Murder in a Hurry (22 page)

“You must, dear,” Mary Halder said, in the same tone.

Then Brian looked down for a moment at Liza O'Brien. She said nothing in words; said with her eyes, with her face, with all the hope and expectancy in her, “Yes, Brian. Please, Brian.”

Then Brian turned to Bill Weigand.

“I thought there was a chance Pine knew something about—Father's death,” he said. “I wanted to try to find out. But—you knew that.”

“Right,” Bill said. “I assumed that. You didn't see him, you say. Didn't talk to him.”

“No.”

“Wait a minute,” Pine said, and started up. “What the hell?”

“Not now, Mr. Pine,” Bill Weigand said. “Go on, Mr. Halder. You thought Pine might know something? Why? Because you thought he might have a motive?”

Brian's fixed expression changed little, but it changed enough.

“Go on, dear,” Mary Halder said, her voice still clear, very gentle. And Liza's fingers tightened on his own; this time his fingers responded for a second.

“Partly that,” Brian said, and he spoke slowly, looked only at Weigand. “Partly—I think he was at the shop. I don't mean the night Dad was—was killed. I don't know about that. Last night. When Liza was hurt.”

It came out then, slowly, was brought out carefully by Brian Halder, who stood facing Weigand; who qualified much of what he said.

It had been when he was taking the sick dog, the dog named Clytemnestra, to the veterinary hospital. A block or two from the shop he had seen a man going toward West Kepp Street. He had been too far away to be certain, the light had been too dim.

“But for what it's worth,” he said, “I thought it was Pine. Or, rather, it occurred to me a minute or two later, that it might have been Pine. And—Liza had seen somebody when she got there. Somebody looking in the window.” He looked down at Liza, and Bill Weigand looked at her. She shook her head.

“I don't know,” she said. “It could have been—anyone. A shadow.”

Weigand turned to the actor, then, and Pine was looking at Mary Halder. Mary nodded.

How careful everybody is of her, Pam thought. But is she that—that breakable? And—does she
want
them to be so careful?

“Well, Mr. Pine?” Bill Weigand asked.

Pine cleared his throat. The sound was unexpected.

“Really,” Mrs. Whiteside said.

“He could have seen me, I guess,” Pine said. “I was there.”

Now everybody looked at him. It was clear that Mary Halder had known what his answer would be; the others seemed surprised. Even Brian Halder seemed surprised.

“Right,” Bill said. “Tell us about it, Mr. Pine.”

Again Pine looked at the slight, pretty woman beside him.

“We both had the idea,” she said. “That is—we talked it over. Because—” now she looked directly at Bill Weigand—“we knew what you might be thinking, Lieutenant. What you could be thinking.”

Bill's face had no expression as he looked back at Mary Halder. Then he shifted his eyes to Pine's face, and waited. Brian Halder made a sound, started to speak his mother's name, but she smiled across the room at him and said, in her light, clear voice, “Don't be frightened, Brinny. It's not the way—”

“Go on, Mr. Pine,” Bill Weigand said. He looked around at the others. “We'll do one thing at a time,” he told them.

“Well,” Pine said, “it was this way—”

He needs somebody to write lines for him, Pam North thought, as the actor hesitated and looked once more, as if for guidance, to Mary Halder. She smiled at him, turned to Weigand.

“Mr. Pine and I probably will get married in a few weeks,” she said. “We would have some months ago if I had been free.” She looked at Weigand, smiled faintly. “Our friendship is a little deeper than I admitted before,” she said. She paused a moment and went on. “Mr. Pine has very little money of his own and what I will receive from my husband's estate will make it easier—much easier.” She looked again at Pine; then at her son. “Men are so afraid of the obvious,” she said. “So—foolish.”

“Really, Mary,” Barbara Whiteside said. “How—how impetuous of you! How—straightforward.”

And she hesitated over the final word, appearing to choose it from many others—from among words which would have meant something quite different and been more apt. And, Pam North thought, Mary Halder flushed a little, and momentarily.

“Dear Barbs,” she said. “Always so—”

But Jennifer Halder had got up from her place beside her husband, had crossed to Mary Halder, held out both hands to her.

