5

From the bedroom there came the cry of a Siamese cat in agony. “Then you feel,” Dave Garroway said, from a twenty-three-inch screen, in a tone of anxiety, “that we tend to underestimate the menace of communism here at home?” “It’s frightening,” the author of The Unseen Menace said, and Dave Garroway looked properly frightened. “Of atheistic communism?” Garroway said, getting it clear, and the author said, “I’m afraid that’s true, Dave.” Garroway looked at the camera, and it was clear to Pam North that he was scared stiff. From the bedroom the cat wailed.

Mr. Garroway’s such a nice man, Pam thought. So—she paused for the word. The word came. “Sincere.” Precisely the right word. The cat wailed. It was clear that the cat was undergoing torture.

“Here, Shadow,” Pam said. “She’s out here.”

The cat named Shadow had lost the cat named Stilts. Stilts was lying on the floor at Pam’s feet. When Shadow wailed first, Stilts lifted her head and listened. Then she put her head down again. Nothing wrong with her, the movement said. Silly cat, but not in any trouble.

There was the quick click of cat claws on the hall’s bare floor. Shadow appeared, crying. She looked at Pam and wailed. “There,” Pam said, and pointed. Shadow ran to Stilts, rubbed against Stilts, began to purr loudly. Stilts licked her, perfunctorily. Shadow licked back with eager excitement. Stilts turned slightly and hit Shadow in the face. Shadow laid her ears back and leaped into an embrace with Stilts. It seemed to Pam, watching, that Stilts sighed. Unquestionably, Stilts pushed. Shadow began to cry on a quite different note—in the tone of a cat about to eat another cat for breakfast.

Stilts, with a sudden flowing movement, stood up and knocked Shadow down. Then she sat and began to wash behind the ears. Shadow looked at her. Shadow sat and washed behind the ears.

“You poor dear,” Pam said to Shadow, “are you going to be a kitten always?”

Shadow leaped to Pam’s lap and Pam stroked her. It was a bit, Pam thought, like stroking an eel only, of course, furrier. Shadow purred. By decibels the loudest purrer we’ve ever had, Pam thought, and said, “Nice baby.”

Stilts watched for a moment. She lay down on the carpet again, and this time put one paw over her eyes.

No two of them are ever alike, Pam thought. She pressed the proper area of remote control and Dave Garroway, still looking frightened, vanished. Which was odd when one considered how much alike these two seal-points looked. Shadow’s eyes were perceptibly larger and, for that matter, bluer. She was a long, low cat, shaped a good deal—a good deal too much, if one chose to be critical—like a dachshund. (This comparison was never made, audibly, in her presence.) Shadow was constantly losing something, usually Stilts, and mourning loudly. People who were always talking of the detached self-reliance of cats should meet Shadow. If, of course, Shadow could, on encountering strangers, be got out from underneath whatever was nearest.

Shadow was almost a year old, and at a year a cat is a cat, ready to follow a cat’s trade. In the country, that summer, Shadow had pursued, and missed, butterflies. Stilts, who was a little over two, had brought home moles, mice, chipmunks and a medium-sized rabbit. (The one, it was to be hoped, who had got under the fence and eaten the lettuce or, at the least, a near relative of the one.)

Stilts was a cat who walked tall; she was, save for slightly crossed eyes, everything a Siamese ought to be. She had been given to the Norths by a sympathetic veterinarian, who—Pam suspected with the Norths in mind—had accepted her from owners who explained that they were ordered to Argentina. All the veterinarian knew of her was that she was a pretty, friendly cat. One of the things he did not know about her was that she was pregnant and another that she had not been inoculated.

When she returned from the hospital, a wraith, after parturition and enteritis, in that order, she found Shadow—then nameless; then of a shape and texture which had almost led to her being called Cushion—under a sofa. “Larger than I would have expected,” Stilts clearly thought, “but one of my kittens.” Stilts, who had evidently been fearless from the day she was born, enticed Shadow from under, explained that cats do not need to hide from people and washed her thoroughly. She earned a slave who was sometimes clearly a nuisance, but one to be tolerated by a gentle cat. Her slave, who had been on order when Stilts was offered, had a long pedigree and quite perceptible tabby markings on her rather thickish tail.

