Murder Has Its Points (14 page)

“There, dear,” Mrs. Constable said, gently, and poured tea. The maid had come into the room, moving very quietly. She took tea to the woman who faced the fireplace; to Pamela. She offered thin sandwiches. In the dim light to which her eyes were growing accustomed, Pam could see that, as she took the cup, Gladys Mason's hand shook a little. A little of the tea spilled into the saucer. Pam looked up at the maid and smiled and said, “Thank you.”

Gladys Mason wore a black dress; a very plain black dress which had, somehow, the appearance of a uniform. Pam, again, sought words in her own mind. A “serviceable” black dress. She wore a small black hat on light hair—hair a grayish blond. Her face was round. From its shape, it should have been a comfortable face. It was drawn. Lines dipped from the corners of the small, pretty mouth. When she was younger she must have had a lovely figure, Pam North thought. Must have had a pretty face.

“It begins to get dark so early now, doesn't it?” Mrs. Constable said and then, “Thank you, Norton.” The maid said, “Yes, Mrs. Constable,” and went out of the dignified room. There was a little pause, a little sipping of tea.

“It's hard to know where to begin,” Mrs. Constable said. “We need—advice. Gladys came to me because—”

“I shouldn't have,” Gladys Mason said. Her voice, Pam thought, was raised a little above its ordinary pitch. “I realize I shouldn't have. Only—” She stopped. She swallowed as if muscles ached from swallowing. “There isn't anybody,” she said, and now her voice was lower; now her voice was dull. “There never has been. Never—never anybody.”

“Dear,” Faith Constable said. “Don't say things like that. They're not—”

“Oh,” Gladys Mason said. “It's true. I've no right to come to you. Least of all to you. You did so much when—when you had no reason to do anything. When you had reason—”

“Nonsense,” Faith said and for the first time the subdued atmosphere was altered. Faith did not speak sharply, yet the effect was of a word spoke sharply. “Come to that, we were birds of a feather. Plucked. Mrs. North—” She paused. “Last names are awkward,” she said. “For me. In the profession we're so—” She raised expressive shoulders.

“Pamela,” Pam North said. “Although, usually, just Pam.”

“Gladys's son has disappeared,” Faith said. “She's worried. She can't—and she really can't—go to the police. It's not as it was with me. Not just—not wanting to.”

“But nobody else—” Pam said and stopped because Faith put down her teacup and shook her head slowly, with finality. Faith looked at Gladys Mason and, clearly, waited. For all her slight grace, her shimmer (apparent even now), Faith Constable was the strong one, Pam thought. Now, without a word, she commanded.

“There's nothing anybody can do,” Gladys said, in a dull voice. “I realize that. It's—” And then, quite unexpectedly, she put her own teacup down and moved as if about to stand up. And again, and this time there was real sharpness in the word, Faith said, “Nonsense.” And this time she commanded with the word, and Gladys Mason leaned back in the chair and looked at the bright leaping of the fire. No, Pam thought, looked toward it. Pam was conscious of a kind of embarrassment, of unease. I'm being pulled into something, Pam thought. Mrs. Mason doesn't want me to be pulled into it. And yet, in a way, does.

“She thinks,” Faith said, “that the police are looking for her son. His name's Robert. Bobby. Or—she thinks he's running and that they will be looking when they find that out. Because—” She looked again at Gladys Mason. There was a considerable pause. Mrs. Mason continued to look toward the dance of little flames which, Pam was sure, she did not really see.

“I'm afraid,” the woman in a black dress said, very slowly, toward the fireplace. “Afraid they will find out—I mean will think—he killed—” Again there were seconds of silence. “Killed his father,” she said. She stopped once more. Faith looked at Pam and her look said, “You heard. Don't let her stop now.” Pam almost could hear the words.

“Find out?” Pam said. “What do you mean, Mrs. Mason? You speak as if—”

“I'm afraid,” Gladys Mason said. “Just—I don't know. I don't really believe it and he says—” She made her first gesture. It was to spread her hands. Small and well-shaped hands. And reddened hands. She looked at Faith. “All right,” she said. “I've gone this far. Come to you. And now, to a—a stranger. All right. I'll tell her.” Then, and this also was for the first time, she turned in her chair so that she looked directly at Pam North. “I think Lauren saw him from her room,” she said. “Lauren Payne. Going in across the street. She said—it was after you had gone—”

Once started, she told it, for the most part, simply enough.

