Dead as a Dinosaur (30 page)

Bill Weigand said, “Oh.”

“So there you are,” Mullins said. “I thought I'd better tell you.”

Bill Weigand nodded. He said, “Right.” He stood up.

“Well,” he said, “what are we waiting for, Sergeant?”

Mullins couldn't think of anything.

Three cats yammered at Martha. They sat and yammered; they clawed at her skirt and yammered; they reared themselves against kitchen counters and spoke their anger and chagrin in the harsh accents of cats with blue eyes and masked faces. They spoke of neglect, of the collapse of the routine by which a cat prefers to live; they spoke of hunger. Most of all, they spoke of hunger.

“What's the matter with you cats?” Martha asked them, hanging her coat in the kitchen closet “What's all the fussin'?”

Spoken to, the three cats raised their voices in answer. Martini went to an empty tin pie plate and put her foot on it; Gin leaped to the counter which contained small cans of prepared beef, for juniors, and pointed at the cans. Sherry sang a dirge, in a voice pitched higher than the other voices.

“Now that's funny,” Martha told the cats. “You know you've had your breakfast. You're trying to put one over.”

They weren't, the cats said. Had breakfast indeed! They had never eaten.

“Well,” Martha said, and stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked around. “It is funny.”

Their food pan was empty. That could be explained. They had eaten their breakfast and forgotten it. But their water bowl also was empty, and they would not have drunk a bowl of water since breakfast. And Mrs. North would not have forgotten; Mrs. North now and then forgot things—to order steel wool, for example. But she did not forget cats.

Martha said “hm-m-m” and went in search. The search did not take long. Mrs. North was not in the apartment. And—she had been. She had got home from the country.

Her week-end case, still packed, stood on the bedroom floor. But neither bed had been occupied. Martha said “hm-m-m” again and then, to the cats who followed her, “All right, come on.” She fed the cats. They ate with fervor. Martha watched them; she had been wrong to think they had been trying to put one over. They had been hungry cats. Martini stopped midway, hurried to the water bowl, lapped anxiously, hurried back, found her place again at the tin pie pan. Thirsty cats, too. Hm-m-m.

Martha went back into the living room. Yes, Mrs. North had come home all right. She had opened mail, and put aside mail addressed to Mr. North. It was a funny thing. Mrs. North had come home, she had fed the cats—Martha had washed the used food pan before she left the afternoon before; it had been filled and put down again. Mrs. North had opened mail. She had—yes, she had smoked a cigarette. Then she had gone out and not come back.

It is perhaps to Mrs. North's credit that Martha assumed only disaster. Mrs. North was not a fly-by-night; if she had flown and not returned, and not made provision for the cats, only disaster could explain. Other attractive women might, with husbands distant, flutter prettily from the nest; Martha had heard of such, and known a few. But Mrs. North would not. (Or, if she did, she would be home in time to feed her cats.)

There was that policeman friend of theirs; he would know what to do. She looked in the Norths' address book and found a number and dialed it. She heard, “Homicide, Sergeant Stein” and asked for Acting Captain Weigand. He had just gone out “No,” Martha said, “I guess not,” when she was asked if anyone else could help. Going to a policeman who was a friend was one thing; going to the police another. But she had to go to somebody.

She telephoned North Books, Inc., and talked to Mr. North's secretary. Mr. North was in San Francisco, at the St. Francis. Martha got pencil and paper; she began to compose a telegram.

Gerald North, sitting by the window of his room at the St. Francis, poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked down on Union Square, on which the morning sun was shining. He watched cars turning into, nosing out of, the parking lot under the square and thought that New York might copy. He was unhurried and at peace, and he had only a slight headache. It had been a lengthy night, but worth it, and fun too. He had the manuscript he had come after, and the promise of another. He had an unforgettable memory of the harbor and the bridge, as the sun sank, seen through the great window of a little house which clung to a hillside. He had a double bedroom reservation on the City of San Francisco, eastward bound, and another on the Commodore Vanderbilt from Chicago. The evening before he had got a letter from Pam, and she was fine (but not too fine) and starting off for a week end in the country with the Thompsons. Jerry North lighted a second cigarette, and somebody knocked at the door. He said, “Come in,” to what would be the waiter after the breakfast things.

