Murder Is Served (4 page)

“Yes,” Pam North said. “I see why you thought it was a man.”

Leonard looked at her a moment and then said, in a faintly surprised tone, “Oh.”

“Such a culmination would have finality, completion,'” Pam read on. “‘It would offer complete discharge, complete release, beyond anything I can imagine. It is possible that, for a person fully what I have called “in hate,” the killing of the object of that hatred is the only way to attain that release. Real hatred cannot be sublimated.'”

Pam looked at Leonard again.

“Is that true?” she said.

He raised his thin shoulders, let them drop.

“If she thinks it is,” he said. “It could be. You want fixed criteria? No, Mrs. North. There aren't any. It could be true for—for this person. Not for you, not for me. A subjective truth. But subjective convictions can lead to objective actions.”

“If a person is sane?” Jerry said, and then Leonard merely looked at him and shrugged again.

“You think she can't be—well, dramatizing? Making it up? Letting a notion run away with her?” That was Pam North. Leonard looked at her, again over the glasses which were not there.

“Of course she can,” he said. “She can be doing it for any purpose—to work off something, to make up a story, to see her instructor jump.”

“But you think that isn't it?”

“I think she hates somebody and is thinking about killing somebody,” Leonard said. “I think she's close to killing somebody. For what it's worth, that's what I think.”

“And?” Jerry said.

“Obviously, I want to share the responsibility,” Leonard said. “That's what motivates me. I want to get out from under, or have somebody under with me. You've had experience.”

“Vicarious,” Pam said. “What do you think, Jerry?”

They both looked at Jerry North, who said, “Lunch or another drink?”

“No,” Pam said. “Answer me.”

Jerry smiled at her, rather faintly. He asked whether she had read everything. Pam looked at the paper again and then looked, with an odd expression, at Professor Leonard.

“Except one line,” she said. “Some dots and then, ‘That is why I think hatred is the most important emotion affecting the normal human mind.' Did she really—?”

“End that way?” Leonard said, and nodded. “Yes. Tying it together again, rounding it off. They almost always do. It amounts to a mentaltic. I copied it off because—well, it completes the picture, somehow. Don't you think?”

“Peculiarly,” Pam said. “Well, Jerry?”

Jerry North spoke slowly.

“It's nebulous,” he said. “Intangible. There's nothing for anyone to get hold of.” He spoke to Leonard. “You realized that. Otherwise, you could have gone to the police. As it is, they wouldn't listen.” He paused. “How could they listen?” he added.

“Not to me,” Leonard agreed. “An academic theory, a crack-pot scare. Coming from me.” He returned Jerry North's look.

“This friend of yours,” he said. “This police lieutenant. Weigand. He'd listen to you. To both of you.”

“Listen,” Jerry said. “Certainly. What can he do?”

“Talk to her?” Leonard said. “Watch her? Find out, somehow, who she's talking about and—warn him? I don't know.”

Jerry shook his head.

“Listen,” he said. “A young woman, with a dramatic temperament, writes a term paper which may indicate she's thinking of murder. She may be pulling your leg. She may be talking out of the top of her head, just working up excitement. She may be experimenting, trying to identify herself with some imaginary person—acting an emotion. She may be just an hysterical young woman. There must be—God—thousands of hysterical young women in New York, threatening to kill their husbands, talking about killing themselves, saying ‘I hate you' to their boyfriends. You see that?”

Leonard shook his head; he started to get up.

“You're wrong,” he said. “I can't prove it. Or—you may be wrong.” He was standing now. “My apologies,” he said. “I had thought—” He did not seem to think it worth finishing. “Thanks for the drinks,” he said, instead.

“No,” Jerry said. “Sit down. I realize you're an expert, that your experience and training carry weight. Bill Weigand would realize that. You say she's not just one of thousands of hysterical young women. I see that. Bill would see it. Because you say so, and you know about these things. And still—what's Bill to do?”

Leonard did sit down. He sat down and regarded his still empty glass, but not as if he saw it. After a time he shook his head slowly.

