Murder Has Its Points (23 page)

She looked at him for some seconds.

“No,” she said, “it hasn't come back to me, Captain. I'm still—confused about it. It's still—a kind of blur.”

But this time her voice was steady; her voice did not in the least reflect confusion. Why, Pam North thought, it isn't the way she says. It's—she's saying something else. Something else entirely. And—she's waiting for something.

“Mrs. Payne,” Bill said, “I've got to ask you this—you didn't—make up this story? About a man limping? Perhaps, about seeing a man at all?”

She did not seem in the least surprised by the question.

“No,” she said. “I didn't make anything up. But—I may have dreamed something, mayn't I?” She looked; then, at Blaine Smythe, sitting so near her, with so anxious a face. “You understand what I mean, don't you, Blaine?” she said. He said, “Of course, dear,” and turned again toward Bill Weigand, his face angry. “Can't you leave her alone?”

“No,” Bill said. “Not anybody. You're quite certain you saw Mr. Self fire a rifle? Not merely start to get out of a car, perhaps holding something?”

“Holding a rifle,” Blaine said. “Firing a rifle. What do you mean, something? You've got the gun, haven't you?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “You saw him fire. Ran across and grabbed him. I gather you struggled for the gun. That you hit him with it. That at some time during the tussle, he hit you. You are getting a black eye, you know.”

“I hit him,” Smythe said. “Or he banged into it. Hell, we weren't fighting for points. It was—it was a scramble. First to keep him from shooting Lauren again. Then—well, I figured he'd just as soon shoot me.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Natural you should.” He turned toward James Self, who had not moved from the deep chair and now did not move in it. But it was entirely clear from his eyes that he wasn't groggy anymore. His eyes were very watchful, now. “Well, Mr. Self,” Bill said, “you still say you didn't—”

The telephone at the end of the room rang. Its ringing was a loud violence in the room. For a moment, nobody moved to answer the telephone. Then Gladys Mason started to stand up, but Pam said, “No, I'll get it. Probably it's that operator to say that this is Wilton. Or Ridgefield. Or—” She did not finish, walked toward the telephone, said, “Hello?” into it. Then she said, “Hello, Sergeant. Yes, he is.” She put the receiver down on the table and started to walk back, and said, “Bill, it's—” But by then Bill Weigand was moving, quickly, down the room toward her, and toward the telephone.

There was complete silence in the room as Bill spoke on the telephone. He said, “O.K., Sergeant. Go ahead.” Then he listened. Then he said, “Who could ask for anything more?” and they heard the click of the receiver going back in the cradle. It was, Pam thought, an extremely disappointing conversation. Bill came back. He said, “Well, Mr. Self? What do you say happened? If not what Mr. Smythe says did? Or—”

“Nope,” Self said. “I still didn't. Either one.” He seemed to consider. Then he said, “Mrs. Payne, do you say you didn't call me up this afternoon? Tell me what was evidently a cock and bull story?”

She did not speak immediately, but looked down the room at him. Then she said, “No, Mr. Self. I didn't call you.”

“And,” Self said, “I've called Tony Payne a rat and you, Captain, have got it fixed in your mind why, haven't you?”

“Go ahead,” Bill said.

“And Mrs. Payne maybe did and maybe didn't see somebody, but if she did whoever she saw might want to keep her quiet. Only, I don't limp, you know. Unless you want to say I faked a limp. As some sort of disguise?”

“Mr. Self, why don't you just tell us—”

“Patience,” Self said. “And, of course, fortitude.” Suddenly he smiled as if amused. “And maybe what they call in the theater voluntary suspension of disbelief. Isn't that what they call it, Smythe? You lying son of a—” He did not finish. Blaine Smythe might not have heard.

“All right,” Self said. “Mrs. Payne—make it somebody who said she was Mrs. Payne—called me up this afternoon. At the shop. She said—”

She had said she wanted him to come up to the house. She had given him reason enough to come.

Bill Weigand shook his head then. He said that that was not good enough. Self raised his eyebrows. “No,” Bill said.

