Death of an Angel (24 page)

“I so want you to understand,” Naomi said, and by implication, if not in fact, reached out her hands toward those scattered in the seats in front of her. Phyllis, Jane Lamont and Castle were in a group, not far from the practical window. Robert Carr, who now had put his hands in his jacket pockets, stood alone, upstage and to the left. It was, Pam thought, as if, symbolically as well as in fact, the people of the theater had withdrawn from him, as from a pariah. “So
hope
you will understand,” Naomi Shaw—no, now Naomi Carr once again—said, in the softest (and most hopeful) of tones. “It's always been Robert and me. From so many years ago, when we were growing up together, so far away from—all this.” “All this” was identified, apparently as everything in front of her, by the most graceful of gestures.

“We didn't always realize,” Naomi said. “I thought—you all know I thought—I could find someone else. Dear Brad—poor dear Brad. I was so fond of him but—but it wasn't the same. And then Robert came back to me.”

She had her audience, now. There could be no doubt of that. (
But why
, Pam thought,
does she need all this?
She's hinted, not quite said. It's as if—as if she were deliberately building it. But she must, Pam decided, be wrong in that, for why would she?)

“And then,” Naomi said, “Robert heard he had to go to—it's Pakistan, isn't it, dear?” She turned slightly toward Robert Carr.

“Chile,” Carr said. His voice seemed flat after hers, downright.

“Of course,” she said. “Chile, of course. He heard it last night and—and he came to me. He has to go—it is tomorrow, isn't it, darling?”

“Yes,” Carr said.

“And then I knew,” Naomi said. “Knew nothing else mattered. Not even my lovely play. Knew I had to go with him—Where he went I had to go. Always—that nothing else—”

Marvin Goetz stood up again.

“Sweetheart!”
he said, and said it as an oath. “You're walking out on us? Just like—”

There was a shot, and the explosion roared in the theater. A rather large chunk of plaster fell out of the proscenium arch. Carr, in a movement like a cat's, threw himself to one side. Mullins came through the door at stage left with a revolver in his hand, and Bill Weigand came through the french doors, down to Naomi. He pushed her aside, toward the group at her right. Somewhere there was sudden, violent shouting; somewhere, behind the barrier against which Pam and Dorian sat there was the noise of men hurrying. A door banged somewhere.

These things did not happen in sequence, but at once. And the house lights came on.

Two men were struggling in the aisle at the right. The taller shouted,
“No you don't. Not again!”
and they went down together, on the floor between the seats.

Mullins ran across the stage and down the wooden stairs. And two men who had been sitting very near in the darkness came out of their seats.

The struggling men rolled in the aisle. The taller man, who was on top, forced the hand of the smaller slowly upward, apparently against desperate resistance. And, between the two hands, clasped in struggle, there was an automatic pistol.

“Got it!”
Wesley Strothers said, gasping a little from his effort. “Just in—”

Mullins reached them first. He wrenched the automatic from the hand that held it, pulled Strothers off Sam Wyatt. Wyatt, for a moment, lay on his back on the floor, and made no effort to get up. One of the men who had been sitting close pulled him to his feet.

“Oh God,” Sam Wyatt said. “Oh God, oh God, oh
God!
”

“Hit anybody?” Strothers said, his voice still high, excited. “Carr all right?”

“Quite all right,” Bill Weigand said, and then Pam saw, and Dorian saw, that Bill had not moved from where he stood near the footlights, at the center of the stage. “Nobody was hit. The shot went very wild.”

“Thank God for that,” Strothers said. “I was afraid for a moment I wouldn't be able—” He did not finish.

“You may as well come up here, Mr. Strothers,” Bill said. “You too, Wyatt.”

But Strothers had already started down the aisle. Wyatt came with Mullins' hand—the hand which did not hold the automatic—hard on his arm. Sam Wyatt kept shaking his head, like a man who has been struck hard, is dazed by the blow. (Even now, Pam thought, I'm sorry for him. But how—?)

Strothers went up the wooden stairs; Wyatt was propelled after him. Naomi Shaw was across the stage, held tight against Carr, who was watching with his face intent, his eyes narrowed. Facing Weigand, Strothers began to speak.

