Murder in a Hurry (27 page)

Then Brian Halder moved suddenly, had Liza in his arms, whirled with her there so that his back was to the white-haired woman, his body between the girl and the gun. Liza started to scream as he touched her, then seemed to go limp in his arms. Then Raymond Whiteside, moving more quickly than seemed possible, lunged toward his wife, grabbing for her hand, for the automatic in her hand. He moved so rapidly that Mrs. Whiteside seemed only astonished; the expression on her face was, in the instant before he closed with her, began to struggle with her, one of unutterable surprise.

She did not seem to struggle, to make any great effort to retain the weapon. That Jerry North thought, as he moved again—was moved, this time by a strong hand against his shoulder, heard Bill Weigand's voice say, loudly, “All right, drop it!”

But Whiteside did not seem to hear Weigand. He fought, with a kind of desperation, for the automatic in his wife's hand and then, when it seemed he almost had the gun free, it was discharged and the little room roared with the sound. He stepped back as his wife fell, let the automatic fall between them.

Then, almost at the same instant, he was on the floor beside Barbara Whiteside, saying her name over and over, his voice uncertain, anguished. For the first moments he was oblivious to everyone; then he looked up.

“Get someone,” he said. “For God's sake—she didn't mean—”

His suffering was terrible to watch, Pam thought. Whatever his wife had done, he had loved her. To have it end thus, so terribly, so differently than he had planned when he had risked his life to keep her from again—oh, Pam thought, we were such fools; so slow.

She touched her cheekbones with her fingertips, in an involuntary gesture, as if she were about to cry. She watched Bill move into the room, put a hand on the shoulder of the broken man. There was little, now, one could do for him, but Bill was doing all—

“Get up, Whiteside,” Bill Weigand said, and his voice was cold, without expression. “You can quit that now and get up.”

Raymond Whiteside turned, looked up at Bill Weigand.

“Right,” Weigand said. “That's the way it is, Colonel. You're all washed up. You can save this sort of thing for the jury.”

Raymond Whiteside's face seemed slowly to gape open.
And mine must be
, Pam North thought, and the fingers of her left hand moved, of themselves, to touch her lips.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said again, and now he seemed to be lifting the substantial lieutenant colonel to his feet. “Halder—Sneddiger—perhaps your wife, Colonel. The attack on Miss O'Brien. It's quite a list, Colonel.” Weigand put both hands on Whiteside's shoulders and completed lifting him with a sudden jerk. “Get the hell out of the way,” Weigand said. “Let them get to her.”

But Mullins was already kneeling beside Mrs. Whiteside, working quickly, deftly. He looked up after a moment. “Maybe,” he said.

“I wonder if she'll want to,” Bill Weigand said, slowly. “Come on, Whiteside. Let's get going'.”

“Oh!” said Pamela North.

13

Thursday, 5:35
P
.
M
. to 7:10
P
.
M
.

Even now, sitting in the Norths' living room, sketching the Norths' major cat, Liza O'Brien found memories difficult to sort out, felt as if she had, as nearly as anything she could think of, fallen over a cliff. It had all been that sudden, that meaningless. If she had fallen she had been caught; evidently she had been caught. But not even about that was there real assurance.

She had not quite fainted when Brian seized her; she could hardly tell, even now, looking back, whether she had come so near to fainting because of terror or relief or—when you came down to it—mere surprise. She thought Brian had touched her face gently, tenderly, as he held her, after the gun had gone off; she thought she could remember, as from a long way distant, the voices of Weigand and the others, of Raymond Whiteside. (His voice, at the very last, had gone suddenly high and shrill.) And she had been there—surely she had been there still?—when men with a stretcher came and lifted Mrs. Whiteside onto it and carried her out. But all of it was misty, as if the air had fogged against both sight and hearing.

Strangely enough, the thing clearest in her memory was Pam North's voice, and Pam was speaking in the taxicab which brought them to the Norths' apartment, where nowadays she seemed always, somewhat inexplicably, to be coming.

“But he
wouldn't
have yelped,” Pam was saying, in this clearest of Liza's memories. “Don't you
see?
So it
had
to be her.”