“It's grand, Mary,” she said. “I'm so glad.”

Mary Halder took the younger woman's hands, smiled up at her. Then she relinquished Jennifer's hands and looked at her son, who still stood, whose face was still unaltered.

“Poor Brinny,” Mary said, and the lightness in her tone was not real. “It'll be all right, Brinny.” She shook her head slightly, she was gently tolerant. “Couldn't you see everybody knew, dear?” she asked him. “Sherman and I could.”

It was because Mary Halder and Sherman Pine could see the obvious (although I'll bet she had to tell him, Pam North thought) that Pine had gone to the shop, had been there about the time Liza was hit from behind, knocked unconscious. That, at least, was the way Pine finally told it, seeking words, finding them slowly.

They had realized, he said, that a good deal pointed to them. “The damned dog, for one,” he said and looked at Bill Weigand and waited.

“Aegisthus,” Bill said. “Right. Go on.”

“Mary looked it up,” Pine said. “Aegisthus was this guy—”

“We know that,” Bill told him.

“It was like the old guy had been—pointing at us,” Sherman Pine said. He shook his head, as if in wonder. “What kind of a guy—” He shook his head again.

“Even without that,” Mary Halder said. “We've always been the obvious ones. Isn't that so, Lieutenant? Isn't it always the widow—or the man whose wife is killed—you think of first? Suspect first. Particularly when—”

“Mary!” Brian said. His voice was not harsh, now; it was anxious, it held a kind of desperate concern.

“Oh,” his mother said, “but we didn't, Brian. Didn't you know?”

“Oh,” Brian said. “I—of course
I
—”

But he hit it too hard, Pam North thought. Even now, he isn't sure. And Liza, gripping Brian's hand, was wordless even in her mind, feeling his fear almost as her own, knowing no words, but only the pressure of her fingers, which might assuage it.

“The damnedest thing,” Pine said, and none of this seemed to touch him; he remained in the circle of his own bewilderment at J. K. Halder's oblique insinuations. “He named one of the dogs Clytemnestra, too. All out of this Greek play. And a black cat—”

“Right,” Bill said. He was being patient, Pam thought. He needed to be. “What did you do, Mr. Pine?”

Sherman Pine and Mary Halder had talked it over; had decided that they would have to help themselves.

“Because,” he said earnestly, “we hadn't done anything. It just looked as though—”

He sought acceptance of this statement from Weigand. “Go on,” Weigand said, his voice without comment, his manner neither accepting nor rejecting the assertion. Pine seemed baffled for a moment; he looked down at Mary Halder. She nodded to him, encouraging him.

He and Mrs. Halder, Pine said, had “put their heads together.” They had decided that their best chance was to find out what Felix Sneddiger had known and why he had come to the Sutton Place house, and found death there. “Because,” Pine said, “neither of us had seen him. That is—”

“He only knows what I told him,” Mary Halder said. “They see that, Sherman.”

“They'd better—” Pine began, but her head signalled him again, and he went on.

Mary Halder knew that Sneddiger had been in the habit of dropping into the pet shop, almost without regard for time, when he had reason to think J. K. Halder was there, and awake. “Wanted to play chess, for God's sake,” Pine said, bafflement again in his voice. So they had thought—“that is, Mrs. Halder did most of the thinking, I guess”—that Sneddiger might have dropped in, or started to drop in, on the night Halder was killed, and that he might have seen something. But they had thought—again Pine indicated Mary Halder, the source of thought—that if he had actually gone in, the murderer would have seen him and, since he had proved himself ready to kill, would then have killed. So they had thought that Sneddiger might have seen something from outside, perhaps through the shop window.

But neither of them had known whether that was possible; whether, precisely, it was possible for Sneddiger to have seen without being seen. So they had decided that he would go down to the shop and try to find out. They had been in Pine's apartment when this decision was reached, and Mary had waited there for him.

And then, involuntarily, Brian Halder sighed. It was a revealing sound.

“No, Brinny,” Mary said. “I wasn't there.” She looked at Liza. “Did you think I—” she began, and Liza said, quickly, “I never did, Mrs. Halder. Really I didn't.”

