Murder Comes First

by Frances

  That Mrs. Logan had opposed their marriage, neither of them denied. When they talked of that, the girl was very young again. She kept looking at Paul as if, however she tried, she must continually reassure herself of his presence. Of the two, now, he was the more assured. Lynn’s mother and Paul’s had quarreled over something Mrs. Logan had charged against Lynn. They did not phrase the charge, or need to. They had no idea who else might have wanted Mrs. Logan dead, and when they spoke of his mother, Paul’s lips were stiff by obvious effort. And Paul, who might have, denied knowing anything about a wrong typewriter, or about Sally, except that she could not be found.

  “But,” he said, “she can’t have anything to do with it. She left—oh, weeks ago. Before we came back to town after Labor Day.”

  “Back to town?” Pam said.

  Paul and his mother had spent most of August at a summer place they had—“not much more than a cabin, really”—near Patterson, New York. Sally and Barton Sandford had spent his vacation, also during August, in a similar place a couple of hundred yards away. Paul and the Sandfords had played tennis at a near-by club; they had had, and made, use of a swimming pool on the estate of some friends of Mrs. Logan’s. It had been a pleasant, relaxed month.

  But during it, it now appeared, something had arisen between the Sandfords. Neither Paul nor his mother had noticed anything; on Labor Day itself they had all been at the pool, with a good many others, and the Sandfords had seemed as always. Two days later, Sandford had come around to the Logan house in town, his face set, to tell Mrs. Logan that her niece had left him, for reasons he insisted he did not know. They had, he said, planned to drive in to New York Tuesday morning. But instead, Sally, who was driving, had taken them to the railroad station at Brewster.

  And there, in the car, parked in front of the station, she had, Sandford said, told him she was not going back to town—that she was going—that she didn’t know where she was going. Some place to “think things out.” He had been, he told Mrs. Logan, utterly surprised and bewildered; he had been so taken aback that he had not known how to argue with her.

  “He said,” Paul remembered, “that it was ‘too damn intangible to talk about.’ That’s what mother told me; I stayed on in the country the rest of the week. Heard about it when I got back.”

  In the end Sandford had taken the train. He thought he had got from Sally a half promise to reconsider; he had expected her, in the end, to drive home to town. But she had not.

  “But what has that to do with—with what happened to mother?” Paul said. “What—”

  The waitress panted up with their food, including several items they had not ordered. They hung in air while she presented, triumphantly, the provender she had intrepidly snatched, one could only assume, from enraged cooks. She rearranged all the little paper doilies. Finally, she panted off.

  But now Paul Logan merely sat and looked at his food. The others waited.

  “If Sally had had any reason to want—to want to harm mother,” he said slowly, “you could work out something. She goes away, ostensibly out west somewhere. She’s gone at the time the poison was put in the medicine bottle. Presumably. So—she’s the only one who, apparently, couldn’t have put it there. I could have, Lynn could have, Bart—Hilda—Lynn’s mother even. But not Sally. If—she really did go that far.”

  “The letters,” Pam told him. “The letters your mother got.”

  “Perhaps she could have got—oh, somebody, to mail them for her,” he said. “I don’t know—there’d be ways of doing things like that. She could even go places in airplanes and mail them herself, I suppose. She could actually be living here in New York somewhere, she could have—” He stopped suddenly. “She had a key to the house,” he said. “At least, she always had had. I don’t think she ever gave it back.”

  There aren’t, Pam thought, really any flaws in it. It could have been that way. But—

  “Why?” Pam said. “Why would she want to—to kill your mother?”

  “I don’t—” Paul began and stopped. “There’s always money,” he said. “Mother’s money. Sally gets quite a bit of it.”

  “Fifty thousand, wasn’t it?” Pam asked, and Logan thought so.

  “A lot, of course,” Pam said, “but still, not very much. Unless you need it dreadfully. Do they? I thought Sally had money herself?”

  “Sally?” Paul said. “I don’t think so. A few thousand, maybe. Not very much.” He looked, with puzzled eyes, at the chicken hash on his plate; he said he was trying to remember something. He couldn’t, he said, make it come clear. It was something about—he snapped his fingers.

