Murder in a Hurry (9 page)

“You've been good to do this,” she said. “I needed this. It was—it's so dreadful. But you two oughtn't to have to—”

Pamela North shook her head, shook off that aspect.

“Obviously,” she said, “the little man knew something. Mr. Sneddiger. Knew too much. But—didn't you think he was surprised when he saw Mr. Halder's body? It sounded as if he were.”

“Oh yes,” Liza said. “I'm certain he was.”

“But then—” Pam said, and shook her head. “There was so little time afterward and—” She sounded puzzled, as if things were refusing to work out. “And you had gone and Mr. Halder—your Mr. Halder—had—” This time she stopped as if a new idea had presented itself. She looked quickly at Liza.

“You mean he could have seen Brian do something?” Liza said. “After Brian put me in the cab? You mean Brian could have—have gone back and—oh,
no!
” She shook her head. “Anyway, Mr. Halder was already dead. He'd been dead for hours, hadn't he? So what could there have been?”

“I don't see it either, Pam,” Jerry North said.

“Neither do I, I guess,” Pam said. “All the same, Mr. Sneddiger did go to the house. And—got killed.”

“Presumably,” Jerry said, “he saw something last night. Something which meant more today than it did then. So—he went to check. And—it meant a great deal more.”

“Listen,” Pam said, “let's go to the apartment. It may be that—” And again she did not complete her sentence.

Liza demurred, but she wanted to be persuaded. She did not want to be alone, be shut out; did not want to think alone, with thoughts going endlessly in a circle of fears. She was persuaded. A cab took them to the Norths' apartment and the three cats, in a circle, greeted them inside the door. But Martini, seeing Liza O'Brien, made a low sound of indignation and retreated under a chair. The other cats seemed to recognize her, smelled to make sure. But then Gin growled, mildly.

“A dog,” Pam told Gin. “Just a little black dog with—with an odd name. Nothing to worry about.” Gin looked up at Mrs. North and spoke, seeming to express doubt that it was anything like so simple. “Small enough for you to chase,” Pam assured the little cat. “Particularly as he probably wouldn't know what you were, with that funny face and—”

“Yah,” Gin said, with more emphasis.

“—voice,” Pam said. “Probably used to soprano cats, Aegisthus is. Such an odd name. I sounded as if I were lisping.”

“You were,” Jerry said. “Aegisthus.”

“So were you,” Pam told him. “What happens is that the end of your tongue gets all over-loaded and—well, things kind of slip off. Esses. I should think Clytemnestra would have found it a—a little handicapping. He could have called her Clytie, I suppose, but when she wanted to—” And she stopped. She stopped as if, approaching a precipice, she had dug in her heels, leaned back against the wind.

“Aegisthus?” Liza O'Brien said. “I don't remember.” But then she did remember.

“Yes,” Jerry said. “Agamemnon came from the wars. Aegisthus had taken his throne, and his wife, who was Clytemnestra. And—they killed him. A way the Greeks had. It was long ago, a legend.”

“And,” Pam North said, “a little black dog. So—so unpleasantly named. Perhaps, though, Mr. Halder named all the animals out of the tragedies.”

Liza spoke slowly.

“I think he did,” she said. “The black cat, the one in the window. He called her Electra.”

“Of course,” Pam said. “So there doesn't need to be any—significance. Probably there's another cat, or a dog, or a monkey, named Orestes. Perhaps—”

“I remember now,” Liza said, and spoke even more slowly. “Orestes and Electra, who was his sister, killed Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. And—and were pursued by Furies. Orestes was Clytemnestra's son, and Agamemnon's.”

“Yes,” Jerry said.

“Actually,” Pam said, “we're making a lot out of a little black dog.”

“Mr. Halder gave his wife the dog,” Liza said. “Why would he give her a dog named—named that? Unless he meant something by it? Unless—” She paused. “It's so dreadful,” she said. “So—so frightening.” Her eyes were wide; she was trembling again.

“Damn the little dog,” Pam North said. But Jerry shook his head. He said it was no good. He said, whether they liked it or not, it was there. The implication was there.

“But she, Mrs. Halder, didn't even know,” Pam said. “The name—what did she say?—‘It's out of literature, isn't it? A Greek play?' But not as if it had any significance to her.”

