Death on the Aisle (27 page)

“And after that,” Weigand pointed out, “she made every effort to be in somebody's company, or in plain sight, until the body was found. In that way, no matter when we finally decided Bolton had been killed, her time was accounted for—she either wasn't in the theatre at all, or she was with somebody. That we were able to guess pretty accurately as to the time of the murder, and it appeared to be before she was around at all, helped her. But it wasn't necessary.”

And then, Weigand said, Ellen Grady threw her bombshell—
Ellen had seen her!
Why Ellen told her instead of the police they would never know. Perhaps she merely gave Mary a chance to explain before she went to the police; perhaps there had been some other, less innocent, plan in the back of her head. “Possibly,” Weigand suggested, “she may have thought she saw a chance to raise money to put into the show; perhaps she thought the money she would put up for Ahlberg would come from Mary Fowler. We'll never know—but we know what she did get.”

Weigand paused, because Pam was shaking her head doubtfully.

“I don't think Ellen knew the importance of what she'd seen,” Pam said. “Like me, I mean—not knowing what she knew. Because if she were going to blackmail a murderer she wouldn't be taking a bath. Silly. I think that Mary Fowler just
thought
Ellen knew, the way she thought
I
knew. And Mary arranged to come around, maybe pretending it was something about costumes. And then she just killed Ellen, without asking her anything. I think that's much more likely.”

Weigand nodded and after a moment said perhaps it was. There was another pause.

“Anyway, that's what Mary Fowler did, or about what she did,” Weigand went on. “I don't think, incidentally, that she had had any intention of running when we missed her, just before she heard Pam talking to herself. She didn't think she had any reason to run. I think she had just come up here to the mezzanine to rest in a comfortable chair. We were all pretty tired—and she, being older, was probably more tired than the rest of us. She probably thought it was all finished business. And then she heard Pam telling herself she knew who had done it.”

“Well,” Mr. North said, “wasn't she safe?”

Weigand shook his head.

“I was pretty sure,” he said. “I was looking for proof. Because she couldn't have seen Evans in the lobby, as she said she did. And I was looking for one lie, even an apparently senseless one.”

“Why couldn't she, Bill?” Dorian asked, looking up at him. “I know why really, of course. Because she had already pushed him. But you didn't know
when
she pushed him, did you?”

Weigand shook his head at her. It was simpler than that, he said. Once you assumed, as he had found no reason not to assume, that Max Ahlberg was telling the truth. It was, he said, a matter of times.

“Ahlberg went through the lobby immediately before Miss Fowler started to knock,” he pointed out. “And then Evans wasn't there. To get there, Evans would have had to come through from the theatre, and he would have had to pass Ahlberg to get where she said he was at the time we know she was there. It's a long lobby, remember—and Evans according to his own version, had poked around the only time he was in the lobby. That was, of course, before he was pushed. To get down to the front of the lobby, starting after Ahlberg was out of the way, he would have had to run. I couldn't see him running.”

“But then why—?” Mrs. North began.

“Because,” Weigand explained before she finished, “she wanted us to believe that he was alive just before she came in. Because she was afraid she had killed him. If he was up and around when she knocked at the lobby doors, and she was in sight afterward—as she was—she couldn't have been the one who knocked him out. It jiggled things up, which was what she wanted.”

Weigand stopped and took a long drink, and stared into his glass. Mr. North relinquished Pam long enough, but not without a warning glance, to fill it up again.

“And so,” Weigand said, “that seems to be all.”

Mr. North, who had just sat down again, put his own glass firmly on the coffee table in front of him.

“That,” he said, “is not all. That's only How. Where's the Why?”

Weigand looked faintly surprised, and as he took in the expressions on the faces of Pam and Dorian he looked a little more surprised. He said that he had thought, of course, that they had got that.

“Specifically,” he said, “to keep Bolton from performing a sinus operation of Berta. Because that was what happened to Mary herself—or, perhaps it would be better to say, what she thought had happened … to make her eyes protrude.”

Everybody stared at him. He nodded.

“That,” he said, “was one of the first things I guessed. That Bolton had performed a sinus operation on Mary some time when they were living together and that the operation made her eyes hideous. Or, as I say, she thought that it did. I don't know whether it did or not; probably nobody does, or ever will. Probably Bolton himself didn't, although I suppose he denied it. But any doctor will tell you that such operations are ticklish things, that they sometimes have unexpected results. I asked Dr. Francis about it and he—well, he's a doctor and he was talking about another doctor, so he hedged. But finally he said, yes, he had known of a case or two when the eyes had behaved oddly after an operation, although nobody knew whether the operation had actually caused their odd behavior. And then he said: ‘But if it were me, I wouldn't let anybody poke around in there. I'd rather go to Florida.' Coming from Francis, that was plenty.

“In any case, Mary Fowler was convinced that the operation Bolton performed had changed her eyes, and ended her career—had changed her from a beautiful woman into a woman people tried not to look at. She had told Berta that, and Berta told Kirk when they were driving down to—well, to tell Mary that they knew, and give her a chance to run for it before they told the police. Remember, Berta had lived most of her life with her aunt and—oh, well, it was natural.”

Weigand paused, staring at nothing. Then he spoke again.