She remembered the tone of Pam North's voice, which was one of entire astonishment.

The next thing Liza—now putting in the delicate tracery of a whisker—could remember clearly was Pam North's again bringing her breakfast in the small guest room and telling her, surprisingly, that it was almost two o'clock; saying, in answer to what must have been a look of disbelief in Liza's eyes, that, nevertheless, that was the time it was.

“They're doing something about the colonel,” Pam had said, putting down the breakfast. “Indicting him, I think. It seems they were sitting, so it was a good time.”

The few hours since then were clear enough, if uneventful. “They” had promised to come back as soon as they could. “Yes,” Pam said, “Brian too. He's with them.” She had smiled quickly then. “He's all right, you know,” she said. “He was trying to keep you from getting shot, because at the moment nobody knew quite what was happening and, anyway, you can't tell about guns.”

And Mrs. Whiteside, still alive, likely to live—“if she wants to,” Pam interpolated—was in a hospital and her husband was in jail, and a good deal more than likely to remain there. But beyond that, Pam North had not seemed a great deal clearer than Liza was herself.

“Apparently,” Pam said, after Liza had breakfasted and showered, come into the living room, begun to watch the cats, “apparently he was the one who killed everybody. But I must say it's confused as far as I'm concerned. Because I thought it had to be
Mrs
. Whiteside. Oh—”

Pam stopped then and, after a pause, said, “Of course. He saw him see it. I knew it had to be the dog.”

But she had not gone on from there; had said it was still confused, and they might as well get it straight from Bill, who would be there any minute. But a good many minutes had passed without Bill Weigand, and after a time, because Martini seemed today entirely agreeable to sit within view, Liza had begun to sketch, using typewriter paper and a stub of a soft pencil.

Then—just as Liza realized there was something wrong with the tracery of whisker; that you didn't really
see
a cat's whiskers that way—they came. Bill Weigand and Jerry North came and Liza O'Brien knew this vaguely, and saw Brian. And Brian saw her, because he walked across to where she was sitting and looked down at her, his face, his eyes, strangely questioning. For a second she looked up at him, her own eyes dark (for that instant her mind, too, shadowed) with uncertainty, and then all that vanished and she stood up and was holding herself tight against him in the fragment of an instant before his arms closed about her, and held her tighter still. And then Liza O'Brien sighed deeply—so deeply, so revealingly, that for a moment she felt her face flushing, and pressed it even more anxiously against Brian's chest. But nobody seemed to be paying any attention to them, and after the first second Liza realized it did not matter at all who paid attention, or how much.

Jerry was mixing drinks, then, and Bill Weigand was on the telephone, saying “at Pam and Jerry's, come on” in a voice which meant, to a now partially disengaged Liza, that he was talking to somebody he loved. That was fine, she thought; that was beautiful, and smiled up at Brian and pressed his hands, asking him to know how beautiful it was—everything was. She thought he did. Then suddenly he grinned at her and said, in a voice only for her, “I ought to slap your funny little face.”

“Of course,” Liza said. “Any time. Always.” Then she decided she must be getting a little hysterical, and further disengaged herself, although without letting go of Brian. Then they found a part of a sofa which was the right size for two people who wanted to sit as closely as possible together.

“All right,” Pamela North said, when the drinks were distributed. “Why was I wrong, Bill? Because I thought it was Mrs. Whiteside. Because she must have been the one who kicked the dog.”

Bill Weigand looked incredibly tired; so, Liza saw now, did Brian and, almost equally, Jerry North. Apparently none of them had slept until two in the afternoon. Probably Weigand had not slept at all.

“He was always more likely,” Bill said. “The thing which set if off worked for both. And Sneddiger was strangled.” He paused. “By hand,” he said. “Her hands might have done it—but her nails would have cut the skin. The skin wasn't broken. Also, if there's an alternative, I'm inclined to doubt children murdering parents. By premeditation. It happens, of course. It doesn't often happen. But it
was
the dog, of course.”

“It yelped,” Pam said. “And from where he sat he could see the top of the stairs. I realized that when I sat there. You could see the people in the foyer. But you could also see up the stairs.”

“Right,” Bill said.

