Murder within Murder (21 page)

“Very dreadful,” Mr. Burt agreed. “A very—unhappy situation for any woman. But it was a long time ago.” He paused. “At least,” he said, “I assume it was a long time ago. From the way you speak of it.”

“Seventeen years,” Pam told him. “Mrs. Merton was thirty.”

Mr. Burt nodded.

“Of course,” he said, “thirty seems quite young to me, Mrs. North. Much younger than it must to you. And seventeen years is a long time. Probably she has rebuilt her life, somehow.”

Pam said she supposed so.

“Probably I'm wasting my sympathy,” she said. “Probably she's married again and happy and it's all like—oh, like some story she read a long time ago. I suppose things fade out, finally.”

Mr. Burt nodded, in agreement.

“They do,” he said. “I assure you they do, Mrs. North. Unless something happens to bring them up again—and it always seems a pity to me when something does. Probably your Mrs. Merton has a new life now and has almost forgotten the old tragedy.” He shook his head. “It is too bad that this brings it up again, even so slightly,” he said. “We can only hope she doesn't read the papers—if she is still alive.”

They were both standing now, and it was clearly time for Pam to go. She went, while Mr. Burt slowly murmured hopes that she would find the compact she had lost; regrets that their search had been a waste of time.

It had been a waste of time, all right, Pam thought as she waved at a taxicab and saw it pull toward her. She had not seen Mrs. Burt, so she knew no more than before whether the picture in her bag was a likeness of Mrs. Burt at thirty, as well as of Helen Merton at thirty. And, although maybe she had missed something, she couldn't see that she had got anything out of Mr. Burt. Either he was a good actor or she was barking up a wrong tree.

“Woof!” Mrs. North said, experimentally.

The taxicab driver half turned in his seat.

“Beg pardon?” he said. His expression was surprised and, Pam thought, a little alarmed.

“I just cleared my throat,” Pam said. She cleared it officially. “I must have swallowed something,” she told him.

12

T
HURSDAY
, 11:30
A
.
M
.
TO
2:30
P
.
M
.

The grist continued to come in. Looking at it, Bill Weigand remembered his speech to Pam and Jerry North on police thoroughness. He sighed. He had been right; it could be argued that he had been too right. There were times when being the detective in charge of a murder investigation was a great deal like being a bookkeeper. You added facts instead of figures; you subtracted errors instead of debits; in the end, if you were lucky, you balanced the books. If you didn't the first time, you kept at it until you did. And people all over the country poured in facts—poured in errors along with them, and surmises. And already Inspector O'Malley felt that Weigand was keeping books badly. What O'Malley felt, he said.

The newspapers were not demanding action; big city newspapers almost never did, unless there was a political issue. Nobody had as yet found a political issue. What the newspapers were doing was to lose interest in the whole matter;
The Times
this morning had relegated it to the second front, and even in the early editions of the afternoon it was below the first-page fold. Neither the district attorney nor Inspector O'Malley approved of this; the district attorney was particularly annoyed. It had been some time since his name was in the newspapers. He had pointed this out, in other words, to the commissioner, who had, without comment of his own, passed the word along to O'Malley. The commissioner had smiled faintly through O'Malley's resultant remarks, knowing O'Malley. O'Malley had passed the word to Weigand, not without comment.

There was no point in passing the word further. Everybody was doing very well—everybody was collecting furiously. Only correlation lagged. Bill looked at his new facts.

Dr. Merton had been traced to a small town in Oklahoma, where he had not prospered after his wife had divorced him; where, five years ago, he had died. So presumably Dr. Merton was not, under another name, in their present cast of characters; he had not disposed of Miss Amelia Gipson when she discovered this. Dr. Merton could be subtracted.

About Mrs. Merton there was nothing new; Washington was checking the date of her return to the United States, if she had returned, and Washington was slow. A police photographer, looking like a sidewalk photographer, was snapping away happily outside the apartment house in which the Burts lived, waiting to snap Mrs. Burt. He had missed her when she went out about ten; he was waiting for her to come back.

