Murder Is Served (19 page)

“And,” Pam said, “where is she? Does she know the police are looking for her? And why did you call us, anyway?”

Paul Foster hesitated, momentarily.

“If I told you where she is, you'd tell the police?” he asked, then. Jerry came in; he was a little explosive; he said, “Damn right we would.”

“Then, obviously—” Foster said. “Yes, Mrs. North, she knows the police want to talk to her.”

“Then it's very simple,” Mrs. North pointed out. “She ought to go to Bill Weigand—he's a detective lieutenant, you know—and let them talk to her. Why not, if she didn't do it?”

There was a longer pause, this time. Then Paul Foster, with an odd hesitancy in his voice, said it was not as simple as that. “There's more than's in the papers,” he said. “It's—I'm afraid it's got loused up a bit. That's why we thought of you. Car—” He stopped abruptly. “A friend of hers telephoned a man named Leonard this morning, to ask him about something and—”

“What she said, really said, in that paper,” Pam North said. “We know about that, Mr. Foster. A man named Weldon Carey called Professor Leonard. Go on.”

“Leonard said he wouldn't talk. He said he'd told you all he knew, anyway. He said you—well, knew this Weigand. But that if you didn't agree with the police you'd, that is—”

“Listen,” Jerry said, “if we know where Mrs. Mott is, we'll tell the police. You can count on that. I hope you haven't got any other idea, Mr. Foster.” Jerry's voice was not friendly.

“If we thought Mrs. Mott didn't do it, we'd tell Bill that,” Pam North said. “We might even try to persuade him. That's all.” She paused briefly, but seemed to be holding the line open by an effort of will. They waited. “I still don't see where you come into this, Mr. Foster,” she said. There was curiosity in her voice. Jerry heard it; identified it; unconsciously sighed.

“Pam—” he began. But he seemed to have, somehow, lost control of the conversation.

“Can't I come around to your place and explain?” Foster said. “That's all we—I—want. Just to have you listen and, if you want to, give us advice.”

“I can do that now,” Jerry said. “Go—” He stopped, realizing that he was not being listened to.

“All right,” Pam said. “I don't see why not. When?”

“Now,” Foster said, and his voice was, again, oddly gay.

“Pam,” Jerry said. “We haven't—”

“Say in half an hour,” Pam told Mr. Foster. “That'll give us time to have breakfast. All right, Jerry?”

“I guess—” Jerry began. His voice was unhappy.

“Good,” Pam said. “In half an hour. Oh—the biscuits! Good-bye.”

She hung up and so, apparently, did Mr. Foster. Jerry North took the telephone down from his ear, shook his head at it, and put it in its cradle. Pam came out of the front room, very rapidly. She did not pause, avoided a cat with what was half a dance step, and went on to the kitchen. Jerry heard the oven door open; heard Pam North say, “Oh!” Then she came to the kitchen door, shaking her head.

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe we can eat a little of the insides. Of course, I could make pancakes, I suppose. Only with Mr. Foster coming so soon—?” She ended, her voice enquiring. They ate the insides of the biscuits, and bacon and boiled eggs. The cats, shouldering one another only slightly, finished the egg remaining in the cups. Pam watched them, considering. “After all,” she said, “I guess they're as sanitary as we are, really. Unless you don't like cats.”

Paul Foster came. He was slim, a little above medium height; he had a smile which lighted up his face. And a red-haired girl, hatless, seemingly wrapped around and around in a heavy cloth coat, came with him. “Paula,” Paul Foster said, and the smile absorbed his face. “We know it's funny. But we decided to get married anyway.”

Paula Foster, unwrapped, was very small. She was also very appealing. She looked at Pam quickly, and seemed pleased with what she saw. She looked at Jerry North. They both looked at Jerry North. Paul Foster looked around the room.

“I don't blame you,” he said. “We've barged in. We're trying to drag you in. If you really want us to, we'll clear out.”

He waited. Pam North waited, looking at her husband.

“No,” Jerry said. “We'll listen, Mr. Foster. Now that you are here.”

The Norths listened. They heard all of it. Jerry shook his head.

“Carey was a damn fool,” he said. “You realize that?”