James Self seemed to consult inwardly. He reached a decision. He said, “O.K. What she said was—”

The woman who had identified herself as Lauren Payne had asked him to come up and get a girl named Jo-An Rhodes. The woman who said she was Lauren Payne said that she had come home and found Miss Rhodes in her house, going through “my husband's papers.” Surprised, Jo-An had become almost hysterical; was still hysterical at the moment of the call. She kept saying, “I wrote him letters. Somebody will show Jim the letters.”

“She said,” Self said, his voice level, without expression, “that she knew about Jo-An and her husband. And—that Jo-An worked for me. And that she—Mrs. Payne—didn't want to call the police, because she knew Jo-An didn't really plan to steal anything, but that technically, she supposed, it would be burglary and—well, a lot of stuff. And would I come and get Jo-An? So I got the car.”

“And,” Bill said, “didn't leave a message for Miss Rhodes?”

Self looked at him and shook his head.

“She came to me,” Bill said. “Said you were missing. That it wasn't like you to go without leaving word at the shop.”

Self said, “Oh.” Then he said, “I wouldn't have if I thought she was up here, would I?” He looked at Bill Weigand, who nodded his head.

So—Self had, he said, got his car and driven to Ridgefield. He had stopped in the village at a drugstore for directions. At that, Pam felt a little like raising her hand.

“You drove directly here?”

Pam took down her mental hand. And James Self shook his head.

“Got lost,” he said. “I damn near always do. The kid, Jo-An, says—Anyway, I got lost. There's this Nod Road and then, farther along, there's a Nod Hill Road, for God's sake. The point being, obviously, to trap the unwary. So—”

So, missing Nod Road, he had driven on several miles to Nod Hill Road, and on it for several more miles before he realized he had gone much too far, and found a house, and asked again—asked, this time, where the hell he was. He had been told; he had finally got to the Payne house.

“I started to get out of the car,” Self said, “and this lying bastard—” He looked at Smythe. Smythe was looking at him, now; looking at Self with a smile which might have been of pity, and shaking his head slowly, in a kind of baffled disparagement. “This son of a bitch,” Self said, “came rushing at me with something in his hands. I thought it was some kind of a club. Anyway, he tried to hit me with it, and I tried to take it away from him—by then I could feel what it was; it was this bloody gun—and we writhed around like a couple of extras in a Western film, and I got in a poke and then—well, then he slammed me. Next thing I knew, somebody was picking me up.”

He stopped.

“A bald and unconvincing narrative,” he said. “To which I can add no verisimilitude by corroborative detail. Mrs. Payne didn't call me. Jo-An obviously isn't here. This—” he paused—“animal, says I had the gun and shot Mrs. Payne with it. And, my fingerprints will be all over the gun, won't they? And, if I know this rat, and I'm beginning to, in all the right places, won't they? Because after he knocked me out, he could put them where he liked, couldn't he?”

“You heard the shot? If you didn't fire it?”

“Sure,” Self said. “Only, I didn't realize what it was until I knew we were fighting over a gun. I had the windows of the car closed and it was before I opened the door and—well, it sounded a long way off. Anyway, you hear the damnedest things in the country.” He looked at Weigand. “And I suppose that sounds thin, too,” he said.

“You saw Mrs. Payne? Saw her fall after she was shot?”

“Movement,” Self said. “A vague feeling there was somebody on the terrace. I was pulling up behind this other car. There was fog all over the windshield.” He spread his hands. “I don't make it any better,” he said. “It's true, but I don't make it any better. It—well, it all happened so damned fast.”

“My God,” Smythe said, in a tone of astonishment and of contempt. “Of all the—” He shook his head, apparently being unable to think of a word for such an enormity. “I hide behind a hedge and shoot a girl I came to take care of, and just at that moment—just at that moment, by God, Self drives up and I try to make him take the gun—my God, Captain!”

“It would be quite a coincidence,” Bill said. “By the way, Mr. Smythe, how'd you get here?”

“Get here?”

Bill waited.

“Oh, see what you mean. I parked my car down on the road, and walked up. The idea—well, the idea was to catch anybody who might try to hurt Lauren. Not scare him away.”

“You seemed pretty sure there would be someone. Why?”

“I was right, wasn't I? I don't know—don't you ever have hunches, Captain? Just—feelings? Anyway, after Lauren called me—” He stopped; looked at Lauren Payne.

