Killing the Goose (28 page)

But there was no place to go. He was between her and the door. Then at the other end of the room, at one side, she saw another door and ran toward it. Behind her she heard Beck laughing. He was laughing and running and still trying to talk.

“You thought you'd fool me, didn't you?” he said. But the words did not come evenly, as in a sentence. They came jerkily. “Thought I wouldn't know you knew about Johnny. Cute little Johnny, with all the pretty words …”

Pam reached the door and clutched it open. It opened on a passage which ended in a blank wall. But at her right was another door. There was no place else to go, so she went through the door, although she knew it was leading her into a trap. It led her into the control room. There was a slanting table with a chair behind it, and another chair, and on the walls some sort of electrical equipment in cupboards. There was no other door.

The door had opened inward and Pam tried to shut it behind her. But Beck had reached it, and he was heavier, and the door opened against her easily. It seemed terrifyingly easy for Beck to force the door.

Before he could reach out and grab her, Pam leaped back into the control room. She hit the chair and it clattered, dully, on the floor. She pressed back against the slanting table, covered with switch keys, which it had fronted. Pam put her hands behind her against the table and faced Dan Beck. Beck stopped hurrying and came in and closed the door. He was smiling again—the same horribly ordinary smile.

“But you didn't fool me, Mrs. North,” he said. “So I can't let you go, can I? Because you'd try to stop me, Mrs. North—you'd try to end all I'm doing. I know you would, Mrs. North—like the others. Like Ann. She didn't know it was so important—so much more important than she was. It's more important than you are, Mrs. North.”

He had stopped and that was more frightening than anything else. Because it meant he was sure. So sure that he no longer had to hurry.

It was as if he had read her mind.

“Twelve minutes still, you know,” he said, as if he were making conversation. “Then, of course, I have to go on again. I have to talk to the people.” He stopped and looked at her. “
My
people, you know,” he said. “Not Elliot's people.
My
people. I was the one who talked to them. Elliot only helped. The ideas were all my ideas.”

Pam got it then, although still she did not fully understand it.

“But Elliot wrote what you said,” she told Beck. “It wasn't really you who said those things. You were just—just an actor. All the time you were just an actor.”

A strange grimace came over his face.

“That's what Ann said,” he told Pam. “Just before she died Ann said that—that I was just an actor. I hadn't been sure what I would do to her before. Not really sure. It wasn't important either way, but I'm not sure I would have killed her if she hadn't said that. It—it annoyed me, I'm afraid.”

It came over Pam North then that Dan Beck was mad. Not mad in an ordinary sense. Not mad in his logic. Only mad in his premises. She started to scream, but almost before Beck laughed she realized the futility of a scream.

“Perfectly soundproof, Mrs. North,” Beck told her, and now he was smiling again in quite an ordinary fashion, as he moved forward to kill her. “Control rooms have to be, you know. They're made to be. The walls will keep sound in—any sound.”

Keep sound in, Pam thought. Keep sound in. But it wasn't that—really. It was all to let sound out. It was all a cunning, skillful way of trapping sound and then letting it out. Letting it go everywhere. And the control room was where you let it out. You—

Faster than she thought, Pam moved. Her fingers groped behind her. There had been a switch larger than the others somewhere on the panel. Perhaps it was the switch which let sound out. Trying not to move her body, groping desperately, she sought the large switch with her fingers. Fumbling frantically, she felt other switches move under her fingers. Maybe that was wrong; maybe it was all wrong and hopeless. But nothing could be more hopeless for anything she did now than what she had already done had made it. She found the large switch and it moved under her fingers.

Now she could scream. She screamed. Beck laughed.

“Very effective, Mrs. North,” he said. “Very effective. And nobody can hear you. I can hear you, but it doesn't mean anything to me. Ann screamed too, you know—Ann started to scream. It's too bad we aren't on the air, Mrs. North, so that everybody could hear such an effective scream. If we were on the air, now—and out at the microphone. Instead of in here where nobody can hear you.”