10

After Mrs. North, the night before, had told Lauren Payne what had happened, Mrs. Mason had been called in. “Nobody knew, you see,” she said. “I was just—a kind of servant. That there was any connection—”

At first, Lauren Payne had seemed to respond quickly and quite simply to the sedative the house physician had given her. After some ten minutes, Mrs. Mason had begun to think she might safely leave. And then Lauren had started to talk. It was as if she were talking in her sleep. The words were hurried, indistinct and, at first, they did not seem relevant to one another. “I couldn't make any sense out of them.” But then, after a few minutes, Lauren had spoken more clearly. In a sentence—in part of a sentence.

“The first time, I wasn't really listening. But then she said it over and over and—”

“He's not supposed to be over there,” Lauren had said; had said several times. “And there's something the matter with his leg. But there's—it's part of—”

The unfinished sentence, of course, did not make sense. But Mrs. Mason, now, was quite sure that that—well, almost certainly that—was what Lauren had said. Then she had repeated, several times, that he was not supposed to be “over there.”

“At first,” Gladys Mason said, “I thought she might be trying to tell me something. I don't think she was, really. Probably she didn't even know, then, that there was anybody else there. But before I was sure of that, I said, ‘Over where, Mrs. Payne?' When I said it the first time she didn't seem to hear me. But I asked her again and then she said, quite clearly, not at all as if she was talking in her sleep, ‘The King Arthur, of course.' But then she went back to—it was like mumbling. She said, ‘He doesn't belong there. He's not supposed—why's he going over there?'”

Gladys Mason said that then she was “worried.” She did not immediately say what in these words had worried her. Gladys had said, “Who do you mean, dear?” and had got no answer. She had said, guessing, “You were looking out the window, Mrs. Payne?” and was answered.

“She seemed to keep going in and out,” Gladys Mason said. “One time it would be just sleep talking. But then it was as if she were perfectly awake. When I asked if she had been looking out her window—the window of her room, across the street toward the other hotel—she said, ‘Of course,' as if I should have known.” Gladys Mason paused. “Her room is on the front of the hotel,” she said. “Of the Dumont. She could have looked directly across the street. Seen anything.”

“But I don't,” Pam said, and Faith, just perceptibly, shook her head. “Did she see whoever it was fire the shot?” Pam said. “Was that what—” Faith shook her head again, but this time Pam ignored the movement. “Worried you?” Pam said. “Did she say she saw your son?”

“No,” Gladys said. “Not that. She didn't say that. Only, don't you see, she saw him—I mean, someone—going into the King Arthur. Somebody who wasn't ‘supposed' to go there. She might have meant, didn't belong there.”

“Did she know your son, Mrs. Mason? As your son, I mean?”

Mrs. Mason's hands moved, again, in a helpless gesture. She didn't know.

“But Anthony might have—pointed him out,” she said. “Anthony knew he was working in the hotel. I—” She broke off. She looked at nothing. When she spoke, it was as if she spoke to nobody. “I did—something I'm ashamed of,” she said, to nobody. “A humiliating thing. When—when we ran out of money, so Bobby couldn't go back to school, I wrote his father. Asked him to help. Only to help a little. I thought—thought he might have changed. It was a begging letter. But Bobby's his son. His
son
. He even looks like his father a little—the way his father was then.”

She paused again.

“He hadn't changed,” she said. “He didn't even answer. But he would only have had to see Bobby to know who he was and—he may have pointed him out to her. It would have been like Anthony. Pointed him out to her and laughed about it and said—I don't know what he would have said. Something that was cruel. And—something that wasn't true.” She turned, abruptly, to Faith Constable. She said, “You told Mrs. North, didn't you?” Faith nodded her head.