“However,” Jerry said, “I will tell him. We'll both tell him. We'll put your case—your fear. It'll worry him. It worries me. I guess it worries Pam. And—if this girl's really going to murder somebody, we won't stop her. Bill won't stop her. There's nothing he can do. He can't arrest her. He can't have her followed around. If he talks to her she'll merely be—well, more careful. If she really means all this.” He stopped, suddenly. “Aren't you going to talk to her yourself?” he asked Leonard. “Wouldn't that be a normal step? An expected step?”

Leonard looked at him for several seconds. He looked at Pam, more directly this time. But then he said only, “I don't know. I'll—think about it. It might help.” He paused again. “But I still wish you'd tell your friend,” he said. “Tell him—tell him anything you like. That I'm a neurotic scholar, disturbed by fantasies. But—tell him. Yes?”

“Oh yes,” Pam said. “Oh yes, Professor.”

The Weigands had listened. Dorian sat in a big chair with her legs curled under her, and looked into the little fire which darted, needlessly, pleasantly, among the logs in the Norths' fireplace. But she listened. Bill Weigand, detective lieutenant, attached to the Homicide Squad, sat at one end of a sofa, with Pam North at the other end. Jerry sat beyond Dorian, nearest a chest with bottles on it. The Norths told it together, filling in, amplifying, commenting, and from time to time Bill Weigand nodded. As one of them emphasized a point, Bill looked at the typed sheets which lay on the sofa beside him—lifted them, looked at them, put them down again.

“And,” Pam North said, “we've told you.”

For a few moments, Bill Weigand said nothing. He looked at his slender wife, curled like a young cat in front of the fire. She seemed to feel his eyes on her, and turned and smiled, but merely waited.

“He knows his business?” Weigand said, then. “This professor of yours? This Leonard?”

Jerry North nodded and said he thought so. He said others thought so, others better trained to form an opinion. “Special readers,” he said. “Before we brought out his book. They thought he was good.”

“And he takes this seriously,” Bill said, as if he were talking to himself.

“Oh yes,” Pam said. “He says so.”

There was something in her voice. The Weigands and Jerry North looked at her, Dorian twisting in the chair by the fire. Pam looked back at them and seemed a little puzzled. “That's all,” she said. “He says he takes it seriously. So I suppose he does.”

“And?” Jerry said.

“No ‘and,'” Pam told him. “He knows the girl. So it isn't just words on paper. It's words plus the girl.”

“Look,” Jerry said. “You're arguing. With whom? Why?” He waited. Then he told her to come on.

“
Because
he knows her,” Pam said. “And she's his student. Why didn't he ask her? Why didn't he say, ‘Oh, Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is—'”

“Mott,” Bill said.

“‘Oh, Mrs. Mott, about this paper of yours. Are you really going to kill somebody you hate? Or is it just fun and games?' Why wouldn't he do that?”

Dorian Weigand looked at her husband and nodded.

“If he was worried,” Pam said. “If he took it so seriously. Unless—”

She paused there and, when Jerry's eyebrows invited her to go on, she shook her head.

“That's all I think,” she said. “Why? Why come to us? To come to you, Bill? Without talking to her?”

“I haven't the answers,” Bill Weigand said. “I haven't anything. How did it sound to you, Jerry?”

Jerry North thought a moment.

“I accept it,” he said. “I think I do. It—worries me. And I don't know why he didn't go to the girl. Why, when I suggested it, he seemed—oh, hesitant, doubtful.”

Bill Weigand nodded, and said, “Right.”

Pam had been looking past Dorian, at the fire.

“Of course,” she said, “we didn't see all of it, all she wrote. Just—that.” She motioned toward the typed pages. “Excerpts he typed out. He copied from—” Then she stopped again and her eyes widened.

“Of course,” she said. “That's what he says. Again. It's what he says.”

There was the faintest possible emphasis on the last word. Dorian was the first to pick it up.

“But why?” she said. “Why would he make all this up? What reason would he have?”

“Look,” Jerry North said. “We just ask each other questions. The point is, we haven't enough to go on.”

Bill Weigand nodded at that.

“Right,” he said. “Or—any place to go. If he's worried, if we're worried, if it's all what he says it is, still there's no place to go. You realize that.”

They realized it. Their expressions said so, the movement of their heads.

