He broke off and looked down at the gun.
“This goes off so easily,” he said, pleasantly. “So very easily. You hardly realize that you have pulled the trigger. Because really it was an argument for not shooting him, wasn’t it? But the gun had gone off before I thought of that.” He let the gun move on, covering Jerry North, covering Mullins, covering Bill Weigand. “Not that it matters,” he said. “Probably I would have shot him anyway.”
It was unreal; it was, to Pam, like something seen on the stage, beyond the footlights; something safe and far away, on the little lighted platform of illusion. Ben Craig spoke the words as if someone else had written them for him to say; you felt that the automatic must hold blanks; that if Ben Craig pulled the trigger it would make a loud, harmless noise; that if one of them pretended to be hit and to die, he would afterward get up and walk away and go back to a dressing room and take makeup off with cold-cream and tissue. But Stephen Anthony had not got up and walked away.
“If only because he made me poison mother,” Craig said. “I think I would have shot him for that, finally. I—” He broke off, and after a moment began again.
“But now I must get away, of course,” he said. “I must bother you to arrange that, Lieutenant. Because your men are very stubborn. They say I can’t go for a walk without your permission, Lieutenant. And of course I must go for a walk.” He smiled at them. “A long walk,” he said. “I came up to arrange it with you, really. I brought this along—in case.” He moved the gun up and down to indicate the identity of “this.” “It makes it a little awkward, so many of you,” he admitted. “I had not planned on that—or on Cousin Pamela’s brightness.” He looked at Pamela closely. “I really hadn’t realized, cousin,” he said. “I really hadn’t.”
Weigand spoke for the first time.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “We knew anyway. You can’t get away with it.”
Craig nodded. He seemed to take the remark as a reasonable statement in a debate.
“I can try,” he said. “I can take you all with me—make it a little party. You can tell your men downstairs that it’s quite all right, Lieutenant—that we’re all going for a little walk.” He smiled at them and waggled the automatic. “Think how easily it goes off, Lieutenant,” he said. “Starting with Cousin Pamela, for example. And—” Suddenly the gun moved stiffly and held.
“No!” Craig said. His voice was no longer friendly. “I wouldn’t try it, Sergeant. There wouldn’t be time!”
The others did not look at Mullins. They felt, rather than saw, the small movement of a hand which had been creeping toward a shoulder holster, and now dropped back again. They could see Mullins’s movement of defeat reflected in Craig’s face, even before he spoke.
“I’ll want your guns, of course,” he said. “My cousin will get them for me, won’t you, Pamela? The sergeant’s? The lieutenant’s? To avoid—disturbance?”
“No,” said Pam. “I won’t, Ben. You can’t get away with it.”
“Get them!” Ben commanded. His voice had changed now. He was out of character, now; he was speaking his own words—speaking them in a voice no longer soft and friendly. The gun fixed on Pam and then Bill Weigand spoke.
“Get them, Pam,” he said. “He’ll shoot.”
There was an instant, then, when Ben Craig’s eyes flickered toward Weigand, following the voice—a moment when the gun was no longer rigid; when for an instant intent was broken. And it was then that Pam, who had half risen at Bill Weigand’s words and put her hand out toward the table, felt her fingers touch the smoothness of the vase which was shaped like a baseball and was cool to the touch and held nodding tulips.
Craig’s eyes had come back toward her and intent was hardening in them, when Pam threw the vase. She picked it up and threw it in one movement and tulips and water showered from it. And, his body moved by nerves older and wiser than the mind, Ben Craig ducked.
The vase hit the door frame and shattered two feet from Ben Craig’s head. Shards flew out from it harmlessly. They were clattering on the floor when the room filled with sound and Weigand’s gun was jumping in his hand. Ben Craig’s gun jumped too, but it was pointed at the floor. It jumped again, with a roar, as Ben fell—rather slowly—among the fragments of the broken vase. One hand came down on a yellow tulip, crushing it against the floor.
