Death Takes a Bow (11 page)

“Listen,” Burden said. He ignored Akron and was speaking to Weigand. “This guy's a nut, Lieutenant. Whatever he says about Jean, don't believe him. She hadn't anything to do with Sproul.”

Weigand was interested. But his voice was mild.

“That's what he says,” he told Burden. “And who sent for you, Mr. Burden?”

His voice was mild to the end. But the last question might have been put to a small, unruly boy.

“All right,” Burden said. “But lay off her.”

The last seemed more to Akron than to Weigand, but Weigand was included.

“Get out,” Weigand said. “And stick around. Sergeant, see that Mr. Burden sticks around.”

Mullins was up, and took Mr. Burden back to the door and out. Mullins' voice rumbled for an instant in instruction to Detective Sergeant Stein. Mullins returned.

“There's another heel for you,” Akron said, with venom. “Another-small-time wolf.”

Weigand's voice was lighter, apparently friendly, seemed to be sharing a man-to-man situation.

“After your sister too, is he?” Weigand said. “But what can you expect, Mr. Akron? With a sister like that?”

Akron looked at him with no corresponding friendliness.

“A helluva chance,” he said. “Burden or any heel like him. What do they think she is?”

Weigand refrained from telling him. Weigand said he might go. And he, unlike Burden, might go where he liked. It was kind of him to help. Akron went, after a hard look at Weigand.

“There's a guy'd like to kill somebody,” Mullins said. “But why? Guys don't kill for their sisters, Loot?”

“They have,” Weigand assured him, “to protect them … or something.”

Mullins looked puzzled.

George Schwartz had come in ambling. He was very thin and well over six feet; his legs had an odd detachment of their own, and seemed to be leading the rest of Schwartz. Schwartz's face was broad and flexible, with high cheekbones and an extraordinarily mobile mouth. He did not, however, use it to sneer with. He smiled at the detectives and to Weigand said, “Hello, Lieutenant.

“The boys said you wanted me,” he reported. “Took me right out of the middle of a piece about wills for probate. You picked a very fortunate time, Lieutenant.”

Schwartz had been fortifying himself with a drink or two. But he was a long way from drunk on them.

“Not,” he added, “that it wouldn't be pleasant at any time to hear that somebody had done in Victor Leeds Sproul.”

“Why?” Weigand asked, with great simplicity.

And then, quite suddenly, the long, easy-going man was no longer easy-going.

“Because,” he said, “Sproul was as unmitigated a bastard as I've ever known. He was—”

Schwartz seemed suddenly to blaze as he continued his description of the dead lecturer. It was a strange, unaccountable spectacle. Sproul was this and Sproul was that; he was a windbag and he was a crook; he weaseled in where nobody wanted him.

“Where?” Weigand put in.

“My life,” Schwartz told him. “Everybody's girl. My girl's life; everybody's girl's.”

He broke off, suddenly cooling. He looked as if he wished he had cooled earlier. But then he shrugged.

“What the hell?” he said. “You'd find out anyway.”

“Sproul got my wife to leave me,” he said. “Got her to divorce me, so he could marry her. Only he didn't plan to marry her.” He paused again, and smiled a little crookedly. “It leaves a guy prejudiced,” he said. “I was right prejudiced against Mr. Sproul.”

“I see you were,” Weigand said. “Who was your wife?”

“Loretta,” Schwartz said. “Loretta Shaw she calls herself now. Loretta Schwartz as was.”

“They're the damnedest bunch,” Mullins said, rather helplessly. “A bunch of bed-hoppers.”

Weigand nodded. He said the whole crowd seemed to get around.

The bomb-shell had been Schwartz's chief contribution. He had been at the dinner, getting time off.

“I sort of liked to watch that monkey,” he said.

Nothing out of the way had happened at the dinner; everybody had been polite and friendly. Sproul had been much as he usually was. Schwartz was of the opinion that somebody had killed the lecturer, but evidently only on the basis that he needed killing. But if Sproul had contemplated suicide, he would have planned it as spectacularly as possible. He had known Sproul in Paris, where he was working with him for a time on the
Herald
. It was during those days, near the end of them, that Sproul had persuaded Loretta Schwartz to leave her husband and become Loretta Shaw, as preparation—so she supposed?—for becoming Loretta Sproul.

