Murder by the Book (19 page)

“Of course,” Jerry said.

“As to how we knew,” Pam said, “we went places and asked. Because a man was murdered.” She paused a moment. “A very nice man,” she said. “A man we'd played tennis with. Had drinks with.”

“And,” Rebecca said, with bitterness in her voice, “you jumped to things—absurd, vicious things.”

“No,” Pam said. “Wondered about things, Mrs. Payne. When you drove to Miami yesterday. Was it to take your mother away from here?”

“It's not your business,” Rebecca Payne said.

“No,” Jerry said. “It's not our business.”

“But you—pried into it. I suppose—told this sheriff?”

“It's not a little thing,” Jerry said, and spoke gently. “It's a man killed. A man who's done a lot of things for people. Who might have done more things. But, at bottom, a man killed. It doesn't really matter who he was.”

“And,” Pam said, “we have told the sheriff. And—he isn't much interested.”

“There's no reason why—” the girl began, and there was still bitterness in her raised voice. But she stopped, as if she had just heard, and said, “Isn't interested?”

“Not much,” Pam said. “He's got—he's pretty sure he has anyway—the man who killed Dr. Piersal.”

The girl stood and looked at them.

“Yes,” Pam said.

For an instant, the girl seemed to sway a little, standing there in the sun. She caught her breath, and the sound was almost that of a sob.

“I'm sorry I spoke that way,” Rebecca Payne said. “I'm always having to say I'm sorry, aren't I? How did you know I took mother to Miami?” She looked at them, intently. “You didn't really, did you?” she said, and spoke to Pam.

“Only guessed,” Pam said. “You did, then?”

“Before any of—” Rebecca began. “No, before I knew about any of this. About the doctor. She didn't know at all, of course. Oh, I suppose she does now. It's in the papers—the Miami papers.”

Anyone who read newspapers, or watched television or listened to radio would know by now.

“Let's,” Rebecca said, “go where it's shady. Where it isn't so noisy.” She gestured toward the ocean. “You may as well know. Not that there's really anything to know.”

They found a shady corner on the porch.

She had not known, Rebecca told them, that her mother was in Key West. Not until Saturday. She had thought her still in the—she hesitated for a moment, and chose “rest home.” But on Saturday, just before lunch, her mother had telephoned her, and said she was in Key West, and where in Key West.

“I was surprised,” Rebecca said. “But—” She shrugged the slender shoulders under the dark blue shirt. “Frankly,” she said, “mother's a bit of a problem. I don't mean just since this last—upset. She's—unpredictable. It's been that way ever since father died. It's—somehow it's as if she had—I don't know. Been cut loose? She used to be—used to plan things, the way other people do. Now it's all impulse. Coming down here was that.”

“She knew you were here?”

“Of course. But she didn't come to be with me. She thinks—well, I suppose that people are trying to tell her what to do. That I am. And I am, I guess. She wants to go her own way.”

“To this motel,” Pam said. “Instead of here, to The Coral Isles.”

“Of course,” Rebecca said. “That was part of it. Don't you see?”

“Part of going her own way?”

Rebecca Payne said that of course that was it. But then she paused, and Jerry thought, She's going to explain herself again. He felt, as he had felt before, an odd amalgam of sympathy and irritation.

“I wanted it that way, too,” she said. “She knew I did. It's—I'm trying to decide something. I want to be alone to think things out.”

It was a cliché, Pam thought. And people live by clichés.

“Alone,” Rebecca said, “or with strangers. People who are—outside. Not part of anything.”

And, feeling this, Jerry thought—almost surely really feeling this—she is driven to bring people inside, make them part of her. As now, he thought, she is bringing us. Seeking to be alone; afraid of loneliness.

