Murder in a Hurry (6 page)

“Half-brother,” Halder said.

“Half-brother,” Weigand said. “He says your father liked animals so much that—well, that he would have seen all of you die if that would have saved—well, that sick boxer pup at the shop.”

“That's absurd,” Brian said. Now he seemed more convinced, was more convincing. “The old man didn't have to mean all he said. He didn't mean half of it.”

“Even half,” Weigand said. “Your father was eccentric. Perhaps bitter; perhaps more. He may have been ill, decided to kill himself, arranged these bizarre circumstances—to point up, somehow, his feeling about animals and people. And—to make the family ridiculous.”

“You've got quite an imagination, Lieutenant,” Brian Halder said.

“Is it easier to imagine somebody killing him and putting him in the pen to die?”

“It cer—” Halder began, and stopped abruptly. Liza could almost see his mind working. “Maybe you're right,” he said. But didn't he realize Weigand would see what she saw?

Weigand merely looked at the tall young man for a moment. Then he spoke mildly. “It may be that—yes, Sergeant?”

Sergeant Mullins was at the door. He moved his head back, summoning Weigand. Weigand went out of the room and closed the door behind him. Then Halder looked at the Norths, seemed to see them for the first time. Quickly, Liza introduced him. He narrowed his eyes, then opened them. “Don't you—?” he said. “Aren't you often involved in—?”

“Too often,” Jerry North said. He shook his head. “Ever since—” He looked at Pam North.

“We had one of our own, or sort of,” Pam said. “And met Bill. But I don't think involved's the word. It's just that—” But now she stopped and looked at Jerry, who told her the word would do. But then Weigand returned. He looked at Brian Halder for a moment.

“Your father died of strychnine,” he said. “Hypodermically injected. Presumably from a syringe which he must have kept in his shop to destroy hopelessly sick animals. And—only his prints are on the syringe.” And then Weigand stopped, and waited for Brian Halder; waited obviously for the tall young man to speak.

Halder shook his head slowly, his expression shocked.

“But isn't that horrible—painful?” he asked. “Would anyone—?”

“A good many have,” Weigand told him. “It's much more frequently used by suicides than by murderers. I agree it's odd. But there it is. Unless you can think of some better reason, Mr. Halder? Had you some better reason for deciding it was murder?”

“But Bill—” Pam North said, and he shook his head at her and waited for Halder.

“I guess I just—just jumped at it,” Brian Halder said, slowly. “It just—seemed likely. I—”

“Bill,” Pam North said. “Listen to me. You say Mr. Halder had the hypodermic there? Did he have strychnine, too?” Bill Weigand nodded, and now he did not try to stop her. “And you think he had it to destroy sick animals?”

“Well?” Bill said.

“Then he was murdered, of course,” Pam said. “Because he liked animals. Don't you see?”

“Go on, Pam,” Bill said.

“He never would have used strychnine,” Pam said. “Not for the animals. It's—they say it's horrible. He would have used—what is it, Jerry?”

“A barbiturate,” Jerry said. “Injected, probably. A shot to put the animal to sleep. Then another, stronger, to—well, to finish the job.”

“Of course,” Pam said. “But never strychnine. Don't you see, Bill? Never anything so cruel.”
*

And now Bill Weigand nodded, and said, slowly, “Right.” And then he smiled faintly.

“But there's a better reason,” he said. “If he got into the pen, injected strychnine—well, death from strychnine isn't easy. There're spasms, you know; convulsions. He—well, probably he would have kicked the pen apart.” Then, quickly, he turned on Brian Halder. “Is that what you knew?” he demanded.

Now Halder shook his head quickly, without hesitation; now the expression of shock, of horror, was unmistakable on his face. Weigand saw it; Liza saw him see it.

“Didn't you know about strychnine, Mr. Halder?” Weigand asked, and now his voice was quiet again. “Didn't you know how a man dies from it?”

*
Pam is only partly right. Some veterinarians use strychnine to destroy animals, but only by injecting it directly into the heart. So used, it causes almost instantaneous death, and is thought to be relatively painless. Administered by a layman, such as Halder was, strychnine would almost inevitably bring about slow and agonized death.

