Hanged for a Sheep (14 page)

By the time the cab had stopped and been paid off, and Pam had been blown across the sidewalk and half up the steps, and then had pulled herself up the other half against a wind which had now turned on her, and gone into the foyer, there was no sign of Harry Perkins. But on the table where mail collected in a silver tray by the vase of daffodils, there was the yellow of a telegram.

Pam was so sure that it told about Jerry that she hardly looked at the name looking out through the transparent panel on the front of the envelope. She thought, afterward, that she would have opened it, probably, no matter whom it was intended for. It was merely good luck that it was really for her—and beautiful, almost unbelievable, luck that it was from Jerry. She stared at the beautiful words:

“Grounded at Pittsburgh coming on by train stop

don't eat arsenic love.

Jerry”

Pam realized how frightened she had really been and put a hand on the little table to steady herself. Trains were all right; she believed in trains. Nothing happened to them, she told herself, except that they were usually late. Now Jerry would be all right. And now she could find Harry Perkins, who had already almost certainly been found by Weigand, and perhaps by the time Jerry got there everything would be settled. Then they could take the cats and go home and watch the cats play while Jerry told her about the book and she told him about how worried she had been. Pam dropped her hat and coat on a chair in the foyer and went into the drawing room.

It was remarkably full of people, including Mullins and Weigand. Mullins and Weigand were standing up, looking like men about to go away, and Weigand was finishing a sentence.

“—ask you more later, when I know more questions,” Weigand was saying, in a tone which had disarmed a good many people, sometimes to their drastic disadvantage. He turned and came toward Pam and saw her and smiled.

“Jerry's all right,” she said. “He's grounded. Have you—?”

Weigand shook his head. Just odds and ends, he told her. “And,” he added, “an experiment or two. I'll tell you later. Routine, for the most part. And we're leaving, now, for a while.”

“But—” Pam said. “What did Perkins say?”

“Perkins?” Weigand repeated. “We haven't found Perkins. What made you think—.”

“But, he just came in!” Pam told the detectives. “A moment before I did. I saw him climb the steps.”

That got them moving, because nobody had seen Perkins. Weigand whirled on the people who seemed to fill the drawing room and demanded information sharply. Perkins had just come in. Had any of them seen him?

The major stood up, bristling a little, and said “no!” Ben Craig, sunk in a chair, shook his head. Aunt Flora shook her torso. Nobody, it turned out, had seen Perkins. Quickly, Weigand and Mullins, aided by Detective Stein and one of the precinct men, searched the house. There was no sign of Perkins. He was not in his room, or in the library above or in any of the bedrooms. Sand, answering for the servants, denied that he had come down to the kitchen or the quarters on the ground floor. Sand insisted, further, that without being seen he could not have gone along the corridor of the ground floor and to the door leading to the sub-cellar, used for storage and the heating plant. Perkins had appeared and disappeared, and Weigand looked a little doubtfully at Pam.

“Of course I'm sure,” she said. “He's so sort of wispy. You couldn't make a mistake.”

Weigand seemed worried, then, and said he didn't like it. He said it so that all could hear.

“He worries me,” Weigand said. “Now you see him and now you don't. And obviously he's hiding.”

“Knows something, Loot,” Mullins came in. “Scared, that's him. Maybe he saw the guy plugged.”

“Or plugged him,” Weigand suggested. “Or knows something about the poisoning. At any rate, I want him. Tomorrow, if he doesn't show we'll get enough of the boys here to take the house apart. Meanwhile, I'll leave a man here—keep an eye on things.”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He followed Weigand, who went without saying anything further. Pam looked after them for a moment, and then went on into the drawing room and found a chair. This time it was the whole family and no fooling, she thought, looking around.

Major Buddie was still standing and now that she was officially in the room, other men stood. Dr. Wesley Buddie, taller and heavier than his brother, impressive and professional but with a friendly smile, stood up and said, “Hello, Pamela.” Bruce McClelland, who had been sitting on a small sofa with Judy—“Yes,” Pam repeated to herself, “Judy!”—stood and grinned at her and said nothing. Christopher Buddie stood, looking as unlike his father as possible, and said, with a kind of mockery, “Good afternoon, Mrs. North.” It was hard to tell what Christopher Buddie was mocking. Ben Craig half stood, sluggishly, and sat again, but made up for it by a special smile of greeting. Pam said, “Oh, please sit down everybody,” and sat down herself, near Aunt Flora.

