“My,” Pam said, “that blew up in my face. My, that blew up in my face. My that—” And then, although she tried to stop she could hear herself giggling. “It isn’t me because I don’t giggle,” Pam said, “but it certainly blew up in my face. My but it—”
8
TUESDAY, 1:20 P.M. TO 3 P.M.
Gerald North looked at his watch for the third time in ten minutes and said “Damn!” It was true Pam had not said definitely that she would call him. It was true she had not said, definitely, that she was going to be at home. It was true that nothing fatal had happened to her yet, and that past performance was still the best basis for a guess of present safety. It was true—The telephone rang. Jerry reached for it convulsively, knocking it from its cradle. He grabbed it, took a deep breath and said: “Yes?” Then he said, exhaling the deep breath rather suddenly, “Good. Put her on.”
“Darling,” Pam North said, before he could say anything. “I’m all right.”
“Of course,” Jerry began, and then heard her. “What do you mean you’re all right?”
“But I am, really,” Pam said. “Except—Jerry—you’ll have to come and get me. Not that I’m not all right.” The last was hurried, anxious.
“Listen,” Jerry said. “Where are you? Where’ve you been?”
“Lots of places,” Pam said. “The last one blew up. So I kept saying it blew up in my face and laughing. And so naturally, they thought I had concussion. But I haven’t, really.”
“Pam!” Jerry said, his voice demanding. “Where are you?”
“Now you mustn’t get excited,” Pam said. “Because I’m perfectly all right.”
“Where are you?” Jerry said, his voice heavy.
“Well,” Pam told him, “I guess you’d call it a—a sort of a hospital, Jerry. But I’m all right.”
“Pam!” Jerry said. “Are you all right?”
“Look,” Pam said, “I’ve just been telling you I’m all right. That’s what I called up for. And to tell you to come and—”
“This sort of hospital,” Jerry said. “What is it?”
“Well,” Pam said, and she sounded reluctant. “Bellevue.” She went on hastily. “Just because it was convenient, Jerry,” she said. “After I got blown up.” She paused, but not long enough for him to speak. “Before the building burned down,” she said. “And really, it only partly burned down. The firemen were so quick.”
“Pam!” Jerry said. “Are you hurt?”
If he would only listen, Pam said, she would explain it. Of course she wasn’t hurt.
“Shaken,” she said. “And maybe I was out for a few minutes. And there’s sort of a bump. And my shoulder hurts a little, but it’s just a bruise. And whatever they say, I know I haven’t got concussion.”
“What who says?” Jerry demanded. “For God’s sake!”
“The doctor says I sound disturbed,” Pam told him. “He says there isn’t anything wrong, except the bump and shock, and much less shock than you’d expect. And they want the bed. But he says concussion is the only—”
“Pam,” Jerry said. “Pam, darling. Start at the beginning.”
“Listen, Jerry,” Pam said, and she was severe with him. “That will have to wait. The beginning was Mr. Oakes, but he’s dead now and so there’s no hurry. And the doctor just thinks I’ve got concussion because I don’t talk the way he expects, which is silly of him, because if I waited for him to catch up he never would. And now I’ve got to have some clothes, so I can leave.”
Her voice sounded all right, Jerry thought—quick and clear and—yes, even now—oddly gay. So probably she was all right.
“Clothes?” he said. He paused and thought about it. “What happened to your clothes?”
“Well,” Pam said, “it’s a funny thing, but they sort of got—well, blown off, I guess. Anyway, when the firemen got there—” She interrupted herself and then went on, hurriedly. “Not all of them, Jerry,” she said. “I still had quite a little on, really. And of course the man in the ambulance covered me up right away. But there isn’t enough to go to lunch in.”
“My God!” Jerry North said. “Lunch!”
