7

Tuesday, 10:30 A.M. to 2:40 P.M.

It was all very well for dear Thelma to be superior; in almost all matters, and especially in those of real importance, she was superior, and Lucinda Whitsett had no thought of questioning a fact so immutable. I am the flighty one, Lucinda thought, and was at the same time aware that being the flighty one, the literary one, should embarrass her more than it did, or at least than it always did. It was all very well for Thelma to say “Lucinda!” in that special tone, because certainly such divagations as Lucinda was prone to would be inclined to annoy a no-nonsense person like dear Thelma. (Miss Lucinda Whitsett liked the word “divagations,” which she had read somewhere. She often thought it, although it was rather ungainly for speech.)

But all the same, Miss Lucinda thought as she hung up the telephone which had not been answered, it is worth looking into, whatever Thelma would think. Even if there is no use in taking it up with Thelma, since she’s already snorted at it, and even if dear Pamela isn’t home, and dear Gerald not at his office, one can’t just sit by and do nothing. That was what had happened in the story she’d read, the story which was really the key to all of this, and the delay which resulted was almost fatal. This time, the delay had already been fatal, if she was right, and might be gain, because poor dear Thelma—

If she had only been able to get hold of Pamela, Pamela would have known what to do. Pamela would see at once how probable the whole thing was, once you remembered the story which was a key to everything, and would then be able to take, or at any rate to advise, the proper practical steps. Thelma wouldn’t listen, already hadn’t listened; and Penny—well, Penny just wouldn’t bestir herself. Particularly as it might mean a trip out of town. It had to have happened out of town because, however ingeniously it had been done, it would by this time have revealed itself if it were a question of the city.

Of course, Miss Lucinda thought at this point, there is concrete—or am I thinking of cement?—but that would be so difficult without the proper facilities, whereas in the country it shouldn’t really be difficult at all. Once, that is, somebody nerved himself to it, which was in itself incomprehensible. Yet there were more things, as someone had told someone—Horatio?—than are easy to dream of in the everyday philosophy. One can smile and smile and be a villain still, as is vouched for by the same distinguished source. When one came down to it, there really were persons like that awful man in Dickens who always kicked his dog, and ended by killing someone. One had to face it.

It did not occur to Miss Lucinda that she might be called upon to face it in person until some time after she had telephoned Pamela North and got no answer. Then the idea was sudden and unnerving, and at the same time rather fascinating. Of course I am flighty, Miss Lucinda thought—and all that. But all the same, Thelma is very, very—well, bossy! Suppose I do read books and remember things in them, is that any reason—?

It wasn’t any reason at all, Miss Lucinda decided. Anyway, there was no reason why she should not at least find out whether there was a place in the country where it could have happened, and the way to do that was obviously to look in telephone books. The library, of course, thought Miss Lucinda Whitsett, and at the very thought of a library she brightened. It had been months, it had been last spring, that she had last been in the New York Public Library, where merely being surrounded by so many books made one tingle exquisitely. If nothing else came of it, she would feel all those books around her. Why, one could almost taste them!

There was, of course, the fact that they were not supposed to leave the hotel but, on thinking about it, Miss Lucinda wondered if that really was a fact. Nobody, certainly, had told her, in so many words, that she was not to leave the hotel. Someone might have told Thelma, or even Penny. But no one had told her. One never knew until one tried. “He either fears his fate too much or his deserts are small who fears to put it to the touch, to win or lose it all,” Miss Lucinda quoted to herself. With this quotation finished—was it quite right, or wasn’t it?—Miss Lucinda acted upon it. She opened the door of her room at the Hotel Welby and stepped out into the corridor. Then she thought of something and went back in. She sat at the writing table provided by the hotel and used one of the pens provided by the hotel, this last with difficulty. She read what she had written and was satisfied.

“Gone to the library to find the place. Cripland not Gribland,” she had written. If she were delayed—there was always a chance she would be delayed in a library—and either Thelma or Penny came to find her, the one who came would find the note instead, and not be worried.

Miss Lucinda again opened the door of her room and stepped into the corridor. She stepped, briskly for a small, rather frail lady, toward the elevators.

When she reached the elevators, she was joined by a plump, comfortable woman who apparently had come from the other end of the corridor, also, it first appeared, to get on the elevator. But while they waited, the plump comfortable woman spoke, saying “Going out, Miss Whitsett?” and at once Miss Lucinda knew who she was. A policewoman; perhaps even a matron.

“Oh dear no,” Miss Lucinda said quickly. “Just down to the lobby for stamps.”

