Murder is the Pay-Off (11 page)

He listened to his father coming along the hall. His father banked over at the Merchants National. It was the one determined stand Dorsey had ever known Nelson Cadwallader Syms to make. He’d refused, even in face of the plea of family solidarity, to bank where his wife’s brother John Maynard was on the Board of Directors. Poor old Nelly, Dorsey thought. He was probably expecting a notice himself that morning, and was in no hurry of any kind to get to the office to get it.

Dorsey went around the table and dropped a kiss on his mother’s feverish cheek. “I’ve got to rush,” he said. He raised his voice to carry to the hall. “So long, Dad. I’ve got to shove. See you later.” He went out the other way, through the kitchen. He always hated to see his father beaten down.

The butler at the Rogerses’ country house out on the Bay glanced apprehensively at the paper propped up in front of the master of the house at the foot of the dining-table. Mr. Rogers had cleared his throat twice already. The third time was the boiling-point, in caloric inverse to the bacon and eggs under the plastic lid covering Mr. Orval’s plate at the other end of the table. The butler’s palms were discreetly moist as he listened intently for Mr. Orval to burst out of his room upstairs. He could hear him then, running halfway down the stairs and slowing up to come the rest of the way quietly and soberly. Mr. Orval’s father did not like people being late to meals and having to race into the dining-room, no matter how many parties they’d been to the night before. The butler cleared his own throat noiselessly and breathed more freely as he poured a cup of coffee from the silver pot and put it at Mr. Orval’s place.

“Good morning, sir,” he said.

Mr. Rogers’s gray brows beetled over the edge of his paper, but not before Orvie Rogers had had time to give his tie a yank into proper place.

“Good morning, son.”

“Good morning, Dad.”

Mr. Rogers went back to his paper, Orvie took the lid off his bacon and eggs.

The butler glided across the thick Chinese rug through the swinging door into the pantry as Mr. Rogers cleared his throat the third time. Behind the door he paused, listening discreetly. He wondered just how rough a session it was going to be. Mr. Orval was not any too fit. The expression on his face as he’d lifted the plastic lid had nothing to do with the bacon and eggs being cold. It had to do merely with their being. He heard Mr. Rogers clear his throat again.

“About those checks we were talking about, son.”

The butler glided swiftly away toward the kitchen. He had heard Mr. Rogers discuss checks with his son before at breakfast, and it was nothing he cared to listen to again.

“You’ll find a check on my desk, Orvie,” Mr. Rogers said. “I want you to take it by and give it to Janey. Tell her it’s a personal loan from me to her, and she can pay it back when and as she can.”

Orvie Rogers looked up quickly and opened his mouth. He closed it again as his father cleared his throat for the fifth time. “I understand this fellow Wernitz was murdered last night.”

“So I heard,” Orvie said. Even coffee tasted foul this morning.

“Good riddance. I wish we could get those machines out of Smith County. Nobody would think of cutting a hole in his pants pocket to let his money dribble out, and nobody with any gumption would put a nickel in a coin machine.”

His brows beetled over at Orvie again. He knew Orvie played the slot machines, and Orvie knew he knew it.

“In any case,” he said, “Janey’s a fine girl. I don’t want her mixed up with this filth. I’m very fond of Janey.”

He said it very much as if it were a personal accusation. Orvie waited, half expecting, from long experience, that his father would go on and say, “If you’d had the gumption of a wet muskrat you’d have married her before Blake did.” He didn’t mind it anymore. Things would have been different if he had married her—or if she would have married him.

“And I suggest you let Blake get out of the way before you go there,” his father said. “I’ve got some idea that what Gus doesn’t know about this won’t hurt him. I dare say most of us are fools when we get out off our own field. I learned that when we had to convert the plant at the beginning of the war.”

At John Maynard’s house in town his daughter, in a tailored suit and white blouse tied in a flat bow at the neck, ready for a day’s work at the
Smithville Gazette,
jabbed viciously into the grapefruit in front of her as she waited for her father’s footsteps on the stairs. At last she put her spoon down impatiently and pressed the bell under the table. When the colored boy came she said, “Lawrence—go upstairs and find out what in God’s name is keeping my father. Bang on the door. Maybe he’s slipped in the shower.”

