Killing the Goose (19 page)

At the end, Max Silverstone, who had a deal to close and wanted to close it, noticed that Mrs. Pennock didn't seem to be talking any more, but was merely standing in the booth abstractedly and had put the receiver down on the little ledge. She was, in short, occupying a telephone booth and not using the telephone, and Mr. Silverstone had a deal to close—right then. Right then if ever. He waited for a minute or so even after he had noticed this, being a gentleman, and when he decided nobody could be expected to wait longer he had, at first, merely rapped on the glass with a coin—with a nickel, to be exact. She had paid no attention.

Then, thoroughly exasperated, Mr. Silverstone had pushed in on the door. It pressed against Mrs. Pennock, who did not move for a moment and then gave suddenly. Then Mrs. Pennock fell out of the booth onto Mr. Silverstone. She covered Mr. Silverstone's good-looking gray suit with blood. She had been standing in blood on the floor of the booth and when the door was open it ran out, smearing Mr. Silverstone's brown shoes. And more blood ran out of Mrs. Pennock.

Mr. Silverstone let out a strangled sort of sound and tried to push Mrs. Pennock back into the booth, but she wouldn't go. Mr. Silverstone held Mrs. Pennock away with one hand and brushed at the blood on his suit with the other and then, just as Detective Hanson caught Mrs. Pennock's body, Mr. Silverstone fainted. He fell in the blood which had flowed out onto the floor.

The ambulance surgeon, when he arrived, examined Mr. Silverstone, who was by then sitting in a chair with sweat standing out on his white forehead, and said he would be all right. Mr. Silverstone had looked down at the blood on his gray suit and shuddered, and kept on shuddering.

The ambulance surgeon had said, in effect, that Mrs. Pennock was all right where she was, which was on the floor just outside the booth. Hanson had lowered her there after Mr. Silverstone had been removed. Mrs. Pennock was as all right on the floor as she would be anywhere, until the Medical Examiner sent somebody. She had been dead, when the ambulance surgeon looked at her, for about half an hour. She had been stabbed through the left side of the back, and through the heart; she had lost consciousness instantly and the time she had lived after that was a matter of purely medical interest. For all other purposes she had been dead when the knife was pulled out and the blood followed it.

The knife was on the floor of the booth. It was long and slim and sharp and apparently had been much used. It was the sort of knife, ground down by repeated sharpenings, that expert carvers use in carving meat; the kind that professional carvers use in view of passers-by as they work on thick slabs of meat, reducing them to thin sandwiches.

Pure reflex, they supposed, had led to its being drawn out and not left in the ugly wound it had made. Thought had followed reflex and the knife had been dropped. It had caught momentarily in Mrs. Pennock's clothing, apparently, and so had not made much sound when it struck the floor. And by that time the door of the booth had obviously been closed again.

Because, Bill Weigand told Sergeant Mullins, who agreed, there was only one way it could have been done. It was hard to think of its being done that way, but it was impossible to think of its being done any other way. Somebody in the group around the booth, hiding the knife with his body, had opened the folding door with his left hand and, concealing the knife now by holding it along his arm—it had to have been that way, Bill thought—appeared to tap Mrs. Pennock on the shoulder. As if he were a friend, and wanted to remind her of something, probably. And when he appeared to tap her on the shoulder, he had actually driven the very sharp knife into her back.

“He” could have been of either sex. The blow took little pressure, unless the knife met a bone, and it had not. Actually, it was, if anything, easier to think of the murderer as a woman, who could have concealed the knife in her handbag, or by holding it against her handbag, and who might more naturally have reached in to call the attention of another woman to something by touching her on the shoulder. Unless somebody was watching carefully, and if the murderer were assured and confident and did not attract attention by hesitancy, it might have been done that way.

“Hell,” Mullins said. “It was done that way, wasn't it? Sure, it could have been.”

Mullins repeated this remark late in the afternoon, at the bar in Charles's, and both the Norths and Dorian Weigand agreed that there could be no quarrel with his logic. Bill Weigand, although his face was set—Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley had not been cordial when he heard the news—smiled faintly. He admitted that Mullins had something.

