10

WEDNESDAY, 1:15 P.M. TO 4:10 P.M.

The sun was warm and bright on the lawn stretching from house to swimming pool, but the shadow began to creep out from the house toward the pool. At first it was only an edge of shadow, reaching no farther than the serving table set between the French doors which led into the long, cool living room. They sat in the sun, not at one table but as they chose, at several small tables. And they did not hurry; almost at once Bill Weigand decided that he had made a mistake in staying. Because this was going on—nobody could guess how long it was going on.

First the table against the house was a bar—first and last it was a bar. The Negro butler in a white coat—the butler named Meggs—brought out trays of bottles and glasses and two maids assisted with ice and cocktail shakers.

“Sit here,” Ann Merle suggested; and Bill Weigand sat with her at a little table for four on the flagstoned terrace. Captain Sullivan of the State Police sat in a third chair rather eagerly, and Mullins looked doubtful. “Here you are, Sergeant,” Weldon Jameson told him, and Mullins sat at another table a little way off with Jameson and Joshua Merle. But almost at once Jameson got up and moved across to take the fourth chair at the table where Weigand and Sullivan sat with Ann Merle. Then Mrs. Burnwood came out through one of the French doors, a little to Weigand’s surprise, and the men stood up briefly. She sat with her nephew and Mullins. Meggs began to shake daiquiris expertly, and a round, pink man in slacks and a pale blue shirt came around the house from the direction of the beach. He blinked a little in the sun, pleasantly.

“Hi,” Ann Merle called. “Just in time. Sit down somewhere. Oh—come here first.”

The round little man came gently across the flagstones, smiling at everybody. He came to stand near Ann. He said, “Good morning, my dear,” in a gentle voice and “Hello, Theodore” to Sullivan. He looked at Bill Weigand with an air of pleased expectancy.

“Pottsy,” Ann said, “this is Lieutenant Weigand. Lieutenant, this is Mr. Potts—Wickersham Potts. The organist.”

Weigand blinked and took the hand Mr. Potts held out. It was a firm hand, solid and confident.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Mr. Potts said, as if he really believed it was a good morning, and was pleased for his own sake and the lieutenant’s sake. “I’m very glad, sir.” He meant that he was glad to meet Weigand, evidently; he sounded as if he were glad.

“How do you do?” Bill said. In spite of himself, his voice had a note of surprise. The note, Bill Weigand was instantly conscious, did not escape Mr. Potts. Mr. Potts did not look like a man from whom much would escape in inflection, in nuance. But Mr. Potts made nothing of it. If Weigand had expected a different sort of Mr. Potts, and was surprised by what he got, that was interesting but unabashing to Mr. Potts. He smiled at Weigand as if already he liked him.

“On leave, Lieutenant?” he inquired gently, his eyes just noticing Weigand’s gray suit.

“Oh,” Ann said. “Not an army lieutenant. A police lieutenant.” She sobered. “About Father, you know, Pottsy.”

“Of course,” Mr. Potts said. “Naturally. It was a very tragic thing—a very cruel and tragic thing. It is strange what people will do to one another.”

“Yes,” Weigand said.

“The human mind,” Mr. Potts said. “A strange and alarming thing, don’t you think so, Lieutenant? Do sit down.”

Bill Weigand sat down and Sullivan sat down.

“Good morning, Mr. Potts,” Weldon Jameson said, and there was a note in his voice which seemed to challenge the organist. Mr. Potts turned a little and regarded Jameson.

“Oh,” he said. “Good morning, Mr. Jameson.”

He turned back to Ann, with no impoliteness but as if he and Jameson had finished a long and interesting conversation and it was time to turn his attention elsewhere.

“In the cottage,” he said, “there are two cans of beans, a can of noodle soup, and some bread which I fear is rather stale. So, if I may?”

“Pottsy!” Ann said. “You know we were expecting you.”

“You are very kind, my dear,” Mr. Potts said. “You are all very kind. I hoped you were. Ah—your aunt.”

He nodded and smiled to Bill Weigand, indicating by both his renewed pleasure in their meeting, and went across to Mrs. Burnwood. After a moment, he sat with her and her nephew and Mullins.

“He’s a dear,” Ann told Bill Weigand. She did not care whether Mr. Potts heard or not, and the tables were close enough so that conversations tangled in the quiet air.

Mr. Potts turned from his conversation with Sergeant Mullins and raised his eyebrows at her and smiled. He turned back to Mullins.

“Yours must be an interesting profession, Sergeant,” he said. “But sad—essentially sad.”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “I know what you mean.”

“Does he?” Ann said to Bill Weigand.

