Murder in a Hurry (16 page)

Liza nodded.

“What's she supposed to do?” Brian asked, then. “Quit living? Quit seeing anybody? With Dad living downtown? Just sit in that house and what? Crochet?”

He seemed to expect an answer; there wasn't any good one Liza could think of. Maybe Mary Halder had been, by those who supposed for others, supposed to crochet. It was clear she hadn't; it was clear that, to Brian, what else she might have done instead required extenuation, even defense. Then—she smiled, answered.

“Of course not, Brian,” she said.

“Dad didn't expect her not to see people,” Brian said, and still seemed to be arguing with himself. “Only—well, about six months ago, this Pine comes along. He's an actor, you know. Younger than Mother, although maybe not much. She used to be on the stage, before she married Dad. She's always liked people like that. I guess some of them are fun.”

He's so serious, Liza thought. Was that why I used to think him more mature than I?

“Lots of people are fun,” Liza said.

Brian said he supposed so. He did not speak as if the matter were one to which he had given much thought. After a moment he continued, speaking carefully; trying, Liza thought, to tell what he so clearly felt the need to tell, yet to avoid implications.

Pine was not the first man with whom Mary Halder, with her husband unavailable, apparently so indifferent, had gone to dinner, to the theater, had “gone around.” For years, for most of the years Brian had been growing up in the tall, narrow house, seeing his father rarely, he could remember men calling for his mother, taking her out. But there had been, he thought, no man who had come for her with any regularity; no man who had not seemed, somehow, his father's friend, or at any rate acquaintance, almost as much as hers. Some of the men had, actually, been his father's contemporaries; had, Brian thought—thought now, with perspective of his own greater age—“gone around” with Mary Halder partly, at least, because they felt that her husband had behaved badly toward her and that his generation, which they could represent by proxy, owed an obligation to hers. “Dad's lawyer, for one,” Brian said. “One or two other men of Dad's age who used to be associated with him, who knew Mother and him before he—moved downtown, used to come to the house.”

There had, naturally, been fewer of his father's contemporaries as time passed; more younger men whose acquaintance Mary Halder had herself made. But there had never been any suggestion that these associations were, or needed to be, surreptitious. Frequently, indeed, one of the men would make a fourth with Mary, Jasper Halder and Jennifer. “Jennifer and Mother have always been sort of pals,” Brian said. “Jenn would say, ‘Get one of your boy friends and come along' to Mary. It was like that.” His father, Brian was sure, knew of all these casual friends and did not disapprove.

“No reason he should,” Brian told Liza and his eyes demanded her belief.

“Of course not,” she said, finding it easy to give the assurance he sought.

But Pine had been, from quite early, different. “Not really different,” Brian had said, and flushed slowly. “Don't think I think—” Again Liza assured him, again said, “Of course not, Brian.” The difference, Brian explained—explained so carefully—was in his father's attitude more than in anything else. J. K. Halder had not accepted Pine as he had the others. Brian explained that. His father was getting more odd as he grew older. “Harder to get along with.” He had always seemed aloof to Brian; seemed to view all of them with detachment, to a degree with irony. But lately he had found fault more often; very lately, Brian felt, he had seemed increasingly annoyed with all of them—with his wife, his older son and Jennifer, Barbara and her “Colonel.” Brian himself had got along with his father better than the others, but even he had not known when something he said or did, meant innocently, would antagonize the older man. His attitude toward Sherman Pine, Brian told Liza—and, she could see, told himself—was only part of this increasing irritability. And then there had been the matter of the dog.

“Mostly we kept animals of some kind,” Brian said. “Junior's got a couple of cockers; Barb and the colonel used to have a big yellow cat, but something happened to it, I guess. And Mother had a little dachshund for years. Nice little pooch. I suppose—oh, well, I suppose as far as Junior and Barb were concerned, it was partly a matter of keeping in good with Dad. He feels—felt—damn funny about dogs and cats. Thought they were better than people. One of his quirks.”

