Murder by the Book (9 page)

Jefferson said, thoughtfully, “
B
and
l
and then a—” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “Bland diet,” he said. “And g-i-s—gastrointestinal series. To find out if she had an ulcer, or something worse. And he planned to confer with Dr. Upton. Why, I wonder?”

“Probably,” Pam said, “a matter of professional ethics. They have such a lot of them. You treat another doctor's wife and you have to tell him what you did.” She looked thoughtfully at nothing in particular. She turned to Jerry. “I guess you're right,” she said. “It doesn't seem to get us anywhere, does it? But it's funny he didn't say dram of what.”

“Making notes for himself,” Jerry pointed out. “Didn't need to.”

Pam supposed so. She supposed the doctor's shorthand might mean more to another doctor, and with that she looked at Deputy Sheriff Jefferson, who nodded.

“Know a man at the naval hospital,” Jefferson said. “Ask him about it when I get a chance. But it doesn't seem to lead to anything, does it?” He sighed. “Feel a little out of my depth, somehow,” he admitted. “I—”

He broke his confession off. Paul Grogan, his face grave, came down the steps from the dining room, beside a gray-haired man in a dark suit; a man wearing, further, a black necktie. Of all the guests at The Coral Isles, Pam thought, only one man would be so dressed. The poor man. He was of medium height, broad of shoulders; he had a tanned, square face and there was a fixed expression on his face, as if he had gone away from behind it. I feel as if I've seen him before some place, Pam thought.

Grogan nodded at them, without his usual smile. He and the man in sombre clothes sat at the bar, their backs to the Norths and Jefferson.

Jefferson leaned toward them, kept his voice low, said, “Upton. Hate to horn in but I suppose—”

A young man in a red jacket came down the stairs briskly and went to Grogan, who listened, and then turned and stood up. He said, “Sheriff?” and moved to the foot of the wide, short stairway to the dining room. Jefferson said, “'Scuse me,” and went to join Grogan. They went up the steps.

Dr. Upton looked after them, his face unchanged. Then he turned away, looked at the tall glass in front of him, and lifted it to his lips.

“The poor man,” Pam said. “The sheriff left the notebook. But of course we can't.”

“No,” Jerry said, “we can't.”

The handsome Greshams came down the steps, came hand in hand. They saw the Norths and smiled brightly, but politely started toward another table. Jerry raised eyebrows, inviting, and the Greshams looked at each other, and came over and pulled up chairs. And after that more people came into the Penguin Bar, and a bar waiter appeared and passed canapés, and gradually the octagonal room filled with sound. When Pam looked again, Dr. Upton had left the bar, taking temptation with him. Of course they couldn't show him the notations Dr. Piersal had made, ask him what he made of them; couldn't intrude. The position of Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson would, in that connection, be quite different. But Pam's hopes that anything would come of it had grown dim.

“Bad thing about Dr. Piersal,” Bob Gresham said. “Heard he was shot or something. Out at the end of—”

“Let's not talk about it,” Nancy Gresham said.

“Heard some guest went out at the crack of dawn and—”

“Please, darling,” Nancy Gresham said. She smiled softly at her husband—her, Pam guessed, very recent husband. “Let's not—”

Gresham said, “Sorry, darling.” To either of the Norths who might care to respond he said, “Tennis tomorrow?”

Tennis took ten minutes, and might have taken longer—Jerry launched on one of his doubles theories, which was that the net man, early on, leave his alley open, hoping for a successful passing shot down it by the receiver and resulting false confidence—if Deputy Sheriff Jefferson had not appeared at the head of the dining room stairs. He was tall there, and unsmiling, and when he caught Pam North's eye he jerked his head backward, in a gesture of command. It was, Pam thought, a brusque gesture from a man who had, such a little time before, been almost apologetic.

“Excuse me,” Pam said, and Jerry added “Us,” and the Greshams moved to let them out. Jerry paid at the bar; Jefferson waited, still unsmiling. When they joined him, he said, “Want you to hear something,” and walked away. They followed—followed through the hotel, across the porch and down from it, along the path by the tennis courts and to the sunning area, sheltered by the bathhouse structure. A tanned young man in a white skivvy shirt and white slacks was sitting in a chair tilted against the bathhouse. He was drinking a Coke from a bottle. He brought his chair down and stood up and looked at them.

