6

Pamela had expected to have lunch at home, alone, contesting with cats for morsels. She had not, certainly, expected to lunch at Sardi’s and not only at Sardi’s, but with Alice Draycroft. She had, on the telephone, said, “Well, I don’t know whether—” and Alice had said, “Darling! It’s been years and years. Seeing you yesterday made me realize.”

It was not entirely clear what, with such impact, Alice Draycroft had realized. Certainly not that, since school—umpteen years ago, Pam thought, putting the telephone back in its cradle—she and Pam had met only now and then, as an actress, usually with a part, may meet the wife of a publisher. Even in school they had not been close. Alice had been ahead of Pam in school; Alice had been a star in productions of the Dramatic Club and once, once only, Pam had played a maid with a duster. (And a few lines of background comment on the people she dusted for.) It was not an adequate basis for a lifelong friendship. Not that Alice, met now and then, wasn’t fun. I’m a pushover, Pam thought, and changed from the gray-blue dress to another—blue-gray—more suitable for Sardi’s. She decided that Sardi’s justified her mink stole.

“Darling!” Alice said, at only a little after one. (Pam had waited hardly ten minutes.) “So wonderful you could. Henri, darling.”

Henri darling (Henry Perkins at home) said, “Ah, Miss Draycroft. If you will, please?” They would, please. The table was in a corner. “A stinger, darling?” Alice said.

“Martini,” Pam said. “Please.”

“So brave of you,” Alice said. “Martinis always—”

“Very cold, very dry, lemon peel,” Pam said, taking no chances, even at Sardi’s.

“And a bloody mary,” Alice said. “Wasn’t this a wonderful idea of mine?”

In fact, it began to seem a very pleasant, if not entirely wonderful, idea. It had to be said—it was gladly thought—of Alice Draycroft that she lifted you up. Sometimes, afterward, you were a little tired, but up you had been. Pam, more the Algonquin type, went seldom to Sardi’s, and change is pleasant.

“Wonderful,” Pam said. “Such a nice place to visit.”

“Darling,” Alice said. “You’re wonderful, darling. And how’s Jerry?”

Pam said Jerry was fine, curbing a slight inclination to say that he was “wonderful.” She knew she should continue; should ask about the condition of Alice’s husband. She was almost sure that Alice had a husband; Alice almost always did have. But, “How’s yours?” seemed hardly a graceful query.

“Betwixt and between, darling,” Alice said. She had always been quick on the uptake, Alice; she never embarrassed without cause. “Such a lovely party you and Jerry gave for everybody.”

“Well,” Pam said.

“Up to a point of course,” Alice said. “Do you still see that wonderful policeman of yours? Such a lamb, I thought he was.”

Pam checked her memory quickly, seeking the opportunity obviously at some time presented Alice Draycroft to discover lamb-like qualities in Captain William Weigand. It came back—the four of them, she and Jerry, Bill and Dorian, at dinner somewhere. Celebrating something? Because “21” came to mind as the somewhere. And Alice, at first across the room, saying “Pam darling” and then with a man—a current husband—briefly at their table.

“Yes,” Pam said. “You mean Bill Weigand, don’t you? Quite often, as a matter of fact.”

“I suppose,” Alice said, “he’s up to his ears now about poor Mr. Payne.”

So that, Pam thought, was that. The inside of things was as precious to Alice Draycroft as to John Gunther. This was part of an innocence which was, probably far more than she herself suspected, part of Alice. “I oughtn’t to tell you who told me; but the real truth is—” Nevertheless, in all innocence. This time, “I happen to know the police think—” But without pretension, in all innocence.

“I suppose so,” Pam said and, before Alice uttered a diminished “Oh,” thought herself unkind. “I thought, since it was Jerry’s party it happened at—” Alice said, hope dying slowly.

“They think probably it was just a crazy person with a gun,” Pam said. She considered; there would hardly be any secrecy about Brozy. “They caught one,” Pam said, “but they’re having to throw him back, Bill says. A hotel thief named—”

She told Alice Draycroft, who was understandably delighted with his name, about Ambrose Light.

“He must have felt he’d hit the jackpot without even pulling the lever,” Alice said. “The poor darling. But they still think it was somebody like that? I mean—” She let it hang, looked beyond Pam. Her expressive face expressed delight. She said, projecting, “Faith. Faith darling. We’re over here.”

For the second time within less than twenty-four hours, Pam was surprised when she looked at Faith Constable, walking toward them—shimmering toward them. At the center of her surprise was the conviction that Faith Constable should be bigger. On stage she was, somehow, never small—rather, she seemed to be any height she chose to be, needed to be. But she was, coming now between tables at Sardi’s, surely not more than five feet tall and she moved as if she weighed nothing whatever. And, it was preposterous for her to be the age she so obviously had to be.