“And there's a guy with a grudge,” Mullins said, when they came to George Schwartz in their checking over.

Weigand nodded.

“With grounds for a grudge, anyway,” he agreed. “And obviously a man who is sore. But a murder grudge, Sergeant?”

That, they agreed, was what they didn't know. Not yet.

Schwartz's long, independent legs had carried him out of the little room off the stage of the Today's Topics Club and, after a pause, Loretta Shaw's slender, pretty legs had carried her in. They had carried her in decisively, because she was in readiness for the question. Inevitably, Weigand realized, she would be in readiness for the question. But that was no reason for not asking it.

“So you used to be married to Schwartz?” Weigand said. “And you ditched him for Sproul?”

“So what?” the girl said, very ready. “Is it something that never happened before?”

Weigand agreed that it wasn't. But he was not as amiable as he had been.

“Girls leave poor men for men with more money,” he agreed. “Obscure men for prominent men. It happens.”

The girl flushed, just perceptibly. But she entered no denial.

“So what?” she said.

Weigand shrugged. So nothing, of necessity.

“It would be simpler, however,” he told her, “if people would volunteer information we are bound to get anyway. Simpler for them. It doesn't matter to us.” He looked at her, deliberately and without expression. “We have plenty of time,” he told her. “All the time in the world. If we need it.”

“You're comical,” the girl told him. “Completely comical.”

Weigand was unperturbed. He even agreed that it was possible. As an individual, thinking what he was thinking, wondering in a new direction. But as a policeman—no.

“The police are not comic, Miss Shaw,” he told her. “Don't fool yourself.”

That, she told him, was what he thought. She had plenty of animosity. Now, she wanted to know, what did he do?

He smiled at her, indifferent to the bait. He did not answer directly, but said only that she could go. She would, he added, stay in town, because he would have other questions from time to time.

“Comical questions,” he said. “Anything for a laugh. That's all, Miss Shaw.”

She went. When her back was turned, Weigand nodded to Mullins, who went behind her to the door and nodded over her head to Detective Stein. Stein gave no sign of noticing, but as she went down the aisle toward the exit he spoke, casually enough, to Detective Flannery, who was a small man for a policeman and not conspicuous. Flannery put his hat on and went down the aisle too, like a man going nowhere in particular. Mullins, standing in the door, nodded approvingly and looked at a short list in his hand and said:

“Which one of you's White—Ralph White?”

A tall, plump man, with a heavy face shaped like a piece of dough, said he was White. Mullins jerked a directing head and White passed him and went into the little room. Mullins came behind him and said:

“Mr. Ralph White, Lieutenant. One of the guys who knew Sproul.”

“Did you, Mr. White?” Weigand inquired. He was very pleasant again. His eyes suggested a chair.

White had a heavy, buttered voice; he reminded Weigand of somebody in the past and after a moment Weigand remembered who. It didn't matter, because the other man was dead. He had died rather suddenly one evening around eleven o'clock, in a manner he had been permitted to anticipate in a cell for thirteen months and seven days.

Which meant, Weigand reminded himself, nothing whatever about Mr. White. It was a type—the pompous and pontifical, who ran to fatness of person and of phraseology. This did not, Weigand told himself with increasing firmness, mean that representatives of the type ran also to murder.

“I had known Mr. Sproul for a considerable period,” White agreed. “Our paths crossed.”

“Did they?” Weigand inquired. He paused for a word. How would paths cross? “Intimately?” Weigand added.

White's heavy face produced a heavy smile. His large head shook itself.

“We were merely acquaintances,” he said. “We frequented the same circles. In Paris, of course. From time to time we met. When I returned to America”—the voice ridiculed an action so gauche, but at the same time admitted its necessity—“when I returned to America, Mr. Sproul looked me up. We met here from time to time, as my work permitted.”

The picture was of a Sproul suppliant, thankful for crumbs of time.

Weigand nodded gravely.

“Your work is—?” he said.