“The baby,” Pam North said, fondly, to the ecstatic purrer on her lap. The telephone rang. Stilts jumped up instantly and danced away to answer it. Shadow, watching her, wailed at this new desertion.

The voice was very low, almost husky. It was carefully controlled—so carefully, Pam thought, as to have in its texture a certain unreality. Pam said, “Why, of course. Whenever you like,” and listened a moment longer and said, “That’ll be fine,” and put the receiver back. For a moment she sat at the telephone table and looked at the olive-green telephone. What did Lauren Payne want, want anxiously, to talk to her about? At—Pam looked at the watch on her wrist—five minutes before nine?

Pam went to the bedroom, followed by cats. Pam spread up both beds—and had to reopen one of them to extricate Stilts, who had got herself spread in. Pam changed from housecoat to a gray-blue dress and had just finished lipstick when the door chimes sounded. Stilts rushed to answer the door. Shadow went under one of the beds.

Lauren Payne wore a woolen sheath, and was a woman who could wear a sheath. She wore mink over it, and Pam, admiringly, thought “Phew.” She was a slender, graceful woman, a little taller than Pam herself. The color of the sheath was a little deeper than the copper of Lauren Payne’s hair, the flickering copper in her greenish eyes. Very lovely, as Pam remembered her. Her low-pitched voice very steady, as it had been on the telephone. She was afraid she was being a nuisance. Her lips smiled. Her eyes did not. There was strain in her eyes.

Seated in a deep chair in the living room, Lauren Payne hardly knew where to begin. It would seem to Mrs. North—“What a pretty cat. A Siamese, isn’t she? Such very blue eyes. A really beautiful cat.”

“We think so,” Pam said, giving all the time needed. “Some people like them fluffy, of course. We feel that fluff hides cat. And there are the knots and—”

Lauren Payne was not listening. Pam North let cats drift away.

“When you came to tell me Anthony was—had been shot,” Lauren said without looking at Pam, and then did look at her. “It was kind of you. It’s a hard thing to do.” She paused. “What did I say, Mrs. North?”

“Why—” Pam said, and paused to remember.

“I’d taken something,” Lauren said. “A sedative. I was—groggy, I guess. And then, afterward, the doctor gave me something else. The thing is—in between it’s rather like a dream. A dream I half remember.”

“Why—” Pam said again. “You were lying down. You said to come in and—”

“Just you. There wasn’t anybody else?”

“Not right away. Then the doctor came. I said I was afraid I had bad news—I said something dreadful had happened. I don’t know the precise words. Then—well, then I merely told you. That Mr. Payne had been shot and that he was dead. And you—”

Lauren leaned forward in the deep chair. It seemed to Pam that her eyes said, “Hurry. Hurry!”

“For a moment,” Pam said, “I thought you hadn’t heard me. Then you said—I’m not sure I remember it precisely. You said, ‘Anthony? Not Anthony?’ and I said something meaningless—that I was sorry. Something like that. You looked at me for a moment—you don’t remember this?”

“No. Go on. Please go on.”

“But,” Pam said, “there wasn’t anything—not really anything. I think you said, ‘No. Oh—no!’ Something like that. And put your hands up to your forehead. You’d been lying down. You were sitting up by then. I don’t remember that I said anything. I think I put my arm around your shoulders. Then you said, ‘Shot? You said he was shot?’ It was something like that. Not really as if you expected me to say it again. Then you said—asked if we—no, ‘they’—‘knew.’ I supposed, who had shot Mr. Payne, and I said, ‘No. Nobody knows yet,’ and then that the shot seemed to have come from above somewhere. I think I said it was probably a sniper. One of those insane—”

“I know,” Lauren said. “That was all I said? Nothing about—anybody?”

“Why,” Pam said, “you said his name—your husband’s. As if you couldn’t believe it. I don’t know what—”

“Nothing else?”

Pam went through her mind. She didn’t remember anything else. After Lauren had covered her eyes, after Pam had moved beside her and put a steadying arm around shaking shoulders, Lauren had made only low, wordless sounds, moaning sounds. “I’m sure that’s all,” Pam said. “Then the doctor came and gave you something and—got somebody to be with you for a while. A nurse—somebody.”

