Murder Has Its Points (9 page)

“Perhaps,” Pam said. “I don't—”

“He's too important to be—damaged,” Faith said. “Even if—” She stopped; very obviously, she stopped herself, abruptly, on check-rein.

“If you mean,” Pam said, and now she was direct, as simply direct, as Faith Constable had unexpectedly become, “even if he killed Mr. Payne—no, Mrs. Constable. There aren't that kind of exceptions.”

Faith Constable was shaking her head seconds before Pam finished. But she let Pam finish.

“I didn't mean that,” she said, then. “Something quite different. It's—” She stopped again, but this time, Pam thought, for her mind to choose the words it wanted. “If Willings did kill Tony,” she said, “there's nothing to be done about it. It'll be tragic, but there'll be nothing to be done about it. Tony's as well dead—oh, nobody's as well dead, I shouldn't say that—Tony wasn't really much of anybody, and Willings may write a dozen books, and everybody'll gain by them.
Every
body.”

It didn't matter if she overstated, Pam thought. And people had worshiped at lesser shrines.

“That doesn't matter,” Faith said. “I realize that. If Willings killed him—but I don't think he did. I think I know who may have and—”

It had happened before, and Pam had grown rather tired of it. For all her growing sympathy for—call it empathy with—Faith Constable, Pam felt irritation stirring. If people had things to tell the police—

“Please,” Faith said. It occurred to Pam that her own face, also, probably was expressive. “Yes, there is something I want the police to hear about. It may be nothing. They may already know. And, it's quite true I don't want to go to them.” She watched Pam's face; evidently saw something in it almost before Pam had herself caught up.

“Part of it's the bad publicity,” Faith said. “I don't deny it. I don't want ‘Actress Grilled in Ex-Husband's Murder.' Or however they'd put it. I don't want that at all. That's cowardly selfish, so all right it's cowardly selfish. And if I have to, in the end, all right, I have to in the end. But—there's more. I—”

“Listen, darlings,” Alice Draycroft said. “Do we have another drink? Or do we have lunch? Or—what I mean is, darlings, how's to take five?”

Faith Constable looked at her friend, and fellow actress, somewhat as if she had never seen her before. After a moment, she smiled a little vaguely, as if she had come back from a great distance to surroundings only a little familiar, and said, “All right, dear. Perhaps we should.” Alice Draycroft looked over her shoulder and a waiter said, “Yes, Miss Draycroft?” and she made a circling movement with the index finger of her right hand. The waiter said, “Yes, Miss Draycroft,” and went. Faith, very carefully, fitted a cigarette into a holder; very carefully lighted the cigarette and sat, looking at the lighter flame for seconds before she snapped the lighter shut. It occurred to Pam that she was looking, not at the tiny flame, but far back to where she had been, been brought back from. The waiter came with drinks. Faith sipped from her glass, and did not look at either of the others—looked at nothing.

“I was very young twenty-five years ago—no, it was twenty-six,” Faith said and only after she had said that looked at Pam North again. “The story of my life,” she said. “More than you'd asked for. Not all of it.” She smiled at Pam, and there was a certain apology in her smile. “I was younger than I should have been, of course. I wasn't really so very young. Not as years go.”

She paused again. After a moment, as abruptly as before, she began again.

“I was just realizing,” she said, “that I wasn't going to be a writer. I'd wanted very much to be a writer, and not nearly so much to act. But it turned out I could act and couldn't write. I suppose that's why I've always been a little' that way—a little hipped—about writers. I suppose that was why I married him in the first place.” She paused again. The pausing—between ideas, now and then between words, was, Pam thought, a part of artistry, of a craft which had, in turn, become part of Faith Constable. “I'm talking about Tony,” Faith said. “He was a real writer—anyway, he thought he was, persuaded me he was.

“We were only married a couple of years,” she said. “I've always said that I was the one who decided to call it quits. That was true. But—only partly true. He wasn't a very nice person, poor Tony. I wasn't nearly so young after a year of it—old enough to notice how very un-nice he was. But that wasn't all.” Once more she paused. She took a breath. (How many times, Pam thought, must she, on stage, have drawn breath in so, miming hesitancy before action. And—how much truth there was in it, method or no method.)

