Killing the Goose (27 page)

Mr. North sat down again, but his thoughts were elsewhere. It wasn't funny any more. It was agonizing. Desperately he wanted to be out of there; frantically he twisted to look at the clock behind him. Eleven-four. Twenty-six minutes to go. And in twenty-six minutes Mrs. North could do anything. There was no trouble in the world that Mrs. North, on the trail of a murderer, couldn't get into in twenty-six minutes.

In his office, Bill Weigand cradled the telephone. Dorian, sitting opposite, had no need to ask. Mr. Beck still had not come in. Jerry shook his head and took up the telephone and spun the dial. He waited; he waited longer than there was any sense in waiting. He cradled the receiver.

“Still,” he said. “Where the hell are they?”

“Try to remember,” Dorian urged. “You don't forget things.”

That was fine to say. It wasn't true. He had forgotten something that Jerry North had said as he left the North apartment early in the evening. Or was it the day before, or the day before that? Something that had seemed incompatible with something else—something about Jerry's keeping Pam locked up, which didn't fit because this was the night that Jerry was going to do something he thought ridiculous and had mentioned amusingly. But Bill couldn't, for the life of him, remember what it was.

And now he wanted desperately to remember, because he wanted to be sure that Pam North was locked up, and not pursuing that theory of hers. Because, driving down to the Homicide Squad headquarters from the fruitless visit to the Hotel André, Bill had suddenly seen another solution of the whole affair—seen it sharply and frighteningly, and with a disturbing conviction of its truth. If it was true—if it really fitted as it seemed to fit—Pam North was walking, in that gay way of hers, into a danger of which she had, even now, no real understanding whatever.

Pamela North, pleased that she had not promised anything, but hopeful that Jerry would be too absorbed to look for her in the mezzanine booth, went quietly out and down some carpeted stairs. There would, at any rate, be no harm in making a telephone call. She asked a uniformed attendant if there were public telephones and was directed across a wide lobby, off which corridors ran in several directions. The corridors were dimly lighted and there were red spots along them. Pam found a telephone booth—fitted with a very special kind of telephone, evidently the New York Telephone Company's fraternal tribute to the Transcontinental Broadcasting System—and dialed the Hotel André. The Hotel André would ring Mr. Beck's apartment, and did.

Mrs. North waited, summoning her resources—and a little wondering what she would say when she got Mr. Beck. A male voice answered, with a formal tenderness.

“Is—is Mr. Beck at home?” Pam said.

Mr. Beck was not at home, the voice said. It was not certain when Mr. Beck was expected. But any message—?

“No message,” Mrs. North said.

She came out of the booth. So after all she was not going to break the promise she hadn't made; she was really going to sit in the glass coop and be a citizen of the world of books. She made way abstractedly for a small, broad man who was hurrying down one of the corridors—and looking, Pam thought suddenly, like the rabbit in the Tenniel illustrations of “Alice in Wonderland.” He went down the corridor and, half way down it, disappeared under one of the red spots. The red spots, apparently, marked doors. Pam started back toward the information desk.

A small boy in an absurd uniform, with a pill-box cap, was standing in the middle of the lobby staring after the man who looked like the Tenniel rabbit. His eyes were round and excited. When Mrs. North came up to him he had to share the experience.

“Gee, lady,” he said. “You know who that was?”

“No,” Pam said. Since this seemed unduly final, she smiled to complete it.

“Gee,” the boy said. “That was Mr. Beck. You know—Mr. Dan Beck? My old man says he's the greatest—”

But Pam was not listening. She stopped suddenly. She stared down the corridor. Mr. Beck must have gone in under the third red light which marked a door of some kind. Perhaps she could find him if she hurried.

She hurried. The little boy stared after her.

“Gee, lady,” he said, in an awed whisper. “You hadn't ought to bother Mr. Beck. Not
now.
”

There was nothing to do but to wait and keep trying. Dorian thought they might as well wait at home, but she realized her husband's uneasy impatience, and did not suggest it. But she did, idly, snap on a small radio on the window sill, and switch from the police calls on which it was set to the broadcast band, and turn the dial at random.