But the smile faded faintly. He drank his martini.

“Of course,” he said, “I shouldn't have used Hanson. The man must be half-witted. But I had to use somebody and—well, I didn't actually figure anything would happen to Mrs. Pennock. Even now, I can't see why anything should have. Which is about what Hanson says, incidentally. He keeps talking about her not having the jewels.”

“You couldn't know,” Dorian said. “How could you know, Bill? And you have to turn some of it over to other men. You can't be everywhere.”

The trouble seemed to be, Bill said with some bitterness, that apparently he couldn't be anywhere. Not anywhere that did any good.

“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I haven't the damnedest idea what's going on. That's what's the matter, really. I'm just groping around in a fog. And somebody's going around in the fog, seeing everything he wants to see, and killing people. And that's what I'm supposed to stop.”

He paused and looked at them.

“Good God,” he said. “That's my only excuse. If I can't stop this sort of thing, I haven't any excuse at all.”

“Bill, dear,” Dorian said. “You'll stop it. Of course you will.”

Bill Weigand smiled, but his smile was unhappy.

“Sure,” he said. “I'll stop it, eventually. Or it will just stop—when this guy in the fog gets through. When he has everything all tidied up. Eventually everybody'll be dead but him, and then I can arrest him. Which is a hell of a way to be a policeman.”

“Jerry had another examination,” Pam said, after a moment during which nobody answered. “He still can't see anything. Not anything they want him to see. You'd think for what he can do it wouldn't matter, wouldn't you?”

“How many is that, Jerry?” Dorian said.

Jerry North grinned, putting a face on it.

“Four,” he said. “I came up a point with the right one, this time. Only I went back a point with the left. Even squinting.”

“You and me,” Bill said, not to be diverted. “We can't see a thing. You haven't got any eyes; me, I haven't got any mind. Between us, we ought to fall flat on our faces.”

“Quit feeling sorry for yourself, Bill,” Pam told him. “Quit being so sunk. Why did they?”

“Because she knew something, obviously,” Bill said. “Which doesn't fit. That's why, I guess, I didn't—”

“Why doesn't it fit?” Pam North insisted.

There were, Bill Weigand told her—and now, she and Dorian noted, he was leaving himself out of it—several reasons why it didn't fit. Primarily, because she had seemed so certain, and so anxious to make them certain, that John Elliot had killed Ann. And in trying to make them certain she had told everything, apparently, that she knew against Elliot. Anyway, she had told enough. So—Elliot, who was the only one she appeared to suspect, the only one she had tried to involve, would have no reason to kill her.

“Because she had already done him all the damage she could,” Pam North agreed, voicing it for the rest of them. Bill nodded.

“I wondered about that when she seemed to be trying to shake somebody down on the telephone,” he said. “It didn't fit, if she really believed Elliot had killed the girl. That's why I decided to keep an eye on her. Half an eye, as it turned out—Hanson. But I didn't take it very seriously. She was such—such a character. I suppose I didn't ever take her seriously.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “somebody did.”

He considered and shook his head. He said he didn't get it, completely.

“Apparently,” he said, “we have to assume that the whole story she told about Elliot was a fake, set up to distract us from the man she really suspected until she had a chance to shake this other man—or woman—down. She was just giving us a false scent, so she could be free to follow the true one, and so we—you, Bill, I mean—wouldn't catch the right person until she had had a chance to make something out of it.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “it doesn't have to be all a fake—her story about Elliot, I mean. Maybe that was true—maybe something like that happened. But maybe she knew something else about somebody else, and thought this other person would pay not to have what she knew told. I mean—she might really have thought that Elliot killed the girl, but knew enough to involve this other person if he didn't come through. Perhaps she actually thought there were merely appearances against this other person, and that she might pick up a little something if she didn't let the appearances come out. But perhaps she was wrong about that—perhaps what she had on the other person wasn't merely an appearance, as she thought, but the real thing. Perhaps—perhaps she went hunting for a rabbit and caught a bear.”

