Murder Has Its Points (15 page)

The shape formed slowly; it was a little as if smoke took shape, formed a pattern. Or as if a cloud took shape against the sky. “Something the matter with his leg.” A tall young man she knew, perhaps only by sight, limping. A thing for Lauren Payne to notice, since he did not always limp.

It had been worse recently for the boy, Gladys Mason told them, talking some of the time to the two women who sat on either side of a flickering fire, some of the time seemingly only to herself. They had thought they could find the money to send him to college, partly from what she could provide, partly from what he could earn himself. He had gone a year; was to have returned in September.

A job he had hoped to get in the college town he hadn't got. She herself had had to go to a doctor. “It turned out to be nothing, but I had to pay just the same.” Going to college had had to be given up. “Only for this year I kept telling him. And he said, ‘Don't fool yourself, Mom. You're not fooling me.'” She looked at the fire for a moment. “Being a busboy was the worst thing that could have happened,” she said. “A busboy—well, there's almost nothing below a busboy. If you want to be a hotel man I suppose it's different. Just by itself—” She made a dismissing gesture with her hands. And, for a moment, it seemed that she had finished telling them what she had to tell.

The shape was still vague, Pam thought. A bitter boy with a limp. A boy who might—but there was no real proof of that—have been seen going into a hotel where he did not belong; a hotel from which (but even that, so far as Pam knew, was not certain) a shot might have been fired. There must, obviously, be more, since, obviously, Gladys Mason believed, and was fighting against believing, her son to be a murderer.

“He said he sold it,” Gladys Mason said, and spoke suddenly. “If he really sold it, and can prove he did. But then, why would he run away?”

Pam looked at Faith Constable and Faith shook her head and, slightly, raised her shoulders.

“Sold what, Mrs. Mason?” Pam said.

For a moment, it seemed that the question surprised the black-clad woman. But then she said, “Oh, didn't I tell you about that? About the rifle?”

“No.”

“At college,” Mrs. Mason said. “He couldn't play the rough games. Because of his knee, you know. But—I suppose you'd say—he had to prove himself. There was a rifle team. Rifle club, or something. He bought a rifle—not a good one, he said. A cheap rifle, secondhand. But—he got to be very good with it. Better than the others. He was—it was good for him, for a while. Being better at something. But then—I don't know—it seemed just to wear off. Anyway, he says he sold the rifle. Months ago. He'd be able to prove that, wouldn't he?”

“I'd think so,” Pam said. “When did he tell you this? About selling the rifle?”

“Why, last night.”

They could only wait. She said she had thought she had told them. “Only me,” Faith said. “Tell Pamela.”

Mrs. Mason had been on duty until eight o'clock the night before. After she had finished, had gone to her room, she had increasingly worried about what Lauren Payne had said, become increasingly convinced that it meant what she feared it meant. She had left her room and gone across town to the room her son lived in and found him there. He was “excited, worked up” but, when she told him what she was afraid of, and what Lauren Payne had said, he had denied “that he'd done anything wrong.” He had said that nobody could prove he had “just because I wanted to.” He had said he had sold the rifle a long time ago. He had told her she mustn't worry.

“I wanted to believe him. I—I
do
believe him. Only—he seemed so strange, so excited.”

Not in words, only in mind. She had not believed him. She had kept on trying, but she had not believed him.

He telephoned her the next morning—that morning. He said he was going away, and that she shouldn't worry. Going away until it “blew over.”

“He still sounded—strange. I don't know—terribly excited. I told him he mustn't do that; told him to wait. When he wouldn't, I told him I'd come and join him—bring him money. That wherever we went we'd go together. He said it would be better if I didn't but—finally I thought I'd persuaded him. I said I'd meet him at Grand Central and he said, all right, at about noon, then, at the information desk. So I put my things in a suitcase—I haven't got many things—and went down the stairs, because I thought they might already be looking for him—that she might have told somebody else—and if they saw me they would follow me. But—”

But Robert Mason had not showed up at the information booth at Grand Central—not at noon, and not by one o'clock, and not by two. Gladys Mason had put her suitcase in a locker then and had gone a few places she thought her son might be. “He had some friends he'd told me about. Not many. Most of them weren't in their rooms and nobody who was had seen him. So—I didn't have anybody, know anybody to go to. I couldn't go to the police and ask them to find him. I couldn't—”

She leaned back in her chair as if very tired.