“—and how do you answer that, Mr. North?” the radio inquired, conversationally.

“I don't know that it needs answering,” Jerry North's voice said. “I'm not sure it doesn't, essentially, answer itself.”

Jerry North did not sound as if he cared much. He sounded as if he were thinking of something else.

Bill Weigand was on his feet by then, and Dorian's slim fingers had twitched off the radio. Bill remembered all of it, and cursed himself for forgetting. This was the night of Jerry's broadcast. Which meant that he and Pam would be at the Transcontinental's towering building on Madison Avenue. Bill moved, and Dorian, not asking needless questions, moved with him. But in the car she had reassurance.

“Anyway,” she said, “Beck won't be there, if that's what you're afraid of, Bill. He's through for the night. Don't you remember—we heard him.”

“He does a repeat later,” Bill said. He opened the Buick up, with its red lights flashing a warning. He let the siren growl gently at intersections. “For the West Coast.” He whirled the car recklessly east through Twenty-eighth. “If he gets the chance—” Weigand went around a bus and Dorian decided she had better not talk, because if he was going to drive like this he needed all his concentration. She wondered why Beck might not get a chance to do his repeat broadcast, but decided that there would be a better time to bring it up. If they lived.

Pamela North went through a door under the red sign, which said “Keep Out. Rehearsal.” All the red signs said that, but the first room she had entered, timidly, had been empty. Nobody was rehearsing anything, and it was not where Mr. Beck had gone. So now Pam entered with more assurance.

She went down a short corridor and opened another door. She walked into a small studio—much smaller than the one in which Jerry was broadcasting. Mr. Beck was in it, sitting at a small table on which there were two microphones. The floor was of some substance which deadened sound, but Pam must have made some noise because Dan Beck looked up. He looked up with irritation.

“Well?” he said. He had a wonderful voice, but it was not suave, as Pam had expected. “Well, what do you want? I got the others out of here because I wanted to be by myself. Just”—he looked up at the clock—“just eighteen minutes by myself. Before I go on. Now what do you want?”

“I—” Pam began.

“Anyway,” he said. “This is the standby studio. You ought to know that, if you work here. You ought to know nobody's allowed in the standby studio except the announcer and the engineer. Even I'm not allowed in here, under the rules.”

That made the rules tremendous. Even rules which should have barred Dan Beck from somewhere, and had understandably failed to bar him, were tremendous rules. Even trying to bar Dan Beck from anywhere was a tremendous thing. That, somehow, was all in the voice.

“Well,” Pam said, “where are they?”

“I told them to get out,” Beck said, succinctly. “Now I'm telling you to get out. My God, girl—don't you know who I am?”

“Yes,” Pam told him. “You're Mr. Beck. Or you say you're Mr. Beck.”

“Then you ought to know—” Beck began. He stopped suddenly and looked at Mrs. North. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded. The voice was anything but suave now. “Who says I'm not Beck?”

“Nobody,” Pam said. “Everybody says you
are
Mr. Beck. You say you are—everybody says you are. Are you?”

She had not meant it to go this way at all. She had meant it to be subtle, indirect.

“Look,” Dan Beck said. “Are you crazy? Do you work here?”

“No,” Pam said. “I don't work here. I came to see you. I saw you going down the corridor like a Tenniel ra—I saw you going down the corridor. And I wanted to see you so I just came.”

Beck stood up. He was not really an imposing figure, but still he was formidable. It suddenly occurred to Pam North that he was very formidable, with the two of them alone in the small studio.

“But if I'm disturbing you, I can come back,” she said, and began to back toward the door. “I'll come back later. Some time. With Bill and—”

Dan Beck moved fast for a man with short legs. He moved, it seemed to Pam, with a kind of scuttling motion. He was around the table and beside her. He put a hand on her arm. It was a strong hand.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait just a minute. Who are
you?
”

“Mrs. North,” Pam said. “Pamela North. I'll go now.”

She moved, but the hand tightened.

“Who's this—Bill?” he said.