“Like the parson, one lovely Sunday morning, although it was powerfully against his religion,” Pam North said. Everybody looked at her. “The jingle,” she said. “And on his way returning, a great big grizzly bear. Although the parson caught the bear, not the other way around.”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “But there's nothing in it about rabbits, Pam.”

“And one dum dumply hare,” Pam said. “A rabbit's a hare, isn't it?”

“Sort of,” Jerry agreed. “He was really hunting quail, I always thought.”

“You two,” Dorian said. “What else, Bill?”

“So,” Bill said, “she went out to telephone this other person, on whom she had so much more than she thought. She went to a public telephone because she thought we might have had the one at the house tapped.”

“Did you?” Pam wanted to know.

Bill merely smiled at her.

“So—” Bill started again, and then he stopped and a line came between his eyes.

“It doesn't fit, does it?” Pam said.

Bill Weigand shook his head.

“Not if she was talking,” he said. “And Hanson had sense enough to notice that she was. It was his high point of the day.”

“Why—” Jerry began. Then he said, “oh, of course!”

“It would be pretty hard to be stabbed by somebody you were talking to on the telephone,” he said. “Particularly in the back.”

Everybody looked at him.

“
I
see what you mean, dear,” Pam said. “It's perfectly logical, really. Until you think about it, of course.”

“All right,” Jerry said, amused. “This one's on me, people. But the fact remains—”

They agreed that the fact remained. If Mrs. Pennock had gone several blocks to a public telephone to blackmail a suspected murderer, and had got him on the telephone, it was hard to see how that same person could be waiting outside the telephone booth to stab her in the back. So, presumably, she was not talking to the person she was blackmailing. This last from Dorian.

“Or,” Jerry said, “she was talking to a servant of the person she was blackmailing and learning he was not at home. And he wasn't at home because he was right outside the booth with a knife. How did he know she would be there, incidentally?”

“Followed her,” Bill said. “Unless she had made an appointment to meet him—or her—in the drug store and filled in time waiting for him by telephoning. That's possible. Except that the amazing Mr. Hanson seems to think she went right to the telephone booths without looking around for anyone, or waiting at all, which isn't natural. She went there as if she had gone to telephone, not to meet somebody.”

Pam said it was very confused. She studied it.

“Of course,” she said, “she may have been wrong again. Perhaps there was another murderer. Making three, in all.”

They looked at her, anxiously, for enlightenment.

“You'd have to use letters, or something,” she said. “Suppose Mr. Elliot is Mr. A.”

She paused and looked around for acceptance of this.

“All right, dear,” Jerry said. “Anything you say, Mr. Elliot is Mr. A.”

“Then,” Pam said. “This other person is Mr. B.—this first other person. The one Mrs. Pennock thought had really done the murder—or had a lot to explain about it. The one she was using Mr. Elliot as a red herring for.”

“Listen,” Jerry said, “Mr. Elliot was Mr. A. just a minute ago. Now he's Mr. Elliot again.”

“A. for Elliot,” Pam said. “I don't care, really, I was just trying to make it clear.”

“All right,” Jerry said. “Maybe it is, Pam. So—?”

“So,” Pam said, “she went out to telephone Mr. B. to try to—to shake him down. But all the time there was a Mr. C. The real murderer. Because she was wrong about Mr. A
and
Mr. B. And Mr. C. killed her while she was talking to Mr. B. and trying to make him give her some money.”

“Yes, but—” Bill and Dorian and Jerry said that almost together. Mullins said, “But listen, Mrs. North.”

“I know,” Mrs. North said. “Why should Mr. C.? Because she thought it was Mr. B., if she didn't think it was Mr. A. Well because—because she
should
have realized it was Mr. C. and Mr. C. thought she
did.
Maybe he thought she had seen him killing Ann, when really she hadn't. But maybe she had said something which made him think she had. So he was just playing safe. Maybe he thought she was thinking about the whole thing too much, and would eventually think the right thing.”

They thought that over.