Murder within Murder (12 page)

She stopped and looked at Bill Weigand and Pamela North, and it was almost certain that there were tears in her eyes.

“She died thinking that about me!” Helen Burt said. “I'm sure she did. That I was telling lies about her. It's so—so terrible.”

Bill Weigand looked at her a moment before he spoke.

“And that was all of it?” he said. “That was all the letter was about?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Burt said. “Oh yes, Lieutenant.”

“I see,” Bill said. “But what did you mean wasn't safe? You wrote ‘It isn't safe for either of us,' or words like that. What wasn't safe?”

“Oh,” Mrs. Burt said. “That! I mean—I only meant that it wasn't safe for our friendship. We had been such friends for so long—ever since we were girls. I meant it wasn't safe for that not to clear things up.”

For a moment more Weigand said nothing. Then he said, “Right. I see, Mrs. Burt.” Then he said:

“By the way, were you girls together here? In New York?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Burt said. “Here. And at school. And in the summers.”

“In Maine?” Weigand said. “I understand the Gipsons used to spend their summers in Maine.”

“In Maine,” Mrs. Burt said. “Oh, yes. When we—” She interrupted herself and looked beyond them at the door through which they had come. “Why, Willard,” she said. “I thought you—” She seemed surprised.

Willard Burt was in his middle fifties; he was also of middle height. He wore rimless glasses. He wore a gray suit which picked up his gray hair and a gray tie just flecked with yellow. He was very quiet and unhurried, standing in the door of his living-room. He smiled at his wife and his smile took in, in anticipation of an introduction, the two sitting across from her. When he spoke it was slowly, with almost studied calm; it was as if his words, his manner, were supports for his wife's unsteadiness.

“Good afternoon, my dear,” he said. “I realize you thought I would be later. But I found there was no need.” He smiled again, easily. “If I'm interrupting?” he said, the words evenly spaced, the unfinished sentence finished by his calm.

“Oh, Willard,” Mrs. Burt said. “I'm so sorry. This is Lieutenant Weigand and this is Mrs.—Mrs. North. I think it is Mrs. North, isn't it, my dear?”

“North,” Pam told her. “Mrs. Gerald North. I'm—my husband and I are friends of Lieutenant Weigand.”

“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Burt said, as her husband nodded slowly and smiled again and said, “Good afternoon.” “Of course, my dear. Lieutenant Weigand is from the police, Willard. About poor Amelia. Some foolish letter I wrote, and they wanted explained. Isn't that it, Lieutenant?”

Weigand was standing up and facing Willard Burt. He said, “Right.” He said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Burt.” He said he was sorry to have bothered Mrs. Burt and that they were just going. Mr. Burt said it was very sad about poor Miss Gipson.

“She and my wife were great friends in the old days,” he said. “Very great friends. Weren't you, my dear?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Burt said. “Such great friends, Willard.”

“I hope, Lieutenant, that my wife's explanation was—coherent?”

Willard Burt smiled beyond Weigand as he spoke, his smile one of tender apology for the question.

“Quite coherent,” Bill assured him. “Entirely coherent and complete, Mr. Burt. As I told Mrs. Burt, it was merely one of the minor details on which my superiors thought it wise to check.”

“Naturally,” Mr. Burt said. “I didn't know about the letter, of course. But if there was one which was not entirely—shall I say, self-explanatory?—you had to satisfy yourselves. It is a very sad thing, Miss Gipson's death.”

“Very,” Weigand agreed. Pam North was standing beside him.

“Oh, Mrs. Burt,” she said, “did you ever know Mrs. Merton? Mrs. Helen Merton? I ask because there was a Mrs. Merton who was a great friend of my mother and she knew a Mrs. Burt. Several years ago and I—” She stopped, because Mrs. Burt was shaking her head.

“No, Mrs. North,” she said. “I never knew a Mrs. Merton that I can recall. And I couldn't have been the right Mrs. Burt, of course, because I've only been Mrs. Burt for—how long is it, dear?”

“Less than two years, my dear,” Mr. Burt said, in his calm, quiet voice. “Twenty-two months, to be exact.”

