Death Takes a Bow (6 page)

Far be it from Dr. Francis to tell the Lieutenant his business. But if he were detecting, he would be interested in anything Sproul had had to eat or drink within a couple of hours of his death, and in the persons who gave it to him. He would report “suspicious death” and go on the assumption of “homicide.”

Bill Weigand nodded and stood for a further moment in thought. Then he said, “Right” and “Thanks.” He crossed to the lectern and rapped on it with the gavel. Everybody looked at him.

“As you've gathered,” Lieutenant Weigand told the audience, “Mr. Sproul has died very suddenly. The police are in charge and I see nothing to be gained by keeping you here. So most of you may go. But I want to talk to any of you who knew Mr. Sproul personally—knew him here or in Paris, recently or even a number of years ago. I'll ask any of you who did know him, even slightly, to remain. Is that clear?”

The members of the audience looked as if it was clear enough.

“Right,” Weigand said. “I might add that we have the means of making a fairly complete check on those who did know Mr. Sproul, so I'd advise anybody who might think he was saving himself trouble by not admitting acquaintanceship to abandon the idea. Is that understood?”

It seemed to be. Weigand looked at the audience with grave severity, hoping that nobody would suspect how hard it would really be to sift out such of Sproul's acquaintances as did not elect to be sifted. He held them a moment and turned away. The audience began to eddy out. Weigand wondered if Sproul's murderer—always assuming a murderer—was in one of the eddies. He wondered—yes, already there were counter eddies pressing against the departing. The press was coming in, with cards in its hat-bands and folds of copy paper in its hands for notes and—It made Weigand think of something. Sproul probably had notes.

He crossed to the body and ran long, nervous fingers into the inside coat pocket. Nothing. He felt a side pocket. Something. A sheaf of folded papers. Weigand flipped the fold open. He had Sproul's notes for the first lecture of his de luxe tour. They began without preamble:

“Tell you Paris meant to me. One American. That way what meant ENTIRE WORLD. Paris symbol of civilization in peril—little ways men lived there—big things happened there—things tourists saw—residents saw—right bank, left bank … try picture what world has lost—”

The notes went on, but Bill Weigand broke off. They would come later, for what help they might be. But before words written down, dead now as the man who was to have spoken them, came people. Bill Weigand turned to the people.

And Pamela North looked at the watch which dangled around her neck and said, unexpectedly and quite clearly, “Oh!” She crossed to Jerry, still looking. “Oh!”

“Jerry,” she said. “The girls!”

“What?” Jerry said. “What girls?”

“The nieces,” Pam said. “What girls did you think?”

“I didn't think any girls,” he said. “I forgot all about them.”

“One of us,” Pam said. “The Penn Station in—in five minutes, really. But they'll be late, of course. They're all late, nowadays.”

It puzzled Bill Weigand, through his major puzzlement.

“Nieces?” he said.

“Trains,” Pam told him. “The war, somehow. They're coming to visit us, because their mother is going to the hospital and their father can't get away. The war, you know.”

Bill Weigand sorted it out. Trains—no, nieces—were coming to see Pam North because, obscurely, of the war. They were going to be late in arriving, also because of the war. But Pam went on. She was addressing both men now—Jerry and Bill Weigand.

“I hate to,” she said. “Leaving you with it. But I'll come back and help as soon as I put them to bed. Martha is going to stay and look after them anyway.”

“Listen,” Jerry said, “I thought—are you sure about their ages?”

“Of course,” Pam North said. “Little girls. I'm sorry about the murder, but I'll hurry.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “I wish you could wait for me,” she said. “But I suppose you can't?” Bill smiled at her and shook his head.

“Do you think—?” Pam began again, and stopped because both men were grinning at her, and because Dorian had come up and was smiling at all of them in an amused way.

