Murder within Murder Page 12

  “I think,” Pam said, “that it looks like a very tiny polar bear. What do you think, Jerry?”

  “I think,” Jerry said, “that it looks like a very tiny Siamese cat.”

  Pam looked at him and seemed disappointed.

  “Oh, that,” Pam said. “Of course it looks like a very tiny Siamese cat. It is a very tiny Siamese cat. But I think it looks even more like a very tiny polar bear.”

  Jerry picked the little cat off Pam’s shoulder. It began to purr instantly on being touched; there was a great deal of purr for so very little cat.

  “Of course,” Jerry said, “it also looks a little like a monkey.”

  He held it in one hand. It climbed up his arm, hurriedly, as if it had just remembered an appointment. It sat on his shoulder. It bit his ear—gently, on the whole.

  “And it acts rather like a monkey,” Jerry said.

  “Polar bears can climb,” Pam pointed out and thought a moment. “Or can’t they? Do they just sit on cakes of ice? Do you know, Mr. Hill?”

  “What?” said Mr. Hill, who was looking with surprise at the cat. The cat looked in surprise at Mr. Hill, who wore a black beard. He was a small man, rather slight, and the beard was dominant.

  “Polar bears,” Mrs. North prompted. “Cakes of ice.”

  “So far as I know,” Mr. Hill said, “all bears climb. Is it a new cat?”

  “It just came,” Pam said. “Of course it won’t take the place of—”

  “But it will,” Jerry said, quickly. “I mean, of course it won’t be the same. But it will be something else—something different—in approximately the same place.”

  “All right,” Pam said. “I know that’s true. But she does remind me of Ruffy, because she’s a cat. I suppose that’s why I keep thinking of her as a very small polar bear.”

  Jerry blinked slightly and looked, involuntarily, at Alexander Hill. Hill, he thought, was looking a little dazed. Jerry was familiar with the look; he had worn it.

  “I think,” Pam said, “that we ought to call her Martini. Then we can call her Teeny for short and she’ll come to either, because after all it’s the vowels.”

  “What?” Mr. Hill said, in a somewhat strained voice.

  “They answer to vowel sounds,” Jerry explained. “They don’t really seem to hear the rest. When we had Pete he would come just as quickly if we merely said ‘Eeee.’ If he wanted to, naturally.”

  Mr. Hill looked at Gerald North with a somewhat fixed expression.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “I had better come back some other time and look over the Gipson notes. Only I’m anxious to get on with it, you know. But, I mean to say … at such a moment.…”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “we just bought her. It’s not a moment, particularly. Except, of course, we’re interested. What do you think of the name, Jerry. Because look at her tail.”

  Jerry looked at her tail. It was very straight and, at the moment, Martini was wearing it straight up. It bristled somewhat and looked like a spike on the end of the little cat.

  “She wears it cocked,” Pam said. “Cocktail. So Martini, naturally.”

  “Or Manhattan,” Mr. Hill said. “Or even Stinger.”

  It was clear that he was getting into the spirit of the thing. But both of the Norths looked at him in honest surprise. Mrs. North, particularly, looked as if she could hardly believe her ears.

  “Oh,” she said, “you couldn’t name her anything like that. Those. Not such a nice little cat.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Hill said.

  “Speaking of drinks,” Jerry North said, “if you’ll take Martini, Pam, I’ll make them.”

  He plucked Martini off his shoulder and gave her back to Pam. Pam put her on the floor and she ran off.

  “She runs like a rocking horse,” Pam said. “It must be because her hind legs are longer than they ought to be and she doesn’t understand it yet. Of course, they ought to be longer than they ought to be, because all Siameses’ are.”

  Rather quickly, Jerry asked Alexander Hill what it would be and, very quickly, Mr. Hill said rye and water, if it wasn’t too much trouble. They went in the living-room after the little cat. As they entered, it flattened itself on the carpet and, with almost terrifying intensity, began to stalk toward them. It got close to Pam’s feet, jumped straight up in the air and came down twisted a little sideways. The tiny tail also twisted with the tiny cat.

