Murder Has Its Points (6 page)

“You didn't like him, obviously.”

“Lots of people I don't like. Lots of things I don't like. There are good things and bad things, and he was a bad thing. He was a fake, and I don't like fakes.
The Africa I Know
.” He used a short, explicit word. He whirled on his stool toward the couple in the corner. “Sorry, lady,” he said.

“Oh,” the girl said, “I've heard the word, Mr. Willings. I've heard a lot of words.”

Willlings turned back to Bill Weigand.

“There you have it,” he said. “Honest girl. Mealy-mouthed bunch ride herd. But everybody knows the words. When a word's a good word for what you want to say, you ought to use the word. Right?”

“Right,” Bill said.

“You're thinking about that review I was going to make him eat. It was a stinker. Also, it was a lousy job. The man couldn't write. You read it, I suppose?”

Bill shook his head.

“I'll be damned,” Willings said. He seemed entirely surprised. “Everybody read it.”

“I didn't, Mr. Willings—after this—incident. At the party. By the way, did you come to the party with that in mind?”

“What else? Heard about the party. Thought it might be fun. Getting Payne to eat, I mean. Long as I was there, I thought I might have a couple.” For the first time he smiled slightly. “A couple made the idea seem very good,” he said. “So I had a couple more. Idea seemed fine. I wasn't drunk. I don't get drunk.” He finished his long rum drink. He patted the base of the glass against the bar. The barman took the glass away and began to mix.

“After the incident,” Bill said. “What did you do?”

“Went up to my room. Had a nap. I sleep when it seems like a good idea. Didn't know about somebody's good deed for the day until about half an hour ago.”

“You'd known Payne for some time?”

“You're a funny copper,” Willings said. “What are you after?”

“Anything I can get.”

“I'm the wrong tree to bark up. But—yes. Donkey's years.”

“Disliking him all the time?”

“More or less. What difference does that make? You only see people you like?”

“I see all kinds.”

“Probably do,” Willings said. “So do I. In some ways, ours is the same trade. Find out about people. You put them in jail. I put them in books. I used Payne a couple of times. Remember Ponsby in my
Turn at the Bridge?
”

Bill remembered the title; only the title. He shook his head.

“Read it, didn't you?”

Bill shook his head again.

“My God,” Willings said. “You
can
read?”

It sounded to Bill Weigand as if Willings really wanted to know, really wanted to resolve a doubt. Bill said, “Yes, I can read. Your character Ponsby was Anthony Payne?”

“Publicly, I deny it,” Willings said.

“Did he recognize himself?”

“As the chaser the girls laughed at? Sure he did. So he tried to put me into
Uprising
. Couldn't swing it, of course. Not up to it.”

“He was a chaser?”

“And how.”

“They did laugh?”

“The bright ones. Faith did. Laughed him out of her life.” He drank. “Not all,” he said. “There're always half-wits.”

“His present wife. Widow. She's one of the ones who didn't laugh?”

Willings shrugged his heavy shoulders and turned to his drink. It occurred to Bill Weigand that he had begun to bore the—justly—famous Mr. Willings. It is the fate of a policeman to bore many.

“No laughing matter, being married to Payne,” Willings said, into his rum drink. “How would I know? Don't know the lady.”

Which seemed to take care of that.

“Met her couple of years ago,” Willings said. “Came down to the islands and looked us up. More damn people look us up. Thought, ‘Poor gal doesn't know what she's in for.' Thought, ‘Too tender for the bastard.' Thought, ‘Shame to waste her on the two-bit phony.' Only met her that once. Had Sally use the gag, after that. ‘Willings is at work,' with proper awe. Good at it, Sally is. Hear her, and you'd swear she believed it. Well?”

The last seemed to toss something into the air. Bill was not entirely sure what.

“She's a good-looking gal,” Willings said, himself catching whatever it was he had tossed. (Sally, whoever Sally might be, or Mrs. Anthony Payne?) “Tender. Also, she's got money. Could be why the bastard married her, couldn't it? Not that I've anything against their having money. One of mine had money, you remember. Samantha, that was. Money's a good thing to have.”

