Murder within Murder (19 page)

They didn't know, Bill said, what kinda dame she was.

“She's pretty and young and emotional,” he said. “I never found any way to pick out people who would kill. Did you? She's just a pretty girl, so far as I can see, who always had enough money, went to pretty good schools, knew the right people.” He paused, considering. “I suppose Ward is a pretty good school,” he said. He spoke abstractedly. “She went there, according to her brother.”

Mullins pointed out that that was reasonable enough. After all, her aunt taught there. Weigand did not answer, but sat looking across his desk at nothing. Mullins looked at him and saw an expression he had seen before. He waited, and after a time he said, “You got something, Loot?”

Weigand came back slowly. He shook his head, but he seemed doubtful. He said they were running into coincidences.

“Sure,” Mullins said. “Life's full of them.” He sighed. “Damn nuisance, too. Fixes it so you don't know where you're going half the time.”

Bill nodded, but he still seemed to be thinking of something else. When he spoke it was slowly, thoughtfully.

“Remember Spencer got kicked out because he was caught fooling around with some girl?” he said. “Or, according to his version, some girl misunderstood what was merely professorial friendliness and went to Miss Gipson. Remember?”

“Sure,” Mullins said. “‘Some spiteful little fool,' he said the girl was.”

“Right,” Weigand said. “What I was thinking was—it would be interesting if Nora Frost, who was Nora Gipson then, was the spiteful little fool. And if Spencer called up today just to let her know he was around. Because, if he's a little touched on the subject—and he could be—he might have a grudge against the girl who got him in the jam. If Nora's the girl. What do you think of that, Sergeant?”

Mullins thought of it. He asked if Weigand had anything to hang it on? Bill shook his head.

“It would be a hell of a note,” Mullins decided. “Because now maybe he'd be gunning for her—for the girl. Maybe he'd figure one down, one to go.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Maybe he would.”

The telephone bell rang then and Bill listened, speaking infrequently. Once he looked at his watch. At the end, he said, “Right. About fifteen minutes.” He replaced the receiver.

“We're having dinner with the Norths, Sergeant,” he said. “At Charles.”

“Swell,” Mullins said, looking as if he thought it was swell.

“Yes,” Bill Weigand said, gently. “Yes. You see, Mrs. North thinks she has a new suspect for us.”

“Oh,” Sergeant Mullins said. After he had said it, he left his mouth slightly open.

As he stood up to go, Bill Weigand looked down at his desk. The photograph of Mrs. Helen Merton, taken when she was thirty, stared up at him. Even if Pam North had a new suspect now, she might be interested in it, he thought. He put the photograph in an envelope and the envelope in his pocket.

11

W
EDNESDAY
, 8:20
P
.
M
.
TO
T
HURSDAY
, 11
A
.
M
.

Pam and Jerry North had taken their drinks to a table in a corner of the café section at Charles. Hugo took Weigand and Sergeant Mullins to the table, although Mullins looked backward, a little wistfully, at the bar.

“Hello, Bill,” Pam said. “We've got a new cat. It looks like a very tiny polar bear, doesn't it, Jerry?”

“Exactly,” Jerry said. “Did you tell Hugo what you wanted?”

“Hugo knows,” Pam said. “I told him what they were going to want. Martini. Old-fashioned. The cat's Martini.”

“What?” said Mullins.

“That's the cat's name,” Pam said. She looked thoughtful. “But I'm afraid she's going to have a confused life,” she said. “Because when anybody wants one she'll think it's her and around our house that would be confusing, I should think. Especially as she already looks like a polar bear.”

“What?” Weigand said.

“Well,” Pam told him, “that would be confusing enough, wouldn't it? To look like a bear and be called after a drink, and all the time to be a cat?”

“Oh,” Bill said. He paused. “I thought it was a new suspect, not a new cat,” he said. “Not that I'm not glad you've got another cat, Pam.”

“Well,” Pam said, “Jerry's almost talked me out of it. The suspect, I mean. But what would you think of Alexander Hill?”