That was it, Pam realized, and knew what she had to do. The sounds were let loose from the control room. But they had to begin in the studio. She had to—

In one movement she stooped, grabbed the light chair and threw it. She was stronger than she had dreamed she could be. But she was not strong enough, and not quick enough. Beck's hands flew up in front of his face and the chair banged into them. He held it there. But he was surprised and staggered slightly and now Pam North moved as she had never moved before.

In master control the sound engineer saw the light flash from the standby studio. It was unexpected; it meant that somewhere in the world all hell had broken loose. It meant that, without warning, a news bulletin had come through of such vital importance that no other program mattered. His hand reached automatically for a switch and threw it. But instead of a bulletin there was silence from the standby studio. The engineer's fingers moved another switch. In Studio 3C a panel on the wall lighted up dimly. It said: “On the Air.”

In Studio 3A, Humphrey Creighton opened his mouth. He was now about to tell how it occurred to him to write “Beyond Yesterday.” He had his extemporaneous remarks on this subject so well in mind that he hardly needed to look at the paper on which he had them well typed. In the guest booth of Studio 3A Mr. Creighton's agent leaned forward with a slight enhancement of interest, approaching a receptive ear to the radio receiver. He hoped old Humpty-Dumpty would knock them dead with this one. Old Humpty-Dumpty hadn't been so damned hot so far, but you couldn't tell.

Pam North got to the door before Dan Beck could let go the chair. She was almost through it before he grabbed for her and got the collar of her dress. It parted. Thank God, Pam thought, running, they make them out of old movie films or something—thank God they come apart. She went out into the studio, and as she ran, panting, she began to scream again.

“I was sitting under a tree at my little place in the country,” Humphrey Creighton said, with the casual air of a man who also has big places in the country, and can sit under half a dozen trees when he likes. “When suddenly—”

Suddenly was the word for it.

“Help,” Pam North's voice said, rising in crescendo. “Help. Help everybody. Dan Beck's trying to kill me. Dan Beck's trying to kill me—just like he killed the others. Help. Oh—help!”

It was afterwards estimated that at least half a million book lovers, from coast to coast, had been about to hear about Mr. Creighton under the tree. There was a little group of them in an apartment in Kansas City; they met every Thursday evening to loiter in the world of books. In Memphis, the Book Forum was reaching an even larger group, composed of the ladies of the Forward Club—and four of their husbands—over loud speakers. In Jersey City, there was a small, scattered but devoted audience and Schenectady contributed, on an estimate, more than five hundred. (It was snowing heavily in Schenectady.) Milwaukee, Louisville, Keokuk, Iowa, Wilkes-Barre, New Orleans and St. Paul had each its quota of listeners, and all of them thought something odd must have happened. It was, they agreed in talking it over, a very funny thing for Mr. Creighton to say at just that point. About Mr. Beck, too.

Half a dozen receivers were open in the Transcontinental Building, including one near the reception desk, at which Bill and Dorian Weigand had just stopped. That was why Bill Weigand, with half a dozen attendants following him, was first to reach the standby studio. It was fortunate, as it turned out, that it could always be opened from outside, in case of emergency, by pressing a concealed button. It was fortunate that one of the attendants knew where the button was.

Pam North was on one side of the table, her hands grasping it, leaning forward—and yelling toward the microphone. Dan Beck was in a somewhat similar position on the other side, and he was swearing with a kind of horrible anger in his voice. He had just started to move around the table when the door opened. He whirled to face it and then, without pausing, he charged at Bill Weigand. Nobody ever knew what he had planned to do. What he did was crumple to the floor when Weigand's fist caught him.

Pam still stood behind the table, her tattered dress hanging in strings from her shoulders. She continued, with a kind of terrified, mad insistence, to shout into the microphone.

But the great radio audience was no longer hearing her. The engineer at master control, after some seconds of horrified astonishment, had hurriedly pulled more levers. Probably if he had thought of it, he would have returned the Book Forum to the air. But it was no time for thought. Desperately, the engineer at master control cut in on a band from Los Angeles. It was playing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” The engineer in master control sighed in relief and slumped in his chair.