“He was,” Foster said. “In some respects he is. But—he's a hell of a guy. Maybe he's a little bit mixed up, still. A lot of us are, you know. But he's a hell of a guy.”

The police, Jerry pointed out, would not think so. Foster smiled and agreed with that.

“And eventually,” Jerry said, “the police will catch up with them. You realize that, Foster? And that they're doing themselves no good?”

Foster agreed with that, in principle. He did not smile.

“But the damage is done, for the moment,” he said. “And—something may turn up. Carey was a fool; nothing drastic was going to happen to the girl in jail. I realize that. But nothing drastic's going to happen, now, if she stays out of it for a day or two. Until she gets a lawyer, anyway. Then, of course, she'll have to surrender. The lawyer will make her. Say—tomorrow.”

“I warn you,” Jerry North said, “if I find out where she is, I'll turn her in. I ought to turn you in, now, you know. You're aiding and abetting, or whatever it is.”

“By force?” Foster said, and his smile went over his face. “You don't know where we live, you know. If you call your policeman friend, you're going to force us to wait for him?”

“Stalemate,” Pam North said. “Deadlock.”

Jerry shook his head. He said it wasn't. He said they could give names to the police, descriptions. Paul Foster nodded to that.

“And they'll find us,” he said. “I don't doubt that. By tomorrow, perhaps. But we only want until tomorrow. What do you gain?”

“Jerry,” Pam said, “doesn't it make sense?”

Jerry North thought it didn't. He shook his head. He said, “Well, all right. What do you want us to do?”

“See the girl,” Paul Foster said. “Listen to her.”

“No,” Jerry said. “Not unless she'll promise to give herself up.”

“Under these conditions,” Foster said. “We bring her here. You'll be in the same spot you're in now. If you telephone, we'll leave—and you'll be no better off. And you might persuade her to give herself up. All I want is for you two to listen to her first.” He was earnest, now. “I've nothing against the police,” he said. “Carey has, I guess. I haven't. But it's open and shut for them. Even if your friend doesn't think so, what can he do? And—if it's shut, if it's wrapped up, in their minds, they quit looking anywhere else. Well, I think somebody ought to look somewhere else. Because I'd swear the girl didn't do it, however it looks. I don't know her, but I've listened to her. I do know Carey. And Carey is certain she didn't do it. And Carey's not a fool, North. Not on things like that. Important things. I'm betting on Carey.”

There was a considerable pause. The Fosters, Pam, looked at Jerry and waited.

“The fact is,” Jerry said, finally, “you want us to bet on Carey too. But we don't know him, so it boils down to this—you want us to bet on
you
. On the two of you.”

“Well?” Foster said, and now he smiled again.

“I suppose she's downstairs in a cab,” Jerry said. “I suppose the idea's to shoot her at us before we change our minds?”

Foster didn't reply to that.

“You understand,” Jerry said, “that I'll do my damnedest to get her to turn herself in?”

“Sure,” Foster said. “Well?”

“Oh for God's sake,” Jerry said. “Bring her up. Bring them both up.”

Bill Weigand sat in his office and drank coffee without character out of a thick, mug-like cup. He had been there all night; he had slept for an hour or two on a couch and slept badly; his mind was filled with a kind of dull anger, a kind of resentment. There were lines deep in his thin face. The telephone rang and he picked it up and said, “Weigand speaking,” and listened. His face did not change. He said, “Sorry, sir. Nothing.” He listened again and said, “Right.” He put the telephone back in its cradle. He returned to the papers on his desk, which were a monument—a monument still in the progress of growth—to the efficiency of the New York Police Department. They represented efficiency, tirelessness; they also represented, Bill Weigand thought wearily, a certain ponderousness, and the momentum of ponderousness.

The machinery started when a certain thing happened. This time it had started, of itself, when André Maillaux had called the police, said Tony Mott was dead by violence. Bill Weigand was part of the machine, Mullins was part of it, Stein was part of it; even Inspector O'Malley was part of it. At any given time, they—and others like them—were apt to be the visible part of the machine. It would be easy to think that they were the machine. Most people, who thought about it at all, probably thought that. Those who read newspaper accounts might easily have a picture of Inspector O'Malley, looking a little like Sherlock Holmes, tirelessly interviewing suspects, poking into dark corners, now and then assisted by a subordinate named William Weigand, Lieutenant of Detectives. Because the major part of the machine was, to the public, anonymous, it probably seemed not to exist.