“Yes,” Bill told her. “Probably.”

The butler in the white coat offered a tray. Pale martinis were on it, with the barely perceptible dullness of the oil from lemon peel on their surfaces. There were no olives. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and Bill did not miss it. There were daiquiris with no frosting of sugar on the rims of the glasses. Ann said, faithfully, Captain Sullivan took daiquiris.

“Scotch, sir?” Meggs suggested to Weldon Jameson. He turned the tray and Jameson lifted scotch from it. Meggs turned away and a dark girl in a green uniform offered canapés. It had somehow the earmarks of a cocktail party—a cocktail party at one thirty in the afternoon. But apparently it was only luncheon at the Merles’. Jameson’s first contact with his scotch brought the level halfway down the glass. Bill Weigand drank his martini slowly at first. Meggs was an artist. He drank more rapidly. His glass and that of Ann Merle went down together, both empty. Captain Sullivan was slower. Meggs gravitated back and removed the glasses and Weigand watched him go with regret. Meggs returned with fresh glasses. Weigand, sipping, discovered that the new drink was freshly made. Meggs was quite a man.

But he should not be sitting here in the sun, a lotus drinker. He should be in Elmcroft, seeing a lawyer, he should be in New York, finding a murderer.

“You have a very delightful place here, Miss Merle,” he said. “A very beautiful place.”

It was nice, Ann Merle agreed.

“We all like it,” she said. “Don’t we, Jamie?”

“Very much,” Jameson said. “Very much, darling.”

It was a casual “darling.”

A car stopped somewhere and a car door slammed. A tall young man in tennis whites came around the house and looked at them.

“Stan!” Ann Merle called. “Hello, Stan.”

The tall young man came across to the table. His face was grave.

“Ann,” he said. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

“Yes, Stan,” Ann Merle said. “It’s a hell of a thing.”

“Are you all right?” the man said. “I wanted to see if you were all right.” He looked at her face intently.

“Don’t I look all right?” she said. “Yes, I’m all right, Stan. You were sweet to—you don’t know all these people, do you, Stan. This is Lieutenant Weigand. A police lieutenant.”

“Oh,” the young man said. “Hello, Lieutenant.”

“Stanley Goode,” Ann said.

Bill Weigand shook hands with Stanley Goode, who was a good enough tennis player to be a tennis bum, and had too much money to be a bum of any kind. And who was one of the few in the first ten not in a uniform of some sort.

“Hello, Captain,” Stanley Goode said to Sullivan. “Jamie.”

“Hello,” Sullivan said, with no perceptible enthusiasm. “Ann’s all right.”

“Sure,” Goode said. “Everybody’s all right. What’s murder among friends?”

“Stan!” Ann said. “For God’s sake, Stan!”

“Sorry,” Goode said. “Everybody looks so damn comfortable. Don’t they, Jamie?”

“Why not?” Jameson said.

“Sit down, Stan,” Ann said. “Have a drink. Don’t be a fool.”

“Stan is young,” Mr. Potts said from the next table. “Very young. He believes in forms. How are you, Stan?”

“Fine,” Stanley Goode said. “Fine as silk.”

He sat down on the grass by Ann’s chair. When Meggs came around again he took a scotch. Ann bent and said something to him.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s the whole damn thing—all the damned things.”

“Not again?” she said.

“Why not?” he said. “Why the hell not? They’ve said it; they stick to it.”

Ann said she was sorry.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stanley Goode said. “You’ve got enough to—I’m sorry as hell about your dad, Ann.”

“I know,” Ann said. “You’re sweet.”

The maids began to pass plates and, after the plates, great trays of salad, cold meat, jellied consommes. It was time for food, Bill Weigand thought—after three martinis it was time for food. He ate, listening to conversation around him. Ann pushed her food back and forth on her plate and lifted her eyebrows to Meggs.

“Bring me a rum collins, Meggs,” she said when he came over. He brought the rum collins, the glass frosted.

Jameson drank thirstily and ate a little. Sullivan drank not at all and ate a good deal. Stanley Goode refused food, saying he had already eaten. He sipped his drink slowly but persistently.

At the other table, Mrs. Burnwood and Mr. A. Wickersham Potts were drinking sherry out of small glasses, and Mullins, already reddening slightly, was drinking old-fashioneds. By the color, Joshua Merle was drinking a cuba libre. But nobody was showing anything, if you discounted the reddening of Mullins, which Weigand was willing to do.

