“Right,” Bill said. “However.”
“I suppose so,” she said. “All right. Have it your own way. While Don was away I got lonesome. And poor Paul—poor Paul was always lonesome. And—and like a baby who wanted something.” She looked at Pam North. “Maybe you’re different,” she said. “I don’t know about other people.”
“Nobody does,” Pam North said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Helms.” She did not say what she was sorry about, but Beatrice Helms nodded.
“Probably it’s better,” she said. “I thought it might be. Don said it would just—confuse things. Anyway—” She paused for a moment. She raised her head. “That’s the way it was. He was like a baby and I was sorry and—I was lonely. It didn’t seem important. Actually, it wasn’t important. It—it wasn’t the same. Can you understand that? Any of you?”
She looked at Bill first. Then at Jerry, then at the other two.
“My dear,” Pam said, “don’t be so angry.”
“And Mr. Helms found out, when he came back?” Bill Weigand’s voice was still gentle.
“He knew,” she said. “Of course he knew. Paul was—different. Of course. And Don asked and I told him.” She stood up. “It will get mixed up,” she said. “We knew it would. You’ll think Don didn’t care. That—it didn’t matter. That wasn’t it. It mattered, and still he understood. He—he was different, too. He understood more things. I suppose maybe he—but that didn’t matter. Really didn’t. What mattered was that he understood. He was sorry, and I was sorry, but he knew it wasn’t—wasn’t the same. Not the thing we had. So he wasn’t even angry with Paul.” She looked at them, and she shook her head. “It’s impossible,” she said. “Impossible to explain. Don said it would be. He said you wouldn’t understand, you’d even think it gave him a—a reason for killing Paul. He said that would be the conventional thing to think and that—” She stopped, very suddenly.
“That the police are conventional,” Bill said. “Right. Perhaps they are, Mrs. Helms. They learn to be.” He smiled faintly. “Actually,” he said, “murder is surprisingly conventional. Motives are surprisingly conventional. Mr. Helms is—astute.”
“You have to know people,” Beatrice Helms said. “Can’t you see that?”
“Oh yes,” Bill said. “I can see that, Mrs. Helms. Some men do kill because they’re jealous. More men don’t. We have to know things like that—simple things. And we have to make up our minds whether this man—any particular man—is one who would or wouldn’t. Unfortunately, we have to tell from outside. You tell me Mr. Helms wouldn’t, that he didn’t feel that way. I can understand that. It’s not unreasonable; it’s very reasonable. But men have come back from the war and found out such things and—killed. I can understand that, too. I’ve met the men. So—”
“It was the way I said,” Beatrice Helms told him. “Just the way I said.”
Bill raised his eyebrows momentarily. He said he hoped so.
“Anyway,” she said, “he couldn’t have come out here and set the trap. Not this week. He was home every night except Wednesday, when we went to the theater.” She nodded. “And met some people we knew,” she said. “And Monday and Tuesday we had people in, and days he was at the office and—”
“When did you leave for Philadelphia Thursday?” Bill asked her.
She looked at him and her eyes widened, and then she seemed to remember something and smiled. What she remembered seemed to give her confidence.
“About eight,” she said. “The house, I mean—the apartment. And then Don went to a poker game with some friends and was there until—oh, ’way after midnight. He can prove it. And the people we had in Monday and Tuesday, and the people we saw Wednesday. Lieutenant, there wasn’t any time he could have come out here. And besides, we haven’t a car.”
She was certain now, confident. And also, Pam thought—and, looking at Bill Weigand, thought he thought—she was convincing.
“He could have rented a car,” Bill told her.
“They keep records,” she said, and she was more than ever confident. “Check them. He didn’t.”
Bill Weigand was amiable. He said, without emphasis, that they would check.
“By the way,” he said. “Were you ever at Wilming’s cottage? I don’t mean during the past week. I mean … before?”
And then, quite unexpectedly, she blushed. And she did not reply in words, but her head moved slowly, reluctantly, in acquiescence.
Bill Weigand stood up.