  “All right, Teeny, I’m dead,” Pam said. She picked the little cat up. Jerry went into the kitchen after bottles and began to come out with them.

  “Mr. Hill is going to write the Gipson case,” he said. “For the book. As well as the.…”

  He went back again.

  “As the first story in the book,” Mr. Hill said. “Piquant, don’t you think?”

  “In the book Miss Gipson was doing research on?” Pam said. “The one you and the others are putting together—but of course.”

  “Piquant,” Mr. Hill said. “Definitely.” His expression changed slightly as he regarded his own thoughts. “Also a natural,” he said. “It ought to make the book if we can work fast enough. Of course, it will be all the better if it isn’t solved.”

  He seemed to wait for Pam North to say something. She said, “Why?” and decided that that was the proper thing for her to have said. Mr. Hill brightened and nodded, approvingly.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Precisely. Because there will be freedom of speculation. Added zest. Don’t you think?”

  Pam North said she saw what he meant.

  “Only of course, Bill wants to solve it,” she pointed out. “And, naturally, he’s a friend of ours.”

  “It will be better for the book,” Mr. Hill said, with finality. “Much better. And I have no expectation that it will be solved. None whatever.”

  “Haven’t you?” Pam said.

  “No,” Mr. Hill said. “None whatever.”

  “Well,” Pam said. “They usually are.”

  Jerry came back in with a tray and put it down on a table. He poured rye into a jigger, looked at it and poured it into a glass. He put in ice.

  “Are what?” he said. “Much water?”

  “Very little, please,” Mr. Hill said. “Solved, Mrs. North thinks. I was saying that I thought the Gipson case wouldn’t be. And pointing out that we’ll do better if it isn’t.”

  Jerry nodded to that, gave Mr. Hill his drink, and began to mix martinis. But it would also, he pointed out, be better for the murderer.

  “Oh,” Mr. Hill said, “that.” He dismissed it.

  “What Mr. Hill wants to do,” Jerry explained, emptying ice out of the cocktail glasses and filling them with very pale martinis, “is to look over the notes she made on the other cases.”

  “Precisely,” Mr. Hill said. “Precisely. There is room for speculation, there. What unappreciated slip of what unknown murderer may Miss Gipson not have detected as she browsed among these almost forgotten records of yesterday’s hatred, revenge and greed? What may she have seen, that had not been seen before, about the stammering Mr. Purdy, the dapper little doctor named Merton and his hoarded cultures of death, about the dim figure who, for reasons never guessed at, ended the life of the pretty girl from the Midwest who had come to New York with her only capital, beauty, and her days so mercilessly short?”

  “I don’t know,” Pam said. “What?”

  “What?” Mr. Hill said.

  “Oh,” Pam said, “I thought you were asking us.”

  Jerry looked at her and, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

  “Oh,” Mr. Hill said. “I was just giving an idea. Something like that I think, don’t you, North? If it isn’t solved, of course.” He paused and spoke slowly, almost as if to himself. “It will be disconcerting if it is solved,” he said. “Very disconcerting.”

  “Of course,” Pam told herself, “he’s merely thinking about the success of the book. And the future of his own speculations.”

  But she looked at Jerry. Jerry sipped his cocktail and she thoug
ht he looked rather puzzled. But she could not catch his eyes.

  “Pam has a theory,” Jerry said, then. “Very interesting. Perhaps not impossible. She thinks it was Mrs. Willard Burt. The one who wrote the letter I mentioned.”

  Mr. Hill looked at Pam North with surprise and, it seemed to her, some incredulity.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because she’s really Helen Merton,” Pam said. “Her name is Helen, you know. Suppose it was really she and not her husband who killed off her family. Was there any reason it couldn’t have been?”

  Mr. Hill looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Not that I remember,” he said. “Although I don’t know that the point was ever raised. It’s—ingenious.”

  “She’s about the right age,” Pam said. “She could have gone away somewhere after she divorced the doctor and come back—perhaps with another last name—and married Mr. Burt. And Amelia Gipson, who knew her before, may have put two and two together and realized that it was really she who had killed off her parents and brothers and sisters, for the money. And she may have threatened to expose her and given her a chance to explain. Which would be the reason for the letter Mrs. Burt wrote. And then Mrs. Burt killed her.”