Dorian's arms were around Pam North, who trembled convulsively in them. Dorian was saying, “It's all right, dear, Bill got him,” when Jerry North, white-faced, burst into the room. In his excitement, he embraced both Pam and Dorian. Dorian smiled up at him and slipped from his arms. He folded them around Pam very tightly. “It's all right, dear,” he said. “It's all right, kid. Bill got him,” Jerry paused. “You were wonderful, kid,” he said. “And your slip shows.” Jerry thought of this for a moment. “At the top,” he said. He thought again. “Not that it matters,” he assured her.

Pam clung to Jerry. She was shaking in his arms, and crying, and laughing a little.

“He wasn't stolen at all, Jerry,” she said. “He wasn't ever stolen. I was all wrong. He was just—just an actor. He didn't even know the words. Jerry. He was just—he was just Elliot's Charlie McCarthy. Isn't that funny, Jerry? And he killed all those people because he was just somebody else's dummy, and so people wouldn't know. Isn't that funny, Jerry?”

Jerry held her very closely. When he spoke his voice was low and quiet.

“No dear,” he said. “It isn't very funny, Pam. Not very funny.”

XV.
Friday, 6:30 P.M. and Thereafter

Bill Weigand came late to the Norths and looked tired and there was a kind of hush while Jerry North measured gin and vermouth, three and one. The ice clattered in the mixer; Jerry poured and twisted lemon peel and Bill drank. Bill said something which sounded like “unh!” in a tone of great contentment. The Norths and Dorian looked at him and he smiled faintly and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “He didn't come through. He's going to make it hard for us.” Bill looked at Pam. “It's too bad,” he said, “that you didn't persuade him to confess over the radio, Pam. There was a recorder on, and that would have made things very nice. Very nice indeed.”

“Well,” Pam said. “I was busy. He was trying to choke me. Or something. In case you didn't notice.”

That, Bill Weigand admitted, would help. Efforts to choke people before witnesses were not well thought of by the Police Department. But a confession to the murders of Ann Lawrence, Frances McCalley, Florence Pennock and John Elliot would have been better.

“Neater,” Pam agreed. “I can see that. Do you have to have it?”

Bill shrugged. He said he hoped not. He said that, on the whole, he thought not. But it would be, at best, a case of intimations—a case made up of small details, each suggesting one thing; none proving, if the jury chose to be literal, anything. Even now, Bill told them, it would be easier to convict Alfred Pierson. Even now, the case against him was simpler and more direct; more understandable.

“Only,” Pam pointed out, “Pierson didn't kill anybody. And Mr. Beck did.” She considered this. “Which ought to make a difference,” she painted out.

Bill smiled a little and said it probably would. In the end. The end wasn't yet; there were still the minutiae of evidence to be amassed. But now—and this was the way it usually happened—they knew where to look.

“Like,” he said, “at Beck's old scripts, enough of which we've found. All written on Elliot's typewriter. Like the story Beck's servants will tell, once we persuade them it would be a good idea to tell. They've told part of it already—they've told that Elliot used to come every day; that he was always with Beck during the time that Beck was supposed to be writing his broadcasts. And they'll tell, because they know, that Beck did go out the night that Ann was killed, instead of staying innocently at home. They won't be able to tell where he went, but it will give him something to explain—and the jury something to guess about.”

“Were they in on it?” Pam wanted to know. “The servants, I mean. The nice old couple?”

The couple was older than it was nice, Weigand said. Were they in on it? That would be hard to say; they wouldn't be charged with anything, if they talked up properly. They were not in on the murder; it was not even certain that they knew about it. They were in on Beck's ramp, to the extent of knowing about it. But that was not criminal. There was, he pointed out, nothing criminal in hiring a ghost. If there were, half the public speakers—

He broke off and corrected himself.

“More than half,” he said. “There's no law against it.”

He paused again, thinking it over. He said that that was what made it so odd. There was no law, there was not even custom, against a man having his speeches written. And that was all Beck had done—unless you went below the surface. And that was what it was going to be difficult to make a jury understand. That was all Beck had done, except to kill four people to prevent a fact coming out which, in the case of another man, would be no more than a pinprick to vanity. The fact that Beck—the great Beck—was only a voice.