Death Takes a Bow (31 page)

“She smiled at me when I left,” he said, over and over. “She looked happy and smiled. Everything was all right.”

But nobody believed him. They made him tell it over and over again and shook their heads and said, “No, buddy, it wasn't that way.” “Come on, son,” they said. “Spill it. You may as well spill it.”

They did not hit him, with fists or rubber hose. They kept him sitting on a straight chair with a strong light on him and they made him tell it over and over again. And over and over again he told them he had not killed the girl; that she was alive and smiled at him when he left the restaurant; that he ran out of the restaurant, with the door whirling behind him, because he was late back at his job.

“All right,” they said. “Tell it over again, fella.”

They looked at each other and let heavy disbelief show in their faces; they laughed a little, contemptuously. Weigand said that he had sat in on it for a while and decided the boy was going to hold out for a long time yet and left it to Mullins. When the boy broke and told it, Mullins would call him.

“It's horrible,” Pam said. “If he didn't do it—it's horrible. Because if he didn't do it, it was bad enough without that.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “If he didn't do it. Only it's a hundred to one he did do it—two hundred to one. And it was horrible about the girl. She was—well, she was sort of a pretty girl. And very young, Pam.”

He looked at her and then he looked at Dorian.

“Right,” he said. “It's tough—it's too damned bad. And do you want us to let him get away with it? Is it all right he stuck a knife in the kid's throat?”

He spoke rather harshly, for him; and rather defensively. Dorian smiled, not happily.

“It's just the poor kids, Bill,” she said. “The poor young kids. We know you can't do anything else.”

Bill Weigand, who had been leaning forward, looked into her face and into Pam's, and then he sat back and for a moment said nothing. When he spoke, it was in his normal tone.

“So,” he said. “There you have it. From the police point of view—routine. A poor fool kid kills a girl he's in love with because he gets mad at her. And we—”

He did not finish, because the telephone bell rang. Jerry crossed the room and dug under a table where the telephone lived. It seemed to be caught on something, and he jerked. There was an indignant yow and Toughy came out, his tail enlarged. He stopped, looked at Jerry reproachfully, scram bled suddenly on the carpet, ran headlong across the room, leaped to the windowsill, crashed into the venetian blinds, bounced, landed half way across the room, leaped convulsively into the air, dashed furiously at the sofa, climbed the back of the sofa and suddenly sat down. He began to wash his back. Toughy had awakened.

“My,” Pam said. “His tail must have been caught in the telephone wire, or something. Isn't he strange?”

Ruffy came into the living room at a dead run, evidently adandoning the bathtub in which, for days, she had decided to live. She leaped over the radio, put both forelegs around Toughy's neck in an embrace and rolled with him to the floor. Toughy landed underneath, flat on his back with a plunk. He lay there and began to eat one of Ruffy's ears. She hissed at him.

“Children,” Pamela North said. “Be good cats.” She explained to Dorian. “They're showing off, now,” she said.

“Please,” Jerry said from the telephone. “I can't—Oh, Weigand. Yes, he's here.”

He beckoned with the telephone and Bill took it. He said, “yes” and “yes.”

“All right,” he said, “we'll just have to keep after him. I'll be along after awhile. Anything else?”

He listened.

“What difference it can possibly make,” he said. “However—”

He listened again.

“We knew that,” he said. He listened further.

“And that,” he said. “But thank the good doctor. Tell him he's very thorough.” He started to cradle the telephone. He thought better of it.

“Mullins!” he said. “Hold it. Don't tell him that last.” He waited. “Right,” he said. “In a couple of hours. I'll be here, meanwhile.”

He cradled the telephone this time and crossed back to his seat on the sofa. They looked at him, enquiringly.

“Mullins,” he said. “The boy's still holding out. The M. E. says she died about an hour before his man saw her, which would make it about a quarter of one. He knew what she had to eat. But so did we. Bacon and tomato sandwich, coffee, a—”

Suddenly he broke off, with an odd expression in his eyes. And then, softly, he said that he would be damned. He said it slowly and with some surprise. Then he was back at the telephone and dialing; then he was speaking into the telephone with a new tone in his voice.

