A Pinch of Poison (10 page)

“Pam,” Mr. North said, “is out somewhere. I'm very much afraid she is out detecting, Bill. But if she comes in, I'll tell her.”

“Right,” Weigand said.

“Only she isn't an old dame,” Mr. North said. “Or not very.”

“Listen, Gerald,” Weigand said. “You're getting to talk like Pam.”

“My God,” said Mr. North, prayerfully. “Thanks for telling me, Bill. Why?”

“Who isn't an old dame?” Weigand asked.

“Oh,” Mr. North said. “You had me worried. That was perfectly clear—Mary Crane isn't an old dame. Very pleasant, really. And in her middle forties, I should think. How're you coming?”

Weigand was, he told Mr. North, still going, in several directions.

“How about coming around for dinner tonight?” Mr. North suggested. “Maybe we could get Dorian in. Pam will want to hear everything.”

Weigand said it sounded swell. And that he'd try. He cradled the telephone, left word that he would be at the Placement Foundation for an hour or so, and left Headquarters. The relative coolness of the morning was gone, he discovered. His car, which had been parked in the sun, was like an oven as he settled behind the wheel. He opened everything and rolled. The breeze was pleasant and he decided on more of it. He touched the siren and rolled faster. On occasion, he thought, it was comfortable to be a cop.

Mrs. North seemed surprised and a little chagrined to see Weigand and said, “Oh!” Then she nodded.

“Of course you would,” she said. “Only I got here first. She doesn't.”

“What?” said Weigand. “Please, Pam.”

“Know why anybody would kill Lois Winston,” Mrs. North said. “Obviously. Isn't that why you're here?”

Weigand looked across the desk at the woman who lived at it and discovered that she was smiling, amusedly. His own eyebrows went up like the shrug of shoulders. Mary Crane, assuming this was Mary Crane, as the lettering on the door promised, apparently was well acquainted with Pamela North.

“This is Miss Crane, Bill,” Mrs. North said. “But I've already asked her, of course.”

Lieutenant Weigand said, “How do you do, Miss Crane.” And Miss Crane said, “Hello, Lieutenant. Mrs. North's been speaking of you.”

Weigand saw why Mr. North had taken exception to the “old dame.” Miss Crane was not, certainly, young. But she had no particular age. She was brown and built solidly and her brown eyes looked as if she had seen a great deal and was still interested in seeing more. She wore a black silk suit that carried its own crispness and a soft white blouse. She would not, Weigand guessed, be wearing flat-heeled shoes or a shapeless felt hat. He thought of cartoons of social workers and looked again.

“No,” Miss Crane said. “You needn't be alarmed, Lieutenant. And sit down. Although there isn't much I can tell you, I'm afraid.” Weigand sat and looked around the casual, rather dimly lighted office.

“Tell him about the Pickett,” Pam North advised. She was looking unusually perky, Weigand thought, with a hat which wore a tiny red feather. The color of the feather identified as Mrs. North's the red straw bag lying on Mary Crane's desk.

“If he likes,” Miss Crane agreed. “But it is obviously absurd. The Pickett, as Mrs. North says, is Ellen Pickett, a worker we had until about a year ago—Miss Winston took over some of her work.”

“Oh yes,” Weigand said. “The one who thought Miss Winston had taken her job. I doubt whether—”

“No,” said Miss Crane, decidedly. “Miss Pickett was very upset and just before she left she made a very difficult scene. She felt that Lois was an amateur who didn't need a job and who was taking hers. But it was just—well, difficult disposition on Miss Pickett's part. It was the disposition, really, which made us decide to let her go, rather than anything Miss Winston did.”

“Although,” Weigand pointed out, “there was some truth in what she said. Miss Winston was an amateur, and didn't need the job and there are, I suppose, only a certain number of jobs?”

It didn't, Miss Crane told him, work out that way. There were, to be sure, only a certain number of paid jobs. “But there is all the work in the world,” she said, and sighed faintly. “We could use twice as many workers as we have; when we find qualified volunteers it is—what shall I say?—so much velvet.