The little dachshund had died. That was about the time Brian's mother met Pine. Two months or so later, when she was seeing a good deal of Pine, J. K. Halder gave her the black Scottie; gave her the dog, told her its name was Aegisthus and, as he told her the name, looked at her in a peculiar manner. Brian remembered it; he had been there. “What a funny name,” his mother had said, and Halder had said, “Greek, my dear” and left it at that. Brian did not think the name had any special meaning to his mother; at the time it had none to him. But he had looked the name up in the unabridged dictionary and found out enough to want to make him find out more. “You know who he was?” Brian asked Liza, who nodded. “Sure,” Brian said. “Everybody does, I guess. I don't actually know whether Mother looked it up, but I suppose she did. She never said anything to me, of course.”

Brian stopped, shook his head slowly: He said it was obviously a hint; might even have been a warning to Mary. “A funny, nasty sort of thing for the old man to do, wasn't it?” he asked. “I always meant to—well, take it up with him. Tell him to lay off. But I never did. He—well, he wasn't an easy man to take things up with and, anyhow, I was fond of him.”

But if the little dog's unusual name had been intended as a warning to Mary Halder, it had had no result; at least, no visible result. She went on seeing Sherman Pine as before. “More often, if anything,” Brian said, and made the words an admission. He heard the admission in his tone and stopped speaking and looked at Liza.

“All right,” he said, as if in answer to something she had said, “maybe they fell for each other. I guess Dad thought so. Well—people do. Even people as old as Mother, I guess. It's—” He broke off.

“Things happen,” Liza told him, feeling for the moment as if
she
were old enough to be his mother, wanting to touch him, pat him gently, as if he were a child. He was so troubled, so intensely troubled; the trouble was so dark in his eyes.

“Now that Dad's dead, they may get married, you know,” he said. “She'll have the money, and—” Again he stopped. He seemed to be avoiding an idea which he found it difficult to avoid. But then he went on more quickly, as if anxious to get something said. And now he came back to the dinner at the Sutton Place house on the night J. K. Halder died; the dinner which Halder had left so abruptly, without explanation. Brian thought he knew why; was afraid he knew why.

They had had dinner in the dining room on the second floor and afterward had come back downstairs for coffee and brandy. They had been sitting in the rear of the room; Barbara Whiteside, Brian remembered, had stayed upstairs for some reason. Then the doorbell had sounded faintly and Brian had thought that his mother had looked, momentarily, startled and confused. One of the servants had opened the door and they had all looked up the room toward the foyer which opened into it. There had been the faint sound of voices and then Mary, saying something hardly articulate as an apology to the others, had got up and gone toward the foyer. She had joined someone there.

“All right,” Brian said. “I think it was Pine. I think before she could stop him, he—well, kissed her. Put his arms around her and kissed her, I guess. Hell—people do.”

He was not, Brian said, sure of this. He had looked and then looked away. Then the Scottie yelped upstairs and came tumbling down the circular staircase in a great hurry, yipping and apparently very put out about something, and Brian had been distracted and watched the dog as, he thought, the others had. By the time he looked back toward the foyer, partly because the Scottie was trotting in that direction to tell his mistress what had happened, the front door was closing. And, almost at once, Mary had come back carrying the little dog, and talking to it.

It was almost immediately after that, however, that J. K. Halder had stood up, had said, abruptly, “Good night,” and had walked to the door, with no more explanation to anyone, and with no apologies. He had, Brian thought, looked intently at Mary Halder, still holding the little dog in her arms, but he had not said anything to her. After he had gone, those who remained had looked at one another, expressed surprise and bewilderment. “I did, too,” Brian said. After that, the party had broken up; Brian had himself left within half an hour or so. Brian had been worried, upset, and wanted to get out of there.

“Because,” he said, “well—if I saw them probably he did. Probably that's what made him walk out. And—I suppose Mother knew it. I don't think she expected Pine, or anyway not so early. I—I guess they had an engagement for later. Those family dinners never lasted very long. They did meet afterward. I found that out. So—you see how it would look to—to people. Including this Weigand guy. As if they'd been found out and were afraid Dad would do something about it and so—” He looked at Liza. “Damn it all,” he said. “Don't you see?”

She saw; there was no way to escape seeing. And she had to make it more difficult, not easier.

