Hanged for a Sheep (16 page)

Something was moving above her and, as she sensed it, Pam North threw herself back against the wall. She stood there, her arms out and her hands lifted level with her shoulders, instinctively in an attitude of defense. And then she looked up. Her neck muscles seemed to resist the movement.

For a moment, in the half darkness, she saw nothing. Something was between her and the light. And then, horribly, she saw that she was looking at the bottoms of a pair of shoes! They were half a dozen feet above her head, and they were moving slowly in a kind of circle—a kind of awkward dance. A dance upon the air.

And then, sickly, Pam knew. Somebody had said that about a man hanged!
She was looking up at a man hanging!

She made herself go on—go on along the hall, and part way up the last flight. Then she was almost level with the hanging man. The head was twisted to one side, and the body was turning slowly in a circle. She knew when she saw the back of the head, but she could not move, or cry out. She was held there, helplessly—staring helplessly—until the body turned so that it faced her. The face was distorted; it was hard to recognize the frightened, gray face of Harry Perkins.

The body hung quietly and from the twist of the head Pam thought the neck was broken. The rope, or whatever it was, was taut from the neck upward, and Pam followed it with her eyes. It was knotted to one of the balusters at the head of the stairs. The body hung down into the stair well.

The rope was dark and irregular. Then Pam, after a moment, knew what it was. It was dark because it was green and the light was dim; it was irregular because it was braided. Nemo's lost leash had been found.

And then the light on the landing above her, and the lights on the landings below, went out together. And Pam, for the second time, threw herself back against the wall, with hands raised, and waited. And now she heard movement above her.

She wanted to run, but she was afraid to run. The darkness was too complete; the stairs pitched too sharply downward. But whoever was above her would have to be cautious too, at least until his—or her?—eyes were adjusted to the dim light which came through the skylight above. Pam began to slip down the stairs, her back to the wall and her hands against it, steadying her.

As she moved, waiting for her own eyes to adjust to the darkness which was already not quite so complete, she tried to get her feet out of the slippers. On the carpeted stairs she could run, barefoot, and not fall. She could make herself small and run. One slipper came off. The other caught, half on and half off.

Balanced precariously, one hand groping for support on the smoothness of the wall, she reached for the slipper. She lost balance as she tugged, swayed perilously for a moment, and got the slipper off. There was reassurance as her feet felt the carpet. But now whoever was above was visible as a darker shadow—now there were two dark shadows at the same height. But only one of them was swaying in the air. That was the body of Harry Perkins—hanging in the darkness, turning slowly, making a shadow against the pale light from above. The other shadow was moving down toward her. It moved with a horrible, slow sureness.

The other shadow, as she looked up at it, seemed enormous. And by now whoever made the shadow could see her—not so distinctly as she could see, perhaps, because the light was behind whoever was creeping down the stairs toward her. But clearly enough, perhaps, to risk a shot. Pam North made herself small against the wall, and went down from step to step. The shadow followed. The shadow, too, was afraid to run down the steep stairs.

And perhaps there lay safety, if the shadow did not have a gun, or could not risk the alarm of a shot. Now—if she ran!

She was only a few steps from the bottom of the flight when she started, crouching as well as she could but not looking back. She ran down stairs and stumbled when the stairs suddenly ended before they should. She stumbled and fell to her hands and knees, and scrambled on until she could regain her feet. The shadow was running too, but there was no shot.

She could almost see where she was going, now, as she ran on along the hall to the next flight, her left hand touching the rail for guidance. She was halfway down the flight when she heard running steps in the hall she had just left. She went headlong down, half falling, clutching at the carpet with her bare feet, clinging with the hand that slid down the rail. But the shadow was gaining.

She would not have time to open the door of her own room, she realized—the murderer who had hanged Harry at the end of the dog's green leash would catch her as she tugged at the door or, if she got the door open and got inside, would force in after her before she could grope for and use the key. So she ran on past her door, and along the third floor hall and then, blindly, along the hall of the second floor. She might have stopped there, and hidden somehow in the library, but she could not think. She could only run down flights of stairs which seemed to have no end.

