Murder Is Suggested (23 page)

“All,” Bill Weigand said, “according to Hoyle.”

He was in the Norths' apartment, with a drink in his hand, and it was Friday evening, at the time for drinks. There was a fire in the fireplace, although it had turned very little cooler. And Martini was sitting on the lap of Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, which was not at all according to Hoyle.

“She really doesn't do it to annoy,” Pam had explained, when Martini spoke once, in question and, not being answered, went the long way round to the chosen lap. (She went to a chair, to another chair, to a table, to lap. Only she knew why.)

“It's all right, Mrs. North,” Mullins said, if with no perceptible enthusiasm. He sat very still. He sipped his old-fashioned warily.

“It's really,” Pam said, “because you don't make advances. So many people keep saying ‘Nice kitty' and things like that and reaching down to have their fingers smelled. Cats hate anything fulsome, you know.”

“It's all right, Mrs. North,” Mullins said, and sat very quietly.

“Go to sleep, Martini,” Pam said. “You are falling asleep—deep, deep sleep. You can't keep your eyes open.” Teeney looked at Pam with interest, from very blue blue eyes. “Shut your eyes,” Pam said. “You are going deep, deep asleep. You are shutting your eyes and you can't open them. You are falling into a deep sleep.” She spoke soothingly. And Martini closed her blue eyes. It was very gratifying.

“I must admit,” Pam said then, “that she fooled me. At the end, anyway. Although I knew her handbag was too heavy. Except that I didn't know, if you know what I mean.”

“You couldn't be clearer,” Jerry told her, and saw glasses empty, and went to the bar. “Go on, Bill.”

It had, Bill told them, been a little odd. Not unprecedented—most confessions included a good deal of self-exoneration. He had never, however, heard a confession to murder which contained, in a curious fashion, so much asservation of superior virtue. It was rather as if Mrs. Oldham, telling how she had killed Professor Elwell, and tried to kill Carl Hunter, expected it all to end with a rising vote of thanks, tendered her for duty faithfully performed.

“In short,” Bill said, “it was Elwell's fault entirely. And Hunter's fault. Both were—are—evil men. She kept using that term—‘evil men.' And she was mother defending young.”

“To put it in the vernacular,” Jerry said, distributing drinks, “she's nuts.”

Possibly, Bill said, that would serve—would very roughly serve. Not, however, in a court of law. At least, he assumed it wouldn't. The point had not been raised, of course, before the magistrate, who had remanded Mrs. Oldham without bail, pending a hearing a week hence, which would never be held because a grand jury would intervene with an indictment, charging murder one.

Insanity would be offered at the trial, Bill supposed. He did not see what else could be tried, since Mrs. Oldham had, among other things, been caught with the weapon on her. But that was not primarily his concern.

“Of course,” Bill said, “she might get a jury with a prejudice against hypnotism—a feeling that it's a kind of black magic, a kind of witchcraft. And that its practitioners are—witches, I suppose.”

“Wizards in this case, I'd think,” Pam said.

Wizards, magicians, voodoo doctors. Anyone who seemed to bring up the dark things, the horrid mysteries which are buried only consciousness-deep in the human mind. “A New York City jury?” Pam said, doubt in her tone. She was told that juries, anywhere, can be a little odd, and said she supposed so.

“It was because Elwell was doing—doing things to Faith's mind?” Pam said. “Perverting her mind? Turning her into a zombie? But—he wasn't. She's a perfectly sane young woman and now she's out from under mama's thumb—”

That was, summarized—very much summarized—the burden of Hope Oldham's confession, which was at the same time an assertion of her innocence. Men like Elwell, debauchers of youth (of the mind of youth; she did not go farther) should be destroyed. And Hunter was as bad. They had only to remember what they had seen—this to Weigand, to Mullins. They had seen Hunter at it; seen how he had tried to make an innocent child believe herself guilty.

“But,” Pam said, “he didn't. It's—confused. She admits she did it—killed Jamey. But she says at the same time that Hunter was trying to make Faith believe—” Pam shook her head. Moving it, she noticed that she was being regarded by Martini, who had both eyes open. “You are falling deeply asleep,” Pam said, in automatic parenthesis. “Deep, deep asleep. You will not wake up until I tell you to. She can't have it both ways.”

“She's not an especially logical woman,” Weigand said. “At best. Now she isn't at her best, of course. She didn't seem to realize that the two things cancel out—that one cancels the other out.”

“While we're on that,” Pam said, “what
was
Hunter up to? Just finding out that Faith remembered her father had had a gun? That the gun had disappeared?”

It had not been that, Bill said. At least at first; at least according to Carl Hunter. Who had, incidentally, got briefly back to his cats, but was spending most of his time holding Faith Oldham's hand, figuratively and, it was to be supposed, literally.

“It needs it, the poor child,” Pam said. “But—what was it really? Not just because she thought Elwell was a—a wizard. Somebody from the lower depths.”

“My dear child,” Jerry said, in a tone meant to annoy. “
You!
” Pam said, but waited. “She had always dominated the girl,” Jerry said. “That was important to her. The most important thing in her life because, among other things, it was a way of staying young. By not being relegated, losing out. And also the deep satisfaction of having power.”

Pam looked at him skeptically, and also with enquiry.

“Not I.” Jerry said, quickly. “I speak in the abstract.”

“You'd better,” Pam told him. And looked at Bill Weigand.

“We could,” Bill said, and smiled at both of them over a cocktail glass, “keep it simple. As it will be kept for a jury. I don't deny either of these—what? Freudian?—theories. An emotional woman's fear of what she did not understand. An aging woman's desire to dominate—to keep power over youth. But—simply—a greedy woman's desire for money. Of which, remember, she hasn't much. And it's been clear all along she hated not having much.”

