Death Takes a Bow (16 page)

Mullins was looking down at the desk. He said, “Ain't those Sproul's notes?” and Weigand looked at him absently and nodded.

“Look,” Mullins said, “I thought you lost them. I thought somebody took them.”

“Somebody brought them back,” Weigand told him. Mullins waited for him to go on, and he did not go on.

“Just like that?” Mullins said. “Who?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said. “Somebody—sent them to me.”

Mullins said that was funny. Then, after a moment, he made an addition.

“So they don't tell us anything,” he said. “Or the guy wouldn't have sent them back.”

Weigand held the sheets out to Mullins and showed him the marks. Mullins said it was sure funny. Weigand agreed.

Presumably, Weigand explained, it wasn't the murderer who had stolen the notes. On the contrary, they seemed to have been stolen by somebody who had, after looking them over, decided to turn assistant detective. Mullins nodded slowly.

“Only,” he said, “there's always a double bluff, ain't there, Loot.”

Weigand smiled at him encouragingly and nodded.

“Right, Sergeant,” he said. “As you say. There's always the double bluff.”

Mullins looked down at him.

“Hell,” he said.
“Another
screwy one. It's those Norths again.”

8

Friday, 12:15
P
.
M
. to 2:10
P
.
M
.

Mrs. North dialed and waited. The telephone buzzed properly and then clicked and spluttered. Absently, Mrs. North reached out and removed Ruffy's right forepaw from the telephone cradle, which Ruffy had been investigating. Mrs. North dialed again and a markedly wheedling voice said: “United States Weather Bureau forecast for New York City and vicinity: Twelve noon temperature fifty-six degrees, humidity ninety-five per cent. This afternoon and early tonight, showers. Not much change in temperature. Drive carefully and save rubber.”

Mrs. North said “thank you” and remembered that Jerry told her she shouldn't, because the dulcet voice was really a recording and had no ears. But Mrs. North, although she believed this with her mind, did not really believe it, and it seemed rude to her not to say anything at all, particularly about driving carefully. Mrs. North removed Ruffy's left forepaw, which was partly wedged under the depressible bar in the telephone cradle, parked the telephone and looked out the window. A gust of wind threw rain blindingly against the window, and the window rattled.

“Showers,” said Mrs. North. “Probably intended to fool the Germans.”

Because this wasn't a shower. This was a deluge. Mrs. North rephrased the weather forecast, to make it conform with the fact. “This afternoon and early tonight, deluges.” Or maybe: “Occasional deluges.” It would have to end: “Swim carefully; conserve life belts.”

It was, Mrs. North realized, being very boring for the nieces. Here was a Saturday and their first in New York, and on Saturdays sailors came in clusters. Not, Mrs. North thought a little anxiously, that the sailors must be allowed to do Beth and Margie any good. But on a sunny day, girls could look at sailors and know that sailors were looking at them, and that probably was enough.

“It had better be,” Mrs. North thought, looking out the window and thinking of the now very disturbing trust put in her by her sister. But they're really such nice little girls.

“Aunt Pam,” Beth said from behind her and Mrs. North turned. Beth looked out of the window. “It rains a lot in New York, doesn't it?” she said, conversationally.

“Sometimes,” Mrs. North said. “I'm sorry.”

“Oh,” Beth said, encouragingly, “It isn't your fault, Aunt Pam.” But the exoneration sounded rather formal. “You can't help it, really. I expect it's just New York. Or the equinox.”

“It's too late for the equinox,” Mrs. North said. “At least I think it is. And I don't really know if there is any, Beth. To make it rain, I mean. I think it just happened to rain.”

Beth looked out at the window, which streamed.

“It certainly is,” she said. “I don't suppose we'll be going out, Aunt Pam. I mean, out anywhere. Like a movie.”

It didn't, Pam thought, looking out the window in her turn, look much like it. But the alternative was Beth and Margie and herself and Martha, in a rather small apartment. Especially, she added to herself, Beth.

“Oh,” Pam North said, “in New York people don't let it stop them. Because of the subways.”

“Can we ride in the subways?” Beth said. “We never have, Aunt Pamela.”

Pam said of course they could.

“But some day when it isn't raining,” she said. “Today, because it's raining, we'd better take a taxicab.”