The matron, or policewoman, looked pointedly at Miss Lucinda’s head, which had a hat on it—a pink hat. At least, the policewoman supposed it was meant to be a hat.

“One always wears a hat,” Miss Lucinda said, quickly. “In Cleveland.”

The other woman said, “Oh.” She said, “They’d rather you didn’t leave the hotel, you know.”

“Of course,” Miss Lucinda said. An elevator stopped then, and she got into it. The other woman did not, although for a moment she hesitated. She was not supposed to do more than, by her presence, by words if necessary, remind the Misses Whitsett of their tacit detention. (If necessary, she might go further with Miss Thelma Whitsett.) The ladies were not expected to lam out; if they did they could quickly be retrieved. In any case, the one who had just gone for stamps was the littlest, and most fluttery. She would not go far. Of course, if she tried to, steps might be taken.

Miss Lucinda, who liked to be as truthful as circumstances permitted, did stop at the hotel desk and did buy stamps, although she did not really need them. But then, with the air of an elderly lady going out for a breath of air, Miss Lucinda went out of the hotel and walked toward Fifth Avenue. She walked sedately, but this was not a manner assumed. She was always sedate, even if a little flighty. She looked about her with great interest in everything, and this, also, she always did.

At Fifth, which was only a little over a block from the hotel, she took a Fifth Avenue bus northward, although the library was then only a few blocks away. She took the bus because she had always enjoyed Fifth Avenue buses when she was in New York—and because, although she had learned better a year before, she still kept thinking that Fifth Avenue buses, unlike other buses, had to provide enough seats to go around. The one she got onto did not.

She got off at Fortieth Street, waited for the lights to change, and crossed the street to the library. She went between the lions and up the broad stairs.

At the desk inside, she enquired the whereabouts of out-of-town telephone directories and was instructed. She started with areas in New York State, although realizing that she might have, in the end, to go on to Connecticut or even New Jersey. But, as it happened, she did not. She found what she wanted very quickly and made a memorandum, since what she wrote down she always remembered.

It was so easy, indeed, that Miss Lucinda could only believe she was being guided. It was with that in mind that she decided on her next step.

Miss Lynn Hickey was not at Forsyte’s; an assistant buyer, she was out assistant buying. She was, however, expected back in an hour or so. Pam and Dorian, being in misses’ sports wear, decided to pass the time, assisted by Dorian’s acquaintance, the senior buyer, who was still there but God knew for how long. There was a delightful sweater-skirt ensemble in a kind of dusty brown which was perfect for Dorian—ideal, as Pam pointed out, for a long walk in the country, if Dorian ever wanted one. Pam herself found almost nothing, except one or two things in the going-to-Florida-line which would be perfect for next summer; things much better than would be available for next summer next spring. “Because,” Pam pointed out, saying charge and send, “it’s always the winter summer people who get the best of everything.” (It turned out subsequently that Pam had no charge account at Forsyte’s, but Forsyte’s happily opened one for her and sent the one or two things—a slacks and shirt outfit and a play suit which would, Dorian remarked, make almost any man want to play.)

The interlude, almost pastoral in its gay-hearted simplicity, was ended by the return of Miss Lynn Hickey, who was five feet and perhaps ninety-five pounds of directed vigor; who was extremely pretty in a somewhat businesslike manner and who was, beyond any doubt, brisk. One would have thought her older than she probably was until, when she remembered Pam North, she said, “Oh” and for an instant appeared younger than she probably was. The manner might be office-hours deep, Pam thought, and explained about her aunts and their predicament, and asked help.

“I’m so sorry,” she said to Pamela, her office-hours manner back again, and, to the senior buyer, “The Frankleberg line stinks, for my money. There might be one or two things.”

“I don’t see how I can help,” she said to Pamela, when her demolition of the Frankleberg line had been acknowledged.

“I am terribly sorry about your aunts, and about Paul’s poor mother, but—”

She shrugged her shoulders, which were as trim as the rest of her.

Pamela realized all that. She was clutching at straws. “Leaving no stone unturned,” she added.

“You see,” Dorian Weigand, who was still Dorian Hunt for the day, said gravely, “Pam feels that there’s always a needle in every haystack.”

Miss Hickey was crisply amused and the others laughed pleasantly with her.

“So often,” Pam said, “people really don’t remember what they do remember. I thought you—couldn’t you have lunch with us?”

Lynn looked doubtful. “Of couse she can,” her senior said. “Well—” Lynn said. “Some place that won’t take too long. There’s a Schrafft’s across the street.”

