10

After Mrs. North, the night before, had told Lauren Payne what had happened, Mrs. Mason had been called in. “Nobody knew, you see,” she said. “I was just—a kind of servant. That there was any connection—”

At first, Lauren Payne had seemed to respond quickly and quite simply to the sedative the house physician had given her. After some ten minutes, Mrs. Mason had begun to think she might safely leave. And then Lauren had started to talk. It was as if she were talking in her sleep. The words were hurried, indistinct and, at first, they did not seem relevant to one another. “I couldn’t make any sense out of them.” But then, after a few minutes, Lauren had spoken more clearly. In a sentence—in part of a sentence.

“The first time, I wasn’t really listening. But then she said it over and over and—”

“He’s not supposed to be over there,” Lauren had said; had said several times. “And there’s something the matter with his leg. But there’s—it’s part of—”

The unfinished sentence, of course, did not make sense. But Mrs. Mason, now, was quite sure that that—well, almost certainly that—was what Lauren had said. Then she had repeated, several times, that he was not supposed to be “over there.”

“At first,” Gladys Mason said, “I thought she might be trying to tell me something. I don’t think she was, really. Probably she didn’t even know, then, that there was anybody else there. But before I was sure of that, I said, ‘Over where, Mrs. Payne?’ When I said it the first time she didn’t seem to hear me. But I asked her again and then she said, quite clearly, not at all as if she was talking in her sleep, ‘The King Arthur, of course.’ But then she went back to—it was like mumbling. She said, ‘He doesn’t belong there. He’s not supposed—why’s he going over there?’”

Gladys Mason said that then she was “worried.” She did not immediately say what in these words had worried her. Gladys had said, “Who do you mean, dear?” and had got no answer. She had said, guessing, “You were looking out the window, Mrs. Payne?” and was answered.

“She seemed to keep going in and out,” Gladys Mason said. “One time it would be just sleep talking. But then it was as if she were perfectly awake. When I asked if she had been looking out her window—the window of her room, across the street toward the other hotel—she said, ‘Of course,’ as if I should have known.” Gladys Mason paused. “Her room is on the front of the hotel,” she said. “Of the Dumont. She could have looked directly across the street. Seen anything.”

“But I don’t,” Pam said, and Faith, just perceptibly, shook her head. “Did she see whoever it was fire the shot?” Pam said. “Was that what—” Faith shook her head again, but this time Pam ignored the movement. “Worried you?” Pam said. “Did she say she saw your son?”

“No,” Gladys said. “Not that. She didn’t say that. Only, don’t you see, she saw him—I mean, someone—going into the King Arthur. Somebody who wasn’t ‘supposed’ to go there. She might have meant, didn’t belong there.”

“Did she know your son, Mrs. Mason? As your son, I mean?”

Mrs. Mason’s hands moved, again, in a helpless gesture. She didn’t know.

“But Anthony might have—pointed him out,” she said. “Anthony knew he was working in the hotel. I—” She broke off. She looked at nothing. When she spoke, it was as if she spoke to nobody. “I did—something I’m ashamed of,” she said, to nobody. “A humiliating thing. When—when we ran out of money, so Bobby couldn’t go back to school, I wrote his father. Asked him to help. Only to help a little. I thought—thought he might have changed. It was a begging letter. But Bobby’s his son. His son. He even looks like his father a little—the way his father was then.”

She paused again.

“He hadn’t changed,” she said. “He didn’t even answer. But he would only have had to see Bobby to know who he was and—he may have pointed him out to her. It would have been like Anthony. Pointed him out to her and laughed about it and said—I don’t know what he would have said. Something that was cruel. And—something that wasn’t true.” She turned, abruptly, to Faith Constable. She said, “You told Mrs. North, didn’t you?” Faith nodded her head.

“He was a cruel man,” Gladys Mason said. “Even when—when there was no need to be cruel. People say now that things aren’t really black and white, and I suppose they aren’t. Only, sometimes they are. He was cruel because—because he enjoyed it. He wanted to get rid of me.” She hesitated, looking toward the fire. “He’d had what he wanted of me. All right. That happens to people. I was a silly little thing—a pretty, silly little thing.” She shook her head, and smiled faintly, the light on her face flickering as the little flames danced in the grate. “It’s like it was somebody else,” she said. “A girl who didn’t like her name—didn’t like the looks of her name—thought it was an ordinary name. And so—I used to spell it g-l-a-d-d-i-s. You can see what—what the girl was. And I was flattered and—oh, he said all sorts of things.” She looked at Faith Constable.

“I can well imagine,” Faith said.

“He could have gone somewhere where it’s easy,” Gladys said. “Or, had me go. I’d have gone. It was—I suppose it was more fun for him the way he did it. Hiring this man—a man I’d only met a few times, and never alone—to lie about me. To say—to say Bobby was his son, not my husband’s. Or—oh, there wasn’t any end to it. Could have been his son. As if there might have been—” She broke off.

