by Frances
“However what?” Mrs. North said. “Why however?”
“What?” the young woman said, looking at Mrs. North without fondness.
“What I mean is,” Mrs. North said. “Why do you say ‘however’? She files, however. Do you mean that because she files I can’t see her? Or what? And what is Estates Incorporated, anyway?”
Mrs. North added this because it had been bothering her and she wanted to know. The other looked at her and there was worry in the clear, business-like eyes.
“What do you mean what is Estates Incorporated?” the young woman said. Her voice was uneasy. “It’s the company.”
“Of course,” Mrs. North said. “I know that. What is it?”
“Listen,” the girl at the desk said, leaning forward and putting her elbows on the desk. “What the hell do you want, miss?”
“Cleo Harper,” Mrs. North said. “Unless she’s filed. Permanently, I mean. And to know what Estates Incorporated is, since you brought it up.”
“I brought it up?” the other said. “I brought it up?”
“Look,” Mrs. North said. “I came in here just like anybody else to see somebody. Cleo Harper who files, however. Is there any reason why I can’t see Miss Harper?”
“What do you want, anyway,” the other said. “What are you trying to pull, miss?”
“I wish,” Mrs. North said, “you wouldn’t call me miss. Or get so excited. I just came to see somebody who works here. Like you do. Is that so very—so very uncustomary?”
“She’s just a file clerk,” the girl said. “Why don’t you see her at home if you want to see her?”
“Because,” Mrs. North said, “she isn’t at home. She’s here.”
“Oh God,” the young woman said. “Oh God!”
She was no longer bright and impersonal. Her accent was no longer bright and impersonal. It puzzled Pamela North somewhat, but she waited.
“It manages estates,” the young woman said. “It just manages estates. For people who have estates.”
Pam North looked at her a moment.
“Did it manage Ann Lawrence’s estate?” she said suddenly.
“Yes,” the receptionist said. “I mean, I don’t know. You’ll have to see Mr. Pierson.”
“Why?” Mrs. North said. “Why instead of Miss Harper?”
“If you want to talk about estates you’ll have to see Mr. Pierson,” the receptionist said. She said it as if it were a final truth to cling to. “Everybody does.”
“All right,” Pam said, quite unexpectedly to herself. “Let me see Mr. Pierson.”
It was as if she had touched a button. It was a button which made everything regular again. She could see the young woman become, instantly, competent and alert and assured. Things were regularized; somebody was asked for who might, within the rules laid down, suitably be asked for.
“I am afraid Mr. Pierson is engaged,” the receptionist said, and now even her accent was assured and untroubled. “Whom shall I say is calling?”
It ought, Mrs. North thought, to be “who.” But she wasn’t quite sure and she decided to ignore it.
“Mrs. Gerald North,” she said. “Although I don’t suppose the name will mean anything to him.”
“Mrs. Gerald North,” the receptionist repeated, writing it down on a pad, in a space set apart for names so submitted. Now everything was beautifully regular.
“In regard to—?” the receptionist said, and paused.
“In regard to seeing Miss Cleo Harper,” Mrs. North said.
The poised pencil trembled slightly.
“Please,” the receptionist said. “Please, Mrs. North.”
It was entreaty.
“All right,” Mrs. North said. “In regard to whether you handle—handled—Miss Ann Lawrence’s estate.”
The pencil started to write. Then it paused. The eyes—they were blue eyes—above the pencil looked at Mrs. North.
“She was killed,” the receptionist said. “Is it something about that? Because there’s a man with Mr. Pierson now about that. A—a Mr. Mullins. A sergeant, but he isn’t dressed like a sergeant. Not like the sergeants I know.”
“He’s a detective sergeant,” Mrs. North explained. “He’s just dressed like anybody.” She paused, visualizing Sergeant Mullins. “Or almost,” she added, in the interest of strict accuracy. “Look. I’d like to see Mr. Mullins, as long as he’s here. Will you tell him, please?”
The receptionist looked at Mrs. North sadly.