“We'll do our best,” Bill Weigand told her gravely. “Naturally, it will be—”

“You?” Pam said. “All of you.” She looked around the stage, and seemed a little wistful. “What a time for nieces!” she said. “I wish—”

She did not say what she wished. She looked around again and accepted the situation with evident decision and went to the edge of the platform. She put a hand on the edge and dropped down without waiting for help and hit solidly and said “Ugh!” She did not pause, however, and went up an aisle, rubbing the dirt from her left hand with a handkerchief.

Mrs. North's steps were brisk but her spirit was reluctant. Here, she thought, is what looks like being one of the best murders we've ever had and I've got nieces. Little nieces. The thought filled her with rebellion.

“It's always women,” she thought and the taxicab driver, pushing the door open from inside, looked at her.

“Huh?” he said. “Where'd you say, lady?”

Pam realized that she had thought out loud again and sighed. Apparently there was, after all, nothing to be done about it. She couldn't even be scared out of it, she decided. “Like hiccoughs,” she thought and, hearing the words, realized that she had done it again. She looked at the taxi driver a little anxiously and discovered that he was looking at her wildly.

“Listen, lady,” he said. “I heard you. Do you want to go some place, that's all I wanta know? Or do you just want to talk about hiccoughs?”

“I'm sorry,” Pam said. “It comes over me sometimes. I plan not to but I do in spite of it. Penn Station.”

“Do what?” the taxi driver asked.

“Penn Station,” Pam said. “Talk to myself.”

“I don't get that about hiccoughs,” the driver said, in a rather gloomy voice. “Which side?”

“Hiccoughs?” Pam North repeated, in apparently honest puzzlement. “Both sides, usually. Right in the middle, really. What about hiccoughs?”

“What about—” the driver began, reaching back to push down his flag and stopping, bemused. “How should I know what about hiccoughs, lady? They're your hiccoughs.”

“I haven't got the hiccoughs,” Pam said. “I want to go to the Pennsylvania Station.”

The driver turned around and stared at her.

“Listen, lady,” he said. “Can we just start over? You get into the hack and you say—what do you say, lady?” His voice was beseeching.

“Oh,” Mrs. North said. “I was thinking about the murder. Pennsylvania Station.”

“O.K.,” the driver said. “Pennsylvania Station. What murder? Murder!”

It seemed to reach him slowly.

“Back there,” Pam told him. “That's why all the police cars. And if you've got to talk, can't you do it while we go? Because they're little girls and I've got to meet them. It's always the woman who has to; while men do interesting things.”

“Your—,” the taxi driver began. He lapsed, staring straight ahead for a moment. Then he shrugged, lifting both hands from the steering wheel. He lowered his right hand to the gear shift level, still staring ahead, and pulled. There was a grinding clash which seemed to please him, and the cab started. The driver stared straight ahead, a little wildly. Mrs. North dismissed him from her mind.

It was true, she thought (and this time she thought silently) that when there were dull things to do, women were ordinarily chosen. If it came to a choice between murder and nieces, men got the murder and women got the nieces. And you couldn't deny that murder was more interesting than nieces. Murder was tremendously, engrossingly interesting.

Realizing how interesting it was, Pam North felt a little worried about herself. Probably, when you came down to it, it wasn't good for you to be so interested in murders. “Habit-forming,” Pam thought. You started out able to take murder or leave it alone—never dreaming of taking it, really. And one murder led to another, and it became—well, a sort of game. And it should never be a game; not really a game. Or, she corrected, not essentially a game, because it would always be in the nature of things a kind of game. A dreadful kind of game, at bottom, but still a game. It would be—Pam tried to think of a simile—it would be like tennis, if, after the set was over, the loser was shot. That would make tennis a rather horrible game, but it would not keep it from being a game. The strokes would be the same, the maneuvering for position, the sparring for openings. Watching it, you would still be watching a game. Only you would care more.

And would it, Pam wondered, be morbid to watch tennis of that sort? She grabbed the handstrap at the side of the cab, which seemed to be going very rapidly, even for a cab—which seemed to be progressing toward the Pennsylvania Station with a kind of desperation. The driver was certainly in a hurry to get there, Pam thought, in parenthesis. But would it be morbid?