  “It is ingenious,” Mr. Hill told Gerald North. “Very ingenious. And not impossible. Precisely. Not impossible.”

  He looked thoughtfully at Mrs. North.

  “What two and two did she put together?” he wanted to know.

  Pam shook her head. She said that was the trouble. She said that, obviously, it wasn’t complete. She said, “Ouch!” Martini had run up Pam’s stockinged leg. “Martini!” Pam said. “You hurt, baby.” She picked the tiny cat up and put it in her lap. It climbed her and sat on her shoulder and began to talk, loudly, into her ear.

  “I wish you stammered,” she said, to the cat. “It might slow you down. Did he, really?”

  “Mr. Purdy?” Mr. Hill said. “Oh yes. Quite badly, I understand. But he still found women with money to marry him.”

  “Did he?” Pam said. “More than one?”

  So he understood, Mr. Hill told her. A friend of his who had investigated the case said that that was one of the things the police were looking into when Purdy was killed in the crash as he tried to get away. They thought there had been at least one other case which was too close a parallel to be mere coincidence.

  “You mean,” Pam said, “he did it professionally?”

  Mr. Hill said that there had been reason to think that he had; that the police had thought he had.

  “You’d think, then, that he’d have been more careful,” Pam said. “More—professional.” She shook her head. “It seems like a very difficult way to make a living,” she said. “Marrying women with money and killing them off.”

  “It turned out to be,” Jerry said. “They’d have caught him except for an accident.”

  Alexander Hill shook his head. He said they didn’t understand. He said it was the excitement, the challenge.

  “There wasn’t a war when he was the right age,” he said. “Or if there was—I suppose he could have been in the first one—he didn’t get in it. This took the place. It was a dangerous way to live.”

  It turned out, Pam said, to be a way to die, but then she shook her head, correcting herself. Flying in a commercial airplane had proved the way to die, so far as Purdy was concerned.

  “It might have been,” Mr. Hill agreed. “That was part of it—part of the challenge. He put his mind against all the other minds; he played an elaborate game of wits with the rest of society. There was always danger in his life and danger is—” He broke off, and his eyes looked through Pam. “Men realized that once,” he said. “The great excitement of life is the risk of losing life. Not as we all must some time—dully. But facing a challenge—putting all your skill to work, trusting to all your luck, gambling. The same thing you get in a game, only a thousand times more intense. Not a cup at stake—or money—or your name in the newspapers. Life at stake. The strange, almost unbearable excitement of mortal combat.”

  He stopped and nodded to himself.

  “Some soldiers know it,” he said. “Along with the boredom. Flyers must have known it—their skill, their luck against death. Moments of indescribable brightness. Even terror must be a kind of brightness.”

  “I’ve been scared,” Pam said. “It wasn’t a kind of brightness.” She remembered. “It was more a kind of darkness,” she said.

  Hill shook his head at her.

  “Not for everybody,” he said. “Obviously. Most of us want to be safe and sane. At most, to drive a car too fast—the obvious things. A little keying up does for most people. But there are some—I think Frank Purdy may have been one—for which the little things aren’t enough. They want to play the most dangerous game of all—and murder, in our ordinary life, is the most dangerous game a man can play.”

  “However,” Jerry North said, “I don’t suppose he minded the money.” Jerry spoke dryly.

  Obviously, Alexander Hill said, the man had to live. He could not enjoy facing the sharp edge of danger if he were going hungry in old clothes.

  “A certain—elegance—would be necessary,” Mr. Hill said, with assurance. “Otherwise, how be debonair?”

  “Look,” Mrs. North said, “have you any reason to think that Mr. Purdy felt any of these things? That he wanted to be debonair or live a dangerous life?” She shook her head. “After all,” she pointed out, “he was named Purdy.”

  She was surprised that Mr. Hill nodded almost eagerly.