Or were they showing something? Later in the afternoon, Bill Weigand wondered if they had not been. He wondered if even then, before the fireworks started, there had not been a tension in the group on the terrace, with the shadow from the house gradually reaching out over them, synchronizing its coolness with the sun’s increasing warmth as if the Merles had planned it so. As, of course, in a sense they had when they built the big white house and put a flagged terrace on the side which would be shady in the afternoon, and left the pool beyond the farthest reach of shade, so that it would be warm there as long as the sun held.

If there was tension, Bill Weigand was only half conscious of it at the time. Relaxed by the cocktails, even his never too disturbing sense of urgency had left him—there on the terrace, with the city a long way off, he tentatively accepted the present as a pause in the day’s occupation. “Which,” he quoted to himself, “is known as the children’s hour.” They had finished their food and were drinking iced coffee—he, at any rate, was drinking iced coffee—when he returned to full awareness and began, casually at first and then more acutely, to wonder whether there was not something in the air among these pleasant people which needed his attention—which was, after all, somehow a part of his occupation.

After the tables had been cleared and only glasses remained—and only one or two of them, he gathered, containing anything so mild as his iced coffee and Mr. Potts’s evident iced tea—people began to move around. Jameson got up, carrying his glass, and wandered away somewhere. And when he wandered back he limped over to the table at which Joshua Merle sat and stood there, looking down at Merle and Merle’s aunt and the round, gentle organist. Stan Goode got up and pulled Ann by the hand from her chair and they went out into the sun and sat side by side in deck chairs. Captain Sullivan looked after them, but did not move.

After a little, Mr. Potts got up from the table and, although there seemed to be no purpose in his movements, they brought him to the table at which Bill Weigand sat, thinking it was time to break loose from this languid comfort and be about his business. Potts sat down.

“Conscience,” he said with no preliminaries, “is a strange thing, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”

“How strange?” Weigand asked him.

“I was thinking of conscience as a compulsion,” Potts said. “A compulsion to repay—to discharge an obligation. An obligation we may so easily overestimate.”

“Not,” Bill Weigand said, “the conscience of a murderer. That isn’t what you’re thinking of.”

“Not entirely,” Mr. Potts said. “That would be interesting too, I should suppose. How must a man feel when he has taken human life?” He paused, reflectively. “Personally,” he said, “I have never committed a murder.”

He said it simply, as one might confer information—as one might say that, personally, he never drank beer. He did not at all say it as anything which was obvious on the face of things; he spoke as if Bill Weigand might have been wondering.

“No,” Weigand said, not quite smiling. “A great many people haven’t, Mr. Potts. A surprising number of people haven’t.”

“Well,” Mr. Potts said, “a surprising number of people have. It depends on what surprises you.”

“Yes,” Bill Weigand said. “What surprises you, Mr. Potts?”

“Very little,” Mr. Potts said. “Very little indeed, Lieutenant. I am sometimes surprised at how many things do not surprise me.” He considered this. “I presume,” he said, “that there is a deficiency somewhere which would account for that. But it could hardly be a vitamin deficiency, would you think, Lieutenant? Because I get a very adequate supply of vitamins, I’m sure.”

“It could,” Bill Weigand told him, “be a deficiency in illusions.”

Mr. Potts looked at Bill and thought it over and nodded.

“That is very true, Lieutenant,” he said. “I am not surprised to find that you have hit on that. It could very well be a deficiency in illusions.” He paused again. “And, of course, I find people very interesting,” he said. “I take a quite real interest in people. But I do not suppose that surprises you, Lieutenant?”

“No,” Bill said. “I can’t say that surprises me.”

Mr. Potts stood up.

“People are very interesting,” he repeated. “Often even small things about them are very revealing. At the moment, I am particularly interested in conscience—not necessarily the conscience of a murderer, because I have seen nothing which reveals that. Not here, at any rate.”

Weigand stood up.

“Do you want to tell me something, Mr. Potts?” he said.

A. Wickersham Potts did not seem surprised at that, either. He smiled faintly and did not answer directly.

“I merely wondered whether you shared my interest in the effect of conscience on an individual,” he said. “Conscience which amounts to a sense of obligation—probably to an excessive sense of obligation.”

He looked across at Ann and Stanley Goode.

“Ann is a very sweet child, Lieutenant,” he said. “She is much more broken up over her father’s death than you might think. She is not at all callous.”

“I hadn’t thought she was,” Weigand assured him.

“No,” Mr. Potts said. “I didn’t think you thought that, Lieutenant. She is under something of a strain at the moment, in addition to that, of course. She is—how shall I say it—being offered an obligation. A share of an obligation. She has other plans, but she is a very sensitive child in many ways.”

He paused again and continued to regard Ann Merle and Goode.