There was and it was not yet crowded. The hostess was as serene as a ship in a light breeze; the waitress, when she arrived, was panting like a tugboat in her haste or, perhaps, in anticipation of labors to come. Lynn refused a cocktail at first, then relented. They sipped, ladylike in ladylike surroundings, two of them looking for a murderer.

“We hoped—” Pam began, and then Lynn Hickey leaned toward her, her eyes bright, her face serious.

“I may as well tell you,” she said, “mother telephone me after you talked to her. The poor dear.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

“She wasn’t very clear,” Lynn said. “She often isn’t. Older people so often aren’t, are they?” She looked intently at Pam, who realized that she was, after all, older than Lynn. As, she told herself, most people were. It was nevertheless startling to be, even by the implication of a glance, associated with Lynn’s mother.

“I’m afraid,” Lynn said, “she may have given you a false impression. I did not kill Paul’s mother.” She smiled, superficially. “But of course I’d say that, wouldn’t I?”

“Yes,” Pam said. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“And Paul didn’t,” Lynn said. She was decisive. It occurred to Pamela that she was, on the whole, too decisive.

“Then,” Pam said, “there isn’t any reason to be so afraid, is there? So keyed up?”

The girl suddenly finished the rest of her drink. She looked into the glass; she put in slim fingers and extracted the olive, and looked at it and then ate it. Little Jill Horner, Pam thought. Or am I just supposed to think that?

“All right,” Lynn said, looking again at Pam, looking then at Dorian. “I’m keyed up. My mother quarrels with somebody, because the somebody says—well, makes accusations against me. Paul and I want to get married and his mother doesn’t want us to. Wants to keep dear little Paul under her dear, god-damned little thumb. And she gets killed. Now we can get married; Paul gets a lot of money; I quit my job. We live happily ever after. Where—in Sing Sing?”

She lifted the empty glass as if to drink from it; put it down again, too hard.

“Or we have nice electric easy chairs side by side,” she said. “In front of the fire. On the fire. We—”

She looked up suddenly.

“They said you’d probably be here,” Paul Logan said. “You’re all keyed up, kid.”

“Damn,” Lynn Hickey said. “Oh—damn!”

“Anyway,” Paul Logan said, “what business is it of yours, Mrs. North? Or of this lady’s?” He indicated Dorian.

“Dorian Hunt,” Pamela said. “This is Mr. Logan. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Logan? We haven’t accused your—Miss Hickey, of anything. IGm trying to help my Aunt Thelma.” But then she looked from one to the other. “And,” she said, “I will.”

She wasn’t doing it now, Paul Logan said, but he sat down.

“Won’t you have a drink?” Pamela North said, polite in fury. Not, she thought, that they didn’t have a right to be furious too, if you came to that. Or, on the other hand, frightened.

Nothing, she realized, ever stayed at a pitch. Now there was the business of trying to attract the waitress, who was doing nothing in particular with a kind of furious intentness; who, finally attracted, panted anxiously to them; who panted away again and was then, for minutes, always so much an impending event that nothing which she might interrupt could be begun. Pamela heard herself remarking on the remarkable lingering of summer in the lap of fall. This was politely noticed by the others. The waitress panted back in triumph, put down a cocktail and spilled part of it.

“All I’m—” Pam began.

“Would you care to order?” the waitress enquired, with intense good will.

“We—” Paul Logan began, his delicately handsome face reddening. But then he smiled suddenly and spread his hands in surrender. They ordered. The waitress panted off.

“Since we’ve all got the chips off,” Pam said, “Dorian and I are just trying to find out what people remember. So—”

That Mrs. Logan had opposed their marriage, neither of them denied. When they talked of that, the girl was very young again. She kept looking at Paul as if, however she tried, she must continually reassure herself of his presence. Of the two, now, he was the more assured. Lynn’s mother and Paul’s had quarreled over something Mrs. Logan had charged against Lynn. They did not phrase the charge, or need to. They had no idea who else might have wanted Mrs. Logan dead, and when they spoke of his mother, Paul’s lips were stiff by obvious effort. And Paul, who might have, denied knowing anything about a wrong typewriter, or about Sally, except that she could not be found.

“But,” he said, “she can’t have anything to do with it. She left—oh, weeks ago. Before we came back to town after Labor Day.”

“Back to town?” Pam said.

Paul and his mother had spent most of August at a summer place they had—“not much more than a cabin, really”—near Patterson, New York. Sally and Barton Sandford had spent his vacation, also during August, in a similar place a couple of hundred yards away. Paul and the Sandfords had played tennis at a near-by club; they had had, and made, use of a swimming pool on the estate of some friends of Mrs. Logan’s. It had been a pleasant, relaxed month.