  “Bart’s worked out something, he said. A—a medicine or something. A formula. Wanted to make it; wanted a laboratory of his own. I remember that.” He paused, snapped his fingers again. “Asked mother early in the summer if she didn’t want to put some money in it,” Paul said. “Said it would be a gold mine. Half joking, you know, but meaning it all the same. Mother—mother said she didn’t believe in gold mines.”

  Whether Barton Sandford had, later, made his request more formally, not half jokingly, Paul didn’t know. His mother had not mentioned it to him. But he was certain Sandford had not, if he asked for money, got it.

  “All the same,” Paul said, “I know—I’m sure—Sal’s all right.”

  “You’re an innocent,” Lynn said. “A babe in arms. You think everybody’s all right.”

  He looked at her; he seemed puzzled and uncertain.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Am I, Lynn?”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s a fine way to be. If there’s somebody—” She broke off short.

  “I’m sorry, Lynn,” he said, and the others might not have been there.

  “Nobody wants you to change,” Lynn told him. “Hear me? Nobody. It was never that.”

  He looked at her.

  “Oh,” she said, “you believe everybody, don’t you? Everybody but me.” She became, then, conscious of the others. She said she was sorry. She said, trying to be on top of it, trying to be crisp, that everything was coming out, that she was a sieve.

  “About Mrs. Sandford,” Pam said. “You don’t agree with Mr. Logan?”

  Lynn Hickey hesitated a moment. She extracted lettuce from a chicken sandwich and looked to see whether anything remained. Then she said Sally was all right. She said Sally was a fine person. Her tone put the tribute in capital letters, and so diminished it.

  “The salt of the earth,” Lynn said. “With such a wonderful, wonderful conscience. Such a—a righteous person.” Lynn seemed surprised at the unfamiliar word, but then approved it. “Righteous,” she said. “That’s it. Never easygoing, with herself or anybody. This business of ‘thinking things out.’ Whoever ‘thinks things out’? That way, I mean. The kind of things I suppose she’s thinking out? About herself and Bart?”

  She looked suddenly at Pam North. The she looked at Dorian.

  “You don’t,” she said. “Neither of you does. It—it makes people all stiff inside. But Sally—well, she’d wonder, all at once, whether she was worthy of Bart, or he was worthy of her, or something. Whether their life together was really right. She’d have to Get Things Straightened Out.”

  She looked at Pam again.

  “Does anybody, ever?” she asked.

  “Not that way,” Pam said. “At least, I never do. But then, I just never think of it.”

  That was it, Lynn said. That was precisely it. Sally Sandford did.

  “A sense of duty,” Dorian suggested, and Lynn said, “God yes!

  “However,” she said then, “that doesn’t fit with her—her killing anybody, does it?”

  It didn’t, apparently. They agreed it didn’t. But then, after a pause, during which they ate, Pam North said, “Still—

  “It can lead to the end justifying the means,” she said. “One sacrificed for—for many, I guess. If Mr. Sandford had found out something which would save millions of people, and Mrs. Logan stood in the way
—I mean, not having her fifty thousand stood in the way—a very conscientious person might—” She paused. “It might seem like a kind of mathematics,” she said. “Adding and subtracting. Not—not people at all. Like dictatorships,” she said. She looked at the others. Paul Logan shook his head and then Dorian Weigand smiled faintly.

  “Or,” she said, “it might be merely wanting fifty thousand dollars. Because it would be fun to have, and to spend. That would be simpler, wouldn’t it? Particularly if you didn’t have very much and wanted to get free from something and start over.”

  “I don’t think Sally—” Paul Logan began, and then stopped abruptly. “Or aren’t you talking about Sally?” he asked.

  “Oh, about Mrs. Sandford,” Dorian said. “I thought Pam was making it a little complicated.”

  Paul Logan looked at Dorian as if waiting for her to go on, but she merely shook her head and said that that was all. But the fact that, by implication, it was not all hung in the air. Paul Logan had got money too by his mother’s death, and freedom too. Freedom, among other things, to marry Lynn Hickey—Lynn who had been, by the woman now dead, characterized as up to anything; Lynn who had herself characterized Sally Sandford as a woman who might be hardened by righteousness.