“Weigand,” he said. “Get me Mullins.” There was a moment's pause. Then Bill Weigand spoke again. “Mullins?” he said. “Read me that again.” He waited. “Are they sure?” he asked. He did not wait to be answered. “Don't ask them that, Mullins. Of course they're sure.” He held the telephone for a moment at a little distance from his ear and tapped on the table with the fingers of his free hand. Then he made up his mind.

“Mullins,” he said. “Let up on the boy. Hold him; put him in storage somewhere. And give him a cigarette and something to eat.” He listened. “Right,” he said. “Screwy is the word for it, Sergeant. I'll be along.”

He put the telephone down and turned and looked at the others, but not as if he saw them clearly.

They waited for him to speak and when he did not, Pam spoke.

“What's the matter, Bill?” she said. “Is it blowing up on you? Didn't the boy do it?”

Weigand shook his head, slowly.

“I don't know,” he said. “Mullins says it's screwy. You see—she'd eaten a baked apple.”

He looked at the others, who looked back at him, evidently unenlightened. He gave them time. Then he explained.

“It's a catch,” he said. “I told you we knew everything, even what she had to eat. Maybe we knew too damned much. You see, she didn't have any baked apple. She wanted one, and there weren't any. So she took a custard. And now the M.E.'s office finds out she had a baked apple. Where'd she get it?”

“Probably,” Dorian said, reasonably, “she went back to the counter and had another try and got a baked apple. I don't see—”

“Right,” Weigand said. “I don't either. Not certainly. Maybe she did just that. And maybe somebody else was there and brought her a baked apple. Because the kid—this Franklin Martinelli—swears she didn't leave the table while he was there, and he's confirmed—a dozen times, probably, that she had a sandwich and a cup of custard and coffee.”

“But,” Jerry said, “you didn't believe him before. Why believe him now?”

Weigand nodded, and said it was a point. Maybe the Martinelli boy was a very bright boy; maybe he'd figured something out. But he would have to be very bright to know that it would matter whether Frances McCalley had a baked apple with her lunch.

“It would take figuring,” Bill said. “I doubt whether the kid figures that way—figures that if she didn't have a baked apple with her regular lunch, didn't leave the table during the time he was there, showed up with a baked apple in her stomach—that all this would mean maybe he didn't do it after all.” He paused, considering. “It's funny,” he said. “Where did she get the apple?”

“Somebody brought it to her,” Pam said. “Maybe the person who killed her. Maybe somebody else. Or did she leave the table, but perhaps after the boy had gone, and got the apple herself. Could she see the counter? Where the things were, I mean? From where she sat?”

Weigand shook his head. He admitted he hadn't noticed.

“Because,” Pam amplified, “maybe she saw somebody bring the apples in. And went and got one. Anyway, it isn't so routine as it was, is it? Perhaps it wasn't the Martinelli boy.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “So we're giving him a rest. And instead of sitting here, basking comfortably, telling sad stories of the death of gangsters, I've got to go around and get to work. Tracing a baked apple from—from the counter to the morgue.”

“Bill!” Dorian said, firmly. “For heaven's sake, darling!”

Bill smiled.

“Nevertheless,” he began. Then the telephone rang again. He looked quickly at Jerry, who waved a hand; he said, “Lieut. Weigand speaking” into the telephone. He looked pained and held the receiving end a couple of inches from his ear.

He looked at the others and made the word “Inspector” with his lips. He said, “Yes, Inspector?”

He listened. He whistled softly. He said, “Right.” He listened again.

“Right away, Inspector,” he said. “But how about the McCalley case? In the Greystone's coffee shop.” He listened. “No,” he said, “I'm not sure it is. Something else has come up. A question of a baked apple.”

Across the room they could hear the telephone splutter. Grinning slightly, Weigand held it farther from his ear.

“Right,” he said. “But I'm not joking. I'm not sure it's the Martinelli boy, and the reason is a baked apple. However—”

He listened further, said, “Right” again, and replaced the telephone in its holder. He stood up.

“Inspector O'Malley,” he said. “In person. From a house on Gramercy Park. They found Miss Ann Lawrence dead there. Somebody hit her with a poker. A brass poker, O'Malley says.”