But during it, it now appeared, something had arisen between the Sandfords. Neither Paul nor his mother had noticed anything; on Labor Day itself they had all been at the pool, with a good many others, and the Sandfords had seemed as always. Two days later, Sandford had come around to the Logan house in town, his face set, to tell Mrs. Logan that her niece had left him, for reasons he insisted he did not know. They had, he said, planned to drive in to New York Tuesday morning. But instead, Sally, who was driving, had taken them to the railroad station at Brewster.

And there, in the car, parked in front of the station, she had, Sandford said, told him she was not going back to town—that she was going—that she didn’t know where she was going. Some place to “think things out.” He had been, he told Mrs. Logan, utterly surprised and bewildered; he had been so taken aback that he had not known how to argue with her.

“He said,” Paul remembered, “that it was ‘too damn intangible to talk about.’ That’s what mother told me; I stayed on in the country the rest of the week. Heard about it when I got back.”

In the end Sandford had taken the train. He thought he had got from Sally a half promise to reconsider; he had expected her, in the end, to drive home to town. But she had not.

“But what has that to do with—with what happened to mother?” Paul said. “What—”

The waitress panted up with their food, including several items they had not ordered. They hung in air while she presented, triumphantly, the provender she had intrepidly snatched, one could only assume, from enraged cooks. She rearranged all the little paper doilies. Finally, she panted off.

But now Paul Logan merely sat and looked at his food. The others waited.

“If Sally had had any reason to want—to want to harm mother,” he said slowly, “you could work out something. She goes away, ostensibly out west somewhere. She’s gone at the time the poison was put in the medicine bottle. Presumably. So—she’s the only one who, apparently, couldn’t have put it there. I could have, Lynn could have, Bart—Hilda—Lynn’s mother even. But not Sally. If—she really did go that far.”

“The letters,” Pam told him. “The letters your mother got.”

“Perhaps she could have got—oh, somebody, to mail them for her,” he said. “I don’t know—there’d be ways of doing things like that. She could even go places in airplanes and mail them herself, I suppose. She could actually be living here in New York somewhere, she could have—” He stopped suddenly. “She had a key to the house,” he said. “At least, she always had had. I don’t think she ever gave it back.”

There aren’t, Pam thought, really any flaws in it. It could have been that way. But—

“Why?” Pam said. “Why would she want to—to kill your mother?”

“I don’t—” Paul began and stopped. “There’s always money,” he said. “Mother’s money. Sally gets quite a bit of it.”

“Fifty thousand, wasn’t it?” Pam asked, and Logan thought so.

“A lot, of course,” Pam said, “but still, not very much. Unless you need it dreadfully. Do they? I thought Sally had money herself?”

“Sally?” Paul said. “I don’t think so. A few thousand, maybe. Not very much.” He looked, with puzzled eyes, at the chicken hash on his plate; he said he was trying to remember something. He couldn’t, he said, make it come clear. It was something about—he snapped his fingers.

“Bart’s worked out something, he said. A—a medicine or something. A formula. Wanted to make it; wanted a laboratory of his own. I remember that.” He paused, snapped his fingers again. “Asked mother early in the summer if she didn’t want to put some money in it,” Paul said. “Said it would be a gold mine. Half joking, you know, but meaning it all the same. Mother—mother said she didn’t believe in gold mines.”

Whether Barton Sandford had, later, made his request more formally, not half jokingly, Paul didn’t know. His mother had not mentioned it to him. But he was certain Sandford had not, if he asked for money, got it.

“All the same,” Paul said, “I know—I’m sure—Sal’s all right.”

“You’re an innocent,” Lynn said. “A babe in arms. You think everybody’s all right.”

He looked at her; he seemed puzzled and uncertain.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Am I, Lynn?”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s a fine way to be. If there’s somebody—” She broke off short.

“I’m sorry, Lynn,” he said, and the others might not have been there.

“Nobody wants you to change,” Lynn told him. “Hear me? Nobody. It was never that.”

He looked at her.

“Oh,” she said, “you believe everybody, don’t you? Everybody but me.” She became, then, conscious of the others. She said she was sorry. She said, trying to be on top of it, trying to be crisp, that everything was coming out, that she was a sieve.

“About Mrs. Sandford,” Pam said. “You don’t agree with Mr. Logan?”

Lynn Hickey hesitated a moment. She extracted lettuce from a chicken sandwich and looked to see whether anything remained. Then she said Sally was all right. She said Sally was a fine person. Her tone put the tribute in capital letters, and so diminished it.