There was a second reason, a quite different reason, for Pamela North’s surprise. It was that Faith Constable, onetime wife of the late Anthony Payne, was not herself at all surprised, but shimmered toward them precisely as if she had expected to find both of them there, waiting, at a corner table at Sardi’s. Pam looked quickly at Alice Draycroft, who looked back with surpassing innocence. “Isn’t this nice, darling?” Alice said. “The nicest things just happen, I always think.”

Chance met at Sardi’s. How actors love to act, Pam thought. How much more likely things are to happen if properly nudged. Why?

Pam had indeed met Faith Constable. Of course Faith remembered Pamela North. There was indeed room at the table for a third; Henri (darling) would see that the daiquiri was very dry.

“We were talking about poor Tony, darling,” Alice Draycroft said, and Faith continued to look entirely unsurprised. She nodded her head.

“Who isn’t?” she said. “He’d be so pleased. Under other circumstances, of course. Or shouldn’t I say that?”

The question appeared to be directed to Pam North, who could think of no answer better than a smile and a slight lifting of the shoulders.

“The police still think it was what they call a sniper,” Alice said, bringing her chance-met friend up to date. “They got one but he wasn’t right, darling. He was named Ambrose Light.”

Faith Constable smiled in a slightly abstracted fashion.

“Ambrose Lightship, darling,” Alice said, and Faith nodded mild appreciation, and seemed to remain at some distance. The daiquiri came. She sipped it, and looked over it at Pam.

“We’re not taking you in, are we, Mrs. North?” Faith said. “I asked Alice to arrange this. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Well,” Pam said, “you didn’t seem astonished to find us here.”

And she was again surprised. On stage, Faith Constable was notably oblique. “Mrs. Constable’s attack is never frontal,” one critic had written, rather recently. “This is one of the charms of her highly individual method. All effects are, as it were, outflanked. As a result even what should have been evident often comes as a surprise to delight the mind.” It appeared that Faith Constable, offstage, had other methods.

“Mrs. North,” Faith said, “I know that you and your husband sometimes”—she hesitated momentarily for a word—“help the police. Everybody knows that.”

She ought to say that to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, Pam thought briefly. He’d tell her a thing or two. On the other hand—

“It’s—just happened,” Pam said. “Only because once a long time ago we found somebody in a bathtub.” She considered the structure of her explanation. “Somebody’s dead body,” Pam said. “So we met Bill Weigand and—” She felt herself drifting. “All right,” Pam North said. “And what, Mrs. Constable?”

But she was quite certain she knew what. “Occupation: Conduit.” She would put that down next time, instead of “Housewife.” Or, perhaps, “Go-between.”

“If you want to know what the police think,” Pam said, “shouldn’t you ask the police? If—”

“Mrs. North,” Faith said, “please don’t be cross with me.”

She said this very simply, as one might ask a favor. She looked at Pam steadily, and there was simplicity in the way she looked at Pam. Pam was sure it was—Of course, she was an actess and—

“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “I’m not cross. I don’t really know what the police think. Bill—that’s Captain Weigand—” Faith nodded her head. “Says that probably it was only a sniper. That your—that Mr. Payne—was a target. Not anything more. But—”

“My former husband,” Faith Constable said, “had an ability to get himself disliked. I know that. I ought to know. I learned, very rapidly, to dislike him heartily. Mrs. North, Willings is a great writer.”

People of the theater use the word “great” with easy familiarity. But Faith, using it in this connection, used it as if she meant it. It was not, however, entirely clear what she meant by it.

“I don’t know him,” she said. “Oh—I’ve met him. That isn’t it.” She smiled suddenly, and the smile changed her face, brought the shimmer back to her. “Kids want autographs,” she said. “They wriggle and titter and go eek! and they’re rather a nuisance and, sometimes, rather sweet. I’d like to be a kid and wriggle and titter and say, ‘Please, Mr. Willings?’” She paused and the smile changed. “Not really,” she said. “A way of putting it. They’ll suspect him, won’t they? Because of this childish brawl. And—the indignity.”

“Perhaps,” Pam said. “I don’t—”

“He’s too important to be—damaged,” Faith said. “Even if—” She stopped; very obviously, she stopped herself, abruptly, on check-rein.

“If you mean,” Pam said, and now she was direct, as simply direct, as Faith Constable had unexpectedly become, “even if he killed Mr. Payne—no, Mrs. Constable. There aren’t that kind of exceptions.”