“To a
movie?”
Beth sounded surprised. “Don't you drive your own car at all, Aunt Pam?”

“Not when it's raining, dear,” Pam said. “Hardly ever in town, because you can never stop anywhere. It's really cheaper to take taxis.”

Beth thought this over and looked at Pamela North with doubt. She compromised, it was evident, by saying she liked taxicabs.

“But papa says they're an extravagance,” she added. “He says street cars are good enough.”

“Does he, dear?” Pam said. “I expect he's right, at home. Only in New York nobody rides street cars.” She thought this over. “Even when there were any,” she said. “Except people who just sat in them.”

Beth clearly didn't get this. Neither, Pamela North thought, do I. Exactly. But that's just what they did.

“If we're going to a movie,” Beth said, after a brief, puzzled pause, “I ought to change my dress. And tell Margie to change hers. Oughtn't I, Aunt Pam?”

Pam said she thought that would be very nice. Between the beating of the rain on the window, and Beth, she felt somehow hypnotized. She rallied.

“I'll tell you what we'll do,” she said. “We'll go out to lunch some place. And then a movie, if we find one. Would you like that, Beth?” She looked at Beth. “I'm sorry about the rain,” Pam said.

“Oh,” Beth said, “I think that will be lovely, Aunt Pam. Could we go to an Automat?”

“Well,” Pam said. “Wouldn't you rather go some place else, dear. Where we can sit down?”

“Oh,” Beth said, “do you have to stand up in the Automat?”

“You have to walk around,” Pam told her. “And it's hard with an umbrella. I think today we won't go to the Automat. Although we will, while you're here.” She smiled at Beth, feeling an unexpected kinship. “I used to like them too,” she said. “Jerry and I used to eat in them a lot.” She smiled, in reminiscence. “I was always thinking the cup would come out too,” she said. “And so the coffee went down the drain, of course.”

It was a funny remembrance, and the remembrance of Jerry's face when he saw her face as the coffee flowed uninterrupted from the spigot made it even funnier. She looked at Beth and saw the effortful smile on Beth's face and remembered.

“Of course,” she said, “you don't know how they work. It wouldn't be funny to you. But it was funny to us.”

“Oh,” Beth said, “I'm sure it was, Aunt Pamela. It must have been very funny.”

This conversation, Pam told herself, is unbelievable. It must be the rain. She turned briskly from the window.

“You and Margie get dressed,” she directed. “We'll go out to lunch, to some nice place, and then to a movie. I'll tell you—we'll go to the Roundabout.”

“Oh,” Beth said. It occurred to Pam that Beth said “Oh” so often because it made her lips look as if they were prepared for a kiss. Pam rejected this speculation, but without finality; she deferred the speculation. “Oh,” Beth said, “that will be lovely, Aunt Pam. Is the Roundabout a nice place?”

That, Pam thought, was certainly a question. Since she was taking the girls to the Roundabout primarily because she had once seen a woman who might be a murderer languishing publicly over a man who might be anything, and was certainly not the kind of man little girls should know, it was hard to tell even herself that the Roundabout was “nice.” The Roundabout was, in a sense, all things to all people, but more to them in the evening than at luncheon time. But that would be hard to explain to Beth.

Really, Pam thought, the Roundabout was at least two places. At luncheon it was just a pretty good place for luncheon, with a trio including a xylophone. At night it was a place with a floor show, and not really a good place. She and Jerry had gone to see what it was like; it was a place you went to to see what it was like. But that, also, would be complicated to explain to Beth. To Beth, Pam noted, and also now to Margie, who had appeared behind her sister.

“Very nice,” Pam said. “It's really very nice, Beth.”

Why was it, Pam wondered, that when you praised anything twice in the same words, you inferentially condemned it? She would have to ask Jerry. He would have a theory. He always had theories.

“Very nice,” Pam repeated, more firmly than ever. “Change your things, children.”

After the simplicity of rain, the Roundabout was surprising. It was too bright and too big, and there were too many mirrors; there were too many tables too pointedly secluded by too many mirrored pillars; there was too much bar with things too shining upon it. Pam wondered what Beth and Margie would tell their mother about it when they got home, and what their mother would afterward write to Pam.