“I came here,” she said. “I hadn't any right, but I came here.”

She had, it appeared, simply done that—come to the narrow house in the East Sixties as to sanctuary. Faith Constable had not been there; she had been at rehearsal. The maid Norton had telephoned the theater.

Now, with her story told, Gladys Mason seemed merely to wait. She waited, Pam thought, to be told what to do. Pam had, also, an unhappy feeling that Faith Constable was waiting too—waiting for Pamela North to point out a course of action. Really, Pam North thought. Of all things!

“More tea?” Faith Constable said. “It may not be very hot. I can have Norton—”

“I'm sure it will be all right,” Pam said, glad she was sure of something. Faith started to get up, but Pam carried her cup to the tea table. Gladys Mason seemed not to have heard the offer of more tea.

What I should tell her to do is obvious, Pam thought, sipping tea which was just barely warm enough. I should tell her to go to the police, explain everything to them. If the boy didn't—

She broke that thought off. For one thing, Mrs. Mason would not go to the police, and could not be expected to go to the police, however fully the logic of such an action might be explained. And, there was hesitation in Pam's own mind. She was, at first, surprised to find it there. Then she was not surprised. If Bill could be the one to find the boy, or Stein could. Or, for that matter, Mullins. And there were, of course, many others.

But few policemen are psychologists and almost none psychiatrists. Something of that sort might be needed here—at the least what might be needed here would be gentleness, a desire to understand. These qualities of mind are by no means universal, and a policeman's trade is unlikely to encourage them. In recent years, particularly, policemen have had little time to spend in consideration of the vagaries of the young mind. The vagaries of young action have kept a good many policemen very busy.

If we could find the boy first, Pam thought. Talk to him. The poor, unhappy kid—the lost kid. Running now. But—running from the police? Or, from everything—from defeat and loneliness; perhaps even from his own mother's inability to believe? Find him and—

My neck again, Pam thought. Stuck out again. Oh, damn it all. “Lame dogs over stiles,” Jerry would say—had so often had occasion to say. “Show Pam a lame dog,” he had told Bill Weigand once, “and she'll find a stile to help it over. Hell, she'll build one. And sly dogs begin to limp when they see her.” All right, Pam thought, I'm the way I am.

It was she, now, who was looking toward the fire, not at it. The other two waited, now, for her, Faith looking at her, Gladys, still leaning back in her chair, seeming to look at nothing. Merely waiting to be told.

Only, Pam thought, we can't find him. How can we find him? So, what can we really—

“Of course,” Pam said, “we don't really know whether there's anything in this, do we? Because we don't know what Mrs. Payne meant to say. We're only—guessing. Perhaps she was talking about somebody entirely different. Perhaps about some
thing
entirely different. Not about the murder at all.”

They listened. Gladys even leaned forward in her chair to listen.

“She came to me this morning,” Pam said. “She thought she might have said something; that she didn't remember what she had said. When she was groggy from the stuff. She hadn't, to me. And she didn't know, or wouldn't tell me, what kind of thing she was afraid she'd said. I thought afraid. As if she thought she might have incriminated somebody. Wait!
Somebody important to her
. And your son, Mrs. Mason, wouldn't have been that. At least—would he?”

“No,” Gladys Mason said. “Only—only to me.”

“So,” Pam said, “all we have to do is to call her up and ask. Because not remembering what she said is one thing, and what she saw is another, isn't it?”

Faith Constable's expressive eyes flickered for a moment. But then she nodded. “Over there,” she said, and pointed toward shadows.

There was no question—except momentarily in Pam's own mind—that Pamela North would be the person to telephone and ask Lauren Payne what, if anything, she had seen the evening before. She found the telephone in the shadows; dialed the number Gladys Mason gave her, heard “Hotel Dumont, good afternoon,” and asked for Mrs. Anthony Payne. She heard “One moment, please,” but it was more than a moment. Then Pam listened again, and said, “Oh,” and hung up.