“The salt of the earth,” Lynn said. “With such a wonderful, wonderful conscience. Such a—a righteous person.” Lynn seemed surprised at the unfamiliar word, but then approved it. “Righteous,” she said. “That’s it. Never easygoing, with herself or anybody. This business of ‘thinking things out.’ Whoever ‘thinks things out’? That way, I mean. The kind of things I suppose she’s thinking out? About herself and Bart?”

She looked suddenly at Pam North. The she looked at Dorian.

“You don’t,” she said. “Neither of you does. It—it makes people all stiff inside. But Sally—well, she’d wonder, all at once, whether she was worthy of Bart, or he was worthy of her, or something. Whether their life together was really right. She’d have to Get Things Straightened Out.”

She looked at Pam again.

“Does anybody, ever?” she asked.

“Not that way,” Pam said. “At least, I never do. But then, I just never think of it.”

That was it, Lynn said. That was precisely it. Sally Sandford did.

“A sense of duty,” Dorian suggested, and Lynn said, “God yes!

“However,” she said then, “that doesn’t fit with her—her killing anybody, does it?”

It didn’t, apparently. They agreed it didn’t. But then, after a pause, during which they ate, Pam North said, “Still—

“It can lead to the end justifying the means,” she said. “One sacrificed for—for many, I guess. If Mr. Sandford had found out something which would save millions of people, and Mrs. Logan stood in the way—I mean, not having her fifty thousand stood in the way—a very conscientious person might—” She paused. “It might seem like a kind of mathematics,” she said. “Adding and subtracting. Not—not people at all. Like dictatorships,” she said. She looked at the others. Paul Logan shook his head and then Dorian Weigand smiled faintly.

“Or,” she said, “it might be merely wanting fifty thousand dollars. Because it would be fun to have, and to spend. That would be simpler, wouldn’t it? Particularly if you didn’t have very much and wanted to get free from something and start over.”

“I don’t think Sally—” Paul Logan began, and then stopped abruptly. “Or aren’t you talking about Sally?” he asked.

“Oh, about Mrs. Sandford,” Dorian said. “I thought Pam was making it a little complicated.”

Paul Logan looked at Dorian as if waiting for her to go on, but she merely shook her head and said that that was all. But the fact that, by implication, it was not all hung in the air. Paul Logan had got money too by his mother’s death, and freedom too. Freedom, among other things, to marry Lynn Hickey—Lynn who had been, by the woman now dead, characterized as up to anything; Lynn who had herself characterized Sally Sandford as a woman who might be hardened by righteousness.

“I suppose,” Pam North said, “that somebody made sure Mrs. Sandford hadn’t merely gone back to the country place? But of course, somebody did?”

That, of course, had been done. By Sandford himself, the Wednesday after Labor Day. And, a few days later, by Paul who, being at the Logan cottage, had walked over to the Sandfords’ and found it locked and empty, cleaned up and closed up for the winter. Having said this, Logan looked from Pam to Dorian, waiting politely, letting show the faint impatience of one who feels a topic exhausted. Lynn Hickey looked at her watch, obviously, and then at Pamela. Her expression said “Well?”

I’m not being good at this, Pam thought; I’m not getting anything except things all along obvious—that Lynn and Paul Logan are in love and want to get married, that now they can, that they had pointed, not too subtly, to Sally Sandford. We are, Pam North, thought, precisely where we were when we came in. She picked up gloves and bag; she tried to attract the waitress.

The waitress, who before had seemed omnipresent, seemed to hang constantly over them, panting, now did not attract. She was around. She puffed up to a near-by table with a glass of water and looked full at Pam and did not see her and puffed off again. She panted back and Pam said, “Oh, waitress!” and the waitress did not hear. She puffed away, prodigiously harassed. Pam watched her go and sighed. She tried to attract a serenely floating hostess, but the hostess floated incased in impervious transparency. Pam said, “Oh dear.”

“Let me get it,” Paul said. “You two go on. If—”

Pam couldn’t think of it. She had brought about the whole, apparently pointless, incident. She could at least pay for it. She saw the waitress again and waved anxiously. The waitress looked at her blankly and Pam realized it was another waitress. Perhaps if she stood up—

She started to and the waitress, who had been hiding—must have been hiding—swooped upon them. She swooped indignantly, as if finally, at too long last, unconscionable lingerers showed signs of movement. She had the bill ready and thrust it upon Logan, who promptly put it in one pocket and produced change from another. Even that hadn’t worked, Pam thought, making the best of it. She couldn’t get information; she couldn’t even get to pay for the food. She stood up, and everybody else stood up. By agreement, they made suitable sounds of separation at the table; Lynn and Paul Logan were thanked for their patience; they, in turn, were sorry they had not helped.

