The Judge Is Reversed (10 page)

“When I first—” Ackerman said, and bit it off. The magnifying lenses hid whatever expression might then have come into Ackerman's light blue eyes.

“Right,” Bill said. “When you first came here—what, Mr. Ackerman?”

“Nobody answered the bell,” Ackerman said. “All right—I did try earlier. About—oh, half past nine.”

“At,” Bill said, “somewhere around the time he was killed.”

He didn't ask. He said. Then he asked.

“How did you know that, Mr. Ackerman? If you didn't know he was dead?”

Floyd Ackerman said he didn't know what Weigand meant.

“Come now,” Weigand said. “You're obviously an intelligent man, Mr. Ackerman. Admitting you'd been here earlier was a slip of the tongue. So, you had been trying to keep that secret. If you didn't know you were here about the time he was killed, why keep it secret?”

“You're trying to trick me. I might have—”

“No. Why?”

“I didn't know the time,” Ackerman said. “When I came here I had no idea anything had happened to him. It was merely that I saw no reason to—to—”

“Put ideas in our heads?”

He could call it that. Ideas which would serve no purpose; would merely obscure the truth. His tone capitalized “The Truth.” He had a very capitalizing style, Bill decided.

“You rang the bell,” Bill said. “At about nine thirty. Nobody answered. You didn't see anybody. Hear anything from inside the apartment. You went away and came back—hours later. That's what you say?”

“Certainly. There was a meeting this afternoon. Of the committee. To consider an answer to—to this libelous attack on Our Work. It was agreed that I should seek a retraction. I thought it best to—confront Blanchard. In Person.”

“Which you had already tried to do. Without consulting the committee.”

“I,” Ackerman said simply, “am the chairman. Also, if you must know, I raise the money.”

Bill had felt under no compulsion to know that. He did not in the least mind knowing it.

Ackerman had heard nothing inside the apartment, except the ringing, distant, of the doorbell. He had seen no one.

“When you went into the lobby downstairs,” Weigand said. “This morning, I mean. You knew which elevator to take?”

“No. I took the first one I saw. Are there others?”

“One. You had a fifty-fifty chance. Mr. Ackerman, was the elevator waiting? At the lobby floor?”

And then, Bill thought, Ackerman hesitated. It was as if, once more, he had a fifty-fifty chance. Then he said, “No. It came down when I pushed the button.”

“Empty?”

Ackerman did not hesitate this time. He spoke, Bill thought, almost too quickly when he said, “Of course it was empty. I've already said—”

“I know,” Bill Weigand said. “Right. I won't take up any more of your time just now.”

Ackerman, Bill thought, looked a little surprised.

“Give your address to one of the men outside,” Bill said. “We may want to talk to you again.”

Ackerman was still shaking when he went out. He had lied about the elevator, Bill thought. Protecting someone else? It occurred to Bill that Ackerman might well try to protect anyone who had killed John Blanchard. Particularly, of course, a white-faced man named Floyd Ackerman.

8

The Norths walked back from Mario's. On the way, they mooted a point—should they tell Bill Weigand that Doug Mears and Hilda Latham had had dinner together, had seemed more friendly than they had appeared to be earlier, had seemed to have important things to talk about? (Or, he to talk about, she to listen to.) Because, Pam said, it would be a case of peep and tell, but on the other hand.

She, Jerry said as they turned into their block, put it very neatly.

“If they were only talking about themselves,” Pam said, clarifying, “no, of course. But if he was explaining that it was perfectly all right for him to have killed Blanchard—what's he doing down here?”

She pointed, not at a man. She pointed at a pale yellow Cadillac, parked at the curb. It was parked within inches of a fire hydrant. Its license plate bore, along with a number, the letters DVS.

“Attending a cat,” Jerry said.

They turned into their apartment house. Dr. Oscar Gebhardt, cat specialist, sat on a stone bench. He did, Pam thought, brighten up the lobby, dressed as he was for his Sunday rounds. (He had explained that several times: When a man works twelve hours a day, seven days a week, it becomes difficult to tell days apart. If one cannot rest on the Sabbath, one can at least relax in costume.) Gebhardt got up from the bench and came toward the Norths, his eyebrows bristling. He said he had been about ready to give them up.