She picked up her spoon again. “Never mind. Here he comes.”

She raised her voice. “Daddy, if you don’t hurry you’re not going downtown with me.”

Then she realized that he was not coming. He was going into the library first. She looked at her watch. She was in a hurry. Gus always got to the office earlier than anybody else, and she had some unfinished business with Gus that she wanted to get on with. Her father was coming now. She looked up expectantly at him. Then she frowned. He wasn’t smiling his slow, easy smile, as he usually did.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?”

“Nothin’, honey.”

John Maynard came around the table and kissed her on the top of her head. He went to his place at the end of the table, waiting until the colored boy had gone out of the room.

“Connie, you haven’t done anythin’ foolish, have you honey?” he asked gently.

“Lots of things, I guess, Dad. Why? What particular one do you want to know about now?”

“I’m not jokin’, honey. I’m talkin’ about those checks I showed you last night. Did you take ’em out of the drawer in there?”

Connie Maynard stared at him. “Good heavens, no. Why should I do that? They’re not— Do you mean they’re gone?”

“That’s what I mean, Con. They’re gone. The whole lot of ’em. I was goin’ to take ’em around after Gus left home this mornin’ and have a little talk with Janey.” He looked past her out of the window for a few moments. “I’m tryin’ to think who was in there last night. Who’d want to take ’em, I mean, Connie.”

He shrugged and picked up his napkin, the old smile coming back on his handsome, rugged face. “It was mighty nice little Janey won the jack pot last night.”

Connie was watching him intently across the table.

“Daddy,” she said sharply. She put down her coffee cup. “Just how well did you know this Doc Wernitz who was killed last night?”

John Maynard smiled at her. “Now, honey.” He wiped his broad mouth with the corner of his napkin. “Now, honey, if I was you, I’d just keep my little nose out of things that don’t concern me. It’s always best. Usually I’ve always found it was safest, in the long run, too.”

The murderer of Paul M. Wernitz
mentally shook his head a little. It was a mistake to come down later than usual for breakfast. It was a mistake to do anything to call anybody’s attention to the fact that he wanted time to be alone, to think, to calculate, and reflect over his errors, so he could retrieve them if necessary and guard against future ones. Above all, he had to act as if there were nothing special on his mind, act as normally and casually as he always acted. He had to forget the sound of old Wernitz’s head as the iron bar hit it, not a loud sound, more like an eggshell as you closed your hand on it to crush it. But that was not why he’d spent so much time over his bath and shave. It was the unfortunate fact that in the average house the bathroom was the only place a man could lock the door and be alone without the risk of somebody walking in and surprising some expression that the most astute and carefully guarded mind might transmit unconsciously to the motor nerves and impulses controlling any man’s face. He had seen something of it in his own face in the medicine-chest mirror as he thought about himself, and the mistakes he’d already made, when he was wiping his face after he had rinsed off the shaving-soap. But it wasn’t Wernitz’s eggshell skull he had been thinking about. He kept his eyes down on his plate as he thought about it all again.

Damn Janey Blake,
he said quietly to himself. Who would ever have thought the little devil had that much guts? If he hadn’t had the quick-wittedness to pick up the phone in Gus’s den they might easily have got him. But they still wouldn’t have been able to connect him with the Wernitz thing out at Newton’s Comer. That was the one thing he didn’t have to worry about. He had been too smart to leave any tracks behind him there. He frowned suddenly, and bit his lower lip, remembering he was supposed to appear as he always did. He relaxed and took up his coffee cup, took a swallow, and put it down calmly.

The Janey business was an error. He could see that now. Calling her up, and calling up out at Wernitz’s to check on Gus and Connie, had seemed to make it easy going. It wasn’t his fault she turned out to be so quick on the trigger, but it was the sort of thing he should have been smart enough to figure on.

I can’t afford any more mistakes,
he thought. Janey was his second, or third. No. His fourth. He had to be brutally honest with himself if nobody else. He had to see his mistakes and admit them, and above all not miss any of them.

