Murder Is Served (10 page)

They had gone to the cab, then, and when they were in it, had said, “Dyckman University” to the driver and lighted cigarettes, Pam had said, “Who is Elaine Britton, do you suppose? All covered with mink.”

“What?” Jerry North said.

“Mink,” Pam said. “I didn't count because it was leopard.” She looked down at her jacket. “Of course,” she said, “mink is mink. You can't get away from it.”

“You can, my dear,” Jerry assured her. “Unless manufacturing costs—”

“I know,” Pam said. “Who is she, do you suppose? Apparently Bill sent for her.”

“Darling,” Jerry said. “How would I know?”

“To me she looked like one of Tony Mott's girls,” Pam said. “Not that I ever saw any of them. Maybe it's just the mink.”

“Maybe,” Jerry said. “What do we say when we see Leonard?”

“‘Look, Professor, come clean,'” Pam told him. “In effect. What precisely did the paper say, and try to remember more of it. Did it specify Tony Mott? Did he know she was Tony Mott's wife? Is he in love with her himself and did he kill Mott because she still loved Mott and he was jealous? Leonard, I mean. And—”

“Pam!” Jerry said. “You're not going to ask Leonard if he killed Tony Mott and tried to throw the blame on the girl because of whom he killed him?”

“Relatives,” Pam said. “‘Hims' and ‘hes.'” She paused. “And ‘whoms,' for that matter,” she said. “It doesn't sound very orderly, does it? Maybe he had another reason to kill Mott.”

“Maybe he didn't kill Mott,” Jerry suggested.

“Of course, if you're going to be negativistic,” Pam said. “Did you notice how that girl stuck out? I mean—”

Jerry said he knew what she meant. He pointed out that he had not seen that girl, presuming they were talking about an Elaine Britton.

“Probably just as well,” Pam said. “I wouldn't trust her.”

“Trust me,” Jerry said, and put an arm around her.

“Within reason,” Pam told him. “But it would be nice if she did it.”

Jerry asked her how many murderers she wanted. She said the mink would do fine, but they still had to think of Leonard. They thought of Leonard.

“Where at Dyckman?” the taxicab driver said, interrupting them. They were stopped by a red light, and he was turned to face them. He looked at them with doubt. “You want to register?” he said.

“Thank you,” Pam North said. “No.”

“People older than you do,” the driver said. “Yesterday I drove a man up there must have been fifty.” He nodded. “Coincidence,” he said. “Makes you think, if you know what I mean. Here I been driving a cab two years—three years come next summer. So, up to yesterday did I go anywhere near Dyckman University? Then I drive this party up there and now I'm driving you two.” He shook his head. “Makes you think,” he said.

“It's a small world,” Jerry told him.

“That's what I say,” the driver said. “What about these Russians, now? What do you think?”

“The light's changed,” Pam said. “It isn't red any more.”

“Say,” the driver said, “that's a good one, lady. That's a good one.” He started the cab. “Where at Dyckman?” he repeated.

“Extension Building,” Jerry told him.

“Like this party yesterday,” the driver said. “It sure makes you think.”

He became, apparently, lost in the thoughts thus forced upon him. They went up the West Side Highway, swung right at 125th Street, continued up Broadway, turned right again and stopped. The Norths got out, paid and tipped. The wind took them, swept them into wide doors. A young man sitting at a desk marked “Information” told them they were wrong. This was the building, yes. But this was not a means of ingress. “The Dyckman Academic Theater, this is,” the young man said. “To get to the Extension offices you go out and around. Around to the right's shorter. Go in the students' entrance and climb the stairs.”

“There must be a way through,” Pam said. “It's cold out there.”

“Passages,” the young man said. “Subterranean. Full of old desks. And, anyway, I can't let you. Against regulations. The regulations say out and around.”

They went out and around. They walked with the wind behind them beside the tall building, which might have been any tall building. “No ivy,” Pam said, her teeth chattering. They found a wrong door, locked, and then the right one. They went into a corridor and faced a flight of stairs. “Even universities smell like schools,” Pam said. “It makes you think.”

“It's a small world,” Jerry assured her.