  “I suppose,” Pam North said, “that somebody made sure Mrs. Sandford hadn’t merely gone back to the country place? But of course, somebody did?”

  That, of course, had been done. By Sandford himself, the Wednesday after Labor Day. And, a few days later, by Paul who, being at the Logan cottage, had walked over to the Sandfords’ and found it locked and empty, cleaned up and closed up for the winter. Having said this, Logan looked from Pam to Dorian, waiting politely, letting show the faint impatience of one who feels a topic exhausted. Lynn Hickey looked at her watch, obviously, and then at Pamela. Her expression said “Well?”

  I’m not being good at this, Pam thought; I’m not getting anything except things all along obvious—that Lynn and Paul Logan are in love and want to get married, that now they can, that they had pointed, not too subtly, to Sally Sandford. We are, Pam North, thought, precisely where we were when we came in. She picked up gloves and bag; she tried to attract the waitress.

  The waitress, who before had seemed omnipresent, seemed to hang constantly over them, panting, now did not attract. She was around. She puffed up to a near-by table with a glass of water and looked full at Pam and did not see her and puffed off again. She panted back and Pam said, “Oh, waitress!” and the waitress did not hear. She puffed away, prodigiously harassed. Pam watched her go and sighed. She tried to attract a serenely floating hostess, but the hostess floated incased in impervious transparency. Pam said, “Oh dear.”

  “Let me get it,” Paul said. “You two go on. If—”

  Pam couldn’t think of it. She had brought about the whole, apparently pointless, incident. She could at least pay for it. She saw the waitress again and waved anxiously. The waitress looked at her blankly and Pam realized it was another waitress. Perhaps if she stood up—

  She started to and the waitress, who had been hiding—must have been hiding—swooped upon them. She swooped indignantly, as if finally, at too long last, unconscionable lingerers showed signs of movement. She had the bill ready and thrust it upon Logan, who promptly put it in one pocket and produced change from another. Even that hadn’t worked, Pam thought, making the best of it. She couldn’t get information; she couldn’t even get to pay for the food. She stood up, and everybody else stood up. By agreement, they made suitable sounds of separation at the table; Lynn and Paul Logan were thanked for their patience; they, in turn, were sorry they had not helped.

  Lynn and Paul went first, as behooved check payers. They paid and passed on, Dorian and Pam behind them—close behind them; closer, it appeared, than Paul Logan realized.

  “—that damned typewriter,” Paul said to Lynn. “I don’t see how we missed—”

  Then Lynn went into a segment of a revolving door and Paul stopped. He took the next segment.

  Little Miss Lucinda went down the stairs in the Grand Central Terminal with one hand lightly on the handrail. Marble stairs were so treacherous. People hurried past her and some of them seemed impatient, although she was taking up very little room. At the bottom of the stairs she discovered she had soiled the fingers of a glove and thought how unlike Cleveland everything was in New York. She went to the information kiosk and made enquiry—she had mislaid the memorandum, but that did not matter, since she did not forget anything once she had written it down. She was given a diminutive timetable.

  Timetables were no trouble for Miss Lucinda, since they were designed to be read. On the trip east, indeed, she had read extensively in a much larger timetable, having exhausted other reading matter. She had, with interest, discovered on which trains baggage could not be checked, which did not run on Saturdays and Sundays and Holiday A, which were “Pullmans Only” and which were not. She found especially interesting the listings of equipment on various through trains—“diner Albany to New York,” “buffet lounge New York to Chicago,” “reduced fare tickets not honored on this train.” She was interested in these things, not for any practical reason, not even because she was especially fond of trains, but because the information had been written out and printed. For the same reason, she often read entirely through the extended directions which sometimes came with patent medicines, and, when there were translations, read the French version as well and did what she could with German. Miss Lucinda liked to read.