“I’m sorry about this, Mrs. Helms,” he said. “It’s murder, unfortunately. I’m sorry it’s murder. However—” She looked up at him and half smiled and nodded, this time to show it was all right. “I’ll have to talk to your husband again, Mrs. Helms,” Bill said. “Will you ask him to come out, please?”
She went across the room. She walked with her body held straight, almost stiffly. She did not look back.
“You wanted motive,” Jerry said, and Bill said, “Right.”
“Also,” he said, “we want opportunity. We want one person to have both. I don’t know how Helms felt about his wife and Wilming. Maybe what she thinks is true. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there’s our motive. But I don’t think he came out here this week to set the trap. It—well, we’ll check. But I think we’ll find he didn’t.”
“So do I,” Pam said. She thought a moment. “It’s very confusing,” she said. “One man has the motive and another man has the opportunity. It’s untidy.”
“Of course,” Dorian said, and her voice seemed to come from a long way off, “Mrs. Helms might have both. If Wilming were—well, if Wilming wouldn’t let go. If—oh, if he kept on clinging, as maybe he did, and her husband, who had understood once, couldn’t go on understanding; if Wilming kept his foot in the door and—”
She seemed to have grown almost drowsy as she talked, and the others were smiling at her with a kind of affection, and now, as if it had been wiped away, her drowsiness disappeared.
“The door!” she said. “Of course! The door! That’s what I couldn’t remember!”
They waited, not saying anything.
“The smoke curling up from the cigarette,” Dorian said, and now again she closed her eyes, letting the picture form in her mind. “The open window with the curtains blowing a little. And the door closing—almost closed. Not quite so nearly closed, I think, when the girl went in—the receptionist. Still closing when I went in. The door over to the left.”
She opened her eyes.
“That was Mr. Wilming’s office,” she said. “The door was what I couldn’t remember.”
“The door was what you saw,” Bill said. “What you saw that made you dangerous. Because there wasn’t any certainty you didn’t see more—didn’t see who was closing it behind him. After Wilming was pushed.”
Pam and Jerry North waited.
“It’s the door to Helms’s office,” Bill Weigand said, explaining it to them. “There were two ways out: through the corridor before, probably a few seconds before, the St. John girl and Dor got there; through Helms’s office. Now we know which.”
“Through,” Pam said. “Or into?”
“Right,” Bill said. “Through—or into.”
They looked at one another.
“Either way—” Jerry said.
“Right,” Bill said. “Helms was closing the door after he pushed Wilming. Or—somebody else was closing it, using Helms’s office as a way out. And Helms says he was in his office. So he did it, or he knows.”
“Or he lied,” Jerry said. “About being there.”
Pam shook her head.
“No, Jerry,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so. Because—wouldn’t it be the wrong lie?”
Bill Weigand seemed not to hear either of them. He looked at nothing. He added it up. He spoke aloud.
“Whoever it was thought he had been seen,” he said. “Perhaps the St. John girl did see him. Perhaps that’s why she had to be killed. It wasn’t certain about Dorian, so they tried to find out. Using hired ha
nds—clumsy hands, fortunately. Helms himself—” He shook his head slowly. He was talking chiefly to himself. “But he didn’t set the trap—”
Pam broke in. She said they hadn’t checked. They had only his word, his wife’s word. But Bill shook his head.
“Their confidence,” he said. “Their—relief that there was something they could be confident about. It’s more than their word—their combined word. I’ve seen that sort of thing too often—the relief when we’re on the wrong track, when we’re getting cold. That’s the way she felt. When we tried to place Helms at the cottage this week—” and it has to be this week, because Wilming was there until Monday morning—we were getting cold.” He looked at nothing again. “Damn!” he said.
“Maybe both of them,” Pam said. “Stanton to fix the trap. Helms to push Wilming. Only—” She shook her head. “Only I don’t believe it,” she said. “Why would they both want to?”
Nobody tried to answer that.