The captain was too welcoming, and his accent was too quaint. But he had them, now, and there was no escape, except to shake a head when he led them toward a table practically under the bar, to continue shaking it in spite of the expression of puzzled surprise in his face, indicating that they were rejecting the very best table in quite the best restaurant in the world, and to nod only when he shrugged toward a table in a corner, where they could all sit with their backs to the wall.

Pam had to shake her head again when the waiter suggested cocktails, shaking it in an undertone to match the tone of the suggestion. Pam had a mental picture of a martini, very cold with beads on the glass—because the glass had first been iced—and a lemon peel twisted over it but not dropped in. No olive, Pam told her mental picture.

“I think the tomato juice cocktail would be nice, to start with, don't you, girls?” Pamela North said, a heroine in her own right. And then, proving that virtue has sometimes rewards beyond itself, Mrs. North looked across the restaurant and saw what she had come to see. She saw Mrs. Paul Williams.

Mrs. Williams was wearing a black silk suit over her corsets, and had let a fur jacket fall over the back of the bar chair. There was nothing languishing about her, although she was sitting between two men, and Pam was disappointed. Mrs. Williams was a busy woman, having a cocktail at a bar before lunch and this was not a discrepancy. Or, at the most, not a discrepancy you could build on. She was not making eyes at anybody. At first, Mrs. North thought she was not with anybody, and then she began to wonder.

Because, without appearing to—without turning to each other, or making any of the physical movements of conversation—Mrs. Williams and the man on her left were talking. He was, from the rear, a not very tall man with dark hair, and he seemed to be looking at his drink while he talked. And Mrs. Williams was looking at her drink as she answered.

It would be absurd, Pam realized, to call their conversation furtive. In the mirrored glare of the Roundabout it was impossible to be furtive, unless you chose to be, in a sense, publicly furtive. Mrs. Williams and the man were not concealing, or trying to conceal, the fact of their conversation. But neither were they advertising it. It occurred to Mrs. North that they were furtive with each other, rather than with the world outside; as if the concealment lay between them, rather than between them and others. But that, Pam North thought, ordering abstractly and keeping her eyes on the two at the bar, was speculation. Of the worst kind. Because they might be, and probably were, merely abstracted; the effect of furtiveness grew out of her imagination, and out of the intentness with which Mrs. Williams and the man—a client?—were weighing what they said to one another.

So the choice of the Roundabout had, and continuing to watch them Pam grew surer of it, resulted in nothing, except the sharing of the noise of a great many other people and indifferent food served with flourishing elaborateness. The tomato juice came, canned and tepid in elaborate ice bowls.

“Oh,” Beth said. “What lovely tomato juice. What a
nice
place, Aunt Pam.”

Pam was surprised and almost showed it, and decided there was no occasion to show surprise.

“Isn't it?” she said. “So gay.”

The man sitting on Mrs. Williams' left half-turned his chair on its swivel, as if he were about to get down. He turned it away from Mrs. Williams, but he seemed still to be speaking to her. She shook her head, and then turned away so that Mrs. North could see her profile clearly.

A girl who looked like a secretary during working hours was standing beside Mrs. Williams and holding out something, and by the color Mrs. North could see it was a telegram. Mrs. North's mind sought an explanation—a story which would match the fact—and decided that the girl was Mrs. Williams' secretary and that she had been told to bring to the restaurant any telegrams which came while Mrs. Williams was at lunch—and that was odd, unless Mrs. Williams had been expecting a telegram of considerable importance—and that the secretary had dutifully brought it.

Still sitting with her profile toward Mrs. North, Mrs. Williams opened the telegram. It was short, evidently, because her eyes remained on it only for a moment. And it was important, evidently, because for an instant after she had read it, Mrs. Williams seemed to stare beyond it. Then she read it again.

And then, and for an instant Mrs. North thought she must be imagining again, Mrs. Williams seemed to sway on her chair. While Mrs. North stared, and half started up to see better, Mrs. Williams swayed on her chair still more, until it was quite evidently not Mrs. North's imagination. Mrs. Williams swayed to her left, and so toward the bar, and the man on her right, feeling the movement beside him, half turned and as Mrs. Williams sagged toward him, took her in his arms. It was clear and strange, and in slow motion.