“Well,” Pam said, reasonably, “of course it was awful about poor Mr. Oakes. But I didn’t see him, really.” She considered. “Any part of him,” she said. “So I’m still hungry, and the doctor says I can go if you’ll bring me clothes and—wait a minute.” She spoke to someone, apparently, at Bellevue Hospital. “My husband,” she said. “He’s bringing me some clothes.” Then she came back to Jerry. “Look,” she said, “they say we’re tying up the line. So you go around and get me some clothes. The black dress with pockets, I think. And a slip and—no, there aren’t any stockings. I’ll just have to—” She lapsed, apparently, into thought. “Oh yes,” she said, “and some pants, please, Jerry. Then we can go to lunch.”
The odd thing was that Pam, dressed in the black dress with the pockets, looked to be in excellent health. The bump on her head did not show, under hair, but it was a good-sized bump as Jerry discovered when she guided his fingers to it. She was a little pale, perhaps; her eyes were a little larger than usual. And there was a quick lightness in her voice which showed that, under everything, she was excited and keyed up. That, the doctor told Jerry, was the aftermath of shock. She would, if she were his wife, spend a day or two in bed. (“Not if I were his wife,” Pam said cryptically, when they were outside. Jerry examined that remark and, in the interest of finding out what had happened, decided not to pick it up.) And her left shoulder, she admitted, hurt when she moved her arm. But she was, she insisted, doing much better than was to be expected.
She had picked up the rest of the story at the hospital, it turned out. She gave it to Jerry firsthand up to the moment of the strange, impalpable force which hurled her from her feet, outside Robert Oakes’s door. After that it was what she had pieced together.
She had arrived, by somewhat devastating coincidence, just as the pilot light on the gas stove in Oakes’s tiny apartment had set off the gas which had been accumulating for, probably, some hours. It was the blast which had knocked her down—and the red tinge to the blackness had been the fire which started in the apartment. The blast had hurled her backward and sideways, so that she was brought up against the wall and banged her head. She apparently had lost consciousness then; it was when she came to in the ambulance that she kept saying, over and over, “my, it blew up in my face” and then had giggled because she thought it was funny to use that phrase about anything so literal. That together with her subsequent remarks had, Jerry concluded, led to the now-abandoned diagnosis of concussion.
Altogether, she had been extraordinarily lucky. Her clothes had been, apparently, very largely blown from her body; at least, there seemed to be nothing she thought worth salvaging, except her shoes. The firemen, who had come very quickly indeed, had found her lying in the hall, just beginning to return to consciousness, and had bundled her up and taken her to an ambulance. Then they had stopped the fire before it had much more than burned out Oakes’s apartment.
Oakes’s body had been broken by the explosion, and somewhat burned. But it was easily identifiable. He had been a man easy to identify—very tall, and very thin, with a small head on a long neck. (That, Pam had gathered from a precinct detective who had questioned her briefly.) But it was the theory of the police—a theory now being verified at the morgue—that neither explosion nor flame had killed Robert Oakes. He had been dead, they thought, some hours before the pilot light set off the collected gas. He had been dead of gas poisoning and there was every evidence that this was what he had planned.
“Those damn pilot lights,” the detective had said. “Half the time somebody decides to bump himself off with gas he forgets the pilot light. And the whole place blows up. They never learn.”
It was not entirely clear who never learned. As nearly as Pam could work it out, the detective seemed to mean that the people who committed suicide never learned. It seemed, Pam told Jerry, an odd thing
to reproach them with.
The taxicab had got them to Charles by the time Pam finished her account. They decided that, in view of everything, they deserved cocktails, and they watched thirstily while Gus twirled gin, and a very little vermouth, with a great deal of ice. They beamed at Gus when he had finished and drank with thirst. Jerry, lifting the brim-filled glass, found that his hand was shaking a little.
“But why Oakes?” Jerry said then, putting the glass down on the bar. “What did he have against the doctor?”
Pam put her glass down, regarded it a moment and then turned her regard to Jerry.
“I suppose that’s the simplest,” she said. “Suicide before the police got him.” She considered. “You’d think he’d have waited until they were—well, closer,” she said. “He was in an awful hurry, if that was it.”
“Panicked,” Jerry suggested, and returned to his glass. “Why? Why did he kill the doctor?”