Pam thought, at first, that she was not going to go on with it; wished she would not go on with it; wanted to say, “Please don’t. You’re only hurting yourself. I believe you. Please don’t.” To say, “It was all long ago. Please don’t.”

“Bobby is his son. He couldn’t have been anyone else’s. There were other people who lied, who said Anthony was on the West Coast at—at the right time. He was, but not all the time. He—he came back. He—came back. Bobby’s his son. God knows, if he weren’t I’d be—be glad. Yes, I’d be glad. Particularly now.”

Suddenly, she put her hands in front of her face; covered her eyes with reddened fingers.

If her boy had killed, it was his father he had killed. The hands were raised to shut that knowledge out.

I wish this would stop, Pam thought. This has to stop.

“When he was old enough, he began to hate Anthony,” Gladys said. “Oh, I told him too much. I was still young and bitter and I told him too much. And—and everything was bad for us for a long time. I was no good at anything and—with a baby. Faith, if you hadn’t—why did you?”

“Bird of a feather,” Faith said. “It doesn’t matter now. It was nothing. And, dear, do you have—?”

Gladys Mason had asked a question but she had not listened to the answer. Pam North was sure of that; sure that she, far away in bitter memories, had merely waited for the older woman to finish speaking.

“He hated his father,” Gladys said. “We both did. And—and he wouldn’t accept anybody else. After a time it seemed to me that he wouldn’t accept anybody. Not even, part of the time, me. Mr. Mason tried. Even got Bobby to take his name. Mr. Mason was—he was all right. Meant to be kind. He tried for a while but—it was hard to be patient. For him. Then he died and—”

She is, Pam thought, trying to make us see a boy growing up in hatred. She hasn’t the words, Pam thought. All the words she has are the ordinary words. She’s trying to explain, extenuate. She is quite sure he killed his father. But, merely because—?

“So many things were wrong,” Gladys said, and now it seemed that she was, in essence, talking to herself; explaining, to herself, what had gone wrong with her life, and with a boy’s life. “He grew too fast. When he was twelve he was taller than I am. And so thin. Always so thin. And—bitter. And, there was always something else.” She broke off, and looked at Faith, then at Pam, as if she had, until that moment, forgotten they were there.

“You want me to stop,” she said. “Not to—to drag you through this. To burden you with it.”

God knows, Pam thought. But she shook her head.

“Only,” Gladys Mason said, “it’s part of—of everything. I’m afraid it is. The other thing, he was sort of ashamed. I suppose you’d call it that. Felt he wasn’t as good as other people. Because—oh, of everything that had happened. A boy starts wrong—a boy who’s thin-skinned—” She paused again.

“Anyway,” she said, “he got this awful need to be as good as anybody—better than anybody. He tried to do things he wasn’t meant to do. Play football, even. In high school he tried to play football. That was how he hurt his knee, you know.”

Pam looked quickly at Faith Constable. Faith, just perceptibly, touched her lips.

“It’s only when he’s tired that he limps at all,” Gladys said. “Tired or—or worked up about something. One doctor said there isn’t really anything the matter with his knee. Not really. That it’s because—oh, a lot of rigamarole. He found he couldn’t play football as well as the other boys and had to find a reason and—People make things up. He hurt his knee. That’s all it was. Not anything—queer.”

The shape formed slowly; it was a little as if smoke took shape, formed a pattern. Or as if a cloud took shape against the sky. “Something the matter with his leg.” A tall young man she knew, perhaps only by sight, limping. A thing for Lauren Payne to notice, since he did not always limp.

It had been worse recently for the boy, Gladys Mason told them, talking some of the time to the two women who sat on either side of a flickering fire, some of the time seemingly only to herself. They had thought they could find the money to send him to college, partly from what she could provide, partly from what he could earn himself. He had gone a year; was to have returned in September.

A job he had hoped to get in the college town he hadn’t got. She herself had had to go to a doctor. “It turned out to be nothing, but I had to pay just the same.” Going to college had had to be given up. “Only for this year I kept telling him. And he said, ‘Don’t fool yourself, Mom. You’re not fooling me.’” She looked at the fire for a moment. “Being a busboy was the worst thing that could have happened,” she said. “A busboy—well, there’s almost nothing below a busboy. If you want to be a hotel man I suppose it’s different. Just by itself—” She made a dismissing gesture with her hands. And, for a moment, it seemed that she had finished telling them what she had to tell.

The shape was still vague, Pam thought. A bitter boy with a limp. A boy who might—but there was no real proof of that—have been seen going into a hotel where he did not belong; a hotel from which (but even that, so far as Pam knew, was not certain) a shot might have been fired. There must, obviously, be more, since, obviously, Gladys Mason believed, and was fighting against believing, her son to be a murderer.

