Murder by the Book (13 page)

“… ashamed,” the girl said, to Pam, who was listening, appeared absorbed. “Just couldn't bear to face you two and the doctor after—after I'd made such a spectacle of myself. It—I thought it would give me time to straighten myself out.”

“It?” Listen, Jerry told himself, or don't listen.

“It often helps,” Pam said. “A long drive. Gets things in perspective. What with all the cars jumping out at you. There must have been lots in Miami.” She paused. “Jumping, I mean,” she said, partially disproving what Jerry had just decided he knew about her. “Don't you think so, Jerry?”

Jerry put it together. Rebecca Payne had taken a long drive to straighten herself out. A drive to, evidently, Miami. Jerry nodded his head, agreeing.

“It did,” Rebecca said, and sipped—this time sipped—her drink. “So much to be objective about, as you say. It worked. Getting up so early, driving when the road was open, the water so many colors. I almost—well, almost forgot myself. Forgot to be … ashamed.”

She had remembered herself now, all right, Jerry thought. Up to the hilt she's remembered herself; back on the psychoanalyst's couch—the one she carries in her mind—she's put herself.

“… if you could stand me again tomorrow,” she said. “I'd try not to be such a—such a mess. You and the doctor. I hate to ask him, but he's been so patient. About—well, about a lot of things. He doesn't know I know but …”

Jerry listened now; they both, acutely, listened now. What the dark girl was saying was that she did not know Dr. Edmund Piersal was dead; that she had left Key West early and driven to Miami—to straighten herself out—and so knew nothing about anything. And a question arose, popped up: Was it to make that clear she had, unasked, so explained herself?

“Something terrible has happened,” Pam said. “Dr. Piersal—Dr. Piersal was killed this morning.”

Rebecca Payne looked at her. Rebecca's dark eyes widened. She had lifted her glass and now put it down untouched, so that it clinked on the tabletop. She said, “How terrible. You mean somebody—?” She looked intently at Pamela North; looked across the table at Jerry.

“Yes,” Jerry said. “Somebody killed him. But I wonder—”

“We all wonder,” Pam said, quickly. “Everybody does. Such a charming man. Not at all the sort of person—”

That was not what Jerry had been about to wonder. But Jerry accepted guidance. He would ask, later, why it had been offered. And, eventually, someone would ask Mrs. Rebecca Payne why, hearing a man had been killed, she should so instantly have assumed he had been murdered.

And perhaps, he thought, the time she would be asked that was now approaching. A tall and tanned youngish man, a light-haired man with gray eyes, stood at the top of the steps from the dining room and looked around the Penguin lounge. The law had arrived. The law looked rather tired.

Ronald Jefferson, chief deputy sheriff of Monroe County, came down the steps and across the room to them.

“Mrs. Payne,” Pam North said, “has been in Miami all day. We just told her about Dr. Piersal. She hadn't heard.”

Jefferson looked down at them.

“This is Sheriff Jefferson,” Pam said, to Rebecca Payne. “He's finding out who it was. Aren't you, sheriff?”

“Deputy,” Jefferson said, and pulled a chair up. “Trying to.” He stood, holding the chair, and looked toward the bar. He said, “Hey, Roy,” and the bar waiter turned and, across the room, said, “Sir?” Jefferson said, “Bourbon and water, Roy,” and pulled the chair out and sat down on it.

Jerry looked at the bar waiter. So this was the beachboy's “other job”—night waiter in the Penguin lounge. People don't look at other people, Jerry thought. Anyway, I don't. A youth in immaculate skivvy shirt and white trousers, spreading towels carefully on beach chaises; a youth in white shirt and cummerbund of dark red and black dress trousers, carrying trays of drinks. Obviously, not the same youth. Only, it was. Clothes make the identity.

Deputy Sheriff Jefferson, it was clear, was a customer who took precedence. Already, Roy was carrying his drink toward their table. He put it down, and the check with it. “Thanks, Roy,” Jefferson said, and then said, “Well?”

“Don't think so,” Roy said. “Pretty sure not. Thank you, sir.”

“Bad thing about the doctor, Miz Payne,” Jefferson said. “Understand you knew him.”

Rebecca Payne shook her head.

