Murder by the Book (11 page)

“Funk,” Pam said. “That's the word I had in mind. Yellow funk?”

“Blue,” Jerry said. “I've no idea why. ‘Yellow' obviously is better. Look, Pam. If you merely find somebody murdered, and have nothing to do with the murder—well, do you panic?
You
don't.”

“I,” Pam said, “am probably more the Stilts type. Among other things.”

“On the other hand,” Jerry said, making it all as clear as he could, “if you've stabbed a man you had—or thought you had—cause to hate and were seen running from where he'd been killed—”

“She saw the beachboy coming round the bathhouse when she was halfway down the pier,” Pam said. “She'd know he hadn't seen her kill anybody. Couldn't have. Look—”

Pam made what Jerry assumed was a diagram, moving hands through air. She pictured, Jerry assumed, the impossibility of the beachboy's having seen murder from where he walked.

“All right,” Jerry said, “she panicked. Which doesn't prove her innocent, does it? On the contrary, if anything. People who panic are dangerous people.”

Pam nodded her head, but it was the abstracted gesture of one who politely notes a statement of the obvious.

Jerry waited for further comment.

“Sometimes,” Pam said, “Shadow runs and hides when she hasn't really done anything, because she thinks it will look like she has.” Pam paused. “As if,” she said, editing. “A few days before we left, I gave her a piece of chicken liver—put it in her dish and said, ‘Here. This is for you,'—and she grabbed it and ran and hid under the bed, because for some reason she thought it would look as if she had stolen it.” She paused again. “She's not a very easy cat to understand.”

“A good many things aren't too clear in her mind,” Jerry said. “To put it mildly. So? I assume we're still up to our knees in analogy?”

“All right,” Pam said. “Over our heads. Although it's there, I think. Anyway—” She looked at Jerry; he nodded his head.

“If people think you might have a reason to kill somebody,” Pam said, “and you know they do, and you find somebody has killed the same somebody—you come on his body, say—you might run and hide. Run from the circumstances. Hide—try to hide—from a shadow of guilt in your own mind. Not real guilt. Only the shadow.”

“You'd be foolish,” Jerry said. “Make things worse. Give substance to this shadow. Apparent substance.”

“Oh,” Pam said, “foolish is a word—foolish is what doesn't work. This has. Anyway, Mr. Jefferson hasn't found her.”

“They'll find her,” Jerry said. “Sooner or later. She won't have helped herself.”

“You always,” Pam said, “want people to be rational. Mostly they aren't.”

Jerry said he knew.

“Not really,” Pam said. “It always surprises you when they aren't. Instead of when they are. It's ingrained. You wouldn't run from something you hadn't done because it might look as if you had. It wouldn't be rational. So—nobody would. Only, you know perfectly well that a good many would. But when they do, you're surprised.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “I'm surprised. To get back. Why are you so sure she didn't?”

“I told you,” Pam said. “Told the sheriff. Because the motive doesn't make sense.”

Jerry smiled. The smile was wide.

“All right,” Pam said. “So I've gone in a circle and wrapped myself around a tree. But running is one thing and killing is another. She wasn't the insulted and injured. Her mother was. It's one thing to be fond of your mother—”

She stopped. Jerry waited. After a moment, he realized that Pam had gone away. The waitress came, offered menus for dessert. Pam did not see hers. Jerry said, “Just coffee.” The waitress waited. Jerry said, “Pam?”

Pam said, “Key lime pie.” She said it from an appreciable distance. The waitress went away.

“There are,” Pam said, “just too many steps. That's what it really is. From Dr. Piersal to the judge, from the judge to her mother, from her mother to her. By that time it's … diluted.”

“To the rational mind,” Jerry said, being not quite able to stop himself.

“I gave you the tree,” Pam said. “Hours ago. Go on the assumption she's reasonably sane. Just a little … quirky. After all, she didn't have this ‘nervous breakdown.' It was her mother—
Jerry!”

“Yes?”

For a moment, Pam merely looked across the table, and Jerry was sure she did not really see him, or anyone.