“Logically,” Jerry North said, from deep in his chair, “it’s Stanton. He pushed Wilming, he heard somebody coming, he went through Helms’s office. Helms saw him. Helms is covering up, for what he can get out of it. Maybe only for the job. Maybe for—well, a bonus. For service over and above the call of duty. Logically.”
“Except—why?” Pam said.
“I don’t know,” Jerry said.
“As a matter of fact, there’s no good why for either of them,” Dorian said. “For the men. Or for Mrs. Helms, actually. There’s no—”
She stopped, because Bill stood up suddenly. His eyes narrowed.
“I wonder if Helms could have got lost?” he said, and his voice had an odd note in it. “Or if Mrs. Helms forgot?”
Mrs. Helms had been standing at the window, looking out into the darkness, looking out at nothing. She turned sharply when Bill Weigand, after knocking quickly, did not wait, but opened the door. All vitality had drained out of her face; she did not even seem curious.
“Where’s your husband?” Bill was curt.
“Why—I thought with you,” she said. “I told him. He went out.” She seemed to consider a moment. “Maybe he stopped at Mr. Stanton’s room,” she said. “I think there was something—”
But Bill Weigand had gone. Beatrice Helms turned back to look out of the window, at the darkness, at nothing.
Buford Stanton’s room was at the end of one of the wings. It was spacious; french windows opened out onto a private terrace. There was a reading light at the head of the broad bed and pillows there, as if someone had been leaning back against them, reading. But there was nobody in the room. And one of the french windows was partly open.
Bill went toward it. He had taken only a step when there was the rasp of a car’s starter outside. The motor caught, raced; steadied to an angry snarl as the clutch went in.
Bill turned back, running now, and yelling, “Mullins!” as he ran. He ran down the corridor, slammed open the door to the living room, ran across it. By that time Mullins was running behind him.
Bill did not seem to see Dorian or the Norths. The three of them were on their feet when he first, from a distance, shouted for Mullins. They stood, frozen, as the two men ran across the room toward the windows.
“Bill!” Pam called. “Bill—I’ve—”
Bill, still running, shook his head.
“Later!” he told her, his voice loud. “Come on, Mullins!”
Bill was at the french windows, pushing one of them open in front of him.
Pam started to run after him, bumped into a chair, pushed it sliding away from her. Jerry reached for her arm, but he was too late. She was running after Bill Weigand and Mullins, and trying to talk at the same time.
“You don’t—” she said, and caught her breath. “Bill—I know—I’ve got—!” She ran out of breath. But she kept on running.
“Pam!” Jerry said, and now his voice was loud. “Wait. We’ll—”
But she did not wait, and Jerry ran after her. He pushed one hand through his hair as he ran and kept calling, “Pam! Pam!” But she did not stop.
Outside, a trooper was running toward them, waving a flashlight, yelling nothing with words; yelling something which might have been “Hey! Hey!” It was because of him, because Bill checked his run an instant when the trooper’s light caught him, that Pam managed to catch up.
“Bill!” she said. “We were wrong. It was upside down. I—”
Bill’s voice cut through her. It was angry; the anger was at the trooper.
“Where the hell were you?” he demanded, and then, as the trooper started to answer, shook his head. “Skip it,” he said. “They’re gone. Where’s the hospital?”
“Huh?” the trooper said. “The what?”
Bill Weigand had continued to move toward his car, the trooper moving with him, anxiously. Now Bill stopped.
“You took Farno—the man who was shot—to a hospital,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Grandview,” the trooper said. “Sure. Six or seven miles. By the good road.”
“Motorcycle?” Bill said, and the trooper nodded.
“Guide us,” Bill said. “Hurry!”
The trooper ran.
“Bill!” Pam said. “Listen!”
“Later,” Bill said. “When I come back.”
He and Mullins went on, still hurrying, not quite running, toward Bill’s parked Buick. Again Jerry reached for Pam’s arm; again, although his fingers brushed it, he was too late.
Bill and Mullins split, moving to opposite doors. The starter kicked at the motor while Mullins’s door on the far side slammed shut. And Pam grabbed at the rear door, jumped and half tumbled in. Jerry, behind her, sprawled on the seat as the car started.
