13

Thursday, 5:35 P.M. to 7:10 P.M.

Even now, sitting in the Norths’ living room, sketching the Norths’ major cat, Liza O’Brien found memories difficult to sort out, felt as if she had, as nearly as anything she could think of, fallen over a cliff. It had all been that sudden, that meaningless. If she had fallen she had been caught; evidently she had been caught. But not even about that was there real assurance.

She had not quite fainted when Brian seized her; she could hardly tell, even now, looking back, whether she had come so near to fainting because of terror or relief or—when you came down to it—mere surprise. She thought Brian had touched her face gently, tenderly, as he held her, after the gun had gone off; she thought she could remember, as from a long way distant, the voices of Weigand and the others, of Raymond Whiteside. (His voice, at the very last, had gone suddenly high and shrill.) And she had been there—surely she had been there still?—when men with a stretcher came and lifted Mrs. Whiteside onto it and carried her out. But all of it was misty, as if the air had fogged against both sight and hearing.

Strangely enough, the thing clearest in her memory was Pam North’s voice, and Pam was speaking in the taxicab which brought them to the Norths’ apartment, where nowadays she seemed always, somewhat inexplicably, to be coming.

“But he wouldn’t have yelped,” Pam was saying, in this clearest of Liza’s memories. “Don’t you see? So it had to be her.”

She remembered the tone of Pam North’s voice, which was one of entire astonishment.

The next thing Liza—now putting in the delicate tracery of a whisker—could remember clearly was Pam North’s again bringing her breakfast in the small guest room and telling her, surprisingly, that it was almost two o’clock; saying, in answer to what must have been a look of disbelief in Liza’s eyes, that, nevertheless, that was the time it was.

“They’re doing something about the colonel,” Pam had said, putting down the breakfast. “Indicting him, I think. It seems they were sitting, so it was a good time.”

The few hours since then were clear enough, if uneventful. “They” had promised to come back as soon as they could. “Yes,” Pam said, “Brian too. He’s with them.” She had smiled quickly then. “He’s all right, you know,” she said. “He was trying to keep you from getting shot, because at the moment nobody knew quite what was happening and, anyway, you can’t tell about guns.”

And Mrs. Whiteside, still alive, likely to live—“if she wants to,” Pam interpolated—was in a hospital and her husband was in jail, and a good deal more than likely to remain there. But beyond that, Pam North had not seemed a great deal clearer than Liza was herself.

“Apparently,” Pam said, after Liza had breakfasted and showered, come into the living room, begun to watch the cats, “apparently he was the one who killed everybody. But I must say it’s confused as far as I’m concerned. Because I thought it had to be Mrs. Whiteside. Oh—”

Pam stopped then and, after a pause, said, “Of course. He saw him see it. I knew it had to be the dog.”

But she had not gone on from there; had said it was still confused, and they might as well get it straight from Bill, who would be there any minute. But a good many minutes had passed without Bill Weigand, and after a time, because Martini seemed today entirely agreeable to sit within view, Liza had begun to sketch, using typewriter paper and a stub of a soft pencil.

Then—just as Liza realized there was something wrong with the tracery of whisker; that you didn’t really see a cat’s whiskers that way—they came. Bill Weigand and Jerry North came and Liza O’Brien knew this vaguely, and saw Brian. And Brian saw her, because he walked across to where she was sitting and looked down at her, his face, his eyes, strangely questioning. For a second she looked up at him, her own eyes dark (for that instant her mind, too, shadowed) with uncertainty, and then all that vanished and she stood up and was holding herself tight against him in the fragment of an instant before his arms closed about her, and held her tighter still. And then Liza O’Brien sighed deeply—so deeply, so revealingly, that for a moment she felt her face flushing, and pressed it even more anxiously against Brian’s chest. But nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them, and after the first second Liza realized it did not matter at all who paid attention, or how much.

Jerry was mixing drinks, then, and Bill Weigand was on the telephone, saying “at Pam and Jerry’s, come on” in a voice which meant, to a now partially disengaged Liza, that he was talking to somebody he loved. That was fine, she thought; that was beautiful, and smiled up at Brian and pressed his hands, asking him to know how beautiful it was—everything was. She thought he did. Then suddenly he grinned at her and said, in a voice only for her, “I ought to slap your funny little face.”