Philip Spencer, Ph.D., had left Ward College in Indiana at the end of the school year in the spring of 1942. The college was reticent, but the local police had been insistent. There had, the college said reluctantly, been a complaint or two about Dr. Spencer's behavior with the students. As to the facts behind the complaints, the college was non-committal; the college clearly wished that the matter had never come up, and seemed obscurely embarrassed. It was likely, Bill Weigand thought, that Dr. Spencer had been sacrificed to the laws of strict propriety. Which was what Spencer had indicated. The college flatly refused to hint at the name of the young woman—or the young women—involved. Weigand was not surprised.

Major Kennet Frost had been in the municipal airport in Kansas City during a good part of the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11. He had been arguing about his plane reservation. He had argued into the evening and then, convinced that he was not going to get the plane he wanted, had wired his wife that he would arrive in the early afternoon of the following day. He had then, unexpectedly, got on an earlier plane without, according to Western Union's records, wiring his wife of his change in plans. Presumably he had not had time. And certainly he had not been in a position to enter Amelia Gipson's apartment and poison her digestive powders. Subtract Major Kennet Frost.

John Gipson had lunched at a small restaurant in Madison Avenue on Wednesday—yesterday. But he had lunched earlier than he had indicated. Unless he had loitered over his food, he had had time to kill Florence Adams in the hotel in West Forty-second Street. The Frosts had not been identified by anybody as having lunched at Twenty-one, which meant nothing; too many people had, and far too many majors.

There was nothing new from California on the early life, courtship and marriage of the Burts. That stood as it was. No subtractions were indicated—and no additions.

Weigand smiled as he picked up the next report. Unquestionably, there was something about Pam North. Perhaps it was that, so often, her theories worked out—approximately. But her conviction that the death of Amelia Gipson was linked to some murder of the past—that there was, in a sense, murder within murder—had put somebody to work. Somebody had gone, again, into the past of Joyce Wentworth, so mysteriously and reasonlessly killed on her way home from work on a gray winter evening in 1942. It had merely meant checking old records, but old records had been checked, on Bill's own instructions. Bill's smile lingered as he read about the girl; it faded. It had been nothing to smile about; it had been cruel and incomprehensible. She had come from a little town in Indiana, leaving school to make her fortune in New York. She had—

Bill Weigand stopped suddenly. He re-read what he had just seen. She had left school, right enough. The school she had left had been Ward College. In the spring of 1942. Weigand told himself that he would be damned.

The case was full of coincidences—a good deal too full of coincidences, which were, individually, too reasonable. Here was an Indiana girl, the daughter of a sufficiently prosperous druggist; here in Indiana was a girls' school of a certain standing—of very good standing. It was natural enough she should have gone to Ward. But was it natural that Ward College should appear so frequently in the book of facts Bill Weigand was balancing? Was it merely another coincidence? Or did he want to talk, at once, with a former instructor named Philip Spencer about a beautiful girl who had, also, left Ward College in the spring of 1942, and who had been killed in December of the same year? Bill Weigand had no trouble answering the last question.

As he and Mullins went uptown in the police car, Bill considered what he had if he abandoned one tenuous theory in favor of another. He nodded to himself. He had a very interesting theory; he had a theory he could come to like.

He told Mullins as much, and Mullins shook his head, unhappily. He said what they didn't lack was theories.

“Gipson did it for money,” he said. “His sister so the old girl couldn't talk. Mrs. Burt because she's really Mrs. Merton. Spencer because she got him fired
and
because she found out he'd knocked off the Wentworth dame. Or Spencer because she got him fired, period, and now he's after the Frost girl because she was the girl who got him in trouble at the college. Some guy named Hill because he thought it would be sorta fun. It's a hell of a crowded killing, Loot.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said, as they stopped in front of the rooming house Philip Spencer existed in. “We'll have to uncrowd it, Sergeant.”

Spencer was home. He was home in a little room on the street side and on the third floor; he was sitting by the only window in the room reading a book. And he called to them to come in when Weigand knocked, and he did not seem to care much who came in. He did not get up and he held his book on his lap. He wore glasses now; he looked older than he had in Weigand's office. He wore a bathrobe which could not call itself a dressing gown; although the window was partway open, the air in the room was old, much used. Philip Spencer looked up at them.