“Anyway,” Rebecca said, “she called me Saturday. Said she was here and had planned to stay about a week, but now wasn't sure she would. Said she couldn't see what I saw in Key West; couldn't see what anybody saw. She—oh, she ran on. She does, sometimes. About—a good deal about—having been to the dog races the night before. Said they were dull, not like real races. She—well, she loves going to the tracks, betting at the tracks.” She paused. She smiled faintly. “Probably lost money on the dogs,” she said. “Anyway—”

They had arranged to lunch together Sunday. But Rebecca had not, she said, been surprised—not really surprised—when her mother called her up early Sunday morning and asked her to rent a car and drive her up to Miami. Mrs. Coleman did not herself drive; hadn't for years. There had been an accident. Rebecca did not know much about that; it had been when she was a little girl. As for a bus—“She'd never think of a bus. Buses are—oh, for a different kind of person. She's like that. Shuts out whole areas. Anyway—”

Anyway, driving to Miami fitted well enough with what Rebecca herself wanted. “I was upset about the day before,” she said. “About the way I acted. That was true. I didn't say anything about mother because—well, you can see why I wouldn't.”

They could.

Rebecca had rented a car and picked her mother up at, she thought, about nine o'clock. She hadn't, then, known anything about the murder. They had driven to Miami, and Mrs. Coleman had checked in at the Columbus. They had had lunch at the Columbus, in the roof restaurant—the “Top of the Columbus.” From there they could see all Miami. After lunch, Mrs. Coleman had gone to her room. Rebecca had driven around Miami, as she had said before; along Collins Avenue on Miami Beach, as she had said before.

“And,” Pam said, “got your hair done. And very well, too.”

And got her hair done. And driven back and turned the car in. And found that the maid hadn't, even then, got around to doing her room.

“That,” Rebecca said, “was all there was to it. When I got back and you told me about the poor doctor there wasn't any point in saying anything about mother's having been here. Raking up the past that hadn't anything to do with it. You can see that.”

“Of course,” Pam said.

And it was understandable. It was what anybody might do; it was the sort of thing which, in similar circumstances, people almost always did. In such extreme circumstances as these, it gave the police a good deal of extra trouble, but policemen are invented to be troubled. In this special case, of course, it was, Pam added, we who were troubled. Finding a coincidence without meaning, tracing it down and—

It was, Pam thought, a little as if Chief Deputy Sheriff Jefferson had been waiting in the wings. He made his entrance along the porch, to their shady corner. He looked very tall, and a little tired and hot, and remarkably unsmiling. He nodded to the Norths and stood and looked down at Rebecca Payne. He said, “Mrs. Payne. There are a few things I want to ask you.” He paused for a moment. “About your mother,” he said, rather heavily. “About your helping her get away.” He paused again. “And,” he said, “there's no point in your saying you didn't.”

She looked up at him.

“To get away?” she said. “It wasn't to help her get away, as you put it. It was—”

She looked at Pam North. It was as if she turned to Pam for help.

“She's just been telling us about it,” Pam said. And then, interrupting herself, “What's happened to this Mr. Bradley? I thought he …”

She left it there, in the air for Jefferson to field. Somewhat to her surprise, Jefferson looked at her angrily. His lips started to move, and Pam, no lip reader, was rather glad she wasn't. But then the expression of anger faded, and Jefferson said, “Sorry, Miz North,” but did not say for what. She could guess. That Mr. Bradley had riled Jefferson.

“There's been a hitch,” Jefferson said. “Anyway, we have to look into all possibilities.”

“Apparently Mrs. Coleman isn't one,” Pam said. “She just wanted to go to Miami. Her being here at all was just—” Pam hesitated, shunning a word. “Just happened to happen,” Pam said. “So she called her daughter up and they drove up together. Neither of them knew what had happened.”

“All right,” Jefferson said. “She called you up, did she, Mrs. Payne?”

“Yes.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday morning,” Rebecca said. “Quite early and—”

She stopped. Jefferson was slowly, with emphasis, shaking his head.

“Nope,” he said. “I checked on that. She didn't make any calls. The motel switchboard keeps a record. No calls.”

Pam, watching, could see the change in the dark girl's face. The change was a faint sagging of muscles, the faint look of defeat. Pam hoped she wasn't really seeing what she thought she saw.

“She did telephone me,” Rebecca said, but her voice was dull. “Perhaps they made a mistake at the motel.”

