Murder within Murder (5 page)

“We'll get enquiries tomorrow, you know,” he said. “When this hits the newspapers. If her address is given. People are”—he paused, picking words—“quite anxious for apartments.”

Weigand said it might be a week or so and the manager looked disappointed. He said that the whole thing was a great inconvenience.

Bill Weigand admitted that it probably was; he joined the Norths, waiting by the door, and interrupted their conversation with the doorman.

“He says she went out about six,” Pam told him. “He supposed to dinner.”

Bill said he supposed the same thing.

Pam wanted to know where now? The library, Bill told her, to see how things went there.

“Then?” Pam said.

Then, Bill Weigand thought, his office and home, until morning.

“Not my office?” Jerry said.

That would keep, Bill thought. It would keep until tomorrow.

“She might have notes there,” Pam said.

Bill agreed she might. He said the notes would keep. He asked if they wanted a lift home in the police car. Jerry North was ready to say yes, but he found that Pam was shaking her head at him.

“We'll walk,” Pam said. “It's only a few blocks. Won't we, Jerry? And such a nice night.”

Jerry agreed they would walk.

Gerald North paid off the taxi driver and looked without pleasure at the elderly office building on Fourth Avenue in the low Thirties. He looked at his watch and said that, of course, it was almost two o'clock.

“In the morning,” he added.

“It won't,” Pam told him, “take a minute. We'll just get her notes before somebody else does and see if there's anything else. That somebody might want. I think Bill should have, but after all it's your office.”

After all, Jerry said, he had spent the day in it. He would spend tomorrow in it.

“Today,” he said, morosely. “Beginning in seven hours.”

But they had crossed the sidewalk to the building entrance and opened the door. It was a building in which publishers nested, gregariously. It was a building to which some of them, sometimes, came late at night, usually to get things they had forgotten. So, although the building belonged to an era when doors were locked at night, its door was not locked. An elderly man slept uneasily on guard by the two elevators. Jerry signed the night register and looked at the guard.

“Poor thing,” Pam said. “We could walk.”

Sympathy, Jerry told her, began at home. They could ride. The guard awoke unwillingly and looked at the Norths without enthusiasm. He said, “God,” with the resignation of one who has ceased to expect an answer. He looked at the stairway which ran up beside the elevators and his look was reproachful. He got up and went to the elevator and into it without saying anything, and waited. When the Norths got in he took them up. He stopped at the fifth floor and they got out. He followed them for a step or two, and when they looked at him he looked fixedly at the staircase. Then he got into the elevator and disappeared with it.

“We'll walk down,” Pam said. “The poor man.”

Jerry said nothing but went along the hall until he came to a door at the end marked “North Books, Inc.” He opened the door with his key and stopped and looked at his key.

“Listen,” he said. “Where was her key? Miss Gipson's? To this door; to her own door at home. To whatever else she had a right to open? Were they in her bag?”

Pam shook her head. She said the police had probably taken them out.

“Bill got the maid's key from the manager,” Jerry told her. “To the apartment. He didn't have it.”

Pam said it was odd, without seeming to think it odd, and why didn't they go in? They went in. Jerry switched on the lights in the reception-room, comfortable in modern furniture. It was a wide, shallow room, with doors at either end and near the ends in the wall opposite the entrance door. Jerry went to the door in the opposite wall at the right end and threw another tumbler switch, lighting the offices. He went down an inner corridor, with a railing on one side and beyond it desks with typewriters hibernating in them. He switched on more lights in a small office at the end of the corridor. He waved at it and sat down in a chair.

“Miss Gipson's,” he said. “Her copies of her notes are in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Each copy is clipped to the notebook in which she made her original notes. She used one notebook for each case. My copies are in my office. The originals have been sent to the authors who are going to use them.” He sighed and appeared to go to sleep. He roused himself. “It's all yours,” he said. “Wake me up when we get home.”

Pam North looked in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk. Then she looked at Jerry.