Lynn and Paul went first, as behooved check payers. They paid and passed on, Dorian and Pam behind them—close behind them; closer, it appeared, than Paul Logan realized.

“—that damned typewriter,” Paul said to Lynn. “I don’t see how we missed—”

Then Lynn went into a segment of a revolving door and Paul stopped. He took the next segment.

Little Miss Lucinda went down the stairs in the Grand Central Terminal with one hand lightly on the handrail. Marble stairs were so treacherous. People hurried past her and some of them seemed impatient, although she was taking up very little room. At the bottom of the stairs she discovered she had soiled the fingers of a glove and thought how unlike Cleveland everything was in New York. She went to the information kiosk and made enquiry—she had mislaid the memorandum, but that did not matter, since she did not forget anything once she had written it down. She was given a diminutive timetable.

Timetables were no trouble for Miss Lucinda, since they were designed to be read. On the trip east, indeed, she had read extensively in a much larger timetable, having exhausted other reading matter. She had, with interest, discovered on which trains baggage could not be checked, which did not run on Saturdays and Sundays and Holiday A, which were “Pullmans Only” and which were not. She found especially interesting the listings of equipment on various through trains—“diner Albany to New York,” “buffet lounge New York to Chicago,” “reduced fare tickets not honored on this train.” She was interested in these things, not for any practical reason, not even because she was especially fond of trains, but because the information had been written out and printed. For the same reason, she often read entirely through the extended directions which sometimes came with patent medicines, and, when there were translations, read the French version as well and did what she could with German. Miss Lucinda liked to read.

So she had no trouble whatever with the simple tables of the Harlem Division of the New York Central Railroad; at eleven forty-five she discovered that a Pawling local left at one forty-six. She bought herself several things to read on the trip and then had lunch in the Commodore Grill, finding it unexpectedly full of men, all of whom were drinking. Emboldened by example, Miss Lucinda had a sherry while she waited for her luncheon to be served, and read the Atlantic Monthly. She finished luncheon in too ample time, went to the newsreel theater and then went looking for her train.

The gates were not yet open when she reached them, and then she debated whether, after all, it would not be the right thing to telephone Thelma, or at any rate Penny—better Penny, on the whole—and explain what she was doing. Because, Miss Lucinda thought, while my note was perfectly clear, they might not quite understand and might worry. She became almost sure she ought to do this, and had even turned away to look for a telephone booth, when she realized clearly what would happen. She would get Thelma, even if she got Penny first, and Thelma would say “Lucinda!” in that certain tone. And then, Miss Lucinda knew, she would give the whole thing up, since there was no use pretending she had an answer to “Lucinda!” said in the certain tone. And she did not want to give the whole thing up; because now, in addition to feeling that she was being guided, she had begun to feel that she was having a very exciting time. It might, she realized, be partly the sherry, but it was nevertheless exciting.

Why, Miss Lucinda thought to herself, it’s almost like something one reads about.

And, in addition, she was really doing it for Thelma, against whom such ridiculous charges were being, or almost being, made. There was always that; it was really her duty not to let herself be stopped. It was really—

Then the gates were opened and Miss Lucinda, with fifteen or twenty other early comers, went through them, and down a long ramp and then along a platform walled on either side by unlighted railroad coaches. They must, Miss Lucinda thought, have walked half a dozen blocks before they finally came to the lighted coaches—four of them—of the Pawling local. They were very old coaches and had the gritting feeling of very old coaches. There were plenty of uncomfortable seats. Miss Lucinda got one and found her ticket and held it in her hand ready—she hated to have to scramble through her bag at the last moment, the way so many women did—and resumed her reading of the Atlantic Monthly.

Looking at her, no one could have dreamed the kind of trip upon which Miss Lucinda had embarked or what she expected to find at the end of it.

There was no need, when Pam and Dorian stood on the sidewalk in front of Schrafft’s, expelled in turn by the revolving door, for Pam to ask Dorian whether she had heard what Paul Logan had said. So Pam said, “Well, what do you think of that? He does know something about the typewriter. So Sally is in it.”

“She always was, I think,” Dorian said, and said then, “There they are.”

Paul Logan and Lynn were walking toward Fifth Avenue. They were obviously talking intently. It appeared that, of the two, Lynn was talking the more. Without consultation, Pam and Dorian turned also toward Fifth Avenue.

“Maybe,” Pam said, “they’ll do something about something. Which side of the street do you want?”

Dorian blinked the lids over greenish eyes.