Jefferson shook his head again. “They charge for calls,” he said. “They don't slip up on that sort of thing.”

Anybody can slip up on almost anything, Pam thought. But—

“Then maybe,” Rebecca said, “she called from some place else.”

Jefferson had one word: “Why?”

It was, Pam thought a very good word. She looked at Jerry and knew that he, too, thought it a good word. She had seen enough of The Bougainvillia to know that it was the sort of motel which has a telephone in every room. Mrs. Coleman would have had only to reach out toward a table by her bed—

“There's a telephone in the room,” Jefferson said. “Why wouldn't she use that?”

Rebecca Payne looked again at Pam, but this time Pam could only, if unhappily, lift her shoulders.

“I don't know,” Rebecca said. “She did—”

“No,” Jefferson said. “I'm afraid not, Mrs. Payne. Did you call her?”

“That was it,” Rebecca said. But she spoke too quickly. And again, Jefferson used the single word: “Why?

“To see if she was there?” he asked, when the dark girl merely looked at nothing, as if there were nothing anywhere to see. “Because you knew Dr. Piersal had been killed? Had gone out on the pier and found him dead. And knew your mother was in town and were afraid—”

“No,” the girl said, “it wasn't that way. It—”

Then, suddenly, she covered her face with her hands.

After a time, she spoke from behind the covering hands, her voice muffled.

“She didn't have anything to do with it,” she said. “She couldn't have. I know she—”

And then her shoulders began to shake. There was nothing to do but wait. It seemed to Pam that they waited a long time before Rebecca Payne took her hands down and said, “I'm sorry. I—” She paused again, and drew her breath in. “It wasn't quite the way I said,” she told them. “It—” And then she stopped. Again they waited. It was Pam, finally, who spoke first.

“My dear,” she said, “when your mother called you Saturday. Did she say she had seen Dr. Piersal at the greyhound races the night before? Was that why you were afraid?”

Slowly, as if she could not help herself, Rebecca Payne nodded her head.

“The boy?” she said, her voice dull. “The boy who takes care of the beach. He saw me? Is that it?”

“Yes,” Jefferson said. “He saw you.”

And had, Pam thought, been unable to identify her. But that didn't matter now.

“I was afraid he had,” Rebecca said. “I had my hair done another way but—” She shrugged her shoulders, helplessly. “I went out there,” she said. “I—I saw the doctor. And, yes, mother had mentioned seeing him at the track. And—”

It had been that—that her mother was in Key West, and knew that Dr. Piersal was in Key West—which had frightened her. She told them that, speaking slowly, choosing words carefully. She had been too worried, too upset, Saturday night to sleep well. Quite early in the morning she had given up trying to sleep at all. She had put on a bathing suit, and a jacket, and gone out. “To wash it away,” she said. She had gone out on the pier toward the steps which led down to the screened water enclosure, and, when she was at the head of the steps, had looked up the pier and seen someone lying on the board flooring. “There was something about the way he was lying that didn't look—looked unnatural.”

She had walked toward the man lying on the pier, and seen the blood and known who he was and that he was dead.

He might not have been, Jefferson thought. A layman can't be sure. But it wouldn't have made any difference. And there was no point, now, in interrupting her.

Her one thought, then, had been to get to her mother, to find out whether her mother was at the motel or—She did not finish that.

Her first plan had been to go back to her room and telephone her mother. But she had seen the beachboy and thought he had seen her, but was not sure, and hoped that, if he had, he would not recognize her. So, when she saw the gate which opened on Flagler Avenue was ajar, she had gone that way.

She had known where the motel was; her mother had told her that, and that it was only a few blocks from The Coral Isles. She also knew the number of her mother's room—she had learned that when they had arranged to meet for lunch—and that it could be reached, as can most motel rooms, without going through the lobby. She had climbed the stairs and found the room and knocked.

“And,” Rebecca said, “she was there. I—I waked her up. So I knew that—that what I had been afraid of—that it couldn't be true. That she couldn't have—have been there and—and have got back and been asleep and—”

She edges around it, Pam thought. Which is natural. You think your mother has killed someone and find she hasn't, can't have—