Dead as a Dinosaur (20 page)

He went into the bar and dawdled over drinks. It seemed longer, but it was only about forty-five minutes until Steck and Emily Preson came in sight. Wayne paid and slid from the bar stool.

Wayne waited just inside the hotel's doors until, in response to the doorman's whistle, a cab slowed in front. Then he had to take a chance. He turned up the collar of his topcoat and pulled his hat to an angle not usual with him. He hoped Steck would again give directions before he got into the cab, instead of afterward. Steck did, and Wayne Preson was close enough to hear them. Where they were going didn't make any sense either; none of it made any sense. He watched Steck's cab move east. He gestured to the doorman, who went out into the street and began to blow his whistle.

“Why,” Pam North said from beside him, “it's Mr. Preson!”

For a moment, Wayne did not recognize the Norths. Then he did.

“Just stopped in there for a drink,” he said, and instantly wished he had not. In his ears, the explanation sounded self-conscious, an explanation not asked for or required.

“Such a pleasant place,” Pam said. “Unlike most places. We go there often.”

Wayne sought a suitably commonplace remark. He said, “Oh yes,” vaguely. Then a cab slowed.

“Here,” he said, “you take this one. It's cold out here.”

“Oh no,” Pam said. “You take it. We're walking.”

The cab came to the curb.

“You're sure you won't?” Wayne said.

“Really,” Pam said. “We're just going around the corner.”

Wayne got in. The cab driver turned toward him.

“Well,” Wayne said, “nice seeing you.”

The Norths were standing very near the cab door. Wayne pulled it toward him. A cab behind, waiting to discharge at the Algonquin, hooted. The driver of Wayne's cab started up.

“Well?” he said.

Now Wayne Preson could tell him.

“The Broadly Institute,” he said. “Up on Fifth Avenue.”

“Oh yeah,” the driver said. “Up there. Where this guy got killed.”

The couple emerging from the taxicab behind had, although nobody touched them, the feeling that they were pulled from the cab. (“New York people are certainly in a hurry,” the woman remarked as they found themselves on the sidewalk. “I don't see how they keep it up.”)

“Follow that cab ahead,” Jerry North said to their driver.

“Why?” the driver asked, with polite interest.

“Because of five dollars,” Jerry told him.

“I tell you, mister,” the driver said. “You twisted my arm.”

“So,” Pam said when they were moving, “that's the way you do it. The only time I tried it, the man just said ‘Why, lady?' and I couldn't think.”

Homer and Laura Preson left the downtown subway train at Ninety-sixth Street. Sergeant Mullins, who had taken the elementary precaution of riding in the car behind and stepping to the platform at each stop, to step back in again just as the doors were closing, saw them leave the car. It was possible they were merely planning a change to a local, and Mullins waited, partly behind a pillar, as unobtrusive as a large man can be. They started off toward an exit to the street, and Mullins went after them. Emerging on the street, they took the first of two taxicabs lined at a hack stand.

Mullins had the door of the second open before he realized it had no driver. Mullins swore, backed out, and looked for the nearest lunch room. He spotted it, two doors up the street, and ran for it. He ran back, more or less dragging a smaller and protesting man. Mullins pushed the man, who was saying, “Hey, looka here! Suppose you are a cop! Suppose—”

“Get going, pal,” Mullins told him. “They're getting a start of us.”

The taxi driver, plucked by the law from a bowl of bean soup, with spaghetti and franks to come, got going. “This ain't Russia, is it?” he enquired, unexpectedly betraying himself as a listener to Kaltenborn. “Or is it?” he added.

“Not that I've heard,” Mullins said. “If you miss the light, jump it.”

They just did not miss the light, going east in Ninety-sixth. At the next avenue, the cab ahead just did not make it. They coasted up behind the leading cab.

“I suppose the city pays for my soup?” the hacker remarked, in a tone which indicated his dark conviction that the city would do nothing of the sort.

“I'll tell you what it is,” Mullins said. “You're breaking my heart, fella.”

The light changed and the two cabs went. They went across Central Park West and dived into the cut through the park. At Fifth they turned north.

