Pity Him Afterwards

Mary Ann was backed against the wall, staring at it wide-eyed, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth. Her voice threadbare and frightened, she said, “You’d better call the police, Mel. You’d better hurry and call the police.”

Bobby did it

Sondgard sat in a kitchen chair, his arms folded across his chest, and studied the message with frustration and irritation. First ROBERT ROBERT ROBERT and now BOBBY DID IT. And before both of them I’M SORRY.

“He wants to be caught,” Sondgard murmured to himself. That was the maddening part of it. This poor creature, this pitiful and infuriating monster, wanted to be caught. He wanted to be stopped, he wanted to be punished, he wanted to be put away where he couldn’t cause any more harm. He couldn’t bring himself to just walk up to the nearest policeman and give himself up, so he did the next best thing. He left messages. He let the world know that he was sorry for what he was doing, that he didn’t want to do it, that he wanted to be stopped from doing it again, and then he let the world know who he was. Robert. Bobby.

There was only one Robert connected with the summer theater, and that was its producer, Robert Haldemann. But Haldemann was always called Bob, never either Robert or Bobby. Haldemann, Sondgard was sure, thought of himself as Bob, not as either Robert or Bobby.

Besides, Haldemann couldn’t have done it. At least, the first one he couldn’t have done, the killing of Cissie Walker. His time was accounted for, he was not even remotely a suspect.

He wants to be caught, Sondgard told himself over and over again. He wants to be caught. He is leaving us clues, he is trying to let us know. But we are too stupid to understand.

He had let them know quite a bit, be sure of quite a bit. They could be sure now that the same person had killed both Cissie Walker and Eddie Cranshaw. They could be sure that this unknown person was one of the people living in this house. After leaving his name in the dirt near the Lowndes house, he had come back here and left another note, so there could be no mistake. He was here, he was the killer of them both, and his name was Bobby.

Or at least, the name Bobby could be connected to him somehow, could lead to him in one way or another. Because his name couldn’t really be Bobby. Sondgard had a small tight list of suspects, and none of them was named Bobby.

He went over the list in his mind. The names were four:

Tom Burns

Ken Forrest

Will Henley

Rod McGee

Tom Burns? There was Bobby Burns, the Scot poet. Was the first name supposed to lead to the last name, and then around to another Burns with a different first name? It seemed complicated and roundabout, but would an insane mind work that way? Sondgard couldn’t tell.

All right, what about the rest? Ken Forrest. No connection there with the name Robert or the name Bobby. Not even a similarity of capital letters. Nor was there any famous person with the name Robert Forrest. The same with Will Henley; no similarity of capital letters, no Robert Henley a familiar name. And Rod McGee? McGee had said his first name was a nickname from Fredric, but could it actually be short for Robert? There was, in any case, a similarity of the capital R in both first names.

Sondgard shook his head in angry irritation. It was worse than a double crostic. Worse than Finnegans Wake without a pony. Worse than the detective books so many of his fellow professors — but not his fellow captains — insisted on writing every summer, in which the final clue always came from the author’s specialty; an inverted signature in a first-edition Gutenberg De civitate Dei, the misspelling of the Kurd word for bird, the inscription on a Ming Dynasty vase, or the odd mineral traces found embedded in the handle of the kris.

Bobby. Bobby. It was a name, or a nickname. It was also slang for British policemen. And a bobby-soxer used to mean a teen-ager. The word “bob” in Damon Runyon argot was a synonym for “dollar.” But so what? None of the suspects was a policeman, British or otherwise. None of them were teenagers. None had a name that was a synonym for “dollar.”

No, this wasn’t going to be a word game. The Bobby scrawled on that table was a name, and reinforced by the name Robert in the earlier message. The killer was leaving a direct clue to himself, in twice giving them this name. Somehow or other, it had to be possible to connect the name and the killer together.

Could he be dealing with one of these split-personality cases? Like The Three Faces of Eve, where the different personalities operated completely independent of one another, and even took on different names. Could one of these four people be split that way, have a different personality which every once in a while assumed control, and which was a homicidal personality, and which had taken for itself the name Robert or Bobby?