Death Takes a Bow (19 page)

“Stop them,” she demanded. “Stop them. They're kidnapping a man!”

“Huh?” the traffic policeman said. “Listen, lady, you want to get yourself killed?”

“Listen,” Pam commanded. “They're kidnapping a man. They're going to kill him. Over there in that car.” She pointed. “You've got to do something!”

“Yeh?” the cop said. He was worse than Mullins; infinitely worse than Mullins. Mullins understood things quickly, or almost quickly. “Who's kidnapping somebody, lady?”

The time of the red light was running out. In seconds, the light would change and the sand-colored sedan would be gone, with the frightened little man and his captors. Pam grabbed the policeman's sleeve and shook it.

“Stop them!” she begged. “Stop them—that car there. They're going to kill a man!”

The policeman looked at her and then, finally, he looked at the sand-colored sedan. You could see, looking frantically up at him, that thought was taking place behind the red and weathered face. The face seemed faintly surprised at this. But now the policeman was moving.

He held up an authoritative hand, stopping the southbound cars. Through the clearing thus achieved, he advanced majestically on the unmoving sedan. Pamela North followed, relief spreading over her in waves. At least, it was out of her hands. She watched the policeman, and relief ebbed somewhat.

It was out of her hands, certainly. But the hands in which it was seemed singularly overconfident. It was clear that the traffic policeman did not really believe that the sedan held desperate men, armed and ready to shoot; held killers, ready for anything. The traffic policeman advanced as if they were only cowering motorists, awaiting an earned reprimand, and perhaps a ticket.

The policeman advanced to the sedan, holding up an authoritative hand. He bent over it, and Mrs. North held her breath. This way was wrong; this way was horribly wrong. He should have gone with his gun out, as ready as they. He should—

He stooped and, through a window which someone inside must have opened, stuck his head into the car. He stuck it well in, so that what remained outside looked very peculiar. It was also very large, so that Mrs. North could not see over or around it. Mrs. North held her breath.

The traffic policeman, however, emerged. He did not look alarmed, or surprised or anything Mrs. North could put a thought to. He stood away from the car and, as he stood away, the car started, since now the lights had changed in its favor. The sedan crossed Fifth Avenue and continued toward the east, and Mrs. North stared after it with open mouth. The New York police department just didn't care! She couldn't believe it.

Mrs. North turned indignantly toward the official culprit, and discovered that he did not look at all like a culprit. He was staring at her, and his stare was measuring and not, she thought, really sympathetic.

“Well, lady,” the policeman said. “Friend of yours, huh?”

“Friend?” Mrs. North said. “Friend? Who?”

“The little guy, lady,” the policeman said. He said it with great, rather sarcastic patience. “The little guy. Friend of yours, huh?”

“No,” Mrs. North said. “I know him, in a way. But—”

“So you know him in a way,” the policeman said, heavily. “Think of that now, lady. So you know him in a way.”

“He—” Mrs. North began, but the policeman was shaking a heavy head at her.

“I wouldn't, lady,” he said. “Don't waste it on me, lady. We got guys who like to hear stories like that, lady. You tell it to them, huh? Do you want to pay for a taxi, lady?”

“Pay for a taxi?” Pam North repeated. “Why should I pay for a taxi? I don't want a taxi.”

“All right, lady,” the policeman said. “It's nothing to me. We'll get you the wagon, lady.”

“Wagon?” Mrs. North repeated. “You don't mean—you're not going to arrest
me
!”

“Sure not,” the policeman said. “Sure not, lady. Just take you over to the station house so you can tell the boys about it. How somebody was kidnapping a friend of yours, and things like that. You wouldn't call it an arrest, lady.”

Pamela North found she could only stare at him. She could only stare at the second policeman who, in answer to a signal from the first, came across from the far corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second, where he had been standing without, it seemed, a care in the world. It was clear now, however, that he had merely been waiting to arrest Pamela North.

Pam found difficulty in believing that anything of this preposterous kind was really happening. She did, however, rally enough to pay for the taxicab which took her to the West Forty-eighth Street police station. And once there, and after a considerable wait, she had a great deal to say to the sergeant at the desk.

