by Frances
“Corridor,” she said. “Not the whole floor, mister. On account of—”
“Corridor,” O’Malley said. But now he smiled at her. “Of course, Mrs. Pinkney,” he said. “This room?”
She nodded. She looked at the others in the room—at the man in a gray suit taking notes; at the “dark-complected” man who wasn’t doing anything she could see, but who had met her at the door of the suite and brought her in; at the man and woman sitting side by side on a sofa, close together. Probably the ones who had done it, Rose Pinkney thought. Whatever it was. Murder, from what they said.
“To turn down the beds,” she said. “Like every night. If somebody’s rented the room, that is to say.”
O’Malley could be patient, particularly with those who made sense—ordinary, everyday simple sense. (Didn’t talk about movies being better if—) He was patient with Rose Pinkney.
She had knocked at the door of Suite 718 at a quarter after seven, or thereabouts. Being unanswered, she had gone in and done what she was supposed to do. She described it.
“Show us,” O’Malley told her, and was still patient—she was to pretend she was coming in the door to the suite, was to do over what she had done earlier. When she got the idea, Rose said, “Okay,” and went out into the outer corridor and closed the door after her and then knocked on it. Stein went and let her in. She said, “Only nobody’s supposed to be here. If they are, I’m supposed to come back later,” and Stein said, he knew, and that she was to pretend they weren’t there.
She shook her head (thinking it pretty silly) and came into the suite. She went first into the bathroom, and came out of it and closed the door. “See if they need fresh towels,” she said. “If the wastebasket’s full.”
“Sure,” O’Malley said. “Nobody in the bathroom the first time?”
“Mister,” she said, “like I told you, we make sure nobody’s in the room.”
“You always close the bathroom door?” O’Malley asked, and she said, “I guess so,” and thought, and said, “Sure, I guess so.” She was told to go on. She went across the living room. She looked into a wastebasket and went into the bedroom. She came back. “Turned down already,” she said. “Want I should make them up and then turn them down?”
“No,” O’Malley said. “That’s all you do? You did it this way earlier?”
“Nobody let me in,” she said, “on account of, there was nobody here. Like I told you. I used my pass key.”
“When you come in,” Mrs. North said, “do you leave the door open? The door to the corridor?”
Rose looked at Mrs. North. She looked at the inspector, who said he’d ask the questions, if it was all right with everybody and then, “All right, do you?”
She did, she always did. So people would know she was in there. In case they didn’t notice the cart.
“All right,” O’Malley said. “The cart? What’s the cart?”
People didn’t know very much, and that was a fact. (But she did not say so.) The cart was on wheels; it had a rack for fresh towels; a bin for soiled towels; a receptacle for the contents of overflowing wastebaskets. It was left outside a room being worked in. “Nobody said to bring the cart,” Rose said.
“That’s all right,” O’Malley said. “Just getting the picture. And there wasn’t anybody in here when you came in?”
“Nobody I saw.”
“Not even,” Pam said, “a cat?”
“I’ll—” O’Malley said. “Well, you didn’t see a cat, Mrs. Pinkney? Funny-looking cat?”
He looked at Mrs. North quickly, with a fleeting expression of pleasure.
“She looks like any—” Pam said, rising to the bait, and had her hand pressed. “Anyway, she’d go under something until she found out who it was, because she’d know it wasn’t us.”
“Did you,” O’Malley said, “see anything of a cat, Mrs. Pinkney? Or hear anything?”
“No.” But then she said, “Only there was this pan in the bathroom, with torn paper in it. So I figured—your cat, miss?”
“Yes,” Pam said. “A Siamese cat. Not funny-looking at all, really.”
“Mine’s red,” Rose said. “Always have a red cat. Feed yours liver?”
“No,” Pam said. “It’s not really good for them. As a regular diet, I mean. And if you give them some now and then, they get so they won’t eat anything else. But Martini doesn’t like it anyway and—”
“Won’t eat nothing else, mine won’t,” Rose said. “Liver or nothing, that’s the old redhead. ’Cept fish, of course. Likes a piece of fish as well as the next—”
“All right,” O’Malley said, swelling ominously, Jerry thought. “All right!”