“It’s too bad about Goode,” he said. “Very bad heart, you know. At least, the doctors say so. I must say he doesn’t look it. I—”

He left whatever he had planned to add to dissipate and went off, not as if he had any particular destination. He went, generally, toward the house. And what, Bill wondered, was that about?

He stood up with his glass, intending to thank Ann and be about his business. But he decided that, instead—and since Ann and Stanley Goode were evidently engrossed—he might talk to Mrs. Burnwood. He crossed to the table where she still sat.

“—and it’s time somebody told you straight out, Joshua,” she was saying. “Your whole attitude is—is unwholesome. That’s the only word for it.”

“You don’t understand, Aunt Mae,” Josh Merle said. His face was darkly intent. “You simply don’t understand Jamie—oh, hello, Weigand.”

Weigand’s eyes sought Mullins, but Mullins had disappeared.

“It was very good of you—” he began. But Mrs. Burnwood was not listening. She was looking beyond him, and young Merle half turned in his chair and looked in the same direction. Suddenly Merle swore, and his voice was angry.

Bill Weigand turned and, no doubt because he was not so deficient in illusions as Mr. Potts, he was surprised. Laurel Burke was coming across the lawn from the car circle. Behind her a car turned on the circle, spitting gravel, and went down toward the county road. Miss Burke apparently had come by taxi and did not plan an immediate return.

Weigand did not watch her. He turned quickly and watched the faces of those who were watching her. Mrs. Burnwood’s face showed surprise and uncertainty. It did not, Weigand thought, show recognition. But Josh Merle knew Laurel Burke and did not want her there. Weigand looked for Mr. Potts to see whether this surprised him, but Mr. Potts was not present to be unsurprised. Nor, for that matter, was Weldon Jameson. Then Weldon Jameson came out from the living room through one of the French doors. He had not seen Laurel Burke yet. When, seeing so many eyes on a single point, he turned and did see Laurel Burke, his back was to Weigand and there was nothing to go on but the set of shoulders and the movement of body. These, Weigand discovered, were nothing at all to go on.

Ann and Stanley Goode had their backs to the house and were still engrossed. They did not turn until Laurel Burke spoke.

Miss Burke was entirely conscious of the entrance she was making. That was evident in each considered step she took, each movement of her body. Her body had many movements. She wore a print dress which let the movements of her body be seen; she had white artificial flowers in her hair to serve as hat. Even from fifty feet her bright fingernails caught the sun and sparkled redly.

“Hello, everybody,” Laurel Burke said in her lowest and most controlled tones—the tones which were almost good enough. “Hello, everybody. I’m Laurel Burke.”

Nobody said anything. Miss Burke did not seem to expect that anybody would say anything. She came toward them, smiling pleasantly, ignoring what she might have interpreted as a lack of welcoming enthusiasm.

It was not clear whether she recognized any of the people looking at her. She did not directly, specially, look at anyone. Possibly her glance lingered a moment as it passed Weldon Jameson, but that was guesswork. Perhaps it lingered again as it encountered the dark, now definitely angry, face of Joshua Merle. But neither Merle nor Jameson said anything in reply to her greeting, and she seemed not at all surprised that they did not.

“I thought,” Laurel Burke said when she was close enough to speak without raising her carefully controlled voice, “I thought I’d better come and introduce myself. I’m Laurel Burke.”

Ann Merle was coming across the lawn toward them now, with Stanley Goode behind her. She did not say anything.

“Don’t,” Miss Burke said, “tell me I’m not welcome. Really I feel as if I were coming home. I’ve heard so much about this beautiful place.”

“How do you do, Miss Burke,” Ann Merle said. Her young voice was level, without expression. “I’m afraid I don’t—”

“You,” Laurel Burke said, “must be Ann.”

“I’m Ann Merle,” Ann told her. “This is the Merle place.”

“Of course, dear,” Laurel said. “The taxi man knew instantly. I had him go on, of course. I knew I would be here—some time.”

Joshua Merle limped forward suddenly until he was quite close to her.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “You—”

“Don’t you, Mr. Merle?” Laurel said. “It is Mr. Merle, isn’t it?”

“You know damn well,” Merle told her.

“And, as you put it, you know damn well what I want,” Laurel said, but she still kept her voice down. “What—we want.” Her accent was heavy on the “we.”

“Who,” Mrs. Burnwood said, with a good deal of distaste “is this—this Miss Burke, Joshua?”

Laurel Burke did not give Joshua time to answer.

“Mrs. Burnwood?” she said. “Of course. Why, my dear, your brother’s girl friend, of course. His very dear girl friend.”