“Not now,” Pam said. “Unless—it's part of something else. A beginning of something else. A—a string we're supposed to pull, which pulls a bigger string and then—then something falls down. Like a Goldberg. Which reminds me, shouldn't we let out the cats?” She looked at the others. “String, you know,” she said.

Jerry went in and let the cats out of the bedroom. They came in single file, Martini leading, blue eyes round and, somehow, doubtful. The other seal-point came after her and had an anxious, puckered face. The blue-point, which had been so unexpected and still looked so surprised, came last, with her head on one side.

Martini sat down and flicked the end of her tail and the seal-point jumped on it.

“Gin,” Pam said. “Watch out. You ought to know how your mother—”

Martini whirled, made a kind of clucking sound in her throat, and bit the ear of the seal-point kitten. The kitten ducked its head and waited for the storm to pass. The blue-point made an odd, irregular leap over her sister and landed on her mother's head. Martini wrapped forepaws around the blue, wrestled the smaller cat to the floor and, apparently, began to devour her. The other kitten, clearly pleased at this development, leaped on Martini's tail again, worrying it happily. The blue-point struggled loose, jumped backward, ran furiously halfway across the living room and stopped, sat down and began to scratch an ear all in one movement.

“There's no doubt,” Pam said, “that three cats are a lot to watch. Of course, if she'd had all five, we'd only have had two—her and one. But when there were only two we had to have three. Because they were so fond of each other.”

“What?” Bill said, and then said, “Never mind.”

“Five kittens we couldn't have kept,” Pam said, ignoring the last. “So we'd have given away four. But three is just possible.” She looked at the cats, which had merged again and seemed to be engaged in a battle royal. “I guess,” she said. “Sherry!” The blue-point had suddenly disentangled herself, rushed across the floor and bumped, at full run, into the leg of a chair. She bounced, sat down and looked dazed.

“She'll knock her brains out,” Bill said, judicially.

“It's only because she's so cross-eyed,” Pam said. “They both are, but she's cross-eyed
and
one of her eyes goes up. So she never knows, poor baby. Do you, Sherry?”

Sherry got up and advanced toward Pam with a slight lurch. She jumped and came down in Pam's lap.

“Always,” Pam said, “she overjumps. I think she sees too far up.”

They digested this. The blue-point purred on Pam's lap. Martini lay down on her side and the seal-point kitten began to nurse her. Both the Norths spoke at once, Jerry saying “Gin!” and Pam, “Martini!” Neither cat paid any attention.

“She hasn't had any milk for weeks,” Pam said. She looked at the cats. “You'd think they'd know,” she said. “Anyway, you'd think the kitten would—miss something. Wouldn't you? But the vet says, so what, everybody's happy, and that it won't go on forever.”

Martini stood up suddenly. She backed away from her kitten, crouched, and leaped at it. The two rolled over and over, a swirl of brown ears, of waving brown tails. Then the kitten suddenly shot out of its mother's embrace and dashed madly from the room. Martini bounded in pursuit. They disappeared and the blue-point on Pam's lap suddenly wailed. She looked up at Pam North, weeping, and then slid from the lap and went after the other two at a gallop. There was a sound from the front of the apartment of something falling. It did not sound like a cat falling; it sounded, as Jerry North pointed out, more like a table.

“So deft,” he said. “So catlike. So precise in all movements. Good God!”

Pam was looking at the fire again and she spoke in a different tone.

“About the other,” she said. “About the—the hating girl. We just wait?”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “And probably for nothing.”

But to that, nobody said anything.

3

S
ATURDAY
,
11:30
A.M. TO
2:50
P.M.

André Maillaux, moving softly, seeing everything, came past the checker's desk and his pleasing plumpness intercepted an invisible ray. The door in front of him opened widely so that if he had been balancing a tray, even the largest tray, there would have been no excuse for accident. André Maillaux was not, to be sure, balancing a tray; it had been upward of fifteen years since André had balanced a tray. Even the lightest tray, occupied by the most special cocktails, prepared under André's own instruction for the most special of guests, was carried after André by another and lesser as André progressed, triumphantly, from service bar to honored table. The tray was held for him while André, with the deftest of fingers, conveyed the glasses; delicately one by one, from napkin-covered chromium to waiting service plates. But now M. Maillaux conveyed only his own pleasing plumpness from kitchen to dining-room.