“We stick out,” Pam said. “If we’re going to tail, we ought to separate. At least on other sides of the street. Or would that be more conspicuous?”

It would, if they were seen at all, be much more conspicuous, Dorian thought. The two of them advancing along opposite sidewalks in pursuit of prey would, if noticed by Paul and Lynn, hardly fail to arouse their interest. Pam and Dorian, therefore, stayed together.

“If they split up, we will,” Pam told Dorian, who agreed, but said, “What will they do something about?”

“The typewriter,” Pam said. “Sally. Because they’ve remembered something, only—” She broke off completely, and looked puzzled.

“Right,” Dorian Weigand said. “I can’t see we’re getting anywhere. Who do you suspect?”

“Everybody,” Pam said, hopelessly. “Except the aunts, of course. Mrs. Sandford most, I guess. But that girl knows something, and so does he. About the typewriter, probably. And Mrs. Logan did too, and perhaps that was why—they’re turning uptown.”

Paul Logan and Lynn Hickey, still talking, were the ones turning uptown. They crossed the street and went north on Fifth. Pam and Dorian increased their saunter to something nearer a trot, reached the intersection, dodged turning taxicabs and went after them. They quickly got too close, and sauntered again. Then, midway of the block, Paul and Lynn stopped in front of Forsyte’s.

“We’re too close,” Pam said, “we’ll have to look in windows.”

They veered toward windows, bumping their way among south-bound pedestrians. The window they reached was dedicated to the wares of the Forsyte Men’s Shop.

“The trouble with tailing,” Pam said, “is that you never get the right window. Or being tailed, for that matter. Can you see them, without looking?”

Dorian could. Paul and Lynn were standing in front of the Forsyte entrance, still talking. Dorian thought he was suggesting something of which the girl was doubtful, since she looked doubtful and shook her head.

“She’s nodding now,” Dorian reported to Pam, who was looking with rather ostentatious innocence at a tweed suit—again nothing Jerry would approve. Pam, whose theory had been that two looks are four times as suspicious as one, abandoned the tweed suit.

Lynn Hickey made a small flicking motion with her right hand and went suddenly into Forsyte’s. Paul stood for a moment. Then he walked unhesitatingly to Pam and Dorian.

“Can’t I drop you some place?” he enquired.

“Drop us?” Pam said, feeling as if he already had. “Oh—thanks no, Mr. Logan. You go right ahead about whatever you’re—I mean, we’re just window-shopping.”

Paul looked at the window; he said, “Oh.” He said, “All right then,” turned away quickly and, seemingly in the same movement, was engulfed by a taxicab which had just discharged. The cab started south and was, almost at once, stopped in traffic.

Pam tugged Dorian’s sleeve and they bumped among south- and north-bound pedestrians to the curb. A cab swerved to them. Pam led the way. She said what she had always wanted to say.

“Follow that cab!” Pamela North commanded.

The driver, who had already knocked down the meter flag, leaned toward them. He said, “Huh, lady?”

“That cab,” Pam said. “Follow it.” She pointed. The cab in question began to move off.

“You a cop?” the driver said. “A lady cop? Or something?”

“No but—” Pam said.

“Then it’s no, lady,” the cab driver said. “Not me. I’m a married man, see? I got three children, see? I—”

“It hasn’t anything to do with your children,” Pam told him.

That was, the driver told her, what she said.

“A man’s got to decide about his own children,” he told her. “If you were a cop, now. As it is, not me, lady.”

“This is the most ridiculous thing—” Pam said, but Dorian patted her arm gently.

“The other cab’s gone now,” Dorian said. “It made a right turn.”

“See, lady,” the driver said. “Listen to your friend. Take you any other place, lady?”

But that Pamela North wouldn’t have. If this were the last cab in New York, it would take her no place. She and Dorian got out. Getting out, Pam looked at the meter, which showed fifteen cents. “The drop’s on the clock, lady,” the driver told her.

Pamela North did not hesitate. She gave the driver a quarter, and waved off change. It was not until several minutes later that she realized she had paid fifteen cents for sitting in one place, and ten cents, presumably, for discovering that a cab driver had three children.

“I had no idea it was so difficult to trail people,” Pam told Dorian. “What should we do now?”

Suddenly both of them stopped walking and faced each other and began to laugh. When they had laughed, Pamela said they might as well go and see how the aunts were coming. Thinking of the aunts, Pam was serious again.

“The poor helpless things,” Pam said, and she and Dorian began to walk toward the Welby in the Murray Hill district.

