Killing the Goose (29 page)

You could begin to see how it was, Weigand said, when you talked to Beck. Because in a way, when you talked to him, it turned out that Beck was mad.

Pam nodded.

“He's crazy,” she said. “It's—it's frightening. I never met one before—a—a leader. If that's what he is. A man trying to be God. And believing it.”

A megalomaniac, Bill Weigand said. Probably actually on the border-line—that mystic, blurred line which lay, perhaps, between what was called insanity and what wasn't. A mania shared by most of history's villains, and by not a few of its saints. A mania which became most dangerous, perhaps, when it distorted a mind which was not essentially a very good mind. Like Hitler's. Like Nero's. Like Dan Beck's. The comparisons were not absurd. Beck was probably as efficient an agent of retrogression, and of terrorism, as Hitler. The danger from Beck had remained, so far, chiefly potential. But there was no reason to think that, given the right time and place, he might not have been as devastating as Hitler—as good a figurehead for tyranny. His mind was as good; if anything, he was slightly more coherent, a little more plausible. And he had the same delusions. He saw himself as a man on horseback.

“Not, I think solely for what he could make out of it,” Bill amplified. “It isn't as simple as that. Unless you broaden the term—make it mean what he could
be
out of it. He isn't insincere, any more than any madman is insincere. Probably he would argue—although not very well since he killed Elliot—that he is really heading, or preparing to head, a great movement to make people happy. But the arguments would be merely window-dressing. Because what made his ideas great, to him—what would have made any idea great—was that he represented it. He was what was tremendous. The greatness lay in him. And I suppose he thought of himself—thinks of himself—as somehow sacred. To stand in his way is—oh, I don't know. Standing in the way of Man, or something.”

“Did you,” Jerry wanted to know, “get all that out of talking with him today?”

Bill Weigand started and then grinned.

“Right,” he said. “It's pure interpretation, based partly on what has to be true. Because he admitted to Pam that he murdered Ann Lawrence, and that was why he murdered her. There wasn't any other reason.” Bill turned to Pam. “Incidentally, Pam,” he said, “you'll have to testify to that. It will be admissible. And you'll have to stand a lot of cross-examination and—and slurs.”

“All right,” Pam said, equably. “I don't think people ought to kill people.” She thought this over. “I never did,” she added. “And you're right about the way Beck feels about things, Bill. You make it very clear.”

Or, Bill qualified, very turgid. But that, or enough of that to go on with, was what the jury would have to understand. Because once they understood that, the rest would be simple. They would still have to use their imaginations, but they would have something for imagination to stand on. They would have to make the assumptions which followed logically—the assumptions to which the State would point.

Ann Lawrence had been telling Elliot that he had to give something up. They could prove that from Mrs. Pennock's statements, which were part of an informal record—admissible, they could hope, on the testimony of members of the police force who had heard her make them. What the jury would have to believe was that Ann was telling Elliot he had to give up writing for Beck. The State could suggest—would suggest—the reasons she must have had. She thought the work Elliot was doing, cynically, was a dangerous and anti-social kind of work. They could prove without much trouble that she had strong views about things like that. She thought, the State would further suggest, that Elliot ought to be doing his own work—that, even if not a “wrong” thing, writing all Beck's speeches for him—writing for Beck everything attributed to Beck—was an unwise thing for Elliot to do. Unwise from the point of view of his own future. The State would suggest that Elliot had come up against a choice between Ann—who could give him not only love but the money and more than the money he made from Beck—and Beck himself. Fighting for Elliot, Ann probably threatened to tell what she knew of the Elliot-Beck collaboration, exposing Beck.

“Which,” Weigand said, “would have ruined Beck if it had been believed. Because Beck, to his followers, wasn't just a man who said things on the radio. He was the Great Man. And he couldn't be just part of a great man—just the voice of a great man. Which was what he really was. Elliot, and the scripts we have show it, was more than a ghost. Elliot was the brains of the whole affair. Probably that knowledge, as much as the money, kept him at it. Elliot had power of his own—and loved it. That's why, even when he began to suspect Beck, he didn't come to us, but tried to work it out on his own. He wouldn't stand for murder, and that in the end killed him. But he would stand for a good deal to keep the Elliot-Beck game going. It was a game he enjoyed. He wasn't, evidently, very scrupulous.”

The night of Ann's murder Elliot, as they would try to reconstruct it for the jury, had listened to the girl and been to a degree swayed. Probably he was easily swayed—and if he was, Beck knew it. Beck was shrewd. Probably the girl's effort to get Elliot away from Beck had been going on for some time, and recently intensifying. After he had left the girl, Elliot had called Beck. (This was assumption, but it fitted.) He had indicated that he was thinking of calling the collaboration off. And Beck went at once to Ann's house for a showdown.

He did not, Weigand thought, go with the explicit intention of killing her. Probably he hoped to persuade her. But if he did he failed. And if he failed, his whole megalomaniac world-structure fell apart. Perhaps the last straw was when she threatened to expose him. And then—

“Well,” Weigand said, “then she was an obstacle and invited—well, invited the thunderbolt. It fell.”

That was the first murder. The second—the murder of Frances McCalley—they could only guess about. (But Beck would not be on trial for it.) During her conversation with Beck, Ann undoubtedly let fall something which revealed that she was not the only one who knew that Beck was really only a voice with Elliot's mind directing it. She let it out that Frances McCalley knew too. And after killing Ann, Beck realized that this knowledge in Frances McCalley's mind would, if she was allowed to reveal it, be a signpost pointing directly at his guilt. So he had to kill her. So he did kill her.