A stenciled hand pointed up the stairs toward “Offices of University Extension.” They started up. The first flight was only half a flight, ending in a landing, with double doors on the left and corridors leading off on the right. They started across the landing toward the next flight of stairs and stopped halfway, opposite the double doors, which were marked “Exit Only.” There was a sound coming from behind the doors; a human sound. It was a voice, it was a wordless moan.

“Oh,” Pam said. “No!”

The moan came again.

“Oh,” Pam said. “Somebody's—”

Jerry North was already pulling at one of the double doors. It opened toward him. Just inside a man was lying, face down. Beyond him, the seats of an empty theater stretched away, around and down toward a stage. The man moaned again. It was a kind of “oh, oh, oh,” slurred into a single, continuing sound. Pam North held the door and Jerry knelt beside the man. Jerry touched him and then looked at his hands. There was blood on them. “Oh,” the man said. “Ohohohoh.” Gently, carefully, Jerry turned him a little so they could see his face. The eyes were closed.

It was a familiar face. It was John Leonard's face. Jerry pulled at his coat, opening it. The shirt was red around the left shoulder. More blood was seeping into the shirt from a wound under it.

The movement seemed to arouse Leonard. His eyes opened slowly and he looked up at Jerry North.

“Lie still,” Jerry said. “You'll be all right. You've been hurt.”

“Knife,” Leonard said. “A knife. Wasn't it?”

“I don't know,” Jerry said. “How do you feel?”

Leonard started to get up.

“No,” Jerry said. “You'd better lie still. We'll get somebody.”

“I feel all right,” Leonard said. “It just—stings. I remember, now. He had a knife—whoever it was had a knife. I was—” Leonard could look down, now, at the blood on his shirt. He closed his eyes suddenly and let himself slip back onto the floor. “Makes me faint,” he said. “Always did. Since I was a boy. One of those things, I guess.”

But his voice sounded stronger.

“I'll get somebody,” Pam said. “Where?”

“Through the theater,” Leonard said. “There'll be somebody at the information desk in the lobby. Have him call the Medical Office. Only I don't think it's anything. Just the blood.”

Pam went, her heels clicking on concrete. She came out on the other side and the young man at the information desk said, “Hey, you're lost again. I told you—” and then stopped when Pam spoke, talking fast.

She was back only minutes when a doctor came. Jerry had taken his own coat, rolled it, slipped it under Leonard's head. Leonard did not seem in much pain, and his voice was quite strong. But he kept his eyes closed. “The blood,” he said. “I don't want to pass out again.”

It took the doctor only minutes. And the wound was nothing, almost nothing. A slash by a knife, not much below the skin, nicking the muscle in the upper part of the left side of Leonard's chest. The bleeding was slow; gauze and adhesive tape covered it, seemed almost to stop it.

“You're all right,” the doctor said. “You can get up, now. We'll fix you up at the office.” He looked at Leonard, who sat up. “Not that you weren't lucky,” he said. “What happened?”

It did not become entirely clear, then or for some time later, what had happened. Re-bandaged, his left arm in a sling, Professor Leonard told the Norths, and the doctor, what he thought had happened.

He had been at his desk, advising students, at about twenty minutes after four. A friend had telephoned him from the bookstore and suggested he take a breather and come over for coffee at the fountain. Leonard had agreed. He had finished with a student, told the next that he would be back in a quarter of an hour, and gone out of the office and down the stairs toward the street. When he had reached the double doors of the exit from the theater he had noticed that one of them was partly open and had decided to cut through the theater auditorium.

He had opened the door further, stepped through and almost at once felt a slashing pain in his chest. It was dim inside the doors but there was enough light for him to see that his coat was cut and then, in an instant, to see blood coming out of a wound. He had more heard than seen someone starting to run across the auditorium and had started in pursuit. And then, apparently, he had fainted and fallen.

He had seen the back only of the running figure, and that through the swirls of darkness which began to converge on his mind when he saw blood seeping through his shirt. He started to shrug his shoulders, winced with the pain, and said he couldn't even tell whether it was a man or a woman.

