Killing the Goose (10 page)

“You've been reading the wrong books,” Bill told him. “I call it lawyer. You're still a damn fool, Elliot.”

“Maybe,” the man said. “But I've got things to do. I've got to see a person—about a murder. I've got to do that first.”

His voice had changed, suddenly. He wasn't being amusing now. He sounded as if he meant to see a man about a murder.

“In a mirror?” Weigand asked. “Where are you?”

“Hell, no,” the voice said. “I didn't kill anybody. Didn't his nibs tell you? And I'm near enough. And not too near.”

He had to be, Weigand decided. Near enough to see who went into the apartment or—or to see a car with tell-tale red headlights. Probably that was it. And so he had gone somewhere near and telephoned. Why? Just to be cute?

“Listen,” the voice said. “Are you still there?”

The man—call him Elliot—wasn't being playful now.

“I'll tell you,” he said. “I know the person you want—maybe. I'm going to find out. If it works out the way I think it will, I can clean it up for you.”

“If you know anything, spill it,” Weigand said. “Don't mess around with it. You—”

But there was no use going on. A dead telephone wire would not be interested. Mr. Elliot, if it had been Mr. Elliot, had hung up and gone away. Cursing softly, Weigand dialed headquarters and said the right things to the right people. Elliot, if he had been in the neighborhood, had better move fast. But hell—he would move fast. You didn't catch men that way. Not in New York, anyway. Not with what the newspapers liked to call “cordons” “thrown” around areas. A cordon was merely a good many men, peering through a dimout made dimmer by falling snow. It wasn't a wire fence. The chances were prohibitive that Mr. Elliot would, for the time being, continue on whatever path he had laid out for himself.

There were too many people in this, Weigand decided; too many people behaving irrationally; too many who seemed determined to bang head on into hostile stone walls. Mrs. Pennock, who was probably up to blackmail, which was dangerous. Mr. Elliot who, if he were not himself a murderer—and somehow Bill doubted at the moment that he was—was looking for trouble if he decided to turn detective. And Elliot wouldn't, Weigand thought, know what to do about trouble if he found it.

“I'd rather trust Pam,” he thought, irrationally. She had a knack of getting out; a knack so far just equal to her knack for getting in.

Bill looked around the apartment again. He opened drawers and saw papers in them—papers that somebody would have to go over, as time went on. But not necessarily tonight. There was a part of a manuscript in one of the drawers and Weigand skimmed over a few pages. It appeared to be a novel. It gave Weigand an idea. He might as well use Elliot's telephone, and cost Elliot a call. He dialed the North's number and, after a moment, Jerry said “hello.”

“Bill,” Weigand said. “Do you know a writer named John Elliot? Did he ever send your firm a manuscript or anything?”

There was a brief pause.

“No,” Jerry said. “It doesn't mean anything to me, off hand. Of course—”

“Of course,” Weigand agreed. “The world's full of writers. You're only one publisher. But you never heard of him?”

“No,” Jerry said. “I didn't. And listen—Pam's out somewhere. About that damned apple, I guess.”

“And Dorian?” Weigand asked. His voice was quick.

“She's here,” Jerry told him. “
She's
all right. But where's
my
wife?”

“Is Mullins with her?” Weigand asked. Jerry said he guessed so. That had been the plan, at any rate. He and Dorian had been told that four was a crowd and had gone to the Norths' to wait. They were still waiting. Jerry was acid.

“Damn your corpses,” he said. “I am now going back and make another attack on Dorian's virtue.”

He hung up. Bill hung up, grinning. He didn't think Pam North was in any danger. Yet, anyhow.

VI.
Tuesday, 10:45 P.M. to 11:30 P.M.

Cleo Harper's conversation was oddly eager; it was as if she had been hoarding words and had now, inexplicably, turned spendthrift. Pam North had been sorry for her from the moment she came down, her pale eyes reddened as if she had been crying, a moist handkerchief in her working fingers. She was too tall and too thin, her pale hair was too pale. She stood a little stooped because she was too tall and that embarrassed her. The room she came into was harsh and impersonal. It was a room in which nobody had ever lingered; Cleo Harper was a girl with whom nobody had ever lingered. They belonged together, Pam thought—a girl who was going nowhere and a room to which nobody ever willingly went; a room in which, probably, young men had waited uneasily for girls to come down to them from the upstairs rooms of Breckley House, and from which young men and their girls had fled a little anxiously, as from something inimical.

