Curtain for a Jester Read online

  Jerry raised his glass, thankfully, and his elbow was bumped from behind by someone who was “Terribly sorry,” and with that was gone. The tipped glass spilled half its contents down Jerry North’s sleeve. It was, under the circumstances, no consolation at all to discover that, this time, the drinks had been made cold enough.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “You shouldn’t talk that way.”

  Jerry North drank what remained in his glass. He drank it too quickly. He choked.

  II

  Tuesday, 12:35 P.M. to 2:55 P.M.

  “Then,” Pamela North said. “One thing led to another. But—do you want all this?”

  She looked down at her hands. They were shaking a little. She clasped them together to stop the shaking. Jerry put a hand briefly on her shoulder, and said nothing. She turned, and managed to smile, and to nod her head in a way which meant that she would be all right, was all right.

  “I don’t know, Pam,” Bill Weigand said. “I don’t know what I want.”

  “It—it happened today.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “It happened today. But—things like this don’t happen only at one time, at one minute of one day, between ten minutes of eleven and ten after. They happen yesterday—and a week ago yesterday, and a month before that.”

  They sat in a small office, with one large window on a court. The wind, more gusty even than it had been the night before, swept down into the court, found itself trapped there, swirled angrily in an attempt to escape. The wide window rattled in the fury of the trapped wind.

  “Well,” Pam said, “the four of us—Jerry and me, Forbes and Mrs. James—we—”

  They had begun to edge their way out of the center of the crowded party, seeking some zone of quiet, some more placid backwater. They had made slow going of it, but it had been managed. They had met, along the tortuous way, people they knew, people to be greeted across intervening strangers, waved at from a distance.

  “Mr. Ingraham too?”

  Ingraham too; Phoebe James more than any of them, which was to be expected. She was a person it was gratifying to know, by whom to be recognized. But the four of them had more or less stayed together, and in the end had found haven.

  “At least,” Pam said, “we got into a corner, sort of. And a man did come with drinks again, and another man with canapés. I had a cigarette and a glass and then, because he poked them at me, a canapé, all at once, and—”

  “You met Mr. Ingraham’s partner there? Reginald Webb? And Mrs. Schaeffer? You were with them when Mr. Ingraham got a telephone call?”

  “Was there something special about the telephone call?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “Webb seems to think there was. He said that Ingraham appeared to be startled. Did you think that?”

  “Not then so much as earlier,” Pam said. “At least—didn’t you think so, Jerry?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry North said. “I wasn’t thinking about much of anything, except how to get the hell out of there. That is, I didn’t think so then. When Pam and I were talking later, it did come back that Forbes’s attitude had changed before the telephone call. But—it’s not very tangible, Bill.”

  Forbes Ingraham had been as soft-spoken, as unaggressively assured as always, when the four of them first stood in the corner of the room, the party swirling before them. He had held a long cigarette holder in white teeth and, with the rest, talked easily. They had talked primarily of books, as became a famous author, a publisher and an attorney who specialized in the affairs of authors fortunate enough to have affairs, and of publishers successful enough to afford him.

  “Mrs. James is one of his clients,” Pam said. “Only—it occurred to me, more than that. From something in their attitudes toward each other. Was I right?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Bill said. “It’s quite possible, of course. She’s divorced. Ingraham never seems to have married. Go on, Pam.”

  But, saying something about the vagaries of libel laws, telling a story about them, Ingraham had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and looked off into the crowd. “As if,” Pam said now, “he saw something that worried him.” But the interruption had lasted only seconds; he had taken up the story again. It was after that that Webb and Mrs. Schaeffer had joined them, and been introduced.

  “That is,” Jerry said, “Mrs. Schaeffer was. We’d met Webb before, of course—or I had. You had too, hadn’t you Pam?”

  “Once or twice,” Pam said. “At first, last night, he was just a quite tall man with a brush hair cut. Very well dressed. But with hair getting a little thin at the top. All the other hairs very—aggressive. To make up for the deserters. We’d seen Mrs. Schaeffer too, of course. But not to speak to.”