But by that time it was well after three o'clock and the little dark man, probably, was dead. That thought, as she waited for the half-convinced sergeant to make a telephone call which was oddly received, crowded out almost all other thoughts. He was almost certainly dead, the little dark man, and with him whatever he knew about the murder of Victor. Leeds Sproul.

It was only quite late that another thought managed to get through. Mrs. North remembered her nieces, waiting at their table at the Roundabout. And alarmingly exposed to sailors.

10

Friday, 7:10
P
.
M
. to 9:45
P
.
M
.

Bill Weigand looked down at the Norths and smiled and said he had thought he would find them there.

“And where,” he added, “are the nieces? The famous nieces?”

“Famous?” Jerry repeated. “Sit down, Bill. At home, with Martha. We're on vacation. Why famous?”

Weigand sat down and said that it was merely a manner of speaking. He looked at Pamela North with amusement.

“All right,” she said. “Say it.”

Bill told her he hadn't anything to say.

“Well,” Pam said, “how could I know? They took him right from under the lion, in broad daylight, except that it was raining, of course. And that one did have a gun.”

So, Weigand told her, did the other one. It was a habit they had.

“Well,” Pam said, a little hotly. “They didn't look like cops. You can always tell a cop.”

Weigand said, “Ouch.”

“These just looked like anybody,” Pam said. “How could I tell?”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “And, by the same token, how could Patrolman O'Brien, of Traffic A?”

Pam said, all right, she'd got herself into it. And Bill had got her out. And she supposed it was funny.

“Sort of,” Bill Weigand agreed. “The Feds pick up a suspicious character, who consorts with a known agent, and we start to take him off quietly to ask him some questions. And you tie up traffic at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street trying to get them arrested. And attract attention generally.”

“And,” Pam said, “get arrested for my trouble.”

Weigand told her she hadn't really been arrested. She had merely been invited to explain.

“By two very large policemen,” Pam pointed out. “Don't be technical. What would you call arrested?”

“Booked,” Weigand told her. “On a charge. Like conspiracy to commit espionage. Or harboring. Or being a suspicious character, as you certainly were to O'Brien. He must have thought you were a great friend of the little man's to go to all that trouble for him.”

Pam said she didn't see it. She didn't like to have people killed. Even if they weren't friends. And she had no way of knowing. Bill Weigand was still looking at her with amusement, and finally she smiled back and said, “All right, I got into it. Again. Was he?”

“Was he what?” Weigand said, and felt that, in the time he had known Mrs. North, he must have said that a hundred times. “Was he what, Pam?”

“A spy,” Pam said. “Did he kill Sproul because—because Hitler told him to. Or Hirohito? And did he have the telegram for Mrs. Williams? And is she a spy, too? And why did he trip me?”

“Really, Pam,” Jerry said. “Really, baby.”

“He doesn't say,” Bill Weigand told her. “Or, exactly, he says ‘no' in a great many words, all very indignant. He says he is a fugitive from the Nazis, as everybody knows; that he knew Heinrich as another anti-Nazi and that the F.B.I. has made a terrible mistake. He says this at length. The last I heard they hadn't got around to Sproul, although we asked them to bear it in mind. It's not what they're chiefly interested in, of course.”

“Heinrich?” Mr. North repeated. “Who's Heinrich?”

Heinrich, Weigand told them, was the bulky man Pam's little man had been talking to under the lion. (“Your little man is Bandelman Jung, Pam,” Weigand interjected. “Or says he is.”) Heinrich was not an anti-Nazi, whatever Bandelman Jung thought, or wanted others to think he thought. Heinrich was a bona-fide enemy agent, like you read about. About Grade C, but genuine. The F.B.I. followed him around, and snaffled off people he spoke to. Heinrich was being very useful, but not to the Reich. The F.B.I. was enjoying Heinrich very much.

“You'd think,” Pamela said, “that Heinrich would begin to suspect, after a while. I mean, never being able to talk to anybody twice. You'd get to feel—sort of puzzled. Lonely, sort of.”

