Killing the Goose (23 page)

“And you're tired,” she said, “and maybe I shouldn't tell it on the telephone anyway. Have you had breakfast?”

“I don't know,” Bill said. “I think—I had some coffee around four and some more, I think, a little while ago. I've been—busy, Pam.”

“We just heard it,” Pam said. “About John Elliot. And I've got an idea. So why don't you come over and have breakfast?”

There was a pause while Bill thought of it, and then sudden decision.

“I don't know any reason,” he said. “We're taking Pierson to magistrate's court at ten and I'm going to be there. And after that, the D.A. wants to take it to the Grand Jury immediately. It's—it's that kind of a case. And I talked to Dorian about four and I think I persuaded her I was all right and that she should go back to sleep. So—”

It took him only about ten minutes. Pam waited—and Jerry waited too, and then went to the study and told his office he would be late, and returned and waited again—while Weigand ate hungrily, but abstractedly. When he had finished, Pam thought he looked better, although still very tired.

“Well, Pam?” he said. “What's the theory?”

Pam answered with a question. Was Weigand sure that Pierson was the man they wanted? He hesitated a moment. Then he nodded.

“All things considered,” he said. “Yes. That is, I think he's the man. I'll admit it's going to be hard to prove. Because, while he had motive and opportunity, we can't prove he had them exclusively. The defense can—”

“He didn't,” Pam said. “Or, if he did, not because of the money. Or, if the money comes into it, not entirely because of the money. Unless he needed the money so badly, to make it good to the Lawrence estate, that he had to steal Mr. Beck.”

Bill Weigand looked at Jerry and Jerry shook his head.

“That's what she keeps saying, Bill,” Jerry said. “She keeps talking about somebody's having stolen Mr. Beck. I think she means kidnapped.”

“I don't care what word you use,” Pam said. “I say stolen because I can spell it. And I never know how many p's in kidnapped.”

Jerry looked at her and ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. It was a little thing—but life was made of little things. Particularly as lived with Mrs. North.

“Listen, darling,” he said. “I don't want to stop you. But you weren't going to
write
it. I mean—you were just going to
say
it. And you can
say
kidnapped. You just did.”

“Of course I can
say
it,” Pam said. “But when I can't spell a word, or have to think about how it's spelled, I just don't use it when I'm talking. Not if there's another word just as good, like ‘stolen.' It's just a—a feeling. I just
feel
that people ought to say words they can spell.”

“But—” Jerry said, and stopped. He thought and tried again. “You mean it's—pretentious, or something?” He said. “To say words you can't spell?”

“Well,” Pam said. “It's sort of pretending you can spell them: Or it feels that way to me. Sometimes. Sometimes, of course, it doesn't at all.”

Jerry thought it over and said, “Oh.”

“As far as I'm concerned,” Bill said, “I often feel the same way, for some reason. But I can spell kidnapped. Why do you think somebody has kidnapped Mr. Beck, Pam? Because obviously nobody has. He's still on the radio.”

“That's just it,” Pam said. “How do you know?”

“Because you can hear him,” Jerry said. “If you're not careful. As we did last night, Pam. Don't you remember?”

Pam looked at him as if she thought he was not as bright as usual. She said of course she remembered.

“That,” she repeated, “is
it.
How do you know it was Mr. Beck? Because I think it was somebody else
pretending
to be Mr. Beck.”

They both looked at her. They looked at her with a kind of surprise and interest and wonderment. Then they looked at each other. Understanding ran between them and by consent Bill Weigand took it up from there. Jerry merely ran his hand rapidly through his hair.

“Listen, Pam,” Bill said. “Let's get this straight. You mean that somebody is impersonating Mr. Beck? That the real Beck has been sto—kidnapped, and that the man we hear on the radio is another man altogether pretending to be Dan Beck? Because that's obviously impossible.”

“Why?” said Pam. “I do think that. Why is it impossible?”

“Because,” Bill began and was baffled momentarily by the multitude of reasons which presented themselves. “I'm tired, Jerry. You tell her.”