“We'll never reconstruct all of it,” he said slowly. “What people did, or about what they did—yes, perhaps. But about what they felt—then we're always guessing. All we can say is, ‘Perhaps it was something like this.' Perhaps, with Mary Fowler, after she had lost everything else, her whole life came to center on Alberta, so that Alberta was everything and she felt toward her all that desperate protectiveness that a mother may feel toward a child. If we assume that it explains a good deal. Say she felt that way and then, whether she was right or not—and probably she was partly right and partly wrong—she saw the girl going along precisely the tragic road she had gone along herself. She saw the girl turning emotionally to Bolton, as she had turned; caught as she had been by the charm he must have had for women, and by their knowledge of what he could do for them—and in the end by his ruthlessness. She saw it all starting over, and saw for Alberta all the betrayal and anguish she had lived through. And she saw the end the same, down to the same physical disfigurement, with all that it meant to any woman and, most of all, to any actress.”

Weigand hesitated a moment.

“I don't suppose she was right in all this,” he said. “About the disfigurement, for example, she was almost certainly wrong. That, even if the operation Bolton performed caused it, was an ugly accident, and accidents don't often repeat themselves in the same pattern. And there's no certainty that even the other thing—the emotional involvement with Bolton—would have happened again. But I think that Mary Fowler believed utterly that it would
all
happen again. I think that—for her—it was
already
happening again. And so …”

There was a pause.

“And,” Mrs. North said, “I think she was a little mad.”

Weigand's face was thoughtful. Finally he said that, in a certain sense, all murderers are a little mad—all murderers who premeditate, at any rate.

“So perhaps Mary Fowler was,” he said. His voice sounded tired. “She had, when you come to think of it, almost enough to make her so—she had been lovely and famous, and lost it all; Bolton had pretended to love her, and had injured her and then because she wasn't beautiful any longer, had no more use for her. And staying in the theatre, as she had, seeing him going on, untouched—unhurt—well, I suppose bitterness lasted longer than it might have otherwise. What she felt about him made it—well, say easy—to decide that the only way to protect Alberta was to kill Bolton.”

He paused and drank slowly.

“That's the madness of murder, Pam,” he said. “The madness of not seeing any other way out.”

He put down his glass and for a while nobody said anything. But now the silence, for the first time in many hours, was relaxed and peaceful. Looking at Pamela North, Bill thought she might go to sleep at any moment, and gently he pulled at Dorian's hair, so convenient to his hand.

“Sleepy, Dor?” he asked.

She looked up at him, and smiled gently and shook her head. Bill looked down at her a moment.

“We might take a ride somewhere,” he said. “Upstate somewhere, perhaps?” His voice was questioning.

Dorian continued to look up at him, smiling faintly. When she spoke her voice was low.

“I think that would be very nice,” she said, a little like a child.

Bill and Dorian looked across at the Norths, and Mrs. North was really asleep. Her head had fallen on Jerry's shoulder, and her hand was tight in his. Bill and Dorian stood up quietly, while Jerry North watched them, and then, with their lips only they made the movements of “Goodnight.”

Jerry looked down at Pam for a moment and then at the others with lifted eyebrows, which did for a shrug. Dorian and Bill Weigand went out very quietly.

In the car, Bill's fingers automatically switched on the radio with the ignition, and a voice began raspingly: “Car Number—” But before the voice went any further, Dorian reached across and twisted the radio knob until it clicked. The voice, baffled, disappeared.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, in a very low, soft voice. Then they drove away.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries

1

T
UESDAY
, J
ANUARY
21

3:15
P.M. TO
4
P.M.

Pamela North got out of the cab and leaned against the wind. It was a furious wind, banging through the street and full of street dust; as she stood with her back to it, the wind rounded her skirt against her legs and tugged at the cab door as she held it open. The cab driver, peering out at her, knocked his flag down and, with a little shrug, climbed out on the other side and came around. He said it was windy.

“Because New York's on the bias,” Pam North told him. “If it weren't, the wind couldn't blow through it this way, because northwest would be up that way.”

Pam pointed. The taxi driver looked at her with some doubt, said “Yeh, maybe you got something there, lady,” and took the tugging door from her. He hauled two bags from the interior of the cab and reached for a black box with a mansard roof. The box, on being jiggled, yowled. The taxi driver let go of it and looked at Mrs. North reproachfully.

“Cats,” she said. He said, “Yeh!”

“Look, lady,” he said. “I don't like 'em. Creeps. You know how it is.”

“Of course,” Pam said. “Lots of people are that way. I'll carry them.”

Gingerly, he handed out the black case with the mansard roof. It yowled on two tones. The taxi driver looked puzzled.

“Two of them,” Mrs. North explained. “But quite small, really. Will you carry the bags up for me?”

He nodded and carried the bags across the walk and up the gritty stone steps to the door of the house. Pam, carrying the cats, followed him and stood just inside the doorway, looking very new against the old house. Sand opened the door while she searched her purse and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. North.” The taxi driver took his money, skirted the black case, which had ceased to yowl, and went away. Back in the cab, he leaned across and looked at Mrs. North and the black case and shook his head doubtfully. Then he drove off. Sand carried the bags inside and Mrs. North lifted the black case over the threshold. It yowled on one note.

“One of them's getting tired,” she told Sand. “They've both been yelling all the way, nearly. Is my aunt—?”

“Yes, Mrs. North,” Sand said. He looked frail to be carrying the bags, she thought, but there was nothing to do about it. He followed her into the foyer and put the bags down by a small table which held a silver tray and a vase which sprayed daffodils.

“In the drawing room, Mrs. North,” Sand said. “Shall I tell madam that you—?”