“With one step out,” Pam said, and spoke, for her, slowly, “it's a good deal thicker, isn't it? More … solid. The mother—what is her name?”

“Coleman,” Jerry said.

“Mrs. Coleman thinks Dr. Piersal was responsible for her husband's death. She tries to prove it and fails and … this judge makes a thing of it. Judges shouldn't, it seems to me. But anyhow—the doctor is responsible for husband's death. And for the judge's bawling her out. She goes into a tail spin of some sort. Gets an obsession. Follows him down here and—”

“Wait,” Jerry said. “There's nothing to indicate she's down here.”

“Or,” Pam said, “that she isn't. She could be anywhere, calling herself anything. What's this?”

“This” was what the waitress had put in front of her.

“Key lime pie,” Jerry said. “You ordered it.”

Pam said, “For heaven's sake!” in a tone of complete astonishment. She said, “Where was I? Oh—I remember. Couldn't she be?”

“Yes,” Jerry said. “She could be.”

“He—Dr. Piersal, that is—could have told her when he was treating her husband, before any of this, that he often came here in the winters. She could have called his office and they could have said he was on vacation. She could have called here and found out he was registered and—”

“It could be,” Jerry said. “We've no reason at all to think—”

“And when the poor thing came down here to kill him,” Pam said, “her daughter found out she had—or guessed she might—and came after her to—to stop her. And when she was too late—
Jerry!”

“I'm here,” Gerald North said.

“Perhaps she saw her mother kill him,” Pam said. “And caught up with her and—and's hiding her somewhere. When this beachboy saw her, she was running after her mother, not really
away
from anything. What's wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Jerry said. “Nothing really. Only—a complete absence of facts, dear.”

Pamela North snapped her fingers, as one who frees them of the irrelevant.

“Probably,” Jerry said, “she's in a nice comfortable sanatorium under the best psychiatric observation. In New York.”

“Nothing,” Pam said, “is more probable than anything else. Is it a different time here than it is in New York?”

“No.”

“Then,” Pam said, “come on.”

She stood up.

“Come on and what?”

“Ask Bill to find out,” Pam said. “He ought to be home now. I'm sorry about the pie.”

The last was to the waitress, who said it was quite all right, ma'am.

A northeast gale flattened snow against the wide window in the big living room. From the East River, below, tugboats hooted mournfully at each other and at the night, protesting that this was weather not fit for tugs. Dorian Weigand, who moves with almost a cat's grace, has a cat's nerves when the wind blows. Although, standing at the window, looking out at the snow's swept fog, she did not really move, there was, Bill Weigand thought, uneasy motion in the way she stood.

“It huffs and it puffs,” Bill said.

“It screams,” she said. “It roars. I hate the wind. I know it is childish to hate the wind. I hate the wind. I'm glad you're home.”

It was Sunday; it was also a day off. In the trade Captain William Weigand practices, the two do not necessarily coincide. Nor is either inviolate. To prove this, the telephone rang.

“I'll take it,” Dorian said. “I'll tell them you've got the flu. I'll tell them you're blind drunk. I'll tell them service to this number has been temporarily discontinued, due to nonpayment of bill.”

She moved across the room, with almost the fluid grace of a cat. She said, “Hello” and spoke starkly.

“I hope,” a familiar voice said, “we didn't drag you in from the terrace or anything. It's such a lovely—oh!”

“Pam,” Dorian said, “it's blowing a hundred miles an hour. It's snowing a foot a minute. Part of the East River Drive just blew past our window.”

“It,” Pam North said, “is hard to remember seasons. The first day it seemed so unfair to make the children go to school. Did Bill tell you we're in another one? And is he there?”

“Yes,” Dorian Weigand said. “And yes. And if you're calling from Key West to send him out on—”

“Of course not,” Pam said. “He told this man to get us to help, but of course not. Can I?”

Dorian held the telephone toward Bill Weigand. He crossed the room to take it. Dorian curled in a chair to listen.

Pam North, speaking from a hot telephone booth in Key West, was sorry to hear about their weather. She knew it was something he wouldn't handle personally. But—

“If it's about Piersal,” Bill Weigand said, “we all take it a little personally, Pam. So?”