“He walked out first,” Faith said. “I hated to admit it then, and I don't like to now. He found another girl—a younger girl. Oh, ten years younger. A girl who appreciated him more. He always needed so much appreciation, poor Tony. A girl named Gladdis Arn—spelled it g-l-a-d-d-i-s, the poor thing. Well—” And once more she paused. “There is a point to this,” she said and seemed, for the first time in some minutes, to realize Pam as an audience, and as a person. “I'll come to the point of it.”

She sipped from her glass, but the glass remained, still, almost full.

“I went to Reno,” she said. “As soon as he could, Tony married Gladdis Arn. She was—I don't quite know how to say it—just a pretty girl. Pretty, full of admiration and, I'm afraid, not very bright. Tony divorced her after about a year—divorced her and said the child she'd just had wasn't his and made the court believe it. Another man helped—a man, Gladdis said, she'd met only once, only casually. The man said it had been different—very different. I always thought he was lying, always thought Tony had hired him. Tony had begun to make money by then.”

She crushed out the cigarette, which had burned down to the rim of the holder.

“Part of it,” she said, “he made out of me, in a way. I was a character in a book he wrote. Very, very bitchy, I was in the book. It didn't sell very well, but the movies bought it and Tony—I've met a good many heels, but it's sometimes hard to believe in Tony—suggested they might get me to play the bitch.” Suddenly, she chuckled. “Sometimes,” she said, “you had almost to admire the bastard. Anyway—”

Anyway, Anthony Payne got rid (legally unless proved otherwise, and it had not been) of a girl who hadn't, after all, appreciated him quite enough and of her child—a boy of about a month. He also, of course, freed himself from any legal need to support Gladdis, now Gladdis Arn again.

“So far as I know,” Faith said, “he never did anything for her and—”

“You may as well,” Alice Draycroft said, “admit you kept her going, darling. We won't tell anybody.”

“Sometimes—” Faith Constable said, darkly, “you—” She did not finish. “That hasn't anything to do with anything.” Alice started to speak again. “You talk too much, darling,” Faith told her, and Alice shrugged her shoulders. She looked at Pam and spread expressive hands in a gesture of hopelessness.

Gladdis Arn had married again some three years after the divorce, and after that Faith had not seen much of her and, finally, nothing at all of her. She could not remember, now, the name of Gladdis's second husband, although she had known it once. She had heard that the son, whose right to any name was legally questionable, had taken that of his stepfather. The second husband, whatever his name had been, had died about four years after he had married Gladdis. Faith had heard that, anyway. And Gladdis had disappeared until—

“Yesterday,” Faith said. “During the party. A strictly terrible woman in the damnedest dress—”

“Not,” Pam North said, “a pink chiffon dress?”

Faith blinked her eyes at Pam. She said, “Clairvoyant?”

“No,” Pam said. “I had the experience.”

“Anyway, I took it for a while and then I said, very ladylike, ‘I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me, darling. I've got to go to the John.'” Faith appeared momentarily diverted. She chuckled softly and said that they should have seen the poor thing's face. They would have thought she had never heard of anyone's going to the john.

“Only,” Faith said, “then I did have to go somewhere, so I thought, since I was going on afterward, I might as well actually. And I was going down the corridor to it and—and there she was. Gladdis.”

Gladdis had been wearing a white dress, which had the look of a uniform. A ring of keys was clipped to the belt of the dress, and she was standing, with a maid, in front of a linen closet, and pointing into the closet and, clearly, explaining something to the maid.

“She stepped back when I came along,” Faith said, “to give me room. And faced me—and her face turned blank. Eyes blank, whole face blank. She said, ‘Excuse me, miss,' in a blank voice. It was—” She paused. “She had never seen me before,” she said. “She was acting it, y'know. Overacting it, the poor thing. So—well, that was the way she wanted it and I—oh, I suppose I smiled to show I'd heard her, and I went on to the john. But—it was Gladdis.”