“Knew him?” Rebecca said. “Just—I played tennis with him yesterday. With him and Mr. and Mrs. North.”

“They told me about that,” Jefferson said. “Well, here's to you.” He drank. “I meant before.”

She looked at him. Her dark eyes narrowed, Jerry thought.

“Hate to be a nuisance,” Jefferson said. “Rake things up that haven't any bearing. Still—”

The girl looked at him for some seconds.

“So,” the girl said. “You know about—” She stopped abruptly. Her eyes widened. She said, “Surely you don't think—” and stopped again. She turned to Pam North. “He—you know too?”

“Yes,” Pam said.

“And,” Rebecca Payne said, “you've—all of you have—built it into something?”

There was incredulity in her voice. An intelligent woman, Jerry told himself, can put almost anything she likes into her voice.

“Take it easy, Miz Payne,” Jefferson said. “For a while there—well, say I sorta wondered. And you suddenly not being around.”

His tone was soothing; there was almost, Jerry thought, apology in his tone. Playing games? Or—Roy had been “pretty sure not.” Had that been set up in advance? Pretty sure Rebecca Payne was not the young woman he had seen, hours before, hurrying on the long pier away from what lay at the end of it?

He looked across the table at Pam. Her eyebrows rose just perceptibly, sharing his surprise. She, too, Jerry decided, had thought Deputy Sheriff Jefferson in full cry after this dark-haired young woman. But now that he had caught up with her—

“I should have known it would come out,” Rebecca Payne said. “You mean about that—that ridiculous lawsuit mother brought against him? I tried so hard to talk her out of it but—That's what you mean, of course.”

“Yes,” Jefferson said. “That's what we wondered about a little. For a while.”

“And thought—what on earth did you think? That I'd—what? Followed him down here and killed him because—because I thought it was something he did or didn't do that led to dad's death and …”

She spread her hands in a gesture of hopelessness—hopelessness in the face of the absurd.

“Well, Miz Payne—”

“No,” she said. “Listen. I never met Dr. Piersal until yesterday. No—day before yesterday. I never believed any of the things mother believed. I was away at school when dad died. He wasn't sick long. He died—well, nobody expected him to die. That's what—what upset mother. You'd …” She paused, apparently seeking words. “Have to know mother,” she said. “They had been closer than most people, she and dad. You could—feel it. Even as a child—” She stopped again.

“You don't care about that,” she told Jefferson. “He was dead when I got home. Dr. Piersal had done all he could—all that was over. But not for mother. For a while I thought—well, that she was out of her mind. She almost was. Perhaps she was. She kept saying Dr. Piersal had killed Peter—that was my father's name, Peter. She called the doctor a murderer. She even tried to have him arrested. Nothing anybody could say—the lawyers or anybody—made any difference. There was an autopsy, and the doctors said that dad had had what Dr. Piersal had said he had, and that the treatment had been what it should have been. She just said, ‘Of course they stick together.' Our regular lawyers wouldn't do anything, but she found somebody who would and—well, it was all a mess. A dreadful mess.”

She had leaned forward as she spoke, had spoken rapidly, her voice tight. She said once more, more slowly, “A dreadful mess,” and leaned back against the cushioned wall.

“I didn't know Dr. Piersal would be here,” she said, and continued to speak slowly, and no longer looked at Jefferson, or at any of them—looked into the air above Jefferson's head. “I didn't know him when I saw him. I had never seen him during all of it. I kept away from the trial—I couldn't do her any good. I couldn't—If I'd known the judge was going to say all those things I—but there still wouldn't have been anything I could have done, would there?”

“Of course not,” Pam North said, softly. But there was nothing to indicate that Rebecca heard her.

“And,” she said, “things weren't going very well for me in—in other ways. I suppose I was selfish, wrapped up in myself. I am. Oh, I know I am.”

She stopped again, but it was only, Jerry thought, that she had quit speaking aloud the words, the explaining, justifying words, which went on and on in her mind.

“Where is your mother now, Mrs. Payne?” Pam asked, her voice still soft. After a few seconds, Rebecca Payne said, “What did you say?”

But Pam did not repeat what she had said. She merely waited.