“When she said she was going with him,” Strothers said. “Leaving the play. I'd been standing there, listening, and—and Sam moved. I felt him move, more than saw him. Then I looked and he'd got this gun out and was aiming at Carr. Then I jumped him, but the gun went off before I could stop it.” He turned, abruptly, to Sam Wyatt. “You're crazy,” he said. “You've gone crazy, Sam.”

“It's no use,” Wyatt said, in a dull voice. “All the time, I knew it wasn't any use.” He turned, then, to face Strothers squarely. “Always a jump ahead, weren't you?” he said, and his voice was no longer dull. His voice vibrated with hatred. “A smart louse, Strothers. For the kind of louse you are. Want to know what kind?”

Sam Wyatt told the tall, dark-eyed producer—told him in crude, hard words.

Pam North expected Bill Weigand to interrupt. But he did not interrupt. He let Wyatt finish. Wesley Strothers listened, his face unchanged. Then Strothers shook his head, pityingly.

“That was the way it happened, then?” Bill said, when Wyatt had finished telling Strothers what kind of a louse he was. “You don't deny it happened that way?”

Bill's voice was even, unexcited. But there was an odd quality in it. Dorian Weigand clutched Pam's arm as she heard Bill speak. “Listen,” she said. “When he talks that way—”

Apparently the odd note in Weigand's voice reached Wyatt's ears, as well. He looked at Weigand, and then his face began slowly to change.

“Do I need to?” he said, and waited. Weigand made a just perceptible motion with his head—a motion to which Mullins responded—before he answered. Then Bill Weigand said, “No, Mr. Wyatt. You don't need to.”

Strothers whirled. And Mullins, behind him, took him by both arms. For an instant, it seemed that Strothers would try to break the big detective's grasp. But then he stood quiet, unresisting.

“I tell you,” Strothers said, “he tried to kill—”

“No,” Bill said. “Oh, it might have worked. Except—I already knew, Strothers. And so, I was waiting for it. For something like it.”

He turned away, then. He turned toward Naomi, who was still circled by Carr's arms.

“Was it all right?” Naomi asked.

“It was very good, Mrs. Carr,” Weigand said. “Very good indeed.”

“Oh,” Naomi said. “I really can act, captain. I'm quite good, really.”

13

Monday, 6:30
P.M.
and after

Bill had promised to drop by for a drink, when he could and if he could. Pam had taken Dorian home with her, more or less as a hostage. “Because,” Pam said, “he must have known all the time, or at least for part of the time. And I thought Sam Wyatt and then Phyllis Barnscott, and he's got to tell me why I was so wrong.”

“It's possible,” Jerry said, stirring, “that you're slipping.” He shook his head, elaborately. He said, “Tut, tut,” in a tone of commiseration. He was, almost at once, disturbed to feel that Pam took seriously what was not seriously intended. “You were right about some of it,” he said. “You were right about the cat. And, basically, about the tea-towel.”

“I didn't come out right,” Pam said. “There's no use trying to cheer me up. Of course, maybe I'll feel better after a drink, but that will just be a feeling, won't it? Just an illusion.”

Martini came and looked at her.

“Even Teeney notices it,” Pam said. “She sits there and looks sorry for me. Don't you, Teeney?”

Martini said, “Yah.” She repeated it.

“Scolding me,” Pam said. “Thinking, how did I ever get mixed up with a human like that? Ashamed of me.”

Jerry gave her a drink. Dorian said, “There, there, Pam. There, there.”

The doorbell rang. They let Bill Weigand in. He looked tired. He also looked contented. Given a drink, he looked pleased.

“All right,” Pam said. “How?”

“How,” Bill said. “How, Jerry. How, Dorian.” They responded politely, each saying, “How.” Pam said, “You three!” And then she said, “You might have got Mr. Carr shot. I suppose you planned that?”

“She's cross,” Jerry said. “She thought it was going to be Miss Barnscott.”

Bill nodded. He said, “No, I didn't plan to get Mr. Carr shot. But then—he didn't get shot, of course.” He gently removed Sherry from a chair and sat in it. She had made the chair very warm.

“You forgot it was a stag party,” Bill said. “That was where you went wrong, Pam.”

“A—” Pam said and then, suddenly, she tapped her forehead with two clenched fists. “I'll never live it down,” she said. “Not inside. Of
course
it was a stag party.”

“Look,” Jerry North said to Dorian Weigand, “have you any idea what they're talking about?”

She shook her head.

“It's Braithwaite,” Pam said, and appeared to be restored. “It's numbing. Does he admit it, Bill?”