“He was a cruel man,” Gladys Mason said. “Even when—when there was no need to be cruel. People say now that things aren't really black and white, and I suppose they aren't. Only, sometimes they are. He was cruel because—because he enjoyed it. He wanted to get rid of me.” She hesitated, looking toward the fire. “He'd had what he wanted of me. All right. That happens to people. I was a silly little thing—a pretty, silly little thing.” She shook her head, and smiled faintly, the light on her face flickering as the little flames danced in the grate. “It's like it was somebody else,” she said. “A girl who didn't like her name—didn't like the looks of her name—thought it was an ordinary name. And so—I used to spell it g-l-a-d-d-i-s. You can see what—what the girl was. And I was flattered and—oh, he said all sorts of things.” She looked at Faith Constable.

“I can well imagine,” Faith said.

“He could have gone somewhere where it's easy,” Gladys said. “Or, had me go. I'd have gone. It was—I suppose it was more fun for him the way he did it. Hiring this man—a man I'd only met a few times, and never alone—to lie about me. To say—to say Bobby was his son, not my husband's. Or—oh, there wasn't any end to it.
Could
have been his son. As if there might have been—” She broke off.

Pam thought, at first, that she was not going to go on with it; wished she would not go on with it; wanted to say, “Please don't. You're only hurting yourself. I believe you. Please don't.” To say, “It was all long ago. Please don't.”

“Bobby is his son. He couldn't have been anyone else's. There were other people who lied, who said Anthony was on the West Coast at—at the right time. He was, but not all the time. He—he came back. He—came back. Bobby's his son. God knows, if he weren't I'd be—be glad. Yes, I'd be
glad
. Particularly now.”

Suddenly, she put her hands in front of her face; covered her eyes with reddened fingers.

If her boy had killed, it was his father he had killed. The hands were raised to shut that knowledge out.

I wish this would stop
, Pam thought. This
has
to stop.

“When he was old enough, he began to hate Anthony,” Gladys said. “Oh, I told him too much. I was still young and bitter and I told him too much. And—and everything was bad for us for a long time. I was no good at anything and—with a baby. Faith, if you hadn't—why did you?”

“Bird of a feather,” Faith said. “It doesn't matter now. It was nothing. And, dear, do you have—?”

Gladys Mason had asked a question but she had not listened to the answer. Pam North was sure of that; sure that she, far away in bitter memories, had merely waited for the older woman to finish speaking.

“He hated his father,” Gladys said. “We both did. And—and he wouldn't accept anybody else. After a time it seemed to me that he wouldn't accept
any
body. Not even, part of the time, me. Mr. Mason tried. Even got Bobby to take his name. Mr. Mason was—he was all right. Meant to be kind. He tried for a while but—it was hard to be patient. For him. Then he died and—”

She is, Pam thought, trying to make us see a boy growing up in hatred. She hasn't the words, Pam thought. All the words she has are the ordinary words. She's trying to explain, extenuate. She is quite sure he killed his father. But, merely because—?

“So many things were wrong,” Gladys said, and now it seemed that she was, in essence, talking to herself; explaining, to herself, what had gone wrong with her life, and with a boy's life. “He grew too fast. When he was twelve he was taller than I am. And so thin. Always so thin. And—bitter. And, there was always something else.” She broke off, and looked at Faith, then at Pam, as if she had, until that moment, forgotten they were there.

“You want me to stop,” she said. “Not to—to drag you through this. To burden you with it.”

God knows, Pam thought. But she shook her head.

“Only,” Gladys Mason said, “it's part of—of everything. I'm afraid it is. The other thing, he was sort of ashamed. I suppose you'd call it that. Felt he wasn't as good as other people. Because—oh, of everything that had happened. A boy starts wrong—a boy who's thin-skinned—” She paused again.

“Anyway,” she said, “he got this awful need to be as good as anybody—better than anybody. He tried to do things he wasn't meant to do. Play football, even. In high school he tried to play football. That was how he hurt his knee, you know.”

Pam looked quickly at Faith Constable. Faith, just perceptibly, touched her lips.

“It's only when he's tired that he limps at all,” Gladys said. “Tired or—or worked up about something. One doctor said there isn't really anything the matter with his knee. Not really. That it's because—oh, a lot of rigamarole. He found he couldn't play football as well as the other boys and had to find a reason and—People make things up. He hurt his knee. That's all it was. Not anything—queer.”