He listened. He said they might already have it; that they had done a little poking around; that Lieutenant Stein was the one who had directed the poking. If they had poked up anything, Stein might already have sent it along to this “deputy sheriff of yours.”

“The one,” Pam said, “you sicked on us.”

“You
will
find bodies, my dear,” Bill said, mildly. “How's it going?”

“In circles,” Pam said. “And whether she showed any homicidal tendencies?”

“What we can find out,” Bill said. “You're for the girl, I take it?”

“I,” Pam said, “am impartial in her favor. Yes.”

“And Jerry?”

“At the moment,” Pam said. “He's counting minutes, probably. Or fractions thereof. What could ‘d-r' mean beside ‘dram.' And ‘doctor,' of course.”

That took a little explanation, during minutes or fractions thereof. “Almost anything,” Bill said, unhelpfully. “Just the letter ‘d' and the letter ‘r'? With no space between? And she had an upset stomach?”

“Yes.”

“I don't—” Bill said and Dorian said, “Dramamine. The stuff they use for seasickness.”

Bill Weigand passed it along.

“It wouldn't hurt anybody? I mean, to the point of killing?”

Bill supposed that too much of almost anything—

“I'll ask a doctor,” Pam said. “I'm sorry about the East River Drive. Will you send us a wire? Jerry's making noises.”

“Make ours to him,” Bill Weigand said.

Sheriff Reppy had returned, but not to the office. He had had a long hot day; he had lost a sailfish. He was sure that Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson was doing a fine job, and he would see that Deputy Sheriff Jefferson got all the credit for it.

“There's this girl—” Jefferson began.

“Ronny,” Reppy said. “I've been up since four. Tomorrow, huh? I've got confidence in you, boy. That's what I've got. Good night.”

Dr. Meister snorted, as Jefferson had supposed he would. He said that a qualified doctor, and one who knew the history—and if Upton wouldn't know his own wife's history who would?—would know a fatal heart attack when he saw it.

“He didn't, actually,” Jefferson said. “She was dead when he got there.”

“All the same,” Meister said, his voice a grumble. “Oh, all right. County pays me to waste time. In pennies but—oh, all right.”

Jefferson put the telephone back. He lighted a cigarette. Call it a day, he thought, and not much of one.

The telephone rang.

“About this man who says he's named Worthington,” State Police Sergeant Robert E. L. Jones said. “The one we're holding for Miami. The one you wanted we should show a mug shot of to Lem Hunter, on account of if he was in Marathon he couldn't have stabbed Piersal. The one who—”

Sergeant Jones was a background layer. Jefferson said, “Yes, Jonesy. I know who you mean.”

“Lem's not sure,” Jones said. “Looks like him, only doesn't really look like him. If he had to say one way or the other, he'd say ‘no.' Says he could be wrong, but that's what he'd have to say.”

Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson said, “Damn!”

9

The room was hot. There was a small window, high up, barred, and it was open. There was a transom above the door, and it was open, too. Air was supposed to pass between them. Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson could detect none. He sat behind the desk, on an uncomfortable wooden chair, and dripped and waited. They brought the man in.

He was thin and narrow-shouldered. He wore the trousers of a blue suit and a white shirt and no tie. He had a thin face, and he did not look as hot as Jefferson felt. Told to sit down, he sat down, on a straight chair, opposite Jefferson. The guard who had brought him in went out and locked the door after him.

“What,” Ronald Jefferson said, “do you want to be called? Worthington? Bradley?”

His voice sounded tired to himself.

“Suit yourself,” the man said. “There's no law against using any name you like.”

“Unless with intent to defraud,” Jefferson said. “Suppose we settle on Bradley.”

“If you like,” the man said.

“You don't deny it?”

“Sheriff,” Jasper Bradley said, and his voice sounded a little weary, “I've heard of fingerprints. My name is Bradley, or was. After—in view of certain circumstances—I now and then use the name Worthington. With no intent to defraud.”

Jefferson said, “Yeah?”