Killing the Goose (26 page)

“Good evening, friends,” Mr. Beck said. “To all of you—on farms and in cities, on quiet front porches, in general stores at cross roads, in modern apartments, in places still gripped by the cold of winter and in those fortunate communities where spring has already come—my friends and fellow Americans—to all of you the
best
of evenings. And now I will tell you what the news of this day has meant to me—”

There was a lusciousness about it; a familiar, poised lusciousness. There was nothing staccato about Dan Beck; there was not anything obviously expert. Only a person trained to notice would have noticed that his breathing through the long opening sentence—a sentence which varied little from night to night, and then only in deference to the season—was controlled with almost superhuman perfection. Only an expert in such matters would have assayed at its correct value the practiced modesty of that last line; the inflection which made of the “me” a simple, utterly unpretentious individual who, but for the most absurd of accidents, would have been sitting on one of those very same front porches of which he spoke so soothingly. A counselor and friend was Dan Beck, and he would rather have been sitting beside you on the front porch than doing anything else in the world—the world with which he was, by the same accident, so, uniquely familiar—had to offer.

“The same old Beck,” Bill Weigand said. “The same ineffable Beck. What price Pam's theory now, Dorian?”

It was, oddly, a relief to hear Beck; to know, from the first syllable of his voice, that he was the same Beck he had always been, on each Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday of the year; the Beck to whom even Bill Weigand, before only casually interested and never, in spite of the commissioner, alarmed, had more or less by chance listened to a dozen times in perhaps as many weeks. Relaxed, partly by the final confidence Beck's voice gave him in Beck's evidently unstolen condition, Bill Weigand sank back in his own corner of the broad sofa. Dan Beck vibrated on.

It puzzled Bill for a moment to realize that Dorian, the cocktail to which she had reverted forgotten, was listening with an odd intentness to Dan Beck. Bill looked at her and started to speak, but she held up a hand to silence him. After an instant, Bill began to listen too.

Because, obscurely, it was Beck and still it wasn't Beck. The practiced voice went on, smoothly, the practiced inflection fell on the indicated words. Nothing tangible was different. But, after a moment, Bill Weigand understood why Dorian was listening with such odd intentness to a voice which usually lulled her into drowsiness. About Dan Beck that evening there was something uneasy, unsure. It was not, after all, the same old Beck. Listening, your attention wandered and you brought it back almost by force; listening, it seemed somehow as if the speaker's attention also wandered. The words were there, and the voice was there, but something under them was missing.

The lack, if they were not imagining it—and when Dorian lifted inquiring eyebrows for assurance, Bill nodded his agreement—was beyond definition. Sometimes it was more evident than at other times, as Dan Beck went on through his fifteen minutes of divulging what the news of that day had meant to him. Sometimes he was surely the old Beck; sometimes he was as surely a new, uncertain Beck. He was, for example, the old Beck at the end, as he had been at the beginning. There was a time half way between when he was the old Beck, too—the old Beck rolling along. But there were other moments when—well, when it was hard to tell.

He finished, with the peroration which was almost a signature, and Dorian switched off the radio. She looked at her husband and waited. They did not need to say anything, and for a minute—a long minute—neither did. Then Dorian spoke.

“What is it, Bill?” she said. “I know what Pam heard. What was it?”

Bill Weigand shook his head slowly. He was abstracted; deep in thought. And now it was as if the uneasiness which he had heard—or thought he heard—in Dan Beck's voice had been transmitted to his own mind.

“I don't know,” he said, finally. “I don't know, Dorian. It's Beck—and it isn't Beck. And that gets us nowhere. I'd swear the voice is Beck's voice, and I heard it only this afternoon—heard it without anything mechanical to get in the way, without any chance of—of any kind of deception. But there's something wrong with it.”

“Would we have heard it if Pam hadn't?” Dorian asked, a small doubt in her voice. “Are we merely hearing something we subconsciously expected to hear, Bill? Are we making up—something?”

It was a possibility that they were. The human mind is not reliable. Bill gave her that as a possibility, but he still did not feel satisfied.

