14

THURSDAY, 8:45 P.M. AND AFTER

Pamela North’s head ached and there was a large bump just at the hairline on her forehead. She looked at Jerry and Bill Weigand, sitting comfortably where they could look at her as she lay on the sofa, and their expressions of gentle commiseration did not appeal to her.

“All right,” she said, “I knocked myself out by diving into the leg of the table. All right. But anyway, I was there.”

“Of course, Pam,” Jerry said.

“And,” Pam said, “I was warm. Which was as much as any of us were. Except poor Amelia, of course.” She reached up and stroked the tiny cat which lay on her shoulder. “We were all stupid, weren’t we, Martini?” she said. “And they were as stupid as anyone.” She considered. “More,” she said. “Anyway—I got the right family. And the right idea.” She paused again. “Underlying, of course,” she said.

“We were all there, finally,” Bill Weigand told her. “I don’t pretend to be proud of it—of any of it. But we did get there.”

“The United States Cavalry,” Pam said. “Mullins to the rescue. With his trusty automatic.”

Bill Weigand was equable about that.

“Better late than and so forth,” he said. “Mullins did save your life. And Mullins never forgets a face. Which was what started the cavalry.”

Pam smiled, then.

“Dear Mullins,” she said. “I’m appreciative, Bill. Only my head does ache. And Mullins hit just his hand?”

“Just his hand,” Bill agreed. “And the gun more than the hand. He just needed a bit of—wrapping up. We wrapped him up. He’s been talking ever since, by the way. Seems very anxious to explain himself. Feels that it was very unfair things didn’t work out better. Keeps saying he got hurried toward the end, and that he can’t bear to be hurried.”

“Because he stammers,” Pam said. “Don’t bite ears, Martini. When he’s hurried he stammers, and that embarrasses him. It’s—it’s a kind of phobia. Is he crazy, Bill?”

Bill Weigand shook his head. He said no crazier than most murderers. Rather businesslike, on the whole, although with a tendency to slip up. He’d fooled them nicely on the crash business, for example—he, and a lot of luck. He had had an hour’s layover in Kansas City when he was trying to fly out of reach; he had found a man who, for a hundred dollars, would take his place in the plane, answering to his name and all. So that the police would keep chasing him on across the country while he turned south and holed in. Which would have confused them, even without the crash, in which the substitute was burned to death—and to unrecognizability.

“You’d think, to hear him talk, that he planned the crash, too,” Bill said. “He likes to think he’s a great planner. When his luck is good, that is. Miss Gipson’s identification of him was just bad luck, of course.”

“Which it was, after all,” Jerry North said.

“Right,” Bill agreed. “Sheer bad luck. As long as nobody suspected him, he was all right. But if any suspicion started an enquiry—even if the suspicion was wrong; even if somebody thought he was Judge Crater—he was out of luck. Because, of course, we’d picked up Purdy’s fingerprints, just as he thought.”

There was a little pause. Jerry and Bill had drinks beside them, and both drank. Pam said she was feeling better, and thought she’d have a very light Scotch. Jerry made her a very light Scotch.

“Really,” she said, “Amelia was brighter than any of us. Which is odd.”

Jerry grinned for a moment, and then said that Amelia Gipson had been very bright.

“Also,” Weigand said, “she was prying. She went into things—particularly when she thought people were misbehaving. She had a very suspicious mind. And she jumped at conclusions—as I imagine she did in Spencer’s case, the poor devil. She thought in this case that somebody had married her dear friend for her money chiefly, perhaps, because she really preferred to think the worst of people. Everything fitted when she got the idea that Burt was Purdy, but she was still guessing.”

“And we,” Pam said, after a pause, “just guessed all over the place. About the niece and nephew. About the perfume. About Mr. Spencer.” She paused again. “What about him?” she asked.

“Just drunk,” Weigand said. “Drunk—and unhappy. And in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He considered. “As, probably, he always will be,” he said. He lifted his drink, his eyes distant.

“He is one of the things—exposed—by all this,” he said. “As always happens. Murder cuts across the face of things; the investigation of murder cuts again. We lay things open. By accident. We bring a man like Spencer out of the safe numbness he was living in; out of the safe obscurity. We find out something we don’t need to know—don’t want to know—about a girl like Nora M. Frost. We find out—”

Pam broke in. She spoke softly.

“What about Nora?” she said. “Was it what … I guessed? That she was afraid Miss Gipson would tell her husband?”

Weigand did not answer, in words. But his silence was an answer.

“But that’s silly,” Pam said, “because she’ll tell him herself, I think. Whatever it was.” She looked at Bill Weigand and then, because his expression seemed to contradict her, she nodded. “She’ll think she shouldn’t,” Pam said. “She’ll think it—it isn’t fair. But she will. I’m pretty sure she will.” She looked at Jerry, this time. “Women do,” she told him.

He smiled at her and said, “All right, Pam.”

“Well,” she said, “they do. They can’t not, even when they try.”

“All right, Pam,” Jerry said again. They looked at each other and after a moment Jerry smiled.