“I am an author,” Mr. White told him, in a tone which faintly chastened. “A novelist.”

Weigand nodded.

“I observe,” Mr. White told him. “I fear I am merely an onlooker, Sergeant. A looker-on and a noter-down.”

Weigand did not question his demotion. His eyes warned Mullins, who would have questioned in his behalf. Weigand threaded his way through the verbal labyrinths of Mr. White's mind—learned that White had met Sproul for the first time in Paris, that he knew most of the members of the group in which Sproul had moved there, that he had dined with the rest before what was to have been Sproul's first lecture and, despite his authorial observations, had noted nothing of particular interest. He agreed with the rest about the facts of the dinner.

Throughout the questioning, White maintained an attitude. It was a little difficult to define. It included a suggestion that White was superior to the rest, who were scurrying small folk to be observed under a glass. It included a note of heavy malice and—unrecognized envy. The last was a guess by Weigand.

“Amusing people,” White told him. “Amusing in their fashions.” He smiled, as to another man of superiority. “All mixed up together, in devious ways, inspector. All very—emotional.”

There was contempt in the voice which formed the word “emotional.”

Weigand nodded, waiting.

“Rather impulsively sexed,” Mr. White continued, and Weigand thought that no man could employ so many phrases without encountering one which was apt. “Impulsively sexed” was, Weigand suspected, apt.

“Sproul not the least,” White continued, a little as if he were dictating a paragraph. “He—sought the favors of so many. Of Loretta Shaw, of Jean Akron. Of others, and often with success.”

Was it an envious note again, Weigand wondered? Did men whose novels made no stir hate men whose novels shook reviewers of the
Times
and
Tribune
book sections? Did men who had, one might reasonably suspect, little success with women, envy men who had, one might again suspect, considerable? The answer to both speculations was the same, and obvious. Was it conceivable that such envy, curdling, might lead to hate and hate lead to murder? That depended, Weigand told himself, on the degree of the curdling. Mr. White was, he suspected, curdled to a rather marked degree.

“I don't like that guy,” Mullins said when, reviewing, they came to him. “He talks like a book.”

“On psychiatry,” Weigand amplified.

Mullins looked blank.

It had seemed, when they let him go, that Mr. White had had nothing but his presence to contribute; Weigand ticked him off as a supernumerary. He wondered, indeed, whether they were not all supernumeraries—Mrs. Paul Williams, the Akrons, George Schwartz and Burden, as well as White. Were they there, as people so often seemed to be during an investigation, merely to fill in the back rows; merely to make trouble for detectives? Or did they fit, each in his inevitable place, in a mosaic which had led to violent, absurdly public, death? That was for them to know, Weigand realized, and for him to find out. Or for one of them to know.

And then Detective Stein opened the door and said, with no great interest, that a guy named Young was there and wanted to see the lieutenant. Lieutenant Weigand repeated the name inquiringly, heard the faint tinkle of a bell, and repeated it with a slightly different pronunciation. Detective Stein said, “Sure, that's what I said” and, on instructions, let in a little dark man. He was, Weigand was pleased to discover, neither a Negro nor a midget. He was only reasonably little and not much more than moderately dark. He had wide cheekbones, with skin stretched over them, and black hair; he was thin and straight and he had, rather surprisingly, quite ordinary brown eyes. They looked at Weigand with no perceptible guile.

“Jung,” the little dark man said. “Bandelman Jung.” He answered a question which he had no doubt discovered to be inevitable. “Eurasian,” he said.

He had no accent. But he did not speak as if English were his native language. It occurred to Weigand that he probably would not speak any language as if it were native.

“You wish to see me?” Bandelman Jung inquired. He was polite with dignity.

Weigand went through routine. Jung had known Mr. Sproul in Paris, where he had also known most of the other members of the group; Mr. Jung was himself a “journalist,” which seemed, on inquiry, that he had written Paris anecdotes for newspapers in a quite remarkably large number of places; he had come to New York after the Germans came to Paris.

“It became necessary,” he said, simply, leaving the story behind to be guessed. His little reports from Paris had not, one could guess, pleased the new invaders of Paris.