“Of course,” Liza said. “Any time. Always.” Then she decided she must be getting a little hysterical, and further disengaged herself, although without letting go of Brian. Then they found a part of a sofa which was the right size for two people who wanted to sit as closely as possible together.

“All right,” Pamela North said, when the drinks were distributed. “Why was I wrong, Bill? Because I thought it was Mrs. Whiteside. Because she must have been the one who kicked the dog.”

Bill Weigand looked incredibly tired; so, Liza saw now, did Brian and, almost equally, Jerry North. Apparently none of them had slept until two in the afternoon. Probably Weigand had not slept at all.

“He was always more likely,” Bill said. “The thing which set if off worked for both. And Sneddiger was strangled.” He paused. “By hand,” he said. “Her hands might have done it—but her nails would have cut the skin. The skin wasn’t broken. Also, if there’s an alternative, I’m inclined to doubt children murdering parents. By premeditation. It happens, of course. It doesn’t often happen. But it was the dog, of course.”

“It yelped,” Pam said. “And from where he sat he could see the top of the stairs. I realized that when I sat there. You could see the people in the foyer. But you could also see up the stairs.”

“Right,” Bill said.

“Would it be all right,” Jerry North asked, starting around with a shaker, “if we lapsed into English? Temporarily? For Miss O’Brien’s sake?”

Pam looked momentarily surprised, but the others laughed, and they were still smiling when the door buzzer sounded and Jerry let Dorian Weigand in. She told them it all seemed very jolly, and asked where her drink was, and then said hello to the cats, who had remained, in spite of what they evidently regarded as a throng of humans. Dorian got her drink and found a place to sit—a place beside Liza, whose shoulder she patted gently, as if in approval.

Then everyone looked at Weigand.

“The grand jury returned a true bill,” he said. “Charge, attempted murder of Mrs. Whiteside. That will hold him; that will be superseded, of course. Murder first on Halder; same on Sneddiger. As I told him, there’s plenty. If necessary, we can add assault with intent on Miss O’Brien. Even simple assault on Pine, where there wasn’t any intent, I imagine. He’s not admitting anything; he’s got a lawyer.” He shook his head. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the D.A. doesn’t think it’s going to be easy. Neither do I. It’ll be all bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. And if he hadn’t, in the end, tried too hard to do just that, he might have been able to hang it on his wife. But then, all along he tried too hard.”

“From the beginning,” Dorian Weigand said. “Please, Bill.”

But Bill looked at Pam North.

“The beginning was the dog who yelped,” Pam said. “Mrs. Whiteside said she merely lifted it off a bed, put it out of a room. But it yelped, and they do when they’re kicked. Or stepped on, of course. And as soon as he yelped, he came down the stairs. And, from where he was sitting, Mr. Halder could look up the stairs and see—well, whose foot it was.”

“Anyway,” Bill said, “the others were all there. Mrs. Whiteside had stayed behind for something.”

“Right,” Pam North said. “And—wait a minute. She couldn’t have seen that he had seen, because she would have been too high up.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “I could make that clearer,” she said. “I guess. I should have thought of that.”

“She admits she—pushed Aegisthus with her foot,” Bill said. “She’s conscious now; ready to talk. I—I rather think she will. She was trying to rescue her husband there at the end; get him out of it, give him a chance to run. He tried to kill her for her pains, while pretending to struggle for a gun she was ready enough to give up—to him. She seems—well, a little annoyed about it all.”

Bill Weigand paused. Unurged, he continued.

“Whiteside saw what happened, saw his father-in-law’s face,” Weigand said. “He knew the old man pretty well; they all did. I suppose to the old man anybody who kicked a dog was—well, peculiarly depraved. Certainly asking for punishment. Whiteside realized that; realized they were in for trouble when Halder got up abruptly and left probably looking like—” He hesitated.

“A thunderhead,” Pam said.

Bill Weigand accepted it.

“Listen,” Dorian said. “Is a jury supposed to understand this? Was Mr. Halder that eccentric?”