But a bellboy came in and said, “Telegram, Mr. North,” and brought the familiar envelope across the room. Jerry signed and left money on the tray; he opened the telegram as the boy closed the door behind him. He read:

“Mrs. North come home last night went away again somewhere and not back this morning to feed cats stop no message either stop worried because not way she is stop thought you ought to know stop best wishes—Martha.”

Contentment vanished as he read. He knew Martha; also he knew Pamela. Like Martha, he envisioned only disaster. Pam had got herself into something again. He re-read the telegram. Feeding the cats—that was the crux of it. Otherwise, one might envision a sick friend or importunate relative, of whom Pam had one or two. But Pam's conviction that cats should be fed on schedule was equaled only by that of the cats themselves.

“Damn!” Jerry said to himself. “Oh-damn!” He stubbed out his cigarette. But, sitting on the bed, reaching for the telephone, he lighted another. He got the porter's desk. It was an emergency. The porter's desk would do what it could and call him back.

He waited, looking across the room, through the window, seeing nothing of what he saw. He jabbed out the new cigarette; almost at once he lighted another. He tried to reason with his feeling; tried to tell himself that there were a dozen explanations—and thought of half a dozen. He did not believe any of them.

He called himself an emotional fool. He said, and now he spoke aloud, “Damn it. Why don't you ever wait? Why don't you—?” He spoke across a continent to Pamela North. The telephone rang and he snatched at it. The porter's desk had managed a reservation on a TWA plane leaving in a little less than an hour. It was, Jerry told them, hearing the tightness in his own voice, good of them. Would they arrange to cancel his reservation on the streamliner? They would send up for the tickets.

Jerry called off a luncheon date. He packed. He found that he was picking things up before he had a hold on them; he found the lock on his suitcase resistant to too hurried fingers. He was being a fool; he was being all kinds of a fool. Of course, Pam would be all right. She was always all right. She—

“Damn!” Jerry said, and yanked at the strap of his suitcase.
Be careful, Pam. Be careful!

There was no real connection. The little man who had lived in these two bare rooms, chilly and dark even on a day so bright and warm for late October, had decided he was a writer. He could write a book about what had happened to him. Actually, he had written it; one could say that, if one felt generous. He had a manuscript to prove it, or had had. Bill Weigand had it now, and read a few pages. The poor guy, Bill thought, and put the manuscript down. It would have to be read, he supposed; conceivably, there might be something useful somewhere in it. It would, however, be a job for—He looked at Mullins thoughtfully. Well, then, for Sergeant Stein. But there was no real connection.

The little, inept burglar named Harry Eaton had sent his book to publishers, having somehow discovered that that is what one does with books. He had sent it to four publishers, North Books, Inc., among them. North Books, Inc., had sent regrets, polite but brief, on—Bill looked at the letter again—August 18. The letter was signed “Gerald North, per E.C.” Jerry had written a memo “Tell him no” and clipped it to the manuscript. Bill could see him doing it. It was no connection at all. There was no conceivable reason why Bill Weigand, Acting Captain, Homicide, Manhattan West, should feel the beginning of that nagging sense of urgency, that need to run to keep up, he so inevitably felt on cases with which the Norths were involved.

There was not much else in the room. Another suit; two shirts and three pairs of underwear shorts in a drawer, a stained tie hanging over a nail on the inside of the closet door. They were printing the place, as a matter of routine. They would, as a matter of routine, check serial numbers on the Voice-Scriber—the only shining object in the dusty rooms—and so, in time, determine the owner. It was as routine as it had seemed. Routine would solve it. Routine was automatic; it would be followed without direction.

“Suppose you get on to the people who make these things,” Bill Weigand said to Mullins, indicating the Voice-Scriber. “Get a line on who owns it.”

“Me?” Mullins said. “You want I should?”

It was not really a job for Mullins. It was a job for the precinct; it hardly rated a detective, first grade, let alone a sergeant.

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I mean Captain. I guess you're right. It'll be a screwy one.”