  So she had no trouble whatever with the simple tables of the Harlem Division of the New York Central Railroad; at eleven forty-five she discovered that a Pawling local left at one forty-six. She bought herself several things to read on the trip and then had lunch in the Commodore Grill, finding it unexpectedly full of men, all of whom were drinking. Emboldened by example, Miss Lucinda had a sherry while she waited for her luncheon to be served, and read the Atlantic Monthly. She finished luncheon in too ample time, went to the newsreel theater and then went looking for her train.

  The gates were not yet open when she reached them, and then she debated whether, after all, it would not be the right thing to telephone Thelma, or at any rate Penny—better Penny, on the whole—and explain what she was doing. Because, Miss Lucinda thought, while my note was perfectly clear, they might not quite understand and might worry. She became almost sure she ought to do this, and had even turned away to look for a telephone booth, when she realized clearly what would happen. She would get Thelma, even if she got Penny first, and Thelma would say “Lucinda!” in that certain tone. And then, Miss Lucinda knew, she would give the whole thing up, since there was no use pretending she had an answer to “Lucinda!” said in the certain tone. And she did not want to give the whole thing up; because now, in addition to feeling that she was being guided, she had begun to feel that she was having a very exciting time. It might, she realized, be partly the sherry, but it was nevertheless exciting.

  Why, Miss Lucinda thought to herself, it’s almost like something one reads about.

  And, in addition, she was really doing it for Thelma, against whom such ridiculous charges were being, or almost being, made. There was always that; it was really her duty not to let herself be stopped. It was really—

  Then the gates were opened and Miss Lucinda, with fifteen or twenty other early comers, went through them, and down a long ramp and then along a platform walled on either side by unlighted railroad coaches. They must, Miss Lucinda thought, have walked half a dozen blocks before they finally came to the lighted coaches—four of them—of the Pawling local. They were very old coaches and had the gritting feeling of very old coaches. There were plenty of uncomfortable seats. Miss Lucinda got one and found her ticket and held it in her hand ready—she hated to have to scramble through her bag at the last moment, the way so many women did—and resumed her reading of the Atlantic Monthly.

  Looking at her, no one could have dreamed the kind of trip upon which Miss Lucinda had embarked
or what she expected to find at the end of it.

  There was no need, when Pam and Dorian stood on the sidewalk in front of Schrafft’s, expelled in turn by the revolving door, for Pam to ask Dorian whether she had heard what Paul Logan had said. So Pam said, “Well, what do you think of that? He does know something about the typewriter. So Sally is in it.”

  “She always was, I think,” Dorian said, and said then, “There they are.”

  Paul Logan and Lynn were walking toward Fifth Avenue. They were obviously talking intently. It appeared that, of the two, Lynn was talking the more. Without consultation, Pam and Dorian turned also toward Fifth Avenue.

  “Maybe,” Pam said, “they’ll do something about something. Which side of the street do you want?”

  Dorian blinked the lids over greenish eyes.

  “We stick out,” Pam said. “If we’re going to tail, we ought to separate. At least on other sides of the street. Or would that be more conspicuous?”

  It would, if they were seen at all, be much more conspicuous, Dorian thought. The two of them advancing along opposite sidewalks in pursuit of prey would, if noticed by Paul and Lynn, hardly fail to arouse their interest. Pam and Dorian, therefore, stayed together.

  “If they split up, we will,” Pam told Dorian, who agreed, but said, “What will they do something about?”

  “The typewriter,” Pam said. “Sally. Because they’ve remembered something, only—” She broke off completely, and looked puzzled.

  “Right,” Dorian Weigand said. “I can’t see we’re getting anywhere. Who do you suspect?”

  “Everybody,” Pam said, hopelessly. “Except the aunts, of course. Mrs. Sandford most, I guess. But that girl knows something, and so does he. About the typewriter, probably. And Mrs. Logan did too, and perhaps that was why—they’re turning uptown.”

  Paul Logan and Lynn Hickey, still talking, were the ones turning uptown. They crossed the street and went north on Fifth. Pam and Dorian increased their saunter to something nearer a trot, reached the intersection, dodged turning taxicabs and went after them. They quickly got too close, and sauntered again. Then, midway of the block, Paul and Lynn stopped in front of Forsyte’s.