if that was what someone was trying to get at Janey’s house last night? The police thought it was Wernitz’s murderer—

  “Connie!” Mrs. Maynard’s quiet voice brought her to. “We will not discuss Mr. Wernitz’s—”

  “Oh, but that’s horrible, Connie!” Martha Ferguson burst out passionately. “That’s a terrible thing for you to say!”

  “And now she’s said it, Lucy,” John Maynard said quietly to his wife, “I guess she’d better go on. You realize, on’t you, honey, you’ve practically accused one of our guests last night of murderin’ Doc Wernitz, and breakin’ in on a defenseless girl with a little baby in the house? You realize what you’re sayin’, don’t you, honey?”

  “Oh, no! I—I’m sorry!”

  Connie shrank back in her chair. The impenetrable, implacable bedrock was there in her father’s eyes again, fixed steadily on her down the length of the candle-lit table. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean any such thing. I—I was just joking.”

  “I’m not sure you were just joking, Constance.” It occurred to Connie that except for her father all the men at the table that evening seemed inarticulate. Aunt Mamie turned to John Maynard. “If you do not inform the police, I shall do it myself, John. Mr. Wernitz did not play the slot machines. He assured me personally that he never put a dime in one of the things. And he also gave me two hundred and fifty dollars to help my campaign against the slot machines. He was more than glad to be of service in the community, he said.”

  EIGHTEEN

  SWEDE CARLSON HEARD the siren as he turned into the country road past Newton’s Corner. It screamed like a chorus of demon Malemutes and died off in a long, reverberating wail in the cold November night. He could see the reflected glow of light over the trees, and a long white finger thrust high into the evening sky and travel down, sweeping a full circle of light and shadow as the beam from the Fire Department’s truck moved searchingly over the landscape. The red light of his own car flashed on and off as his driver pressed the accelerator to the floor boards and they bounced and swerved, tearing up the graveled corduroy country road. Doc Wernitz’s place was three quarters of a mile farther on. The fire truck was in the middle of the road, the searchlight playing over the yellow marshland off to the right and over the dilapidated tobacco barn in the brown sleeping field to the left. Gus’s car was in the ditch there, the four wheels where the top should have been. A shorter beam from the truck held it steadily in its yellow track.

  “He got out, Chief. There’s some blood around, but not too much. Jeez, just take a look at that front seat.”

  The driver of the ambulance parked in front of the truck pointed down at the wrecked car, and at the bloody patch on the marsh grass at the side of the ditch. “He got out there, crawled out. You can see where he climbed back up on the road and got over there.”

  Carlson looked at the blown rear tire with its gaping ragged hole, and at the tracks of the car careening off the dirt road. He followed the driver across to the white-painted concrete culvert. There was a large bloody handprint on it.

  “He got over here and sat down.”

  The men from the fire truck were sweeping the marsh and the dried field with the long powerful beam.

  “It don’t look like he’s left the road anywhere, Chief. Looks like he sat here, and then got up and staggered on down thataway. The radiator’s still boilin’.”

  The beam shot along the narro
w curving ribbon toward the Wernitz entrance. It picked up and held the solemn sentinel line of black cedars leading to and concealing the low brick farmhouse where Doc Wernitz had lived and with brutal violence stopped living.

  Swede Carlson got back in his car. In a smashup like the one there in the ditch it-was either a miracle or else. Your number was up, or it wasn’t.

  “Pull over and we’ll go along,” he said to the fireman by the truck. “He’s probably headed for the Wernitz place. There’s a telephone there. Stand by till I give you the word.”

  They went on and turned into the cedar-lined, lane. Halfway along to the farmhouse, the red beam caught a figure lurching on toward the house. “There he is.” The driver gave the car all the speed it would take. Carlson watched silently. Ed Noonan had said he was going to get drunk, and he looked it. He was staggering on, catching himself and staggering on again, until the red beam caught him. He stopped, swaying unsteadily.

  Carlson was out of the car and caught him. “Blake!” He held him up, looking anxiously at his blood-smeared face. There was a gash down from his temple, the blood still dripping from it. His eyes were blurred and bloodshot, but there was no alcohol on his breath. Shock was all Gus Blake was drunk with. Carlson put his arm around him and led him to the car. He opened the rear door.

  “I’m okay.” Gus crawled in and sank down on the seat. “Just a blowout. Tires no good.”

  “Take it easy,” Swede Carlson said. “Give us a light, bub.” The driver handed back a flashlight. “And some iodine and bandages.” Carlson took the first-aid kit. “Wait a minute. We can save this till we get to the house. Get movin’. No—hold it a second.”

  He was looking intently at Gus. “You ought to be dead, but you aren’t. We’ll have a look at you at the place. Right now brace up, fella. What’d you head out here for? Anythin’ I ought to know before I walk in on it?”

  Gus felt his head with both hands. He was still dazed, but things were gradually falling back into place. Then suddenly they all seemed to snap together. He opened his eyes, shut them, and opened them again. He’d had a wreck. He was still alive. He wished in some dull and painful way that it had all been as simple as that. What did they call it? The will to death, the unconscious desire to die and be finished with it? If that was what he had been trying to do, going sixty over the lousy road back there, he should have succeeded. But he hadn’t. He was still here. Swede Carlson was here. Everything was the same. Janey and Orvie were still here, too. His stomach turned dark brown again and he licked his dry, dirt-caked lips. They tasted of salt and grit. He got his handkerchief out and spit the stuff out of his mouth.