  The Mrs. Schaeffer of the cocktail party had been the beautifully groomed, slender woman who sat with mink on the sofa in the reception room of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb—the widow of Samuel Schaeffer.

  “Who,” Pam said, “died accidentally a while back. Forbes—Forbes was telling us.”

  “Webb and Mrs. Schaeffer were together? I mean—obviously they were then. Did you have—” Bill Weigand paused. He looked at Pam, as if in doubt about a word. “Any intuition about them? As you had about Ingraham and Mrs. James?”

  “If there’s one word I hate,” Pam North said. “People just use their minds and people talk about—intuition.”

  Bill Weigand waited.

  “No,” Pam said. “I didn’t notice anything especially. What do they say? And what would it have to do with—with this, anyway?”

  “They haven’t been asked,” Bill said. “I don’t know that it has anything. There were six in a group, then, when Mr. Ingraham got this telephone call?”

  It had not been, exactly, a telephone call. A man—one of the men in white coats—had come through the party to Forbes Ingraham and spoken to him and, after listening, Ingraham had said, “The hell he does.”

  “And seemed annoyed?”

  For a moment, possibly. Phoebe James—“she has the loveliest voice, Bill”—Phoebe James had been telling about something that had happened when she was lecturing in Kansas City, and they had all been listening, amused. The servant’s message had been an interruption. But, if annoyed at the interruption, Ingraham had recovered himself quickly. He had thanked the man in the white coat, and had picked up Mrs. James’s story and handed it back to her. Only after she had finished had he said that he had to make a telephone call, and gone off to make it. He had been unhurried, suave, not then “startled.” He had been gone about five minutes, perhaps ten, and had rejoined them, and made no further mention of the call.

  It had been some time later—perhaps half an hour later—that Nan Schaeffer had looked at the watch on her wrist and had said, “Goodness. I’d no idea. I’ve really got to get away.” There had then been such mutual, and conventional, expressions of esteem as are used at partings, and Nan Schaeffer had gone, Webb with her. But, as they discovered later, while themselves looking for a hostess to thank, with her only toward the door, not through it. Webb was still there, drink in hand, talking to two women and another man. Catching their eyes over the heads of others—“he’s the height people ought to be in crowds,” Pam said—Reginald Webb had lifted a glass toward them. He had been there when, finally, they left, to a reproachful “Darlings! Must you?” from Margaret.

  “Then?”

  Then the four of them—Ingraham and Phoebe James; the Norths—had stood in front of the apartment house and waved at taxicabs, and while they waited for a cab to condescend, it had been Ingraham who had said, “Why don’t we all have dinner together. Unless you’re tied up?” The last was to the Norths.

  “We weren’t. We’d been going out somewhere anyway, because you never know about cocktail parties and it isn’t fair to Martha. And we’ve always liked Forbes—not just as a lawyer—and Mrs. James is charming and—”

  “And,” Jerry said, “we’d got started. You know how it is.”

  They had gone to a mid-town r
estaurant suggested by Ingraham; described by him, during a short cab ride, as a place he often lunched, but which he thought even better at the dinner hour. “Also,” he had said, “it won’t be crowded.”

  It had not been. Perhaps a dozen tables, out of several times as many, had been occupied. But, the restaurant had not seemed, as restaurants sometimes do under such circumstances, at all deserted, at all dreary. The atmosphere had been relaxed, leisurely.

  “For one thing,” Jerry said, “the tables are far enough apart. Some of these places—”

  They had had new drinks, and better ones. “The whole damn time at the party,” Jerry said, “I got two and a half cocktails, not counting the half down my sleeve.”

  Pam realized, now thinking back to the evening before, that she had noticed the couple at a side table, half way back in the restaurant, as the four of them were being seated near the front. But she had noticed them only absently, during that hardly conscious survey most people make on entering an unfamiliar restaurant. She did not think that Ingraham, who was first screened from them by the maitre d’ and afterward sat with his back to the couple, had at first noticed them at all.