“But,” Pam said, doubtfully, “you mean she
did
know about the money Jamey was leaving Faith. I thought Mullins was sure—oh.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Not that money. I don't think she knew about that. I'm quite sure—Hunter's quite sure—Faith didn't know about the inheritance
when she was awake.
That Elwell had induced amnesia. The money—the entirely new way of life—they would both have had if Faith married Arnold Ames. Or somebody like Ames. That was the simple motive.”

And—they had heard, from Faith, that part of Elwell's effort to free the girl from her mother's dominance had involved encouraging her to live in her own way, follow her own feelings. Which would not, it was clear, lead her to Ames.

“You mean he really—broke that up?” Pam asked this. And Bill Weigand shrugged, and looked at his empty glass, and at his host, who rose in hostly fashion.

They would, Bill supposed, never know about that. It was not a thing on which a finger could be precisely put. Ames had already, perhaps, turned wary, partly because Mrs. Oldham seemed in rather hot pursuit. At least, Ames himself implied that. Which might be a salve to his own pride. But it did seem very probable that Elwell had done at least part of what Mrs. Oldham thought he had, and done it intentionally.

“Playing God,” Jerry said.

“For good purpose,” Pam said. “Anybody looking at her and Hunter can see that.” But, if not Ames, perhaps somebody else, equally desirable? But not if Hunter got too far. She tried to blame it on him?

She had certainly known he was at the house at approximately the right time. Sitting in her chair at the window, she had seen him leave. If the police decided he was the killer, it would amount to a bonus.

“Two wizards with one stone,” Pam said, and there was a momentary pause.

Mrs. Oldham, once her daughter had left Wednesday afternoon, had gone through the laboratory to Elwell's office, and shot him, and returned the same way. And then gone out herself and—

“Wait,” Jerry said, “she
did
have a key to the laboratory then? You mean, Jamey had given her one, too?”

Not intentionally. He had supplied Faith with a key to be copied after she had lost hers—two keys, as it turned out, one being to the front door of his own house. But it was Mrs. Oldham who took the keys to a hardware store and had duplicates made. “Enough,” Bill said, “to go around. She was the one who did the errands. She made a great point of that.”

Hope had thought that, with Elwell dead, she would have no difficulty in reassuming dominance over Faith, redirecting her toward a profitable marriage. But, with Elwell dead, Faith had turned not to her mother but, more fully even than before, to Hunter. And the police did not seem to accept Hunter as the killer. “She blamed us for that,” Weigand said. “Pointed out that if we'd been up to the mark we'd have seen he was the obvious one. If she'd succeeded in eliminating Hunter, it would have been our fault for not having him safe in jail.”

“Hunter knew she was the one who shot him? That was what put him oh the right track? And then—that was why he hypnotized Faith. To find out about the gun and—”

But Pam stopped, although she had been reasonably triumphant. Bill was shaking his head.

“At one stage,” Bill Weigand said, “you had the theory that Faith might have killed Elwell. Under hypnotic suggestion. As an act of mercy. Well—Hunter got the same theory, decided to hypnotize Faith and find out. So he would know what he had to protect her from. He says, ‘So I could help her if she needed help.' It was when he convinced himself she didn't that he started to make the recording, and to search around in her mind—that's the way he phrased it, incidentally—to find out what he could. And stumbled—he says it was a stumble—on the gun.”

There was a considerable silence, then. Bill finished his new drink. He said, “Well—”

“Wait,” Pam said. “Mrs. Oldham came to us—got us to go with her—why?”

She had, Bill said, been afraid that Hunter would get to Faith, would hypnotize her. Mrs. Oldham had gone to the Norths to light a back fire, plant a theory. The theory: that Hunter, himself the murderer, would try through hypnosis to make Faith believe herself guilty, bring her to confess guilt. So—

“Actually,” Pam North said, “all the time all the poor thing had to do was wait a few months. And Jamey would have died and Faith got the money and—nobody would have had to kill anybody.”

She put it succinctly, Bill agreed, and stood up. Martini, seeing movement, jumped from Mullins's lap. Pam looked at her reproachfully; said she was a bad subject, that she was supposed to be asleep.

“Come on, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said. “These people—”

He stopped and looked intently at Sergeant Mullins, who had not responded. They all looked at Mullins. “
Sergeant!
” Bill Weigand said, with more emphasis. And Sergeant Aloysius Mullins slept. Then Jerry and Bill looked at Pamela North, whose eyes rounded.

“Goodness,” Pam said. “I—
I really did it.
But I must have hit the wrong one. Goodness! I—I was aiming at Martini and—”

They waited.

“Sergeant,” Pam said, her voice very clear and decided. “Sergeant Mullins. You can wake up, now.”

There was a moment of some tension.

Sergeant Mullins opened his eyes.

“Did the Loot-I-mean-captain tell you that this Oldham dame admits cooling the professor?” Sergeant Mullins asked.

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

1

There was, Pamela North said, no use waiting to be adopted. “Because,” she said, “of the elevator. It's asking too much.”

She said this across the breakfast table, on a bright morning in early September. Jerry said, “Um-m-m” and, “Somebody ought to teach him a second service” and then, “What, Pam?” When he said the last he looked up from the folded newspaper stretched beside his plate.

Pam did not repeat, but only waited for seepage, which she assumed to be inevitable. Momentarily, her words lay on a mind's surface, like drops of water on dry soil. They would penetrate.

“The elevator does complicate it,” Jerry North said. “You're ready, then?”

“Yes,” she said. “It's empty the way it is. Of course, there'll never be another—”

He smiled at her; smiled tenderly.

“All right,” Pam said. “Take it as unsaid. All the same, it's true.”