It’s a funny kind of thing,
he thought, moving the newspaper so it shielded his face. It wasn’t as if he’d acted on the spur of the moment. He’d known for some time he was going to kill Paul M. Wernitz. He had considered ways and means on what he might call an academic level for quite a while. The fact that Wernitz had forced his hand by suddenly letting it be known he was closing up shop and leaving Smithville, so that he had to use perhaps his least brilliant
modus operandi,
was unfortunate in one sense but very fortunate in another. Brilliance was likely to be involved, while in a murder at least simplicity and the presence of a natural and obvious suspect—especially if he happened to be an alien employee—was all to the good, if not egotistically so satisfying. He had been surprised himself at how neat the whole thing was—just as he was surprised now at how easy it was to carry on as if there were nothing at all on his mind. He heard himself listening and talking as much as he ever talked while he was trying to read the paper at the breakfast table. It was almost as if he were two people existing in one body. The only thing to watch, really, was that one didn’t get confused with the other.

He turned the page of the paper, realizing that the page he was apparently so engrossed in had nothing on it but an ad for a special sale of women’s fur coats. He turned to the financial reports. That was something he could be legitimately engrossed in, if anybody happened to notice.

Janey was a mistake. But Janey was only secondary, an effect following a cause, and the cause was his real mistake.
It was just a piece of damned luck, is all it was,
he told himself. But it wasn’t true, and he knew it. If he had let the blasted thing stay where it was, he wouldn’t have had any bad luck to complain about. Up to that point, everything was okay. Nobody could trace the calls he put in to get the service mechanics out of the place and off to the farthest corners of the county. He’d figured them out with a map, and gone to each place, to see for certain that Wernitz owned the machines there, get the names of the people who’d call in, and even listen to them to see what they’d say when they did call. He’d made a mistake about Heron Point, not checking up to find out it was closing down the day before. But even that had worked out all right, too, because Buzz Rodriguez who took the call hadn’t remembered, either, until he was halfway there, so that he got to the basement only in time to get a crack on his head, too. All that, with the one slight mistake that hadn’t mattered, had been carefully worked out and skillfully done.

The thing to do now was to sit tight; and there was one little trouble. He frowned down again at the small print of the stock market listings before he could catch himself. He had to get the thing he’d made the stupid mistake, his only serious mistake, of picking up off the dirt floor of Wernitz’s cellar.

I don’t know why the hell it worries me the way it does.
He could say that again, the way he’d said it to himself when he’d almost nicked his jawbone shaving. The chances were a hundred to one, a thousand to one more likely, that nobody but himself knew anything about it, or could even connect him with Wernitz by means of it.

Wernitz was close-mouthed, solitary in a psychotic degree. Afraid of the dark, blinding himself with glaring white lights, superstitious as a root-and-clay painted aborigine clutching on to his tribal talisman. But a talisman lost potency if other tribesmen knew about it. Even Achilles probably never went around bragging about his heel.

He quit reading the market reports and took another swallow of coffee. It was cold now, but he hardly noticed it. The palms of his hands had broken out in cold sweat. He unobtrusively wiped them off on the napkin in his lap. A hundred to one or a thousand to one, he had to get Wernitz’s talisman back, the gold-washed lucky quarter that he could have known Wernitz would reach for when the lights went off, to hold in his hand to come down into the shadow-filled basement and put in a new fuse. It must have been in his hand, to fly out and land, glittering like an evil eye there on the dirt floor when the iron bar came down on the eggshell skull.

Why did I have to pick it up? Why didn’t I leave it there?

He knew the answer to that, too. It had appealed to a kind of grisly sense of ironic relief, all of a sudden. It had even been grimly comic. “Whoever called this thing a lucky piece?” Wernitz had been almost fanatically dependent on it.

He took the last bite of his toast and the last sip of cold coffee. It was entirely by accident he’d learned about it himself. Some perfectly minor and unimportant piece of business that needed Wernitz’s signature. He had said yes, in the clipped laconic way of speaking he had, and then put his hand in his pocket, taken something out, put it on the table under his hand and peered at it. He said yes again. Then, as he’d started to put it back in his pocket his elbow struck the chair and the thing fell on the floor. He went after it in a flash. It was the gilded quarter. Funny, all of it, in one way, but not in another. Not the way Wernitz’s dry face had broken out with sweat as he retrieved it and put it back in his pocket. “No,” he said then.