  Certainly he had seemed surprised, and oddly intent when, while he and the Norths and Mrs. James sipped drinks, waited for oysters, the two had left the restaurant and, leaving it, passed close to the four at the table. Ingraham had been speaking, he stopped in mid-word. They all, as he did, looked at the backs of a slight blond girl, whose hair was a silvery cap, and a tall, thin man with black hair who walked close behind her and, as he followed her, appeared to continue a conversation which, if to be judged by his attitude, was of importance. The girl, assuming she listened, gave no sign of it, but walked away steadily, with the man behind her. She walked stiffly.

  It looked like the end of an argument, or perhaps like the middle of one and Pam thought, “They’ve had a tiff; they’re both upset” and then became conscious of the intentness with which Forbes Ingraham was looking after them. It was several seconds before Ingraham appeared aware of the silence he had caused, and then that Pam, and Mrs. James too, had turned to look at him.

  “People from the office,” he said. “Didn’t realize they were—” But that he did not finish. Instead, he took up what he had been saying previously—seemed, indeed, to resume with the half finished word, so smoothly was the transition made.

  “Tall, dark man,” Weigand said, when he had heard this much. “Blond girl. That’d be Cuyler—Francis Cuyler. The girl’s a stenographer—Phyllis something.” He turned to Mullins in a corner of the office.

  “Moore,” Mullins said. “Haven’t talked to her yet.”

  “We’ve talked very little to any of them,” Bill Weigand told the Norths. “Starting with you, since you turned up.” He gestured around the office in which they sat, with the furious wind rattling at the window. “This is Cuyler’s,” he said, of the office. “Go on, Pam.”

  “I could see the table they’d been at,” Pam said. “A waiter came up with cups and a pot of coffee, and looked surprised. Then he looked at the door, but they’d gone, but apparently they’d left money for the check so he shrugged. You know how waiters shrug?”

  “I never noticed that they—” Bill Weigand began, in spite of himself, and then achieved resistance. Some time it would be interesting to learn, from Pamela North, how the shrugs of waiters differed from other shrugs, as presumably they did. This was not the time. “Yes,” Bill said. “You felt they had left suddenly. Without finishing?”

  “Oh yes,” Pam said. “When she saw Forbes was there, probably. She was sitting so she could see him.”

  “I don’t—” Jerry began, and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Because of the way he—Forbes, I mean—looked at them, of course,” Pam said. “What else?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said, feeling, at once, that he should, and that there was something wrong with it—post hoc ergo propter hoc, possibly. Or, Jerry decided, a little desperately, the other way around.

  After that, Pam said, they had eaten and had been waiting for dessert when the second interruption came.

  “But I don’t know what any of this has to do—” Pam said, and was stopped by Bill Weigand’s gesture; said, “Oh, all right.”

  The maitre d’ had come to the table, apologized for interrupting, said that a gentleman at the bar would like to see Mr. Ingraham. Ingraham had stood up, asking that they excuse him, and followed the maitre d’ to the small bar at one side of the entrance to the dining area. There he had joined a tall man, who evidently awaited him, sitting on one of the stools.

  “A big man, in his sixties, probably,” Pam said. “He had gray hair—iron gray, they call it, although—” This time Pam stopped her own digression. “Red face and a very long jaw and he wore a blue suit that was too tight across the shoulders. Of course, I didn’t want to stare.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Of course not, darling.”

  “I never,” Pam said, “understand how people can just not be interested. Especially when things are so interesting.”

  Ingraham had talked with the man at the bar for perhaps five minutes. The big man had gone, then, and as he turned away, Ingraham had put a hand briefly on the man’s shoulder, in a gesture which might have been one of encouragement. Ingraham had returned to the table, then, and there had been no further interruptions. After dinner, the Norths had gone home and, after a suitable lapse of time, to bed.

  “The man at the bar,” Bill Weigand said. “Describe him again, will you?” Pam described him again. Weigand’s eyes narrowed; he nodded his head; he said it was interesting.