“Which he might have enjoyed more,” Jerry pointed out. “A jest, and, in a way, a challenge. But private, to be enjoyed by him and, perhaps, a few others. His sons, perhaps. While she didn't know, missed the point of it.”

“Cruel,” Pam said. “Even if—if she was.”

“Oh yes,” Jerry agreed. “Cruel. But
he
died, you know. It's possible that—” He stopped and looked, involuntarily, at Liza O'Brien.

“The challenge was taken up?” she said. “Is that what you mean? By—by Brian's mother and—and who?”

Neither of them answered.

“You mean this man who was with her?” Liza said. “This—Sherman Pine, wasn't it?”

“We're only guessing,” Jerry said, but now Pam shook her head.

“Partly guessing,” she said. “They heard the news on the radio, remember? But—in a cocktail lounge, somewhere? In the kind of bar the other brother stopped in, maybe. At the tail end of a ball game, or something. But Mrs. Halder and Pine wouldn't have been in that kind of a bar. Where they were, there'd have been music, if anything, or even television. If—if they were in a cocktail lounge at all. But if they were in an apartment, say, in—Mr. Pine's apartment. Then—”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “You sound like your maiden aunt.”

“My aunt is no maiden,” Pam said. “She's been married four or five times. Don't you remember?
And
wears a wig.”

“Listen,” Jerry said again, and now he ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. “Listen, Pam. Keep your aunt out of it.”

“All right,” Pam said, “only don't call her a maiden. How did she get in, anyway?” She sounded honestly puzzled.

“She was an abstraction,” Jerry said. “I'm very sorry.”

He was told he should be. He was told to leave out the abstractions. “Particularly wigged,” Pam added. “An abstraction with a wig.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “You implied, way back there when we were on the subject, that if Mrs. Halder went to Pine's apartment for a drink, instead of to a cocktail lounge, he was—well, Aegisthus to her Clytemnestra. Which is an idea which would occur to—all right,
my
maiden aunt.”

“I didn't know,” Pam said. “Oh, all right, Jerry. Not that I don't sometimes think maiden aunts weren't pretty smart. I mean, weren't sometimes pretty smart. There's no point in saying that merely because there's smoke there
isn't
any fire.”

But then Pam looked at Liza O'Brien, who was looking at nothing.

“We forgot,” Pam said, and now her voice was soft, unhappy. “We do, sometimes.”

But Liza shook her head. It didn't matter; it was not what anybody said, or could say. It was Brian, always it was Brian; now it was, it might be, Brian pursued by Furies, Brian running for the rest of his life down a hated corridor of memory, Brian never the same again—never hers again. If a man's mother killed his father, because there was another man for her, what would be left of the son's life, if he were a man like Brian? If—

“Remember,” Pam said, “there's nothing to go on. Agamemnon was killed because he came home, you know. Mr. Halder—well, there's nothing to indicate he was coming home. Nothing to indicate he wasn't merely—well, amused. So then, why?”

But there was an answer to that, and Liza faced the answer, and spoke it slowly.

“He had a lot of money,” she said. “Maybe they—maybe somebody—wanted the money.”

There was nothing to say to that. Its inescapable truth was given a brief tribute of silence. Then Pam North spoke.

“Sometimes,” Pam said, “it's easier not to begin at the beginning. I keep thinking of Mr. Sneddiger. Because there are several reasons for killing Mr. Halder, and only one for killing Mr. Sneddiger. Of course, most of the reasons for killing Mr. Halder probably are money, one way or another. Because, if you've got money, that's what happens.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said, “lots of people with money die perfectly natural—”

“Obviously,” Pam said. “Especially when they haven't got relatives. But you aren't arguing that strychnine is natural, are you?”

“No,” Jerry said.

“Sometimes, Jerry,” his wife told him, “you do wander from the subject.”

“Which is?”

“Mr. Sneddiger. For whom there was only one reason. He knew too much.”

And then Pam made a small sound which was almost a gasp, and looked at Liza O'Brien with an expression of concern, almost of alarm. Then she looked at Jerry.

