“—ask you more later, when I know more questions,” Weigand was saying, in a tone which had disarmed a good many people, sometimes to their drastic disadvantage. He turned and came toward Pam and saw her and smiled.
“Jerry’s all right,” she said. “He’s grounded. Have you—?”
Weigand shook his head. Just odds and ends, he told her. “And,” he added, “an experiment or two. I’ll tell you later. Routine, for the most part. And we’re leaving, now, for a while.”
“But—” Pam said. “What did Perkins say?”
“Perkins?” Weigand repeated. “We haven’t found Perkins. What made you think—.”
“But, he just came in!” Pam told the detectives. “A moment before I did. I saw him climb the steps.”
That got them moving, because nobody had seen Perkins. Weigand whirled on the people who seemed to fill the drawing room and demanded information sharply. Perkins had just come in. Had any of them seen him?
The major stood up, bristling a little, and said “no!” Ben Craig, sunk in a chair, shook his head. Aunt Flora shook her torso. Nobody, it turned out, had seen Perkins. Quickly, Weigand and Mullins, aided by Detective Stein and one of the precinct men, searched the house. There was no sign of Perkins. He was not in his room, or in the library above or in any of the bedrooms. Sand, answering for the servants, denied that he had come down to the kitchen or the quarters on the ground floor. Sand insisted, further, that without being seen he could not have gone along the corridor of the ground floor and to the door leading to the sub-cellar, used for storage and the heating plant. Perkins had appeared and disappeared, and Weigand looked a little doubtfully at Pam.
“Of course I’m sure,” she said. “He’s so sort of wispy. You couldn’t make a mistake.”
Weigand seemed worried, then, and said he didn’t like it. He said it so that all could hear.
“He worries me,” Weigand said. “Now you see him and now you don’t. And obviously he’s hiding.”
“Knows something, Loot,” Mullins came in. “Scared, that’s him. Maybe he saw the guy plugged.”
“Or plugged him,” Weigand suggested. “Or knows something about the poisoning. At any rate, I want him. Tomorrow, if he doesn’t show we’ll get enough of the boys here to take the house apart. Meanwhile, I’ll leave a man here—keep an eye on things.”
“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He followed Weigand, who went without saying anything further. Pam looked after them for a moment, and then went on into the drawing room and found a chair. This time it was the whole family and no fooling, she thought, looking around.
Major Buddie was still standing and now that she was officially in the room, other men stood. Dr. Wesley Buddie, taller and heavier than his brother, impressive and professional but with a friendly smile, stood up and said, “Hello, Pamela.” Bruce McClelland, who had been sitting on a small sofa with Judy—“Yes,” Pam repeated to herself, “Judy!”—stood and grinned at her and said nothing. Christopher Buddie stood, looking as unlike his father as possible, and said, with a kind of mockery, “Good afternoon, Mrs. North.” It was hard to tell what Christopher Buddie was mocking. Ben Craig half stood, sluggishly, and sat again, but made up for it by a special smile of greeting. Pam said, “Oh, please sit down everybody,” and sat down herself, near Aunt Flora.
“Now,” said Aunt Flora, smiling rather horribly, “we’re going to have a family council, dearie. Everybody—including the murderer.”
She beamed around the family circle.
“And the poisoner,” Aunt Flora added, jovially.
“Must you always be a character, darling?” Christopher Buddie enquired, still mocking. He was dark and thin, with narrow lips. Narrow lips, Pam suddenly realized, looking around, were an un-Buddielike characteristic. The other Buddies, including Aunt Flora herself, had full lips. Which meant, probably, that full lips came from Aunt Flora, since she had them and—yes—Cousin Ben had them, too. There was less color in his, so that you noticed it belatedly. But Christopher’s lips were thin and flexible. His nose was thin and looked as if it might be flexible too, although at the moment it was not flexing.
“Who’s a character?” Aunt Flora demanded. “Character yourself, Chris.” She stared at him. “What are you making fun of, dearie?” she demanded. Chris was not as assured as he thought himself, Pam decided. He looked taken aback. But so often did much older people when Aunt Flora spoke to them.