  “Sounds like Matt Halpern,” he said. “He was a client of Ingraham’s. We’ve found that out.”

  “Halpern?” Pam repeated. “Oh, the labor czar.”

  He had been called that, Bill agreed. At the moment, he appeared to be a czar facing revolution, which is a common lot of czars. He was also a czar under indictment for misappropriation of union funds.

  “And a client of Ingraham’s?” Jerry North said, disbelief in his voice. “I never knew Forbes took on that sort of thing.”

  Apparently he had, this time, Bill told them. Why—well, they would try to find out. Particularly since Halpern seemed to have become a dangerous associate.

  “Somebody tried to kill him around midnight last night,” Bill told them. “Fired shots out of a car, into his, and, as the newspapers say, ‘sped off.’ Missed Halpern. Wounded a man with him, not seriously.” Unexpectedly, Bill Weigand smiled, with some amusement. “Private cop,” he said. “Named Mallet. Presumably a bodyguard for Halpern. But—Mallet was down on his hands and knees on the car floor a second after the first shot. A bullet ricocheted and hit him in the—well, the area most prominent in his position. Very sad case.”

  “Mallet?” Pam said. “Haven’t I read about him somewhere?”

  “I hope not, Pamela,” Bill Weigand said.

  Weigand stood, then, and thanked them, and promised to keep in touch—a promise which, over the years, had become inevitable—and opened the office door. Pamela started through it, and then drew back and said, in a voice suddenly very small, not quite certain, that she thought they might wait a minute. Bill looked out, and nodded, and closed the door.

  Men were carrying the body of Forbes Ingraham from his big office where, at ten minutes after eleven that morning, he had been found dead. He had been shot once in the forehead, from close range. He had fallen forward on his desk, and his blood had flowed onto the yellow pad which was always there, rendering indecipherable whatever he might have written on it in his neat, small script.

  The Norths, coming at noon to sign their wills, had found Acting Captain William Weigand, Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, already there—Weigand and many others, from the precinct, the police laboratory, the District Attorney’s office. By then they were all convinced that, although Forbes Ingraham might conceivably have fired the bullet into his own head, he had not done so, seemingly hav
ing lacked a weapon. Nowhere in the suite of offices was a weapon to be found, and this was to be expected. It was murder, and almost at once took on the appearance of murder most obscure.

  Now Pam and Jerry North waited, and again Pam clasped her hands together, since they persisted in shaking. When they had waited long enough, Bill Weigand investigated, and went with them out of Francis Cuyler’s office and through the corridor and the reception room. Mary Burton lay on the sofa in the reception room. She was very white. Bill watched them go, and turned back. He said to Mullins, “Well, let’s see what it looks like.”

  It took them time, talking, one by one, to the people who had been in the office that morning—and who had heard no shot from Ingraham’s sound-proofed office. All had been talked to earlier by detectives from the precinct, briefly by the assistant district attorney from the Homicide Bureau. They had, by and large, agreed on the facts—on the externals of the facts. Since the facts did not lead immediately to a conclusion, the assistant district attorney had gone elsewhere, leaving spade work to the police—which meant, in the first instance, to Homicide, West, which meant to Weigand, Mullins assisting—and, if developments required, some hundreds more assisting too.

  Now they talked to Reginald Webb, surviving partner of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb; to Francis Cuyler, tall and dark, pawing black hair from a white face, an associate of the firm; to Saul Karn, five feet tall, precise, gesturing with rimless glasses to emphasize his points, and also an associate; to Phyllis Moore, pretty and white and shaken, and to Dorothy Lynch—Mrs. Dorothy Lynch—trim and competent, and showing no emotion; to Mary Burton—Mrs. Mary Burton—middle-aged and long-faced, insisting she was quite all right, holding a damp wad of handkerchief to red eyes.

  Mrs. Burton, of all of them, had the most immediate reason to be near shock. She had found Ingraham’s body. Remembering, she had made a low, moaning sound and covered her face with her hands. She had lifted her long face after a moment, and said, in a choked voice, that she was very sorry—that it had been a terrible shock.