Murder Comes First (15 page)

“I'm so sorry,” she said to Pamela, her office-hours manner back again, and, to the senior buyer, “The Frankleberg line stinks, for my money. There might be one or two things.”

“I don't see how I can help,” she said to Pamela, when her demolition of the Frankleberg line had been acknowledged.

“I am terribly sorry about your aunts, and about Paul's poor mother, but—”

She shrugged her shoulders, which were as trim as the rest of her.

Pamela realized all that. She was clutching at straws. “Leaving no stone unturned,” she added.

“You see,” Dorian Weigand, who was still Dorian Hunt for the day, said gravely, “Pam feels that there's always a needle in every haystack.”

Miss Hickey was crisply amused and the others laughed pleasantly with her.

“So often,” Pam said, “people really don't remember what they
do
remember. I thought you—couldn't you have lunch with us?”

Lynn looked doubtful. “Of couse she can,” her senior said. “Well—” Lynn said. “Some place that won't take too long. There's a Schrafft's across the street.”

There was and it was not yet crowded. The hostess was as serene as a ship in a light breeze; the waitress, when she arrived, was panting like a tugboat in her haste or, perhaps, in anticipation of labors to come. Lynn refused a cocktail at first, then relented. They sipped, ladylike in ladylike surroundings, two of them looking for a murderer.

“We hoped—” Pam began, and then Lynn Hickey leaned toward her, her eyes bright, her face serious.

“I may as well tell you,” she said, “mother telephone me after you talked to her. The poor dear.”

Pam North said, “Oh.”

“She wasn't very clear,” Lynn said. “She often isn't. Older people so often aren't, are they?” She looked intently at Pam, who realized that she was, after all, older than Lynn. As, she told herself, most people were. It was nevertheless startling to be, even by the implication of a glance, associated with Lynn's mother.

“I'm afraid,” Lynn said, “she may have given you a false impression. I did not kill Paul's mother.” She smiled, superficially. “But of course I'd say that, wouldn't I?”

“Yes,” Pam said. “You would, wouldn't you?”

“And Paul didn't,” Lynn said. She was decisive. It occurred to Pamela that she was, on the whole, too decisive.

“Then,” Pam said, “there isn't any reason to be so afraid, is there? So keyed up?”

The girl suddenly finished the rest of her drink. She looked into the glass; she put in slim fingers and extracted the olive, and looked at it and then ate it. Little Jill Horner, Pam thought. Or am I just supposed to think that?

“All right,” Lynn said, looking again at Pam, looking then at Dorian. “I'm keyed up. My mother quarrels with somebody, because the somebody says—well, makes accusations against me. Paul and I want to get married and his mother doesn't want us to. Wants to keep dear little Paul under her dear, god-damned little thumb. And she gets killed. Now we can get married; Paul gets a lot of money; I quit my job. We live happily ever after. Where—in Sing Sing?”

She lifted the empty glass as if to drink from it; put it down again, too hard.

“Or we have nice electric easy chairs side by side,” she said. “In front of the fire. On the fire. We—”

She looked up suddenly.

“They said you'd probably be here,” Paul Logan said. “You're all keyed up, kid.”

“Damn,” Lynn Hickey said. “Oh—
damn!
”

“Anyway,” Paul Logan said, “what business is it of yours, Mrs. North? Or of this lady's?” He indicated Dorian.

“Dorian Hunt,” Pamela said. “This is Mr. Logan. Won't you sit down, Mr. Logan? We haven't accused your—Miss Hickey, of anything. IGm trying to help my Aunt Thelma.” But then she looked from one to the other. “And,” she said, “I will.”

She wasn't doing it now, Paul Logan said, but he sat down.

“Won't you have a drink?” Pamela North said, polite in fury. Not, she thought, that they didn't have a right to be furious too, if you came to that. Or, on the other hand, frightened.

Nothing, she realized, ever stayed at a pitch. Now there was the business of trying to attract the waitress, who was doing nothing in particular with a kind of furious intentness; who, finally attracted, panted anxiously to them; who panted away again and was then, for minutes, always so much an impending event that nothing which she might interrupt could be begun. Pamela heard herself remarking on the remarkable lingering of summer in the lap of fall. This was politely noticed by the others. The waitress panted back in triumph, put down a cocktail and spilled part of it.