Weigand remembered nothing about Samantha, never having heard of her before. There seemed no use in mentioning this to Willings, who clearly thought that all the world would remember Samantha, who would have acquired fame by osmosis. To those who had much to do with Gardner Willings it must sometimes be hard to remember that Willings
was
the institution he took himself to be, or close to it.

“However,” Willings said, “I wasn't thinking of Lauren particularly. He had this new one, you know. Pretty little thing and I'd guess about twenty. Tender. Half-witted, of course, or she'd have seen through him. But—tender. Too young to laugh. Not bright enough. But—pretty as hell.”

Bill Weigand waited. Willings seemed, now, entirely ready to keep himself going. Willings is willing, Bill Weigand thought, and rather wished he hadn't.

“Couple of nights ago,” Willings said. “Having dinner with a man named Self. Starting some sort of magazine. Good stuff. Stuff nobody'll want. Wants me to do something for it.
Me
.” He paused, apparently in wonderment. “And I may,” Willings said. “Just may. Nice kid, this Self boy. Reminds me of—” He stopped and drank and, for a moment, looked beyond the drink, at nothing—at the past.

“Anyway,” Willings said, “Payne came in with this girl—little dark girl with big dark eyes. Looking at the bastard with—” He paused. “As if her eyes saw greatness,” he said. “The poor, pretty, benighted little idiot. And Self started to stand up. Damn near knocked the table over. And then, just sat down again and looked at them. Good scene, and some time I'll do it the way it ought to be done. Confrontation, see?”

“Right,” Bill said. “Because the girl was with Payne?”

“What else? His girl. Looking that way at this pink dome of nothing at all. Suddenly, his hands full of dust.”

“He say something to tell you that?”

Willings turned and looked at Bill Weigand, and with surprise. His look, Bill thought, is to say that I'm even dumber than he had thought. But when Willings spoke it was with resignation.

“No,” he said. “Said nothing. I see things, copper. It was the way I saw it.”

“Right,” Bill said. “This Self—James Self? I thought he ran a bookstore.”

“He runs a bookstore. Runs a bookstore. Writes reviews for—oh,
Partisan Review
. Gets out a magazine of his own. The poor bastard can't write, you see.” There was a note of deep sorrow in Willings's heavy voice, as he mentioned, with a kind of awe, this most tragic of human predicaments. “Got to do something.” He finished his drink and looked at his empty glass. He shook his head at it. He said, “You know Self?”

“Heard of him today,” Bill said. “He was at the party here.”

“Girl with him?”

Bill didn't know.

“Didn't see him,” Willings said. “Hell of a lot of nobodies. As you'd expect. Why does anybody give a party like that?”

“I don't know,” Bill said, and reached the bottom of his own glass and stood up. “You'll be in town a few days?”

“Probably. Why?”

“We like to know where people are.”

“I didn't kill the bastard. Not worth the trouble.”

Bill Weigand said, “Right,” and went out of “The Bottom of the Well.” It was, he thought, mildly interesting that Gardner Willings had, more or less unprompted, brought up the “confrontation” scene which had involved James Self and a pretty dark girl with big dark eyes. And Anthony Payne. A small present to a deserving policeman? Present of small red herring?

Call it a night, now. Bill went out of the Hotel Dumont. On the sidewalk, Captain Jonathan Frank said, “Hey!” to him. Frank looked pleased. “Got him?” Bill said, and Frank, his voice sounding pleased, said it looked like it.

“Hiding on the roof,” he said, and pointed across the street toward the Hotel King Arthur. “Tried to make a run for it, and one of the boys had to stop him. Knocked him out, sort of. But he'll come around, O.K.”

“Sure,” Bill said. “So that's that.”

“Looks like it,” Frank said. “Lucky break. Find out where he ditched the gun, and we're in.”

5

From the bedroom there came the cry of a Siamese cat in agony. “Then you feel,” Dave Garroway said, from a twenty-three-inch screen, in a tone of anxiety, “that we tend to underestimate the menace of communism here at home?” “It's frightening,” the author of
The Unseen Menace
said, and Dave Garroway looked properly frightened. “Of atheistic communism?” Garroway said, getting it clear, and the author said, “I'm afraid that's true, Dave.” Garroway looked at the camera, and it was clear to Pam North that he was scared stiff. From the bedroom the cat wailed.