“Why,” Pam said. “And how? Of course, he might have a motive like Mr. Weber’s.” Jerry opened his eyes and waited. She told him about Mr. Weber. “Except,” she said, “it would be a rather remarkable coincidence. Two men in the same fix.” She considered again; she finished her glass. “Of course,” she said, “there’s no denying there’s another theory.”
Jerry emptied his glass, looked at it, looked at Gus and raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the empty glasses, and then looked at Pam again.
“Yes,” he said. “Naturally. Somebody knocked him out, turned on the gas and left him there. The same one as before. Because—well, I suppose because Oakes knew something, too.” He considered that. “Our man—or woman—must have been mighty careless about who was looking,” he said. Then, because Pam was looking beyond him and beginning to smile, he turned on his stool.
“Oh, hello, Bill,” Jerry said. “Imagine meeting you here.”
“Right,” Bill said. “It’s a small world.” He looked beyond Jerry, and smiled. “You look very well, Pam—considering,” he said. “All right. Let’s have it.”
Pam North let him have it. It took time; they left the bar, found a table, interrupted themselves to eat, sat with cigarettes and coffee afterward as the tempo of the restaurant slackened—as John went by from the bar to the waiters’ dining room with a glass of beer in his hand, and came back from it with his hands empty; as Gus went by with his glass of beer.
“So,” Pam said, “we can boil it down. Dunnigan—nothing. Flint—I don’t know. He’s a sorehead. Perhaps he got an offhand, hurried examination. But he’d think so anyway. Weber—he apparently got a careful, unhurried examination and learned that he was going blind. And Dr. Gordon refused—or didn’t offer—to connect his blindness with an accident where he worked, so that Weber doesn’t get insurance. And Oakes blew up.”
Weigand nodded slowly and said, “Right.”
“Actually,” he said, “I don’t know what you were after. Do you?”
She was, Pam told him, after something strange. Anything strange.
“Not, of course, as strange as being blown up with Mr. Oakes,” she added. “That was stranger than I’d expected.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “Oakes. Oakes died of gas poisoning, not of the explosion. Not of the fire. And in a couple of months he would have died of cancer. Behind his right eye. So he had reason enough to turn on the gas.”
Pam said “oh,” and shivered.
“On the other hand,” Bill said, “it is quite possible that someone got in, knocked him out and turned on the gas for him. Taking the chance, obviously, that he wouldn’t recover consciousness before the gas got him. A considerable chance.”
“Can’t they tell?” Jerry wanted to know. Bill Weigand shook his head. He said it was doubtful, because of the damage done to the body by the explosion and, afterward, by the fire. He said they were trying to tell. He pressed a cigarette out in the ashtray and almost at once lighted another.
“The chances are he killed himself because he was sick,” he said. “Not because he was guilty of murder and afraid of being caught. The chances are that Weber—you got more than we did from him, Pam—is merely the quiet, beaten little man you thought he was. But it is true we can make out a motive. The chances are that Flint is merely a sorehead, and would have complained no matter what kind of treatment he got.” He paused. “The chances are that young Gordon killed his stepfather,” he said. “In a fit of—‘uncontrollable irritation,’ call it: And has tried to cover up since.”
“But,” Pam said, “you aren’t satisfied.”
Bill Weigand smiled at her and shook his head.
“Chiefly because I can’t see him killing the girl,” he said. “And a guy I talked to can’t. He’s not very much taken with the idea that Gordon would have killed his stepfather. He’s less taken with the idea he would have killed again. And he’s supposed to know about that sort of thing. Combat-fatigue cases are easily irritated—sure. But he can’t remember one who’s been irritated enough to kill anybody. Particularly one as far along toward recovery as Gordon seems to be. But—give a motive and lack of control—well, maybe. He would hesitate to predict.”
“Sounds like a doctor,” Jerry said.
“Right,” Bill said. “He is a doctor.”
None of them said anything for a moment.
“I still wish it could be Mr. Smith,” Pam said. “I think he’s—ideal.”
