Curtain for a Jester (24 page)

Men were running toward the staircase then—there were half a dozen men running down aisles, around tables. Baker bent quickly over the policeman on the floor, and did something, and then ran with the others toward Mr. Punch.

Mr. Punch stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at them all.

“They were all rats,” Mr. Punch said, rather loudly, but in the same muffled, slurred voice Pam had heard before.

“Hey,” one of the men who looked up said, and said it in a tone of utter surprise. “That's the man who—that man's
dead.
”

“It is, Fox,” Bill Weigand said. “But he isn't—
don't do that!
”

“Why?” Mr. Punch asked.

He had something in his hand; the light glittered on it—on the blade of a knife.

Mr. Punch held the knife, with its long blade pointed inward toward himself, and held it with both hands. He held it so for an instant, looking down at it, and then plunged the knife toward his own chest—plunged it until hands met chest, the hilt of the knife between them.

He held it so, for a second, and then slowly moved his hands away and looked down at them. Only the hilt was between the hands. The blade had broken—

Mr. Punch laughed, then—a high, strange laugh. He opened the clasped hands and the hilt of the knife fell from them, and began to clatter down the stairs. As it bounced, the blade shot out from the hilt and the thing was a knife again—as much of a knife as it had ever been.

“You may as well come down, Monteath,” Bill Weigand said, mildly.

“Yes,” Arthur Monteath said, from behind the grotesque mask of Mr. Punch. “You do seem to have won the last trick, don't you?”

Arthur Monteath came down the circular stair. In spite of the steepness of the stairs, the impediment of the long, starred robe, his descent was not without dignity.

XII

Friday, 5:45 P.M. to 7:10 P.M.

Dorian Weigand sat in a deep chair, her right foot tucked under her left leg. A Siamese cat lay on her lap. A drawing pad rested on the cat, and Dorian made a picture on the pad—a picture of a towering astrologer with the head of Mr. Punch, standing at the top of a spiral staircase. The down-hooking nose of Mr. Punch all but met the chin which spiked up beneath it. Mr. Punch was in his most malevolent mood, and he cast a grotesque shadow on the wall

“Was that the way it looked?” Dorian asked and Pam North, who stood above her, carrying a plate of olives and sliced raw carrots, said, “Um-m. Yes. Only worse, if anything. You don't show the knife. But—that's pretty much the way it looked. Olive?”

“It seems,” Dorian said, “a little extreme, somehow. I guess not right now.” The last appertained to the olive.

“Well,” Pam said, “Mr. Monteath seems to be an extreme man. Dropping the dummy off the roof. To say nothing of poor Mr. Dewsnap on his head. To say nothing of Mr. Wilmot, to begin with.”

She gestured with the olive-carrot plate at Jerry North, who shuddered; at Bill Weigand, who merely shook his head. Pam took an olive. She looked at the carrots and said that what they needed was a rabbit. She returned to her own chair and sipped from the glass beside it.

“To be perfectly honest,” Pam said, “I was surprised. But you weren't. That's why Sergeant Fox was there. To identify the voice. But you knew already.”

This was to Bill Weigand, who sat in another chair, with another cat. The cat was Martini, and this was remarkable. Martini was more apt to nibble people (other than the Norths) than to sit on them.

“I told you you can always go by cats,” Pam said to Jerry.

“You did indeed,” Jerry said. “And you couldn't, as it turned out. Because, if you could have, Punch would have been Mr. Baker. And Mr. Baker is—what, Bill? FBI?”

“Near enough” Bill said, and did not amplify. They waited. “His name isn't Baker,” Bill said. “He's older than he looks.”

“Martha will like that,” Pam said. “Of course, it will be confusing not knowing what her name is.”

They all looked at her. Jerry blinked.

“They'd been after Mr. Wilmot for some time, then,” Pam said. “Or was it more Mr. Dewsnap?”

Bill shrugged. He had not been informed; it was unlikely that he would be. At a guess—Dewsnap had headed it, had been the professional.

“A spy ring,” Pam said. “Right here in this apartment house. Atom bombs and everything.”

Bill said he gathered atom bombs, as such, had already been pretty well taken care of. There were other things—a good many other things. He hadn't been told what; wouldn't be told what. But—if she cared for the term—a spy ring.