For the first time, Pam thought, watching Cleo Harper sitting uncomfortably on an uncomfortable chair, worrying a damp handkerchief—for the first time I understand what places like this are for; sterilized places like this, in which girls voluntarily live in dormitories, hygienically. They are for girls like Cleo Harper, with whom nobody will ever really want to live. They are for tall girls with flat chests and inevitably damp handkerchiefs, and always with slight colds in the head.

Cleo Harper had a slight cold in the head and as she talked she sniffled. It was also evident after a moment that she had been crying and was ready to cry again. She cried again, unbecomingly, when Mullins identified himself, and introduced Mrs. North without identification, and said that he wanted to go over again the circumstances of her meeting Frank Martinelli that afternoon. The tall, pale girl bent her head and gulped. You could, Pam found, be very sorry for her, without liking her.

“Oh,” Cleo Harper said, “it was dreadful—dreadful. To do a thing like that—to Fran. To Fran of all people. To dear Fran.”

Her words are inadequate, too, Pam North thought. She means more than that.

“She was my best friend,” Cleo said and dabbed at her nose. “Ever since I went to the company she was my best friend. She understood.”

Cleo Harper did not say what Frances McCalley had understood—what there had been to understand. It was as if she had merely used the word which lay nearest.

“And she's dead,” Cleo said. “I just can't believe it. I just can't. What a horrible thing to do.”

“It was horrible,” Pam North said. “I know how you must feel.”

But I don't, Pam thought. I can never know how she feels. It's as if she were feeling in a different language.

“About this boy,” Mullins said. “This Martinelli.”

But it was not easy to guide Cleo Harper. She was insistent that they know about Frances McCalley, who had been her dearest friend, with whom she had “always been,” with whom she had gone to movies and walked home from work, with whom once she had gone to a camp on summer vacation, with whom—in summer—she had ridden back and forth on the Staten Island ferry. You could see the two of them, as she talked; perhaps, Pam thought, you could see more than she meant them to see, or more than she knew.

Because there was nothing to indicate that Frances McCalley had been a girl whom Cleo Harper would have contented. You could only guess at Frances now, and guess with little knowledge. But Martinelli, murderer or not, was a dark; angry youth and, murderer or not, he appeared to have had a dark, angry attachment to Frances McCalley. And a girl who was, contentedly, Cleo Harper's best friend would hardly, you could suspect, engender such an attachment. People who are killed violently, unless they are killed by accident, usually have in some fashion been violently alive. Or so Pam North, listening to words which got them nowhere, thought as she listened. No one would, for example, kill Cleo Harper.

“Unless,” Pam said to herself, “they were married to her. But nobody ever would be.”

Pam heard herself think this and was suddenly shocked. I'm cruel, she thought; I'm contemptuous because she isn't attractive, I'm cruel because Jerry loves me and nobody will ever love her—no man and, not really, any woman. She's just trying to make herself believe that Fran was her dearest friend; that she was dear to Fran. She is making it up for herself so that she can have it as a memory and—

“Until she met that horrible boy,” Cleo said. “That horrible, black, dirty boy. She must have been crazy—it wasn't like her. She was never that way.”

There was an odd emphasis on the word “that.” Cleo Harper spoke as if there were a kind of unspeakable loathesomeness about being “that way.” But as far as appeared, she meant merely that Frances had been normally responsive—had been at any rate interested—in a young man.

“He did something to her,” Cleo said. And now there was a new note in her thin voice. Before she had been sorry for herself, and writing ineffectual drama about her own not quite believable bereavement. But there was a new note now, not immediately decipherable. If Cleo had seemed strong enough to hate, you might have thought it hate. It caught Pam North's attention.

“It ought to be him,” the girl said. “Him lying there, all cut and with blood all over him. Somebody ought to have killed him and then none of it would have happened.”

