5

TUESDAY, 9:30 P.M. TO 10:20 P.M.

Mary Hunter had seemed to be moving in a dream after Joshua Merle left Charles. She had finished her drink in a dream and eaten—or moved her food in a semblance of eating—in a dream. After one or two efforts by Jerry North which brought almost imperceptible, but unquestionably negative, movements of the head from Pam—they had left her in the dream. And having dinner with a sad, if pretty dreamer, haunted by her discovery of murder—and very possibly, Pam thought, by something more—had not encouraged either appetite or conversation. So the Norths had appeared almost as dreamy as the girl; it was evidently only absent-mindedness which led Jerry to order fresh martinis after they were at their table. Presumably it was only abstraction which led him to drink his thirstily, and his prolonged gaze at Pam’s half-full glass after he had finished was evidently only the gaze of a man who was thinking of something quite different. He seemed quite surprised when Pam pushed the half-full glass toward him, but the surprise passed quickly, with the martini.

The girl had merely acquiesced to their suggestion that a hotel on lower Fifth Avenue would be handy to where they were, and when she walked between them—the necessary block or two—she might have been a sleepwalker. Only after she had registered and turned to the Norths from the desk did she make an effort to shake the mist from her mind.

Then she tried to make her voice casual, or seemed to try. She said they had both been wonderful.

“It was an amazing thing for you to do,” she said. “You must have thought I was crazy—to call that way on people I didn’t know. To drag you into—into my mess.”

Jerry said it wasn’t anything. The girl said oh, but it was. Pam looked at both of them. She spoke suddenly, with no abstraction at all in her voice.

“Do you know,” she said, “you talk as if we’d filled in at bridge. Or paid your bill at a restaurant because you’d left your purse at home. Or told you that Commerce Street is two blocks down and one to the right.” Pam paused. “Only it isn’t, of course,” she said. “It’s—where is it, Jerry?”

“Well,” Jerry said, “it’s not really down at all. It’s straight across, just about where Fourth Street and Twelfth Street cross.”

“You,” Pam said, “are thinking of Bank Street. Not that it isn’t perfectly natural—Bank—Commerce. But I meant the Cherry Lane Street. That’s Commerce. And it’s downtown, with a theater on it. Or used to be.”

Jerry North ran a hand abstractedly through his hair.

“Look, darling,” he said. “Who gives a damn where Commerce Street is? Except the people who live on it.”

“What?” Pam said. “I don’t understand. What makes you dislike Commerce Street? Except that you don’t know where it is. Which is your own fault, if anybody’s.”

“Listen,” Jerry said. “Listen, Pam. I like Commerce Street. I also like Bank Street, except when it runs into the stables, which it probably doesn’t any more.” He looked at her anxiously. “What on earth,” he wanted to know, “are we supposed to be talking about?”

That, Pam told him, was just it. That was precisely it. What were they talking about? That was the whole point, and what she was saying. They were talking, as far as he could tell, about something casual—something entirely trivial. Like the whereabouts of Bank Street.

“And really,” she said, “it’s murder. We weren’t filling in for bridge. We were—we were attending a murder.”

She looked at Mary Hunter.

“On,” she said, “invitation. Your invitation, darling. So now you have to decide.”

The slender girl looked back at Pam North. She stood motionless, and her face was almost motionless.

“Decide what, Mrs. North?” she said.

“We can’t talk here,” Pam said. “Not really. We’ll sit down some place.” She looked at Jerry, who nodded. “In the bar,” she said. “Because it’s convenient.”

She started across the lobby toward the bar. The girl hesitated, and Jerry seemed to hesitate with her. But his hesitation was not uncertain; it suggested. Mary Hunter followed Mrs. North. She sat down with them, but with no air of permanence.

“What you have to decide,” Pam said, as if nothing had intervened, “is whether we’re to drop out. As of now. And if we are—why did you call us in? Because it wasn’t what I’d expect—what anyone would expect. Unless you knew us better.”

The girl seemed withdrawn. She said she was sorry.

“No,” Pam said. “It isn’t that easy. As if it were a—a case of mistaken identity. You called us in because you were frightened—terribly frightened. And you were frightened because of more than merely finding a body. You were—you were frightened for yourself. Because it all meant something about you.”

Mary Hunter shook her head. Her voice was low and she seemed to have trouble keeping it steady.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I do, now. It was an imposition. And it was unnecessary.”