“Did you think you saw your mother, Mr. Halder?” Bill Weigand asked. “Perhaps in that passageway you—didn't enter?”

“I just heard someone. I thought of Pine because—well,” Brian said, “I thought I'd seen him nearby. I guess I—”

“Poor Brinny,” Mrs. Halder said. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed, her laughter low, amused. “We aren't that—inseparable, dear,” she said. Then Brian Halder flushed. “It's all right, Brinny,” his mother said. “Only—you mustn't be
too
much like your father.”

That's unkind, Liza O'Brien thought. Can't you see, he's not at all like his father, so much wants not to be like his father? That it was always you? And then she thought, until now. She looked up at Brian and, this time, his gaze met hers, this time the aloofness faded from his deep-set, intent eyes. His eyes were unhappy still, worried, but now she found acceptance in them.

Mary had remained in Sherman Pine's apartment and he had gone to West Kepp Street; this was after the theater, after they had talked it over for some time. That was their story. Pine had found a single light burning in the pet shop and had spent some time peering into it through the window, moving to various positions, trying different angles. If Miss O'Brien had seen somebody looking in, probably it had, Pine said, been he. And—he had satisfied himself that someone going down the steps to the shop, or starting down them, and happening to look through either the door or the window, could see and probably identify anyone within, even with only the single bulb lighted.

Pine could not be at all exact as to the time he had reached the shop, except that it was some time after midnight; perhaps in the neighborhood of twelve-thirty. He had not seen Brian Halder carrying the dog, but he thought he might well not have. He was trying to find West Kepp Street and had begun to think he had missed it. In the end, however, he had found he had been all the time on the right way.

And Brian was no more able to be exact as to the time he had left the shop with the boxer, and, a few minutes later, seen the man he thought—belatedly—might be Pine. Again it was “some time after midnight.” But he thought the trip to the hospital and back had taken him around three quarters of an hour.

“Miss O'Brien?” Weigand said. “I suppose you didn't look at your watch at all?”

“No,” she said. “I wasn't more than—oh, perhaps five minutes—in the shop before—before somebody hit me. But I don't know when I got there. Of course, if it was Mr. Pine I saw, obviously he got there first.”

“You saw somebody apparently looking in the window,” Weigand said. “But when you got there, there was nobody. You didn't see anybody walk off up the street? Or, pass anybody coming your way?”

She shook her head. She looked at Sherman Pine.

“Of course,” she said, “the street isn't well lighted.”

Bill Weigand shook his own head at that. “Well?” he said, this time to Sherman Pine.

Pine seemed puzzled.

“I didn't try to hide, if that's what you're getting at,” he said. “I didn't go into the shop and hide and wait for Miss O'Brien, so I could hit her.”

Bill Weigand listened to him.

“There are plenty of places to hide in the shop,” he said. “Plenty of shadows. Of things to get under.”

“No,” Pine said. “Not me, Lieutenant.”

“You looked in the window a few times,” Bill said. “Through the door. Satisfied yourself. Then just walked away. Openly. Right?”

“That's the way—” Pine began, and then stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. “There's a passage next the shop. You know?”

Weigand indicated that he knew.

“I thought for a moment there might be another window, opening off the passage,” Pine said. “I stepped in the passage for a moment. But there wasn't anything—just a brick wall.”

“At the rear of the building there's a window,” Bill told him. “Barred. Opening into the place Mr. Halder slept. Did you find that?”

Pine hadn't. He had gone only perhaps ten feet into the passage, satisfied himself there was no window, gone back.

“But,” he said, “while I was in there, Miss O'Brien might have come along. I mean—she might have seen me looking in the window in front and then I might have gone into the passage and seemed—”

“Right,” Bill said. He looked at Pine. “You cover things, Mr. Pine,” he said. He looked at Liza.

“It could have been that way,” she said.

“Right,” Weigand said again. “It could have been.” He paused a moment. “Then you went out of the passage, without looking into the shop again, and went back to your apartment, Mr. Pine.”

“Yes,” Pine said.