The showroom of Sport Cars, Inc., on Broadway in the Sixties, was not large, but it was very bright. Its window displayed a small, gleaming object which, Bill Weigand reflected on his way to the door, needed only passenger space to make it a nice little car. A tall young man, who seemed to be alone in the showroom, greeted Bill at the door with enthusiasm. Shortly, his enthusiasm lessened.

“Wayne isn't here,” the tall young man said. “And why should I talk about him behind his back? Tell you our business?”

“Because two men've got themselves killed,” Bill explained.

The tall young man laughed heartily. He would, he said then, like to see anyone convince him Wayne Preson went around killing people. He said that all you needed to do was to look at Wayne Preson.

Bill wondered, briefly and as he often did, what people supposed murderers looked like. Did they expect daggers between teeth? The outlines of automatics under suit jackets?

“All I want to know,” Bill said, “is—did Preson need money? Was he hard up?”

The tall young man laughed with even greater amusement.

“Wayne?” he asked, as if an entirely new person had been brought, incomprehensibly, into the discussion. “You're talking about Wayne Preson?”

“Right,” Bill said, his voice patient.

“Hard up?” the tall young man repeated.

“Right,” Bill said. “You've heard the expression, Mr.—uh?”

“Smith,” the tall young man said. “John Smith.” He laughed again. “Think I'm kidding?” he asked.

“No,” Bill said. “I don't think you're kidding. Is Wayne Preson hard up?”

“He's planning to buy a half interest in this show,” John Smith said. “That's how hard up he is. It's a good show, too. His family's got it. How'd you think he kept up with this crowd without money?”

“Crowd?” Bill repeated. “What crowd?”

“Marie Albrenza; that bunch,” John Smith said. “The people we sell cars to. You didn't think we sold cars like that”—he indicated the shiny object on display—“to people—people named Smith?”

That idea, it appeared from the subsequent laughter, was funnier than any which had gone before.

“Look,” Bill said. “I'm a policeman. I'm investigating a murder. Two murders. Two people got killed. Quit being so damned funny, Mr. Smith.”

“Listen,” Smith said. “You can't—”

He stopped, rather suddenly.

“Right,” Bill said. “I can. Don't be funny at all, Mr. Smith. Just talk.”

John Smith, whose trouble perhaps, Bill thought, was only youth—high pressure youth—did talk.

Wayne Preson was, he said, part of a group of young and youngish people with money and leisure and with, it was to be hoped, an inclination toward imported sports cars. He supposed they used them to drive between Twenty-One and the Stork, with perhaps side trips to Long Island. A few years before, Smith had met Preson somewhere—he didn't recall, now, precisely where. At that time, Smith had just got the agency for two British manufacturers of light, fast—and for the most part topless—cars. He got to talking about them with Preson; it was Preson who suggested he might make a useful salesman. He had started as a salesman on commission. He had sold cars.

“He makes plenty here,” Smith said. “I guess he doesn't need it. Like I said, his family seems to have it. Anyway, he's going to buy in. He's got enough money for that.”

“How far in?” Bill asked.

Smith hesitated.

“Twenty-five thousand in,” he said. “How far in that takes him is none of your business.” He nodded approval of his own point. “Cop or no cop,” he added.

“So far as I know,” Bill Weigand said, “his family hasn't money in a big way. Did he say it had?”

Smith paused. Finally he shook his head.

“I don't remember that he did,” Smith said. “Maybe I just guessed that. But anyway, he's made a lot out of selling cars in the last three-four years.”

“You think he saved the twenty-five thousand?”

“I don't know,” Smith said. “He could have, if he wanted to.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Well—thanks, Mr. Smith.”

“You're barking up the wrong tree,” John Smith assured Weigand as he went with him toward the door.

“I'm barking up several,” Bill told him. He stopped to look at the car. “Can you get in that yourself?” he asked Smith.

“Well—” Smith said. “Sure I can. There's plenty of room in there. If you're—”

“I'm not,” Bill said. He went.