He hadn't, Weigand pointed out, said that. “As good as,” Mullins told him. Weigand thought a moment; then he said, “Right. Perhaps I did. Hurry it up?”

“O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Weigand said. “Get going, Sergeant.”

Mullins got going. So, leaving routine in experienced hands, did Weigand. He went to a telephone; he called North Books, Inc. He found that Mr. North was still in San Francisco. He was expected back Friday morning. Was there anything Miss Corning could do to help the Captain?

A man named Eaton, who had written a book called—called
what?
“My Life in Crime?” She didn't remember any Eaton.

There had been a letter, Bill told her. The letter rejected Mr. Eaton's life in crime. She had signed Mr. North's name, initialed under it.

But that she did all the time. No doubt she had this time. She would look it up in the files. In August? August 18? She would look it up.

“I wish you would,” Bill told her. “Not that it means anything in particular, so far as I know. What I'd really like to know, did Mr. North have any personal contact with Eaton, do you know?”

So far as Miss Corning knew, he had had none. But she was uncertain about it. She did not remember that Eaton had come personally to the office, but she was not sure he had not. She did not, in short, remember anything whatever about Harry Eaton. This was reasonable. Bill Weigand said, “Right.”

He had work to do, Bill Weigand told himself. He was a policeman, on the city payroll. Routine was reaching his battered desk in the West Twentieth Street station house and stopping there, dammed up by his absence. A petty burglar was strangled instead of shot; it developed that he once had had his reminiscences rejected by, among others, North Books, Inc. In a day when every candlestick maker had a book in him and most let it out, this was not surprising.

Already, Bill Weigand told himself, sternly, he had wasted a morning on a case for the precinct, merely because the name of North had occurred in it. Now he would—

But there was no great harm, Bill decided, in wasting another ten minutes or so, merely to allay that nagging sense of urgency. He dialed another telephone number, this one familiar. If Jerry North had had any contact with little Harry Eaton, any contact of even remote interest, he would have mentioned it to Pam. The Norths mentioned all things to each other. Jerry would not dream of concealing a small burglar, or a book titled: “My Life in Crime.”

The telephone signaled that it was ringing in the North apartment. Then it was answered.

“Hello, Martha,” Bill said. “This is Weigand. Is Mrs. North—?”

“She's gone,” Martha said. “That's what it is. Something's happened to her. You can't tell me.”

“Listen,” Bill Weigand said. “What? Who's gone?”

“I tried to get you,” Martha said. “You weren't there. So I wired Mr. North. He's in San Francisco.”

“Please, Martha,” Bill Weigand said. “You mean Mrs. North isn't there? You don't know where she is?”

Martha told him, then. She told him all of it, with special reference to the hunger of the cats. “You better come right here and do something,” Martha ended.

No doubt there were a dozen explanations. The absence of Pam North from her apartment at one-thirty of a Tuesday afternoon did not spell disaster.

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I'll be over.”

He drove downtown. He did not drive like a policeman in a hurry, but he did not loiter. Martha let him in. She told the story again. She had it ready, now. She had finished cleaning the apartment in mid-afternoon of the day before. She had gone home to Harlem. Mrs. North had already telephoned that she would not be home to dinner. Mrs. North had come home during the evening. She had fed the cats. She had opened letters from Bergdorf and Saks and Lord & Taylor. The captain could see the envelopes and the enclosures. She had put her weekend bag in the bedroom, leaving it packed. Then she had gone somewhere. She had been gone all night. And—she had not returned in the morning to feed the cats.

“Maybe she went to spend the night with a friend,” Bill Weigand said.

“The cats,” Martha said.

“Perhaps something's happened to Mr. North and she's flown west,” Bill said.

“Even then, she wouldn't forget the cats,” Martha told him. “You know that, Captain. What you pretend for?”

He did not know why he pretended. He went through the apartment and found nothing Martha had not found. He went through Pam North's desk, and found only what one might expect to find. (This included two rather lengthy colums of figures, added to totals which failed by a considerable margin to coincide. Idly, Bill Weigand added one of the columns. Pam had been wrong. He resisted the temptation to add the other column. Pam had been, he supposed, balancing a checkbook or working on a budget.)