Murder Is Served (3 page)

Jerry North looked at Pam, who was guileless, who appeared guileless. She had on a cherry-red dress and a small hat which seemed to have been made out of part of a leopard. She looked at him without a flicker in her eyes.

“I'm afraid—” Leonard began. He looked a little afraid, Jerry thought, like a psychologist who has slipped on something—a semantic, perhaps. He and Pam North ought, Jerry decided, to be rather interesting together. It would be interesting to watch a professional approach to the Pam North mind. At the moment, however, Professor Leonard did not seem to be approaching. Jerry motioned him to sit beside Pam; sat opposite them.

“Cocktails,” Pam said, as if it were obvious. “I took a chance and—oh, all right George. But I'm afraid I was wrong.”

George had brought in two martinis.

“However,” Pam said, “it works out. I'm almost ready for another, and Jerry wants one, and we can send George back for something else. Scotch?”

“To save time,” Leonard said. “Oh!” He looked at Pam North, who remained guileless. “Of course,” he said. “A martini's all right. Fine. Unless you?”

“Oh, I can wait,” Pam said. They drank. And waited.

“Well,” John Leonard said, “it's a funny thing. A frightening thing, in a sense.” He looked at his cocktail, drank half of it. He turned to look at Pam North.

“Did Mr. North tell you anything?” he asked. Pam nodded, amber earrings nodded.

“A little,” she said. “You've stumbled—he said ‘stumbled'—on a potential murder. Or murderer?”

Leonard nodded. He said, “Good. A potential murderer. I keep thinking I must be wrong. Then I read it again. I'm not wrong. Do you see?”

Both the Norths looked at him, and both waited.

“The uncertainty,” he said. “The feeling it's all—all imagination. My own. That I'm reading things in. It's one of my students, you see. A girl—rather beautiful, in her—oh, her mid-twenties. She's an actress. I don't know how good, how much she's really worked at it. Summer stock, I think, and a few parts in town. She's taking dramatic courses chiefly. Working in the experimental theater, reading plays. We have courses like that, you know. Play writing, even. I don't know why she's interested in psychology.”

“It's reasonable,” Pam said. “Understandable.”

Leonard said he supposed so. At any rate, she was in one of his classes, listening to lectures on psychology, reading psychological treatises, trying to find out how the mind works.

“The normal mind, you know,” Leonard said. “What we call the normal mind. Why it acts as it does. An elementary course, naturally. Designed to give them—oh, an inkling. A little familiarity with terms. I don't know what good it does them.”

He paused with that, and finished his drink. Jerry leaned back, caught George's eye at the other end of the open room, and gestured. George nodded.

John Leonard turned his cocktail glass slowly round and round in long, thin fingers.

“Anyway,” he said, “I had them write this term paper. In class.” He looked at Jerry North. “It's the end of the winter term, you know,” he said. “They have to have grades. I have to find out which have been listening, or even thinking. So they write these papers.”

“I remember,” Jerry said.

Leonard nodded gravely. He said of course. He described the nature of the assignment—to write, to discuss, the way one of the dominating emotions affected the normal mind. The idea being that they would reveal what they had learned, what they had thought.

“They're all kinds, of course,” Leonard said. “From kids just twenty to a few middle-aged people. It's an extension course, you see. Naturally, I got a—a variety in the papers. You can imagine it, probably. ‘I think love is the most important emotion affecting the normal human mind because it is so universal.' That sort of thing. ‘Looking around at the people I see every day, I am afraid that a great deal of human activity is motivated by the emotion of greed.' You can imagine. And some very different. A G.I. named Carey, for example—one of the ones who went through it. Did you ever think very much about fear—just plain, animal fear of being hurt, of being killed? Of—of ceasing to be? Of, as he said, having your guts spilled out? Carey has. A good deal, apparently. He wrote quite a paper.”

George brought new drinks. Leonard looked at his in apparent surprise. He started it. He said he was getting off the track.

