Killing the Goose (11 page)

“A sticker,” Mullins said. “Sort of a Boy Scout knife. Like a kid might have had.”

“His hand was in his pocket, anyway,” the tall, thin girl insisted. “I thought it was a knife—afterward. He was almost running because he had just killed her and—”

It was difficult to keep her even remotely objective. Martinelli had, it appeared, gone very rapidly through a revolving door, setting it swirling. Cleo had been indignant and turned to say something to him and recognized him.

“He looked terrible,” she said. “Like he was crazy. So I didn't say anything. He turned and ran up the street.”

“Ran?” Pam repeated.

“It was almost running,” the girl said. “Because he was afraid—because of what he'd done. And the knife in his pocket, all bloody.”

“Listen,” Mullins said. “He didn't have the knife. Whoever did it left the knife.”

“I don't believe it,” the girl said. “You're trying to pretend he didn't do it. You're crooked and he's paid you something or—”

“Jeeze,” Mullins said. “Jeeze, miss.” He looked at her as if he were measuring her for something. “You've got some mighty funny ideas, miss,” he said, with unexpected mildness.

“You oughtn't to say things like that, Miss Harper,” Pam North told her. “They're confusing. You don't understand about things like that. People don't pay for murders.” She paused to consider. “Not that way, anyhow,” she said. “Like buying a license. Not from Sergeant Mullins.”

“You don't know,” the girl said, looking at Pam. “How
could
you know?”

This, Pam thought, is one of the strangest conversations. One of the very strangest.

“Listen,” she said. “Can't you just pretend you
don't
know the boy killed her? And just tell us what happened?”

“He ran,” the girl said. “With his face all twisted and with the knife in his pocket.”

Of course, Pam thought, she could be just a little queer, perhaps only because of strain. Or she could be—what was the word?—psychotic. Or, of course, she could be, for some purpose which was not clear, pretending to be these things. She was difficult.

“And to think,” Pam said to herself, “that I thought she was just a flat-chested girl, who didn't mean anything! Just something facts would come out of if you pressed a button.”

Then Pam looked a little alarmed at the others, thinking that again she might have thought out loud. But apparently this time she hadn't.

“Suppose,” Mullins said, “I just ask some questions. And you just answer them. O.K.?”

“What do you want to know?” the girl said. “I told you about seeing him.”

What he wanted to know Mullins got slowly. She had stared after Franklin Martinelli for a moment while he ran—or perhaps merely walked rapidly—up the street. Then she had gone on into the restaurant. She had gone up to the counter. She had got her lunch.

“What?” Pam said.

“I got my lunch,” the girl said.

Pam was impatient.

“I know,” she said. “What for lunch?”

“Oh,” the girl said. “Stew. Irish stew.”

It was incongruous. Pam had expected—

“Oh,” she said. “Not just a sandwich? Cream cheese and jelly or something?”

“Stew,” the girl said. “I was hungry. I didn't know then that—”

“Of course not,” Pam said. “I didn't mean that. And then what?”

“Then I ate it,” the girl said.

Pam shook her head.

“For dessert,” she said. “What did you have for dessert?” She paused. “A baked apple?” she said. She said it casually.

“No,” the girl said. “Why? What made you think a baked apple?”

“I didn't,” Pam said. “I was just—suggesting. As if I'd been in and you came in from outside and I said ‘is it clearing up?' or something like that. Meaning, what is it doing?”

“Oh,” the girl said. “I had a fruit salad. I looked at the baked apples, but I don't really—”

“What!” Pam said. She said it very suddenly.

“—like baked apples particularly,” Cleo Harper said. “There are always those little hard slivers around the core.”

“There shouldn't be,” Pam told her. “That's just careless preparation. You ought to—”

She broke off. It was hard enough to keep Cleo Harper on the subject, without helping her this way.

“Listen,” Pam said. “Forget about that. You saw the baked apples?”

The girl nodded.

“The man just put them down,” she said. “A tray full of them. That's why I looked. Usually I don't even look at them, but these just came in.”

“A full tray?” Pam insisted. “I mean—a completely full tray? Not even one gone?”