“Jerry!” Pam said. “Won't whoever did it think, wonder, whether Mr. Sneddiger didn't tell—” She did not finish, but looked toward Liza. And then both of the Norths looked at Liza gravely, and watched her shake her head.

“He didn't tell me anything,” she said. “I know he didn't. I've—I've been thinking back. He was just surprised, and shocked, and—and there wasn't anything to make me feel that he knew more than I did, than we could see.” She looked first at Pam and then at Jerry. “I'm sure,” she said. “I've thought and thought.”

“Only—” Pam North began, and the door buzzer rasped sharply, interrupting her. It rasped twice, then three times quickly.

“Let Bill in, Jerry,” Pam said. “I wondered.”

And Liza O'Brien realized then that all of this had, to some degree at least, been planned; been planned, as it were, around her, over her; that her being there was part of some plan and that now Bill—Dorian's Bill; the police department's Bill, also—was coming as part of the plan. For an instant she felt oddly defrauded, as if counterfeit had been offered, and the most nefarious of counterfeits—spurious friendship. But then Pam said, “Liza,” gently, and the girl looked at Pam, at Pam's small, intensely alive face and thought, no, it isn't false, isn't a fake, they're not against me, or against Brian. Then Bill Weigand was in the room, not surprised to find her there, half smiling at her.

“So,” he said, “you're all right, I see.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said. “I'm all right now.”

“We have to ask unpleasant things,” Weigand said. “It can't be helped. We're in an unpleasant business.”

“I realize that,” Liza said. “It was—I'm sorry I couldn't take it.”

She was, Weigand told her, taking it fine. Better, he said, than a lot would.

“Bill,” Pam North said. “Did you realize about Aegisthus? The little dog?”

“Yes,” Weigand said. “Why yes, Pam.”

“That Aegisthus was—?”

“Right,” Weigand said, and looked quickly, seemingly with doubt, at Liza O'Brien.

“Oh, we've been all over it,” Pam said.

“And got?” Bill asked her.

“Oh,” Pam said, “in the air. So—what about Mr. Sneddiger?”

Bill Weigand sat down. He looked again at Liza O'Brien. He spoke slowly, to her. He said that, first, he wanted to make her position clear, and his own. “Pam and Jerry hear a good deal,” he said. “More than they should, from time to time. My superiors—” He paused, and suddenly grinned at Pamela North. “O'Malley doesn't know, yet,” he said, in an aside. He sobered. “Won't approve,” he finished, to Liza again. “In theory, you should be kept completely in the dark, Miss O'Brien. Because, in theory, you're involved. But, I think in this case you'd better—well, know the general situation. Because—”

He paused and looked at her. She waited; felt, once more, growing uneasiness.

“Felix Sneddiger was killed because he knew something,” Weigand said. “I don't know what; perhaps only the person who killed him knows what. Unless, Miss O'Brien, Sneddiger said something to you. At the shop.”

He paused; she shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said. “We've been talking about it. There was nothing.”

“Tell it to me again,” Weigand said, and listened as she told him again. He asked questions—small, probing questions; questions which were hard to answer; questions which required that she try to inject her mind, thus retrospectively, into the mind of the little, wrinkled man she had met so briefly, who so uglily had died. Again, more vividly than before, she saw the little shop and herself and the little old man in it; saw the animals, the black cat Electra, the sick boxer; the hideously folded body of J. K. Halder. Weigand was patient; Liza tried to make her patience match his own; tried not to let her nerves rebel under the cross-examination.

“Bill,” Pam said, finally, “can't you see?”

Then he nodded, slowly; then he said, “Right.” He had, he told them, and now Liza felt herself again on an equal footing with the others, included with them, to find out.

“Because,” Weigand said, “somebody is wondering just what I was wondering. You may as well realize that, Miss O'Brien. And that the person who is wondering most, cares most, is the person who killed Halder and then killed Sneddiger. Did Sneddiger tell you what he knew?”

“He didn't,” Liza said. “You can see he didn't.”

Now Bill Weigand nodded again. He repeated that he had had to be sure.

“So,” he said, “for your own—safety, I think you ought to know how things stand, so far as we can tell how they stand. Because, Miss O'Brien—you're going to have to be careful for a while. Do you realize that?”