Murder Has Its Points (17 page)

“Listen, Captain,” Blaine Smythe said. “You don't want me any longer, do you? I've got this—hell, you don't think I'd do anything to good old Tony? And anyway, I wasn't there.”

“Right,” Bill said. “I understand Mr. Payne got you fired. From this part. Apparently, now he isn't around—”

Blaine said, “Oh, that,” in a tone which dismissed that. “He got a bee in his bonnet. Sure. Nothing would have come of it. Look, Captain, you're not that crazy. To get the idea I—hell, man, I could get any one of half a dozen parts. Some of them a helluva lot better, if that's all right with you, Lars.”

Lars Simon leaned back slightly and looked at the ceiling far above them. He said, “Sure, Blaine.”

“Mr. Smythe,” Weigand said, “I understand you and Mrs. Payne—the present Mrs. Payne—are quite good friends.”

He was asked what he meant by that. He said he meant no more than he said by that. He said it was a very simple question.

“Listen,” Smythe said, “if you mean—”

“No,” Bill said. “Only what I said. Asked. Are you?”

Smythe didn't know what he meant by “good.” He said they'd met each other around from time to time. He said he'd taken her out a few times. “But that was before she married Payne.” He said there had never been anything more than that to it. “Matter of fact,” he said, “she's not my type. Probably I'm not her type, either. Anyway, she never acted like it.” He looked at Bill Weigand intently. “Somebody tell you different? Or, are you trying a game?”

“No game,” Bill said.

“Then?” Smythe said, and once more looked at his watch and, from it, at Weigand, with accusation.

“Go keep your date,” Bill said. “If we think of any more questions we'll look you up.”

Blaine Smythe stood up quickly. So, not quite so quickly, did Lars Simon.

“Couple more things I'd like to ask you, Mr. Simon,” Bill said. “If you haven't got a date too?”

“My wife's used to waiting,” Lars Simon said. “Poor wretch.”

Bill watched Blaine Smythe, tall and suave of movement, walk up the aisle.

“Mr. Simon,” he said, when Smythe had gone out the door, “Payne did get him fired?” Lars nodded. “Why?”

“Thought he knew something about acting,” Lars said. “Payne did. Said Blaine didn't ‘feel' the part.
Feel
, for God's sake. Went over my head to Birdy. Ing Birdwood. He had money in it, you know. Payne had. Or maybe Lauren had. You knew she's got money?”

“Yes.”

“So Birdy gave Blaine notice. Can at this stage, you know.”

“So now he's got the part back?”

“That's right. Now he's got the part back. He's good, as a matter of fact.”

“Good enough to have half a dozen other parts for the taking?”

“Captain,” Lars said, “they all talk that way, the poor bastards.”

“He didn't have?”

“I don't know he didn't have,” Lars said. “Of course, the season's moving along. This time of year, things are pretty much set. Off Broadway's another matter. Could be off Broadway. Only, Blaine isn't exactly an art-for-art's-sake sort of bloke. Or Equity-minimum-for-art's-sake either.” He looked at Bill Weigand with enhanced interest. He said, “You figure a bloke would kill another bloke for a job?”

Bill said nobody could tell what a bloke would kill another bloke for. He said that if reason entered into murder, there would be no murder. He said, “You don't want to gossip, I suppose? I can't insist if you don't.”

“About what?”

“You heard what I asked Smythe.”

Lars Simon considered. In due time he nodded his head slowly. He stopped nodding his head, and looked at the stage, where there was, at the moment, nothing worth looking at.

“No,” Lars said, “I guess I don't, Captain,” and then looked at Bill. “Which,” he said, “I suppose you'll take as an answer.” Bill said nothing. “I will say this,” Lars said. “From what I hear, Tony Payne was a bit of a heel where women were concerned. So if Lauren, who's a nice girl from what I've seen of her—” He let it hang there, for the moment. Then he said, “Payne had latched onto a babe. A chick—a very downy chick. But I suppose you've turned that up?”

“Right,” Bill said. “One, anyway. I suppose you mean Jo-An Rhodes?”