Jerry paused to get a grip on himself and told her. In the first place, Dan Beck sounded last night just as he always sounded. “Awful.” She was imagining things. To start with, she had nothing to start with.

He wasn't, Pam told him, being very clear. But she thought she understood what he was trying to say, and it was a matter of opinion. Suppose, just for argument, that she
had
something to start with. Suppose there
was
something wrong with Beck's talk on the radio the night before. Suppose, just for argument, that it was different.

“How different?” Jerry said, deciding to take it a step at a time. “It was the same voice, wasn't it?”

“I don't know,” Pam said. “It didn't sound unlike the same voice. But it was on the radio, remember. They can do it with a mixer, or something. The sound engineers. If the man who was impersonating Mr. Beck had a voice just
something
like his, they could make it sound right enough to fool almost everybody if they were
expecting
it to be Mr. Beck's voice. Because most of the time you hear what you
expect
to hear. Not what you
really
hear.”

There was, Jerry had to admit to himself, something in that. But it was, he felt, beside the point. Because even Pam admitted that it sounded like the same voice, if you expected to hear Beck's voice. And that seemed to argue that Pam hadn't expected to hear Beck's voice.

“Really,” Pam said, “I didn't notice the voice first. You're right about that. It was only afterward that I realized how it would be about the voice, if it sounded just reasonably like the right voice. Really it was what he said.”

Jerry said it sounded like the same sort of thing to him. He said it sounded like, using the more polite of the several things it sounded like to him.

“Of course,” Pam said. “It was the same sort of thing—generally. But it didn't feel like the same thing. It was—a matter of style, I guess. It sounded rougher, and at the same time less—less certain. The other times I've heard it—oh, it swung along. Swang along? Anyway, you felt that it was going very well, even when you hated to admit it was going very well. Confident and—dramatic. And all the sentences the right length. And last night it sounded like an imitation. And then I thought—suppose it is an imitation? Suppose it isn't Mr. Beck at all, but somebody imitating him.”

“And then,” Jerry said, “you thought somebody had stolen him.”

Pam nodded.

“And that somebody was impersonating him,” she said. “Nazis. Or Japanese. Don't you see what they could do?”

Jerry looked at Bill Weigand, and now there was doubt in his eyes.

“Come to think of it, Bill,” he said, “it wouldn't be a bad trick. It would even be a pretty good trick. It could be made—oh, into a kind of sabotage of minds. Beck has a tremendous following—and a not very bright following. Suppose—suppose you wanted peace, say. Peace of the Nazi kind, of the Jap kind. You could—you could work on them. Subtly, of course. Not all at once. I could do it myself, if I were a Nazi and had the chance. Anybody could do it who knew the tricks. It could be—it could be a tremendous thing, really.”

Bill hesitated. He was, Pam decided, thinking it over.

“Suppose you were doing that,” she said. “Suppose you were an agent for Germany. And you had it all fixed up—you had somebody to impersonate Beck; you had the people fixed you would have to have fixed. And then suppose, by accident somehow, a girl like Ann Lawrence stumbled on the truth. She knew the real Beck; suppose she saw the substitute Beck—suppose something came up so that they couldn't keep her from seeing him—and knew right away that he wasn't Beck. If you were an agent and found out that she knew, wouldn't you kill her? And if she had told other people—like the McCalley girl, and her servant, and Elliot, as she might, wouldn't you kill them too? And wouldn't that account for the different weapons and things, and the fact that Mrs. Pennock was killed while she was actually talking to somebody who logically ought to have been the murderer? Because it would have to be a gang and anybody in the gang could be sent out to murder any of them. One of them could kill Mrs. Pennock, for example, while she was talking to another one.”

It was a long speech and Pam was almost breathless when she finished. She was also intent and anxious, because the more she outlined it the more she believed it. And Bill had not interrupted her, even by the shaking of a head.

She waited after she had finished and still Bill Weigand did not interrupt. He was thinking about it, she decided, and finding something in it.