“I don't either,” Dorian said, answering what he had not said. “I think there's—something. Of course maybe he just had a bad night.”

“And,” Bill reminded her, “a bad last night. It could be, of course, that he's distracted and upset by what's happened.”

But Bill could not quite convince himself that that was it. Dan Beck was a professional—that, whatever else now was lacking, was clear in every intonation of his voice. Professionals are hard to unsettle; professionalism is a hard surface to walk on in the most treacherous quagmire of emotion. Once on the path, professionalism would be an assured guide.

“It's almost as if he didn't believe what he was saying,” Dorian said. “Could that be it?”

Bill stood up and began to walk slowly up and down the room. He thought of this suggestion and shook his head over it.

“He said about what he always says,” he told her. “The same old—guff. Or dangerous twaddle, or whatever it is. Why would he believe it last week and not tonight? If that's true—well, that would be stronger than almost any other explanation. I'd as soon think he was—stolen.”

“Which isn't—” Dorian began. Then he stopped, suddenly. “Bill!” she said. “Could Pam be right, after all?” There was hurried anxiety in her voice. “Because if she is—” Dorian said, and sat looking at Bill, wide-eyed.

“She can't be,” Bill told her, but his voice, too, was hurried. “It's—preposterous. And, anyway, Jerry will keep her out—out of anything.”

“All of us together never kept her out of anything,” Dorian told him. “You know that, Bill. She—when she forgets to be afraid, you can't keep her out of anything. Not even Jerry can. Bill—I'm worried.”

Bill stopped walking and looked at her.

“All right, kid,” he said. “I'm worried, too. I'm worried without knowing why. I'm worried against everything that makes sense. Because, damn it all, that
was
Beck on the radio. It—had to be Beck. Nobody could get away with anything else.”

Dorian looked at him for rather a long time.

“Couldn't they, Bill?” she said. “Are you sure they couldn't?”

Bill wasn't sure. Looking at each other, they both knew it. They knew, too, that they weren't going out, late and lazily as they had planned to do, a day's work done, to dinner at Charles. Or perhaps at the Lafayette, for a change? Because the day's work wasn't done. Bill argued, briefly, and without too much conviction, that Dorian at least was going out quietly and eat a lazy dinner somewhere, even by herself, and after it come home safely to the apartment. Dorian's answer was to change her housecoat for a gray silk suit and a hat that dipped low over her right eye.

They went first to Dan Beck's apartment at the Hotel André, and Bill wondered what on earth they were going to say to Beck, short of asking him point blank why he didn't sound as he should on the radio. He needn't, Bill found out, have worried. Dan Beck was not at his apartment. He had not returned from the studio. He was not expected back until late.

It was possible, of course, that he imagined it. But the motherly, elderly woman did not seem motherly when she told them this. There was an odd note in her voice. She spoke as if, suddenly, a need to be polite and ingratiating had ended. She was almost curt, as if it did not matter any more how she sounded to Detective Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Squad. Lieutenant Weigand had an odd, and further unsettling, conviction as they left that the motherly little woman was laughing at them, and laughing with something very like malevolence.

XIV.
Thursday, 10:59 P.M. to 11:31 P.M.

From where he sat at the head of a long table, set with individual microphones instead of plates, Jerry North could look across a long room and up at a kind of mezzanine at the other end. The mezzanine was fronted with heavy glass, so that parties on conducted tours could walk into it and look down on broadcasting and walk out again without adding their sounds to the captive sounds below. But now there was no touring party; there was Pamela North, who smiled and nodded reassurance to Jerry, and there were two men from Jerry's office and several other people who were friends of the several authors on the Book Forum. Thus, Jerry thought, proving that after all authors had friends.

Behind Jerry's back, in the control room—walled by glass from the studio, like the mezzanine opposite it—the sound engineer lifted his hand. The announcer, standing at his own microphone—and within Jerry's range of vision—stiffened just perceptibly. The hand went down quickly and the announcer spoke.