Weigand was over him, then. And Weigand’s right foot shot out, kicking the automatic out of Craig’s right hand. It clattered across the floor and stopped silently on the rug. Weigand stood over the man on the floor and stared down at him. Craig stared back, and his eyes were filled with wonderment and question.
“Your legs,” Weigand told him, knowing that as yet the pain had not started, that Craig didn’t know. “But you weren’t going anywhere, Craig.”
Lieutenant Weigand’s voice was hard and uninflected.
Craig looked down at the blood on his legs.
“No,” he said. “No. Not anywhere.”
Mullins was standing beside Weigand, now, and staring down at Craig.
“And this is the guy that was framed,” he said. His tone was mocking, harsh. “So you was framed, fella!”
Bill Weigand looked at Mullins then, and there was an odd smile on his lips.
“Yes, sergeant,” Weigand said. “This is the guy who was framed. Sure enough framed, sergeant—framed right into murder. Weren’t you, Craig?”
The pain had begun, now. Craig’s lips were moving, and the words that came out of them were words you would not have thought a middle-aged banker of peculiarly sedentary habit would have ever heard. Most of them were directed toward Pamela North, who listened with interest.
“You can tell he’s been in the Navy,” Pam said. Her words were casual, but her voice shook a little. Then she turned to Jerry.
“You see,” she said. “The idea was right all the time. The vase, I mean. I just had to get the direction—oh, Jerry!”
And suddenly Pam was in Jerry North’s arms, hiding her head against his shoulder. He patted her on the back and said, “All right, baby. There, baby.” He looked down at the top of her head, reflectively. “It’s all right, Pam,” he told her. “Only if you were going to miss someone—” He appeared to ponder it. Then he nodded. “It was a fine idea, Pam,” he said. “There’s nothing like a vase.”
Abstractedly, in a familiar gesture, he ran his free hand through his hair. The bump was still there, but it seemed to be receding.
15
THURSDAY
5:15 P.M. TO 6:35 P.M.
“Up to then,” Pam said, “I thought it was the major, although it was hard to see him poisoning Aunt Flora. But then I thought—how does Ben know that there weren’t any prints on the bottle but his? He couldn’t know unless he wiped it off himself, and if he did that why would he leave his own prints on? Except that he’d know if somebody told him—and that meant somebody had told him between the time the bottle disappeared and the time the kitties found it. And so somebody must have been threatening him, because whoever it was didn’t come to the police, and that sounded more like Anthony than anybody, because Anthony was a blackmailer anyway. And so it had to be Ben.”
Pam paused, fished the olive from the bottom of her glass, and nibbled briskly around it. She pushed her empty glass across the bar to Adam, who beamed on her and took it away.
“We’ve had a hard day, Jerry,” Pam told him, when he looked at her doubtfully. “Solving murders and everything. Two will be all right.” She watched Adam stirring a new martini. “Or three,” she added hopefully.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Jerry said. “It isn’t solved. Not very, anyway. All I know is who.” He finished his own drink and pushed the glass across the bar. Adam welcomed it. “Of course,” Jerry added, “I came in late. Probably that’s it. But I can’t say I get it.”
“It was complicated,” a new voice said. Bill Weigand, who looked extremely tired, but with a relaxed tiredness, had taken the bar stool next Pam North’s. �
��Chiefly because the people were complicated. Particularly Anthony. A devious man, Anthony.”
“The death of a devious man,” another new voice said. This came from beside Jerry, who turned and smiled and said, “Hello, Dorian.” Dorian Weigand said, “Hello, you” and then, to Pam, “Is it your fault I get left out of things?”
Weigand smiled across the Norths at her and shook his head gently.
“My fault, Dorrie,” he said. “I can’t have you being shot at. You’re too new.”
Pam sounded indignant.
“And for me it’s all right,” she said. “What am I? Second-hand?”
That, Bill told her, was Jerry’s problem. Jerry frowned at him.
“I was in Houston,” he said. “Reading another ‘Gone With the Wind.’ And she was visiting a nice, elderly aunt. And we look to the police for protection. And you are police.”