“Don't know her name, actually. Pretty little dark thing. Saw them together once or twice and Payne looked—well, you know how men look sometimes. As if he were about to—absorb her. Could be she had a boy friend. Looked the type that would, if boys are what they ought to be.” He looked at the stage again. “I don't argue all of them are,” he said, rather absently.

People rather kept pointing at Jo-An Rhodes and, by indirection, James Self. In murder investigations, people are rather inclined to point—to point away. Sometimes, of course, merely wishing to be helpful.

“This rifle of yours,” Bill said, and Lars shook his head and said, “Not mine. Birdy's.”

“Right,” Bill said. “This prop rifle. Anyone, obviously—any member of the cast, anybody associated with the production—could walk in and pick it up. Take it anywhere and use it. Get it, back for the next day's rehearsal.”

“As you say. Obviously. But as far as that goes, anybody, in the cast or not, could walk in and pick it up and, as you say, use it.”

“The theater's not kept locked?”

“If you call this barn a theater—no. With what? Nothing works. Why? There's nothing worth stealing.”

“The rifle. And anybody who knew it was here, lying around loose, could have told anybody else.”

Lars supposed so. Then, somewhat belatedly, the idea seemed to cheer him.

“And this anybody could walk in any time,” he said. “As you did yourself, Captain.”

There was no special point that Bill could see in their continuing to agree with each other about the rifle.

“When I came in,” he said, “you were cueing Smythe. But I gather you're not really playing the part?”

Lars Simon laughed. He said, “My God no. I was standing in for Faith. Faith Constable.”

“Who had the day off?”

That was not it. Faith Constable did not have the day off. None of the boys and girls got days off. Not at this stage. Faith had showed with the others. “She's a trouper, the Lady Constable.” But, an hour or so after she had arrived, she had got a telephone call. “Believe it or not, we've got a telephone in this dump.” She had told Lars that something had come up, and that he would have to get along without her for the afternoon. She had not said what had come up. Lars had raised no objection: “You don't with La Constable. She knows who she is. In a nice way, but she knows who she is.”

Simon had no idea—no idea at all—what had suddenly “come up”?

He had not. It was clear, however, that it was something Faith Constable thought important. “As I said, she's a trouper.”

A detective, mind concentrated on a case, risks obsession. There was no reason to suppose, Bill told himself, that what had seemed “important” to Mrs. Faith Constable had any relation to what was, at the moment, most important to Homicide, Manhattan West. All sudden and unexplained movements are, however, interesting.

As a matter of routine, no one else in the case bore a grudge against Anthony Payne? Nobody Lars Simon knew of?

Lars considered briefly. It was a hell of a big cast. The ones Weigand had seen were only principals. There were a lot of walk-ons, mostly natives.

“Payne did have a habit—bad habit—of treating Tommy as if he were a native,” Lars said. “You saw Tommy? Harvard '56, cum laude. I don't imagine it bothered Tommy. He's the most goddamn well-adjusted bloke I ever saw.” He considered again. “Among actors, anyway,” he said.

“Mr. Payne has been attending rehearsals?”

Lars rubbed his receding hair with both hands, in apparent anguish. He said, “And how!” He turned to Bill Weigand. “Do you really have to catch the bloke who spared us Payne?” he said.

Bill said he had to try, and went across the runway over the orchestra pit and got the rifle. There was no point in bothering about any fingerprints which might be on it. If it had a story to tell, its grooves would speak mutely. Ballistics would decipher the word.

In his car, Bill Weigand call the Telegraph Bureau to see whether anybody wanted him. Nobody did. With the motor started, Bill wrestled briefly with temptation. He might now go home, where Dorian was waiting. He might, showered and changed, with her beside him, drive across town and downtown and have with Pam and Jerry North the drink to which they had been invited. The temptation was considerable.