“This evening, as every Thursday evening at this hour,” the announcer said, bending close to the microphone as if about to caress it and, seemingly, whispering in its ear—“This evening we bring you another session of the Book Forum—a half hour during which authors, critics and publishers meet, informally, to take you with them into the world of books.”

The announcer's voice acquired a special hush, as of reverence, when he spoke of the world of books. Mr. North felt slightly ill, but remembered that hundreds of thousands of people probably were listening, and that some of them—perhaps a good many of them—might buy Humphrey Creighton's “Beyond Yesterday.” Jerry North looked at Creighton, perspiring briskly at the other end of the table. Not if they saw Creighton, Jerry thought morosely. But fortunately they couldn't; possibly the war's only benefit was that it had postponed television.

“—Humphrey Creighton,” the announcer continued, “author of that vivid novel”—the announcer hesitated and stared with apparently disbelief at his notes—“Beyond Yesterday.” The announcer looked anxiously at Mr. North, who nodded. The announcer looked relieved, but still puzzled. Probably, Jerry North thought, they should have changed the title after all. It was one of those books they might have called anything. “And last but—”

Jerry waited, with a kind of fixed hopelessness. Sure enough—

“—not least, Mr. Gerald North, the proud publisher of Mr. Creighton's best-selling book, and tonight's guest host on the Book Forum, brought you as a public service feature by the Transcontinental Broadcasting System over its member and affiliated stations from coast to coast. Mr. North!”

Jerry jumped slightly and the announcer, turning from the microphone, pointed a commanding finger at him. Jerry looked down at his introductory speech—the speech which he had carefully prepared the day before to start the Book Forum on its thoughtful, but nevertheless entirely impromptu, way and began to read. He was a little surprised, as he had been each time fate brought him before a studio microphone, to discover just how unfrightening it was. Called upon to speak before an audience, Mr. North clutched at the nearest fixed object and trembled violently, at least until he was well under way. Confronted by a microphone, before which so many insisted that they became blue with mike-fright, Mr. North was calm and undisturbed. Probably, he had sometimes thought, this was because he did not really believe in radio—not deeply and personally. He simply did not believe that, when he talked into an object which—on this occasion particularly—looked like a cage for a very small bird, anything further happened. He did not believe that his voice went mysteriously out into an alien world and was heard by thousands of alien people, ten of whom, made visible, would have constituted an audience and a menace. He knew that his voice was going out and that it could, if they chose, be heard by thousands. He merely did not believe it.

He talked easily, finished the page, and read the paragraph on the page following which threw the ball—rather neatly Mr. North thought—at Humphrey Creighton. Mr. Creighton saw it coming and a wild look came into his eyes. Mr. Creighton, it appeared, was one of those who really believed in radio. Mr. Creighton made a small, stifled sound, cleared his throat—which made the announcer, whose throat never needed clearing—glare at him—and started over. Mr. North thought that Mr. Creighton looked, and sounded, very funny and looked up toward the mezzanine which held Mrs. North to see if she shared his amusement. She was listening, presumably, to the broadcast, picked up on the studio receiver. Mr. North looked casually, then he looked intently. Then his look became fixed, and somewhat glassy. Because Mrs. North was not there. Mrs. North had quietly left the world of books. She had gone out into another world—and it came over Mr. North, clammily, that he had never actually persuaded her to promise that she would stay in the glass-enclosed coop in which he had left her. If she had promised, she would have stayed. But somehow she had avoided promising.

Mr. North half started up. Everybody glared at him: the announcer, Mr. Creighton, two other authors of rival firms—brought in to show that this was really the world of books, in which commercial rivalry was unheard of—and one rather tired-looking reviewer, who had thought Mr. Creighton's “Beyond Yesterday” a colossal bore in the first place and was trying to recall why he had consented to appear on the Book Forum. (Not that it wasn't reasonably good advertising, of course.) All of these faces, which were extremely varied faces under usual circumstances, confronted Mr. North with a single expression of shocked horror. “Don't you know,” the faces said, in pantomime, “don't you know we're ON THE AIR?”