Adam set martinis in a row along the edge of the bar. The glasses were too full to lift. The four bent in unison and sipped from the standing glasses. They sighed in approval.
“Good,” Pam said. Then she turned to Weigand. “Well,” she said. “Do we have to read it in the paper? After saving your life, probably?”
Weigand lifted his glass and sipped again. He said, all right, what did they want to know?
“Everything,” Jerry told him, and Dorian, beyond him, said “Right.” Weigand nodded. But it was not, he pointed out, a story to shout along a bar. Reluctantly, they moved to Charles’s cocktail corner, taking their drinks with them.
“First,” Pam said, “about Ben.” Excitement went out of her voice, suddenly. She sounded a little frightened. “Will he live?”
“Live?” Weigand repeated, apparently honestly surprised. “Why yes he’ll live—for a while. And he won’t die from bullets in his legs.” He looked at Pamela North and understood. “You needn’t worry, Pam,” he said. “You haven’t a hand in it. Not that sort of hand. If he dies, it won’t be your responsibility—not because of the vase, anyway.” He smiled at her. “Or because of anything, actually,” he added. “I don’t mean the point about the fingerprints wasn’t important, or that I hadn’t missed it. For the moment. But that part of it was never too difficult. I always thought it was Ben.”
It was, Pam told him, easy to say that. And, how, for example, had he come always to think it was Ben?
Weigand was not discomfited.
“Because he didn’t like to stand up,” he told them. “Even when he was startled, he kept on sitting down. Even when he was frightened, or angry. And everybody else in the family jumps up. Except the major, who never seems to sit down. And the person who killed Anthony was a sitter.” He broke off. “The difficulty there was that it might almost as well be your aunt,” he added. “Because she couldn’t get up very fast. But it wasn’t in character that she’d kill Perkins. She wouldn’t need to. That left Ben—and no evidence.”
Jerry said that, so far as he could see, there had never been much. Weigand nodded, seriously. That had always been the point, he said. Not who so much as how and why, and how did they prove it. You had to guess at how and why.
“Deduce,” Dorian corrected. “Work it out, like a problem. Beginning chiefly with character.”
Weigand smiled at her and said that he would, if she preferred, call it deduction. Now, however, Ben had saved them from further speculation. Because, in a hospital prison ward, Ben had decided to make things easy. Ben had, half an hour before, finished telling everything. It was, Weigand thought, a rather odd story, and it began with Anthony.
“The devious man,” Pam said. “The blackmailer. It would—He—he was made to be the center of plots.”
Weigand looked a little surprised, and nodded approvingly. Pam’s remark was, he told her, more apropos than she could imagine. He looked at her again.
“Or is it?” he said. He had learned not to put arbitrary limits on the things Pamela North could imagine. Pam now merely smiled at him. Then she said that, anyway, he could tell the others. All she had was a notion.
Weigand left it for the future.
“Right,” he said. He would summarize it. It began, as Pam thought, with Stephen Anthony and his deviousness: his restless search for fresh “angles” and his need of them after Aunt Flora had dismissed him, and he was on his own. The simplest angle—and here they really had to guess, knowing approximately as much as Ben Craig—was that offered by Clem’s letters and the opportunity they gave to blackmail Major Buddie and, potentially at any rate, Clem herself and through her others. How far that had gone was, however, unimportant; the letters themselves were unimportant, except for what they proved about Anthony’s method of making a living. What turned his method of making a living into a method of dying was, except for his character, entirely separate.
Anthony had been greedy; whatever he might have got through the letters wasn’t enough. He looked around for new victims and decided on Craig, who was in a vulnerable position as a banker, since his repute and his profession were tied together. The only difficulty was that he had nothing on Craig. He decided to remedy that and he had to be given credit for the notion; his course might not be unexampled in the art of blackmail, but it was certainly uncommon. Anthony decided to provide by his own efforts the grounds on which he could subsequently extort the money to repay himself for his trouble.