“In a place,” Rebecca said. “A very pleasant place. She had—she got very upset a few months ago. A depression, the doctor said—a mild depression, and that she'd come out of it. Only, more quickly in this place where—where she wouldn't have to decide things. Where she could be treated. And, I suppose, watched. It's not an institution. Oh, I suppose, in a way it is. But not the kind one thinks of—it's a big place in the country, with lovely grounds—more like a club than anything. It's all voluntary, of course. People go there if they want to, if their doctors tell them they should. And if they have enough money. It's frightfully expensive. They can leave when they want to. I suppose mother will leave before long. When I went to see her last, before I came down here, she seemed fine—perfectly all right again. And that's what the doctors say, too.”

She stopped again. It was, somehow, as if she had finally run down. Jerry thought that.

“Watched?” Pam said. “Your mother. You said—”

Rebecca seemed to come back from a distance. She repeated “Watched?” and then said, “Oh. Yes, I think that's part of it. In depressions—well, apparently there's a chance people may try to … hurt themselves.” She looked at Pamela North. She said, “Only themselves, of course.”

“Of course,” Pam said.

Ronald Jefferson swallowed bourbon and water.

“About today, Miz Payne,” he said, and added, “Just for the record.”

“I was a little upset,” she said. “About—about nothing, really. I thought a drive would be good for what ailed me. And I'd never really seen Miami—just the airport. The hotel picked me up there. This morning I rented a car and drove up and spent the day there. Drove through the beach area—along Collins Avenue. It's preposterous there, isn't it? Ridiculous.”

Nobody quarreled with her. Jefferson did, Pam thought, look slightly surprised.

She had got back about an hour ago. She looked at her watch. “Surely,” she said, “she'll have finished by now. It's been a long day.”

She made a movement toward getting up. Jerry and Ronald Jefferson pulled the table out.

“It was good of you to let me barge in,” she said, to Jerry. “Good of you both to listen.”

She went across the lounge and up the steps. Jefferson and Jerry North sat down again. Jerry said, “Well?”

“The beachboy's pretty sure she's not the one he saw,” Jefferson said. “Anyway—looks as if you were right about that alibi, Mrs. North.”

Pam raised eyebrows, and shoulders.

“Worthington's,” Jefferson said. “Bradley's, that is. You said it was probably faked. Looks as if it was.”

“And you think he's your man?”

“Looks like it,” Jefferson said. “It sure looks like it.”

He made the statement, Jerry thought, with rather special pleasure.

Deputy Sheriff Jefferson finished his drink with a sudden swallow. He said he would know more in the morning, and said, “Good night, folks,” and went toward the exit. He paused on his way and spoke briefly to Dr. Tucker Upton, who still sat at the bar. Upton nodded his head slowly.

“Had her hair done, didn't she?” Jerry said. “Makes a difference in the way she looks, doesn't it?”

Pam said, “Yes, Jerry,” and continued to look toward the bar.

“Didn't mention it,” Jerry said.

“No, Jerry.”

“Differently dressed, too. As Roy is himself.”

“Yes, Jerry. Quite differently.”

He wasn't, Jerry decided, getting any place. No place, at least, where Pam was. He said, “Another drink?”

“Good-heavens, no,” Pam said, coming back. “I want to go to bed.”

11

Of the two, Pam North goes to sleep more quickly. After a time, and usually after only a few minutes, Jerry can hear her soft sleep-breathing, and with that a feeling of security, of reassurance, comes to him. His world is as it should be, turns as it should turn. Then, and almost never before then, he sleeps himself.

He had very little time to wait, that Sunday night. She said, “hmmm,” relaxed; he heard her turn in her bed. Then the sleep-breathing began, and with it his own relaxation. The outlines of thought began slowly to soften, consciousness to dissolve. Gerald North, who had had a long day himself, slept.

“Probably,” Pamela North said, “it's something in the oath.”

She did not speak loudly. It was as if she were continuing a conversation already well set in its course.

Jerry said, “whadga?” and was awake, and said, “What did you say, Pam?”

Pam said, “What?” Then, aggrieved, she said, “You woke me up. I'd just gone to sleep and you woke me up.”

“You said something,” Jerry said. “Something about an oath.”