Murder in a Hurry (17 page)

Martini was wary until she discovered that the door opened to Bill and Dorian Weigand. Then she jumped to the radio and made a small sound of welcome. Dorian Weigand, moving almost as gracefully as Martini—but not jumping to the radio—held a slim hand down for the cat to smell. Martini obliged and, very faintly, purred. Bill also was greeted by the cats, returned their greetings. Gin crouched to jump to Bill's shoulders, but Jerry picked her up and put her on his own, whereupon she steadied herself with claws and Pam North said, “Jerry, she's shedding. And that isn't your Siamese-colored suit.”

After that, humans could greet and be greeted; after that Jerry, still wearing Gin—to Martini's audible, jealous disapproval—could mix drinks. After that Dorian, slim, green-eyed, looking now rather tired but still moving with her special grace, could find a chair and lean back in it and tuck one foot under the other leg and say, with satisfaction, “Ah.” Sherry at once joined her, saying plaintive things, perhaps complaining of Gin's attitude about ear licking.

“It's funny about animals,” Pam North said, and the other three looked at her and waited. She looked from one to the other, and seemed puzzled. “I don't know why I said that,” she said. “Except something reminded me of something about animals.” She looked at each of the cats in turn. “But now I don't know what it was,” she said.

Jerry resumed mixing drinks and distributed them.

“Oh,” Pam said, “I remember part of it. The way they like people or don't. The way Sherry likes Dorian and tells her her troubles. And some people they just avoid.” But the last was said in a rather puzzled tone. “What started me?” Pam asked Jerry. Jerry sipped and gave the matter thought.

“Martini and Miss O'Brien?” he said. “As far as that goes, Martini and almost anybody she doesn't know.”

But Pam shook her head. That, she explained, was merely because Martini was by nature shy and skeptical. It was a general attitude.

“Anyway,” she said, “what started me wasn't a cat. More like a dog—oh! Aegisthus.” She listened. “I lisped it again,” she said. Her tone dismissed it. “By the way, Dorian, before Bill tells us about the lawyer, Jerry's very pleased with Liza O'Brien's cats. Aren't you, Jerry?”

Jerry North said he was. He said there was a nice feeling.

“She's going to be good, I think,” Dorian Weigand said. “She's a nice child. She'll break her neck to do a job on the book.” Dorian paused to drink. “I hope—” she said, and looked at her husband. Bill smiled at her, lifted his shoulders momentarily. He said it was early days, yet, and was asked by Pam how early. He did not answer directly. Instead he told Pam he hoped she would be pleased to find out there was a will in it after all; a will which was to have been changed. They waited.

He told them, briefly, partially, of his interview with J. K. Halder's lawyer; of the cryptic telegram. With the new information, Weigand had done, and caused to be done, several things. With it, the Monday night dinner, Halder's abrupt departure from it, assumed enhanced importance. Already, the police had been seeking to establish Halder's exact movements on the night he died; with the information from Isaac Faberworth, they went harder to work on it.

They found that Halder had left the Sutton Place house about nine-thirty, perhaps a few minutes earlier—perhaps as early as nine-twenty. He had apparently walked for several blocks; he had got a cab, bound downtown, on Third Avenue at about nine-forty. It had taken much combing by many men to discover this, to find a hacker whose time sheet showed the right pickup, the right discharge of passenger near West Kepp Street. But, once found, the driver remembered; remembered because he got few calls to that part of town, and was helpless there, and had to be guided by Halder. “Brooklyn I know,” the hacker said. “But this Green Witch Village—boy!” He remembered that his fare had stopped on the way at a Western Union office in West Fourth Street. It was a small office and they had luck again; Halder was remembered. He had filed his message to his attorney at nine-fifty-eight.

He had gone back to the waiting cab and, according to the cab driver's schedule, had been let out at West Kepp Street at ten minutes after ten. The trail ended there.

“Except that he got to the shop,” Bill said, “and was there undisturbed for some time. He was there long enough to feed the animals and to handle the black cat, unless he had spent the evening with black cat hairs on one leg of his dinner trousers.”

