Death of a Tall Man (19 page)

“Oh!” Pam said. “I'm—” It seemed futile to say, again, that she was sorry. But Mr. Weber waited politely. When she did not go on, he nodded and smiled a little.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see—I can understand—that you are sorry. It is—unpleasant to hear such things. Naturally. Doctor also was sorry. He said he wished he could say it was the small piece of steel. So that I would receive the insurance, you know. But he said he could not say that. Doctor was an honest man, so he could not say that. It was a disease, not the small piece of steel.”

Pam said, “Oh!” again, realizing what the quiet little man was telling her. There had been an injury, which would have meant compensation. But what was wrong was not the injury; Dr. Gordon had not been able to attribute it to the injury.

“It will be a long time?” she said. “Before—I mean—” She broke off again.

“It will be always,” Mr. Weber said. “In a few weeks, I will not see anything. Now there is only a little light. And shadows. In a few weeks—shadows.”

The little man had dignity. He stated a fact.

“Even the doctor I did not see clearly,” he said. “That is what you wanted to know? He was a shadow. And, of course, I could hear his voice. He was sorry about what he had to tell me.”

“His voice,” Pam said. “It was—there wasn't anything odd about it? Anything you wouldn't have expected? As if he were—oh, nervous? Worried?”

“No,” Mr. Weber said. “I do not think he was worried. He was sorry he had to give me bad news after he examined my eyes. He told me to come home and—wait. He gave me the name of some people to see afterward. People who—he said there were things—work—one could do afterward. He said I should come and see him again in a week or two, although he did not think there was anything he could do. Doctor was an honest man.”

“I'm—” Pam said. “I wish there were something I could do.”

“You are good,” Mr. Weber said. “Isn't she good, mama? But there is nothing.” He paused. After a time he said, “Things happen.”

Pam went, then; she made small, half-phrased sounds to Mrs. Weber and it seemed to her, grotesquely, that Mrs. Weber was comforting her. She left the little apartment, and its faded neatness, and Mr. Weber, waiting in the dusk for darkness. This time, she thought, I got more than I asked for. And then, against her will, she realized how much more she had got than she had asked for. It didn't fit, all her emotions told her; it did not fit, all that she believed to be true about the aging, beaten people she had left. Humanly, it was unbelievable. But her mind stopped her there. About people little was really unbelievable; about people you had met but once you merely thought, without remotely knowing, that things were hard to believe.

Shut the people out of it. Make Mr. Weber merely a name. Turn him from a small, waiting man into a designation on a police file, and it was different. Then you had a man with a motive; with, she thought, the best motive they had found. Suppose his quiet was bitterness; suppose that repeated “honest” used to describe Dr. Gordon was bitter irony. Because what it amounted to was this—Dr. Gordon had ruled not only against Fritz Weber's eyesight. He had, at the same time, ruled against the money which might have palliated blindness. He had said that the shop accident, which would be covered by the workman's compensation law, was not the cause of what was wrong with Fritz Weber's eyes. He had not stretched a point, as perhaps he might have. However sorry he had been, he had told Weber that his blindness was to be without recompense, while having it in his power to say something else. Men had been bitterly, violently hated for less. It was likely that men had been killed for less. And you could not guess what flaming hatred, what violence, there might be in even the smallest and quietest of men.

Pam North wished that she had not visited the Webers. She did not want to put into Bill Weigand's mind what she would have to put there.

It was noon, and before very long she should call Jerry. Perhaps, Pam thought, she ought to give the whole thing up and call Jerry now. She didn't really want to see any more people. Not after the Webers. It would be simpler to let the rest of it go, and it would please Jerry, who would think—if he knew about it—that she should have let all of it go, from the start.

But on the other hand, Robert Oakes lived very near. She could walk to the address on Second Avenue which was Oakes's, and it was foolish to be so near and not finish things off, since she had gone this far. She hesitated outside the building on Stuyvesant Square and then, as if she had flipped a coin in her mind, turned and walked toward Second Avenue. Her heels clicked on the pavement. She walked as if she were under orders.