It was one of the problems, Bill agreed. But he thought so. The whole pattern of Halder’s life had been so eccentric that any jury, almost the lowest common denominator of any jury, ought to be able to extend eccentricity to cover Halder’s rage at witnessing what he no doubt considered the abuse of an animal.

“Whiteside tried to do something to fix things up,” Bill said, then. “He went down to the pet shop; probably tried to calm the old man down, first. But—he went prepared. The old man was stubborn; probably told Whiteside that he was changing his will, cutting his daughter down—perhaps throwing her out entirely. Probably told Whiteside, to prove it was settled, that he had wired his lawyer. So—”

“But,” Pam said, “didn’t he take an awful risk? Suppose Mr. Halder had wired—oh—‘Planning to cut daughter Barbara out of will because she tried to kick dog downstairs stop will come office tomorrow stop’?”

It would, Bill agreed, appear so. But—Halder had not wired in detail, and this Whiteside had somehow found out. Presumably, Halder had repeated to him the actual content of the wire; perhaps even shown him a copy. In any event, Whiteside had had reason to feel the risk wasn’t great; that it was of no importance against the certainty that his wife would be disinherited the next day.

“And—” Bill started to go on, but Pam North stopped him. Pam said, “Wait a minute,” and, when Bill waited, said, “What was the hurry? Was the colonel terribly broke or—?”

“Oh,” Bill Weigand said. “No—not more than usual. He’d lived for years on his wife, who lived on her father, but he wasn’t particularly broke. The hurry was that Halder would have died in a few months. The income from him would stop and, if the will change went through, the Whitesides wouldn’t inherit. Halder might, actually, have died the next day—or the next week. And, somehow, Whiteside had found out about it. Probably the old man told him. We found out, of course, from the autopsy.”

Pam said, “Oh.”

“Quite possibly,” Bill said, “Halder had summoned the family to tell them that—perhaps even to say he had decided to come home for his last few months. We’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter. He never got around to telling them at the dinner; he may have told Whiteside that night—something like ‘Don’t think I’ll change the will back; I won’t live long enough.’ So—the colonel hurried.”

He had killed his father-in-law and, to make it appear suicide—“while insane, presumably”—he had put the body in the pen; put the poison left over in Halder’s medicine cabinet; pressed Halder’s fingers on his own hypodermic.

“The strychnine?” Jerry asked, and Bill shrugged. He said they were trying to trace it; expected to, in the end.

“At a guess,” he said, “Whiteside got it a couple of years ago to kill a cat they had. At least, they had a cat and—” He looked at Brian Halder.

“A yellow cat,” Brian said. “They said it died. I don’t know. Come to think of it, the cat disappeared very suddenly.”

“Right,” Bill said. “That’s hypothesis. We’ll find out more. Anyway, he had it. And used it. And, at some stage in this, Felix Sneddiger looked in the window and saw him. Here again we have to assume—Sneddiger’s dead, Whiteside doesn’t talk. But I’d assume that Halder had described the members of his family, that from the description Sneddiger thought the man he had seen was Whiteside and—well, went up to be sure.” Bill paused. “He found out,” he said.

Sneddiger might, before he died, have insisted he had told what he knew to someone else, Bill Weigand went on. That in an effort to save his own life by making his murder useless. He didn’t save his life, but he alarmed Whiteside. Later, when Whiteside found out that Sneddiger and Liza had been together when the body was found, he jumped to the conclusion that Sneddiger had talked to her.

“He didn’t,” Liza heard herself say. “I’ve kept saying he didn’t.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Early on, I decided he hadn’t. But—Whiteside couldn’t take the chance. He followed you to the shop, Miss O’Brien, tried to kill you; would have if Mr. Halder”—he indicated Brian—“hadn’t come back at a fortunate time. I presume he hid in the shop momentarily, ducked out when Mr. Halder went for a pillow, and hid in the passageway. I presume he was the person Mr. Halder heard—and was afraid was Pine or his mother. Or both of them.” He smiled faintly as he looked at Brian Halder. “You did think that?” he said, but then said, “Never mind,” before Brian had time to answer. If, Liza thought, he needed to answer. Poor Brian. Dear Brian. Again she pressed his hands. He smiled down at her.

Again Jerry North made the rounds with a cocktail shaker; Liza smiled and shook her head. The others let their glasses be filled, and Bill Weigand drank from his and went on.