But they did end in the entrance foyer, and here there was more pale light coming in through the panes in the heavy doors. She started for the doors, hesitated and turned back. Perhaps the murderer wanted her outside the house—out in the whirling snow, where he could hit her down and leave her in the snow and the cold for them to finish—to finish and conceal! She ran, gasping for breath, into the drawing room. There was a little light there, too; furniture loomed around her.

Pam was not thinking, now. She was thinking only that she had to get behind something, or under something, and that was not thought. That was instinct—the instinct in peril to be hidden by something, and protected by something; to put some barrier up. Pam ran across the room; a low table caught one of her legs and sent sharp pain through it and she fell. And then she crawled on, on hands and knees, until she was behind the larger sofa. And there she crouched, trying to quiet her gasping breath.

And then sanity came back, and she thought she had done precisely what the pursuer would have chosen to have her do. She had trapped herself, limited her freedom. When he found her there she could not run, but only look up at death and shudder away from it and try to scream. Whereas, she could have screamed as she ran—ran past occupied bedrooms in which her screams would have been heard. But she had forgotten to scream—or been afraid to scream, or had too little breath to scream. It was afterward you screamed, or when you had only a scream left, not while you were running.

Pam crouched and waited and stared at the door leading from the hall, where the shadow would appear. But the shadow did not appear; the door remained a gray blankness against the darker walls. Pam cowered, terrified, and nothing happened. She listened, and she did not hear anything but her own drawn breaths. Miraculously, she was no longer pursued.

But perhaps the pursuer was wily; perhaps he was waiting for her to move—waiting just outside the door. Pam waited—and waited. And nothing happened. She began to notice that she was cramped and cold, and nothing happened. There was not even any sound.

And then the idea came to her that she might creep, if she were careful, back across the drawing room and into the foyer, and across it to the coat closet by the stairs and to the telephone there. If she could get into the closet and close the door without being detected, she could use the telephone and get help. She could get Weigand and Mullins, and they would take care of her—they might even catch the person who had hanged Harry Perkins before he got back into his bedroom, if he had come out of a bedroom, and pretended sleep and innocence.

Pam waited a little longer—five minutes, ten minutes, there was no way of knowing. She waited, crouched behind the sofa, and listened and heard nothing. And finally, with infinite slowness and care, on hands and knees, she began to creep across the room toward the door. Halfway across she stopped, because she thought she heard someone in the hall, and waited. But it was only the wind, she decided, tugging at the house, battering against the closed doors which shut it out. She crept on.

Not until she reached the door did she stand, and then she clung to the side of the door to steady herself against the darkness. At first she thought the foyer was empty and then something moved. A man moved away from the door of the coat closet—moved silently and carefully, and stood at the foot of the stairs, apparently looking up. Pam shuddered back and she did not know that she gasped, or made any other sound.

But she must have made some sound, because the figure moved; moved slowly, it seemed stealthily, as if the man did not want his movement detected—as if he were tensing his muscles to leap toward her. And then Pam knew that she had fatally miscalculated; that the man had been waiting in the foyer, knowing that if he waited long enough she would come creeping toward him. As she had.

And now, she thought, I can't turn my back to run! Now he's got me, and if I turn—

And then she remembered the heavy vase on the table near the door. If she leaped first, with the vase grasped by its narrow neck; if the surprise was hers, and the weapon, these might be enough. It was a chance—

Pam had the vase in her right hand and was swinging it up as she half jumped, half ran, toward the figure at the foot of the stairs. Water was draining out of it as she lifted the vase, and cascading into her face; she could feel it cold through her sweater and down her body. And she was, ridiculously, showered with yellow daffodils as she leaped toward the threatening figure, which was turning, now.

