Murder by the Book (5 page)

“He comes from New York,” Jefferson said. “Came. You're New Yorkers, aren't you?”

Both Norths nodded their heads.

“You didn't know him there?”

Jerry said, “No.”

Pam said, “There are millions of people in New York.”

“You'd heard of him? Mr. Grogan says he was a very well-known man.”

“I'd heard his name,” Jerry said. “I realized that after we met him here.”

“You came down here to fish, I suppose?”

“I don't—” Jerry said.

“Most people come to the Keys to fish,” Jefferson said.

“We,” Jerry said, “came because it's warm here.”

“Wonderful climate,” Jefferson said. “Best in the country. Except for hurricanes, of course. You're not a fisherman, then? Game fish?”

“No. What's this got to do with anything?”

“The doctor was knifed,” Jefferson said. “A good many fishermen carry knives. Pretty big knives. Pretty sharp.”

“Piersal was killed with a knife like that?”

“We don't know yet,” Jefferson said. “Could be. We haven't found it, if it was. You're the fisherman of the family, ma'am?”

“I never,” Pam said. “Oh—for the pelicans, you mean? That was just yesterday. A Miss Brownley told me about the pelicans and she was leaving and I—” She paused. “I was just being a substitute,” Pam said. “A stand-in.”

“Sheriff,” Jerry said, “Dr. Piersal was a big man. A strong man. For his age—for almost any age—he was a very quick man. We played tennis with him. And … he wasn't stabbed in the back.”

“Surprise,” Jefferson said. “A knife—a good sharp knife—can be very quick. Somebody you have no reason to suspect. Maybe shows you a knife. Holds it out in front of you. Then …”

Deputy Sheriff Jefferson moved his right hand, the fingers clenched as if around the handle of a knife, in a short, violent gesture. He made his point.

“A man could stab himself,” Jerry said. “As he fell, the knife could slip out of his hand. Fall into the water.”

“Yes,” Jefferson said. “We've got a skin diver coming. Only—” He looked at Gerald North. “You'd think a doctor would know an easier way, wouldn't you? Ma'am, did the doctor know you were going out to the pier this morning? You tell him you were?”

“I told him about the pelicans,” Pam said. “How they waited, how impatient they got, how each knew when it was his turn—yes, I think I told him I might go out this morning.”

“He didn't say anything about going out to watch?”

“No,” Pam said. “But—he did seem interested. Of course, he was polite. A polite man. So …” She raised her hands, in the gesture of not knowing. She said, “I don't know, sheriff. I hope it wasn't …”

She did not finish.

“A dozen reasons why he should have gone out there,” Jerry said. Deputy Sheriff Jefferson waited politely. “For the walk,” Jerry said. “To look at the ocean. Maybe to fish. It's supposed to be a fishing pier.”

“No rod,” Jefferson said.

“To see if the pelicans were really there,” Jerry offered. He wasn't, he realized, going to come up with a dozen reasons. He thought of saying, “To kill himself,” and decided against it. Jefferson waited for some further seconds. Then he said, “Let's get it in order.”

Always, Pam North thought, people want to get things in order. It is the most futile of human aspirations.

“You got here?” Jefferson said, which seemed to be taking things back a bit.

They had got to Key West, and The Coral Isles, late Thursday—after dinner Thursday. Because the train from New York to Miami was late; because they had to grope, in a rented car, across Seven Mile Bridge, in a thunderstorm; because from the car rental office to the little island which is the city of Key West is some hundred and sixty miles.

They had met Dr. Edmund Piersal, a rangy, pleasant man who was sitting at the tennis court, waiting for somebody to show, Friday morning about eleven. Jerry had played a set with him, and lost it. Later, three young men had shown up and Dr. Piersal had made a fourth with them, a flip of the racket putting him in and leaving Jerry out. The set had dragged on; Pam and Jerry had left before it was finished.

“Any idea who these men were? The doctor seem to know them?”

“I think he had played with them before,” Jerry said. “Navy people, I gathered.”

“There was a girl dressed for tennis who just watched,” Pam said. “A Miss Payne.”

“The doctor know her?”