“Oh,” Pam said, “then it couldn't have been, of course. This was much longer ago. In—oh, it was years ago. In 1928, I think. That my mother knew Mrs. Merton, I mean.”

Both of the Burts looked at Pam North. They were politely detached and curious.

“It was some other Mrs. Burt,” Pam said. “I remember, now. That Mrs. Burt's husband was a doctor. And you're
Mr
. Burt.”

“An investor,” Mr. Burt said. “Purely an investor, Mrs. North.”

The Burts stood side by side as they watched Bill Weigand and Pamela North go out of the room, and heard the door close behind them.

“You must tell me about the letter, my dear,” Willard Burt said to his wife, in his slow, calm voice.

Bill Weigand could see that Pam was excited. She spoke almost as the door closed behind them, but her voice was low.

“Bill!” she said. “Did you get it?”

He nodded slowly.

“That Mrs. Burt uses Fleur de Something or Other?”

He said. “Yes, Pam.”

“Well?” Pam said, as he pressed the button for the elevator.

“It's interesting,” he said. “Several things were interesting.”

The elevator came. It took them down. They walked through the colonnades.

“Her story about the letter,” Pam said. “Was that interesting?”

“Very,” Bill said. His voice was dry.

“True?” Pam said.

“Not very,” Bill told her. “I shouldn't think it was very true, Pam. Your Merton stuff was very subtle.”

“Well,” Pam said, “it isn't easy to bring in. I couldn't just say, ‘By the way, Mrs. Burt, while we're on the subject of murder, are you the divorced wife of Dr. Thomas Merton, who was tried and not quite convicted of killing a whole family in 1928? But was it really you who killed them, and not your husband at all, and did Miss Amelia Gipson find that out somehow in digging into the old case and did you kill her so she couldn't tell the police?' Could I?”

“No,” Bill said, “probably not.”

“Did you watch her when I mentioned the name?” Pam said. “And what did you think?”

“Yes,” Bill said. “And I don't know. Did you think she'd faint? Or confess on the spot?”

“I thought she would—show something,” Pam said. “In her face. And—I don't know. Her eyes—did she seem to go away, for a second?”

Bill Weigand held open the door of the police car and Pam got in.

“It's hard to tell,” he said. “There—could have been something.”

“It was
Helen
Merton,” Pam said. “And she'd be about Mrs. Burt's age and—”

Bill nodded slowly. He said he thought they'd try to find out, for the record, what had happened to Mrs. Merton after she had divorced her husband a noncommittal few months after he was just not convicted of murdering her father and mother, two of her sisters and a brother. When he finished saying that he looked, not as if he were seeing anything, at the back of the detective who was driving the car. His face was very thoughtful.

Then the radio, which had been droning in a monotone, spoke sharply.

“Car Forty call in,” it said. “Car Forty call in. This is urgent. That is all.”

The car swerved toward a cigar store on the next corner. Pam North and the driver waited in the car while Weigand went in. They looked at him when he came out, a few minutes later. His face was more than thoughtful now. It was angry.

“They got the maid,” he said, and his voice was angry. “Shot her in a cheap hotel in Forty-second Street. I suppose she tried a shakedown.” He got into the car. “The poor little fool,” he said. “The poor, pathetic little fool!”

8

W
EDNESDAY
, 3:45
P
.
M
.
TO
6:20
P
.
M
.

Florence Adams had been shot once and the bullet had gone in just above the bridge of her nose. She had fallen face down and her black hair draggled in blood. The slug, which was still in her head, evidently was from a small-caliber revolver or pistol; the assistant medical examiner guessed a .25. “A woman's gun,” one of the precinct detectives told Bill Weigand, turning it over to him. “You wanted her,” the precinct man said. “You've got her.”

He hadn't, Bill said mildly, wanted her this way. He had wanted her talking.

“Well,” the precinct man said, reasonably, “somebody else didn't. Huh?”

Bill agreed that it looked that way.

“The woman who got the Gipson dame,” the precinct man said, as if stating a fact.

Bill agreed again, still mildly, but made a correction. “Whoever got the Gipson dame,” he said. The precinct man said he thought it was a woman who got the Gipson dame. He said he thought everybody figured it that way.