“Lawrence?” Pam said. “Ann Lawrence? Ought we—”

Weigand shrugged. He said the Inspector seemed to think so. Apparently she had been important, since the Inspector went around in person; apparently she had money, since she lived in a house—her own house—on Gramercy Park. And apparently the Inspector was now ready to turn it over to Weigand.

“To assist,” Weigand explained, gravely. “To do the routine. And after I get there, our O'Malley will decide he has already done the important thinking, got everything well in hand, and had better leave detail to me. So he will go and play poker with the boys.”

Weigand was amused, not aggrieved.

“He's got a right,” Dorian said.

“Sure he's got a right,” Bill told her and both of them smiled.

“And the other one—the girl in the cafeteria?” Pam asked. “What about her?”

Mullins, for the time being, Weigand said. After the time being they would see.

“And now,” he said, “I've got to join the Inspector.”

Pam said it was too bad. She said she had been thinking of a rubber of bridge. But she did not, and Weigand was a little surprised by this, suggest that they all go along and help. She said they would see Dorian got home and to come back right away if somebody confessed, or Inspector O'Malley had it all solved, and that it was nice that the department had let him come at all.

After he had gone, Pam stood for a moment with her back to the closed door, and found Jerry looking at her speculatively. He was, she decided, puzzled. She waited for him to mention it.

But after looking at her, he apparently decided to let sleeping issues lie, because when he spoke he seemed to be skirting murder rather elaborately, and to be about to return to the subject of Dan Beck, as if he had never left it. Pam waited, politely, until he reached what might be the end of a sentence. Then she spoke.

“I think,” she said, “that we'd better all help Sergeant Mullins. About the baked apple. Because it's going to confuse him dreadfully, without Bill. And because—because the girl was just a baby, really. Don't you think?”

“No,” Jerry said, firmly.

“I do,” Pam said. “I think we ought to.”

II.
Tuesday, 8:10 P.M. to 8:55 P.M.

It had begun to snow, which was discouraging, because already there had been enough snow; because, against all evidence, one persisted in thinking of March as one of the months of spring. It was not cold, which was something; you might think of the large, stolidly falling flakes as a spring snow. There were a great many of the flakes and they were falling heavily, but without hurry; it was a tired snow. It was forming slush on the sidewalks and streets; it had plastered on the top of Weigand's car, and on the cold hood and on the windshield. Weigand flicked snow from the windshield with heavy gloves and got into the car. The motor started, with no enthusiasm, and the snow on the hood almost at once began to melt.

From inside the car, looking out through the smeared glass, the snow seemed heavier than it had before. It was a soft, moving, implacable wall around the car. When Weigand switched on his dim lights, their faint radiance bounced off the snow. It seemed improbable that a car could move through the white wall. For a moment, Bill Weigand felt shut off from everything, in a new, strange world. Then he switched on the windshield wipers. They floundered against the snow, pushed it aside. They began to clear spaces on the glass, each space looking—Weigand decided—like the amount of the national income spent for the war effort.

Starting, the car skidded in the slush. Weigand coaxed it to a straight line and eased it through the half-melted snow, not hurrying. He turned up Fifth Avenue and, after a few blocks, crossed to Fourth. At Nineteenth he turned east and, when he reached the park, groped slowly around it. The snow was heavier than ever when the car moved; the soft white wall turned into a maelstrom, sweeping and twisting toward him, swirling up in front of the windshield and over the car. It was dizzying. Weigand did not look for street numbers, but watched for a small cluster of cars. On the north side of the square, east of Lexington, he found it and nosed the Buick in. A uniformed patrolman started forward, identified the car and made a gesture which was, in its fashion, a salute.

Weigand stopped on the sidewalk for a moment and looked up at the house. It was a small house, as New York houses went—narrow, three-stories, sedate. Brass rails, which probably glistened under more favorable conditions, curved on either side of the few steps which led up to the door, off-center in the façade. It was a pretty little house, Weigand thought, and went up the steps. He pushed against the door and it opened quietly, softly resisting against its pneumatic check. There was another uniformed man just inside, much drier and more contented. He saluted with more spirit and said, “Hello, Lieutenant. The inspector's upstairs.”