He drove to his office and looked over reports. There were plenty of fingerprints on the bones. There were prints of almost everybody, including Mrs. Gerald North. Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley had been over the routine reports. He had put an exclamation point, harshly, after the name of Mrs. North. He had written: “W. W. See me!” and underlined it three times. That could be left, Bill decided, until the next day. He looked at his watch. It was a few minutes after nine. Inspector O'Malley closed for the day not later than five; he had been known to close at three, particularly on Saturdays. A good many things did. Including, Bill Weigand thought, Columbia University. He wondered if Homer Preson was lying, or had been lied to.

Things were out of hand at the Broadly Institute even before the doors reopened Saturday afternoon. Saturday was normally a busy day at the Institute, as busy days normally went there. From Monday through Friday, a majority of the visitors were fossil fanciers, prone to look long and with sagacity at rearticulated skeletons, to study with purpose the books of the library on the second floor. But on Saturdays, and again on Sundays, most visitors were people who found those days heavy on the hands and who looked at Tyrannosaurus with well-what-do-you-know-about-that? expressions. “No, baby, of course it isn't real,” Dr. Paul Agee, passing through the Great Hall, had once heard a young man tell his girl as, arms locked and the future in their faces, they had looked unbelievingly at the past. “I know,” the girl had answered. “It's too absurd, isn't it?”

But this Saturday, the eighth of December, was not like other Saturdays. It was blustery and rather cold, but by the time the doors of the Institute reopened a hundred or more people were waiting, impatient to experience paleontology. Several of them went so far as to knock abruptly on the doors of the big building, meanwhile peering in somewhat balefully. When the doors did open, the leaders burst in as if in pursuit of something but, once inside, seemed to have forgotten what they sought. They clustered in front of Teddy the Tyrannosaurus, who bared his ancient teeth. From him, they fanned out.

It can hardly be supposed they, or the hundreds who came after them, expected to find the body of Dr. Jesse Landcraft, the skull in fragments, still lying in front of a Neanderthal cave, a prehistoric axe blood-stained beside it. That would, of course, have been fine and rewarding, but it was not really to be anticipated. There were some expressions of disappointment, and a few of anger, when the scene of the crime was found to be curtained off, but this concealment most of the visitors seemed to have expected. When anything really good happened, the cops tried to keep people away. You couldn't get within blocks of a good fire; when police cars converged on buildings, excitingly, other policemen converged to hold back taxpayers. But you could
be
there. You could stand behind firelines; you could cluster across the street from buildings in which crimes of lurid violence had been committed.

That Saturday afternoon, people could be at the Broadly Institute, where murder had been—where, in some hour of darkness, an axe fashioned in the unimaginable past had been brought down on a man's head, and the head had broken. People could pass the now curtained exhibit, and linger in front of it, knowing that just beyond fabric and glass, only feet away, the cave-man murder had occurred—the one the papers were full of, the one people were talking about. They could discover, and later tell, that this cave-man place, see, is to the left as you go into this big hall, just a ways back of this dragon, or whatever it is, they say is a thousand years old maybe. “Sure,” they could say, “I went up there and looked at it. Sure is a funny place to pick to kill a guy.”

The Great Hall was uncomfortably crowded by four o'clock and the pressure began to force visitors upward. They reached the second floor easily and invaded the library, to the consternation of several students who were, in a fashion, boning up, and had thought to be left alone to it. They wandered out of the library and scrutinized fossil remains in cases along corridors; finding these of little interest, they climbed higher and began to wander the upper corridors, peering in at empty offices through doors innocently left open. Dr. Paul Agee, who was uncharacteristically in his office that afternoon, was among the objects peered at. He did, then, with some difficulty get the floors above the second established as out of bounds. The police helped him.

None of this was unexpected to the police, and Dr. Agee had been warned. That he had nevertheless decided to keep the Institute open struck the police as foolhardy, but out of their province. They did provide guards. They did try to keep people from carrying off, as souvenirs, parts of Teddy the Tyrannosaurus. (In this, it was subsequently discovered, they were only partially successful.) They tried to keep people from breaking the glass on exhibit alcoves and falling into them. But by late afternoon, things had grown even worse than the police had anticipated.