“First,” she said, “you wanted to see Miss Harper. Then you wanted to see Mr. Pierson. Now you want to see this Mr.—this Sergeant Mullins. Whom do you want to see?”
“Any of them,” Pam said. “All of them. Let’s start with Mr. Mullins.”
The girl looked at Mrs. North again and shook her head. But she picked up a telephone and pressed a button and then she said, softly, “A Mrs. North would like to speak to Mr. Mullins.” She waited. “No,” she said, “she’s right here.” She looked up at Mrs. North. “Right here,” she repeated, with rather odd emphasis. She waited and said “thank you” and then, to Mrs. North, she said: “They say to come in, Mrs. North.”
She pointed the way and, after Mrs. North had started down a corridor, she looked after Mrs. North with a strange, awed expression. Then she sat and stared at the elevator door, but she stared at it with eyes which held foreboding.
Alfred Pierson had been the third name on Sergeant Mullins’ list of those who had been at Ann Lawrence’s house the evening before she was killed. But the first name was that of a man who had left on an overnight sleeper for Washington and the second that of a woman who had left, at a remarkably early hour that morning, for a shopping tour which, Mullins gathered from her maid, promised to be extensive. So Mullins had come to Estates Incorporated and Mr. Pierson at a few minutes before ten o’clock.
Mullins had been obscurely surprised to see Mr. Pierson, because he had visualized him as quite different from what he was. Mullins, for no good reason, unless names have a character of their own, which is doubtful, had anticipated meeting a grayish man in middle life. He met a blackish man in, evidently, his early thirties.
Alfred Pierson had black hair with a wave in it, and black eyes; he was slender and graceful; his dark suit managed not to look like a dark suit a man would wear to an office and his face, lightly tanned, looked as if a barber had only just finished with it. He looked very well taken care of and, Mullins admitted a shade reluctantly, as if he could very well take care of things. Particularly, Mullins added to himself, of women.
He was quick when he met Mullins, but he was at the same time unhurried. He offered cigarettes quickly, with a deft movement; he waited quietly while Mullins lighted the cigarette and until Mullins spoke. He nodded when Mullins spoke and there was a suitable expression of gravity on his face, nothing more.
“Yes,” he said. “I read about it this morning. In the Times. A horrible thing—almost unbelievable. Was it a case of someone—breaking in? One of those—one of those murders?”
His emphasis clarified his words.
“No,” Mullins said. “Not so far as we know. If you mean was she raped, no. She was just killed.”
“Tragic,” Alfred Pierson said. “Utterly tragic. She was a lovely person. It is hard to believe.”
Nevertheless, Mullins indicated, it had to be believed. It had also to be investigated. Which brought him—
“Of course,” Mr. Pierson said. “I was there a few hours before it happened. If, as the Times said, it happened some time very early yesterday morning. I and a number of others. You want to know if I saw anything—well, anything that would help. Anything suspicious.”
It simplified matters for people to question themselves. Mullins merely nodded.
“Let me think,” the black-eyed Mr. Pierson said. “There was nothing at the time, of course. It was all very pleasant and gay and—unexciting. You want to know whether, looking back, I remember anything strange in view of what happened. The answer is, I don’t.”<
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He paused.
“Nothing,” he said, with finality. “A few people who knew one another in the home of a girl we all knew and liked. Or, in some instances, more than liked.” He broke off. “In several cases, more than liked,” he added, thoughtfully.
“Who?” Mullins wanted to know. He explained. “We’ve gotta find out everything we can about her, you know,” he said. “We always do. Most of it don’t help, but we always do.”
“Who more than liked her?” Pierson repeated. “Elliot—a chap named John Elliot. For one.”
“Yes,” Mullins said, appearing to make a note of it. “John Elliot. We’ve heard of him. Who else?”
Pierson shrugged. No one else, in quite the same sense. Elliot made no bones about it. His attitude toward Ann Lawrence, and hers toward him, were accepted things. They were acknowledged.
“But most men who knew her had—well, had notions,” he said. He smiled slightly, rather sadly. “I did—once. For a little while. I suppose I was thinking of that as much as anything. I don’t really know how other men felt.”