“You mean,” Mrs. Pinkney said, “you don’t want me any more?”
“That’s right,” O’Malley said. “Go—go home and feed your damned cat.” This hurt her feelings. Her face showed it. “Sorry if I—” she began, and O’Malley made the effort.
“You did fine, Mrs. Pinkney,” he said. “Didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“Well!” she said, and started out. Stein went with her. Stein came back.
“You see,” Pam North said, “how Miss Towne could have got in. Or anybody. Or Miss Towne and anybody. While the maid was in the bedroom before she left and—”
“Listen,” O’Malley said and there was, Jerry thought, an unexpected note in the inspector’s voice—a note almost of entreaty. “Listen, Mrs. North, suppose you let me do it, huh?”
“Of course, inspector,” Pam said. “I was just trying—”
“Just don’t, please,” the inspector said. “That’s all I ask, lady.”
III
It had not been, of course. Inspector Artemus O’Malley had asked a great deal more, and asked much of it over and over, and asked much of it with evident doubt that he was being truthfully answered. But finally, at a little after two o’clock in the morning, he had said that that was all for now and that they could go. This, for a few moments, presented something of a problem. They could not, of course, sleep what remained of the night in Suite 718. They could get another room in the hotel—perhaps. “Let’s go home,” Pam said. “I don’t like hotel life as much as I thought I would. We can do something about Mr. Prentori.”
They packed up again—packed their clothes, got Martini from under the sofa and packed her (and she was furious) and got a cab, after some waiting, and went home. “It’s not the same without Bill,” Pam said, moodily. “Bill would know that we didn’t have anything to—” Jerry waited, and heard nothing more, except soft and steady breathing. Some time later, he went to sleep himself.
Almost instantly, bells rang and buckets banged and while the Norths struggled out of sleep, there was heavy knocking at the apartment door. “They’ve come for us,” Pam said. “Oh my goodness.” But “they” had not. Mr. Prentori had come, with aides, with buckets, with stepladders. He had come early; it was only seven-thirty when he came. The Norths fled—they fed Martini and put her in the kitchen, and left a note for Martha, and fled. They paused in flight at a near-by Schrafft’s, and had accumulated newspapers by then. The newspapers were full of the death of Amanda Towne. There was in them also a good deal about Mr. and Mrs. North—Gerald North, head of North Books, Inc., and his “attractive wife.” The Herald Tribune reminded its readers that the Norths had been, before, involved in crimes of violence. The Herald Tribune had the discretion to add “innocently” but—rather unkindly, Pam thought—qualified with, “in the past.”
“All we’re going to find out this time is what we read in the newspapers,” Pam said, and read in the Herald Tribune. And Jerry—after scanning the book page quickly, to make sure that the advertisement of Look Away, Stranger had appeared on schedule—went back to the front page of the Times, and read of violent death.
Amanda Towne, whose picture did her credit, had been found dead, under circumstances the police characterized as suspicious, in a hotel suite occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North who, however, had an apartmen
t of their own in Manhattan. (Why they were not in it remained unexplained in the Herald Tribune, although Inspector O’Malley was freely mentioned and his views, which were rather guarded, were fully quoted. If he had passed on the reason for the Norths’ presence at the Breckenridge, that did not appear. Which, Pam thought, was needlessly mean of him.)
The exact cause of Amanda Towne’s death had not been determined when the Herald Tribune went to press. But the Times had “apparently of asphyxiation.” Miss Towne had a suite of her own on the same floor of the hotel—a corner suite, which the Herald Tribune considered “luxurious.” The Times withheld comment. What she was doing in the wrong suite, and doing there dead, was the core of the matter. On this mystery, the Norths—it was reported—had been able to shed no light. The Norths, according to their account, did not know Miss Towne. The Norths, according to the police, said that they had gone out to dinner and the movies, leaving their suite empty—except for a Siamese cat—and had returned to find Miss Towne’s body. They had reported this to the police.