Robert Oakes, No. 2 examining room, lived in a five-story tenement which had been reconverted. It was now of yellow brick instead of red. It had an entrance two steps down instead of several steps up. Pam pressed a downstairs bell, waited, pressed it again and tried the door. The door was unlocked. She went up a rebuilt stairway; a fireproofed anachronism, surrounded by inflammable walls. Mr. Oakes lived on the third floor—third floor rear. And, as she climbed, Pam North realized that probably he wasn't at home. People who were at home answered their bells.

She reached the third floor and went back down the hallways toward a door at the end. She was about ten feet from the doorway when something happened which was surprising and which was afterward difficult to describe. There was nothing in the hallway, except much used air, and yet something picked her up in gigantic, amorphous hands and threw her backward.

There was a feeling of being struck, but of being struck everywhere at once, and at the same time there was a tremendous roar and things began to come apart around her. The door she was looking at disintegrated while she still saw it, and while she was still throwing her hands up to protect her face. Then there was movement and a sudden, jarring, interruption of movement and a sharp pain in her left shoulder, which cut through a general feeling of terror and lesser pain. And then blackness swirled in around her and poured over her, except that at the last moment there was a red glow to the darkness.

“My,” Pam said, “that blew up in my face. My, that blew up in my face. My that—” And then, although she tried to stop she could hear herself giggling. “It isn't me because I don't giggle,” Pam said, “but it certainly blew up in my face. My but it—”

8

T
UESDAY
, 1:20
P.M. TO
3
P.M.

Gerald North looked at his watch for the third time in ten minutes and said “Damn!” It was true Pam had not said definitely that she would call him. It was true she had not said, definitely, that she was going to be at home. It was true that nothing fatal had happened to her yet, and that past performance was still the best basis for a guess of present safety. It was true—The telephone rang. Jerry reached for it convulsively, knocking it from its cradle. He grabbed it, took a deep breath and said: “Yes?” Then he said, exhaling the deep breath rather suddenly, “Good. Put her on.”

“Darling,” Pam North said, before he could say anything. “I'm all right.”

“Of course,” Jerry began, and then heard her. “What do you mean you're all right?”

“But I am, really,” Pam said. “Except—Jerry—you'll have to come and get me. Not that I'm not all right.” The last was hurried, anxious.

“Listen,” Jerry said. “Where are you? Where've you been?”

“Lots of places,” Pam said. “The last one blew up. So I kept saying it blew up in my face and laughing. And so naturally, they thought I had concussion. But I haven't, really.”

“Pam!” Jerry said, his voice demanding. “Where are you?”

“Now you mustn't get excited,” Pam said. “Because I'm perfectly all right.”

“Where are you?” Jerry said, his voice heavy.

“Well,” Pam told him, “I guess you'd call it a—a sort of a hospital, Jerry. But I'm all right.”

“Pam!”
Jerry said.
“Are you all right?”

“Look,” Pam said, “I've just been telling you I'm all right. That's what I called up for. And to tell you to come and—”

“This sort of hospital,” Jerry said. “What is it?”

“Well,” Pam said, and she sounded reluctant. “Bellevue.” She went on hastily. “Just because it was convenient, Jerry,” she said. “After I got blown up.” She paused, but not long enough for him to speak. “Before the building burned down,” she said. “And really, it only partly burned down. The firemen were so quick.”

“Pam!” Jerry said. “Are you hurt?”

If he would only listen, Pam said, she would explain it. Of course she wasn't hurt.

“Shaken,” she said. “And maybe I was out for a few minutes. And there's sort of a bump. And my shoulder hurts a little, but it's just a bruise. And whatever they say, I know I haven't got concussion.”

“What who says?” Jerry demanded. “For God's sake!”

“The doctor says I sound disturbed,” Pam told him. “He says there isn't anything wrong, except the bump and shock, and much less shock than you'd expect. And they want the bed. But he says concussion is the only—”

“Pam,” Jerry said. “Pam, darling. Start at the beginning.”