He knew, of course, what it was necessary to know—that Aunt Flora took medicines freely for her partly imagined ill health; that Dr. Wesley Buddie occasionally sent sample products both to her and to Craig. He took advantage of these facts. He steamed a crescent label reading: “Professional Sample” from one of the bottles in his wife’s collection. He bought a small bottle of Folwell’s Fruit Salts. He got arsenic and added a little—but not enough to kill. He avoided as unnecessary the faintest risk of murder. He wrapped this bottle, forged a note with Dr. Buddie’s initials, and sent it along to Craig. He waited to see what would happen.
What happened was what he hoped would happen: Craig took the bottle to his mother’s room, mixed a dose from it and gave it to her. She became ill.
“Then,” Weigand said, “Anthony went to see her and abstracted the bottle. He handled it carefully by the cork. And now you see what he had—he had a case of attempted murder on the part of Ben Craig.”
Pam started to say something, and Weigand interrupted.
“Right,” he said. “It wasn’t a perfect case. But it was good enough to put Craig on trial, if not to convict him. It was good enough to convince Craig’s mother that he had tried to poison her, even if it did not convince a jury. Craig stood to lose his reputation, if nothing else, from legal action. He stood to lose his inheritance, if his mother believed what the evidence showed. Either way, he was in a spot—and he had a pretty flimsy story.”
Craig had found this out some days later when Stephen Anthony called him up. Anthony had been careful on the telephone, but he had been clear enough, too. He said he had a little bottle and that he had had a little of the contents analyzed and that they contained arsenic. He said he had reason to believe that Craig might be interested in the bottle and would like to talk to him about it. He said it looked to him as if there were fingerprints on it.
“But how,” Jerry wanted to know, “could Anthony have known that they were Craig’s fingerprints, unless he had them brought up, and knew enough to compare. And he hadn’t had them brought up.”
Weigand nodded. Anthony couldn’t have known. But he knew that Craig had got the bottle and had handled it, and so that his prints would almost certainly be on it. And Craig knew the same thing. He had been wondering about the bottle and trying to find it, because he had begun to suspect the trick played on him. Anthony might only suspect that Craig had handled the bottle and left prints on it. Craig knew he had. So he had to agree to see Anthony, and he fixed a time when everybody in the house might be expected to be in bed and left the door unlocked. And he also, which was something Anthony hadn’t counted on, got out his automatic.
&
nbsp; “For which, incidentally, he had a permit,” Weigand said. “On the chance it might be useful in the bank.”
Anthony appeared and Craig led him to the breakfast room, saying they wouldn’t be interrupted there. And then an odd thing happened, because Anthony had been thinking, too, about fingerprints and had realized that, for all he knew, there might be so many other prints beside Craig’s that the evidence would be valueless. And so, before going to meet Craig, Anthony wiped off all the prints, being careful to handle the bottle by the projecting cork, so that his own prints would not get on the glass. He was being very devious, as became him.
Craig pretended, at first, that he didn’t know what Anthony meant by the bottle, or by the suggestions he made or the hints—to start with—that money would take care of things. So Anthony, who had planned it very much that way, took the bottle out and handed it to Craig. And Craig took it and looked at it and handed it back, still pretending innocence—and still sitting comfortably in his chair. Anthony was standing up, and smiling and very sure of himself. He took the bottle by the cork and then he said:
“It’s no use, Craig. You got the bottle in the mail—sure. But you can’t prove it. You gave the poison to your mother—sure you didn’t know it was poison. But you can’t prove it. All that anybody can prove is what I can prove—that you gave your mother poison out of this bottle. Because, Craig, it’s got your fingerprints on it—you just put them there. I cleaned the bottle up just before I handed it to you. Now yours are the only prints—”
He was leaning close to Craig, holding the bottle, gloating over his own cleverness, probably getting ready to fix a price on the bottle which linked Craig with attempted murder. But he had said all he was ever going to say.
Hanged for a Sheep Page 20