He was thinking about it. He was thinking, specifically, of one small odd thing of which Mrs. North knew nothing. He was thinking of a comfortable, middle-aged housekeeper who helped her husband take care of Dan Beck, and of the way, as a detective had left, she had peered surreptitiously after him. It was a tiny, clear picture in his mind, and he had almost forgotten it. And it fitted. It fitted Mrs. North's picture of a gang. Or it fitted another picture, which was—in final outcome at any rate—the same picture. Because, although it was clear that Mrs. North didn't, he doubted the impersonation theory. That would be difficult to bring off. He told her why.

“Impersonation on that scale is story-book stuff,” he said. “It isn't possible—or it's so improbable, so involved, that for practical purposes it isn't possible. You could find somebody about Beck's size, probably. Maybe you could find somebody who looked enough like him so that, if you didn't know either of the men very well, you would have difficulty telling which was which. Perhaps you could even find somebody with a voice enough like Beck's to confuse people—on the radio anyway. But none of these similarities, even if you got them all in the same man, would be enough to fool anybody. Not even a little; not even for a minute. Not anybody who knew Beck better than by sight. They'd simply say, ‘That isn't Beck.' You could say it looks like Beck and sounds like Beck and anybody who knew him would grant you that and still merely laugh and say, ‘But of course it isn't Beck. It isn't even very like Beck.'”

“Well,” Pam said, “he could just keep away from people who knew Beck that well, couldn't he? I don't say it would be perfect—really. I said all along it wouldn't be. I said it didn't fool Ann Lawrence.”

But Bill Weigand shook his head, and when Pam looked hopefully at Jerry, he shook his head too.

“Beck couldn't, Pam,” Jerry said. “That's just it. A recluse—a man who didn't see very many people. But not Beck. For one thing, he broadcasts three times a week. He has to go to a radio studio, with attendants who know him and an announcer who knows him and people in the sound room who know him. All of them would know too well to be fooled. Think of the sound engineers, for example. They must know every intonation of his voice.”

“But,” Pam said, “I said it would have to be a conspiracy. There would have to be a lot of people in it. I think there were a lot of people in it, not only at the studio but a lot of people in lots of places. Maybe this Mr. Pierson was in it along with a lot of others. Maybe he really did kill Ann—maybe he killed any of them or all of them. But it was because he was in the conspiracy. Maybe stealing Ann's money was part of the conspiracy. Maybe that's how they financed it. Maybe it isn't Nazis, but just people in this country who
think
like Nazis.” She paused. “Because,” she said, “I do think there are American fascists, even if the newspapers make fun and get indignant. Because there are so many people in this country there would almost have to be every kind of people there were anywhere.”

There was a short pause, during which Jerry and Bill Weigand declined the conversational opening provided by Pam North's concluding venture. Then Bill suggested the other idea. He said that it had come to him as he thought of the little old woman at Beck's—the little woman who looked so motherly and was so evidently spying on him as he left. Of course, he pointed out, she might have been merely innocently curious.

“The other possibility,” he said, “is that Beck is really Beck, but that he's under some sort of pressure. I mean, if I believed your theory at all, Pam, I'd believe some such version as that—not the impression theory. Suppose Beck was, in some way, really being held prisoner and made to say what these people—the people in your conspiracy, the Axis agents—wanted him to say. Suppose the nice old couple in his apartment are really guards in a way, put there to see that Beck obeys orders. Suppose he knows he'll be killed if he doesn't do what he's told. Or suppose—”

Bill Weigand stopped suddenly and thought what he was saying. It was preposterous, of course, but the further he went into it the more small hints came up to make him think it might not of necessity be preposterous. First the little woman spying; now Beck's past.

“He lived for a good many years abroad,” Weigand said. “During the time Hitler was coming up. And it isn't clear just where he lived or what he did. At least it isn't to me. Somehow, in that time, he might have left—hostages. There may be someone over there in Nazi hands—a woman or a child, perhaps—who is being used to keep Beck in line.”

Pam shook her head.