“Listen, Jerry,” Pam said, and she was severe with him. “That will have to wait. The beginning was Mr. Oakes, but he's dead now and so there's no hurry. And the doctor just thinks I've got concussion because I don't talk the way he expects, which is silly of him, because if I waited for him to catch up he never would. And now I've got to have some clothes, so I can leave.”

Her voice sounded all right, Jerry thought—quick and clear and—yes, even now—oddly gay. So probably she was all right.

“Clothes?” he said. He paused and thought about it. “What happened to your clothes?”

“Well,” Pam said, “it's a funny thing, but they sort of got—well, blown off, I guess. Anyway, when the firemen got there—” She interrupted herself and then went on, hurriedly. “Not all of them, Jerry,” she said. “I still had quite a little on, really. And of course the man in the ambulance covered me up right away. But there isn't enough to go to lunch in.”

“My God!” Jerry North said. “Lunch!”

“Well,” Pam said, reasonably, “of course it was awful about poor Mr. Oakes. But I didn't see him, really.” She considered. “Any part of him,” she said. “So I'm still hungry, and the doctor says I can go if you'll bring me clothes and—wait a minute.” She spoke to someone, apparently, at Bellevue Hospital. “My husband,” she said. “He's bringing me some clothes.” Then she came back to Jerry. “Look,” she said, “they say we're tying up the line. So you go around and get me some clothes. The black dress with pockets, I think. And a slip and—no, there aren't any stockings. I'll just have to—” She lapsed, apparently, into thought. “Oh yes,” she said, “and some pants, please, Jerry. Then we can go to lunch.”

The odd thing was that Pam, dressed in the black dress with the pockets, looked to be in excellent health. The bump on her head did not show, under hair, but it was a good-sized bump as Jerry discovered when she guided his fingers to it. She was a little pale, perhaps; her eyes were a little larger than usual. And there was a quick lightness in her voice which showed that, under everything, she was excited and keyed up. That, the doctor told Jerry, was the aftermath of shock. She would, if she were his wife, spend a day or two in bed. (“Not if I were his wife,” Pam said cryptically, when they were outside. Jerry examined that remark and, in the interest of finding out what had happened, decided not to pick it up.) And her left shoulder, she admitted, hurt when she moved her arm. But she was, she insisted, doing much better than was to be expected.

She had picked up the rest of the story at the hospital, it turned out. She gave it to Jerry firsthand up to the moment of the strange, impalpable force which hurled her from her feet, outside Robert Oakes's door. After that it was what she had pieced together.

She had arrived, by somewhat devastating coincidence, just as the pilot light on the gas stove in Oakes's tiny apartment had set off the gas which had been accumulating for, probably, some hours. It was the blast which had knocked her down—and the red tinge to the blackness had been the fire which started in the apartment. The blast had hurled her backward and sideways, so that she was brought up against the wall and banged her head. She apparently had lost consciousness then; it was when she came to in the ambulance that she kept saying, over and over, “my, it blew up in my face” and then had giggled because she thought it was funny to use that phrase about anything so literal. That together with her subsequent remarks had, Jerry concluded, led to the now-abandoned diagnosis of concussion.

Altogether, she had been extraordinarily lucky. Her clothes had been, apparently, very largely blown from her body; at least, there seemed to be nothing she thought worth salvaging, except her shoes. The firemen, who had come very quickly indeed, had found her lying in the hall, just beginning to return to consciousness, and had bundled her up and taken her to an ambulance. Then they had stopped the fire before it had much more than burned out Oakes's apartment.

Oakes's body had been broken by the explosion, and somewhat burned. But it was easily identifiable. He had been a man easy to identify—very tall, and very thin, with a small head on a long neck. (That, Pam had gathered from a precinct detective who had questioned her briefly.) But it was the theory of the police—a theory now being verified at the morgue—that neither explosion nor flame had killed Robert Oakes. He had been dead, they thought, some hours before the pilot light set off the collected gas. He had been dead of gas poisoning and there was every evidence that this was what he had planned.