“Now,” said Aunt Flora, smiling rather horribly, “we're going to have a family council, dearie. Everybody—including the murderer.”

She beamed around the family circle.

“
And
the poisoner,” Aunt Flora added, jovially.

“Must you
always
be a character, darling?” Christopher Buddie enquired, still mocking. He was dark and thin, with narrow lips. Narrow lips, Pam suddenly realized, looking around, were an un-Buddielike characteristic. The other Buddies, including Aunt Flora herself, had full lips. Which meant, probably, that full lips came from Aunt Flora, since she had them and—yes—Cousin Ben had them, too. There was less color in his, so that you noticed it belatedly. But Christopher's lips were thin and flexible. His nose was thin and looked as if it might be flexible too, although at the moment it was not flexing.

“Who's a character?” Aunt Flora demanded. “Character yourself, Chris.” She stared at him. “What
are
you making fun of, dearie?” she demanded. Chris was not as assured as he thought himself, Pam decided. He looked taken aback. But so often did much older people when Aunt Flora spoke to them.

“He's a playwright, mother,” Dr. Wesley Buddie said, easily. “An observer of life—an amused observer. Incipiently, a Noel Coward. We're just for practice.”

But he smiled at his son affectionately, and Chris Buddie smiled back. His face was no longer so sharp when he smiled.

“Well,” said Aunt Flora, “tell him not to practice on me, Wesley. I won't have it.”

But she didn't mind having it, Pam thought. It amused her, and in some fashion gratified her. It singled her out, and of that Aunt Flora always approved.

When nobody said anything, Aunt Flora looked at the small watch on her plump wrist.

“My God,” she said. “Cocktail time! Why didn't somebody say something?”

Christopher Buddie rang the bell which summoned Sand and turned back to Clem Buddie. They had their chairs drawn so that they formed an intimate V. And Bruce McClelland was absorbed, evidently, in Judy. Bruce and Judy were talking, indeed, as if they had only just met, and as if they had to talk fast to make up for time lost. But Bruce was supposed to be devoted to Clem, not to Judy. Pam wondered if what had happened the night before had changed things; if, meeting late at night in the lonely house, finding themselves united by the little emergency of the disappearances of Clem and the major, Bruce and Judy had found more than they had expected. It was conceivable, even, that Bruce had discovered that, for him, it was really Judy all the time. Things like that could happen. Certainly they were acting as if something very like that had happened.

It was hard to tell about people, Pam thought as she watched drinks being passed and sipped her own, as she listened, with half a mind, to the conversation which with the drinks was resumed around her. It was hard to tell who was in love with whom, and that was one of the easiest things. (It was easier in the later stages than it was before “anything” had happened. Pam smiled inwardly at the “anything.” People had such odd, fragile defenses against words they were afraid of.)

And if it was hard to tell about a thing which went so much by pattern, how much more difficult to tell—well, for example, whether one person out of several was a murderer. That was the crux of it. Here, supposing that neither Harry Perkins nor the servants nor some outsider called “X” had killed Stephen Anthony, was a murderer. He or she was drinking with the rest, talking with the rest casually, remembering little family jokes with the rest and saying with them, “Remember when we all—” and laughing when they laughed. And perhaps the murderer, sitting there with the others, almost forgot at times he was a murderer, because even a murderer cannot always remember, as the grief-stricken cannot always remember grief.

But it must come back again and again, that sense of being a murderer. Sometimes it must come in the middle of speech, confusing a thought already formulated—it must go round and round in the head, the knowledge of murder and of pursuit. The thought that shrewd men and clumsy men, intelligent men and dogged men, men in blue uniforms and men in slouch hats, were everywhere after you must make a coldness in your mind. Here a man was talking to somebody, and perhaps a word would give you away. Here a man was peering through a comparison microscope at tiny scratches on a piece of metal, and perhaps some scratch would give you away. Here a man was sifting through papers, steadily, unwearingly, looking for some written word that would give you away. And when he was tired, another man would look. And somewhere men in white uniforms were probing with knives into the body of the man you had killed, looking for something which would give you away.