“If I were somebody else,” Pam said, when she had reached this point in the story, “I’d say those Norths are the ones who did it. A cooked-up story if I ever heard one.”
“You,” Jerry said, washing toast down with coffee, “you and Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, in command of detectives, Borough of Manhattan. All they need is a motive.” He put his newspaper down briefly, so that he could look across the table at Pam. “You saw her show,” Jerry said, thoughtfully. “Some of the shows you see make a person feel like—”
“It is not,” Pam said, “anything to joke about. I don’t see why we’re not in jail.”
“Give us time,” Jerry told her, and went back to reading about Amanda Towne, of whom there was a good deal to write.
She had been in her middle forties, native of Arkansas, former newspaper woman in Chicago. She had been married, briefly, twenty years before, to Russell Barnes, then also a newspaper reporter—and now a copyreader (but copy editor in the Times) on an afternoon newspaper. According to Mr. Barnes, there had been no divorce; merely a friendly (and certainly protracted) separation. Mr. Barnes was shocked to hear of his wife’s death. (And, therewith, more or less vanished from the picture.)
Amanda Towne had been living alone, and had resumed her maiden name, when she turned from newspapers to broadcasting. She had been first a newscaster on an afternoon radio program, her time period brief and her sphere news of interest to women. But she had not stayed there, or on the Chicago station which had given her a start. She went on to a half-hour period; to interviews as well as news—and to many glowing, dramatized, little reports on products of interest to women. She expanded further, became a network feature, and an institution and was an hour long and a nation wide. By this stage, her show had a name—“People Next Door”—originated in New York, where celebrities suitable to trial by interview are somewhat more easily come by.
“But what Amanda never did,” her business manager, Mrs. Alice Fleming, assured the Herald Tribune’s radio and TV authority (who had a separate story of her own, beginning on Page 1) “was to lose the common touch. She hated the word ‘folksy,’ of course, but I’m afraid it was often used of her. It was what made her appeal so universal. All over the country, women felt she was just—well, I guess, just the next door neighbor who had come in to call.”
The transition from radio to television was somewhat difficult, and a good many—particularly among the women interviewers—fell between. Amanda did not; she kept a foot firmly on radio for longer than most, when radio dissolved under it, she was firmly on TV, from two to three, three afternoons a week, and was often asked, further, to give the woman’s point of view on matters of world importance, Sunday afternoons being the most frequent times for this, since on Sundays television is most likely to think deeply.
“In recent years” (this was the Times’ television commentator) “Amanda Towne became noted for the frequently penetrating quality of her questions, which sometimes drew forth revealing answers. In not a few cases, answers were somewhat more revealing than those interviewed realized. Her program was, through the years, often the source of news stories. The recent misadventure of Judge Roger Parkman is a minor example—although perhaps not particularly minor to Judge Parkman, whose political career, some think, has been jeopardized.”
The Times’ radio and TV man did not go further into that. The writer of the Herald Tribune’s lead story did.
“Miss Towne,” he wrote, “had a knack of making those she interviewed feel relaxed, as if they were talking with a sympathetic friend in privacy. It is said along Madison Avenue that some lived to regret what they had said in these relaxed moments, and to feel that Miss Towne had ‘led them on.’ An example cited is the very recent case of Judge Roger Parkman who, in the course of an interview with Miss Towne, made a casual remark which has been widely, if unfairly, interpreted as reflecting adversely on certain minority groups.”
This, to the Herald Tribune’s rewrite man, appeared to cover that, and he went to graze in other pastures. Pam read on, searching and not finding, and put her paper down on the table and said, “Jerry. This Judge Parkman?”
Jerry said, “U-mmm?”
“Parkman,” Pam said. “Isn’t it in the Times? What did he say that was so awful?”
“‘—were varied,’” Jerry read. “‘From the climbers of new mountains, to winners of cooking contests, from best-selling authors to—’”
“Parkman,” Pam said. “Judge” (she checked) “Roger Parkman. Something he said has been widely interpreted.”