“It’s a very consoling thought,” he told her. “I’ll keep it in mind, Pam.”

Pam made a face at him, and then winced, because making a face hurt. She dropped that, and turned to Weigand.

“What did we do, really?” she said. “Except Mullins?”

Bill Weigand shrugged.

“Kept the pressure on,” he said. “Looked into things. Asked questions. Made people nervous—and finally, made a murderer nervous. It happens that way. We asked questions, dug into things, fished around in the past—and one of us remembered something. He could—feel us around him, all the time. Pushing. He never knew when we’d find something—or what we’d find. So he couldn’t simply stand by any more and merely watch. He had to try to find out what we were up to. He had to talk too much—to you, Pam. He had to kill too much. He had to break into your office, Jerry, to find out whether there was anything in Miss Gipson’s notes which would incriminate him. Because we, like Miss Gipson, were prying into things.”

“In all directions,” Pam pointed out. “In too many directions. All of us—including you, Bill.”

Bill agreed. He said they always did. They pried in all directions; eventually they got a break. Or, as in this instance, two breaks—Purdy’s fear that Pam had picked up his mistake of knowing too much; Mullins’s identification of his photograph. One had solved the case; the other had, undoubtedly, saved the lives of Purdy’s wife and Pam North.

“For which,” Pam said, “we are properly appreciative. Very. Why did Purdy think somebody wouldn’t recognize him?”

“He thought he had changed enough,” Weigand told her. “His hair had gone entirely gray; he had taken to wearing glasses. He had changed a good deal—enough so that I didn’t recognize him, although I’d seen his pictures. And there was a psychological twist to it—he had had a stammer which he was conscious of—which was, he realized, an identifying characteristic no one could forget. When he wanted to change himself he concentrated on that—and he concentrated successfully. And I suppose it loomed so large—in his mind—that when he had finally eliminated that one tremendous thing he underestimated the things that still remained—the things Mullins spotted—the set of the eyes—the shape of the face—all the things which, if you have a memory for faces, you don’t forget. Mullins has a memory for faces.”

“Still,” Pam said, “it was risky.”

Bill Weigand agreed. It was risky. Purdy had realized that. He had, he had told them when he began to talk, tried to avoid coming back to New York. But his wife had insisted—insisted so strongly that he was afraid if he did not agree, he would make her suspicious. Under the circumstances, he was, naturally, very anxious not to do anything which would alienate her. And—always—he thought he was changed enough. Bill finished with that and returned to his drink.

Pam spoke reflectively after a moment. She said they had certainly picked up a lot of miscellaneous information in their prying. Bill agreed again.

“Nora’s secret,” Pam said, “which Jerry and I aren’t supposed to know about. The fact that Nora’s brother needs money. All those things about poor Mr. Spencer.”

Bill nodded. He said you couldn’t tell what was important unless you went to the trouble of finding out about it. Nora did have a secret; her brother did need money.

“Which,” Jerry said, “he’ll now get. And the result, I suppose, will be another gadget for the home. A newer gadget.”

Bill Weigand supposed so.

“And the perfume,” Pam said. “That was another wrong direction. Who did visit her, Bill? Who smelled?”

Bill Weigand looked surprised.

“Oh,” he said, “that was Burt, all right. Purdy. He took a little atomizer in his pocket with some of the perfume his wife uses. He sprayed it around the apartment when he went to switch the packet of medicine for one of poison. He thought we’d decide it had been his wife—I suppose he thought there was a chance we—the law—might kill her and save him the trouble. He was a fool, of course. He always was, apparently. And so he thought we’d all be. He thought that, even if we didn’t look at once for his wife, we would certainly look only for a woman. He’s explained the whole thing to us very proudly, on the whole.”

“I don’t know,” Pam said. “It seems sort of clever to me. Like a good dodge.”

Bill Weigand said it was, in one way, very clever. Very subtle.

“And,” he said, “very unlikely to mislead a cop. Because a cop would either not notice it at all, or not pay any attention to it if he did. Because cops can’t bother with things which are merely—anomalous. They haven’t time. They have to keep the pressure on.”

“Why did Amelia Gipson get a job in Jerry’s office, when she didn’t need to?” Pam asked.

Weigand shrugged. He said he hadn’t the faintest idea. He said probably because she was bored doing nothing.

“Or,” Jerry amplified, “thought it was immoral not to be working. I suspect she would have thought that.”

“The poor thing,” Pam said. “So—so sure—and upright—and anxious to have things orderly and right. Whether it was really any of her business or not.”

She lifted the cat down and held it on her lap, stroking gently. The little cat began to purr. It had a very loud purr.

“It ought to be a lesson to us,” Pam said, as much to the cat as to anybody. “To keep our paws out of things, Martini. Not to think the worst of people. Not to be—too inquisitive. And not to go to people you think are murderers and tell them what we think. It will really be a lesson to us, won’t it, Martini?”

“I doubt it,” Jerry said. He went over and sat down on the edge of the sofa by Pam. He put his hand out toward one of hers. Martini leaped at the new hand. She bit it.