4

Tuesday, 7:25
P
.
M
. to 8:45
P
.
M
.

Brian Halder had never answered Weigand's question; he had had little chance to answer it. He had been, not too abruptly, yet with finality, dismissed. He would be talked to later. But Liza had not been dismissed. She had been given the chance to revise her own story, confirm Brian's and, flushing a little, had taken it.

“Now,” Weigand said, “you knew who Mr. Halder was?”

She opened her eyes wider.

“Brian's father,” she said, surprised. Then Weigand smiled faintly.

“More than that,” he said. “You never heard of J. K. Halder?” He looked at her. “No,” he said, “that would have been about the time you were born.”

“For God's sake!” Jerry North said. “
That
Halder.”

“Right,” Bill said. “That Halder.” He turned back to Liza. “He was quite famous, once,” he said. “Quite spectacular. Did you ever hear of Industrial United?”

She shook her head.

“An investment trust,” he said. “In the middle twenties, one of the biggest. Halder was Industrial United—almost all of it. He started with a few hundred thousand; small change in that league. He built up to—well, nobody ever knew exactly how many millions. There were yelps along the way from—well, call them the building materials. The people, the organizations, which in one way or another made Halder's millions out of his few hundred thousands. And then, at the right time, very suddenly, in 1928, he cashed in on the whole business.”

“My,” Pam North said.

“Not quietly,” Weigand said. “He'd not been in the limelight before, not much in the newspapers. After he sold out, and for no reason anybody could understand, he held a big press conference. Talked for almost the only time in his life; talked to a bunch of financial reporters and editors. And told them, in effect, that the whole thing was a racket—all he had done, all they were doing. Except, as he pointed out, he had made money out of it; made it, he told them, out of even bigger fools than they were. ‘If possible,' he told them. I knew a man who was there. Halder said that the only reason he had been able to do it was because everybody—apparently he made no exceptions—was like himself, out for what he could get. The difference was, he told them, that he had got it. Then he said, ‘Frankly, gentlemen, people make me sick' and told them where the bar was.”

“Well,” Pam said. “All that. And he died in a pet shop. What happened to the money?”

As far as Weigand knew, nothing had happened to the money. The money was still around. The house they were in was part of the money. On that, they were still working and for some time would be. But so far as they had discovered, J. K. Halder had leased an obscure shop, filled it with animals, gone to live in it merely because he was, as he had said, “sick of people.”

“Now,” Weigand said, “you are going to marry Mr. Brian Halder, Miss O'Brien.”

She nodded.

“Did his father object?”

“No,” she said. “I—I don't think he knew. Brian said—”

“Yes?”

“I didn't know all this,” she said. “All this you say about him, about Mr. Halder. But Brian said he was difficult that—that you had to put things to him in the right way. That he didn't—” She flushed again and swallowed. “Well,” she said, “that he thought there were too many people around already, and didn't think there ought to be any more marriages and—”

“That,” Pam North said, “is the silliest thing I ever heard of. Seriously?”

“I don't know,” Liza said. “No—not literally, I guess. Brian maybe said that more to show how—how odd his father was. But that's what he said. He may have been half joking. Exaggerating.”

“But you say Halder didn't know about your and his son's plans?” Weigand asked.

She shook her head. “Unless Brian told him in the last day or two,” she said. “I don't think he did.”

Weigand stood for a moment, then, looking down at her. She could not tell what he was thinking; could not, although she wanted to, feel him, understand him, as a person.

“Right,” he said. “I think that's all for the moment.” He shook his head. “Don't try to mix things up after this, Miss O'Brien.” Again he paused, looking down at her. “One other thing,” he said. “Where were you last night?”

She looked at him, her eyes wide.

“Last night?” she repeated.

“Until about eleven-thirty,” Pam North said, “she was at out apartment, trying to get Martini to come out from behind a sofa.”

Weigand nodded. “And after that?” he asked.

“I went home,” Liza said. “Straight home. And went to bed. Was it—was it last night?”