“All right,” Jefferson said, “This the lady you saw?”

The young man—the youth who passed out towels; arranged pads on wooden chaises—looked at Pam North. He looked at her carefully.

“No,” he said, “it isn't. I don't think so.” He continued to look at Pam. “She was wearing shorts—white shorts—and a beach coat. Blue coat.”

“Aside from what she was wearing,” Jefferson said. “Could this have been the lady?”

“Look,” the beachboy said. “I was way off.”

“Whatever this is about,” Pam said, “I can always go and put on shorts. What
is
this about?”

“He saw somebody coming off the pier,” Jefferson said. “You can't be any surer than that?”

The beachboy continued to look at Pam North. He walked to the side, and looked at her from there. Pam stood very straight, looked straight ahead.

The beachboy went behind her. Pam did not move. Jefferson said, “Well?”

“No,” the beachboy said, “it isn't. I remember now. The one I saw had black hair. She was sort of—” He considered. “Lanky,” he said. “Little, but lanky.”

Pamela North addressed the wall of the bathhouse. She said, “Thank you. I guess.” She turned, rather abruptly, and faced Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson. “And you,” Pam said. She spoke distantly. Rather, Jerry thought, as if Jefferson were as inanimate as the bathhouse wall.

“Suppose,” Jerry said, “you tell us what this is about, Jefferson. As my wife asked you to.”

“Since,” Pam said, “you already knew, because I'd told you, that I was out on the pier—I suppose this is about this morning?—and found Dr. Piersal's—”

“Tell them, Roy,” Jefferson said.

“O.K.,” Roy said. “I was coming back with …”

He had gone to the hotel store room for his supply of towels. He had done this early, because he had then to rake the beach. “On account of that damn seaweed.” He had come around the corner of the bathhouse, with a bundle of towels on his shoulder, and seen someone moving along the pier, toward the shore. A woman—a thin woman, “Lanky, somehow”—wearing white shorts and a blue jacket.

When he first saw her, she had been running. “Trotting, more like it.” Then she stopped running, he thought when she had seen him and realized he could see her, and merely walked rapidly.

When she reached the end of the pier, Roy assumed she would turn to her right, toward him, since that was the way to the hotel. But she did not. She went straight ahead, and out of sight behind the bathhouse. “That way,” Roy said, and pointed.

“Toward the gate,” Jefferson said. “It's supposed to be kept locked, isn't it?”

“Supposed,” Roy said. “Only somebody lost the key to the padlock and we had to use a crowbar to get the truck in and—well, nobody's got a new lock yet. Not my job, and I told Mr. Grogan—”

“All right,” Jefferson said. “She—this woman you saw—was going toward the gate. And that would have put her?”

“You know where,” Roy said. “On Flagler. Right across from the staff dormitory.”

“It could have been one of the girls working here. A waitress? Maid?”

“Sure,” Roy said. “Not a maid. They're colored. A waitress, sure.”

“And you mightn't have known her?”

“They come and go,” Roy said. “Here today and gone tomorrow, like they say.”

“You haven't seen her since?”

“Not to recognize.”

“All right, Roy,” Jefferson said. “Tell Mr. and Mrs. North when this was.”

It had been at a quarter of seven. When Roy had picked up his bundle of towels in the store room, he had checked his watch with a clock in the corridor. It had been eighteen of seven. Allow three minutes—

“All right,” Jefferson said. He turned to the Norths. “Fits the description, doesn't it?” he said.

“I'm afraid so,” Pam said, and Jerry nodded his head. “She wore a blue jacket to the tennis court,” Pam said. “For the record, I haven't got a blue jacket.”

She was, Jerry realized, still slightly annoyed at Deputy Sheriff Jefferson. It had, he thought, been some time since she had been treated as a suspect.

“Or,” Pam said, “a black wig, if it comes to that.”

Jefferson smiled. He said, “Don't hold a grudge, ma'am.” He said, “A quarter of seven could have been about the time the doctor was killed. One way or the other, about the time. She was running when Roy here first saw her. When she saw him, she quit running. But she didn't come toward him, come face to face with him. And—”

“We heard him,” Jerry said. He turned to the beachboy. “She wasn't carrying anything?”