“Not a nurse,” Lauren said. “One of the housekeepers. An assistant housekeeper, I think it was. A woman—a very nice woman—named—” She shook her head. “Mason,” she said. “Something like that. It doesn’t matter. I went to sleep quite soon, I think.” She leaned back in the deep chair and closed her eyes. “You’ll think—I don’t know what you’ll think,” she said, and spoke slowly, from a distance, in a voice which no longer, to Pam’s ears, sounded so carefully guarded. “To come to a complete stranger this way. Ask about what I ought to remember myself.”

“It was a terrible shock,” Pam said. “A terrible thing to happen. I don’t wonder you—”

“You see,” Lauren said, as if Pam had not spoken. (As I might as well not have, Pam thought. Since I said nothing.) “You see, I—with Anthony gone—there isn’t anybody. I’m—I feel terribly alone. That’s it, really. I—I couldn’t just sit in that awful room. The room I’d—I’d heard it in. I had to—well, just talk, I guess. To somebody. And you—you were kind last night.”

“Nothing,” Pam said. “I only—”

“That was all it was,” Lauren said. “A—just an inpulse.” She leaned forward in the chair and smiled again—smiled again with lips, still did not smile with eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me.”

“Oh. As for that? You mean, literally, you haven’t anybody to turn to?”

“Literally,” Lauren said. She smiled again. “It’s not so terrible,” she said. “I’m a grown woman. Just at the moment, with Anthony gone—I feel—I suppose the word is bereft.”

It seemed to Pam that, now, manner had returned to the voice; that voice was too carefully considered, words (for all the seeming stumbling over them) most carefully chosen. And Pam found that she did not think that “bereft” was, really, quite the word. Not the word to use of one’s self. Still, of course—

“But,” Pam said, “you must have friends.”

Lauren shook her head. She said, “Acquaintances. Anthony is—was—always so busy. And so often away getting material. We had very little—” She ended with a shrug of delicate shoulders.

And in Pam’s mind, in spite of her best intentions, three words formed—“Oh, come now.”

“That Mr. Smythe,” Pam said. “Blaine Smythe? I thought he seemed—”

Lauren said, “Oh,” in a certain way—a way which dismissed Blaine Smythe. “A friend of Anthony’s,” she said. “Not of mine, really. One of the actors in Anthony’s play. Anthony met him at rehearsals, I suppose. I hardly know him.”

This time Pam almost spoke the same three words. She remembered Lauren and Blaine Smythe sitting on a sofa in the Dumont’s Gold Room, of Smythe leaning toward the slender and lovely (and strangely nervous, uneasy) woman and talking, with what had looked like intent earnestness, to her.

“I’ve bothered you long enough,” Lauren said. “I’m sure you have things to do.”

“No,” Pam said. “Oh—things. Not really things, though. You know.”

Lauren Payne did not look as if she did.

“Mrs. Payne,” Pam said, “what did you think you might have said. And forgotten saying?”

(What were you afraid you might have said? And fogotten saying?)

“Goodness,” Lauren said. “I didn’t have the faintest. That was it. I thought you understood that. I just—there was a gap. It disturbed me a little. That was all.”

(Oh, come now.)

“And,” Lauren said, “it’s been dear of you, and I feel so much better, just having a chance to—to talk. Even if I didn’t make much sense.”

She got out of the deep chair. Her movement was without effort, remarkable for grace. Not frail at all, obviously. Whatever one thought on seeing her first. Lithe, if one came to that.

“The more I think of it,” Lauren said, and smiled again and this time held out a slender hand, “the more I think my barging in this way was quite unforgivable.”

Pam shook her head. Lauren Payne’s expressive face changed suddenly. It seemed to droop, to lose contours.

“It’s all so meaningless,” Lauren said, and spoke slowly. “So—so horribly without meaning. Somebody—somebody half crazy—shoots a gun, just—just to shoot a gun—and kills somebody like Anthony.” She put both hands to her forehead, covering her eyes. She held them there a moment, took them down, said, “I’m sorry. But it would almost have been better—” She broke off. “The police do think it was that, don’t they? What they call a sniper?”

“I suppose so,” Pam said. “At least—yes, I suppose they do.”

“Somebody they’ll never catch. It’s all so meaningless.”

Pam thought of several things to say. What she said was, “Yes.”