Strothers admitted nothing. It was not to be assumed he would. Thanks to the evidence of two detectives, who had been attentive witnesses, in their seats behind Sam Wyatt, it was not necessary that he should. At least, the assistant district attorney for homicide hoped it would not.

“He had the gun in his pocket,” Bill said. “Took it out and fired, not as if he planned to hit anyone. He'd got beyond trying to save the play, I suppose. Wanted to save his skin. After he fired, he grabbed Wyatt, who had started to get up, and struggled with him, pretending to wrestle for the automatic. He was confident we'd believe his version, not Wyatt's. It might have worked, if we hadn't been sure enough already.”

“It was all just to stir up the animals?” Dorian said. “The whole thing about Miss Shaw and her going to Chile?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I hoped he'd move. I didn't expect precisely what I got, although I did warn Carr to be ready to dodge. And promised we'd cover him.”

“You didn't,” Pam said.

“If Strothers had been closer, we would have. At that distance, with an automatic—there isn't one man in a hundred can hit what he aims at. And Strothers didn't aim. That wasn't the idea. The idea was to clinch it against Wyatt. That had more or less been the idea for some time.”

He seemed to consider the matter closed. He partly emptied his glass. They looked at him somewhat coldly. He smiled at them, and said he would spell it out.

“Like C-A-T for cat,” Pam said. “Do that.”

“Not the whole thing about Miss Shaw and Chile,” Bill said. “To stir up the animals, I mean. She and Carr are married. He is going to Chile—not tomorrow, but in about a week. But she isn't going with him. When I left the theater, she was telling Goetz about a new piece of business she wanted in the second act. She's quite an actress.”

“You wrote the scene,” Dorian told him.

“Not the lines,” Bill said. “I suggested an outline. She filled it in.”

“Anyway,” Pam said, “I knew it wasn't really a kidnapping. Because kidnappers don't carol at their work. I suppose you knew that all the time, too?”

Bill shook his head. The “kidnapping” had, for a time, presented an obstacle—a piece he could not fit. But then he remembered that the man, according to Naomi's maid, had shouted that Naomi couldn't “get away with it.” Bill remembered he had heard Carr use almost that phrase but saying “away from it”—meaning that Naomi could not get away from what they shared.

“L-O-V-E for love,” Pam said. “It took them long enough to find it out. But they didn't plan to have it look like a kidnapping?”

They had not, Bill said. They had forgotten, in their excitement—Carr had courted very vigorously—that the maid might overhear. The plan, when they had shouted themselves to agreement, had been merely to slip away, remarry, and tell nobody, since there would have been criticism of a marriage so soon after Fitch's death.

“I should think so,” Dorian said.

“Well,” Pam said, “probably she forgot she really loved Carr, who was in Pakistan anyway. And thought she loved Fitch.”

“And,” Jerry said, “all that pretty, pretty money, darlings.”

When they were through, Bill said, with patience. She had, at any rate, married Carr. The plan had been to keep it secret until he returned from Chile, then to announce that they had just been remarried. Nellie Blythe's sharp ears had spoiled that. They had returned, to explain that kidnapping was not involved. They had agreed to play the scene as Bill suggested.

“Don't tell me she didn't love it,” Pam said.

Bill promised he would not tell her that.

“Sometime,” Dorian said, “I wish people would begin at the beginning. Strothers killed Fitch so that Naomi wouldn't marry him and leave the play. He fed him oxalic acid—oh. The stag party. Of
course!
”

Jerry North looked at her. He shook his head slowly, sadly. “I guess it
is
Braithwaite,” he said.

“Right,” Bill said. Even before the murder, Strothers had started the frame-up against Wyatt which was to cover it. He had suggested that Wyatt arrange to see Fitch, have one more try at changing Fitch's mind. The arrangement, for eleven-thirty, the next morning, had been made at the Friday night party, in Strothers' presence. When he finally admitted going to see Fitch, Wyatt had said that “we” had thought of new arguments, and that Fitch had agreed to listen. But Strothers knew him well, was certain he would only listen, not agree. So Strothers killed him. Strothers had not, of course, been able to anticipate that Wyatt would at first deny having been in Fitch's upstairs rooms. That Wyatt had was, from Strothers' point of view, merely good fortune. But, even without Wyatt's lie, Strothers had proved him as a suspect.