“I telephoned him,” Lauren said. “At the theater. I—I asked him to come up. I—I was afraid to be here alone. I thought—oh, I got to imagining things. When the car came up—Mr. Self's car—I thought it was Blaine. That's why I went out.”

It's not coming together, Pam thought. It's coming apart. She said she wasn't expecting anyone—Pam interrupted herself, called herself a ninny. Lauren would hardly tell three other women that she had invited a man to a lonely, house, in which she was alone, the night after her husband's murder. She, Pam, thought, hoped we would go away before he came.

“After Lauren called me,” Blaine Smythe said, “I—well, I got to worrying. I thought, maybe she knows something. Maybe—And I knew about young Mason here. Tony had told me. Said the kid was nuts. That there was no telling what he'd—Anyway, I checked at the hotel—I know them there—and found the kid hadn't showed up for work and—” he spread his hands. Said that there they had it. And added that he was damn glad he had come, even if it wasn't the kid.

Bill Weigand merely listened. It seemed to Pam that he was merely waiting for Smythe to finish, waiting politely. Well, Self's story was as thin as he said it was—said it was before anyone else could, as clever liars do. Now Bill would say to the Connecticut policeman that he thought they had what they needed, and that he'd better take Mr. Self along for the time being and—

“Mrs. Constable,” Weigand said, “you left the rehearsal of
Uprising
this afternoon after you had got a telephone call. Who called you?”

“Why,” Faith said. “Gladys.” One sensitive, expressive hand flickered toward the woman in dull black. “She wanted me to help her. Wanted somebody she could—somebody who could advise her. Why?”

“And you, or she, called Mrs. North, and she joined you and then—then you came up here? To see Mrs. Payne? Perhaps to warn her? And, hoping you could—intercept Robert before he had a chance to do harm? If he meant to do harm?'

“Yes. To do what we could.”

“Mr. Simon didn't object to your leaving the rehearsal?”

“Lars?” There was surprise in her modulated voice. “Dear Lars?” Lars Simon, her voice said, would not do anything so preposterous. There was, Bill thought, the further suggestion that Lars had better not try. “Why do you ask that?”

“Oh,” Bill said, “curiosity. Do you mind telling me something about the play, Mrs. Constable? When I went into the theater, Mr. Smythe here was sitting at a table, near the center of the stage. Mr. Simon—he was filling in for you, he told me afterward—came on and said—well, a sentence apparently ending, ‘it was you who began it.'”

“Cues Blaine,” Mrs. Constable said. “Second scene, second act. Yes?”

“You mind telling me something about the situation?”

She said, “Good heavens, man!” She looked around at the others; she shrugged her shoulders, deftly. Her hands flickered for a moment, registering incredulity and surprise.

“Please,” Weigand said. “It may have bearing, Mrs. Constable.”

“I don't,” she said, “have any idea how much you want, Captain. Not the whole play?” He shook his head. “I thought not,” she said. “And thank heaven not. Well—at that moment. There's a native uprising, you know. White settlers in peril. All that. They attack—the natives, that darling Tommy so fearsome with his sharp teeth—at the end of the first scene. Curtain. The second scene, it's the next morning. I come in and tell Blaine—who's George Silcox in the play—that he began it. Then—”

“Right,” Bill said. “He's sitting on a chair by a table. He has his right leg up on another chair. Why?”

“Why? Oh, the leg. Because he was shot in it, of course.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “I guessed it was something like that. This afternoon. Lars Simon didn't like the way Mr. Smythe moved when you—that is, when he—cued him. He said something like—” Bill paused, remembering words. “Like ‘you've got to start wearing it. Otherwise you'll be skipping all over the place.' Wearing what, Mrs. Constable?”

But he did not wait for her answer. He turned, abruptly, toward Blaine Smythe, who now sat facing him, leaning a little forward in his chair.

“Perhaps I'd better ask you,” Weigand said. “Wearing what, Mr. Smythe?”

Smythe looked at him for a moment, and then smiled; seemed to chuckle. He said, “Man, are you thorough! The bandage, of course. It's a—” He hesitated. “A sort of snap-on,” he said. “The prop man ran it up. There's only a few minutes between the scenes. Just time for me to snap the gadget on my foot. Looks like a lot of bandaging from out front.”