In the back seat of the car there was a rifle which might—and of course might not—prove to be a State exhibit. And, above the soft sound of the Buick's motor, he could hear a voice—a legal voice. “Now, Captain,” the voice said to an inner ear, “you found this rifle, you say. And you took it at once to the office, of course, and marked it properly and dispatched it, as is required in the regulations of the department, for ballistic examination? Oh—you didn't do that? You took it home with you? Up to your apartment? Is that right? And then you and your wife went to the apartment of Mr. and Mrs.—let's see, now. North, isn't it?—and still had the rifle with you? Carried it around quite a time, didn't you, Captain? You're sure that there was no opportunity for somebody to substitute another rifle for the one you say you found in the theater? That's what you say, Captain? Remembering you are on oath. You expect this jury to—”

Bill Weigand, who was only a few crosstown blocks from his apartment which overlooks the East River, drove downtown to West Twentieth Street, and carried the rifle upstairs, and put a tag on it and initialed the tag, and called for a patrolman to take it to ballistics. The patrolman gave him a receipt for it, and put his own initials under Weigand's on the tag, and took the rifle downstairs again to a police car and drove off with it.

The telephone on Bill's desk rang. Connecticut State Police, Ridgefield Barracks. Reporting: Mrs. Anthony Payne had returned to her house on Nod Road. She had returned alone at a little before five. The State Police had been keeping an eye on the house at the request of Anthony Payne who, some days before, had told them that the house would be empty, that he and his wife would be in New York and that the couple who constituted the staff had been given the time off. At a little before five, the eyes being kept—those of Trooper Owen Cutler—had seen lights go on in the house. To verify, he had driven up to it and found Mrs. Payne there, alone. (Alone by her statement; he had not, of course, searched.) He had expressed sympathy, been thanked, driven off. Did Captain Weigand want any further steps taken?

Bill hesitated. He could not think of any. But still—Would they mind keeping an eye on the house, as manpower permitted? Not that anything would happen. But still—

The State Police said, “O.K., Captain.”

So—it was still not much after five. Bill checked through his mind. He found a nagging in his mind. There is always something and what now was this—this vague and unsatisfactory thing; this kind of scratching, as if something shut out sought admittance or something inside wanted out? Something he had passed over which should not have been passed over, and which now was scratching his subconscious? Weigand flipped the mental pages of the day, and turned up nothing. Well, if it was important, it would nag, would tickle, its way to the surface. Meanwhile—

The telephone rang. A young woman was at the desk downstairs and wanted to see Captain Weigand. Young woman named Jo-An Rhodes. Did Weigand want—?

12

There is a Navy injunction which has to do with the dignity of the service. In one variant, it goes: “A Naval officer never drinks. But if he drinks he never gets drunk. But if he gets drunk he never falls down. But if he falls down he falls on his stripes.”

Excessive drinking is not a problem to Pamela North. But she has problems of her own. She has an injunction for herself, and it goes: “Don't stick your neck out. But if you stick your neck out, tell somebody you're going to. But if you don't tell somebody you're going to, have a convincing reason for not telling. But if your reason would not convince most people, be sure that it convinces you.”

When she and Faith Constable had made their minds up, and made Gladys Mason's up for her, there was a self-convincing reason not to tell the police—not even Bill Weigand—what they were about to be up to. The whole point was to reach a frightened boy, give a frightened boy a chance to explain; reach him before there was too much to explain. It was, admittedly, the taking of a chance, conceivably a chance with a woman's life. “He won't,” Mrs. Mason said. “I know he won't.” Which was something, if not enough. The main point was more simple: If the boy planned to do anything, he had already had all afternoon to do it in.

But to tell Jerry was an entirely different matter. He would, Pam realized, kick and scream. After kicking, he would put his foot down. But in the end, he might even come with them, which would be satisfactory—very satisfactory indeed.

From the telephone in the shadows of Faith Constable's apartment, Pam dialed Jerry's office; asked to speak to Jerry, listened and said, in a diminished tone, “Oh.”

Jerry was with author, business consultation over a drink or two; precise whereabouts unknown. Being a publisher, Pam often thinks, requires a good deal of drinking. He was expected back at the office.

“Well,” Pam said, “when he gets back, tell him—no, I'll dictate it.”

The girl still wore the shapeless sweater and tweed skirt, but now with a topcoat over them. She wore brown oxfords, a little scuffed. Her short dark hair looked as if wind had blown it. Standing in the doorway to Bill Weigand's office, looking up at him from large dark eyes, she might almost have been a schoolgirl. One rather expected to see books under one arm, perhaps with a strap around them.