“I like it very much,” Pam said. “And Mr. Wilmot was sending plans of things disguised as plans for other things—I mean magic cabinets and what not—to—to whom?”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “To anyone who would buy, I imagine. That was all the other side of it, Pam. Not our side. Of course, the two things dovetailed.”

“Suppose,” Dorian said, “somebody begins at the beginning? I came in at the end. This—” She gestured with the drawing pad. The cat on her lap stood up, arched back, revolved twice and sat down again. “Please, Sherry,” Dorian said. “You don't need your spikes. I won't let you fall off. Well?”

Bill finished his drink. He looked at his empty glass. Jerry went for the shaker, mixed again, filled glasses.

“Now,” Pam North said.

“It began with blackmail,” Bill said. “Monteath admits that. Blackmail of his wife. He doesn't say what she had done—or what it could have been made to appear she had done. He says, ‘I killed a man to keep a secret. Why should I tell it now?' Behren knows, of course. But Behren isn't in our hands. In any case, it doesn't matter too much. And—I probably wouldn't tell if I knew. The woman's dead. She's been dead a long time. She didn't want to live. In effect, she killed herself. When I found that out, there was a pattern.”

“You knew more than we did,” Pam said, with a somewhat defrauded air.

Bill admitted that. He said, mildly, that that, among other things, was what policemen were for.

“I wish,” Dorian said, “that people would quit interrupting people.”

Bill grinned at her. He said, “Right.” He said it was this way.

Years before, in Maine, Arthur Monteath had killed a man he said was an unknown intruder who had tried to force his way into a seaside cottage. The local police accepted this. It was not true. The man Monteath had killed was one of two not very skillful blackmailers—apprentice blackmailers. The other had been a red-haired young man named Alexander Behren. Monteath admitted, now—now that he was admitting almost everything—that the man he killed, Parks, and Behren had come to the cottage by arrangement, to collect. But by the time they came, Monteath had decided not to pay, but to kill. His wife's heart attack which he blamed on the strain she had been under—“I don't know how justly,” Bill said. “But it was what he thought”—had made him ready to kill. He had planned to kill both men. Behren had escaped.

Behren had not tried again, partly—one could guess—because he decided Monteath was too dangerous; partly because, with Mrs. Monteath dead, he had no safe victim. He could not tell what he knew about Parks's death without revealing what had taken him and Parks to the cottage. Shortly after, Behren had been inducted into the army. The whole affair seemed to have ended.

Bill paused to sip from his glass.

“You got all this from Monteath?” Jerry asked. “After last night?”

“In detail,” Bill said. “Before that, it was an hypothesis——based on a nurse's memories. A pattern into which things seemed to fit. It gave me an assumption—something to test out.”

So—with Mrs. Monteath dead, with Parks dead, with Behren in the army, the Maine affair appeared to have come to an end. If Wilmot and his wife had not, while on vacation, happened to stop by the Monteath cottage, it probably would have ended there.

“And here, I'm still guessing,” Bill said. “Wilmot's dead; Mrs. Wilmot doesn't know; Monteath says he doesn't know, whether Wilmot was involved in the blackmail attempt. I don't know. He may have been. He may not have been—the Wilmots' visit may have been entirely fortuitous. I rather suspect it was—and that Monteath's attitude, before the fact, aroused Wilmot's interest, after the fact. Monteath may have been obviously anxious to get rid of the Wilmots; Mrs. Wilmot thought he was. Wilmot may have suspected something was up. And if Wilmot was already involved in espionage, it would occur to him that Monteath might one day supply information, under pressure. The killing of Parks, if it wasn't what it seemed to be, would give the means of applying pressure. My guess would be that Wilmot kept an eye on things and, when Behren came into it, got in touch with Behren—and got information that, when the time came, he could use. Monteath wasn't ready for pressure then. He could be left to—well, to ripen, as he went on in the State Department. Wilmot could wait.”

The precise pattern here was, Bill said again, a matter of hypothesis. Since other things fitted, the hypothesis was, clearly, correct in substance.