“You're sure?” Pam said. “After so many years and—”

“Yes,” Faith said, “I'm quite sure. Oh—she's changed. We all change. But, I had some reason to remember her, y'know. A reason that once had seemed a very good one. It was Gladdis. Apparently she's a housekeeper of some sort. Not just a maid but—she works at the hotel. She was there yesterday, while the party was going on. And—she would have heard about this ruckus between Tony and Willings, wouldn't she? It would have spread all over. And—”

She paused and lighted another cigarette.

“The poor thing had more reason than anybody to hate Tony Payne,” Faith said, and spoke slowly. “To her, more than to anybody else, he had been the heel of all time. And with Willings set up as—”

She looked at her watch and shook her head over what she saw. She flipped the cigarette out of the holder and ground it out, and pushed her chair back a little. But, once more, she paused.

“The boy,” she said. “He'd be in his early twenties now, wouldn't he? And—with as much cause to hate as his mother. More—the young can hate so much more. Whether Tony was really his father or wasn't—” She did not finish that. She moved her chair a little farther from the table.

“You can see,” she said to Pam. “I hope you can—why I don't want to be the one to—to go to the police. I suppose telling you, leaving it up to you, is—well, pretty much the same thing. But, it doesn't seem quite so bitchy. Maybe I really mean that it won't
look
quite so bitchy. I suppose it's because of the goldfish bowl I live in and—people, all the darlings who love me—” She broke off. “Not you, Alice,” she said. “They'd all say, ‘Took Faith Constable long enough, but she got her own back. A bit of a bitch, Faith Constable, but what would you expect?'”

She stood up, now. Alice looked up at her, and she shook her head.

“Rehearsal,” she said. “Lars will be frothing already. Forgive me, darlings. Have a nice lunch.”

She started to shimmer away. But she stopped, turned back.

“I remember,” she said. “Mason. That was the name of the man she married. Mason.”

And then she went.

7

Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley had, on the whole, taken it rather well. A few screams which somewhat resembled prayers; a few shouted warnings about listening to people nobody could make head or tail of; some violent instructions that Weigand remember
he
was the cop, and not that couple of screwy amateurs and particularly the dame. But no order to come, forthwith, to O'Malley's office in West Fifty-fourth Street; no direct threat that, if he caught the Norths messing around it, he would, “g.d. it to hell,” toss them in the tank and throw away the key.

Bill Weigand could not remember that the inspector had ever, before, been so moderate on an issue which was, to him, immoderate. The inspector was, conceivably, softening up. Or, perhaps, he was merely getting tired. He had fought the battle of the Norths for a very long time, but not to much avail. It was his conviction that the Norths loused things up; that any case in which they were involved became improperly complicated and that this was clearly the fault of the Norths. He felt, also, that, with the Norths present, Weigand forgot the duty of a cop: Keep it simple and arrest the most likely. In this case, a sniper, by preference, but—

“About this Willings guy,” Inspector O'Malley had said when he turned from the Norths. “This Payne guy knocks him down in front of a lot of people and from what I hear this Willings guy goes around banging himself on the chest, like this Tarzan guy. Lick any man in the bar, that's what I hear Willings is. So what's the matter with the Willings guy, Bill?”

“Nothing,” Bill said. “I don't say you're not right, chief. Only, we don't want to rush things, do we? He's a fairly important man—”

“Important? Whatja mean important? Way I get it, he's just a writer. Book writer.”

“Well—”

“That's what I mean,” O'Malley said. “This North guy gets into it, and you get screwy ideas. Like a book writer's being an important guy. On account, this North guy publishes books. You see what I mean, Bill?”

“Right. Only—”

“A guy writes for newspapers,” O'Malley said, “and I don't say you wouldn't have something. Or even magazines. But this guy just writes books.”

“Right. I remember that, chief.”

“You young cops,” O'Malley said, tolerantly. “Got anything for the newspaper boys?”

“Nothing they need to have. Anyway, they ought to be happy for now.”

“There's the afternoons, Bill.”

“Give 'em Brozy, chief. They'll like Brozy.”