Cleo Harper gulped and dabbed at her eyes. Then she looked up and it occurred to Pam that perhaps was not altogether ineffectual. There was something odd about her eyes.

“The dirty little beast,” the girl said. “The dirty—
thing!
”

There was no doubt about the note in her voice now. It was venom. There was room in the thin body and the thin mind of Cleo Harper for one large emotion—hatred. It was surprising.

“Now, miss,” Mullins said. “Now, miss. You don't want to work yourself up. O.K.?”

“You ought to kill him for it,” Cleo Harper said. “You ought—you've got a right. He killed her—he changed her and then he killed her. Somebody ought to kill him. He oughtn't to be alive.”

It was abashing. That was the only word for it. It was so naked; it was so much more than people said to other people. It spread emotions out too openly, let you see too deep. I don't want to know that much about her, Pam thought. It is more than anybody ought to know about anybody else. It's—ugly.

And it lay in the tone, in the inflection.

“Now, miss,” Mullins said. “You oughtn't to talk that way. It ain't—”

He broke off, looking puzzled. Pam had a disturbing notion that Mullins had been about to say it wasn't ladylike. Or perhaps he had really seen, and almost said, that it was not human.

Mullins looked at Mrs. North, with a kind of anxiety. It was, his look told her, getting beyond him.

It was beyond Pam too, she thought. Or she hoped it was—or she hoped she was wrong. She hoped that Cleo Harper hated Frank Martinelli because she believed he had killed her friend; that she felt a hatred which, although extreme, would still be comprehensible. Pam hoped that all this venom, which was not like anything she had seen before or wanted to see, was directed against a murderer, and not merely against a man—because he was a man and so had “changed” the feelings of a girl.

I don't care what people do, Pam thought. It isn't that. Or how they feel, because any way of feeling can be natural and all right. Or I suppose it can—for some. But this would be ugly.

Pam North groped for a word more accurate. When she found it she hesitated to use it even in her own mind because it was too big a word for people. For ordinary people, anyway. But the word was “evil.” Looking at Cleo Harper, hearing her hitter words continue, Pam thought that there was something evil, and unexpected, in the room. Or that there might be. It was not clear. Possibly, Pam thought, she was now herself a writer of melodrama, inventing motives, imagining mysteries in simple things. Probably Cleo Harper was merely an overwrought, not very effectual, person who had lost a friend and lacked self-control.

It was easier to think that. More comfortable. Thinking that made the world more comprehensible and, in a way, more tolerable. That, Pam decided, was why people had quit believing in evil. It was too uncomfortable a belief. It was too unseemly. Even now, with something enormous that was surely evil loose in the world, and not yet bound, it was hard to believe in evil on a smaller, more human scale. It was easier and less alarming to think that you were merely making things up.

People did not believe in big emotions, except, of course, their own emotions, which they always considered big. They—

“Philosophy,” Pam said to herself, alarmed, deciding to stop it at once.

“Huh?” Mullins said. Cleo Harper merely stopped talking for a moment and looked at Pam through reddened eyes. Pam realized she had done it again.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I must have been thinking out loud. I do, you know. Even when I think I'm not. Like now.”

“Why philosophy?” Mullins said. “I don't get it.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Mullins,” Cleo Harper said. “I'm trying to tell you—and she—”

“I'm really sorry,” Pam said. “It was just a thought. I was really listening. You were going to tell us about seeing the Martinelli boy at the cafeteria.”

Cleo Harper hadn't been, precisely. She had been telling them what ought to be done with Franklin Martinelli. But she was oddly obedient. She took up a new line of thought without protest and now Pam did listen.

“He was running,” she said. “His face was all twisted up. And—I just remembered. He had one hand in his pocket, like he was holding something. The knife!”

Mullins shook his head, chiefly in answer to the question in Mrs. North's eyes. It couldn't have been the knife, he said. They had found the knife, on the floor where it had been dropped, apparently, as soon as its work was done. It was a clasp knife with one long blade and a rough handle which was smeared, but not usefully imprinted, by the hand which grasped it.