“Incidentally,” he said, still to Brian Halder, “you didn’t drop into a bar after you found your father’s body and telephoned us. You tried to find your mother. Right?” Brian merely looked at him, but failure to deny was affirmation. “Called the house, probably,” Bill said. “Found she wasn’t there. Tried Pine’s apartment. Not there either?”

“Nobody was,” Brian said. “They’d—they’d stopped by the theater to pick up Pine’s mail. Fan mail.” The last was ironic; Brian was not, Liza realized, likely ever to achieve enthusiastic regard for the man who was evidently to become his step-father. Poor Brian. She would have to explain to him—somehow, as time went on—that neutrality in such matters was possible; that things were not always, not necessarily, so desperate. His hands are so strong, she thought then, with profound irrelevancy.…

Whiteside, finding that Liza had remained alive, must have been at first frightened and afterward puzzled, Bill Weigand said. He spoke slowly, formulating it in his own mind; speaking as much to clarify things for himself as to explain them to the others. No doubt, Whiteside expected Liza to tell, at once, what she knew. But when there was no evidence she had told anything, when the police did not show by action that they had new information, he was left to guess whether she really knew nothing or, knowing something, was keeping quiet for purposes of her own. Liza herself had come back by then, was listening again.

“What purposes?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t I have told what I knew? Since, that is, it was about Mr. Whiteside and not—” She broke off, and flushed slightly.

“Because,” Pamela North said, “he could have thought you were going to blackmail him. Because what we think about other people is because of what we know about ourselves and he would have.” She paused a moment, and looked slightly worried. “Only,” she said, “how do I know that about him? I mean, if—”

“We know, Pam,” Jerry told her. “It’s all right. We like you anyway.” He went to mix another round; the sound of ice against glass was, for a few moments, a pleasant obbligato to Bill Weigand’s low voice. Then Jerry passed drinks again, and this time Liza did not refuse.

“—uncertainly,” Weigand was saying. “It showed all through the last few hours. Not knowing which way to turn. The absurd attack on Pine, for example. It was supposed to complicate matters for us; gives us something difficult to fit into a logical case against Whiteside himself. Why should he try, apparently, to kill Pine? No reason. Why should Mr. Halder here?” Bill indicated Brian. “We had a choice of reasons. Mr. Halder thought Pine had killed his father and was trying to get revenge. We’d been directed to Greek tragedy—which was more or less extraneous incidentally—by Mr. Halder’s father. We could think of Pine as Aegisthus—the character, not the pooch—and Mr. Halder as Orestes. Or—Pine knew something which would involve Mr. Halder, and had to be silenced. Whiteside evidently saw you two”—now he indicated both Brian and Liza—“coming from the stage door, guessed accurately you were trying to see Pine. Guessed, again rightly, we would—find out about it. Or—” He paused.

“Ever so many others,” Pam North said. “Brian was trying to make it appear he thought Pine was guilty, although he was guilty himself, which would make you think—where was I?” She looked at her empty glass, with something like reproach.

Most of the glasses were empty, then. And most of it, Bill Weigand’s attitude revealed, was told. He seemed abstracted, now; he would be, Liza thought, thinking of the next steps, of the things which, for him, for other detectives, for the district attorney’s men, would go on and on, far beyond this, more intricately than this, more—

“He didn’t try to kill Pine, then?” That was Jerry North, as if from a distance.

“Right,” Bill said. “No use to him dead. He and his wife were at the theater, you know. He left his seat after the lights were out—our man missed that—went down the aisle to the door Mr. Halder used later and—”

But for us it’s over, Liza thought. All that matters is over. For us it’s just beginning and there ought to be lots of time. Please, make it lots of time for Brian and me—oh please.… And then she thought, he takes things so hard, so desperately, and there will be so many things to understand … and it was such an odd way to start but now I know so much more and …

Why, Liza O’Brien thought, I’m going to sleep. Brian put his arm around me and I’m going to sleep. What … a … nice … place … to … Liza O’Brien thought.

“The nice thing about an evening with the Norths,” Pam said, her voice very low, for Jerry’s ear, “is that it’s so stimulating.”