“Actually,” he said, “not so far off. Carey and this girl are obviously seeing a lot of each other. I don't know how much, of course. I would think a—lot.” He gave the last word a special emphasis, an intentional importance. He picked up his glass and looked at it, but for a moment did not, to Pam North, seem to see it. Then he did see it and moved it to his lips.

“This girl's named Peggy,” he said. “Mrs. Peggy Mott. She wrote about hate. She was one of the few who did.” He looked at Pam North. “Actually,” he said, “not many people really experience hatred, you know. Annoyance, dislike, disapproval, but not the big thing. Well—this girl, this Peggy Mott—she has experienced it. She is experiencing it. This little essay she wrote, this paper, it was about the real thing. I'd stake—well, that's my business. I'd stake my job on it, my chance for a full professorship. This pretty young woman—she's blond, very pretty smooth hair, very wide eyes—hates somebody so much that she could kill him. And—I think she's
going
to kill him!”

“It's a man, then,” Pam said. “Does she—identify him?”

Leonard shook his head.

“Actually,” he said, “I only think it's a man. She says ‘this person,' ‘the one I hate'—that sort of thing. She doesn't write particularly well. It's full of clichés, of obvious words. I don't think she even tried to—well, to write it, to make it sound like an abstraction, like a hypothetical situation. And that's frightening, you know. Abandonment of disguise, of pretense, is a kind of failure to protect one's self, you see. It may indicate a kind of desperation. In a way, it's as if she had given up. I read that into it. I'm supposed to be able to read below the surface, you see.” He drank again, and now he looked at Jerry North. “As a matter of fact,” he said, rather simply, not with emphasis, “I'm quite good at it. I really know my business.”

Jerry North nodded his head.

“Did you bring this paper?” Pam said. “Can we see it?”

“I typed out parts,” Leonard said. “It's long, you understand. Long and full of repetitions. It's not all on one pitch, either. She goes off the track, gropes around, mixes obvious stuff with this—this other. I copied out passages—the beginning, sentences here and there. I brought that along.”

He took two sheets of typewriter paper, folded lengthwise, out of his coat pocket. He offered them to Pam who looked at Jerry and, when he nodded, took the sheets.

“She had a title on it,” Leonard said. “Printed at the top, rather large, underlined twice, just one word—‘Hatred.' The second underlining was heavier than the first. The first paragraph is the way it started, the rest is what I've picked out here and there.”

Pam nodded, beginning to read. She read:

“People say hatred isn't very common and that what most people think is hatred is really just dislike. I do not question that that is true of most people. But I know that there are some people whose whole approach to life is governed by hatred; hatred that makes you want to kill, very slowly and so that it hurts a great deal for a long time. I myself have experienced that kind of hatred and I still experience it. It makes everything else seem unimportant. More than anything else I want to kill this person I hate.”

Pam finished and looked up. Leonard was watching her.

“That first paragraph was her first paragraph,” Leonard said. “I thought she would go on and say what caused this hatred, or even say who had aroused it. She doesn't. As I said, I only think it's a man. Because—”

“Oh yes,” Pam said. “Because of the—intensity. You think love is mixed up in it—sex. That it's—built up, somehow, by sexual emotion.”

Leonard nodded.

She was not fencing with Leonard now, whatever she had done at first. Jerry noticed that. And, as he thought about her, she looked at him, as she so often did.

“I'll read it aloud,” she said. “It goes—”

She read the first paragraph again, aloud. Then she went on:

“‘It can last for months, perhaps even for years, and merely grow stronger. Other emotions may fade and grow less important. Hatred is like a hunger and grows stronger.… Another thing hatred does is to crowd out everything else. It doesn't leave room for anything else.'”

Pam stopped reading and looked at Professor Leonard and then at Jerry North.

“She's studying drama,” Pam said to Leonard. “You said that.”

Leonard, who had been looking at his empty glass while Pam North read, looked up at her now. He did not raise his head fully; it was as if he looked at her over his glasses, although at the moment he was not wearing glasses.