“All I'm—” Pam began.

“Would you care to order?” the waitress enquired, with intense good will.

“We—” Paul Logan began, his delicately handsome face reddening. But then he smiled suddenly and spread his hands in surrender. They ordered. The waitress panted off.

“Since we've all got the chips off,” Pam said, “Dorian and I are just trying to find out what people remember. So—”

That Mrs. Logan had opposed their marriage, neither of them denied. When they talked of that, the girl was very young again. She kept looking at Paul as if, however she tried, she must continually reassure herself of his presence. Of the two, now, he was the more assured. Lynn's mother and Paul's had quarreled over something Mrs. Logan had charged against Lynn. They did not phrase the charge, or need to. They had no idea who else might have wanted Mrs. Logan dead, and when they spoke of his mother, Paul's lips were stiff by obvious effort. And Paul, who might have, denied knowing anything about a wrong typewriter, or about Sally, except that she could not be found.

“But,” he said, “she can't have anything to do with it. She left—oh, weeks ago. Before we came back to town after Labor Day.”

“Back to town?” Pam said.

Paul and his mother had spent most of August at a summer place they had—“not much more than a cabin, really”—near Patterson, New York. Sally and Barton Sandford had spent his vacation, also during August, in a similar place a couple of hundred yards away. Paul and the Sandfords had played tennis at a near-by club; they had had, and made, use of a swimming pool on the estate of some friends of Mrs. Logan's. It had been a pleasant, relaxed month.

But during it, it now appeared, something had arisen between the Sandfords. Neither Paul nor his mother had noticed anything; on Labor Day itself they had all been at the pool, with a good many others, and the Sandfords had seemed as always. Two days later, Sandford had come around to the Logan house in town, his face set, to tell Mrs. Logan that her niece had left him, for reasons he insisted he did not know. They had, he said, planned to drive in to New York Tuesday morning. But instead, Sally, who was driving, had taken them to the railroad station at Brewster.

And there, in the car, parked in front of the station, she had, Sandford said, told him she was not going back to town—that she was going—that she didn't know where she was going. Some place to “think things out.” He had been, he told Mrs. Logan, utterly surprised and bewildered; he had been so taken aback that he had not known how to argue with her.

“He said,” Paul remembered, “that it was ‘too damn intangible to talk about.' That's what mother told me; I stayed on in the country the rest of the week. Heard about it when I got back.”

In the end Sandford had taken the train. He thought he had got from Sally a half promise to reconsider; he had expected her, in the end, to drive home to town. But she had not.

“But what has that to do with—with what happened to mother?” Paul said. “What—”

The waitress panted up with their food, including several items they had not ordered. They hung in air while she presented, triumphantly, the provender she had intrepidly snatched, one could only assume, from enraged cooks. She rearranged all the little paper doilies. Finally, she panted off.

But now Paul Logan merely sat and looked at his food. The others waited.

“If Sally had had any reason to want—to want to harm mother,” he said slowly, “you could work out something. She goes away, ostensibly out west somewhere. She's gone at the time the poison was put in the medicine bottle. Presumably. So—she's the only one who, apparently, couldn't have put it there. I could have, Lynn could have, Bart—Hilda—Lynn's mother even. But not Sally. If—
she really did go that far
.”

“The letters,” Pam told him. “The letters your mother got.”

“Perhaps she could have got—oh, somebody, to mail them for her,” he said. “I don't know—there'd be ways of doing things like that. She could even go places in airplanes and mail them herself, I suppose. She could actually be living here in New York somewhere, she could have—” He stopped suddenly. “She had a key to the house,” he said. “At least, she always had had. I don't think she ever gave it back.”

There aren't, Pam thought, really any flaws in it. It could have been that way. But—

“Why?” Pam said. “Why would she want to—to kill your mother?”

“I don't—” Paul began and stopped. “There's always money,” he said. “Mother's money. Sally gets quite a bit of it.”

“Fifty thousand, wasn't it?” Pam asked, and Logan thought so.