Faith Constable was shaking her head seconds before Pam finished. But she let Pam finish.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, then. “Something quite different. It’s—” She stopped again, but this time, Pam thought, for her mind to choose the words it wanted. “If Willings did kill Tony,” she said, “there’s nothing to be done about it. It’ll be tragic, but there’ll be nothing to be done about it. Tony’s as well dead—oh, nobody’s as well dead, I shouldn’t say that—Tony wasn’t really much of anybody, and Willings may write a dozen books, and everybody’ll gain by them. Everybody.”

It didn’t matter if she overstated, Pam thought. And people had worshiped at lesser shrines.

“That doesn’t matter,” Faith said. “I realize that. If Willings killed him—but I don’t think he did. I think I know who may have and—”

It had happened before, and Pam had grown rather tired of it. For all her growing sympathy for—call it empathy with—Faith Constable, Pam felt irritation stirring. If people had things to tell the police—

“Please,” Faith said. It occurred to Pam that her own face, also, probably was expressive. “Yes, there is something I want the police to hear about. It may be nothing. They may already know. And, it’s quite true I don’t want to go to them.” She watched Pam’s face; evidently saw something in it almost before Pam had herself caught up.

“Part of it’s the bad publicity,” Faith said. “I don’t deny it. I don’t want ‘Actress Grilled in Ex-Husband’s Murder.’ Or however they’d put it. I don’t want that at all. That’s cowardly selfish, so all right it’s cowardly selfish. And if I have to, in the end, all right, I have to in the end. But—there’s more. I—”

“Listen, darlings,” Alice Draycroft said. “Do we have another drink? Or do we have lunch? Or—what I mean is, darlings, how’s to take five?”

Faith Constable looked at her friend, and fellow actress, somewhat as if she had never seen her before. After a moment, she smiled a little vaguely, as if she had come back from a great distance to surroundings only a little familiar, and said, “All right, dear. Perhaps we should.” Alice Draycroft looked over her shoulder and a waiter said, “Yes, Miss Draycroft?” and she made a circling movement with the index finger of her right hand. The waiter said, “Yes, Miss Draycroft,” and went. Faith, very carefully, fitted a cigarette into a holder; very carefully lighted the cigarette and sat, looking at the lighter flame for seconds before she snapped the lighter shut. It occurred to Pam that she was looking, not at the tiny flame, but far back to where she had been, been brought back from. The waiter came with drinks. Faith sipped from her glass, and did not look at either of the others—looked at nothing.

“I was very young twenty-five years ago—no, it was twenty-six,” Faith said and only after she had said that looked at Pam North again. “The story of my life,” she said. “More than you’d asked for. Not all of it.” She smiled at Pam, and there was a certain apology in her smile. “I was younger than I should have been, of course. I wasn’t really so very young. Not as years go.”

She paused again. After a moment, as abruptly as before, she began again.

“I was just realizing,” she said, “that I wasn’t going to be a writer. I’d wanted very much to be a writer, and not nearly so much to act. But it turned out I could act and couldn’t write. I suppose that’s why I’ve always been a little’ that way—a little hipped—about writers. I suppose that was why I married him in the first place.” She paused again. The pausing—between ideas, now and then between words, was, Pam thought, a part of artistry, of a craft which had, in turn, become part of Faith Constable. “I’m talking about Tony,” Faith said. “He was a real writer—anyway, he thought he was, persuaded me he was.

“We were only married a couple of years,” she said. “I’ve always said that I was the one who decided to call it quits. That was true. But—only partly true. He wasn’t a very nice person, poor Tony. I wasn’t nearly so young after a year of it—old enough to notice how very un-nice he was. But that wasn’t all.” Once more she paused. She took a breath. (How many times, Pam thought, must she, on stage, have drawn breath in so, miming hesitancy before action. And—how much truth there was in it, method or no method.)

“He walked out first,” Faith said. “I hated to admit it then, and I don’t like to now. He found another girl—a younger girl. Oh, ten years younger. A girl who appreciated him more. He always needed so much appreciation, poor Tony. A girl named Gladdis Arn—spelled it g-l-a-d-d-i-s, the poor thing. Well—” And once more she paused. “There is a point to this,” she said and seemed, for the first time in some minutes, to realize Pam as an audience, and as a person. “I’ll come to the point of it.”

She sipped from her glass, but the glass remained, still, almost full.

“I went to Reno,” she said. “As soon as he could, Tony married Gladdis Arn. She was—I don’t quite know how to say it—just a pretty girl. Pretty, full of admiration and, I’m afraid, not very bright. Tony divorced her after about a year—divorced her and said the child she’d just had wasn’t his and made the court believe it. Another man helped—a man, Gladdis said, she’d met only once, only casually. The man said it had been different—very different. I always thought he was lying, always thought Tony had hired him. Tony had begun to make money by then.”

She crushed out the cigarette, which had burned down to the rim of the holder.