“He’s a playwright, mother,” Dr. Wesley Buddie said, easily. “An observer of life—an amused observer. Incipiently, a Noel Coward. We’re just for practice.”
But he smiled at his son affectionately, and Chris Buddie smiled back. His face was no longer so sharp when he smiled.
“Well,” said Aunt Flora, “tell him not to practice on me, Wesley. I won’t have it.”
But she didn’t mind having it, Pam thought. It amused her, and in some fashion gratified her. It singled her out, and of that Aunt Flora always approved.
When nobody said anything, Aunt Flora looked at the small watch on her plump wrist.
“My God,” she said. “Cocktail time! Why didn’t somebody say something?”
Christopher Buddie rang the bell which summoned Sand and turned back to Clem Buddie. They had their chairs drawn so that they formed an intimate V. And Bruce McClelland was absorbed, evidently, in Judy. Bruce and Judy were talking, indeed, as if they had only just met, and as if they had to talk fast to make up for time lost. But Bruce was supposed to be devoted to Clem, not to Judy. Pam wondered if what had happened the night before had changed things; if, meeting late at night in the lonely house, finding themselves united by the little emergency of the disappearances of Clem and the major, Bruce and Judy had found more than they had expected. It was conceivable, even, that Bruce had discovered that, for him, it was really Judy all the time. Things like that could happen. Certainly they were acting as if something very like that had happened.
It was hard to tell about people, Pam thought as she watched drinks being passed and sipped her own, as she listened, with half a mind, to the conversation which with the drinks was resumed around her. It was hard to tell who was in love with whom, and that was one of the easiest things. (It was easier in the later stages than it was before “anything” had happened. Pam smiled inwardly at the “anything.” People had such odd, fragile defenses against words they were afraid of.)
And if it was hard to tell about a thing which went so much by pattern, how much more difficult to tell—well, for example, whether one person out of several was a murderer. That was the crux of it. Here, supposing that neither Harry Perkins nor the servants nor some outsider called “X” had killed Stephen Anthony, was a murderer. He or she was drinking with the rest, talking with the rest casually, remembering little family jokes with the rest and saying with them, “Remember when we all—” and laughing when they laughed. And perhaps the murderer, sitting there with the others, almost forgot at times he was a murderer, because even a murderer cannot always remember, as the grief-stricken cannot always remember grief.
But it must come back again and again, that sense of being a murderer. Sometimes it must come in the middle of speech, confusing a thought already formulated—it must go round and round in the head, the knowledge of murder and of pursuit. The thought that shrewd men and clumsy men, intelligent men and dogged men, men in blue uniforms and men in slouch hats, were everywhere after you must make a coldness in your mind. Here a man was talking to somebody, and perhaps a word would give you away. Here a man was peering through a comparison microscope at tiny scratches on a piece of metal, and perhaps some scratch would give you away. Here a man was sifting through papers, steadily, unwearingly, looking for some written word that would give you away. And when he was tired, another man would look. And somewhere men in white uniforms were probing with knives into the body of the man you had killed, looking for something which would give you away.
All over the city, you would think, men would be searching for you—
in words and in metal, in scraps of paper, in the things you did yesterday and the things your victims had planned to do tomorrow—and there would be no stopping them. Because, whatever they tolerated, the police did not tolerate murder, or ever give up looking for a murderer. And the men you saw—men like Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Squad, and Sergeant Mullins and Detective Stein, and uniformed and ununiformed men from the precinct—they were only the men nearest, most visible. Behind them there were many times as many anonymous men, all with their hands against you. And behind them there was something greatly vaster and more anonymous—something so anonymous that you could not give it a name, or could give it many names. The People of the State of New York against you; the Public against you; Society against you; Law against you; Civilization against you. You could call it anything, and it was always against you. But, looking around at the others, Pam realized that you—the strange, not quite imaginable Murderer—You—could remain resilient. You could chat and remember and laugh, and outsiders could not see the fear that must be in your eyes.