“A lot, of course,” Pam said, “but still, not very much. Unless you need it dreadfully. Do they? I thought Sally had money herself?”

“Sally?” Paul said. “I don't think so. A few thousand, maybe. Not very much.” He looked, with puzzled eyes, at the chicken hash on his plate; he said he was trying to remember something. He couldn't, he said, make it come clear. It was something about—he snapped his fingers.

“Bart's worked out something, he said. A—a medicine or something. A formula. Wanted to make it; wanted a laboratory of his own. I remember that.” He paused, snapped his fingers again. “Asked mother early in the summer if she didn't want to put some money in it,” Paul said. “Said it would be a gold mine. Half joking, you know, but meaning it all the same. Mother—mother said she didn't believe in gold mines.”

Whether Barton Sandford had, later, made his request more formally, not half jokingly, Paul didn't know. His mother had not mentioned it to him. But he was certain Sandford had not, if he asked for money, got it.

“All the same,” Paul said, “I know—I'm sure—Sal's all right.”

“You're an innocent,” Lynn said. “A babe in arms. You think everybody's all right.”

He looked at her; he seemed puzzled and uncertain.

“I don't think so,” he said. “Am I, Lynn?”

“It's all right,” she said. “It's a fine way to be. If there's somebody—” She broke off short.

“I'm sorry, Lynn,” he said, and the others might not have been there.

“Nobody wants you to change,” Lynn told him. “Hear me? Nobody. It was never that.”

He looked at her.

“Oh,” she said, “you believe everybody, don't you? Everybody but me.” She became, then, conscious of the others. She said she was sorry. She said, trying to be on top of it, trying to be crisp, that everything was coming out, that she was a sieve.

“About Mrs. Sandford,” Pam said. “You don't agree with Mr. Logan?”

Lynn Hickey hesitated a moment. She extracted lettuce from a chicken sandwich and looked to see whether anything remained. Then she said Sally was all right. She said Sally was a fine person. Her tone put the tribute in capital letters, and so diminished it.

“The salt of the earth,” Lynn said. “With such a wonderful, wonderful conscience. Such a—a righteous person.” Lynn seemed surprised at the unfamiliar word, but then approved it. “Righteous,” she said. “That's it. Never easygoing, with herself or anybody. This business of ‘thinking things out.' Whoever ‘thinks things out'? That way, I mean. The kind of things I suppose she's thinking out? About herself and Bart?”

She looked suddenly at Pam North. The she looked at Dorian.

“You don't,” she said. “Neither of you does. It—it makes people all stiff inside. But Sally—well, she'd wonder, all at once, whether she was worthy of Bart, or he was worthy of her, or something. Whether their life together was really
right
. She'd have to Get Things Straightened Out.”

She looked at Pam again.

“Does anybody, ever?” she asked.

“Not that way,” Pam said. “At least, I never do. But then, I just never think of it.”

That was it, Lynn said. That was precisely it. Sally Sandford did.

“A sense of duty,” Dorian suggested, and Lynn said, “God yes!

“However,” she said then, “that doesn't fit with her—her killing anybody, does it?”

It didn't, apparently. They agreed it didn't. But then, after a pause, during which they ate, Pam North said, “Still—

“It can lead to the end justifying the means,” she said. “One sacrificed for—for many, I guess. If Mr. Sandford had found out something which would save millions of people, and Mrs. Logan stood in the way—I mean, not having her fifty thousand stood in the way—a very conscientious person might—” She paused. “It might seem like a kind of mathematics,” she said. “Adding and subtracting. Not—not people at all. Like dictatorships,” she said. She looked at the others. Paul Logan shook his head and then Dorian Weigand smiled faintly.

“Or,” she said, “it might be merely wanting fifty thousand dollars. Because it would be fun to have, and to spend. That would be simpler, wouldn't it? Particularly if you didn't have very much and wanted to get free from something and start over.”

“I don't think Sally—” Paul Logan began, and then stopped abruptly. “Or aren't you talking about Sally?” he asked.

“Oh, about Mrs. Sandford,” Dorian said. “I thought Pam was making it a little complicated.”