Jerry marked his place with a finger. He said, “What did you say about Mr. Dulles?”
“Really,” Pam said. “You never listen. Parkman. Judge Parkman. Something on Miss Towne’s program. Isn’t it in the Times?”
“Oh,” Jerry said. “Yes. Something about—” He paused. He remembered. He said he remembered. He said it had been chiefly in the Post. Because Judge Parkman was a Republican. He’d been talked about for lieutenant governor or something. The rest of the papers had followed it with little enthusiasm.
“What?” Pam said.
“It wasn’t anything much,” Jerry said. “I do remember it was on Miss Towne’s program. Perfectly innocent, anybody’d think. Only—” Pam waited while Jerry thought. “All he said,” Jerry told her, “was something like ‘people like you and me.’ Or maybe, ‘You and I and people like us.’”
Pam shook her head. She said it must have been the context.
It had been, Jerry said. He couldn’t remember the context in any detail. But—relaxed, possibly led on—Judge Parkman had allowed himself to be netted in a context which made a probably innocent remark appear to reflect on all who were not, as he and Miss Towne triumphantly were, white and Protestant and, presumably, eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. “On the distaff side,” Jerry said, before Pam could say that a man couldn’t very well be a daughter.
“Oh,” Pam said. “In New York City. A politician. And a Republican. Ouch!”
In a word, it had been “Ouch!” Judge Parkman had been saying that, in statements of considerable length, since the previous Friday, when he had spoken lightheartedly to the so sympathetic Amanda Towne—and to many thousands more, not all of them inclined to forbearance. There had been much pattering of little feet as Republicans from all around trotted forward to disavow Judge Parkman’s implications; to say how deeply they, on the other hand, loved people of all races and all colors and all creeds. It had become entirely evident that Judge Parkman would not further be talked about for lieutenant governor. Or anything.
“The poor man,” Pam said. “People should be very clear in what they say, shouldn’t they?”
Jerry looked at her. He swallowed coffee. After consideration, he said, “Yes, Pamela.”
“His career in shreds,” Pam said. “And I suppose, nobody to sue? Since he said it himself. He must have been very annoyed at Miss
Towne.” She paused. “Very,” she said. “Particularly if she led him on, as the papers say. Wove the context.”
“Wove the—” Jerry said and paused to consider. Perhaps, on second thought, a context could be woven, and a career reduced to shreds thereby. It occurred to him, on third thought, that that, or part of it, might be precisely what Pam was doing.
“Listen,” Jerry said. “He’d hardly be that annoyed, if that’s what you mean.” He lighted a cigarette and looked at it. “As,” he said, “I suppose it is.”
“Well,” Pam said.
“What good would it do him?” Jerry asked. “The damage is done, presumably. Probably he can live it down. Anyway—”
Pam said she knew the one about frying pans and fires. To say nothing of least said soonest mended, and the rest. All the same—
“Suppose,” she said, “he tried to get her to have him on the program again? So he could straighten things out? Say how much he loved minorities with votes? And she wouldn’t do it? And he got mad and—”
“No,” Jerry said.
“Somebody got mad,” Pam pointed out. “Or frightened. Or stood to profit. I wonder if—”
“No,” Jerry said. “This time, we won’t try to help. All right? We sit this one out.”
“If we’re let,” Pam said.
It was not precisely a promise. It would have, Jerry decided, to serve. He went to his office and Pam went back to the apartment, where the men of Prentori sized.
At a quarter of eleven, Jerry was talking, on the telephone, with an author about a bug, and being firm in his insistence that the bug would not go away no matter how little you looked at it. Miss Prentice, who received, came to the door of his office and her eyes were bright. “Try to think of something, Clem,” Jerry said to the author. “Before we send it to the printer,” and hung up and said, “Yes?” to Miss Prentice, who was clearly pleased and excited—as if the Book-of-the-Month had called in person, with entreaties.
“Mr. Kingsley would like to see you,” Miss Prentice said, as one who imparts tidings almost too joyous for belief.