“Sometime—!” Bill said, but did not finish because a motorcycle roared, shot out of darkness and came along side, with the trooper waving. He yelled too. “Shortcut!” he yelled. “Four miles. Come—” He gunned his motor, drowning his words. The motorcycle leaped and the Buick, less spectacularly—surged after it. The motorcycle’s siren started as it hit the road at the end of the drive.
They went perhaps a mile on black road, checked, turned sharply right. Then it was a ride to remember—a ride on a one-lane road winding between fences, shooting up and dropping down, turning on itself. It had been a dirt trail; it had been surfaced after a casual fashion. At forty-five—at fifty—at sixty on brief straight-aways—it was unbelievable. The heavy Buick jumped into the air, it lurched on curves, the tires protesting. Ahead the trooper’s motorcycle bucked in the wide spread of their headlights, its siren doleful, coming in spurts, now and then wailing its mechanical pain, the terror of steel and rubber.
In the rear seat of the Buick the Norths were shaken together, shaken apart. Pam was still trying to say what she had to say, but the words were thrown out of her.
“Something you said,” she tried to tell Bill, shouting against noise, shouting out of excitement. “It was wrong—that was—” They went around a curve; she was thrown against Jerry, her face buried in his coat, her words stifled.
The car went up a sudden grade and seemed to jump into the air. It came down, slewing; it caught the road.
“Wow!” Mullins said. “Jeez, Loot!”
Bill said nothing. The car got its wheels under it and leaped. Then, as if it had been squeezed out of something, it spurted into a concrete road. Bill skid-turned, needing the whole of the road. A hundred yards ahead, its siren still going, the motorcycle broke the night into fragments with its excited sounds.
They went a mile on the concrete, and were going seventy-five within the mile. Then the trooper on the motorcycle began to wave madly, pointing to his right, slackening speed dangerously under the car’s lights. The car slowed, did not quite over-run him, turned with him to the right up a graveled drive. There were posts on either side of the entrance, with lighted globes on them and the word “Grandview” on each globe. They spurted up the drive, came to a wide circle and stopped. The circle was empty; suddenly
the quiet of the night drew itself back to gather, to absorb them.
And then, from the road they had just left, they heard the motor of another car—a car coming very fast. Bill started the Buick, circled to the edge of the parking place, stopped where the branches of two trees drooped low, broodingly, over the gravel. The motor of the approaching car dropped in pitch; then it picked up again. It was coming up the drive. Its lights picked up the hospital façade, were sharp on the entrance. Then the car stopped, its lights still bright on the parking space. Spreading, the lights picked up Weigand’s car, Weigand half out of it on his side, the rear door opening.
In the instant stillness they could hear the crack of a latch released on the door of the car which faced them and shed its light on them. And at almost the same instant they heard a man running toward them, his feet thudding, scratching, on the gravel. He seemed to be running desperately; first he seemed to be running diagonally toward them, then toward the hospital doors.
Then another man began to shout.
“Stop him!” the second man shouted. “Stop—I’ll shoot!”
“No!” Bill Weigand yelled. “Wait!”
And Mullins ran toward the fleeing man, cutting in on him. In the lights the bodies of the two running men seemed to collide; they swayed; one of them went down.
“O.K., Loot!” Mullins called, with a kind of gasp in his voice.
“Bill!” Pam said. “You’ve got to listen. About the trap. You’ve got to!”
Bill turned toward her. The lights of the car were on his face.
“You said Stanton,” Pam said, her words falling over one another. “Because he owned it, he was most likely. Bill—the man who lived in it. Don’t you see? The man who lived in it. Don’t you see? And everything straightens out.”
Afterward Bill Weigand thought that, somewhere in the back of his mind—half-formed, foggy—the knowledge must have been there already, waiting. Because through the stumble of Pam’s words, he did see. But by that time Donald Helms, running too, was up to them.
“Good!” he said. “Great! My God, I was afraid—” He broke off and drew breath. “He was after Farno, of course. To—to shut him up.”
Untidy Murder Page 20
