Dead as a Dinosaur (31 page)

There was nothing. She had come home, fed cats, smoked a cigarette, looked at the mail and then—

It was, at a guess, something in the mail. He called Martha back from the kitchen. She had, he assumed, brought the mail up that day. Or had Mrs. North brought it up herself?

Martha had brought it up, with the morning papers.

“Try to remember,” Bill said. “The papers. These letters for Mr. North. The three she opened. Was that all the mail?”

“Don't seem like I remember—” Martha began, and then broke off. “Seems like I do,” she said. “There was something else. Bigger.”

“A package?” Weigand asked. “A bigger envelope?”

“Seems like it was another letter,” Martha said. “Jus' not the same shape.”

She had not paid much attention. She tried now to remember. Another envelope, almost certainly. She thought it had been square. She hadn't put her mind to it.

She could not come closer, however she tried. But perhaps, Bill thought, it was something. There had been a squarish envelope in the mail; Mrs. North had taken it with her when she went. But where one went from there he didn't, at the moment, know.

He called headquarters and got the Missing Persons Bureau. He said, “Look, Joe, this could be important.” He gave a description of Pamela North, speaking rapidly. With Martha's aid, he described what she probably had been wearing—a beige woolen dress with brown cuffs; a brown suède coat, no hat on her bright hair. He was asked to hold it, and did. It took a few minutes. Then Joe said, “Nope, sorry. No report.”

“You'll get it out?” Bill asked, and was promised that it would go out with expedition. He hung up, then dialed his own office.

There were two things. One was a telegram from Gerald North. “Martha says Pam missing. Flying back. Will you do what you can?” The other was Sergeant Mullins, in person, reporting progress.

They had been lucky, for once. A Voice-Scriber with the serial number as given had been sold directly by the regional sales office of the company and not, as might have happened, by an agency anywhere in the east—or in the country, for that matter. This had made the check easy.

The machine had been sold to a Miss Hilda Godwin, of 2 Elm Lane, Manhattan.

“It's in the Village, somewhere,” Mullins said. “Want I should drop around? If I can find it?”

“I'll meet you there,” Bill said. He told Mullins where he was, and why.

“Jeeze,” Mullins said. “Like I said. A screwy one.”

Bill did not argue it. He did what he could to reassure Martha, which was little. She was to get in touch with his office at once if anything turned up—preferably, Mrs. North. He said a brief goodbye to Sherry, who would permit it, and to Gin, who remained across the room. Martini had disappeared as completely as her mistress. Bill Weigand walked from the Norths' apartment to Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, where he consulted a traffic patrolman as to the probable location of Elm Lane. He walked through Christopher Street to Seventh Avenue, where he consulted another traffic patrolman. He walked part way back through Christopher Street, turned left, turned left again, and was back on Seventh Avenue, this time at Greenwich. He consulted another traffic patrolman there and went west into a labyrinth, and came on Elm Lane just when he had abandoned hope. It was a short street, and no elms grew on it. No. 2 was on a corner. Acting Captain Weigand stopped in front of it and looked at it in astonishment.

He knew New York, which is various, particularly below Fourteenth Street. But he could not remember he had ever seen a house quite like this little house.

Its smallness was the chief thing. It was, he thought, the smallest house he had ever seen and been inclined to call a house. In width, it could hardly be more than fifteen feet; there seemed scarcely space for the flight of stairs up to the doorway, for the polished brass rails on either side of the stairs. Yet there was space for the door, and for two narrow windows, leaded, holding glass fabricated in another day. There was a brass knocker on the white door.

Along the intersecting street—Brock Street—the little house ran for perhaps forty feet. The lot ran deeper by some distance; a wooden fence shielded what was no doubt a garden. Midway of the fence, there were double doors.

The little house was two stories high. It had, of all things, a mansard roof. It was proud and dainty amid taller, square buildings, most of them the conventional brick dwellings of older New York; all of them neatly flattened after the appropriate four floors; all of them, obviously, divided now into apartments. All but the little house. There was not, surely, enough of it to divide.

Bill Weigand went up the flight of white steps to the white door, feeling that he should first have wiped his feet. He pressed a button and heard a bell ring. Then he waited. He rang again, and as he did so a prowl car came up to the curb, making little of itself, and Mullins got out. He looked at the house and said that he would be damned. He joined Bill at the door. Bill rang again and waited again. Nobody came to the white door.