“Of which,” she added after a moment, “there isn't too much here.”

“And Miss Winston was qualified, I gather?” Weigand asked.

Miss Crane was succinct. “Very,” she said. She had gone to the school of social work and had spent three years at the Foundation in a, more or less, probationary capacity. Then, because, and only because, she was a useful worker they would have been glad to employ, she joined the regular staff of investigators. She took assignments like the rest, worked more or less the same hours—“with, naturally, some latitude,” Miss Crane added—and was in every sense a staff employee, except that she was unpaid. Her status was unusual but by no means unique, Miss Crane explained. Most large, well-run agencies had one or two such volunteers on their staffs.

Weigand nodded and decided to clean up as he went along. Had Miss Pickett got another job, he wondered.

She had, Miss Crane told him. In Detroit in an agency—She paused, and sought words. “Which has somewhat different standards from ours,” she said.

“The movie one,” Mrs. North explained. “The one you're always reading about.
They don't keep any records!
”

Mrs. North spoke as if this were a rather dreadful thing, which came, Weigand thought, oddly from Mrs. North. He thought of investigating, out of sheer personal curiosity, and pushed the thought away. He wondered whether Miss Crane could tell him how Miss Winston had spent the previous day; her last day.

“As far as her work here went, I mean,” he explained.

Miss Crane nodded. She already had got out the assignment record, she said. Miss Winston had been on an investigation during the afternoon, talking with prospective foster parents. Earlier she had been making a routine checkup at the Municipal Building.

“Yes?” Weigand said. “How was that?”

It was, it seemed, simple enough. One of the Foundation's older wards—a girl of seventeen, who had not been adopted and was being partly supported by the agency—had made up her mind to get married to a boy of about her own age.

“We hoped she hadn't,” Miss Crane said. “There were several reasons, none of which matter. We tried to reason her out of it.”

They were not sure they had been successful and had suspected that the girl had got married anyway, falsifying her age. Miss Winston, with her own appointment several hours off, had volunteered to check at the Municipal Building on marriage licenses issued during the past week or two. That was what she had done Tuesday morning. Weigand, listening, said “Hm-m-m” with interest and the women looked at him.

“That hooks up with something,” Mrs. North challenged. “When you sound that way, it always hooks up with something. Doesn't it?”

Weigand admitted that it might, but volunteered nothing. Mrs. North commanded with her eyes and he shook his head. “Later, maybe,” he told her. He turned back to Mary Crane.

“In the afternoon,” she said, “Lois seems to have gone to see some prospective foster parents—a Mr. and Mrs. Graham who live”—she consulted a card—“up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”

“Where,” Mrs. North wanted to know, “is that?”

It was, Weigand told her, the section the Henry Hudson Parkway ran through after it crossed the Harlem River. She looked puzzled.

“Ben Riley's,” he explained.

She brightened, and then clouded suddenly.

“Isn't that still Manhattan?” she said. “I always thought so.”

Weigand told her it was the Bronx, all right. But not the Bronx one usually thought of. He broke off, thinking.

“This investigation,” he said. “This may sound foolish to you but—could there be anything dangerous in it? I mean, could she—or any worker—find out something that she shouldn't and—well, antagonize people?” He saw that Miss Crane was smiling, and smiled back, rather apologetically. “I suppose,” he said, “I'm thinking of our kind of investigations—police investigations.”

Miss Crane said he probably was. Investigations of possible foster homes would not, she said, be at all likely to lead the investigators into dangerous situations.

“It is a little difficult to explain to a layman,” she said. “Particularly against all the background of misinformation which has been built up in the layman. Our ‘investigations' don't include any prying. They are conversations, chiefly—the worker talks to the prospective foster parents and tries to get to know them; she looks over their house and gets an idea about their financial standing. She asks them questions which, when they first apply for children, they are told will have to be asked. She sees neighbors and friends and relatives whose names the foster parents supply for that purpose. You can see there are a good many things we have to know, before we trust a child with strangers.”

Weigand nodded.