“Listen,” the girl said. “I think you're nuts, whoever you are. What difference does it make?”

“Well,” Pam said. “It makes all—”

Again she broke off, because Mullins suddenly shook his head at her.

“It doesn't make any,” she said. “I don't know why I asked. It doesn't mean anything.”

Cleo Harper looked at Pam North with great and evident doubt. Then she shook her head.

“So I looked at the apples,” she said. “And I got a fruit salad and I went over and sat with a girl I knew and ate lunch. And then—when I was leaving—somebody screamed and—and—”

“You went over?” Pam asked. Her voice was gentle. Whatever the girl was, you had to be gentle.

Cleo Harper nodded without speaking. She drew in her breath in a quick, shivering gasp.

“Don't remember it,” Pam said. “It doesn't do any good.”

It was good advice, and obviously futile.

Mullins waited a moment and then he took over. He got a guess that Cleo Harper had taken about twenty minutes to eat her lunch, talking with the other girl as she ate. So it was perhaps twenty-five minutes after she had come in, and seen the Martinelli boy going out, that the scream had come. Pamela North broke in, her question to Mullins.

“Couldn't you have told?” she asked. “From the outside booth, I mean. Somebody looking in? Doesn't the mere fact that it was almost half an hour mean that the boy couldn't have done it because somebody would have found her in that time?”

Mullins shook his head. It was not light in the booth—not glaringly light. The Greystone Coffee Shop went in for subdued lighting. It had not been unduly crowded; a person sitting alone in a booth had a reasonable chance of remaining alone. A person passing and looking in casually, and not actually sitting down opposite, might have assumed that she was merely sitting there. The woman who discovered her had done so because, with the restaurant filling up, she
had
started to sit down opposite the huddled girl. Then she had screamed.

“But,” Mullins said, looking at Mrs. North questioningly, “that doesn't matter now because—don't you get it, Mrs. North?”

“Of course,” Mrs. North said. “Who thought of it? Who brought it out, Sergeant? I just wondered whether we needed it.”

The girl looked at Mullins and then at Mrs. North.

“You talk and talk,” she said. “It doesn't make sense. The Martinelli boy killed her and you just sit here and talk and talk. And don't make sense.”

“You're sure the tray was
full
of apples?” Pam insisted. “You have to remember.”

“But I do remember,” the girl said. “They just brought it in—a man just brought it in. Why shouldn't it be full?”

“Because if it was,” Pam said, “the Martinelli boy couldn't have. Because—”

Mullins stood up.

“I wouldn't say any more, Mrs. North,” he said. “We won't bother Miss Harper with all that. O.K.?”

“I don't—” Pam began. But Mullins shook his head at her. She still didn't see why not, and thought of saying so, but decided it wasn't important. Then she went out with Mullins, leaving the thin girl with a damp handkerchief clutched in one hand in the room. Cleo Harper looked after them, apparently not understanding.

Outside, Mullins indicated, with a kind of bumbling tact, that Mrs. North sometimes talked too much.

“She'd deny it in a minute to get at the kid,” he said. “If she knew what to deny—and maybe, from what you said, she does now. But there's no reason giving her a blueprint, Mrs. North.”

“All right,” Mrs. North said. “But it is a blueprint, isn't it? As plain as, or plainer. Plainer, I should think. In black and white, not blue.”

“I—” Mullins began. He paused.

“You know,” he said, in quiet wonderment, “sometimes I understand you, Mrs. North.” Mullins considered himself with a kind of awe. “Honest to God,” he said. “Sometimes it ain't screwy at all, really.”

They were, Mrs. North told him, almost sternly, talking about blueprints. Not about her.

“And baked apples,” she said. “And an alibi.” She paused. “And you know,” she said, “it really
is
an alibi. Not something people just
call
an alibi. He really was somewhere else when it happened. He must have been—punching the time clock, maybe. Where he worked. Or perhaps actually working.”

Mullins was not really happy about it. But he said “yeah” and added that he guessed it was.