The train ran beautifully for almost half an hour; it was not comfortable, it bumped a good deal, but it went rapidly and with determination. Miss Lucinda read all of a short story in the Atlantic and liked it very much. It was a gentle story. When she was reading, Miss Lucinda could forget almost anything, and now she could even forget her errand.

But after this fine start, the train lost impetus. It stopped at White Plains, went on reluctantly for a very short distance and stopped again. This time it stopped at what was, Miss Lucinda discovered by looking at signs, North White Plains. Having got this far, the train seemed entirely to lose interest. Looking up the corridor from the middle of the second, non-smoking, coach, Miss Lucinda discovered that it also lost its locomotive. But the sign had said Pawling.

After another considerable time, however, a steam locomotive backed slowly down the track toward the train. Miss Lucinda watched, fascinated and a little frightened, with the feeling that something surely had gone wrong. The locomotive came on, ever more slowly, as if disgruntled by its approaching task, and just before it hit almost stopped. Miss Lucinda closed her eyes, and there was a jolt. There was then another longish pause, and men walked up and down beside the train. Then, with an even more pronounced jolt, the train started off. It did not go rapidly, now, or with assurance. It went on only for about five minutes and then stopped again.

Toilsomely, then, it progressed toward Pawling, its laborious progress so distracting that not even the Atlantic could fully engross Miss Lucinda. Something of the train’s obvious disinclination to reach its destination found an echo in Miss Lucinda’s mind. Perhaps, she thought, she had been too precipitate, after all.

She also began to think that perhaps she had been wrong. She began, indeed, very much to hope she had been wrong. If it had not been an action so—so fluttery—so much in the character she knew Thelma ascribed to her, Miss Lucinda might have got off the train at Mount Kisco. But she did not.

“If you can convince us there’s a tie-in, we’ll coöperate,” the man on the other side of the desk told Bill Weigand. “We always do. You know that. The trouble is, you’re merely playing a hunch.”

“Right,” Bill told him.

“And when you come down to it,” the other man said, “it’s an unofficial hunch. Your inspector’s satisfied. The county district attorney’s satisfied.”

“It won’t hold,” Bill told him.

The man across the desk shrugged, indicating that whether it would hold was a matter on which he had no opinion, and one outside his range of interest.

“It’s at a delicate point,” the man behind the desk said then. “It’s no reflection on you—certainly not on you. No reflection on any of your people. But we don’t want a mob scene.”

“I don’t,” Bill told him, “see precisely how you’re going to avoid it, in the end. After the inspector gets through following his red herring. He will, you know.”

Again the man shrugged. He said maybe it would all be wound up by then.

“Try this one,” Bill said. “Your man’s been in and out of the city a good deal recently? In line of duty?”

The man hesitated. Then he said they all got around a good deal on a job like this.

“Right,” Bill said. “About your first tip-off. Was it from one of your regular sources?”

The man behind the desk hesitated even longer over that. Then he said, “No comment.”

“Or closer home?” Bill said, as if finishing what he had only begun to say.

“Nope,” the man said. “Sorry, Weigand. No comment.”

Bill waited.

“It’s no good,” the man told him. “If it were just this one thing, maybe. But there are all sorts of tie-ins in things like this—here, there, everywhere. Damn it, I haven’t authority to take a chance on the whole operation, even if I wanted to. You can see that.”

“Right,” Bill said. He stood up.

“It’s a damn nuisance all around,” the other man said, standing up too.

Murder usually was, Bill told him. They shook hands. Bill started toward the door; seemed to think of something more.

“Heard from the one who tipped you off recently?” Bill asked.

“Not for—” the other man began, smiled slightly, and finished, “No comment.” But then he added, “No reason why we should, you know.”

“Right,” Bill said. “No reason at all. As a matter of fact, I didn’t think you had.”

Bill went, then, leaving the other man to look for a moment doubtfully at his closed office door. Then he picked up a telephone and told the answerer to send Saul in.

Bill Weigand retrieved his Buick, parked in a side street off Foley Square, and drove up Lafayette Street. It was still only a hunch; there was nothing much to go on. Nor was there, he thought, at the moment any place to go, except home. He went home.

He expected to find Dorian, and did not. He found a note saying she was out with Pam.

He reached toward the telephone, but it rang under his hand. He listened.

“I thought it would,” he said, after listening for more than a minute. He listened again, smiling faintly. “Right,” he said. “I’m on my way, Inspector.”

He replaced the receiver and wrote a note for Dorian. He wrote, “It blew up in Arty’s face. You and Pam keep out of trouble.”

He went down in the elevator and was surprised to hear himself whistling. He drove downtown to his office in the West Twentieth Street station.