Bill Weigand looked blank. He said he wouldn't think anything, having no idea who Alexander Hill was.

“A smallish man with a very black beard,” Pam said. “He writes. About murders.”

“Oh,” Bill said. It might have meant anything.

“It's a lot of nonsense, Bill,” Jerry North said. “Pam knows it is.”

“All the same,” Pam said, “he talked very oddly.”

“He's a very odd man,” Jerry told her. “He didn't talk oddly, for him.”

Bill Weigand suggested they let him in on it. They let him in on it.

“You mean to say,” Bill said, “that you think he killed Amelia Gipson because her murder would make a good story for the book?” He looked at Pam with doubt. “Really?” he said.

Pam said it sounded foolish that way. She thought it over. She said it sounded flippant. She said Bill was leaving out two points. Hill's certainty that the crime would not be solved. His obvious interest—relish, almost—when he talked of murder as such, and the excitement of committing it. She said there was also something more. Something indefinable. An attitude. She said Bill would have to give her that.

Bill nodded. He said that, since he had not been there, he would give her the attitude.

“But,” he said, “you have to know a person very well to—sort out their attitudes. What you took for an attitude may be a mannerism. Do you know him very well?”

“No,” Pam said. “Jerry knows him better.”

“Well,” Bill said, “did he have an attitude, Jerry?”

Jerry paused a moment and then said he knew what Pam meant. But he said, also, that he didn't know Hill well enough to know whether it was a mannerism. He said that, obviously, he had not been convinced by Pam's theory, since he had tried to argue her out of it.

“As for the interest in murder, per se,” Bill said, “he makes his living by it, I gather. By writing about it. So he has theories. The one he spun for you isn't unusual; it's quite popular in literary circles. De Quincey. That sort of thing.” He paused, reflecting. “Except for Leopold and Loeb,” he said, “I don't remember running into it outside books. And they were—”

He paused, seeking words.

“Otherwise peculiar,” Pam North said. “I know. And Mr. Hill certainly isn't that.”

Bill nodded. And as for the writer's assurance that the case would not be solved, there was a school of writers which held that the police never solved anything. Which, he added mildly, was untrue. They solved most things. Private detectives got divorce evidence. They got back stolen jewelry by making dickers the police couldn't make. They investigated applicants for surety bonds. It was, he said, a matter of machinery.

“For example,” he said, “fifty or more men, all of them trained, some of them fairly bright, have been working on this case. Part of the time; all of the time. They've been interviewing practically everyone who was in the library when she collapsed there. They've gone over the apartment house she lived in. They've taken hundreds of fingerprints and run them through the files, looking for somebody we know. They've been checking into the lives of everyone concerned. Out in California, they've been checking up on the Burts, because Mrs. Burt wrote a letter to Miss Gipson. They've checked up on the handwriting in the letter, just to make sure she did write it. They've checked—are still checking—on Major Frost, to see if he was really in Kansas City instead of New York yesterday afternoon. The precinct men have just about taken apart the hotel in which Florence Adams was killed—and incidentally, we've picked up a couple of men we've been anxious to meet for quite some time. They've interviewed people who work and live within earshot of the hotel, trying to find somebody who did hear a shot and knows what time he heard it, because if we come to a trial we'll want to pin that down if we can. At the laboratory over in Brooklyn they've put the slug that killed the girl through all the tests there are, and if we find the .25 caliber German automatic it came from we'll greet it like a brother. Precinct men have been trying to find out where John Gipson had lunch today and if anybody can swear he did, and whether the Frosts had lunch at Twenty-one and when. Out in Indiana, men are checking up on Philip Spencer and trying to find out why, exactly, he lost his job—and who the student was he was supposed to have made passes at. Up in Maine—”

“Look,” Jerry said mildly, “who are you arguing with, Bill? Your drink's getting warm.”

Bill Weigand broke off, looked at Jerry a moment without apparently seeing him, looked at his drink and finished it. They looked at the menus, then, and ordered.