“I made allowances, Mrs. North,” he said. “Say she dramatizes it. Say that, in this relation, she is dramatizing herself to—to anyone who will listen. Take all that into account. And don't get the idea that people who dramatize their emotions in words, in attitudes, don't also dramatize them in action—aren't more likely to dramatize them in action. Don't think that it's really the still waters which run deep. That's the easy, comfortable thought; the reassuring thought.”

Pam North continued to look at the thin, gangling man beside her. He takes this seriously, she thought; he takes it hard. I wonder whether he knows how hard he takes it? Such a red mouth he has. But all she said was, “All right,” and then she went on reading.

“‘It can begin slowly and be built up by a lot of little things,'” Pam read from the typed words in front of her. “‘Or sometimes, I can imagine, it can come suddenly. There could be a kind of hate at first sight.'”

Pam stopped and looked again at Leonard, and this time he shook his head.

“All right,” he said. “Dramatization. Not true of the sane mind. But go on.”

“‘The deepest hatred, I think, comes about because of many little things,'” Pam read. “‘Little betrayals, little cruelties. It starts small and grows like a snowball and …'”

Jerry interrupted.

“Clichés, you realize,” he said to Leonard. “‘Grows like a snowball.' ‘Hatred is like hunger.' Clichés of expression, possibly of feeling?”

Leonard answered the question in Jerry's inflection by shaking his head again.

“I said she doesn't write well,” he agreed. “She falls into easy verbal forms. Most people do. It doesn't mean anything about—well, the importance of what's being said. In this case, the reality, the intensity, of what she feels.” He paused and seemed to consider. “Of course,” he said, “I know her, to some extent. I've seen her, heard her talk. Perhaps that makes a difference.” He looked at Pam North suddenly. “You think I overstated?” he said. “Took it too seriously? Go on.”

“‘It is difficult to explain hatred to a person who has never felt it,'” Pam read. “‘I suppose it would not be difficult, or anyway not so difficult, for a writer. But the words I think of, now that I try to explain why it seems to me the most important emotion a person can feel, do not seem adequate to explain what hatred is like. Most of the words are the same words you would use to write about dislike or annoyance or something like that. There isn't anything to compare it to.'”

Professor Leonard interrupted this time.

“To give a sense of magnitude, I suppose she means,” he said. “To express its quality of uniqueness. You see what she means.”

“Oh yes,” Pam said. She looked back at what she had read. “All at once,” she said, “I don't think you took it too seriously. I did at first.”

“Oh,” Leonard said. “Obviously.”

“Anyway,” Pam said, and resumed reading, “‘When a person hates another person, really hates them, it would be in a strange kind of way fulfilling. It would be—'”

“You notice how she shifts there,” Leonard pointed out. “She did from time to time all the way through. An unconscious attempt to get back to a general discussion, you know. To avoid betraying herself.” He nodded. “At the expense of grammar,” he added. “Which is rather significant. She started one way, ended another, as if something took over in the middle of the sentence. The instinct of self-preservation, I think the something was.”

Pam nodded, rather abstractedly, and said, “Listen.” She read again.

“‘—in a strange kind of way fulfilling,'” she read. “‘It would be
satisfying
, more satisfying than anything else.'” Pam interrupted. “The first ‘satisfying' is underlined,” she said. “It goes on: ‘Nobody who has not really hated somebody can understand that—how it fills you up, fills your mind up. As I said, it leaves no room for anything else. But after a while you don't want anything else, because hating is enough, hating is a
complete
emotion.'” Pam looked up again. “‘Complete' is underlined too,” she said. She went back to the paper.

“‘Most people think that love is the most important emotion. Perhaps it is, sometimes. But for a person who has been in love, hating—you could almost call it being in hate—is a great deal more important, because hatred occupies you so much more completely. Only a person who has had both experiences can realize that. And I should think that killing the person you hate would be a more satisfying emotional experience than anything else.'”

Pam looked up again.

“She didn't plan to write ‘anything else,' did she?” Pam asked.

Leonard shook his head.

“She started another word,” he said. “She scratched it out, thoroughly. The censor at work, of course.”