Bill smiled and shook his head. Then he said one word. “How?”
“All right,” Pam said, “erase him. How about Mrs. Gordon? How about this—friend of hers?”
“Westcott,” Bill said. “Lawrence Westcott.”
“How about both of them?” Jerry said. “In the tradition. Wife and lover do in husband.”
Bill Weigand nodded.
“That one Heimrich will buy,” he said. “He’d like to buy it. And—he’s beginning to think he can pay for it. Westcott and the lady went around together a good deal. Quite a good deal. Neighbors noticed. She’s a lot younger than Gordon was. Westcott’s nearer her age. He has more time, and apparently likes to spend it with her. And—I think he had lunch with her yesterday and went along with her on, anyway, part of her shopping trip.”
“Look,” Pam said, “no woman’s going to buy a new hat just before she and her lover kill her husband.”
Jerry shook his head at that. He didn’t, he said, see why not. Women would, as far as he could see, buy hats any time.
“A pickup,” he said. “Like a pill. Benzedrine. Probably very stimulating to murder.”
“Jerry!” Pam said, with reproach.
Bill Weigand smiled at both of them.
“Possibly,” he said, “they figured that a little shopping expedition would look very innocent, just then. That we’d figure the way Pam does.”
Pamela North was not content and murmured slightly. Then she made a small motion, indicating tentative acceptance, with her shoulders.
“All right,” she said. “How, then?”
That, Bill told them, was no problem—at least at the moment. There was nothing to indicate that Westcott had not been free during the crucial time. Since he was, they thought, with Mrs. Gordon, he could not obviously have any alibi except one she would give him. Which they needn’t buy. Since she would presumably have a key to the back door of the offices, he presumably could get it—with her knowledge or without it. He could go in, taking a chance on being seen—ready to call the whole thing off if he was seen. He could kill Dr. Gordon in the doctor’s private office, go through the examining rooms or along the corridor—probably the former, since the rooms gave cover—and go out the back door again. Taking the chance of being seen when, now, it would matter a great deal. But taking no greater chance than many murderers took. He could then meet Mrs. Gordon at some place prearranged, tell her the job was finished, send her to the office to play the shocked and grieved wife; himself go home to North Salem. Or, if she were not in it, not see her after the killing and let her shock and grief be real. Always, either way, plan
ning to marry her and, through her, Dr. Gordon’s money.
“Was there a lot of money?” Pam said. “And does he need it?”
“Plenty,” Bill said. “Not particularly, as far as Heimrich’s got. But that sort of checkup takes time. Just as it’s taking time to find out about the trust fund—Dan Gordon’s money. All we’ve got so far is that it’s shrunk all right—just as Smith said. Smith’s cooperating fully, incidentally. Shaking his head and looking shocked and saying ‘tut, tut’ at appropriate intervals.”
“What I want to know,” Pam said, “is why I don’t like Mr. Smith unless it’s because he’s the murderer?”
They both looked at her. Jerry ran his right hand through his hair.
“Pam!” he said. He considered. “You don’t like the way he wears his hair,” he suggested. “You don’t like his voice. You think he’s too fat.”
Pam shook her head. She said he wasn’t fat. She said he wore his hair short and straight up, to which she didn’t object. “Although,” she said, “it makes him look a little like a brush.” She guessed she just didn’t like him.
“I never thought of his looking like a brush,” Bill said. “However—I guess you can’t have him, Pam. Alibis are a nuisance.”
Bill smiled at her.
“By the way,” he said, “if you want to worry about something profitable, I’ll give you something. Where did Dr. Gordon’s glasses go? And why did they go there?”
“Go?” Pam repeated. “Didn’t they just get broken—the way glasses do?”
Bill Weigand shook his head. Not, at any rate, in Dr. Gordon’s office. Because, no matter how carefully the pieces had been picked up, there would have been traces. Tiny fragments, invisible to the eye—but recoverable when the floor was cleaned properly by the police, and the dust and lint examined under microscope. And no glass had been recovered.
Death of a Tall Man Page 15