There was no mistaking what she meant. She had not intended there should be. There was a complete hush over the terrace. It was so complete that the sound of ice falling into a glass from Meggs’s silver tongs was like a crash.

“Oh,” Laurel said, and her voice was sweet—was very sweet. “I don’t believe you knew. I really don’t believe Georgey told you. He was so secretive, wasn’t he. Poor, dear Georgey.”

“You—!” Joshua Merle said, and moved very close to her. She did not draw back, but her voice was harder when she spoke.

“I wouldn’t, Josh Merle,” she said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t. You might hurt your little brother.” She paused. “Or, of course, your little sister,” she said. “Your father’s youngest child, whatever the brat turns out to be.”

Everybody looked at her with a different look.

“Oh,” Laurel said, “you can’t see anything yet. But you will, my dears.” She looked at them, and now there was no longer an attempt at suavity. “You sure as hell will. About December, the doctor says.”

Mrs. Burnwood detached herself from a world which contained Laurel Burke and spoke across the unlimited space she had opened between them.

“I do not believe you,” she said, giving each word its own distinct finality.

“No?” Laurel Burke said. “Well, my lawyer does.”

And if Mrs. Burnwood’s tone was distant, Miss Burke’s tone was assured—utterly assured. If Miss Burke was lying, she lied like an expert.

“Lieutenant Weigand,” Mrs. Burnwood said, across almost as great a distance, “do we have to accept this, Captain Sullivan?”

“No,” Sullivan said. “You can order her off your grounds. She’s trespassing.”

“Yes, Mrs. Burnwood,” Bill Weigand said. “You can do that. If you want to.”

“Oh, Lieutenant,” Laurel Burke said, “how nice to see you again.”

“Is it?” Bill Weigand asked her.

“Lieutenant,” Ann Merle said. “Do you know Miss Burke?”

Weigand nodded slowly. He said he had talked to her.

“About your father’s murder, Miss Merle,” he said. He let it lie there.

“Then,” Ann said, “she did know father. She was—what she says she was?”

“She knew your father, Miss Merle,” Weigand said. “She may have been.” He paused a moment. “I’d talk to her, if I were you—all of you. Although, as Sullivan says, you can throw her out.”

“I think the lieutenant is so intelligent, don’t you?” Miss Burke said, to nobody in particular. “And those drinks you all have do look so refreshing on such a warm afternoon.”

Mrs. Burnwood turned and walked, without hurrying, with the stiffest of possible backs, across the terrace and through one of the French doors. Only after she had gone did anyone speak. Then it was Ann Merle.

“Meggs,” she said, “Miss Burke would like a drink.”

“Rye,” Miss Burke said. “And soda if you’ve got it.”

“Yes’m,” Meggs said. He said it reproachfully. The very notion, his voice said, that the Merle establishment would be at any time, under any conceivable circumstances, without soda! Meggs, Bill Weigand decided afterward, was the only person who really got under Laurel Burke’s skin throughout that long afternoon and evening, during which so many people tried to. Meggs convicted her of ignorance and of gaucherie with what, in his mouth, was a single syllable.

With a drink, Laurel Burke became a guest. It was interesting to watch the change. With a drink, she got a chair. With a chair, she became part of the group on the terrace, entitled to all privileges appertaining. Men stood until she was seated, Meggs moved a small table within reach of her hand, Meggs opened a box of cigarettes and put it by her drink. When she took a cigarette, Josh Merle, although his face was still dark and angry, bent toward her with a light.

“Thank you,” Miss Burke said, politely. She considered. “You are all very kind,” she told them.

Mr. Potts was back from wherever he had been, Bill Weigand noticed. He looked at Miss Burke with interest but without surprise.

“Weigand,” Joshua Merle said.

“Yes?” Bill Weigand said.

“You say this—this Miss Burke could have been what she says she was?”

“She could have been,” Weigand said. “I don’t know that she was.”

“You think she was?” Merle wanted to know.

“I think she could have been,” Weigand said. “Naturally, I don’t know that she is going to have your father’s child, Mr. Merle. I don’t know that she’s going to have anybody’s child.”

“Ask my doctor,” Laurel Burke said, shortly.

“I imagine they will, Miss Burke,” Bill Weigand said. “I imagine they’ll do just that. I suppose you are thinking about a paternity suit? Against the estate?”

“If they want it that way,” Laurel Burke said. “I don’t insist on it. I don’t mind it.”

“In spite of the fact,” Bill reminded her, “that you lived in the Madison Avenue place as Murdock’s wife?”

She could, Laurel Burke said, get around that all right.