Pam hesitated a moment. But it would be better if he knew that she was a friend of Bill's.

“Lieutenant Weigand,” she said. “He's a—”

“Yes,” Beck said. “I know who he is. And he sent you here. To ask if I'm really Beck?”

“No.” Pam said. “That is—yes. He's—he's right outside.”

Beck pushed her out of the way and was at the door. He turned a catch which took the place of a key.

“We'll keep him outside,” he said. He turned and looked at Mrs. North. “All right,” he said. “What do you want, Mrs. North? I'm Dan Beck. What do you want?”

He did not look like a rabbit any longer. Certainly he did not sound like a rabbit. Pam tried to keep her voice light and steady.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all—if you're really Mr. Beck. And not just a—just a voice.”

She was not, after she had said it, clear why she had said it just that way. Perhaps, she eventually thought, she had had, subconsciously, a glimpse of the way things really were; perhaps her subconscious had chosen the words for her. But, then, she was not prepared for the effect upon Dan Beck of what she said.

He stood for a moment staring at her, measuringly. His eyes seemed to grow smaller and his brows came together; although for a moment he did not move, there was still a kind of thrusting forward of his short, compact body. Without actually moving his feet, he came nearer. He came nearer threateningly.

“So,” he said. “You did guess. Or was it Weigand who guessed?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Both of us. It was—it was obvious, Mr. Beck. If you want me to go on calling you Beck?”

He looked a little puzzled.

“What would you call me?” he said. “I'm Beck—I'm still Beck. What would you call me?”

It was hard to understand what he was getting at. He seemed to make an admission; now he seemed to withdraw it. But Pam decided she must not show that she did not understand.

“Jones,” she said. “Smith. Anything.” She met his threat steadily. “Because, whatever you say, you're not Beck. Not really. I knew that last night. I ought to have known it all the time, probably.”

The last was bluff. She could think of no reason she should have known it all the time.

“All the time?” he repeated. “But—but Elliot was alive until yesterday. And I didn't run out until yesterday. We kept ahead, you know.”

He was talking less to her than to himself, Pam North thought. She was authentically puzzling him; somehow they were talking at cross-purposes. But there was no lessening of the menace he presented—his face set hard with the brows drawn together, his body a little forward on his short legs. He was grotesque, as he stood there, Pam thought. Grotesque—and dangerous. And she was alone with him in a room with a locked door behind her.

She tried to speak lightly, and it was harder, because now she realized fully her danger. Because whatever was obscure and unclear in the situation, the situation still was dangerous. Pam began to move backward, slowly, toward the door which had let her in.

“You couldn't have known before,” Beck went on, explaining it to himself. “Not from the broadcast. Because we kept ahead, you see. As a margin of safety. In case Elliot was ill some day, or couldn't—” He broke off and looked at her and saw her backing away. Then he smiled. It was an ordinary smile, doing ordinary things to lips and cheeks. And it was horrible. It was horrible because it was ordinary. It was horrible because Beck was a squat little man, almost grotesque, and smiling—and moving toward her to kill her. Because that's what he's doing, Pam thought. That's what he's doing!

“But you know now, don't you, Mrs. North,” he said, and he gave up any pretense that he was not moving toward her. “And they sent you to—what would you say, Mrs. North? Probably you know the words too, Mrs. North. Like Elliot. Elliot knew a lot of words, Mrs. North. He died just the same.”

“I don't know!” Pam said, and now her voice went up a little. “I don't know what you're talking about. I just thought you weren't Mr. Beck—that you were only pretending to be Mr. Beck. That somebody had kidnapped the real Mr. Beck. But I think you are Mr. Beck.” She was almost against the door, now. Her fingers were reaching up behind her for the catch on the door. “Truly, I think you're Mr. Beck,” she insisted.

He did not answer. Instead he lunged toward her, his hands up and the fingers spread out. They came at the level of her throat. Pam North screamed. More quickly than she would have thought she ever could, she leaped to the side. She half jumped, half ran, past Dan Beck. One of his hands caught the shoulder of her dress and the silk tore and she went on, the dress falling from her shoulder.