Mr. Garroway's such a nice man, Pam thought. So—she paused for the word. The word came. “Sincere.” Precisely the right word. The cat wailed. It was clear that the cat was undergoing torture.

“Here, Shadow,” Pam said. “She's out here.”

The cat named Shadow had lost the cat named Stilts. Stilts was lying on the floor at Pam's feet. When Shadow wailed first, Stilts lifted her head and listened. Then she put her head down again. Nothing wrong with her, the movement said. Silly cat, but not in any trouble.

There was the quick click of cat claws on the hall's bare floor. Shadow appeared, crying. She looked at Pam and wailed. “There,” Pam said, and pointed. Shadow ran to Stilts, rubbed against Stilts, began to purr loudly. Stilts licked her, perfunctorily. Shadow licked back with eager excitement. Stilts turned slightly and hit Shadow in the face. Shadow laid her ears back and leaped into an embrace with Stilts. It seemed to Pam, watching, that Stilts sighed. Unquestionably, Stilts pushed. Shadow began to cry on a quite different note—in the tone of a cat about to eat another cat for breakfast.

Stilts, with a sudden flowing movement, stood up and knocked Shadow down. Then she sat and began to wash behind the ears. Shadow looked at her. Shadow sat and washed behind the ears.

“You poor dear,” Pam said to Shadow, “are you going to be a kitten always?”

Shadow leaped to Pam's lap and Pam stroked her. It was a bit, Pam thought, like stroking an eel only, of course, furrier. Shadow purred. By decibels the loudest purrer we've ever had, Pam thought, and said, “Nice baby.”

Stilts watched for a moment. She lay down on the carpet again, and this time put one paw over her eyes.

No two of them are ever alike, Pam thought. She pressed the proper area of remote control and Dave Garroway, still looking frightened, vanished. Which was odd when one considered how much alike these two seal-points looked. Shadow's eyes were perceptibly larger and, for that matter, bluer. She was a long, low cat, shaped a good deal—a good deal too much, if one chose to be critical—like a dachshund. (This comparison was never made, audibly, in her presence.) Shadow was constantly losing something, usually Stilts, and mourning loudly. People who were always talking of the detached self-reliance of cats should meet Shadow. If, of course, Shadow could, on encountering strangers, be got out from underneath whatever was nearest.

Shadow was almost a year old, and at a year a cat is a cat, ready to follow a cat's trade. In the country, that summer, Shadow had pursued, and missed, butterflies. Stilts, who was a little over two, had brought home moles, mice, chipmunks and a medium-sized rabbit. (The one, it was to be hoped, who had got under the fence and eaten the lettuce or, at the least, a near relative of the one.)

Stilts was a cat who walked tall; she was, save for slightly crossed eyes, everything a Siamese ought to be. She had been given to the Norths by a sympathetic veterinarian, who—Pam suspected with the Norths in mind—had accepted her from owners who explained that they were ordered to Argentina. All the veterinarian knew of her was that she was a pretty, friendly cat. One of the things he did not know about her was that she was pregnant and another that she had not been inoculated.

When she returned from the hospital, a wraith, after parturition and enteritis, in that order, she found Shadow—then nameless; then of a shape and texture which had almost led to her being called Cushion—under a sofa. “Larger than I would have expected,” Stilts clearly thought, “but one of my kittens.” Stilts, who had evidently been fearless from the day she was born, enticed Shadow from under, explained that cats do not need to hide from people and washed her thoroughly. She earned a slave who was sometimes clearly a nuisance, but one to be tolerated by a gentle cat. Her slave, who had been on order when Stilts was offered, had a long pedigree and quite perceptible tabby markings on her rather thickish tail.

“The baby,” Pam North said, fondly, to the ecstatic purrer on her lap. The telephone rang. Stilts jumped up instantly and danced away to answer it. Shadow, watching her, wailed at this new desertion.

The voice was very low, almost husky. It was carefully controlled—so carefully, Pam thought, as to have in its texture a certain unreality. Pam said, “Why, of course. Whenever you like,” and listened a moment longer and said, “That'll be fine,” and put the receiver back. For a moment she sat at the telephone table and looked at the olive-green telephone. What did Lauren Payne want, want anxiously, to talk to her about? At—Pam looked at the watch on her wrist—five minutes before nine?