“No,” Mullins agreed. “A guy can’t always tell. But who would you think?”
“Does it make any difference, now?” Pierson wanted to know. “Any real difference?”
“We don’t know,” Mullins said. “It could. We don’t know why she was killed. Maybe it was somebody who hated her. Maybe she was in somebody’s way. Maybe it was somebody who was crazy about her. All kind of things happen.”
Pierson nodded.
“And all men—” he said, and let it drop. Mullins nodded. That was one allusion he knew.
“Yeah,” he said. “It happens,”
“Probably,” Pierson said, “I ought to tell you, under the circumstances, that I wasn’t—well, violently in love with Ann. I just thought about it sometimes, the way a man does. You know?”
“Sure,” Mullins said. “Who don’t? She must of been quite a girl.”
“Well,” Pierson said, “she made you—think about it. I don’t suppose she intended to, or not more than most. You know what I mean? It seems the hell of a way to talk about her, now.”
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “I know how you feel. And that was all there was to it?”
“Yes,” Pierson said. “There was Elliot, anyway, if I had other ideas. And there were other people. I was merely trying to give you an idea the way other men might have felt. I don’t know what anybody else felt, of course.”
“O.K.,” Mullins said. “But who else might have felt the way you did? Or more so?”
Pierson looked at nothing, obviously remembering.
“A guy named Beck, maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. The guy on the radio. A funny little guy with a hell of a voice.”
“Beck,” Mullins repeated.
“He made it look fatherly, if anything,” Pierson said. “And even that wasn’t obvious. Probably there wasn’t anything else. I tell you I don’t know.”
“I know,” Mullins said. “I’m not holding you to anything, Mr. Pierson. We’re just—fishing around. Trying to find out something about her. What kind of a girl she was; that sort of thing.”
“She was a swell girl,” Pierson said. “Don’t get any ideas. She didn’t—how do you want me to say it?”
“Play around?” Mullins suggested. “We know that, Mr. Pierson. She hadn’t played around, that way. What else about her?”
“Oh,” Pierson said, “I don’t know. What do you want to know? She had a lot of money from her parents, who were dead.’ She had an aunt somewhere—upstate, I think. She went to a good school and a while to college—Bryn Mawr, I think. She was engaged to some guy once and didn’t marry him and she knew a lot of people and she did some kind of war work—driving a car, I think. And she didn’t wear a uniform, if she had a uniform, except when she was driving the car. And it was her own car—and she could drive it. She was just a nice girl with plenty of money, but not worrying about it, and plenty of people who liked her. She went a lot of places around town, the way people do, and she had a house up in Connecticut somewhere and people used to go up there weekends and play tennis and things. In the summer.”
Mullins said it sounded like a pretty good way to live.
“Yes,” Pierson said, “it’s an all right way to live. Or was, until recently. I suppose she was a little—unsatisfied—lately. Like everybody. And not just because it was hard to get gas, and food for weekends and that sort of thing. I mean she was—well, keyed up—like almost everybody.”
“Sure,” Mullins said. “I know what you mean.”
“You got it too, Sergeant?” Pierson asked, looking at Mullins with a new expression.
“Sure,” Mullins said. “I was in the last one, but sure. What the hell’d you think?”
“Look,” Pierson said, “they say I’ve got a bad heart. And my own doctor says they’re crazy. What do you do about that, Sergeant. Do you know any way?”
“No,” Mullins said. “I don’t know any way, Mr. Pierson. I heard about another guy like that. There didn’t seem to be any way.”
“Of course,” Pierson said. “That was for a commission. Maybe the draft board will feel different.”
There was a pause while they regarded this possibility. It was now a comfortable, friendly conversation and Mullins, during the pause, awoke to the fact that it was no longer leading anywhere. There had been a few points, but they seemed to have passed. He sighed slightly and became again a policeman.
“So,” he said, “I gather nothing out of the ordinary happened at the dinner or afterward. Nothing we ought to know about.”
Pierson, coming back, said there wasn’t. If anything occurred to him, he’d let Sergeant Mullins know. But he didn’t suppose anything would.