You did it because you could stop thinking about it, not for long but long enough for surcease. You could get your second wind, in a way, and then start over. And the people looking at you, if you could remember that, would be people with dull eyes, who could not really see.
If I could really see, Pam thought, I could see which one was the murderer, and it wouldn’t matter about times and motives. She was looking, she found, at Aunt Flora—Aunt Flora with the applied complexion and the uneasy wig, with the bright amused eyes and the full lips and the remarkable necklessness; Aunt Flora who had married four times and had once, remarkably, managed to get a husband who was chief of police locked up in one of his own station houses for drunkenness; Aunt Flora who could be so boisterous one moment and so shrewdly sympathetic the next and who immediately thought of shooting when she thought of the sudden deaths of men. Aunt Flora could shoot a pistol, if you came to that; Aunt Flora was apt to be impatient of people who got in her way; Aunt Flora was, Pam suspected, essentially amoral. Could Aunt Flora kill a man? Probably. Had she? Pam peered and peered with her mind, and could not tell.
And there was, after Aunt Flora, Cousin Alden Buddie, the choleric, stubby little major. Naturally he could kill. It was his profession, and there was grim evidence enough in the world that the line between public and private murder was a wavering one. But if he killed, would he not kill openly, defiantly, as a man who had a right to kill? “Eh?” Would he not kill contemptuously, and carry until the last a bristling scorn for those who criticized him, even if their final criticism was the drastic one of electrocution? Or was he more subtle than he seemed? For men of the army were no longer trained to advance in long lines, their chests manfully inviting bullets, bands playing to advertise their presence and flags fluttering to focus fire. Now they manoeuvered, and perhaps the major, if he decided to murder, would manoeuvre, too. And what would make him murder? Pam looked at him. Almost anything he didn’t like, she decided, suddenly—given the right time and the right place, the right intensity of disapproval, and the major might murder anybody. But had he, in this case? It was hopeless. Pam went on.
She looked at Clem Buddie, slender and animated and, just now, very poised. There was less to know about the young—it was hard to tell how deep veneer went, and how hot the fires were underneath. The very young counted so much on veneer because they were so uncertain—some of the very young did. And some of them were perhaps hard almost all the way through and some of them only very thinly surfaced with hardness. It was difficult to tell which Clem was, but Pam thought only surfaced. But the very young are, to outsiders and often to themselves, capable of almost anything. And perhaps in this case anything included murder. But you couldn’t tell.
Nor could Pam tell, knowing him only slightly, much of anything about Christopher Buddie, except that he was intelligent, and not so sure of himself as he thought and probably violent only mentally. Judy was not, Pam thought, violent at all, for herself. But for Clem, her younger sister, Judy might be violently protective—emotion might catch her and do what it wanted with her and perhaps even carry her on to murder. She’s the best of all of us, Pam thought, and the least-considering. But wasn’t murder, when you came down to it, an action possible only to those who were, essentially, unconsidering; to those who saw only what was nearest and could not really see that other things came after, or if they saw could not emotionally realize?
If that were true, it would bar Ben Craig as a murderer. Because Cousin Ben was a man who considered, carefully. He looked before he leaped, and then he did not leap but moved forward cautiously. He was listening, now, with a smile to something the major was saying across the room, and seemed completely relaxed and comfortable. He looked as if he would prefer to husband all his resources, even to the extent of saying as little as possible. And yet he managed to remain entirely affable. Which was shrewd of him. He was, probably, a man shrewd even to the point of meanness, and she had already thought that murder was not the act of a shrewd man but of an unconsidering one—of a violent and emotional one. It was, Pam considered, difficult to imagine Ben Craig doing anything which required as much initiative as murder, and as much hotness of blood.