“Part of it,” she said, “he made out of me, in a way. I was a character in a book he wrote. Very, very bitchy, I was in the book. It didn’t sell very well, but the movies bought it and Tony—I’ve met a good many heels, but it’s sometimes hard to believe in Tony—suggested they might get me to play the bitch.” Suddenly, she chuckled. “Sometimes,” she said, “you had almost to admire the bastard. Anyway—”

Anyway, Anthony Payne got rid (legally unless proved otherwise, and it had not been) of a girl who hadn’t, after all, appreciated him quite enough and of her child—a boy of about a month. He also, of course, freed himself from any legal need to support Gladdis, now Gladdis Arn again.

“So far as I know,” Faith said, “he never did anything for her and—”

“You may as well,” Alice Draycroft said, “admit you kept her going, darling. We won’t tell anybody.”

“Sometimes—” Faith Constable said, darkly, “you—” She did not finish. “That hasn’t anything to do with anything.” Alice started to speak again. “You talk too much, darling,” Faith told her, and Alice shrugged her shoulders. She looked at Pam and spread expressive hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

Gladdis Arn had married again some three years after the divorce, and after that Faith had not seen much of her and, finally, nothing at all of her. She could not remember, now, the name of Gladdis’s second husband, although she had known it once. She had heard that the son, whose right to any name was legally questionable, had taken that of his stepfather. The second husband, whatever his name had been, had died about four years after he had married Gladdis. Faith had heard that, anyway. And Gladdis had disappeared until—

“Yesterday,” Faith said. “During the party. A strictly terrible woman in the damnedest dress—”

“Not,” Pam North said, “a pink chiffon dress?”

Faith blinked her eyes at Pam. She said, “Clairvoyant?”

“No,” Pam said. “I had the experience.”

“Anyway, I took it for a while and then I said, very ladylike, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, darling. I’ve got to go to the John.’” Faith appeared momentarily diverted. She chuckled softly and said that they should have seen the poor thing’s face. They would have thought she had never heard of anyone’s going to the john.

“Only,” Faith said, “then I did have to go somewhere, so I thought, since I was going on afterward, I might as well actually. And I was going down the corridor to it and—and there she was. Gladdis.”

Gladdis had been wearing a white dress, which had the look of a uniform. A ring of keys was clipped to the belt of the dress, and she was standing, with a maid, in front of a linen closet, and pointing into the closet and, clearly, explaining something to the maid.

“She stepped back when I came along,” Faith said, “to give me room. And faced me—and her face turned blank. Eyes blank, whole face blank. She said, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ in a blank voice. It was—” She paused. “She had never seen me before,” she said. “She was acting it, y’know. Overacting it, the poor thing. So—well, that was the way she wanted it and I—oh, I suppose I smiled to show I’d heard her, and I went on to the john. But—it was Gladdis.”

“You’re sure?” Pam said. “After so many years and—”

“Yes,” Faith said, “I’m quite sure. Oh—she’s changed. We all change. But, I had some reason to remember her, y’know. A reason that once had seemed a very good one. It was Gladdis. Apparently she’s a housekeeper of some sort. Not just a maid but—she works at the hotel. She was there yesterday, while the party was going on. And—she would have heard about this ruckus between Tony and Willings, wouldn’t she? It would have spread all over. And—”

She paused and lighted another cigarette.

“The poor thing had more reason than anybody to hate Tony Payne,” Faith said, and spoke slowly. “To her, more than to anybody else, he had been the heel of all time. And with Willings set up as—”

She looked at her watch and shook her head over what she saw. She flipped the cigarette out of the holder and ground it out, and pushed her chair back a little. But, once more, she paused.

“The boy,” she said. “He’d be in his early twenties now, wouldn’t he? And—with as much cause to hate as his mother. More—the young can hate so much more. Whether Tony was really his father or wasn’t—” She did not finish that. She moved her chair a little farther from the table.

“You can see,” she said to Pam. “I hope you can—why I don’t want to be the one to—to go to the police. I suppose telling you, leaving it up to you, is—well, pretty much the same thing. But, it doesn’t seem quite so bitchy. Maybe I really mean that it won’t look quite so bitchy. I suppose it’s because of the goldfish bowl I live in and—people, all the darlings who love me—” She broke off. “Not you, Alice,” she said. “They’d all say, ‘Took Faith Constable long enough, but she got her own back. A bit of a bitch, Faith Constable, but what would you expect?’”

She stood up, now. Alice looked up at her, and she shook her head.

“Rehearsal,” she said. “Lars will be frothing already. Forgive me, darlings. Have a nice lunch.”

She started to shimmer away. But she stopped, turned back.

“I remember,” she said. “Mason. That was the name of the man she married. Mason.”

And then she went.