“He said he sold it,” Gladys Mason said, and spoke suddenly. “If he really sold it, and can prove he did. But then, why would he run away?”

Pam looked at Faith Constable and Faith shook her head and, slightly, raised her shoulders.

“Sold what, Mrs. Mason?” Pam said.

For a moment, it seemed that the question surprised the black-clad woman. But then she said, “Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? About the rifle?”

“No.”

“At college,” Mrs. Mason said. “He couldn’t play the rough games. Because of his knee, you know. But—I suppose you’d say—he had to prove himself. There was a rifle team. Rifle club, or something. He bought a rifle—not a good one, he said. A cheap rifle, secondhand. But—he got to be very good with it. Better than the others. He was—it was good for him, for a while. Being better at something. But then—I don’t know—it seemed just to wear off. Anyway, he says he sold the rifle. Months ago. He’d be able to prove that, wouldn’t he?”

“I’d think so,” Pam said. “When did he tell you this? About selling the rifle?”

“Why, last night.”

They could only wait. She said she had thought she had told them. “Only me,” Faith said. “Tell Pamela.”

Mrs. Mason had been on duty until eight o’clock the night before. After she had finished, had gone to her room, she had increasingly worried about what Lauren Payne had said, become increasingly convinced that it meant what she feared it meant. She had left her room and gone across town to the room her son lived in and found him there. He was “excited, worked up” but, when she told him what she was afraid of, and what Lauren Payne had said, he had denied “that he’d done anything wrong.” He had said that nobody could prove he had “just because I wanted to.” He had said he had sold the rifle a long time ago. He had told her she mustn’t worry.

“I wanted to believe him. I—I do believe him. Only—he seemed so strange, so excited.”

Not in words, only in mind. She had not believed him. She had kept on trying, but she had not believed him.

He telephoned her the next morning—that morning. He said he was going away, and that she shouldn’t worry. Going away until it “blew over.”

“He still sounded—strange. I don’t know—terribly excited. I told him he mustn’t do that; told him to wait. When he wouldn’t, I told him I’d come and join him—bring him money. That wherever we went we’d go together. He said it would be better if I didn’t but—finally I thought I’d persuaded him. I said I’d meet him at Grand Central and he said, all right, at about noon, then, at the information desk. So I put my things in a suitcase—I haven’t got many things—and went down the stairs, because I thought they might already be looking for him—that she might have told somebody else—and if they saw me they would follow me. But—”

But Robert Mason had not showed up at the information booth at Grand Central—not at noon, and not by one o’clock, and not by two. Gladys Mason had put her suitcase in a locker then and had gone a few places she thought her son might be. “He had some friends he’d told me about. Not many. Most of them weren’t in their rooms and nobody who was had seen him. So—I didn’t have anybody, know anybody to go to. I couldn’t go to the police and ask them to find him. I couldn’t—”

She leaned back in her chair as if very tired.

“I came here,” she said. “I hadn’t any right, but I came here.”

She had, it appeared, simply done that—come to the narrow house in the East Sixties as to sanctuary. Faith Constable had not been there; she had been at rehearsal. The maid Norton had telephoned the theater.

Now, with her story told, Gladys Mason seemed merely to wait. She waited, Pam thought, to be told what to do. Pam had, also, an unhappy feeling that Faith Constable was waiting too—waiting for Pamela North to point out a course of action. Really, Pam North thought. Of all things!

“More tea?” Faith Constable said. “It may not be very hot. I can have Norton—”

“I’m sure it will be all right,” Pam said, glad she was sure of something. Faith started to get up, but Pam carried her cup to the tea table. Gladys Mason seemed not to have heard the offer of more tea.

What I should tell her to do is obvious, Pam thought, sipping tea which was just barely warm enough. I should tell her to go to the police, explain everything to them. If the boy didn’t—

She broke that thought off. For one thing, Mrs. Mason would not go to the police, and could not be expected to go to the police, however fully the logic of such an action might be explained. And, there was hesitation in Pam’s own mind. She was, at first, surprised to find it there. Then she was not surprised. If Bill could be the one to find the boy, or Stein could. Or, for that matter, Mullins. And there were, of course, many others.

But few policemen are psychologists and almost none psychiatrists. Something of that sort might be needed here—at the least what might be needed here would be gentleness, a desire to understand. These qualities of mind are by no means universal, and a policeman’s trade is unlikely to encourage them. In recent years, particularly, policemen have had little time to spend in consideration of the vagaries of the young mind. The vagaries of young action have kept a good many policemen very busy.