“Plenty of people knew that was a gag,” she said. “Plenty of people.”

There was, Bill Weigand thought, a definite meaning in her emphasis on plenty. She might mean that some of them were in the group which heard her. It sounded as if she did mean that.

Bill Weigand looked at the group—Jameson, Merle, Ann Merle, Potts, Sullivan and himself and Mullins—who had also come back from wherever he had been—and Stanley Goode. And, of course, Meggs, circulating again with drinks. Everybody took drinks; almost abstractedly, Bill Weigand took one himself.

He waited for Ann or Josh Merle to deny—perhaps to deny heatedly—that their father was capable of living the kind of life Laurel Burke was saying he had lived; the kind of life which implied a surreptitious relationship with a girl such as Laurel, carried on under the cover of his secretary’s name; all of which implied, in essence, a series of mean assignations in a hide-out—a life lacking entirely in the dignity George Merle had otherwise seemed to prize. But neither Ann nor Joshua challenged the girl on those grounds. These, he concluded, were wise children.

“What is going to be your story, Miss Burke?” Josh Merle asked. “Why should we pay off? I gather you want us to pay you off?”

“I want you to support your father’s youngest child, Mr. Merle,” she said. “I hoped you would want to.”

Merle told her to come off it. He said she wanted them to support her. Because of her nuisance value. She opened her eyes wide in apparent astonishment and said that she thought he was taking a very unkind attitude. She said he wasn’t at all like his father.

“Your father was always terribly sweet to me,” she said.

Merle said, “Hell!” with emphasis and looked at Weigand.

“He used to take me to the most interesting places,” she said, as if Merle had not spoken. “To night clubs like—like the Zero Club.”

Again there was an odd emphasis. It was on the name of the club, which Bill Weigand knew, it being a part of his business to know them all. The Zero Club was in a basement and it was so dimly lighted that the face of a companion floated dimly across a table. It was a place where the chances of running into people—save in the purely physical sense, which was always probable—were reassuringly slight. If you wanted to be reassured, as George Merle must have. But there seemed no clear reason why Laurel Burke had gone to the trouble of mentioning it.

“Do any of you know the Zero Club?” she asked, “such an interesting place.”

She looked around. Weigand could not see that her glance lingered on any of them.

“Yes,” Mr. Potts said, unexpectedly. “A very odd place indeed, Miss Burke. Why?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just wondered. You’d like it, I’m sure—all of you. Mr. Jameson—you’d like it. Mr. Merle.”

The two men looked at her. Joshua Merle said he doubted it.

“As a matter of fact,” Jameson said, “I don’t like it particularly. Any part of it.”

“Really, Mr. Jameson?” she said. “Really? Do you like it, Miss Merle?”

“I like to see the people I’m with,” Ann said. “I’m not afraid of people’s seeing me.”

“Why, of course not, Miss Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Why should you be?”

“What is your story?” Joshua Merle insisted. “If you’ve got a story.”

“Why,” Laurel said, “just what you suppose, Mr. Merle. Your father met me and was attracted and—things just happened. He rented me that dear little apartment and—”

“Under Murdock’s name,” Bill Weigand said. “So you could pose as Murdock’s wife?”

“Your dear father was so careful, Mr. Merle,” Laurel Burke said. “Of course he was such an important man.”

“Did Murdock—find you for Mr. Merle?” Weigand asked.

She looked at him.

“I think that’s a terrible thing to say, Lieutenant,” she said. “So exactly what a policeman would think.”

“It’s what I think,” Joshua Merle told her. “I knew Murdock. He—did things like that for Father.”

He spoke bitterly. He was without illusions about his father. At some time, when he had found out things first, and the illusions first began to go, he had been bitterly hurt. Now the bitterness was dry and old.

“My dear boy,” Laurel Burke said, with a kind of awful archness, “you make Mr. Murdock sound like—what is the word—a pimp. And your father—really, Mr. Merle, I can’t have you saying things like that about your dear father.”

“You—” Merle began. Then he stopped. His voice grew quieter although his face did not change. “We’ll have to talk this over, Miss Burke. We’ll have to go into it.”

“Of course,” Laurel Burke said. “That’s why I came. So we could all talk it over like friends.”

“Of course,” Mr. Potts said gently, “Mr. Merle—Mr. George Merle—was over sixty, wasn’t he?”

Laurel Burke looked at him. She said, “Why, Mr. Potts!”

She stood up.

“You know,” she said, “I’d really love to wash my hands.”