“Why was it unnecessary?” Mrs. North said. “Because now you’re out of it?”

The girl didn’t say anything, in words. Her eyes said something. Pam looked quickly at Jerry and watched him shake his head slowly. She waited for him to speak. He spoke gently.

“I’m afraid, Mrs. Hunter, that it isn’t going to be that way,” he said. “Pam’s right.” He paused and looked at her. His voice was even more gentle when he went on, but his words were very slow and clear.

“You see, Mrs. Hunter, you’re not out of it,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain—you shouldn’t have brought us in, perhaps. We’re not detectives and—I hardly know how to say this—we—we aren’t casual about murder. People can’t be. People can’t pick it up, find out things—too many things—and drop it. And walk away. If you hadn’t called Pam—if you hadn’t brought us into it all—that would be different. We wouldn’t have any responsibility.”

“And now,” the girl said, “now you feel you have?”

It was hardly a question. It hardly needed an answer.

“You see,” Pam said, “you’ve told us too much. By calling us—by things you’ve said—by—by the way you looked.”

“When I saw Josh,” the girl said. There was a kind of resignation in her voice. “I tried not to.”

“When you saw Josh,” Pam said. She hesitated. “You see, my dear,” she said, “I had to tell Bill about that. You see I had to.”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Perhaps you did. It’s all—it’s all wrong. I don’t know what I thought—why I called.”

“You called because you were frightened,” Pam said. “You sounded frightened.” Pam looked at her a moment intently. “And now you aren’t,” she said. “Or you’re frightened differently.”

“I’m not frightened,” the girl said. “It was a shock—it would be a shock, wouldn’t it? To find Josh’s father there, dead—to find anybody in your apartment, shot, when you—when you just came home in the evening by yourself.” She paused. “And what was he doing there?” she said. “Why there?”

Pam looked at Jerry, who lifted his shoulders slightly and said, “Precisely.” He said nothing further. Mary Hunter and Pam waited a moment, and he still said nothing further.

“Anyway,” the girl said, “maybe I was frightened. Just at first. I knew him—I used to know him, anyway. It was my apartment. I found him. I was afraid—I was afraid the police wouldn’t understand.”

“Precisely,” Jerry said. They both looked at him.

“There’s only one other thing they would want,” he added. “A motive. Did you have a motive, Mrs. Hunter?”

The girl spoke quickly and said, “No—no, of course not.” She said it so very quickly that Pam looked at her oddly, and then looked at Jerry. He, also, was looking at Mary Hunter, and he seemed to be waiting. The girl looked at Pam North and then at Jerry North and said the obvious.

“What motive could I have?” said she.

There was another little pause. There seemed, Pam thought, to be more pauses in the conversation than conversation. It was a pause—an uneasy pause—marred a little by words.

“Precisely,” Jerry said. He seemed, Pam thought, to have taken a fancy to the word. She was sorry; it was not a word she much cared for. But she was not surprised to see that Jerry was looking at her with an evident inquiry in his glance, or that he was moving as if to rise. She picked up her bag.

“And since you haven’t,” Jerry said, “you naturally aren’t frightened. Since you aren’t frightened, you don’t want us to—you don’t want us as seconds, or whatever you had in mind. We’re bound, as I said, to tell Bill Weigand what you’ve told us—and suggested to us. We don’t have to go on with it.”

He pushed the table a little aside and stood up.

“And,” he said, “you probably want rest and quiet. And won’t mind if we get along. All right?”

“I—” the girl said.

Pam stood up too. They waited a moment looking down at her. She looked up at them.

“I didn’t mean—” said she, and broke off again.

“There wasn’t anything to mean,” Jerry told her. “You—you called a doctor. An amateur doctor, as it happens. You got well before the doctor came.”

Pam laid a hand on his arm. He looked at it a moment and then looked back at the girl. And for a fraction of a second longer he waited.

“Are you well, Mrs. Hunter?” Pam said, beside him.

The slender girl looked up at them for a moment longer, and then she—very slowly—shook her head. And her eyes had tears in them—painful tears.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I swear I didn’t kill him.”

“But,” Jerry said, “you had a motive. Or something the police would call a motive, if they wanted to.” He did not put the words as a question.

The girl nodded.

“Josh,” she said. “Josh and I—”

But Pam was shaking her head.