“Right,” Weigand said. “It figures that way. What about time? On this one?”

It had been recent—within two or three hours. Bill Weigand looked at his watch and said it was three-fifty. The precinct man looked at his watch and said yeah, it was.

“Not much before one, then,” Bill said to the assistant medical examiner, who was standing, looking down at the body. “Not much after—not much after what, Doctor?”

The doctor turned around and looked at him.

“Well,” he said, “I'd say she's been dead an hour, at the shortest.”

“Between twelve-thirty and ten minutes of three, then?” Bill said.

The doctor said he guessed so. He said it was probably between one and two-thirty. He went toward the door. He told them to send it along any time. He paused, looked back, and said he hated to see them get it so young.

“Right,” Bill said. “So do I. Or any time.”

“Sure,” the doctor said. “Abstractly.” He went out. The man who was taking fingerprints dropped one dead hand on the floor and stepped over the body so he could reach the other hand. He began to make impressions from it on slips of paper. Weigand watched him a moment; watched the other fingerprint man, who was dusting door-knobs, the ironwork of the bed near which the girl had fallen, the sides and back of the wooden chair, the woodwork around the doors. Bill said he was probably finding plenty. The fingerprint man looked at him and twisted his mouth and nodded. He said it didn't look as if anybody had ever wiped anything in the room. He said the freshest were the girl's, if that mattered.

“On the outside knob?” Bill wanted to know.

The man shook his head. He said somebody had recently used a cloth to turn it, and blurred the prints. He said he hadn't got anything clear off it, even the girl's. Weigand was not pleased, but he was not surprised.

He talked to the elderly clerk on duty at the desk and the man answered him hurriedly, with something like fear in his eyes. The hotel in West Forty-second Street was familiar with the police, and familiarity had bred trepidation. Now the clerk was eager to tell what he knew. But he knew little. He was sure that Florence Adams had gone out of the hotel a little after eleven. He had not seen her come back.

“But I guess she got back, all right,” the man said.

“Right,” Weigand said. “She got back.”

The clerk said she must have got by without his seeing her. He said it could be.

“It ain't that we don't try to keep track of 'em, Captain,” he said. “You see how it is.”

Weigand saw how it was. The lobby was small, but even so the clerk's counter was placed so that a man behind it might easily not see who came in and went out.

“And nobody asked for her?” Bill said. He said it without optimism, anticipating the shake of the clerk's head. Nobody had come to the desk and asked the room number of Miss Florence Adams. Nobody would have, planning to kill her. The girl must have given her murderer the number of her room. Or the murderer must have come in with her.

“Strangers?” Weigand asked. The man shook his head again.

“You know how it is, Captain,” he said. “Most of 'em is strangers. Except the ones who live here.”

Bill Weigand said he knew how it was.

“And you didn't hear the shot?” he said. He was going over ground the precinct men had gone over.

“Not to know it was a shot,” the man said. “I musta heard it, Captain, but I musta thought it was a backfire.”

“Or somewhere else and none of your business,” Weigand said. The man shook his head, and the dirty white hair fluttered around its central baldness.

“Honest to God, Captain,” he said. “I didn't hear nothing I thought was a shot.”

Whether he had or not, he was going to stick to a safer version. If he was getting away with something, he figured to get away with it. They were, for the time being, going to have to be content with the time interval they had. Twelve-thirty to two-fifty maximum; one and two-thirty minimum. It would do; so far as Bill Weigand could see, it was going to have to do. So the next thing was: Where was everybody? It was something that you always got down to. Who had opportunity?

Men came through the lobby carrying a basket. The clerk looked at it; he had seen it before.

“Yeah,” he said. “Curtains.”

Then he looked at his own hands. He moved his fingers, carefully, with intention; testing their sentience. And then, oddly, almost gloatingly, he smiled.

Bill Weigand did not go back to the room. He went down to the police car in which he had told Pam North she could sit. There had been no need for either of them to assure the other that she was not going up to the room in which Florence Adams lay with her black hair in blood. Bill told Pam, briefly, what he had found.