“After you left the Norths',” she said, and her voice reflected her reluctance to say what he had to know about, “somebody called Lieutenant Weigand. From his office, I think. Apparently—well, Brian, apparently your father's lawyer had called the police and—said he had something important to tell them. I suppose it could be—”

“You don't know what?” Brian said, interrupting her.

She shook her head. If Weigand had heard on the telephone, he had not revealed what he heard. Perhaps it was nothing.

But Brian shook his head and now, unexpectedly, he seemed to have gained confidence, decision.

“Probably Dad got in touch with him,” Brian said. “We may as well face that, Liza. Got in touch to—well, maybe he planned to divorce Mother. Or—he could have been going to change his will, I suppose. So that—that Pine wouldn't get the money, too. And if Pine found that out—found it was either one, because he'd miss the money either way—Pine might have—” He paused. “You can see what Pine might have done,” he said. “And how Mother would be—involved.” But then he spoke quickly. “Not in what Pine might have done,” he said. “Not in—in the thing itself. But how she'd be dragged into it; get all—fouled up by it.” He looked at Liza intently. “Nothing more than that,” he told her. “But that's bad enough.”

Oh Brian
, she thought.
Dear Brian. You can't make it go away that easily. Not when you're afraid of so much more!

Brian stood up suddenly; now all the brooding uncertainty, the unhappiness, seemed to have hardened into something else. His eyes had changed most; had hardened most.
Why, he could be dangerous
, the girl thought.

But all Brian did, at the moment, was to look at his watch, as if it were an enemy, and shake his head. Then he looked at her, not as at an enemy, since his eyes softened and he half smiled.

“I'm going to get hold of Pine,” he said. “Try to—well, shake it out of him, if necessary. But it's after six, and he's probably eating dinner. He's got a part in some show, you know. We'll—I'll catch him at the theater, later.”

But that was wrong; that was puzzling.

“Listen,” Liza said, “didn't you say he came around the other evening? Monday evening? After you'd all finished dinner? Why wasn't he at the theater then?”

“He—” Brian began, but then he stopped and his brows drew together. He said, after a pause, that it was funny.

“You said,” Liza told him, “that you only
thought
it was Pine.”

To that, however, he shook his head, slowly. Whatever he'd said before, he told her, he was sure it had been Pine.

“Do the police know he was there?” Liza asked.

Again the heavy brows above the dark eyes drew together. After a moment's thought, Brian Halder said he didn't know. He had not told them, naturally. He didn't know whether the others had or whether, except for his mother, they had even known who had come to the door. The incident had been lost sight of Monday evening, forgotten in the greater interest of J. K. Halder's abrupt departure.

“Brian,” she said then. “You've asked your mother about this? About all of it. Haven't you?”

Again he hesitated a moment; then he nodded. That was how he knew it had been Pine. His mother admitted it had been Pine. She also said that, from about eleven-thirty that night, she had been with Pine until about one-thirty. “So,” Brian said, “if it was Pine, Dad must have been killed some time yesterday morning. Around two or three. Something like that. You see that?” He looked at her. “It
had
to be that way,” he told her.

There was one thing more she had to ask; that Brian had to take her asking.

“Brian,” she said, “has your mother told the police about this?”

He shook his head; he said, “No, Liza.” Then he looked at her almost with challenge. “But she will if they ask.”

9

Wednesday, 6:35
P
.
M
. to 10:33
P
.
M
.

Jerry North put cracked ice into cocktail glasses; and two of the cats, one sitting on either side of the operation, watched intently, one might almost have thought with comprehension. He finished and both of them looked up at him and waited. “That's all,” Jerry told them. He explained the matter to the two cats, who listened gravely. A human put cracked ice into glasses in advance, so that the glasses would be cold. Then when very cold liquid is poured in, it did not lose its chill to the glass. “See?” Jerry asked. Gin said, “Yah?” and tried to rub against Jerry North's arm, her tail wavering over the glasses. “Ice,” Jerry explained, with patience. “Ice, not tails.” He put Gin down on the floor, and Sherry fell instantly into her role of an abandoned cat, loved by no one, and cried out longingly. Jerry rubbed her ears and put her down by Gin. She immediately began to lick behind Gin's ears. Gin flicked her ears with impatience and the door buzzer sounded. The three cats, Martini appearing out of nowhere, went to assist.