Mrs. Pennock was killed because she had seen Beck come to the house after Elliot had left. But she had also seen Pierson there—Pierson had gone there between Elliot's departure and Beck's arrival. Mrs. Pennock wasn't sure that Ann had not been dead when Beck arrived—she wasn't sure whether Pierson or Beck had killed the girl. (She knew Elliot hadn't; Elliot was a shield set up to protect the other two men to keep them safe for blackmail.) So she had tried to blackmail them both. And there Pierson would come in. Already, twisting this way and that to get out of his own trap, he had hinted that he would admit that Mrs. Pennock had been talking to him when she was killed. He might even, Weigand thought, say that he had heard Mrs. Pennock speak to Beck before Beck killed her.

“And if he does,” Bill said, “I think he'll be lying. To save his own skin. Which it won't—he's going up for larceny, whatever he does.” He smiled slightly. “Of course,” he admitted, “the length of time he goes up for may—but you wouldn't want to hear about that.”

“No,” Jerry said gravely. “We couldn't bear to.”

Elliot probably suspected Beck from the first; presumably he had gone to the considerable trouble of escaping because he wanted to get to Beck and find out. Probably Beck talked Elliot out of the idea—or almost out of the idea—for a time. And he gave Elliot the alibi, which was at the same time an alibi for Beck. It was easy to half-persuade Elliot of Beck's innocence, because Elliot wanted to believe him innocent. He wanted to keep the collaboration going. But that half persuasion became a good deal less than half when Elliot heard of Frances McCalley's death. Here were the two people who were linked, chiefly, through him—and the two who knew he was more than half the great Beck. It must have become pretty clear to Elliot then, and it must have become clearer the more he thought about it. Until—

“Until he went to Beck again,” Pam said. “And accused him. And then Beck got violent again. And killed him. Because by that time there wasn't any choice, even if he did lay the golden eggs. Because you have to kill even that kind of a goose if it can—can—What can geese do, anyway?”

“Hiss at you,” Dorian said. “Fly at your eyes. I don't know.”

This one, Bill pointed out, could send Beck to the electric chair.

Bill Weigand discovered, with faint surprise, that his cocktail glass was full again. He noted, with pleasure, that he had neglected to keep any sort of count. He put the cocktail where it belonged.

“And so, I think, can we,” he added. “With a little here and a little there, and the right kind of hints and things.” He looked at his empty glass reflectively, holding it not quite out, but so that a really ardent host might think of it as being out. Jerry North obliged.

“I hope we can,” he said. “It will please the commissioner very much. The commissioner doesn't like Mr. Beck.”

Pam considered this. She thought of Beck on the other side of a very frail table, and of what she had seen in Beck's eyes.

“Do you know,” she said, “I think the commissioner and I will get on fine. When we meet, of course. He seems to dislike the most—the most unlikeable people. And Mr. Beck was, wasn't he?”

It was interesting, Bill Weigand thought, to notice that Pam North used the past tense in speaking of Mr. Beck. Now if the jury could be brought to see with Pam North's eyes. He thought this over and sighed. There would have, he decided, to be an easier way than that.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries

1

T
UESDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
11: 5:30
P
.
M
.
TO
10:55
P
.
M
.

Miss Amelia Gipson presented a firm front to the world; she stood for no nonsense. For the conscious period of her fifty-two years she had stood for no nonsense in a world which was stubbornly nonsensical. The nonsense in the world had not been greatly abated by her attitude, but Miss Gipson's skirts were clean. What one person could do, she had done. If that was inadequate, the fault lay elsewhere; there was a laxity in higher places. Miss Gipson often suspected that there was.

She wore a gray rayon dress on this, the last evening of her life. It was fitted smoothly on her substantial body, which, although Miss Gipson was not notably a large woman, was apt to give frailer persons an impression of massiveness. It followed her firm bosom—a meticulously undivided expanse—with discretion; it was snug over her corseted hips. There was a touch of white at the throat; there was a little watch hanging from a silver pin on the left side of the central expanse. Above the touch of white at the throat, Miss Gipson's face was firm and untroubled; it was a face on which assurance rode, sure of a welcome. Miss Gipson did not know that it was the last evening of her life. Nothing was further from her thoughts.

The colored elevator man in the Holborn Annex greeted her with docile respect and rather as if he expected her to smell his breath. She had complained to the management on one occasion that there had been, in George's car, an unmistakable odor of liquor. She had indicated a belief that it might have had its origin in George. She had pointed out that an elevator operated by a person under the influence of alcohol was a menace to the tenants. The management had listened, nodding agreement, and had taken it up.

“Beer ain't liquor,” George had insisted. “I had me a beer. A beer ain't liquor.”

Anything was liquor to Miss Gipson, the management thought, fleetingly, and as it thought of Miss Gipson had a sudden, unaccountable longing for a drink. But the management merely cautioned George, a little vaguely, not to let it happen again. He hoped, this evening, that Miss Gipson would not detect that it had happened again.

Miss Gipson was not thinking of George. She had collected her mail at the desk when she came in, and the top letter was addressed to Miss Amelia Gibson. Miss Gipson's eyes had hardened when she saw this, and realized that the world was at its nonsense again. There was no reason why the world, including department stores with fur collections to announce, should not learn that Miss Gipson's name was spelled with a
p
, instead of a common
b
. Miss Gipson had had a good deal of trouble with the world about this and resignedly expected to have more. It was not that she did not make the difference clear.