Mullins had already stood up to leave when Pamela North was announced by the receptionist. Mullins was surprised, but not greatly. When Pierson raised eyebrows, Mullins said only that Mrs. North was a friend of the lieutenant’s. Mrs. North could speak for herself.
Mrs. North, looking very trim and very interested, came through the door. Her eyes flickered over Mr. Pierson politely and came to rest on Sergeant Mullins. Mrs. North spoke for herself.
“Mr. Mullins,” she said. “I might have known you’d be here first. Isn’t it a coincidence that Cleo Harper works here?”
“What?” Mullins said. Then he remembered a note on Cleo Harper which he had forgotten; a note which explained why, as he came to its offices, the name Estates Incorporated had seemed familiar. But he still didn’t quite see why it was a coincidence.
“Why?” Mullins said.
“Why because it handles her estate, of course,” Mrs. North said. “Ann’s estate. This—this company does. Doesn’t it, Mr. Pierson?”
Now she looked at Mr. Pierson with interest. He looked back at her, and Mullins, intercepting the look, decided that it was at least with interest. Possibly, Mullins thought suddenly, there was even more than interest in the look with which Mr. Pierson greeted Mrs. North’s announcement.
But all he said was, “Why yes, as a matter of fact, I believe it does.”
Mullins looked at Mr. Pierson for almost a minute with considerable intentness. But when he spoke, his voice was mild. Mr. Pierson hadn’t, Mullins pointed out, got around to mentioning that point.
“And don’t,” Mullins added, “tell me I didn’t ask.”
But precisely, Pierson explained, that was what he would have to tell Mullins. Mullins hadn’t asked. It did not occur to him to volunteer the information any more than it would have occurred to him to volunteer the information that Miss Lawrence had had a checking account in the Corn Exchange Bank Trust Company or—or that she owned a Cadillac. That Estates Incorporated managed her estate was, to his mind, extraneous. He still thought it was extraneous.
“Were you in charge of her estate yourself, Mr. Pierson?” Pam North asked in the light tone of one who merely wanted to know. Pierson examined the idea and examined Pam North. He said that the handlin
g of an estate by the company was never, in any real sense, a one-man job.
“Well,” Pam said. “Not in a real sense. In a—in a titular sense?”
Mr. Pierson was in no hurry to answer. He thought it over, giving a great impression of a man thinking over an abstruse—and academic—point. But finally he nodded.
“In a sense,” he said. “Only in a sense. I advised her. When she came to ask questions or sign papers, I saw her. No doubt the impression was given that I was her adviser. But it was a corporation responsibility. I was merely—well, a contact man.”
It sounded all right, Pam thought. It sounded fine. But—
“Was that how you met her?” Mullins asked. “Did you get to be friends, or whatever it was, because you advised her about her estate? Or did you know her before?”
Pierson didn’t see what that had to do with it. Mullins remained bland. No doubt it had nothing to do with it.
“The lieutenant will want to know,” Mullins said. “I’ve got to anticipate what the lieutenant will want to know. I don’t know what he’ll do with it, myself.”
Pam looked at Mullins quickly and looked away. Mullins was being very innocent. You’d think he didn’t have an idea of his own. But Pam thought he must have several ideas of his own.
“As a matter of fact,” Pierson said, “I did know her before. My father and her father were friends; the families used to get together now and then. I knew her when she was a little girl. And later.”
“Before you joined this company?” Mullins asked.
“Oh yes,” Pierson said. “Naturally. I was in college when she was a, little girl. I knew her then—before then. But we weren’t childhood sweethearts or anything, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t mean anything,” Mullins said. “I just want to get the picture. For the lieutenant.”
“Well,” Pierson said. “Don’t get the wrong picture. She was just a little girl in a family my family knew. I only really began to know her a few years ago.”
“Sure,” Mullins said. “I’ll explain to the lieutenant.”
Mullins stood up and his eyes signaled Mrs. North.
“Well,” he said, “I guess that’s all the lieutenant would want to know. Don’t you think so, Mrs. North?”