They watched her go across the terrace, guided by Meggs, and through one of the French doors. And then they turned and looked at Bill Weigand and waited, the question evident but unphrased. Slowly, with regret, Bill Weigand nodded.

“As I said,” he told them, “I am inclined to believe she was your father’s girl. The girl he kept. Whether she is going to have a child by him I haven’t any idea. Naturally. She may be. If she is, she’ll probably be able to collect, unless—”

He paused and looked around at them.

“Unless she killed your father, or was mixed up in it,” he said. “Because you may as well know—if you don’t know—Murdock didn’t kill him. And Murdock didn’t kill himself. He didn’t, so far as I know, kill anybody. But somebody killed him.”

He looked for surprise and found none of it.

“Of course,” Mr. Potts said, gently, “we guessed that, Lieutenant. Because otherwise, why would you be here?”

Weigand looked at A. Wickersham Potts and smiled faintly.

“I didn’t expect you to be surprised, Mr. Potts,” he said.

“Do you think she killed him?” Joshua Merle said, and there was something like hope in his tone.

Weigand shrugged slightly. There was a chance, he said. If, say, he suddenly told her he was finished and that she and the child—if any—could whistle for their support. Then she might have killed, either in rage or with consideration, after weighing one thing against another and deciding that Merle’s family was a better bet than Merle. But there was, at the moment, no evidence.

“There are alternatives,” he said. “Several alternatives. Miss Burke and Murdock and whatever they had cooked up may have had nothing to do with it.”

“You mean,” Mr. Potts said, “that there was an understanding between Murdock and Miss Burke—an understanding to defraud Mr. Merle? That he was—a victim?”

Wickersham Potts was shrewd. He was very shrewd. But Weigand contented himself with the non-committal remark that such things happened. In, he pointed out, a variety of ways—variants on the “badger game.” Murdock as the outraged husband, for example.

Mr. Potts shook his head. He thought it would not have been that. Knowing George Merle, having met Mr. Murdock, he thought it had not been that. Not in those terms.

“Mr. Merle and Mr. Murdock knew each other quite well,” he said. “Much too well for that, I should have thought. But if Mr. Murdock had—found Miss Burke for Mr. Merle and then had arranged with her to share the proceeds of—er—her pregnancy—that would be more likely. And the Mr. and Mrs. Murdock arrangement may not have been so—how shall I say it?—so completely a formality as we are asked to suppose. What do you think of that version, Lieutenant?”

Weigand thought that Mr. Potts was very shrewd indeed, and very observant. It occurred to him that Mr. Potts might some day be too observant for his own good. But he merely said that Mr. Potts’s idea was, indeed, an idea.

“It was interesting about the Zero Club,” Mr. Potts said. “Very interesting. I don’t care for the place, myself. But of course every man to his taste. Don’t you all agree?”

Then Mr. Potts got up and went off, not as if he were going any place in particular. And after that, for a long time, Weigand was not sure where Mr. Potts was. He was not, for several hours, sure where anybody was.

There had been a general tendency to break up when Mr. Potts departed; and Mullins, reappearing from the direction of the swimming pool, had looked inquiringly at Bill Weigand. Weigand shook his head. They were not leaving; they were waiting. Because it had occurred to Bill Weigand that it was not so necessary now for him to go to New York. It looked as if the part of New York he was interested in might be coming to Long Island.

He detained Joshua Merle when Merle started to rise, with an “Oh, Mr. Merle. If you’ve got a moment?” Merle sat down. Weigand’s attitude did not encourage the others to remain. Captain Sullivan was already gone; now Stanley Goode and Ann went off together, stopping by the table which held only bottles and glasses again, going together into the shadows of the big living room. Jameson limped off after them, and Joshua Merle’s eyes followed him. Bill Weigand’s first question brought them back.

“At one time, Mr. Merle,” Weigand said, “I gather you knew Mary Hunter—Mary Thorgson she was then—quite well. Is that correct?”

Merle shook his head slightly as if to clear it.

“What’s that got to do with it?” he said. “With anything?”

It was, Weigand told him, merely something he wanted to know about; he wanted to know about it because he was investigating a murder—the murder of Mr. Merle’s father. Merle was under no obligation to answer, unless he wanted to help.

“I don’t get it,” Merle said. “Mary doesn’t come into this. She—got out fast enough after she got what she wanted. But—yes, I knew her at one time. I thought we were going to get married. Does that surprise you?”

“No,” Weigand told him. “What happened?”

“My sainted father,” Merle said. “And a check. If you knew Mary and I were engaged, you must have known it from her. But I suppose she didn’t tell you all of it. I can see why she wouldn’t.”

“She told me—she told some friends of mine—that your father intervened,” Weigand said.

