Death Takes a Bow (22 page)

It did, Weigand thought, sound as if Mr. Jung's mind would bear looking into.

“Your secretary brought you a telegram while you were there,” he said, guessing a little. “We have reason for thinking Mr. Jung stole it. Did he? And why?”

“You mean,” Mrs. Williams said, “that that Mrs. North thought somebody stole it. Don't you? She's irresponsible.”

Weigand, unruffled, agreed that Mrs. North thought Mrs. Williams had received a telegram, and that Jung had stolen it. He saw no reason for correcting Mrs. Williams' impression of Mrs. North's responsibility. The point, he repeated, was whether she had received a telegram, and whether Jung had stolen it.

“I got a telegram,” Mrs. Williams agreed, coldly. “From an out-of-town client, making an appointment with me for this morning.” She looked at her watch. “For ten-fifteen,” she said. “Which is five minutes from now, Lieutenant. And I fail to see that it concerns you in any way whatever.”

She half rose, to end the interview. Weigand obediently stood up.

“I gather,” he said, “that Mr. Jung didn't steal the telegram?”

Mrs. Williams entirely rose.

“Certainly not,” she said. “Why should he? Nobody stole it. I brought it back here, had my secretary make a note of the appointment, and threw the telegram in the waste basket. And you're wasting the time of both of us, Lieutenant.”

Weigand said, in a voice without particular expression, that he was sorry. He added that it was something detectives often did, always with regret. But it was sometimes necessary. He moved toward the door and then turned, remembering something.

“By the way,” he said, “Mrs. North said you fainted, or almost fainted, after you got the telegram. But obviously the message couldn't—”

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Williams said. “It was—it is a physical peculiarity, Lieutenant. Sometimes when I eat or drink hurriedly, or when I'm nervous, a—a pressure results which seems to affect nerve ganglia, so that I momentarily feel faint. That happened yesterday. It had nothing to do with the message, of course.”

Weigand said he saw, and that she was very kind. He left the office and closed the door behind him. There was no one in the stiff chairs in the outer office, where visitors presumably would wait. Mrs. Williams' out-of-town client had evidently not arrived. Weigand looked at his watch, found it still lacked a minute or two of ten-fifteen and went on.

He stepped into the elevator and started down. Mrs. Williams' secretary reached the elevator corridor just in time to see the top of the elevator disappear. She returned to the office and picked up the telephone and said that she was sorry, she had been unable to catch Lieutenant Weigand. She looked up in time to smile at a rotund gentleman from New Darien, Connecticut, who was coming in, and to tell him that Mrs. Williams was free to see him now.

It was almost ten-thirty when Weigand pushed a button beside the name of Loretta Shaw in the vestibule of a walk-up apartment behind Altman's in the Murray Hill area. It rang a bell; Weigand could hear the bell. Nothing else happened, so Weigand pressed the button again, and the bell rang again. Still nothing happened. Then a telephone began ringing, and it sounded as if the telephone bell was in the same apartment with the doorbell. The telephone bell kept on ringing. Then Loretta Shaw opened the outside door of the vestibule and came in from the street and said, without pleasure, “Oh. You.”

“Were you coming to see me, Lieutenant?” she said and Weigand, because it was obvious to both of them, merely nodded. The telephone bell kept on ringing and Loretta Shaw listened to it.

“It sounds like mine,” she said, and began groping in her bag for keys. It took her a woman's time to find her keys. Weigand, for reasons not entirely clear, but probably having to do with Dorian's similar gropings, was somewhat disarmed. But Loretta Shaw found her keys and opened the door and ran ahead up the stairs to the second floor apartment in front. Weigand came after her. She unlocked a second door, ran across a wide, comfortable room to a telephone and reached it just as it stopped ringing. She took the telephone from its cradle and listened and said, “Damn.”

“Why is it—” she began and then, evidently remembering who Weigand was, stopped.

“I don't know,” Weigand told her. “It always does.”

She did not respond. She threw hat and light, fuzzy coat on a chair and faced Weigand and said, “Well, Lieutenant?” She did not welcome him.