“You say you started after him,” Pam said. “But you were just inside the doors when we found you. Against them, almost. And they were closed.”

Professor Leonard shook his head. He managed to smile faintly. He suggested he might have come to, partially, tried to reach the doors, fainted again against them. “I don't know,” he said.

“This man who called you,” Pam said. “This friend—”

“Paul,” Leonard said. “Paul Weinberg. In the philosophy department. My God, do you suppose he's still waiting?”

A telephone call answered that question. Professor Weinberg was not waiting in the bookstore. He was in his office. He had been in his office all afternoon. He had not been at any time at the bookstore. And he had not called his friend and colleague, Professor John Leonard. He had been too busy even to think of it.

“Well,” Leonard said. “Well. Think of that. So it was—intentional. Planned.” He passed his free hand through his thin blond hair, in a gesture which made Pam North think of Jerry. He looked at Jerry North, then at Pam. “Who?” he said. “Why?”

Neither of them could answer that.

“Maybe Bill can,” Pam said. “Lieutenant Weigand. Eventually.”

“Tell me again,” Weldon Carey said. His voice was rough, he sounded angry. “Tell me again. Make it better if you can.”

She told him again. She had got a telephone call from Tony Mott, asking her to come to his office. “From my husband,” she said. “My dear husband.” Weldon Carey told her to skip that. “Skip the whole line,” he said. His voice was still rough. But he reached out across the table and covered one of her hands with his.

“You got this call,” he said. “You're sure it was Mott?”

“I thought so,” Peggy Mott said. “It sounded all right.”

“Go on,” Carey said. “Tell me again.”

She had gone to the office, getting there perhaps five minutes before her appointment with Mott. She had gone in the back way, as she had done before, as he suggested she do. She had knocked, thought she heard him speak—she was not certain now that she had heard anything—and had opened the door. “I was keyed up,” she said. “I thought—I hoped—”

“All right,” Carey said. “I know. Go ahead, Peg.”

“He was lying there,” she said. “He'd—he'd fallen forward across his desk. There was—was blood all over the desk.”

“He was dead?” Carey said.

“I thought so,” the girl said. She began to shake; he could feel the movement in her hand. “I thought so.”

“You didn't touch him?”

“Oh, no! No!”

“And you went out. Did you run?”

“I think I walked.”

“You didn't tell anybody? Go for help?”

“I was afraid. Oh, don't you see? Don't you see, Weldon? I was afraid.”

“You found him, you don't know whether he was dead, you didn't call anybody. Sure I know. It's what I'd have done, or anybody. But you'll be talking to cops, Peg. Don't you see? You'll be talking to cops.”

She kept on shivering. Her wide eyes were fixed.

“It was that way,” she said. “What shall I do?”

They were in a booth, in a little restaurant near Fourth Street. There were cocktails in front of both of them. He finished his in a kind of fury.

“Drink your drink,” he said. “For God's sake—drink your drink.”

She took the glass, raised it to her lips, set it down again as if she had forgotten why she lifted it. Her eyes were fixed; she was not using them to see with. Damn those eyes, Weldon Carey thought. Damn those beautiful eyes. Oh, lady, but you're lovely! He was furious at her, trapped by her loveliness; resentful of her loveliness. Good God, Weldon Carey thought, haven't I had enough of the big things? Can't I just have the little, easy things? The pleasant, trivial things? Do I have to beat my brains out all my life?

He was a dark, angry man. His black hair was disordered and there was a kind of fury in his black eyes. He leaned a little toward the girl; even seated, his whole body had a kind of thrusting, forward movement. Now he snapped his fingers, holding his hand up in front of her face.

“Drink your drink, I said,” he told her. “Drink your drink, Peg. Drink it!”

The girl's eyes came back.

“Why do you bother?” she asked him, and her voice was suddenly quiet. “It's hard on you—wrong for you. You ought—”

“Shut up,” Weldon Carey said. “Shut up, Peg.” He made her eyes meet his. “Don't be a fool, Peg,” he said. “Don't be a fool, darling,” he paused. “Darling,” he said again, very slowly, very carefully, as if it were a word which held some special magic.