Bill and Jerry agreed. But Heinrich was not, so far as was yet revealed, a sensitive man. Heinrich didn't seem to notice.

“Of course,” Pam said, “maybe it's been that way all his life. Maybe he doesn't notice any difference. He looked a little like that.”

They let the question of Heinrich's possibly thwarted life die gradually among them. Weigand drank a Martini, because it was technically before dinner, but declined food because he had actually had some sandwiches when it looked as if he wouldn't get away. Jerry North happily explored the earthenware pot which had contained pot au feu, a specialty of the house. Mrs. North looked abstractedly at a silver dish which had contained sole marguéry, let remembrance appear momentarily on her face, and said that Bill had wanted to know about the nieces.

“Tell him, Jerry,” she directed.

Jerry said it was sort of funny.

“Pam called up,” he said, “and went on about the nieces, which she'd left somewhere. So I had to drop what I was doing and go after them. And whatever led you to the Roundabout, Pam? A loathsome place.”

“Isn't it,” Pam said. “Mrs. Williams. And she was there, too.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “the nieces were there, all right. Right where Pam had left them. And were they having a fine time.”

“Sailors?” Bill wanted to know. Jerry shook his head.

“Marines,” he said. “Very fine Marines, as it turned out. One of them was a Ph.D. and probably Phi Beta Kappa from the way he talked, and the other was Princeton. Very fine Marines. They treated me very nicely, when Beth introduced us. They stood up and called me ‘sir' and evidently wanted me to sit down very quickly, because I was old and infirm and they didn't want me collapsing on their hands. Beth and Margie thought so too, I noticed.”

“Nonsense,” Pam said. “You look fine, Jerry. Not old at all. Really.”

Bill and Jerry looked at each other and didn't say anything. Then Jerry went on.

“The boys were very much afraid I'd think they'd picked the girls up,” he said. “By that time they'd discovered, probably, that the girls were a little younger than—well, a little younger than they'd thought. They looked a little worried. And they were, in a nice way, rather severe with me. They indicated that we were taking rather a risk, leaving nieces about. One of them was very serious. He said—well, he said:

“‘I don't know whether you know, sir, but there are some men around who wouldn't understand. Sailors, you know.'

“And the other Marine nodded, very gravely, with a kind of worried look. So I thanked them, and brought the girls home. Beth said, on the way, that she thought Marines were much nicer than sailors. And Margie said, ‘But Beth, Uncle Jerry was a sailor,' and Beth said, ‘Oh, but that was such a long time ago. Things were different, weren't they, Uncle Jerry?'”

“And what did you say?” Pam wanted to know.

Jerry shrugged.

“I said, ‘Sure!'” he told her. “What did you expect me to say?”

Pam looked a little worried.

“Do you suppose things are different, Jerry?” she said. “Ought we to do something about it? For the nieces, I mean?”

“No,” Jerry said. “I don't think things are very different. I think the nieces will be all right. If we watch them.”

Pam thought it over and Fritz looked down at her and said, “Ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, Mrs. North?” Pam looked tempted and shook her head. She ordered coffee and so did Jerry, and Weigand joined them. The coffee came.

“Where are you?” Jerry said. “Do you know yet?”

It hadn't been twenty-four hours yet, Weigand told them. They sounded like Inspector Artemus O'Malley. No, he didn't know.

“How's Bandelman Jung for a choice?” Jerry wanted to know. Bill Weigand shrugged. He said that, obviously, it could be. Certainly Jung had been into things.

“He was the guy you chased,” he said. “Or the chances are he was. He left fingerprints in the speakers' room, all right. He was—probably he was the man who stole the lecture notes and—brought them back.”

“What?” Pam said.

Weigand told them about it. Or told them as much as he thought they ought to know.

“And sent them back to you by messenger,” Pam said. “That was funny. Were there prints on the notes?”

Weigand shook his head. He said, “gloves.” Pam said Jung sounded like the murderer to her.

He could be, Weigand agreed. Certainly he had been doing a good many things, some of them in connection with Sproul's death, which needed explanation. But the trouble was that a good many others could be, too.