“You've been having me followed,” she charged, when Weigand said nothing, waiting.

Weigand said, “Right.”

“Yesterday,” he said. “Up to last night. A man saw you home. Then I called the man off.”

He had not wanted to call the man off, or any of the other men off. But Inspector O'Malley had had other notions; he had wanted to know how many men Weigand thought he was entitled to, and where he thought the men he was using were getting him. So the men had been called off.

“Why follow me?” Loretta Shaw wanted to know. “Do you think I killed Lee?”

“I don't know,” Weigand said, “Did you?”

“I was going to marry him,” the girl said. “Why should I?”

Weigand said they might as well sit down. This was evidently going to take time.

“You're making it hard for everybody, Miss Shaw,” he told her. “Including yourself. You weren't going to marry Sproul. You were—are—going to marry Mr. Schwartz.”

The girl looked at him and sat down. Weigand sat down where he could see her face, and nodded at the expression on it. “Yes,” he said.

Loretta Shaw said he was crazy. He had things mixed up. She had been married to George Schwartz. A long time ago, in Paris. She had divorced him.

“I know,” Weigand said. “And Thursday you and he got a license to marry again. While you were still pretending to be engaged to Sproul. And before Sproul was killed.”

The girl said there must be some mistake, but she aid not say it with conviction. Weigand merely smiled and shook his head and waited. He was good at waiting.

“Suppose we did,” she said, when he had waited her out. “What then?”

“Then you'd get married to Schwartz,” Bill Weigand explained. “Instead of to Sproul. The inference is that you knew Sproul wouldn't be marrying anybody, because Sproul would be dead.”

The girl looked at Weigand with contempt. She said that, if she understood what he was saying, he was assuming that she and George were fools. “Utter damn fools,” she said.

Weigand nodded, rather affably.

“We're not,” she said. “If we had known what was—what was going to happen, that's the last thing we would have done. Obviously.”

“People do foolish things,” Weigand told her. “We often find the things they do helpful. If you and Schwartz weren't fools, what were you? If you didn't know Sproul was going to die, what did you plan to do about him?”

The girl looked at him; he could feel her trying to get under the surface and find out about him. You could only guess at her purpose. Perhaps she was trying to discover what she could get away with; perhaps she was trying to decide if he would recognize the truth if he heard it. She would, whatever her purpose, pretend it was the latter.

“You wouldn't understand,” she told him. It was the inevitable opening. Weigand made the inevitable answer to it. “Try to make me.”

“No,” she said. “It isn't clear enough. It—it isn't one way or the other. It was the way I felt at the time, after George and I—after we talked. It seemed simple and we were just going to tell Sproul. It was—” She broke off and stared at him. “People feel one way at one time and another way right afterward,” she said. “Or I do. Do you understand that?”

Weigand was tired of being led carefully by the hand through the kindergarten of psychology.

“Look,” he said. “The only way to talk to people, Miss Shaw, is to assume they can follow what you say—that they have enough experience to understand simple things. Maybe you find out they haven't. That's just too bad. But if you want to tell them anything, you have to try to get across. Suppose you just assume I can understand. You felt Thursday afternoon some time that you would rather marry George Schwartz than Mr. Sproul. You agreed to apply for a marriage license with him. Then afterward you weren't so sure. Right?”

“It's more complicated than that,” she said. “It's like being different people. Or going around and looking at things from another direction. And finding they look different.”

Weigand felt himself being sucked into it.

“Everything,” he told her, “is more complicated than the simplest words for it. Tritely, we feel more than we can say. And so the person we're talking to has to help. You say, ‘I thought Thursday afternoon I wanted to marry Schwartz. Later I changed my mind, or almost changed my mind.' All right—that isn't all of it. I know that isn't all of it. But we can't spend the day on it.”

“I know,” she said. She smiled for the first time. “Isn't it awful?” she said.

Weigand did not intend to smile in response, but he almost did. He said, “Right.”