By the night of the April Fool's party, Monteath was, it appeared, considered ripe. He had information Wilmot could sell. So, Wilmot had arranged, in the elaborate disguise of a practical joke, a reminder for Monteath—a red-haired mannequin, enough like Behren, as Monteath had known Behren, to make the point; to remind Monteath of the past, and disclose that Wilmot knew of the past.

“It seems very elaborate,” Dorian said, apparently to the cat named Sherry. “Oblique.”

“A stratagem,” Pam said, rounding it off.

Bill agreed. It would have been simpler for Wilmot to take Monteath aside and to whisper in his ear.

“But,” Bill said, “the elaborate appealed to Mr. Wilmot. It always had. It was part of the design of his life.”

There they had it—a fancy for devious progress toward goals: the surprised discomfiture of the butt of a jest; a highly dramatized warning to Arthur Monteath, through mimic repetition of murder. In both cases, the means as interesting to Wilmot as the end; in the latter case, a large and startled audience for a theatrical production. It was conceivable that Wilmot had regarded espionage itself, with its essential and necessary deviousness, as very like a practical joke.

In any event, Monteath had taken Wilmot's meaning. There had been a whispered conference then; Monteath had agreed to see Wilmot the next day, knowing that it was blackmail over again, but not this time for money.

“For what?” Jerry asked.

Bill Weigand hesitated. Then he shrugged, said he couldn't see that it mattered.

“A list of names,” he said. “Names of people doing—well, they were described to me as doing ‘little chores' for us in Eastern Europe.”

“Spies,” Pam North said.

Bill half smiled. He said she must know the United States government did not employ spies.

“Then the more fool it,” Pam said. “Us.”

“Anyway,” Bill said, “Monteath had a little list. Not a written list. A list in his mind. He was taking it to Washington. Wilmot and company wanted it. Presumably, they planned to sell names from it to governments which might be interested.”

“And get these people killed,” Pam said. “Or put in prison for life or something.”

She looked at it, Bill told her, as Monteath had. Monteath said Wilmot and Dewsnap were rats; he expressed no regret at having killed rats. He was sorry he had been caught.

“I'm not sure I'm not,” Pam said. “Of course—”

They waited politely, but she did not finish.

Monteath had had no intention of parting with the list. On the other hand, he had no intention, if it could be avoided, of going on trial in Maine for murder. So he had stopped by the Norths' apartment after leaving the party, stayed long enough to make it reasonably certain that no lingering guest would remain in the penthouse and gone back up to pay an unexpected visit.

“But,” Pam said, “we went to the elevator with him. And he went—” She stopped.

“Right,” Bill said. “He said he was going down; you expected him to go down. It never occurred to you that he might as easily have gone up.”

“But,” Dorian said, “there's an indicator, or a light, or—”

“Stuck,” Pam said. “It always thinks it's the fifth floor. Mr. Monteath had noticed that?”

“Right,” Bill said. “He had.”

He had gone up, but not to the door of the penthouse. He had gone up the fire stairs to the roof, over the low wall to the penthouse terrace and had found an open door leading to the kitchen.

“An open door?” Jerry said.

“Right,” Bill said. “He'd opened it before he left. With the crowd there, there was no difficulty. He'd also noticed the knives.”

So—in the kitchen he had waited, watched Wilmot finish a drink, picked up a knife, holding it so his arm hid it, walked in on a startled Wilmot and—used the knife.

“Then,” Bill said, “he naturally threw the dummy off the roof.”

They waited.

“Because it might be a link,” Bill said. “It obviously was intended to resemble somebody. Monteath gave us credit, assumed we would notice this and investigate. We might identify the dummy with Behren, and Behren with Parks, and Parks with Monteath. By the time it hit the sidewalk twelve floors down, nobody was going to identify it with anybody. People would describe it, but—” Bill shrugged.

“I thought,” Pam said, “that we described it very well. But I see what you mean.”

Monteath had realized, of course, that the descent of a man-sized dummy from a penthouse to the street below would be noticed, even late at night. He had taken care to drop it when nobody was passing; he had returned, sat down and waited. In due course, the police arrived below; subsequently, Sergeant Fox arrived at the door. Monteath impersonated Wilmot—a drunken Wilmot.