I don't really know what being morbid is, Pam thought. Of course you're more interested in things which are important, like life, than in things which are not really important, like tennis cups. Is that morbid? And you are more interested in murder than in nieces, and there is no use pretending that you are not. Because, Pam told herself, murder is always important. Maybe it is the most important thing in the world, because it is the most final thing in the world.

“You can't be interested in life without being interested in death,” Pam told herself and realized that, this time, she had again thought out loud. She realized it because the driver bent a little lower over his wheel, as if he were shrinking from something. She was sorry she had spoken aloud, but after all it was true. That was one reason why almost everybody was interested in murder—everybody who was alive. It was because, however you thought about it, it was in itself a thing of major importance.

It isn't morbid, Pam thought. Not really—not being interested in it isn't. People always are, as long as they're interested in anything—anything human. Some people pretend not to be, but it is either pretense or they aren't interested any more, in anything. Even uninteresting murders are interesting and you read about them in the newspapers. You read enough, anyway, to find out that the details are not interesting. But you read that much, always, because murder is interesting. It is horrible and frightening and dangerous, and perhaps it is morbid. But it is interesting.

“And,” Pam thought, “what really is morbid is not to be interested in things which are interesting.”

The taxi driver spoke. His voice was uneasy, tentative.

“Which side, lady?” he said. “Penn or Long Island?”

“Oh,” Pam said. “It doesn't matter, really. I'm meeting … Either side—Penn, I guess. Or right in front.”

“Thanks, lady,” the driver said. “Right in front all right?”

He seemed to be a very odd taxi driver, Pam thought. He wasn't like most taxicab drivers, really. He was—sort of subdued. Which was inappropriate in taxi drivers. The cab stopped and she left it and paid her fare and looked thoughtfully at the taxi driver. He was inappropriate, although he looked appropriate enough. It was—

The word “appropriate” seemed to have done something to her mind; it had stirred her mind and found a lump in it, of which Pam had not a moment before been conscious. It was a lump of something she ought to remember, or think about; it was a lump of something odd, not yet arranged in its proper place—not yet resolved by her mind. It was a lump about something else which had been inappropriate and not what she expected, although both what had been at odds with expectation and what the expectation had been were only uneasy feelings, not ideas.

It did not, Pam thought, walking along the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station toward the stairs leading down to the concourse, apply essentially to the taxi driver. He was clear in her mind, and he was inappropriate, and that was that. This was either before the taxi driver, or was to come after him. The inappropriate thing was either in the past or in the future—something which had been wrong, or something which was going to be wrong. Like going to the Penn Station to meet people coming in at the Grand Central. Although it wasn't that, because the girls were coming from Philadelphia, and that was Penn Station. So it couldn't be that.

It was in the past, Pam decided, and, because it was now bothering her noticeably, she went into the past to look for it. It felt like being in the very recent past—today's past, probably. She went over her day—over breakfast with Jerry worrying about his speech, and over luncheon with Dorian at the French place in Radio City, where they had taken up the outdoor tables and were laying a kind of floor, probably for the ice skating which ought to begin before long, now; over cocktails at Charles with Jerry and dinner afterward at home—dinner early because of the lecture, and with Jerry still not eating anything much, and turning every topic of conversation into something about the introductory speeches he had to deliver. (Jerry is so foolish about things, Pam thought. He's so sweet, really.)

There was nothing inappropriate in the day up to then, or at the Today's Topics Club. Nothing until Jerry had turned, after a really very nice little talk, and invited Mr. Sproul to get up. And Mr. Sproul hadn't got up—that was inappropriate, all right. Pam thought about it, going down the stairs, and shook her head. That was a big thing; this which bothered her was a little thing. It wasn't about Mr. Sproul—or, anyway, not about Mr. Sproul's being dead. It was a little thing, perhaps afterward, which was at odds with expectation. It was—Pam tried again to make it come clear—it was as if a picture you had once seen and now saw again had subtly changed in the meantime; it was as if the tree in the right foreground had turned, between the two times of seeing, into a bush.