Stilts accompanied Mrs. Lauren Payne to the apartment door, and would have gone farther with her if Pam had been less quick. The door closed, Pam put the dancing cat on the floor and spoke to her.

“What,” Pam asked her dancing cat, “was she afraid she had said? Doesn’t she know her husband got Blaine Smythe fired, and that I can tell casual acquaintance from something else whatever the direction of the wind? And if she wants to know what the police think, why doesn’t she ask the police? Because she knows we’re friends of Bill Weigand?”

“Yow-ough?” Stilts said.

“You may well ask,” Pam North said.

There was no point in wasting further time on the case of Anthony Payne, deceased. There were, certainly, aspects of interest. Mr. Payne had, it appeared, given several persons cause to dislike him, most obviously a burly man with a red beard; quite probably a man—undescribed—named James Self; possibly a wife or two; avowedly a harried playwright-director. Which had nothing to do with the case. A man may be hated by hundreds and die, quite by accident, under a ten-ton truck. Or, as is always more likely, quietly in bed. Or, which was more apposite, as the chance target of a madman. In the mind, write “Closed” to the case of Anthony Payne.

Captain William Weigand, at his desk in the squad offices in West Twentieth Street, stamped the word “Closed” across his mind and the telephone rang on his desk. That would be Mullins, Sergeant Aloysius, reporting the results of cooperation with detectives of the Charles Street Station in connection with a suspicious death in a furnished room in Bank Street. (Probably suicide, but one or two things didn’t check.) Weigand picked up the receiver and said, “Weigand.”

Not Sergeant Mullins. Captain Frank, commanding, Fourth Detective District. Surprised to find Weigand around so early. (Weigand had been at his desk for some forty-five minutes.) In re this Payne kill.

“I thought—” Bill Weigand said.

“Sure. So did I. Only—this character on the roof. Turns out to be an old client. You know Brozy?”

Weigand did not know Brozy. It would do Bill good to get around more. Bill didn’t doubt it. So?

“Ambrose Light,” Frank said and Bill Weigand, not unnaturally, said, “What?”

“Sure,” Frank said. “Great little jokers his parents were, some Mr. and Mrs. Light. Turn a psychiatrist loose on Brozy and you’d probably come up with something. But—”

Ambrose Light, called Brozy, was a professional hotel thief, making a modest but fairly consistent living by visiting the rooms of hotel guests, preferably in the absence of the guests. A little here and a little there, it turned out to be Brozy, who owned a useful collection of general keys, and a few other instruments of value in his profession.

Brozy had been following his trade the previous evening in the Hotel King Arthur, the location being purely coincidental but the time a matter of selection. Brozy preferred, naturally, to make his little visits when guests would be most likely to be elsewhere, at this hour at dinner. Brozy liked the quiet hour.

This hour had suddenly, and to him inexplicably, ceased to be quiet at a little after eight the previous evening. Brozy had been trying out a key when, clearly in that very street, all hell broke loose. All hell, to Brozy, was most quickly identified with police sirens.

Brozy found a hall window and looked down from it, and had never seen so many cops spilling out of cruise cars. Nothing like that had ever happend to Brozy before. Hotel detectives, yes. Now and then an unfair guest who pretended to be out while actually being in but the whole lousy force—

“Jeeze,” Brozy said, simply, explaining to Detective Foley in the West Fifty-fourth Street Station House, after he had regained the consciousness lost when he had tried to make a run for it, and had run into a fist. “What I thought was what the hell? On account of, I hadn’t touched off no alarm.”

As he had looked down, he had seen several cops disappear under the marquee of the King Arthur. That had been enough for Brozy, and he had begun an ascent, by fire stairway. He had been on the third floor when he heard the racket, and the King Arthur was twelve stories high. It was quite a climb for Brozy, whose trade seldom required violent exercise. He went up a final ladder to the roof and made himself inconspicuous in the lee of a parapet.

This had been a mistake, and he freely admitted as much to Detective Foley. If he had got himself into a room and hid out there, under a bed if necessary, he might have got away with it. “I was a nut,” Brozy admitted frankly. “How’d I know who you were looking for? Jeeze, Sergeant, I never shot nobody.”