“Well,” he said, “come to arrest me, Lieutenant?”

“Perhaps,” Weigand said. “I want to ask you some things, first.”

Spencer dog-eared the corner of the page he was reading. He put the book down on the floor beside him.

“If you want to sit down, you'll have to sit on the bed,” he said. “Both of you, I guess.”

Weigand looked at the bed.

“So far as I've ever noticed,” Spencer said, “there aren't any. Of course, I may be immune.” He looked around the room with apparent interest. “I must say,” he told them, “you'd expect the bed to be crawling, considering everything else.”

Bill Weigand merely waited, standing.

“Why don't you say you didn't come here to talk about my bed?” Spencer asked him.

“Because I knew you would, eventually,” Bill told him.

Spencer nodded. He said that was very good. He said he realized he ought to let Weigand have his chair.

“But,” he said, “it's the only halfway comfortable place to sit in the room. And after all, it's my room. As E. B. White said about Rockefeller's wall. A very fine writer, incidentally.”

“He is,” Weigand said. “It is very incidental. When did your wife die, Mr. Spencer?”

Spencer looked at him, and there was some curiosity in his eyes. But there was none in his voice.

“November 1942,” he said.

“You took it hard,” Bill said. “You still do.”

It was none of his business, Spencer told him. It was none of his described business. Spencer's voice was still unexcited, contrasting oddly with his words. It seemed like a dead voice. Bill Weigand waited.

“I am emphatic,” Spencer said. “I agree. But it isn't, you know.”

“I don't know,” Weigand told him. “If I did, I wouldn't waste time. You took it hard.” Weigand could have it his own way, Spencer told him. He took it hard.

“What was the name of the girl who complained about you to Miss Gipson?” Weigand said. “The time you got dismissed. In the spring of 1942?”

Spencer shook his head.

“Nope,” he said. “No comment.”

“Was it Miss Gipson's niece?” Weigand said. “Nora Gipson? Nora Frost, now? The one you telephoned yesterday?”

“Hell no,” Spencer said. “What gave you that idea?”

“Partly,” Weigand told him, “the fact that you were interested enough to call her up.”

Spencer shook his head, and smiled without enthusiasm. He said Weigand could call that a whim. Condolences from an old friend of the family.

“Also,” he said, “I had been drinking. Naturally that may have influenced me.”

“But she wasn't the girl who got you in trouble? Or who you got in trouble?” Weigand wanted to know.

The dead voice said it wished Weigand would get one thing straight.

“I didn't get any girl in trouble,” he said. “Whatever you mean by it. Some nasty-minded little fool who figured any man who spoke to her was—assailing her virtue—misunderstood. Or pretended to misunderstand. For your record, it wasn't Nora Gipson.”

“You knew her,” Weigand told him.

Spencer agreed he knew her. He said he knew a hundred and fifty girls at Ward. He said most of them were in his classes at one time or another. He knew Nora Gipson; knew she was Amelia Gipson's niece.

“And,” he said, “an attractive enough infant, from all I saw. If I had been pursuing infants.”

“Which you were not,” Weigand said. “Right. Who was the girl, Mr. Spencer? There's a reason I want to know.”

Spencer merely shook his head. Weigand nodded. When he went on, he was merely telling a story.

“There was another pretty girl at Ward that spring,” he said. “For all I know, there were hundreds. This one was thin and tall and she had red hair—I guess maybe you'd call her beautiful, not pretty. Remember a girl like that?”

Spencer did not answer, although Weigand gave him a moment. He merely waited.

“She left Ward in the spring of 1942,” Weigand said. “The same time you did, Mr. Spencer. She came to New York. She got a job as a dress model—a very superior sort of dress model, in a very superior store. By the time they got through with her, she was really beautiful. She came to New York in August and got the job in October. October 1942, that was. She also saw some talent agents and went the rounds of the producers looking for a job on the stage. She was planning a lot of things for the future.”