“It may have been,” Bill Weigand said. “All right, Miss O'Brien. That's all for now.”

“Must I go home?”

He hesitated. Then he smiled, and then, fleetingly, he became a person to Liza; someone she could almost understand.

“Go find him,” Weigand said. “Talk it over. Get it straightened out—if you can. You'll have to some time. But don't try to cook up anything else between you.”

“Oh no,” she said, and went out through the door he opened for her, went to find Brian, but went frightened and uneasy, fearing as much as she hoped.

Brian came to meet her up the long room and put both hands on her shoulders and looked, gravely, into her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I guess I made a mess of it. You were swell, Liza. Very swell.”

Then he put an arm around her shoulders, and walked with her down the room toward the windows, where the two men and the two women were sitting, now were looking at Brian and at her, and waiting. There seemed to her a kind of uneasiness, almost of suspicion, in the way they all looked at her. But both of the men stood up as she and Brian approached, and the heavier man—lieutenant colonel what?—smiled in a friendly enough fashion. Then Brian introduced them and she tried to concentrate on their names, associate them finally with the way their faces were.

Whiteside, that was the lieutenant colonel, although Brian called him colonel. The older woman was his wife, Barbara. “My sister,” Brian said. “My half-sister.”

“How do you do, Miss O'Brien?” Mrs. Whiteside said, enunciating so distinctly that it seemed she really asked the question, expected an answer.

The tall man was Brian's half-brother. Jasper, Brian said. “But everybody calls him ‘Junior.' Or J. K. As they do—” he paused. “As they did Dad,” he said.

“Skip the ‘Junior,' for God's sake,” Brian's half-brother said. It was odd, Liza thought, that he could so remind her of Brian and yet be, in all but height, physically so different. It's more, she thought, than his being so much older, although he must be twice as old as Brian; more than twice.

And the blond woman, slight, not a great deal taller than Liza herself, she was Jennifer Halder, Jasper Halder's, “Junior's,” wife. Seen close, she was well-groomed, her features regular; seen close she was much younger than her husband, or than either of the Whitesides. She smiled at Liza; looked from her to Brian and back to her again, smiled and nodded. “But such a dreadful time,” she said. “So awful about Father Halder.”

“
Father
Halder,” Mrs. Whiteside said. “Really, Jennifer! You never called him that, you know. Why start now?”

“Dear Barbs,” Jennifer Halder said, sweetly. “Poor dear Father Halder.”

“Anyway,” Mrs. Whiteside said, “I didn't truckle. Didn't get down on my hands and—”

“Now,” Colonel Whiteside said. “Now my dears. We're all on edge.”

“Truckle,” Jennifer said, still sweetly. “When did I ever hear ‘truckle'?”

“Please, Jennifer,” the colonel said, his voice low, persuasive. “Barbara. We're all very much upset, Miss O'Brien.”

“Much more, Raymond,” Jennifer said. “Broken hearted. All broken hearted.”

“Really!” Barbara Whiteside said. “
Really
, Raymond!” Impatiently, she gestured with strong, square hands, carefully cared for, newly manicured.

It was embarrassing; they rasped at one another, indifferent to anything but the need to rasp. Liza wished, anxiously, there were some way to escape from the group, from the sharp words, the cutting meanings, they were throwing at one another, over her head, around her, as if she were not there. She looked up at Brian.

For a moment he looked down at her, for that moment it seemed that something—assurance, confidence—was to be re-established. But then there was a sound from the other end of the long room and Brian's head turned toward the sound.

Weigand and the Norths had come out of the library, but it was not at them Brian Halder looked. A slim, dark woman was coming up the steps from the foyer, with a tall, very fair, very scrubbed-looking, man behind her. And Brian seemed to forget Liza; to forget her even before he withdrew his arm from her shoulders as if it were misplaced there, and started down the room toward the newcomers.

“Mary!” Brian Halder said. “Mary! Where on earth?”

The dark woman came toward Brian in a little rush.

“My dear!” she said. “Brian! We just heard. Oh—Brian!”