“Not that I saw,” Roy said. “I suppose there'd be pockets in the coat she was wearing, but I didn't see anything. Look, it's time I close up shop. I'm supposed to start this other job—”

“All right,” Jefferson said. “You live in the staff dormitory?”

“Sure.”

“Keep your eyes open, will you?”

“Listen,” Roy said. “They're nice kids. Some of them are pros. Some of them—hell, we get all kinds. Kids who go to college and have to knock off for a semester to make a buck. I wouldn't want—”

“Sure not,” Jefferson said. “But maybe if this girl you saw was one of the staff, she just—well, saw the doctor lying there and got scared. Didn't want to get mixed up in it. Maybe she's just a kid and—”

“O.K.,” Roy said. “I'll keep my eyes open.”

They walked back toward the hotel. This time, Jefferson did not stride ahead; this time Pam walked between the two men. Jefferson said, “Don't get the idea that I—” and let it hang there, and was told to forget it. “Had to be sure,” Jefferson said, and it was Pamela who said, “Of course you did, Mr. Jefferson. You don't think this girl was one of the waitresses, do you? You said that for Roy's benefit.”

“I think one of the waitresses,” Jefferson said, “would have told somebody what she'd seen—if she saw somebody killing the doctor, or saw him lying there dead. This business about not wanting to get mixed up in it—” He shrugged wide shoulders.

“Yes,” Pam said. “Eyewash. For Roy's eyes. So he'll keep them open. Rebecca Payne, then. Would have gone back to the hotel, but Roy saw her. So—kept on running. Where? In tennis shorts, and a shirt I suppose, and a bluejacket? Without money.”

“Like the beachboy said,” Jefferson said. “The jacket probably had pockets in it. We don't know what she had in the pockets. As for what she was wearing—one of the few places in the country where it would pass for the uniform of the day.”

“Or,” Jerry North said, “she could have gone around the hotel and in the front entrance. Up to her room to change. Nobody around at that hour. Wasn't when we—” He did not finish that. Already, he thought, Pam had a faraway look in her eyes. Seeing again, he thought, what she had seen that morning.

“Sure,” Jefferson said. “We'll ask her when we find her.”

“The poor thing,” Pam said, and seemed to speak from a distance. “She thought everybody was against her. Now—everybody is.”

There was, Jerry realized—from the tone of Pam's voice, from his knowledge of his wife—an exception to that “everybody.” Pamela North had taken sides. She almost always did.

“You'll want this,” Jerry said, and gave Jefferson Dr. Piersal's notebook.

7

It was, Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson thought, all over but the catching. That might take only hours; it might, on the other hand, take weeks. They had fingerprints, now; with New York's cooperation, they would soon have a picture. Eventually, they would find Mrs. Rebecca Payne and ask her why she had killed Dr. Edmund Piersal. Her reasons wouldn't make much sense—revenge for things Piersal hadn't done; murder, you could call it, of the symbol of a hostile, deriding world. Jefferson didn't like it; the county attorney wouldn't like it. And in the end, Rebecca Payne probably would be locked up in one of the places they kept people who were off their rockers.

But if you called it motive, sane or looney, they had a motive. They had her—almost certainly would have her—identified at the scene of the crime, at about the time of the crime's commission. Jefferson considered calling it a day. He could go to the “Sun and Surf” and have a swim, and a drink and something to eat. Then he could go back to his office and see that everything was being done to catch Rebecca Payne—that bus drivers were being asked, and taxi drivers and the car rental agencies; to see that the flights out to Miami had not been forgotten. In short, to fill time, and waste time, asking the obvious.

Jefferson, tempted, knowing he should resist temptation, sighed and felt the small black notebook in his pocket and went in search of Dr. Tucker Upton. Clip off any loose ends that dangled, because the county attorney would, when they had caught up with Rebecca Payne, want them neatly clipped.

(“Sure this theory of suicide because he'd done something wrong in treating this woman is absurd,” the county attorney would say. “So, why didn't you prove it was while you had a chance? Like before her body was cremated, for instance?”)