If we could find the boy first, Pam thought. Talk to him. The poor, unhappy kid—the lost kid. Running now. But—running from the police? Or, from everything—from defeat and loneliness; perhaps even from his own mother’s inability to believe? Find him and—

My neck again, Pam thought. Stuck out again. Oh, damn it all. “Lame dogs over stiles,” Jerry would say—had so often had occasion to say. “Show Pam a lame dog,” he had told Bill Weigand once, “and she’ll find a stile to help it over. Hell, she’ll build one. And sly dogs begin to limp when they see her.” All right, Pam thought, I’m the way I am.

It was she, now, who was looking toward the fire, not at it. The other two waited, now, for her, Faith looking at her, Gladys, still leaning back in her chair, seeming to look at nothing. Merely waiting to be told.

Only, Pam thought, we can’t find him. How can we find him? So, what can we really—

“Of course,” Pam said, “we don’t really know whether there’s anything in this, do we? Because we don’t know what Mrs. Payne meant to say. We’re only—guessing. Perhaps she was talking about somebody entirely different. Perhaps about something entirely different. Not about the murder at all.”

They listened. Gladys even leaned forward in her chair to listen.

“She came to me this morning,” Pam said. “She thought she might have said something; that she didn’t remember what she had said. When she was groggy from the stuff. She hadn’t, to me. And she didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell me, what kind of thing she was afraid she’d said. I thought afraid. As if she thought she might have incriminated somebody. Wait! Somebody important to her. And your son, Mrs. Mason, wouldn’t have been that. At least—would he?”

“No,” Gladys Mason said. “Only—only to me.”

“So,” Pam said, “all we have to do is to call her up and ask. Because not remembering what she said is one thing, and what she saw is another, isn’t it?”

Faith Constable’s expressive eyes flickered for a moment. But then she nodded. “Over there,” she said, and pointed toward shadows.

There was no question—except momentarily in Pam’s own mind—that Pamela North would be the person to telephone and ask Lauren Payne what, if anything, she had seen the evening before. She found the telephone in the shadows; dialed the number Gladys Mason gave her, heard “Hotel Dumont, good afternoon,” and asked for Mrs. Anthony Payne. She heard “One moment, please,” but it was more than a moment. Then Pam listened again, and said, “Oh,” and hung up.

Mrs. Anthony Payne had checked out of the Hotel Dumont. It was rather like reaching a foot up for a final stair-tread which isn’t there. Pam went back to her chair and sipped tea which was no longer warm at all. I don’t, she thought, really like tea. The idea of tea is wonderful but tea, when all’s said and done, is only tea.

“They have a house in a place called Ridgefield,” Gladys Mason said. “There was a picture of it in a magazine. Anthony in sports clothes.” She paused. “Trying,” she said, “to look like a man who likes roses. Ridgefield, Connecticut.”

It took longer to find a telephone number, through information—through information which at first reported no Anthony Payne listed in Ridgefield, New Jersey, and said, “Oh,” with some indignation and, after what seemed a longish time for research, reported an Idlewood number with detachment, and in a tone of considerable doubt. (The doubt, Pam realized, was of the mental capacity of someone who did not know the difference between New Jersey and Connecticut.)

Pam dialed and waited and listened to the signal which meant the distant ringing of a telephone bell. She waited for some time, knowing that people who live in country houses are often out of them. Mrs. Payne might be out in the garden. It was difficult to guess what, late of a November afternoon, she might be doing in a garden. But still—

Pam put the receiver back, finally. She went back to the fire. She said that, of course, there was no reason really, to suppose that Mrs. Payne had gone back to her house in Ridgefield. She might, of course, have gone anywhere. She might—

Pam went back to the telephone and dialed again, and listened again to distant ringing. Sometimes country people hear a bell ringing from some distance, and hurry in only to be too late.

The telephone was not answered. Pam went back across the room and, midway, felt something which was rather like a physical chill. This time, she did not sit down. She stood in front of the fire, which was now only a nostalgic flicker. But it was not the failure of a needless fire in a warm room which had caused a contracting chill.

“Mrs. Mason,” Pam North said, “does he know where they live? Your son, I mean. Where the Paynes live?”

“Why yes,” Gladys said. “He was the one who showed me the picture. He said—it doesn’t matter, does it, what he said?”

It did not. But that he had known—

“You told him what she said? About seeing someone?”

“Of course. That was what—” She did not finish, but her body stiffened; there was a sudden fixation of the eye muscles, so that her eyes turned starey. And Faith said, “Oh. He wouldn’t—”

It did not need to be said; it would only hurt to have it said. But it was a chill in the room. A murderer is seen and no good may come to the person who sees him.

“You were to meet him at Grand Central,” Pam said. That much had to be said. “Trains run from there to Connecticut. Not to Ridgefield, I don’t think, but to somewhere near—near enough.”

Mrs. Mason did not say anything. Faith said, “But, dear—” and did not finish.

“He wouldn’t,” Gladys said. “I know he—”

But she stopped with that. She didn’t know what the boy would do or wouldn’t do. She had told them that already.