There had been nothing, then, to indicate that he had. But by later in the day he had met her and had arranged with her for mixed doubles, with the Norths if available, the next morning. “Yesterday morning,” Pam said, doing her bit to get things in order.

“Yes,” Jefferson said. “You played tennis with him and this Miss—what did you say her name was?”

“Rebecca Payne. The poor child.”

Jefferson raised blond eyebrows.

“Nothing,” Pam said. “She's—terribly unsure of herself. It hasn't anything to do with anything. She—you felt she was expecting to be laughed at. Ridiculed.”

“Know the type,” Jefferson said. “Then you had a drink with the doctor. Lunch with him?”

“He said he was going downtown for lunch. Some place near the Aquarium.”

“‘The Pompano,'” Jefferson said. “Good fish place. Last you saw of him until—last you saw of him alive?”

Jerry said, “Yes.” Pam started to repeat the word, but hesitated.

She wasn't sure; said she wasn't sure. They had danced for a while the night before on the patio; had left early. As they were leaving she had seen a man slie thought was Piersal. He was standing, bending down, at a table. There was a girl at the table, there alone.

“I only saw his back,” Pam said. “Thought it might be the doctor. Thought the girl might be Miss Payne. Whoever it was, she was shaking her head. I thought the man was asking her to dance, and that she was saying no. But I'm not sure at all.”

“Let's go over this morning once more,” Jefferson said. “Be sure we've got things in order.”

Pam, then Jerry, went over the morning, getting it in order. It was, Pam thought, in the same order it had been before—the same ugly order.

Jefferson thanked them; he said it was all pretty clear. He said he hoped he wouldn't have to bother them again. He said, “Staying long?” and when Jerry said, “About two weeks,” he nodded his head. He said the weather was almost always fine this time of year. He went across the lobby and out onto the porch.

Jerry said, “Well,” and the Norths stood up. It was Pam who said, “Let's see what they're doing”; she led the way to the porch.

They could see the end of the pier; men were clustered there. Deputy Sheriff Jefferson was walking toward the pier. A uniformed man stood at the shore end of the pier, doing nothing, yet cutting off the activity there from the slowly increasing activity of the hotel—from Larry Saunders, dragging his brush across the tennis courts; from the beach boy raking at the seaweed the tide had left on the beach.

A tall, lithe young man stood on the diving board of the pool, bouncing his preparation; in the pool a girl in a white bathing cap looked up at him in evident admiration. The little girl in the yellow dress was dipping her feet in the flat pan of disinfectant solution at pool's edge. All at once, dress and everything, she sat down in it. “Goodness,” Pam North said. The young man quit bouncing on the diving board and knifed into the pool. One of the gardeners came, a little wearily, along a path, dragging a hose reel. He coupled the hose to a spigot set into the lawn, and dragged the reel away again, the hose unwinding.

There was nothing to see, except the hotel's life stirring. The Norths went back into the hotel.

*
The Norths Meet Murder
(1940).

4

The Norths went in to breakfast. They were not especially cheered by Deputy Sheriff Jefferson's question concerning the probable length of their stay. Pam had, she said, got the feeling that he didn't want them hurrying off. Jerry admitted to the same feeling.

“He's got a very suspicious mind,” Pam said. “Merely because I find poor Dr. Piersal, and could have made an appointment to meet him there—because of the pelicans, of course—and there was nobody else around, and I suppose anybody could have stabbed him if he wasn't expecting it—where was I?”

“Clearing yourself,” Jerry told her, and wrote orange juice and coffee and other things on the breakfast slip. “Just one egg,” Pam said. “Not one order.”

Jerry knew. Pam is a one-egg person. One order is for two eggs; the ritual is inviolate. Jerry wrote, “One single egg, three minutes,” and underlined the word “single.” Pam would get two eggs. It would serve no purpose to tell her that she had to eat but one. It was, for reasons rather obscure to Gerald North, the principle of the thing.

The Norths did not hurry breakfast. Absentmindedly, Pam ate both her eggs. They bought the Sunday Miami
Herald
, divided it for portage, and bore it to the porch. From where they sat, they could see the end of the pier. There was nobody there, but halfway toward shore a bellman—probably the unhappy Jimmy—stood as sentinel, waiting to tell people that the pier, but only temporarily, was unsafe. There was no sign anywhere of Deputy Sheriff Jefferson. The state police seemed to have vanished. But then two men went out onto the pier, and they both carried buckets, and one of them carried a heavy brush.