“I'm sorry, Jerry,” she said, “but you did say ‘right?' Because they aren't, you know.”

“They were,” he said. “I suppose she moved them. Look, darling.”

Pam looked. Then she looked at Jerry.

“Listen, Jerry,” she said. “Are you sure this is the right office? Because there's nothing in the desk. Nothing at all.” She paused. “Except some old paper clips and things, of course,” she said. “No notes. No letters.”

“I tell you—” Jerry said, and suddenly sat up. He went to the desk and pulled out the drawers one after another and shut them again. He looked at Pam. He was no longer sleepy.

“We were late,” Pam said. “In spite of everything, we were late.”

Jerry nodded. He said there had evidently been something in Miss Gipson's desk that somebody wanted.

“Her murderer,” Pam said.

“You jump, Pam,” Jerry said. “But probably her murderer.”

“You wouldn't like me if I didn't jump,” Pam said. “We both know that. And it's foolish to call it a jump. He wanted her notes on the famous crimes.”

Jerry shook his head at that. He pointed out that that really was a jump. He said it might have been anything—anything that collects in an office desk, even in a month. Letters received at the office, or carried to the office for rereading and left in the desk. Little memoranda, scrawled on slips of paper. Or written on desk calendars.

They had both thought of that at the same moment. Their heads met over the desk. The desk calendar was there. The uppermost sheet said Tuesday, September 11. But the old sheets—the turned-back sheets—were missing. Two-thirds of the year had vanished. And the past month of Amelia Gipson's life.

“Well,” Pam said.

She watched as Jerry leafed into the future, which was not to be Miss Gipson's future. In early October there was one notation: “Dentist, 2
P
.
M
.” That was to have been on October 9. Beyond that, in so far as she had confided to her desk calendar, Miss Gipson had had no plans.

“Perhaps she tore the old ones off and threw them away after they were finished,” Pam said. “The old days.”

“Perhaps,” Jerry said. “But I never knew anyone who did, did you? From this kind of a calendar, with rings meant to—to hold the past? For reference? Because that's one thing calendars on office desks are for. Day before yesterday's telephone numbers—things like that.”

Pam was nodding slowly.

“What happened,” she said, “was that everything was taken. Whether it meant anything or not. So we wouldn't know what
did
mean something. Don't you suppose it was that way?”

Jerry agreed it could have been. He was looking thoughtfully at nothing. Then he said, “Wait here a minute, Pam,” and went out of the office, and she could hear his steps going down the corridor. She stopped hearing them and waited in an office which had grown very still. She waited until surely it was time for him to come back. And then the lights in the general office went out. Pam was on her feet and crying, “Jerry! Jerry!” with her voice rising and then she was running through the office, dim and shadowy with only the light from the office behind her to dispel the darkness. As she ran toward Jerry's office she saw that there was no light in it.

She was not afraid, except for Jerry. She forgot to be afraid. But it took her a moment to find the tumbler switch inside the door of Jerry's office. And then she screamed, because Jerry North was on his hands and knees on the floor and was shaking his head in a puzzled fashion. She ran to him, but by then he was getting up and she stopped. There was a bruise on his forehead and in the center of it a thin line of blood where the skin was broken.

“Jerry!” she said. “
Darling!
Oh darling! Are you—”

She stopped, because, although his face was puzzled and not quite all together, Jerry was grinning at her.

“No, Pam,” he said, “I'm not all right, as you see. But I'm all right. I just bumped my head.”

“Somebody hit you!” Pam said. Her voice was high and tense.

Jerry started to shake his head and then stopped shaking it and put a hand to it. He saw blood on his hand and began to dab at the blood with a handkerchief.

“I fell into the desk,” he said. “Nobody hit me. But somebody pushed me. From behind, hard. Just as I was reaching for the light switch. It—it caught me off balance. And so I fell into the desk. It—it dazed me for a minute. But I'm all right.”

“Darling!” Pam said. “And I got you into it. You didn't want to come. I made you.”

Jerry said it was all right.