“He might have,” Pam pointed out. “Same color. Like Jerry's Siamese-colored suit. The one he always says he's going to get, anyway.”

It was possible, Bill agreed. It was probably not important. Certainly he had been there long enough to feed the animals. There had been traces of chopped meat under the fingernails of one hand. That, Bill said, he had certainly not worn all evening. At a guess, he had been unmolested for an hour or more. Because, at a guess again, he had been alive at midnight and dead by three o'clock the next morning.

“No closer than that?” Jerry asked.

Bill shook his head and said that, unfortunately, the Medical Examiner's office wanted that much leeway. Pinned down, as hard as the police could pin them, they had consented to prefer one o'clock to, say, two-forty-five. It was not, Bill admitted, as helpful as it might be.

Then, at whatever hour was chosen—it might have been as early as midnight, even a little before that—J. K. Halder had been held, or in some other fashion briefly immobilized, and a grain or more of strychnine had been injected into him, hypodermically. Within fifteen minutes, probably, he had begun to feel an unaccountable uneasiness and the beginning of convulsive movements. Within an hour or so—an hour of agony—he was dead.

“But,” Bill said, “until somebody—somebody at the Sutton Place house—panicked and killed Miss O'Brien's little old man, we'd have had a hard time proving this, whatever we thought. The injection was made in his left arm, where he could conveniently have made it himself; the hypodermic was in a cupboard, where he might have placed it after using it; it had only his prints on it. Only one set of his prints, which would have taken explaining. His dying doubled up as he did in the pen, in spite of the convulsions of strychnine poison and your point, Pam, that he would never have used strychnine to destroy animals he was fond of, would both have taken more explaining. But—a good lawyer might have got around them somehow; have convinced a jury that it wasn't proved Halder didn't kill himself. Sneddiger's death was—simpler.”

Detectives looking through files and asking questions, technicians looking into a seventy-odd-year-old body, had discovered this much of what had happened after Halder had left the Sutton Place house Monday night. Bill Weigand, assisted by Sergeant Mullins, had been less successful in finding out what had happened before he left the house.

Weigand had talked, at the house, with the Whitesides, Mary Halder and the servants; at her apartment, he had talked to Mrs. J. K. Halder, Jr. He had not as yet talked to “Junior” himself or, further, to Brian Halder. Weigand had questioned on the assumption that something had happened at the dinner which led Halder to decide to change his will and that that decision might have led to his murder. “Then all the rest of it,” Bill said, “is trimming.” He did not mean, he said, that it was extraneous, necessarily; that in the pattern of these lives, the name given the little black Scottie, the ailing boxer bitch, the small long-haired cat, did not somehow fit. But it was simpler, for the time being at any rate, to assume that it was not because a Scottie was named Aegisthus that J. K. Halder was killed in his pet shop.

“But,” Pam North said.

He did not, Weigand said, mean to say that the Scottie's name was an incident, without meaning; that Halder had not, when he gave the little dog to his younger wife and told her it was already named, meant obliquely to imply something, and most probably that he was not being kept in ignorance.

“So obviously subtle,” Pam said, with disapproval.

The others agreed to that. But they were not, Jerry pointed out, sitting in judgment on J. K. Halder's style, which might well have been too elaborately indirect. He had not been killed because he had a habit of going around Robin Hood's barn. He had been killed because—But there Jerry North paused, handed it back to Bill Weigand.

Bill did not immediately pick it up. He said that, at first, none of the family remembered that anything of importance had happened at the dinner. All—Mrs. Halder herself, her step-daughter and the lieutenant colonel, the junior Mrs. Halder—had agreed that Halder had left abruptly. They had agreed in saying they did not know why. Jennifer Halder, to whom Weigand had gone first, had thought, or said she thought, that her father-in-law had merely decided to be eccentric. This, she told Weigand, did not surprise her; she could not see why it should surprise anyone. He had been, she had said, “a funny old duck”; he had also, she thought, known it; enjoyed being a funny old duck, and had been especially “funny” when the notion took him, needing no actual reason. She suggested the dinner itself, Halder's arranging of it, had been only an example of J. K. Halder's “funniness.” She had assumed, she told Bill Weigand, that the old man, after calling the family together, had merely become bored with all of them. “As heaven knows—” she had begun, and then stopped in mock discretion. She had been tolerant and detached; had said that she was rather fond of the funny old duck but could not pretend deep grief. “After all,” she said, “I very seldom saw him. He was Jas's father, that was all.” To her he had been, she indicated, no more than a rather odd abstraction.