“If you’re going to tell us any more, you’ll end by telling us everything more,” she said. “And not here—perhaps not anywhere. What we know, Bill knows. At least—”

“Unless Pam decides it would confuse him,” Jerry filled in, and he smiled faintly. “Which has happened.” He sobered. “But if Pam means that we’re not on anybody’s side, as she does, she’s right,” he said. “If she means we’re not protecting anybody.”

“Except,” Pam said, “if they didn’t do it. And then, of course, we would be. Unless we were wrong, of course.”

The girl looked at both of them, and shook her head again. She said she didn’t need protection.

“For myself,” she said. And then as if this might be misleading, she added more hastily. “Or for anybody,” she said. “And there isn’t much to tell. But—I’d like to tell you what there is. And you can tell me—well, if I ought to be afraid. And if I ought to tell your Bill—Lieutenant Weigand—about Josh and me and Josh’s father.”

“Still,” Pam said, “not here. We’d better go up to your room, if you want to tell us anything.”

“Without prejudice,” Jerry said.

The girl smiled up at him.

“Without prejudice,” she said.

The girl’s room had one chair that was supposed to be comfortable, and one about which no one had supposed anything, except that it was a chair to put by a table and to be sat on by a guest who wanted—for whatever obscure reasons of his own—to sit by a table. There was a bed, with a reading lamp on the headboard, artfully placed so that a bed-reader’s head would inevitably shadow his book; there was a telephone and there was a window from which one could look down on Fifth Avenue. Mary Hunter sat in the straight chair and Pam North in the other. Pam tried to sit on her foot and be comfortable, but there was no room in the chair. She tried it twice and gave it up. Jerry sat on the window-sill. He looked down at the street and it was a long way down, so he looked instead at Mary Hunter. She had very wide-spaced eyes; her cheekbones made her face a soft triangle. She would, Jerry thought, photograph beautifully.

She talked with many little pauses between her sentences and she talked more slowly as she went on, but also with less hesitancy. She remembered as she talked.

It had been—what there was of it to be—in the summer before the war. “The strange summer,” she said, and Pam nodded. She remembered it as a strange summer—a restless summer, in which all that one did seemed tentative and merely a part of waiting; a summer in which nothing could be started that would outlast the summer; a time in which no one could keep his mind on anything that was, because it was so clear what was to be. And yet it had not been clear what was coming—not clear to the mind. There was a kind of disbelief in everything and nothing was quite real, even the approaching—the almost certainly approaching—reality of the future which was to change everything. (And which had, actually, changed only some things, and those only for some people.) But perhaps this was only, Pam thought, the way one remembered the summer; perhaps, for the most part, it had really been like any summer, no more desperate—except that now, knowing more clearly that it was the last summer of its kind, one felt it should have been desperate, and so remembered that it was.

And it could not have been so very different for a girl of nineteen—blond and pretty and living pleasantly on Long Island. Living only pleasantly, not extravagantly. “It was just a little house, really,” Mary said. “Not like the Merles’. Dad didn’t have money like that—he didn’t have as much money as he used to have.” But there had been the big car—the reasonably big car—and the station wagon. It had, Jerry North gathered, been more than suburban.

“Two or three years before that,” the girl said, “Dad was—I think he was—making quite a lot of money. When I was about sixteen. Everything felt like he was making a lot of money. I guess I just took it for granted. Then, just before I was nineteen—that was in February—he told mother they’d have to pull in their horns. But when she looked worried and said, ‘You mean really, Frank?’ he smiled and shook his head and said, ‘Not really. Just a little.’”

They waited, because she paused then.

“This has something to do with the rest of it,” she said. “It’s not—not just reminiscence.”

They accepted her statement without words. She went on.

It had been that spring—the spring she was nineteen—that she had really met Joshua Merle. She accented the word “really” and explained. It was not, really—she smiled slightly at her repetition of the word—not really the first time she had met him. She must have met him a dozen times when they were both growing up, he a few years ahead of her in the process. The families had known each other—casually. “Or I thought casually,” she said. “Now I don’t know. Because Dad and Mr. Merle had some sort of business contact.”

She shook her head and said she was sorry.

“That’s all I know,” she said. “I didn’t think much about things like that. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. The Merles were just people who—oh, who went to the same church Mother and Dad did and who had a lot of money and a big place, and who sent the best flowers when the church was decorated. That didn’t mean much one way or the other, to me, because the church didn’t. I guess it didn’t to Dad, either, but it did to Mother.”