“Gebby,” Jerry North said, “do you know you're parked in front of a fire plug?”

“Obviously,” Gebhardt said. “Only place I could find.”

Which, clearly, settled that. What Oscar Gebhardt paid in traffic fines would have kept him in taxicabs for life, a fact he cheerfully admitted. But he preferred to drive the Cadillac. For one thing, his calls frequently took him far from the city. For another, he liked to drive Cadillacs.

“Happened to be down here,” Gebhardt said, in the elevator going up. “Thought I'd say hello.”

“Hello, Gebby,” Pam said. “Do you know where I can get a Siamese that isn't pointed?”

“Hard thing to do,” Gebhardt said, as Jerry let them into the apartment. “Damn near all of them are pointed. Damn fool cat people.”

“I'll make coffee,” Pam said.

“Can't stay long,” Oscar Gebhardt said, sitting down and putting his black bag on the floor beside him. “Got a very bad vitamin deficiency in Sutton Place. Keep feeding him crab meat. The things people feed cats!”

Pam went into the kitchen. Oscar Gebhardt looked around the room. “Strange not to see her here,” he said. “Spunky little thing, wasn't she?”

“Yes,” Jerry said, and spoke in a low tone and looked toward the open kitchen door.

“All right,” Gebhardt said. “I'll keep my mouth shut. She still cry?”

“Not as much,” Jerry said, and then Pam came back, and said it wouldn't be a minute. She looked at Gebhardt's hard, wonderfully deft, hands. There was a new bandage now, this one on the left index finger. Cats are more deft than the deftest hands.

“Intestinal stoppage,” Gebhardt said. “Came from eating mouse bones. And hide, of course. Damn fool owner was afraid to get a good grip. Afraid she'd break. Look—I take it you two know these policemen?”

“Yes,” Pam said. “For a long time, Gebby.”

“The big one,” Gebhardt said, “is a pain in the neck. You tell him the truth and where does it get you?”

“Mullins,” Jerry said. “Sergeant Mullins. It got him scratched.”

“Bitten,” Gebhardt said.

“You could have had one of us hold her,” Pam said. “We know how. Poor Mullins.”

“I weep for him,” Gebhardt said, with sudden gaiety. He sobered.

“Look,” he said, “are they going to get the idea I killed John? Make a hell of a lot of trouble about it? Because, I haven't got time to waste on that sort of thing.”

Oscar Gebhardt seemed very serious about it. He seemed, further, to be rather concerned about it.

“Mullins had to find out,” Pam said. “Nobody'll think you had anything to do with it. Why should they?”

“No reason,” Gebhardt said. “Anyway—no, no reason.”

Pam said, “It's boiling by now,” and went, and, within minutes, returned with coffee on a tray.

“All right, Gebby,” Jerry North said, when the coffee had been served. “Let's have it.”

Gebhardt looked astonished—or, they both thought, tried to look astonished. He said there was nothing for anybody to have. He said the coffee was very fine coffee.

“You want what?” Jerry said. “Intercession? For us to tell Bill Weigand you're not the kind of man who goes around killing people? Particularly clients. We'll be glad to, Gebby. But listen—”

Gebby listened, while Gerald North said the obvious, carefully. Policemen like Weigand are impartial. They are also shrewd, also experienced. A person who says he found a man dying, a person who has a key to the apartment in which the man dies—obviously, he must explain himself. As obviously, Gebhardt had. Which would end it.

“In a word,” Pam said, “you're making a mountain, Gebby.”

Which, she thought, isn't at all like you, Gebby.

Gebhardt listened, he nodded his head. He sipped coffee. He said he probably was making a mountain. Then he said, “Only—”

They looked at him.

“All right,” he said, “John left me somewhere around two hundred thousand dollars, I imagine. When they find out about it—well. There you are.”

“My,” Pam said. “What a lot of money.”

“To,” Gebhardt said, “start a research hospital—center—with. But whether his will makes that clear—” He shrugged, wide shoulders under the reddish tweed jacket. “Of course,” he said, and brightened, “could be he changed his mind. Couple of years ago he told me about it.” They waited. “It was this way,” Gebhardt said.