And if hotness of blood and violence were required, there was Bruce McClelland. He and Judy were a match in that—they were generous, emotional people. Bruce was shrewd enough in his way, probably. Pam knew him well enough to think that, and Jerry said he wrote well, which was a kind of shrewdness. And his newspapers thought well of him and gave him important jobs to do, and papers did not so put their faith in people who could not tell which side of the bread had butter on it. But there was no question of his initiative and little, Pam thought, that he could be violent if a cause arose. Probably he might kill, under the right circumstances. Had not there been such circumstances?
“I can’t tell anything,” Pam said, to herself.
“Can’t you, dearie?” Aunt Flora said, comfortably. “I must say you don’t say much this afternoon, dearie. But I didn’t know that it was because you had secrets.”
Pam was momentarily confused. Then she smiled, with only a little embarrassment, at Aunt Flora.
“Darling!” she said. “I must have been talking out loud again. I did think I’d given it up after—after that awful time. Because once, you know, I almost talked myself to death.”
Aunt Flora was very interested. She insisted that Pam tell her all about it, then and there. Pam did.1
1. The story of Pam’s almost fatal conversation with herself has been told in Death on the Aisle.
9
WEDNESDAY
6:15 P.M. TO THURSDAY, 12:15 A.M.
The mood of the whole family had somehow changed during dinner, Pam thought as she undressed a little after 11 o’clock that night. When they were scattered through the drawing room, they had seemed to talk normally; it seemed that they had all, including whichever of them was hiding murder, forgotten Stephen Anthony’s violent death in the adjoining room. The doors to the room were closed and Sand had not used it as a passage from the pantry, as he sometimes did, but had come and gone through the foyer. But it was always near and, under everything else, it had always been in Pam’s mind. But there was nothing to indicate, before they sat down to dinner a little after 7:30, that it had been in the minds of the others.
It was hard to understand how then, almost as they sat down in the dining room, the atmosphere had changed. Perhaps it was the comparative darkness of the room, with only the table lighted by candle flames which twisted now and then with the movement of the air. Perhaps they felt the shadows behind them. Perhaps only one felt it first, and felt suddenly a fear which was conveyed, no one could tell how, to the rest. Perhaps it was merely that, when the pattern of casualness they had established in the drawing room was necessarily broken by the physical movements necessary to get them upstairs and regrouped around the long table, it was broken irretrievably and each mind fled back to fear
.
Whatever the cause, the pattern of casualness—of sufficiently secure men and women talking idly in an atmosphere also secure—was not re-established after they moved to the dining room. At first they merely sat, each as if waiting for the conversation to resume. And then, while they were still waiting, it became hopeless. It seemed to Pam that she could almost hear the silence change from something merely accidental to something permanent and nerve stretching; could feel, almost physically, and in the air, the passing of the time when it was still possible for some one of them to speak casually into the time when anything said by anyone would of necessity be portentous.
It was Aunt Flora, characteristically, who broke the silence, which had endured through Sand’s distribution of the soup and continued momentarily thereafter, with all of them looking at the plates as if they could not imagine what the plates held or how they came to be there.
“It was one of us, you know,” Aunt Flora said. Her tone held nothing except flat statement, but Pam, looking at her, thought that her face had somehow shrunk under its unvarying surface. Aunt Flora looked slowly down one side of the long table and up the other—looked at her sons and her grandsons, looked at Clem and Judy and included Pam herself in the stare which did not change. “One of us is a murderer.”
There was still no emphasis.
“Now, mother,” Ben Craig said, and seemed to decide that any possible addition would be inadequate. “Now mother.”
His mother waited rather obviously for him to say something more. He said nothing more.
“Can’t deny it, can we?” she said. “You can’t deny it, can you, dearie?” The last was specifically to Ben. “Somebody here killed him. And fed me arsenic.”
“Don’t be ghoulish, grandmother,” Chris Buddie said. Pam could feel him trying to regain the crisp mockery that was his manner. Aunt Flora looked at him.
“Ghoulish?” she repeated. “Don’t be a fool, dearie.” She dropped him and looked around the table again.
Hanged for a Sheep Page 11