“It is all done for the child, essentially,” she told him. “But in some measure for the foster parents, too. The more we know about them, the better chance we have of—well, fitting them with a child. If the foster parents have been through college, for example, they will be happiest with a child who may, some day, go through college, and they would be disappointed with a child whose mind wasn't fitted for formal education. And we try to fit races and temperaments and—well, you can see it is something of a job.”

“And Miss Winston was a good worker?” Weigand said.

“Very,” Miss Crane told him. “She—well, it has been a very great shock to all of us, Lieutenant.”

Weigand nodded. Pam North broke in.

“Are the Grahams the people who are going to get Michael?” she said. Miss Crane nodded.

“Michael?” Weigand echoed.

“The little boy we are thinking of placing with Mr. and Mrs. Graham,” Miss Crane told him. “A child of about three. The placement seems to be very suitable, although Miss Winston's death will delay matters. She was handling it, and much of the investigation may have to be done over. I won't know until I have read her recent reports.”

“Oh,” said Weigand. He thought it over. Michael, he decided, didn't come in. He might see the Grahams, because it sometimes helped to find out what a person who had been murdered was doing and saying in the hours before death. It would be, just possibly, worth a trip to Riverdale. Meanwhile—He stood up and started to thank Miss Crane. He was glad, at any rate, to know that Lois Winston had had an opportunity to go over the marriage license lists at the Municipal Building. It would be interesting to find out whether, in searching them, she had run across a name more familiar to her than that of the wayward ward of the Placement Foundation.

“Listen,” Mrs. North said, firmly. “I think you ought to hear about Michael. It's a very strange story and—well, you never know.”

Weigand started to shake his head, and again met command in Pam North's eyes. She was, for some reason, rather eager about this, he decided. He looked at his watch. Another half-hour wouldn't make much difference, one way or the other.

“What,” he said, “about Michael?”

Mrs. North looked at Mary Crane and nodded. Miss Crane seemed puzzled. She said she couldn't see what bearing it could possibly have. She looked at Lieutenant Weigand and smiled questioningly and he nodded, just perceptibly.

“If it doesn't take too long,” he said. “We want to keep Mrs. North happy.”

It wouldn't, Miss Crane agreed, take long. It was, like all the Foundation's case histories, confidential. “Mrs. North is on the committee, of course,” Miss Crane explained. She looked a little bewildered about that, Weigand noticed. He merely nodded, barricading a sympathetic grin. The nod accepted the forthcoming information as confidential.

Michael, Miss Crane explained, was a little boy of three with a rather unusual history. He had come to the organization some six weeks earlier, being brought under care by a man who said he was the child's father. Miss Crane herself had eventually interviewed the man—an odd, unshaven man who looked ill and, eventually, said he was ill. He wore dark glasses, she said, and even so sat with his back to the window because the light hurt his eyes. He wanted to surrender Michael, his son, for adoption. He had not brought the boy.

“He said he was Richard Osborne,” Miss Crane said. Osborne said he had been a draftsman, but recently had been too ill to work. He had been taking care of Michael by himself since his wife had left him, when they were living in San Francisco. He had come to New York on an offer of a job and had got it, but held it only a few months. That had been during the winter before. While he still had the job, he had begun to feel weak and ill and had looked around for someone with whom he could board the child. Through a man who worked with him he had heard of a woman—a Mrs. Halstead—who sometimes boarded children. She—Miss Crane stopped. She had been summarizing from a sheaf of papers on her desk, now and then checking her memory against something written there. Now she looked up.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember, now. I should have started back a bit. Mrs. Halstead lives up in Riverdale too, you see. But it isn't merely coincidence.”

“Well,” Weigand said, “let's finish with the boy.”

The boy's father, Miss Crane continued, had gone to see Mrs. Halstead, decided she would be suitable, and arranged to board the child there. He had done so until recently, paying seven dollars each week. For the past several weeks, however, he had been unable to pay.

That was because he had, recently, grown so ill that he could not continue to work. He had gone to a doctor and, on the doctor's advice, to the Veterans Bureau. A complete physical examination had followed.