A couple of years ago, with a patient attended to, Blanchard and Dr. Gebhardt, over coffee, had discussed cats—cats in general. And, to sympathetic ears, Oscar Gebhardt had expanded on an idea he had had long in mind, and expected never to do anything about—an idea that, some time, somebody should do something about.

Veterinary medicine lacked research facilities. Gebhardt did not argue that the need for such facilities had a high order of precedence. Other things should, obviously, come first. “But not,” he said now, with some bitterness, “shooting skyrockets at the moon.” Also, concentrated research on the diseases of animals—and particularly of small animals—would almost inevitably carry the possibility of greater usefulness. “Incidentally,” Gebhardt said, “where do people think Pasteur started? Anthrax. That's where. Bunch of sheep. Damn silly things, sheep.”

Gebhardt did not contend that much valuable work was not being done. At, for example, Cornell. But not enough. With enough money—

“Well,” he said, “I got steamed up about it. Told John what I'd like to do would be to start a hospital which would be, mainly, a research center and really find out a few things. Not that I don't know more than most. But none of us knows enough.”

Gebhardt supposed that, unconsciously, he had been making a pitch. But it had been unconscious, he insisted, and the Norths believed. He had ridden a hobby, with no destination in mind.

He had, he said—and the Norths believed—been vastly surprised when, a few months later (while he was treating another Blanchard cat) John Blanchard had said, casually, “By the way, Gebby. About that research hospital of yours. I'm leaving you some money for it. Enough to get it started, anyway. What you said would get it started.”

Gebhardt had said that to build, equip, get going, something like two hundred thousand dollars would be necessary. If they were really to do a job.

“I guess my mouth fell open,” he said, talking now to the Norths. “Anyway, he said, ‘Only, Gebby, I never felt better in my life, so don't get your hopes up.' Since he was only a couple of years older than I am, and in, from the looks of him, a hell of a lot better condition, I didn't get them up.” He paused. “That sounds wrong,” he said. “John—I liked John.” He paused and finished his coffee. He said, well, there they had it.

“This bequest,” Jerry said. “Would it be to—some sort of foundation? Or, for a specified purpose? Or—just to you, Gebby?”

“To me, I gathered,” Gebhardt said. “No strings. John wouldn't have tied strings to it, I imagine. I don't actually know. It would make a difference, wouldn't it? In the way it looked?”

“It might,” Jerry said. “But I don't think you've got anything to worry about, really. Bill Weigand's not a man to jump at things. And, he'll listen to things. I wouldn't worry.”

“This man you call Mullins,” Gebhardt said, with doubt.

Weigand, they told him, was the man who would decide, the man to be considered. Not that Mullins wouldn't listen, too. Not that Mullins pushed people around.

Gebhardt seemed to accept that statement with some scepticism. He said, but with doubt, that after all, they knew Mullins and he didn't. His eyebrows, Pam thought, didn't bristle quite so resolutely. She offered, he took, another cup of coffee. She changed the subject. Did he know anything about a Madeline Somers? Who, it appeared, ran a cat store?

He did. He knew most people who associated themselves with cats.

As pet shops went, that of Miss Somers was pretty good. He didn't argue that it was a place to go for a prize cat. He didn't argue that there were not some cats on sale at Miss Somers's “store” who were culls from established catteries. But—the cats Miss Somers had for sale were healthy cats. He knew the “vet”—he paused, corrected himself, said “veterinarian”—who checked on them. They would be inoculated. And it might, at that, be a place to find a Siamese who wasn't pointed.

“Because,” he said, “you don't win prizes with them now unless they are, and more's the pity. So a cattery might let a cat with a cat's face go cheap. Not, Mrs. North, that your Miss Somers is going to.”

There was only one thing he knew against Miss Madeline Somers. She was one of some damn fool collection of crackpots who called themselves “The Committee Against Cruelty.” They had tried to get Dr. Oscar Gebhardt to lend his support, and he had told them where to jump.

“Crackpots,” he repeated. “And that man Ackerman—ought to be locked up. Happen to read that advertisement?”

They had.

“John wrote a letter taking their hides off,” Gebhardt said. “Showed it to me a couple of days ago. Don't know whether he sent it to anybody.”