  “Precisely,” he said. “Precisely. An ordinary name; not a romantic name. Don’t you see that that may very well have been it? That if he had been named—oh, memorably—he might never have felt the need for excitement? His whole life may have been a revulsion against a dull and ordinary name—a name without history, without association.”

  “No,” Pam North said, “I can’t say I do, Mr. Hill. Do you, really?”

  “I.…” Hill began. Then he stopped suddenly and his manner changed. “Forgive me,” he said. “A literary fancy, obviously. Actually I suppose Purdy killed vulgarly for money. Another vulgar action in a vulgar world.” He looked at Mrs. North and smiled. It was not, Pam North thought, a particularly friendly smile. “Common sense,” he said. “You return me to actuality, Mrs. North. Of course, my speculation was farfetched.”

  “I merely meant,” Pam said, feeling that somehow she had failed one of Mr. Hill’s better moments, “that Mr. Purdy sounds as if he had been a rather ordinary person. Only with peculiar habits.”

  “No doubt,” Mr. Hill said. “No doubt. You will forgive an old romancer. It is—occupational.” He looked at her and smiled again. “I assure you,” he said, “that my feet are quite firmly on the ground. Quite firmly.”

  “Drink?” Jerry said.

  Alexander Hill did not mind if he did. But he drank quickly; he said that this was very pleasant, but that there was work to be done. If he might have the notes? He wanted to read them that night; he wanted to write this macabre introduction to a book of crimes as soon as he could get about it. Jerry went to get the notes.

  “Won’t you have to wait to see how it comes out?” Pam asked Mr. Hill. “I mean—suppose you just get started and it’s solved?”

  Mr. Hill nodded. He said there was that. But he said that it did not matter greatly. The fact was there; the mood would grow from it. It was the mood that was important. How it came out was incidental.

  “But,” he said, “I shall write, I think, on the assumption that the case will not be solved. At least, not immediately. I shall, if it is at all possible, maintain the mood of mystery.”

  Pam merely nodded, and looked a little abstracted. Jerry came back with the notes, and Alexander Hill rose almost immediately. The cat jumped, after alarmed preparations, from Pam’s lap and advanced on Mr. Hill’s foot. Mr. Hill looked at it and moved his foot. He moved it rather quickly, because Martini had merely begun her stalk. She sat down, looked disappoin
ted, and then turned suddenly and bit her tail. She paid no further attention to Mr. Hill and Mr. Hill went away.

  “That’s a very funny man,” Pam said, after she had heard the elevator door close.

  Jerry was pouring fresh drinks. He said there was no doubt that Mr. Hill was a very funny man.

  “However,” he said, “he writes a mean piece. Which is what we want. Drink up.”

  Pam drank up. Jerry refilled their glasses. The cat clambered up his trouser leg, its eyes round and blue and excited. It went out his arm, clinging, and smelled the drink in his glass. It drew back and said “yow!” It returned along his arm, holding tight, glancing down at the floor in what looked like trepidation. It reached his lap and began to purr.

  “Now there,” Pam said, “is somebody who does live dangerously. Martini. But you have to be a cat.”

  Jerry shook his head. He said that millions of men and women and children had been living dangerously—dreadfully too dangerously—for years.

  “I mean in peace,” Pam said. “In ordinary life.”

  What did she mean ordinary life, Jerry wanted to know. Because it was peace which was extraordinary, not war. Had been, always.

  “Perhaps not now,” Pam said. “Not any more. Perhaps now danger is too dangerous.”

  Jerry said he hoped so. He said that, in spite of everything, he had grown fond of the human race. He did not say it as if he meant to be humorous. Pam looked at him quickly. She got up quickly and went over and leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. Neither said anything, but Jerry looked up and smiled at her and began to stroke the tiny cat. Pam smiled back at him and went back to her chair.

  “Speaking of Mr. Hill,” she said. “Does he really believe all that? And is it true?”

  Jerry shrugged. He said that he didn’t know Hill well enough to be certain. He might. It was a literary fancy; Mr. Hill did not expect people to take him seriously. Which did not prove that he was not, really, serious.