“No record of violence,” Frank told Bill Weigand. “Just a small-time regular who’s been in and out for years. About as likely to kill somebody as—” He paused to consider. “A maiden aunt.” He considered again. “Less than some I’ve met,” he added. “Which doesn’t prove anything, of course.”

“Light heard nothing? Saw nothing?”

“He says not, and I guess he didn’t. Matter of fact, I’ve never seen such an astonished little man. You can’t blame him, actually. Oh, we got the wrong man, Bill. Which doesn’t prove there wasn’t a right man we didn’t get, does it?”

Bill agreed it didn’t.

“Still a sniper for my money,” Frank said.

Bill Weigand said, “Right.”

“Only,” Frank said, “the old man says for you to get cracking, on your side of the street.”

Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, commanding detectives, Borough of Manhattan, had spoken. Bill was mildly surprised he had not heard O’Malley, who after all was only some thirty-four blocks away. He would hear. He would also have to tell O’Malley that the Norths were in it, and listen and say, when opportunity presented, “Yes, chief. Again. I know, chief—”

Sufficient unto the hour.

Bill said, “Right, Johnny,” and hung up.

Amost at once the telephone rang again. This was, it appeared, the hour. Bill Weigand picked up the telephone and held the receiver at a suitable distance from his ear. He said, “Weigand” and then, “Oh,” and put the earpiece against his ear. He said, “Hello, Pam.”

“You didn’t sound natural at first,” Pam North said.

“I thought you were the inspector,” Bill Weigand said, and it was Pam’s turn to say, in a most understanding fashion, “Oh.” Then she said that something had happened that she thought he ought to know about.

“Pipeline,” Pam said. “Or should it be listening post?”

“I don’t know,” Bill said. “What, Pamela?”

“Me. Being used as. To you, of course. It’s happened before, you know.”

“Right,” Bill said. “What’s happened before, Pam?”

“People come to us to find out what you’re up to,” Pam said. “Are you sure you’re all right, Bill? First you thought I was O’Malley. Do I sound like O’Malley?”

“No. Who wants to find out through you what I am, as you put it, up to?”

“Mrs. Payne. The Widow Payne. Only that wasn’t all of it, I don’t think. I think she’s afraid she’s let some cat out of some bag. Stilts! Quit that! Scratching a sofa. Where was I?”

“Cat out of bag,” Bill said.

“Of course. Listen—”

Bill listened. When Pam had finished he asked questions. She was sure that Lauren Payne had not said, to her, anything that revealed anything? Pam could remember nothing. Sure that she had called Blaine Smythe a friend of her husband’s, not of hers? Yes, and Pam didn’t believe it for a minute. Bill should have seen them—

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I don’t doubt you’re right.”

Nor, knowing Pam, did he doubt. Pamela North has now and again put two and two together and come up with odd sums, but two was each time two, and only the addition wrong.

The woman who, after the doctor had given sedation, had stayed with Lauren Payne?

“A housekeeper. Or assistant housekeeper. She thought her name was Mason. Something like Mason. Why?”

“If I,” Bill said, “were afraid I’d let a cat out of a bag, I’d look everywhere the cat might have gone, wouldn’t you? If I was afraid I’d talked out of turn—”

“Of course,” Pam said. “I should have—” She paused. “Never mind,” she said.

“You left her with the impression that we still think it’s—what the News this morning called ‘Mad Killer’?”

“I tried to. I don’t know why, exactly. Or whether it worked exactly. Do you?”

“It’s still probable,” Bill said. “Only, the boys uptown thought they had the man and didn’t. Not the man. Only Brozy.” He told her, briefly, about Brozy.

“The poor man,” Pam said. “So like Eve, in a way.”

Bill merely waited.

“You pick an apple,” Pam said, “and the heavens fall. Ambrose must have felt that. So much commotion about such a little thing. What else, Bill?”

Lieutenant John Stein opened the door of Bill’s office. He widened his brown eyes. He pointed upward and shook the pointing hand.

“Sorry, Pam,” Bill said. “The inspector’s trying to get me.” He hung up. He remembered he had forgotten to tell Pam not to get herself in trouble, as she always did, as Jerry always did. Usually to no avail. He took the telephone up. He said, “Put the chief on, please,” and held the receiver well away from his ear. He listened for a time. He said, “Yes, Inspector, I’m afraid so. Again.”