Intervened, Merle said, was good. Intervened was very good. Weigand waited. Merle said he still didn’t see what it had to do with anything, but what the hell?

“I was in love with her,” he said. “She acted as if she were in love with me. But Father laughed at that—and he was right that time. He said ‘like father, like daughter’ and not to trust any Thorgson. You see, her father had tried to gyp the old man once. He didn’t get away with it—it was the other way around—but the old boy hated him. Or had contempt for him. And he said Mary was the same breed. I—I suppose I yelled at him. And he just smiled, in a way he had—not a nice way.”

The way George Merle smiled meant that he would take care of things in his own fashion, whatever his son thought. He had, Joshua Merle said.

“One afternoon,” Merle told Weigand, “the old boy sent for her—I was off changing and she was right here, sitting on this terrace. She went in to see him and when I came out she had gone—with a nice check. It was as easy as that. The old boy said if she wanted money she could get it easier than by marrying me—probably told her some nonsense about cutting me off in his will and stopping my allowance meanwhile. What he called an allowance—enough to keep me in cigarettes and tied to the house. He said he would pay her then and there. And he did. I was worth ten thousand dollars to Mary—ten thousand lousy smackers.”

“Did she tell you this?” Weigand asked.

“I didn’t see her again,” Joshua Merle said. “Not to talk to, anyway. The old boy told me. He was—he was smirking about it. I hated him.”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “Did you go on hating him, Mr. Merle?”

Merle looked at Bill Weigand and his eyes narrowed.

“I didn’t like him much,” he said. “I never liked him much after that. But he was right and I suppose he did me a good turn. But I just didn’t like him.” He paused and looked at Weigand hard. “Do you think I’d kill my father because I didn’t like him, Weigand?” he wanted to know.

Weigand shook his head, but did not answer directly. Instead, he asked another question.

“Suppose,” he said, “your father lied to you about her. Suppose—I’m merely supposing—he told her some other story—that you had asked him to get rid of her for you. Something like that. And suppose that later, recently say, she found out the story he told you. What would you think of that, Merle?”

Merle thought it was a lot of nonsense. He didn’t call it nonsense, but that was roughly what he meant. But after he had said that, he looked at Weigand with narrowed eyes. He wanted, after a moment, to know what Weigand meant by that.

“Your father was killed in Mrs. Hunter’s apartment,” Weigand said. “Suppose—and this is merely supposition again—she really loved you and never got over it entirely. Suppose she suddenly came into her apartment and found your father there—suppose she arranged to get him there after she found out. Suppose she tried to get him to tell you the truth and he just laughed at her. And suppose all the hate she had been feeling since she found out floated up and—.”

Merle looked at Weigand as if he were seeing horrors. He passed his hand over his forehead. It was quite a while before he spoke.

“You’re making it up,” he said, and swore at Weigand savagely.

Weigand sat quietly and looked at him.

“But I said I was making it up,” he agreed. “I said I was supposing. It is a hypothesis entirely, Mr. Merle. Only—it is a possible hypothesis. Assuming your father lied.”

“He didn’t lie. Not that time,” Merle said. He said it with determination, and with anger.

“Oh, yes,” Weigand said. “He lied, I think, Mr. Merle. I really think he lied.”

He waited and Merle merely stared at the ground.

“You see, Merle,” Weigand said, “your father hated Mrs. Hunter’s father. He had cheated Mr. Thorgson out of quite a sum of money, I suspect. And often we hate those we wrong—it is a form of self-justification. Your father wasn’t going to let Thorgson have the satisfaction of seeing his daughter married to you.” Weigand paused. “Of course, to do your father credit,” he added, “he may not have thought the feeling between you and Mary was really serious.”

Merle did not look up. He spoke to the ground. He said:

“It was serious, all right.”

After a considerable time, Merle spoke again.

“Is that all you wanted?” he said.

Weigand agreed it was all he wanted. But when Merle stood up and had taken one limping step, Bill Weigand spoke as if he had just remembered something.

“By the way,” he said. “That man who called you at Charles and told you your father had been killed—would you know his voice if you heard it again? Had you ever heard it before?”

“I don’t know,” Merle said. “I don’t remember that I’d ever heard it before. It was muffled, sort of. I didn’t think about that—just about what the man said. I just heard what he said and started off without waiting for Jamie.”

“Right,” Weigand said.

Merle went off. For a man with a limp, he walked fast.

Bill Weigand rather unexpectedly found himself alone. He was alone when Pam and Jerry North arrived, bringing Mary Hunter with them. Then it was a little after four o’clock.