If the water and the flowers had not so ridiculously blinded her, Pam might have realized sooner. Even as it was she realized in time to let out a small, horrified, “Oh!” as the vase began its descent on the unprotected head in front of her. But she did not realize in time to deflect, or greatly retard, the blow.

The bulbous end of the vase descended with a crack upon the head of Gerald North, home at last from Texas to the arms of his loving wife. It hit and broke, and Jerry North went down under it, shards dropping from his head and water showering around him. And Pam, at almost precisely the same moment, went down beside him.

Jerry was not unconscious; he did not seem even to be much hurt. But he was remarkably surprised. He sat with his eyes wide open and stared at Pam, and he raised one hand in a familiar gesture before he spoke. The hand lingered in his wet hair as he regarded Pam, kneeling frantic-eyed beside him.

“For God's sake, Pam,” Jerry said. “For God's sake.”

“Darling!” Pam said. “Darling! Oh Jerry—it's you! And I
hit
you!”

“You certainly did,” Jerry said. He did not sound so helplessly astonished, now. “You certainly hit me, all right. And what the hell—?”

“Jerry!” Pam said, and because it sounded so fine she said it again. “Jerry! You've come!”

“Well—” Jerry North said, doubtfully. He looked at her, and in spite of everything he looked as if he were about to smile. “I seem to have picked the hell of a time for it,” he remarked. “What was the idea, Pam?”

“Oh,” Pam said. “I thought you were trying to kill me. But you're not the one.”

“No,” Jerry said, with finality. “I'm certainly not.”

“He's killed Harry Perkins, now,” Pam said, and now that she knew Jerry was not much hurt, there was a new terror in her voice—a remembered terror. “Harry's hanging up there, Jerry. At the top of the stairs. By Nemo's leash.”

Jerry put a wet arm around his wet, and convulsively shaking, wife. He pulled her toward him, and as he held her, stared up the stairs into the darkness. He held her more closely, reassuringly. Then, quietly, he pulled himself and her to their feet. His voice was very low, and he kept his arm tight around her.

“Hold it, baby,” he said. “Hold it. Where's the phone?”

Pam pointed toward the door of the coat closet. They went toward it, and as they went both of them kept looking sidewise up the stairs.

10

W
EDNESDAY

11:30
P.M. TO
T
HURSDAY
, 1:15
A.M.

There was no light beating in Ross Brack's eyes and nobody stood over him with a length of hose. He was comfortable enough in Weigand's small, shabby office, sitting on the wrong side of Weigand's scarred desk. The light beat down on the detective and on Brack more or less impartially; it glared down, also, on Mullins, who sat like a man with nothing to do, and on the police stenographer, who kept busy. Brack did not look as tired as Weigand, and was smoking a cigarette. But it would have been easier for Weigand to leave the office than for Brack to leave.

“You worked with Anthony,” Weigand said, not in the form of a question. Brack said “no.”

“Or he worked with you,” Weigand amended. “Say he was smalltime.”

“No,” Brack said. “I knew the punk. He didn't work with me.” He paused and regarded Weigand and smiled. “Though I wouldn't know what you mean by work,” he added.

Weigand told him he could skip it.

“I've nothing on you,” he said. “Not at the moment. Later, I hope. I want to know about Anthony.”

“Nor any other time,” Brack told him. “Anthony was a punk.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “What kind of a punk, Brack?”

“Just a punk,” Brack said. “He wasn't working for me. On his own. Punk stuff.”

“Such as?” Weigand said. Brack stared at him. “He's dead,” Weigand pointed out. “It won't be a squeal.”

Brack continued to stare. Finally he said, “The hell with it.

“Shake-down,” Brack said. “Small time stuff. Dames. Old dames, mostly. Before he ran into the Buddie dame.”

“And after?” Weigand said. Brack shook his head. Weigand waited for him.

“Maybe,” Brack said. “How the hell should I know?”

“You get around,” Weigand told him. “You're not a punk.”

Brack said “Thanks.”

“You know something about Anthony,” Weigand insisted. “The boys might find out.”