“All right, Pam,” Jerry said, and put a hand on one of hers.

“‘Who would have thought'”—Pam began, a little unsteadily, to quote and he said, “No, Pam. Don't. Quit thinking about it. Read some more
Herald.”
He gave her more
Herald
, of which the supply seemed inexhaustible.

(It was Chicago's day to have an eight-column blizzard. “While Miami Beach basked in eighty-degree temperatures.”)

At a little before ten, Jerry suggested tennis. Pam hesitated; Pam didn't know. It seemed, somehow, a little …

She was told that that was nonsense. Piersal had been a good guy, a fine guy. But they need not dress in black on his account. Nor, he added, mope. They had come for holiday; for them tennis was part of holiday.

There was life in the lobby now. A good deal of it, Pam thought, was supplied by the sports shirts the men wore. The shirts were not only alive; they leaped up and down and shouted. Pam looked, with approval, at her husband—in walking shorts, to be sure, but above them covered by a dark polo shirt.

They walked through the lobby toward the staircase which would lead them to their room. (In the morning, the elevator was to be avoided; waiters held room service trays in it, over their heads and, precariously, over yours.) They passed Paul Grogan—a partially recovered Grogan. He was talking to a man in a sports jacket, who held a light suitcase in one hand and a black bag in the other. But Grogan saw the Norths; Grogan saw all. He lifted a hand to them and smiled, but only at half-voltage. The Norths went on, up the stairs, to their pleasant room.

They changed. They played a set. As they were finishing, a tall young man and a very pretty girl came and sat by the court, rackets beside them. They sat in adjacent chairs and held hands. As, Pam thought, they had done when they dived together into the pool, when they walked the length of the lobby. Glued, apparently. And very nice, too. Nothing to apologize for; nothing to hide.

“And set,” Jerry said, lobbing over Pam's head. Her drop shots today had a stabbing—no, think of some other word. They were effective today. Guile was the answer; the lob was an answer.

“Wonder if you'd care for a spot of …” the tall young man said. The Norths did. The young couple came unglued; they were the Greshams. Bob and Nancy Gresham. They came from Chicago.

“Watched you yesterday,” Gresham said. “With a tall, elderly man. Doesn't seem to be around today.”

“No,” Jerry said, “he doesn't seem to be around today. Want to serve them up?”

The tall young man served one up. It was an ace past Pam. “Won't happen again,” he said, and crossed over and served again. It was an ace past Jerry. “Never happened before,” Bob Gresham said. “Not twice in a row.”

But the Norths carried the spry young Greshams to deuce, and it made them feel spryer themselves, and younger themselves; it made them, for the moment and mildly, fond of the young Greshams. They bought the Greshams a drink. “In ball bearings,” Gresham said. “In books,” Jerry said, and was looked at. “Publishing,” Jerry said.

The buffet was set up. It was twice yesterday's buffet, in honor of Sunday. Midway of the long table there was an ice-sculpture—a bird of some sort. Not a pelican. (I'm getting hipped on pelicans, Jerry thought.) Probably a turkey.

They shared a table with the Greshams, learning about ball bearings. And roller bearings too, for that matter.…

“Traveling is very educational,” Pam said. “But they're nice young things.”

They were midway of the lobby, siesta bound, when a bellman called their name. “Mr. North, please. Mr. North.”

It was a telephone call. It was Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson. He would like to see them at his office. He would send a car if—

“No,” Jerry said, and spoke quickly. He did not and was sure—almost sure, at any rate—Pam did not want to be carried away on the wings of a siren. A false impression of peremptory arrest would be given. He hoped a false impression. They would drive down. After they changed their clothes.…

Deputy Jefferson was alone in a large, bare office. There were other desks, empty. There did not seem to be a jail attached.

Jefferson was sorry to have dragged them down. Hated to interrupt people on vacation. Would have gone to the hotel, only—

He did not, at once, go on with that. He said that one or two things had come up. First, he had been in touch with New York. Talked to this friend of theirs.