She said she would try to explain, then. She and Schwartz had been married. In Paris. Weigand knew that? All right, then. Something had happened and they thought they didn't want to be married any longer. Perhaps they didn't; perhaps they were right then. Perhaps they shouldn't be married. “Lee said we were wrong for each other,” she said. They—she and Schwartz—came back to the United States at different times, and met again only a few months ago. And then she was engaged to marry Sproul. And then she discovered that she was not really sure.

“And Schwartz?” Weigand said.

“He was sure,” she said. “Or thought he was sure. He wanted us to get married again. He said it was all Lee Sproul. All our trouble. He had—he had a theory.”

She looked at Weigand a little helplessly. “I don't know,” she said. “It sounds crazy. Like something in a—in a psychological novel. Maybe it is something George just—made up. Without knowing he made it up.”

Weigand shrugged. They were going back into it.

“Just tell me,” he said.

She looked at him doubtfully. She didn't, she said, quite see why she was telling him what she was. Weigand simplified that for her. She was telling him because she had to explain an action that looked, from a police point of view, very strange. She was telling him so much because the explanation was, from her point of view, complex. She nodded.

Schwartz's theory, as nearly as she could understand it—“and express it”—was that Sproul had deliberately broken up their marriage. He had worked on both of them, persuading each separately that their marriage was wrong. He had done it, not primarily to get her—“although he wanted me, in his way”—but to prove a point.

“We were living—oh, call it simply,” she said. “With emotional simplicity. We were contented. Sproul didn't believe in that; didn't believe people could live simply and contentedly. He thought—oh, that the emotions were a turmoil. Like Freud. And we violated a theory; maybe a theory he'd built his whole life on. But if we stopped living simply, his theory would be all right again. So he—he tried to unsimplify us. And apparently he was right, because it worked.” She listened to herself doubtfully, and looked at Weigand with the doubt in her eyes, “There was more to it than that, the way George said it,” she said. “He talked for hours. He said there was malice in it too, and jealousy—not jealousy of him, but of the fact that we were happy with each other.” She broke off. “That makes us sound like children on a honeymoon,” she said. “We weren't. Things went wrong, and we had doubts, and we did and said things and—but underneath we were happy to be together, and didn't want it changed. And Sproul changed it. Anyway, that's what George thought.” She paused again. “I guess that's what I think too,” she said. “The way I felt Thursday. I'm talked into it again.”

She examined Weigand's expression.

“I'm a fool,” she said. “I get to talking. All this hasn't anything to do with what you want to know.”

It had, Weigand thought. More than she realized at the moment. He was sorry about that.

“How did Schwartz feel about all this? About what he believed Sproul had done?” he wanted to know.

“He hated Sproul,” she said. “He said he was—oh, a lot of things. A vivisectionist. That—that people like him shouldn't—”

She understood then, and broke off. And this time her eyes were frightened, and she tried to hide it.

“Shouldn't be allowed to what?” Weigand said. “Live?”

“Oh, no!” she said. “You don't understand.”

But she was too hurried. Too emphatic. Schwartz had said something like that. He would have to get it out of her, which wasn't going to be pleasant. Or easy. And then the doorbell rang.

The girl didn't move. She did not seem to hear it. But she heard it all right. Weigand guessed, not thinking it was a hard guess.

“Let him in, Miss Shaw,” he said. “Get it over with.”

She seemed about to rebel, but she went across the room and pressed a button behind a door. They could hear the downstairs door open when the catch was released, and hear it close again with a small, heavy bang. They could hear feet on the stairs. Weigand stood behind the girl when she opened the door. She said, “George!” in a tone of warning and Schwartz looked over her head at Bill Weigand.

“Hello, copper,” Schwartz said. “Bullying women?”

Weigand looked at him.

“Just until you got here, Schwartz,” he said. “Just until you got here.”

Schwartz stood for a moment with an arm around the girl's shoulder. He said, “I'm sorry, honey.” He led her across the room to a chair, and put her in it and turned to face Weigand.

“Well, copper?” he said.