Mrs. Anthony Payne had checked out of the Hotel Dumont. It was rather like reaching a foot up for a final stair-tread which isn't there. Pam went back to her chair and sipped tea which was no longer warm at all. I don't, she thought, really like tea. The idea of tea is wonderful but tea, when all's said and done, is only tea.

“They have a house in a place called Ridgefield,” Gladys Mason said. “There was a picture of it in a magazine. Anthony in sports clothes.” She paused. “Trying,” she said, “to look like a man who likes roses. Ridgefield, Connecticut.”

It took longer to find a telephone number, through information—through information which at first reported no Anthony Payne listed in Ridgefield, New Jersey, and said, “Oh,” with some indignation and, after what seemed a longish time for research, reported an Idlewood number with detachment, and in a tone of considerable doubt. (The doubt, Pam realized, was of the mental capacity of someone who did not know the difference between New Jersey and Connecticut.)

Pam dialed and waited and listened to the signal which meant the distant ringing of a telephone bell. She waited for some time, knowing that people who live in country houses are often out of them. Mrs. Payne might be out in the garden. It was difficult to guess what, late of a November afternoon, she might be doing in a garden. But still—

Pam put the receiver back, finally. She went back to the fire. She said that, of course, there was no reason really, to suppose that Mrs. Payne had gone back to her house in Ridgefield. She might, of course, have gone anywhere. She might—

Pam went back to the telephone and dialed again, and listened again to distant ringing. Sometimes country people hear a bell ringing from some distance, and hurry in only to be too late.

The telephone was not answered. Pam went back across the room and, midway, felt something which was rather like a physical chill. This time, she did not sit down. She stood in front of the fire, which was now only a nostalgic flicker. But it was not the failure of a needless fire in a warm room which had caused a contracting chill.

“Mrs. Mason,” Pam North said, “does he know where they live? Your son, I mean. Where the Paynes live?”

“Why yes,” Gladys said. “He was the one who showed me the picture. He said—it doesn't matter, does it, what he said?”

It did not. But that he had known—

“You told him what she said? About seeing someone?”

“Of course. That was what—” She did not finish, but her body stiffened; there was a sudden fixation of the eye muscles, so that her eyes turned starey. And Faith said,
“Oh. He wouldn't—”

It did not need to be said; it would only hurt to have it said. But it was a chill in the room. A murderer is seen and no good may come to the person who sees him.

“You were to meet him at Grand Central,” Pam said. That much had to be said. “Trains run from there to Connecticut. Not to Ridgefield, I don't think, but to somewhere near—near enough.”

Mrs. Mason did not say anything. Faith said, “But, dear—” and did not finish.

“He
wouldn't
,” Gladys said. “I know he—”

But she stopped with that. She didn't know what the boy would do or wouldn't do. She had told them that already.

11

Bill Weigand parked his car in the upper West Fifties and told the Telegraph Bureau where the car was, and that for some time he wouldn't be in it, and where he would be. He walked a quarter of a block and looked at his destination and involuntarily shook his head.

It had been a very foolish place to build a theater, even in the twenties, when it had seemed that New York could never have enough theaters. Probably it had been a “jinx house” even then, which was only a way of saying that it had been, usually for a few nights at a time, occupied by plays which couldn't find better lodging and that usually because they deserved none. And “The Excelsior” is not really a name anyone in his right mind would wish on a theater.

The name of the theater was still lettered across its façade. It was lettered now in the empty sockets of light bulbs long since shattered. The brick of the façade had once been painted white. That had been a mistake, too.

The theater into which Livingston Birdwood's production of
Uprising
, a play in three acts by Lars Simon, based on a novel by Anthony Payne, was to open during the holidays, was ten blocks south, where theaters belong. It was by no means new—no theater in New York is really new—but it was bright with paint, and lights sparkled on it. It was also occupied by a musical which only now, after rather more than two years, was beginning to dwindle away.