“Nobody home,” Mullins said, after several more minutes.

Weigand agreed with him.

It stopped them, of course. It was one of those things, and one which happens as frequently to policemen as to others. You call on someone unexpectedly, and the someone is not at home. There is nothing further to do, no matter how a sense of the need for haste nags at your mind. You cannot break down a sedate white door, policeman or not. You can merely go away and try again later.

Acting Captain William Weigand and Sergeant Aloysius Mullins walked down the white stairway, which would just accommodate the two of them abreast. At the foot of it, a tall man awaited them politely. When they had reached the sidewalk, he went up the stairs. He rang the bell. Weigand and Mullins regarded him. They waited. He rang the bell several times.

“I'm afraid,” Weigand said, “that Miss Godwin is not at home.”

The tall man turned and looked down at Weigand and Sergeant Mullins. He was a handsome man in, perhaps, his middle forties. His features were regular, his chin firm; his skin had the freshness of the massaged. He wore a dark gray suit which fitted well across square shoulders; he carried a darker gray topcoat folded neatly over his left arm. He raised his eyebrows momentarily at the two below him. Then he smiled.

“An elusive young lady,” he said. “I gather you have already tried?”

“Right,” Weigand told him.

The tall man looked at the police car and back at Weigand and Mullins. He raised his eyebrows again, slightly. “The police?” he said. “Surely—?”

“Miss Godwin seems to have been robbed,” Weigand told him. “Burglarized, rather. By a sneak thief. We hope she'll be able to identify some of her property.”

The tall man came down the steps, shaking his head. He wore a homburg on his head. It became him. Seen closer, below the homburg, his hair was graying becomingly at the temples. He was very sorry to hear that Miss Godwin had been victimized.

“You wouldn't happen to know when Miss Godwin will be home?” Bill asked him.

He smiled and shook his head; he shrugged.

“Not our Hilda,” he said. “One never does, really. She's unpredictable, of course. She may have packed up and gone anywhere. She often does, you know.”

Bill Weigand shook his head, indicating that he didn't.

“But,” the tall man said, “you know who she is, surely?”

The name had meant nothing; it appeared it should have. So prompted, Bill began vaguely to remember. Hilda Godwin. Hilda Godwin.

“The writer,” the tall man said. “Perhaps we are inclined to over-estimate her fame. But still—” He waited. Making, Weigand thought, almost too evident an allowance for a policeman, he waited.

“I do remember,” Bill said. “The poet. They compared her to Millay—almost compared her to Millay. Several years ago, wasn't it?”

“About five,” the man said. “When she was twenty. Mrs. Parker also was mentioned, by way of comparison. I believe there was even, in some quarters, passing reference to Keats.” He smiled, the smile of maturity. “She has the further advantage of being beautiful,” he said. “It is always desirable for a poet to have beauty.”

He spoke well; it was evident he enjoyed it. His speech went well with the little house; it was less appropriate to the situation. Bill Weigand nodded, to indicate that he had heard.

“Have to try again,” he said. “If you should find her, Mr.—?”

“Wilson,” the tall man said. “Bernard Wilson.”

There was, it seemed to Bill Weigand, the faintest of implied suggestion that that name, also, might prove familiar. It did not.

“Wilson,” Bill said, finishing his sentence. “Will you ask her to get in touch with me? Acting Captain Weigand?” He paused, momentarily, realizing that even to the uninitiated the identification he had been about to add might seem strange. “Tenth precinct,” he said. “The West Twentieth Street station house. She'll find it listed.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Wilson said. “Although—she may be anywhere by now, as I said. California, Florida. The south of France.” He shook his head. “And I had stopped by to ask if I could give her tea,” he added. “Unpredictable, our Hilda.”

It was far from a stolen dictating machine.

“Well,” Bill said, “thanks.”

He led the way to the police car; Mullins went around it to get behind the wheel. When Bill was in the car, Mr. Wilson crossed the sidewalk and spoke.

“By the way,” he said. “What was the nature of the property you recovered? In case I should happen to find Hilda? She may merely be out to lunch, of course.”

“A Voice-Scriber,” Weigand said. “It's a—”

“I know,” Mr. Wilson said. He shook his head. “How young writers change,” he said. “I can remember—”

“Well, thanks,” Bill said again. Mullins started the car. They left Mr. Bernard Wilson on the sidewalk, with whatever it was he remembered.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 Frances and Richard Lockridge

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3136-3

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