“I don't know what got me started on that,” Bill said, when Fritz had gone off to get them food. “Only people somehow get the idea that chasing criminals is a one-man job—just because newspapermen and everybody else find it easier to write about it that way. It's—it's a mass movement.”

“Why Maine?” Pam said.

They all looked at her.

“What are they looking for in Maine?” she said. “You said ‘up in Maine' and then Jerry interrupted you.”

Oh yes, Bill said, that. He said that John Gipson had explained his sister's letter and that his explanation could stand checking in Maine. He stopped.

“Well?” Pam said.

“Period,” Bill said. “Confidential, unless it means something. By agreement with young Gipson.”

Pam said, “Oh.” She said, “All right.”

“Of course,” she said, “I suppose Amelia had found out something about her niece and was going to tell her niece's husband. Something about a man. Apparently a man in Maine.”

“What makes you think that?” Bill said. His voice was, he thought, noncommittal.

Pam said that was the way the letter sounded.

“And,” she said, “you're transparent, Bill. Actually, I just threw it out. You should have heard yourself keep expression out of your voice.”

Bill Weigand said, “Oh.”

Fritz came back with the food. They ate, making small remarks between bites, chiefly to prove that they were too civilized to obey the human instinct to put first things first. Pam finished and lighted a cigarette.

“About Mr. Hill,” she said, “I really still like Mrs. Burt better. What have you found out about her, or is that confidential, too?”

Bill Weigand reached across and took a cigarette out of Pam's pack. He said it wasn't confidential. He told them what they had found out about Mrs. Burt, her recent history, her marriage. And he pulled the photograph out of his pocket and gave it to Pam. She looked at it, and then she looked at Bill and raised her eyebrows. Jerry North took the photograph from her and looked at it, and then he, too, looked at Bill.

“Well,” Pam said, “who is it?”

“Is it anybody you ever saw?” Bill asked her. She took the photograph back from Jerry and looked at it again.

“I don't know,” she said. “Is it?”

“If your theory about Helen Burt is true, it's a picture of her seventeen years ago, when she was Helen Merton,” he said. “Is it?”

Pam looked at the photograph carefully. She said clothes were funny, even seventeen years ago. She put the photograph down in front of her and looked off into space. Then she looked back at Bill.

“I don't know,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I don't know either,” Bill said. “There's no apparent reason—like a long nose, or a harelip or anything—why it couldn't be. I'd even say there was a general similarity.”

Pam nodded. She said she would, too.

“The age is the trouble, partly,” she said. “People change so, unless you know them very well. In pictures, particularly.”

“Huh?” Mullins said, emerging suddenly from his food.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Pam said. “Enjoy yourself?”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “What do you mean people change if you don't know them, Mrs. North?”

“Only,” she said, “if you know very well what people look like now, you can pick them out then. But you have to.”

“Oh,” Mullins said. He thought it over. “Sure,” he said. He looked at Bill Weigand.

“Obviously,” Bill told him, gravely. “Very clearly put.”

“Oh,” Mullins said. He looked at his plate, which looked back at him blankly.

“Have you got a picture of her now?” Pam asked.

Bill Weigand shook his head. He said they didn't have yet. He said they could get one; he said they probably would.

“You think it's a digression, don't you?” Pam said. Bill nodded.

“Who
do
you think?” she said.

Bill Weigand lifted his shoulders.

“No hunch,” he said. “For your use only, Pam. Not to be quoted. The odds are on one of the kids. I'd say on Gipson. He wanted money. If his aunt died he'd have money. That's where the odds always are.”

“Or his sister,” Jerry said. “If she had a good enough motive—this mysterious motive.”

“That isn't mysterious,” Pam said. “It's merely confidential. Is she in love with her husband, Bill?”

“Am I Dorothy Dix?” Bill said. Pam merely waited. “For a guess—yes,” he said. “For a guess, he's in love with her.”

“And the man in Maine?” Pam said.

“What man in Maine?” Bill wanted to know.

“By all means,” Pam said. “Be confidential. I take it you won't buy Mr. Hill?”