“Would it be all right,” Jerry North asked, starting around with a shaker, “if we lapsed into English? Temporarily? For Miss O'Brien's sake?”

Pam looked momentarily surprised, but the others laughed, and they were still smiling when the door buzzer sounded and Jerry let Dorian Weigand in. She told them it all seemed very jolly, and asked where her drink was, and then said hello to the cats, who had remained, in spite of what they evidently regarded as a throng of humans. Dorian got her drink and found a place to sit—a place beside Liza, whose shoulder she patted gently, as if in approval.

Then everyone looked at Weigand.

“The grand jury returned a true bill,” he said. “Charge, attempted murder of Mrs. Whiteside. That will hold him; that will be superseded, of course. Murder first on Halder; same on Sneddiger. As I told him, there's plenty. If necessary, we can add assault with intent on Miss O'Brien. Even simple assault on Pine, where there wasn't any intent, I imagine. He's not admitting anything; he's got a lawyer.” He shook his head. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the D.A. doesn't think it's going to be easy. Neither do I. It'll be all bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. And if he hadn't, in the end, tried too hard to do just that, he might have been able to hang it on his wife. But then, all along he tried too hard.”

“From the beginning,” Dorian Weigand said. “Please, Bill.”

But Bill looked at Pam North.

“The beginning was the dog who yelped,” Pam said. “Mrs. Whiteside said she merely lifted it off a bed, put it out of a room. But it yelped, and they do when they're kicked. Or stepped on, of course. And as soon as he yelped, he came down the stairs.
And
, from where he was sitting, Mr. Halder could look up the stairs and see—well, whose foot it was.”

“Anyway,” Bill said, “the others were all there. Mrs. Whiteside had stayed behind for something.”

“Right,” Pam North said. “And—wait a minute. She couldn't have seen that he had seen, because she would have been too high up.” She looked at Bill Weigand. “I could make that clearer,” she said. “I guess. I should have thought of that.”

“She admits she—pushed Aegisthus with her foot,” Bill said. “She's conscious now; ready to talk. I—I rather think she will. She was trying to rescue her husband there at the end; get him out of it, give him a chance to run. He tried to kill her for her pains, while pretending to struggle for a gun she was ready enough to give up—to him. She seems—well, a little annoyed about it all.”

Bill Weigand paused. Unurged, he continued.

“Whiteside saw what happened, saw his father-in-law's face,” Weigand said. “He knew the old man pretty well; they all did. I suppose to the old man anybody who kicked a dog was—well, peculiarly depraved. Certainly asking for punishment. Whiteside realized that; realized they were in for trouble when Halder got up abruptly and left probably looking like—” He hesitated.

“A thunderhead,” Pam said.

Bill Weigand accepted it.

“Listen,” Dorian said. “Is a jury supposed to understand this? Was Mr. Halder
that
eccentric?”

It was one of the problems, Bill agreed. But he thought so. The whole pattern of Halder's life had been so eccentric that any jury, almost the lowest common denominator of any jury, ought to be able to extend eccentricity to cover Halder's rage at witnessing what he no doubt considered the abuse of an animal.

“Whiteside tried to do something to fix things up,” Bill said, then. “He went down to the pet shop; probably tried to calm the old man down, first. But—he went prepared. The old man was stubborn; probably told Whiteside that he was changing his will, cutting his daughter down—perhaps throwing her out entirely. Probably told Whiteside, to prove it was settled, that he had wired his lawyer. So—”

“But,” Pam said, “didn't he take an awful risk? Suppose Mr. Halder had wired—oh—‘Planning to cut daughter Barbara out of will because she tried to kick dog downstairs stop will come office tomorrow stop'?”

It would, Bill agreed, appear so. But—Halder had not wired in detail, and this Whiteside had somehow found out. Presumably, Halder had repeated to him the actual content of the wire; perhaps even shown him a copy. In any event, Whiteside had had reason to feel the risk wasn't great; that it was of no importance against the certainty that his wife would be disinherited the next day.

“And—” Bill started to go on, but Pam North stopped him. Pam said, “Wait a minute,” and, when Bill waited, said, “What was the hurry? Was the colonel terribly broke or—?”