But when Bill had told her of her father-in-law's decision to change his will, her detachment had markedly lessened. She had wanted to know whether his intention to do this, expressed in a telegram to his attorney, was in any way legally binding and, when told it was not, had not tried to hide her relief. Nor, except for a moment or two, had she tried to hide her evident conviction that, if the will had been changed, she and her husband would have been losers. This had, apparently, been so much an inevitable conclusion in her own mind that she had taken it for granted that it would be as inevitable in Weigand's, and only when he raised the point that Halder's specific intentions had been entirely undisclosed realized she was being needlessly revealing. Then she admitted, by her manner as well as her words, that she had trapped herself.

But she assumed, she then insisted, that she and her husband would lose again only because they had been the ones to lose before. She told him of the earlier will change, in which they had lost drastically, and of what they assumed to be the reason for it—that they were going to have a child. Bill amplified for his wife and the Norths, explaining that Jennifer Halder's version accorded with that of Halder's lawyer.

“For heaven's sake!” Pam said. “Why—the
awful
old man! The—genocidist!” She considered. “As far as I'm concerned,” she said, “it can be suicide any time, after that. Serves him right.”

Jerry smiled at her, and shook his head at her.

“Because,” Pam said, “he must have been crazy. But go ahead, Bill.”

Bill had, he said, questioned along the obvious lines, and Jennifer Halder had denied that, since the time five years before, there had been any new cause for Halder to become annoyed at his older son. Specifically, she had said—and then had smiled, seemed amused—they were not again going to have a child.

“But of course—” Pam North said.

“Right,” Bill said. “I'll agree we have to take her word for it.”

“For the time being,” Pam amplified, and again Bill said “Right.”

Under continued questioning, Jennifer Halder had continued not to remember any incident at the dinner which might have incensed the old man; continued to insist that no incident would be necessary to make him behave oddly. Then Bill had gone on to the Sutton Place house, and questioned the Whitesides, separately, and Mary Halder. Mullins, meanwhile, talked to the servants.

The Whitesides and Mrs. Halder were all, they had assured Weigand, surprised that Halder had decided to change his will; they all, he thought, appeared to be relieved that the cryptic telegram would do nothing to invalidate the present will. But each of them denied that he would expect to lose if the will were changed, all being clear of conscience, sure they had done nothing to offend the old man. This might prove that they lacked the motive Jennifer and her husband might have had; it might also prove they were more reticent than Jennifer had been.

It was Dorian, who had seemed to be almost asleep, except that her fingers gently stroked the blond cat in her lap, who pointed out that Jennifer Halder's apparent frankness might be actual calculation—and that she had after all told Bill nothing he had not learned elsewhere. Bill nodded to this.

Both the Whitesides had, like Jennifer, denied that anything out of the way had happened at the dinner; both seemed to share her belief that Halder had needed no incentive to behave oddly. (The colonel had added, “Particularly during the last few weeks, poor old chap.”) And, at first, Mary Halder had taken the same line. But by then Mullins had talked to Burns, and reported what Burns remembered, so that, to Mary Halder, Bill had shaken his head slowly. She had at first seemed puzzled; then she had appeared to understand and had said, “Oh, that!”

“I suppose,” she had said, then, “you mean Sherman's coming? But that wasn't anything.”

She had been told to go on. She had gone on. At a little after nine on Monday evening, she said, Sherman Pine had showed up at the house. She had not expected him; Burns had let him into the foyer and, recognizing him down the length of the living room, she had at once gone to the foyer. She had been surprised and, after a moment, he had been apologetic.