“Since it must have been
after
the Harper girl came in,” Pam pointed out. “Because there weren't any apples earlier, and a full tray came in when Cleo did and Frances
had
eaten one. The poor kid!” Pam thought a moment. “It's kind of sadder that way,” she said. “Nothing but a baked apple at the last, with all the other things—all the good things—in the world. Things with fine, sharp tastes and good smells and all the strange things she's never—And in the end just a baked apple.”

She was not in the least facetious. Mullins didn't think she was. He thought it over and said, “yeah,” again.

“Only,” he said, “maybe she liked them better than anything else.”

Pam shook her head.

“That wouldn't be possible,” she said. “Baked apples aren't like that, even if you like them. They're just—all fight. At best that's all they are. Not like olives or—or—something with a new sauce. Or beefsteak outdoors over charcoal. Or—”

“Or cornbeef,” Mullins said, suddenly. “The kind that crumbles, sort of. I guess you're right, Mrs. North.”

They looked at each other, a little hungrily. Sergeant Mullins was the first to break it.

“Of course,” he said, but without conviction. “There could have been
another
tray of apples. Making three in all. And she could have had one from that. While Martinelli was still there.”

“I don't believe it,” Pam said. “Neither do you, Sergeant. Not really. That would be too many baked apples. Altogether.”

There was, Mullins told her, a way to check up on that. They were walking through the snow, away from the safe, uninteresting neighborhood picked by the founders of Breckley House as appropriate to safe and uninteresting lives. They were looking, without optimism, for a taxicab.

“Remember how many there used to be?” Pam said, waving at one which went on disdainfully, with successful passengers gloating behind windows. Mullins agreed without emphasis, giving matter-of-fact acknowledgment to departed luxuries. He was looking for something else; he found it in the lights of a cigar store, doubly dimmed out by the falling snow. He led Mrs. North to it. It had a soda fountain, too, and Mrs. North sat promptly.

“Oh yes,” she said, “and really good vichyssoise. But meanwhile, I'm going to have coffee. Aren't you, Mr. Mullins?”

Mullins said he was, in a minute. He pulled out a notebook and went through its pages, said “yeah” abstractedly and found a telephone booth. He was gone a good while, and Mrs. North drank coffee. Then he came back and sat beside her.

“Two was all,” he said. “I got the manager and he got somebody else—the baked apple department, I guess. There was only two trays of apples, so I guess you're right.”

Pam nodded and said she thought so. Because otherwise, what was the sense of it?

“And sometimes I don't,” Mullins said. “There's sometimes, Mrs. North, that you stop me.” He paused. “Cold,” he said. “How's about some coffee, bud?”

Bud produced coffee. Mullins drank. Mrs. North seemed impatient.

“Well,” she said. “We'll have to go tell him. The poor kid.”

“In the morning,” Mullins said. “After we see the loot.”

“Now,” Mrs. North insisted. “We don't have to get him out, or anything. But we have to talk to him right away, now that we know he didn't do it.”

“Why?” said Mullins, gulping.

“Because,” Pam said, “he knew the girl. So maybe he knows why somebody would want to kill her.” She paused.

“And if he does,” she added, simply, “I think we ought to ask him. Don't you?”

Sergeant Mullins looked at her, started to say something, withdrew it and shook his head.

“Sometimes—” he said, indefinitely. He abandoned it. “O.K., Mrs. North,” he said. “He's in the precinct. We'll talk to him like you say.”

VII.
Tuesday, 11:31 P.M. to Wednesday, 1:15 A.M.

Jerry North said, in the tone of one whose worst expectations are more than fulfilled, “What? What, Pam?”

“The police station,” Pam told him, patiently. “Only not to stay.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “that's good. That's fine. Why, Pam?”

“Because it was just as we thought,” Pam told him, using a generous plural to mollify. “He couldn't have done it on account of the apple. Only it's too complicated to go into on the telephone, Jerry. And now we're going over to tell him he didn't do it.”

“Doesn't he know?” Jerry said. “I mean—do you have to tell him?” He paused, apparently listening to himself. “Anybody knows if he
didn't
commit a murder,” Jerry went on, clarifying. “It isn't as if everything had gone black, Pam.”