Pam started to say something, but Jerry shook his head at her. The girl did not notice.

She had met Joshua Merle at a dance at the country club on a Saturday night. As she remembered it—as she remembered something—her face changed and her eyes changed. They had met in a big way. The words were hers. “We met in a big way,” she said. “We didn’t know where we had been all our lives—all one another’s life—how ought I to say it, Mrs. North?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mrs. North said. “The way you said it was perfectly clear.” Pam looked at Jerry. “Perfectly clear,” she repeated.

“At least as clear as—” Jerry said, and stopped. Pam slightly made a face at him.

“Josh—it’s because of his grandfather,” the girl explained. “The name is. Josh had been down from Princeton for the weekend. During the rest of the spring he was down for other weekends, and after he was graduated he was home.

“And we met a lot,” she said. “An awful lot—we went riding and played tennis and danced and went swimming and—oh, all the things you do in summer.” She paused. “Including falling in love,” she said. “Which is something you do mostly in summer, I guess. Josh was—he was sweet.”

She paused for a longer moment; it seemed that she was not going on.

“And something happened?” Mrs. North said, finally.

The girl looked at her.

“I—” she said. She stopped. “We were going to get married,” she said. “We decided to get married. Before the war started. Because everybody knew it was going to start. But—.” She swallowed and shook her head, so that the short blond hair was ruffled. When she continued it was with an effort to make her voice impersonal; it was with what seemed to be an effort to wipe out of her mind the knowledge that she was telling the story to anyone. She spoke as if speaking to herself.

“It was like—oh, like a melodrama,” she said. “Some kind of a bad play. Josh took me to their place one afternoon and we were going to have a swim and a drink and then go on to dinner with some other people. And Mr. Merle sent word out to me by one of the servants that he would like me to come to his study. And I went. I was wearing a white play suit. I didn’t feel grown up at all.”

George Merle had been very formidable at a desk—a heavy desk with a sheet of plate glass over the top. He had sat behind the desk and he had said, “Sit down, Miss Thorgson.” She had sat down and he had sat for a long minute looking at her and not saying anything. “And knowing what he was doing to me,” the girl said. Then he had begun to talk.

He said that he was afraid she and Joshua were getting unfortunate notions about each other, and that he did not want her to make any mistake. He said this coldly and evenly, and without any particular inflection. He had sat behind the heavy desk and looked at the slight blond girl in a white play suit which made her—there, with him looking at her—feel helplessly like a child, and he had spoken evenly and without any friendliness in his voice.

“You think,” he had said, “that Joshua has a great deal of money, or will have. No doubt your father thinks so too.”

“My father?” the girl had said. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Merle.”

Merle had said that she knew well enough. That her father knew well enough. But he had no objection to putting it into words.

“You think that Joshua is worth marrying,” he said. “No doubt your father thinks that is a good way to get it back. You can tell him for me it won’t work.”

The girl said that she hadn’t understood. “I told him I didn’t understand what he meant,” she said.

“What I mean is,” he said, “that you are planning to marry Joshua for his money—my money. Your father put you up to it, I imagine. But it isn’t going to work. Because if he marries you he won’t have any money. Now or in the future. He won’t have his allowance. He won’t get any money when I die.” He had paused, then, thinking it over. “At least,” he said, “he won’t if I can help it. The way the courts are now, no sane man can say what they’ll rule. But it would take him years—and for years he wouldn’t have any money. You can tell your father that, Miss Thorgson.”

The girl still hadn’t understood.

“Even now,” she said, “I don’t know what he meant. But I think he hated Dad. It must have been something—something to do with business—that they were in together. I think it had something to do with Dad not having as much money as he used to have—suddenly not having as much money. But I don’t know. I never asked Dad—I never told him anything about it. I couldn’t. And then he died, that fall.”

Then, before the implacable man behind the heavy desk, she had merely stood up, feeling white. “I must have been white,” she said. “I felt so—so gone. And I said a very strange thing.”

She paused, not hesitantly, but as if she were remembering anew.

“I said, ‘You’re horrible. You ought to die,’” the girl said. “I said ‘You ought to die.’ And this afternoon I came home and—and he was dead.”

Her voice was distant; it had the distance of an echo.