“Come on,” Pam said. “We'll go right home. We'll get a doctor. We'll—”

But Jerry, a little unsteadily, was opening a drawer in his desk. He brought out a handful of typewritten sheets.

“Miss Gipson's notes,” he said. “On the four cases she'd finished. My copies. So they weren't—”

He stopped, because Pam did not seem to be listening to him.

“Jerry!” Pam said. “There's perfume in here. There was in Miss Gipson's office, too, but I was too excited to realize it. The same perfume.”

Jerry tested the air. He nodded.

“Not mine,” Pam said. “Not what I'm wearing now, as it wasn't before. That Fleur de Something or Other. The same as was in her apartment. The murderer's perfume.”

Jerry did not say, this time, that she was jumping. He said he thought they ought to get out of there. They went out, leaving the lights burning behind them. It was Pam who rang the elevator bell, and kept on ringing it until the building guard brought the elevator up and glowered at them. This time he spoke, but not until they were at the ground floor.

“People could use the stairs,” he said then. “Coming down, anyway. Other people do.”

“Who does?” Pam said, quickly.

“Whoever just went out, of course,” he said. “Who did you think?”

“But who was it?” Pam said.

He shook his head at that.

“I just heard them,” he said. “I didn't see nobody. Just steps woke me up, but they were gone before I looked.”

*
Pamela North attempted to smell out a murderer in
Payoff for the Banker
. She was widely misunderstood.

4

W
EDNESDAY
, 7:30
A
.
M
.
TO
10:20
A
.
M
.

The grist was coming in. Bill Weigand, drinking coffee out of a paper container and abstractedly eating an egg sandwich, looked at it without enthusiasm. One hundred and thirty-three men and women, and boys and girls, had filed slips at the central desk in the main reference room between seven o'clock the evening before and closing time. The slips included, along with titles and catalogue numbers, the names and addresses of the readers. Few of these were particularly legible; there was no reason to suppose that, if the murderer were one of them, the murderer would have signed a name and given an address. He—to use a pronoun which was probably erroneous in gender—need not have turned in a slip at all. That was not required; certainly in his case it would not have been indicated. He could have walked through the catalogue-room and into either the North or South Reading Rooms and no one would have questioned him. He could have been looking a word up in a dictionary. He could have been reading the Britannica. Or he could merely have been looking for Miss Amelia Gipson, to see how the poison was working on her.

That he had been there seemed probable. It had not seemed probable, because obviously it was not necessary for his plan, until Gerald North had called at 2:30 that morning and told of the ransacking of Miss Gipson's desk at North Books, Inc.; told also of having been pushed into his own desk; added aggrievedly that he had a headache as a result. The intruder had had keys to the office, Jerry North pointed out. Presumably they were Miss Gipson's keys. Didn't Bill think?

Bill Weigand did think. And in that event, the chances were high that—unless, of course, Miss Gipson had given her murderer the keys to the North offices, to facilitate his heavy task—the keys had been taken from the Gipson purse in the confusion which followed her violent attack of illness in the North Reading Room of the library. Therefore, the murderer was in the North Reading Room of the library. The murderer had not taken the folding drinking cup from the purse. Therefore, the murderer had not minded their discovering that a concentrated solution of sodium fluoride had been drunk from the cup. That was not puzzling. Presence of the cup, with its traces of poison, would encourage them to think of suicide. Only Miss Gipson had got the better of her murderer there.

Bill Weigand sighed, reached for the remains of his sandwich and found there were no remains. He finished his paper cup of coffee, savoring the taste of cardboard—the slight fuzziness of texture which probably was attributable to dissolved wood pulp—and sighed. He was reminded of Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O'Malley.

O'Malley still believed in suicide. He thought the last line Miss Gipson had written, in a hand firm up to the end—before it was no longer a living hand, but a dying one in which a fountain pen trailed meaninglessly—was merely something she had written about the Purdy case. She was taking notes on a poison murder, wasn't she? The last line mentioned poison, didn't it? Well?