But it existed and functioned; it consisted of men, but it was, in the aggregate of their efforts, tireless. It consisted of medical experts, toxicologists; of varying specialists at the police laboratory; of men who knew fingerprints, and dust; of men who could tell all there was to tell, and find out all there was to find out, about fabrics and wood and metals. These technicians had gone to work, almost automatically, when a light glowed on a police switchboard and an operator heard André Maillaux's excited voice. Less automatically, after Weigand pressed certain buttons—it was a machine which pressed its own buttons—other parts of the machine started. While the medical men, and the other experts, worked to find out all that matter would reveal about Tony Mott's death, these other parts of the machine worked to find out all that could be found out about Tony Mott's life before his death.

Detectives—Smith and Jones and Robertson, Sibloni, Isaacson, Troblotsky and Murphy—went from place to place and asked questions and listened and wrote down the answers. Whom had Tony Mott known, who had liked him and who had disliked him? Had he loved this woman and hated this one, had this man a grudge against him because he had lost money through Tony Mott, and this man because he had lost love through Tony Mott? Was he suing somebody, or being sued? Had a finger in this pie, where someone did not want his fingers? Had he been in a good mood when he got up the morning of his death? Had someone threatened him five years ago?

Nothing, almost nothing, was too small for the machine, too irrelevant. The machine's raw material was Tony Mott, in his entirety, in all his relationships. The machine's product was information, piling on the desk of Bill Weigand, who became the machine's calculator.

The point was, Bill thought, looking at his desk, that the machine did not stop as automatically as it started. The night before, when he had decided that it was wrapped up, with Peggy Mott wrapped in the middle of it, Bill Weigand had pressed certain buttons which stopped the' machine. After that, it sought no new raw material. But it seemed still to be full of material which it continued to process. It ground this material into information and deposited it on Weigand's desk.

Dossiers, for example, continued to arrive. There was one of a man who believed that Mott had defrauded him three years before, and had gone to court about it. There was one of a man who had taken a swing at Mott in a night club, for reasons about which there was variety of opinion. There were several of young women who had known Mott and loved him or hated him, or been married to him or tried to get married to him. There was one of the chef at the Restaurant Maillaux, who was said to have muttered darkly over some criticism Mott was supposed to have made of his Breast of Capon André. Weigand read with tired eyes and a tired mind. He did not see that it now had any particular importance; it was merely that the machine took time to grind to a stop.

“SNODGRASS,” he read. “William. Maître d'hôtel; Associate M. from early days; admits tried to invest when M. needed money; says M. willing until Mott showed interest; Snodgrass then frozen out. Some gossip he resented this and showed resentment Mott. Snod. denies this. Gives age as 43, probably older; born London, naturalized Am. Cit.; married, lives Bronx; recently reported planning open restaurant of his own; says only had thought of it, not decided. Arrived restaurant about 10 a.m. Sat.; says did not see Mott alive. Could have without being seen; see attached.”

“Snodgrass,” Bill thought, and smiled, faintly. An unexpected name for the suave William. Bill saw attached, which was a sketch map of the office area at the Restaurant Maillaux. It told him nothing he had not known; access to the whole area could be had, from the restaurant, from the street (through the storeroom), in a variety of ways. William could have got to the office at any time without passing the receptionist. So could André. So could Tom, Dick and Harry. Bill sighed. “Tom, Dick and Harry”—those inevitable possibilities. The possibilities the defense, any defense, always played upon. The seven million or so in New York, the thousands who knew who Tony Mott was, the hundreds who knew him, well and not so well. How did the police know it was not one of these? A Tom? A Dick? A Harry? Why had they narrowed it to outraged innocence here on trial before this distinguished, perceptive jury? Was it not absurd? A hundred had opportunity as good, might have had a motive better. It was going to happen that way this time, when they put Peggy Mott on trial. (After they caught Peggy Mott again.) The district attorney would have his troubles. The layout of the office was going to be no help.