All over the city, you would think, men would be searching for you—in words and in metal, in scraps of paper, in the things you did yesterday and the things your victims had planned to do tomorrow—and there would be no stopping them. Because, whatever they tolerated, the police did not tolerate murder, or ever give up looking for a murderer. And the men you saw—men like Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Squad, and Sergeant Mullins and Detective Stein, and uniformed and ununiformed men from the precinct—they were only the men nearest, most visible. Behind them there were many times as many anonymous men, all with their hands against you. And behind them there was something greatly vaster and more anonymous—something so anonymous that you could not give it a name, or could give it many names. The People of the State of New York against you; the Public against you; Society against you; Law against you; Civilization against you. You could call it anything, and it was always against you. But, looking around at the others, Pam realized that you—the strange, not quite imaginable Murderer—You—could remain resilient. You could chat and remember and laugh, and outsiders could not see the fear that must be in your eyes.

You did it because you could stop thinking about it, not for long but long enough for surcease. You could get your second wind, in a way, and then start over. And the people looking at you, if you could remember that, would be people with dull eyes, who could not really see.

If I could really see, Pam thought, I could see which one was the murderer, and it wouldn't matter about times and motives. She was looking, she found, at Aunt Flora—Aunt Flora with the applied complexion and the uneasy wig, with the bright amused eyes and the full lips and the remarkable necklessness; Aunt Flora who had married four times and had once, remarkably, managed to get a husband who was chief of police locked up in one of his own station houses for drunkenness; Aunt Flora who could be so boisterous one moment and so shrewdly sympathetic the next and who immediately thought of shooting when she thought of the sudden deaths of men. Aunt Flora could shoot a pistol, if you came to that; Aunt Flora was apt to be impatient of people who got in her way; Aunt Flora was, Pam suspected, essentially amoral. Could Aunt Flora kill a man? Probably. Had she? Pam peered and peered with her mind, and could not tell.

And there was, after Aunt Flora, Cousin Alden Buddie, the choleric, stubby little major. Naturally he could kill. It was his profession, and there was grim evidence enough in the world that the line between public and private murder was a wavering one. But if he killed, would he not kill openly, defiantly, as a man who had a right to kill? “Eh?” Would he not kill contemptuously, and carry until the last a bristling scorn for those who criticized him, even if their final criticism was the drastic one of electrocution? Or was he more subtle than he seemed? For men of the army were no longer trained to advance in long lines, their chests manfully inviting bullets, bands playing to advertise their presence and flags fluttering to focus fire. Now they manoeuvered, and perhaps the major, if he decided to murder, would manoeuvre, too. And what would make him murder? Pam looked at him. Almost anything he didn't like, she decided, suddenly—given the right time and the right place, the right intensity of disapproval, and the major might murder anybody. But had he, in this case? It was hopeless. Pam went on.

She looked at Clem Buddie, slender and animated and, just now, very poised. There was less to know about the young—it was hard to tell how deep veneer went, and how hot the fires were underneath. The very young counted so much on veneer because they were so uncertain—some of the very young did. And some of them were perhaps hard almost all the way through and some of them only very thinly surfaced with hardness. It was difficult to tell which Clem was, but Pam thought only surfaced. But the very young are, to outsiders and often to themselves, capable of almost anything. And perhaps in this case anything included murder. But you couldn't tell.

Nor could Pam tell, knowing him only slightly, much of anything about Christopher Buddie, except that he was intelligent, and not so sure of himself as he thought and probably violent only mentally. Judy was not, Pam thought, violent at all, for herself. But for Clem, her younger sister, Judy might be violently protective—emotion might catch her and do what it wanted with her and perhaps even carry her on to murder. She's the best of all of us, Pam thought, and the least-considering. But wasn't murder, when you came down to it, an action possible only to those who were, essentially, unconsidering; to those who saw only what was nearest and could not really see that other things came after, or if they saw could not emotionally realize?