Death Has a Small Voice

by Frances Lockridge

  There was another license number in the notebooks—HG-7425, the number which Hilda Godwin had gone to the trouble to obtain. The car so licensed was a Buick station wagon, on a Roadmaster chassis.

  In addition, men from the Mercer Street station had been taking apart the little house in Elm Lane, seeking any secrets it might hide. So far as the reports showed, it had as yet revealed none.

  Bill Weigand rubbed his weary eyes with his finger tips. He read reports—reports hastily got together during the night, of necessity fragmentary, limited to the barest facts: reports on people.

  Hilda Godwin would have been twenty-seven in the spring, a report told Bill Weigand. She had been born in New York, and born to money. Her parents had died when she was still a child. She had studied at Dyckman University. When she was nineteen she had begun to publish poetry in magazines; there had been a book of poems when she was twenty-one and another in each of the following years. By the time of the third book, people who had never thought of reading poetry were reading that of Hilda Godwin. Her beauty, which was unquestionable and responded to photography, had helped; her youth had helped; her publishers had helped. Beyond those things, although the report from Sergeant Stein did not specifically so say, there had been some special quality in the poems themselves—there must have been, Bill Weigand thought. He wondered what; some time, he thought, he would try to find out—after other things had been found out.

  The poetry had stopped after the third book; it appeared that Hilda Godwin had for a time merely played. Then she had returned to writing, this time prose. She had bought the little house two years before; she had been as often away from it as in it. So—

  Weigand laid the report aside. It did not sum up a life, briefly lived, one would guess lived vividly. It left a name and an age, and the titles of three books; it added to the record.

  Garrett Shaw came up next; his report was brief. Age, 43. Occupation, art dealer. Married to Alfrieda Shaw, apparently well known as a sculptor. “Modern; reasonably representational,” Stein, who had dictated the report, noted. Extent of acquaintance with Hilda Godwin still to be investigated. Whereabouts at critical times still to be determined. “Note: Times of murders not established.” Lived on Gramercy Park.

  Wilson, Bernard. Age 47. Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy; associate professor of English at Dyckman. On Dyckman faculty fifteen years; best known, as teacher, for seminar classes on creative writing. Well known as critic and essayist. Conducted radio symposiums, on Sunday afternoons, on literary subjects; had been, from 1946 to 1948, an editor of Sweepings, which had been a poetry magazine. “Folded, November, 1948.” Educated Columbia University and Oxford (Rhodes Scholar). Doctorate, Harvard. Extent of association with Hilda Godwin undetermined. “No informants available. Appears possible she may have attended his classes; times coincide.”

  That was Wilson, from the reports. Bill Weigand put the report aside.

  Alec Lyster was nearer the age Hilda Godwin had been. He was twenty-eight. He had been in the United States for the past three years; he was an occasional correspondent, mostly by mail, of three British newspapers (listed) and a magazine. He was an occasional contributor to Punch, on the American way of life; to the Atlantic Monthy, on the British way of life. Wrote some light verse. Lived on the upper West Side, near the drive, in one room apartment. Much in company of Madeleine Barclay, actress. “Bit parts.” Extent of relationship with Hilda Godwin undetermined. “Note: Most of this from friend of his found at Four Corners. Informant says saw good deal of H. G. year or so ago.”

  Rogers, Gilbert. Age, 34. Employed as an editor, Hudson Press. Arrested speeding (Riverside Drive) 1951; altercation with arresting officer; no indication intoxication; fined $25, which paid. Joined staff of Hudson Press in autumn of 1949, coming on from Chicago, where had worked in another publishing house. Extent of relationship with H. G. undetermined. Whereabouts during presumptive critical periods unknown.

  There was a general summary from Stein: “All we can dig up on these people at moment. Sources difficult to contact. No records on anybody but Rogers.”

  They had, Weigand thought, got a good deal in a few night hours. There was a good deal more left to get. Bill Weigand tapped the fingers of his right hand rhythmically on the desk at which he sat. He could use a break.

  The telephone rang. Bill Weigand’s voice sounded weary in his own ears as he answered.

  “Man named Shaw out here,” a voice said. “Says he’s got to see you.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Send him in.”

  VIII

  Wednesday, 5:30 A.M. to 6:08 A.M.

  Sergeant Mullins said, “What the hell?” and Bill Weigand, tapping the desk with his fingers, shook his head. Then the door opened with sudden violence, a heavy, dark man filled the doorway, a heavy voice rumbled.

  “What’s this about Hilda?” Garrett Shaw demanded.

  He looked as if he had dressed hastily; his soft shirt was open at the neck, a day’s beard was dark on his face. The skin over his right cheekbone was reddened; in the center of the area there was a small cut, the blood dried on it.

  Weigand did not hurry his answer. After a moment, he said, “She’s dead, Mr. Shaw. She was strangled.”

  “You talked about a burglar,” Shaw told him. “Said she was all right.”

  “I didn’t know, then,” Bill told him. “We only found out a few hours ago.” He looked up at Shaw. “How did you know?” he asked.

  Shaw came into the room. He stood over Weigand’s desk and stared down at Weigand.

  “You know a man named Rogers?” he asked. “You know him?”

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  “He just tried to kill me,” Shaw said. “He’s gone crazy. Did you know that?”

  Bill shook his head.

  “Comes in yelling,” Shaw said. “Jumps me. Yells about Hilda. About—I don’t know what. I had to knock him down.” He put his hands on the desk. He leaned down toward Bill Weigand. “Tried to kill me,” he said, and the heavy rumbling voice filled the little office as a shout would have filled it. “You sit there on—”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Shaw,” Mullins said, and left his desk near the window. “Just take it easy.” Shaw was a big man, but Mullins looked bigger as he came across the office. “Just sit down and take it easy,” Mullins said.

  Shaw looked at Mullins. He looked at Bill Weigand.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Sit down, Mr. Shaw. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  It took shape slowly.

  Shaw had been in his apartment, asleep. His wife had gone to Chicago, leaving on the midnight train. He had seen her off, stopped on the way home for a drink, gone to bed about two. He thought it was about an hour ago that the doorbell of his apartment had wakened him. Someone had pushed the bell and kept on pushing. Shaw had, sleepily, gone to the door and opened it and Gilbert Rogers had pushed in, and pushed the door closed behind him. He had, at first, merely cursed Garrett Shaw.

  “Couldn’t make head or tail of it,” Shaw told them, leaning toward Bill’s desk, putting heavy hands on it. “Incoherent. I tell you, the man’s gone crazy.”

  What had come out after a little, Shaw said, was that Hilda was dead; that somebody had killed her. What had come out was the repeated, the loudly repeated—“the man was yelling”—assertion that Shaw wouldn’t get away with it.

  “Wait,” Bill said. “He was accusing you of killing Miss Godwin? Is that what it was?”

  “You know,” Shaw said, “I’m damned if I know. I suppose so. It must have been that. But he didn’t say that. He just—yelled. Then he swung at me.”

  He raised his hand to his damaged cheek. “Landed,” he said. “Wears a ring or something. Cut me. See?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Then?”

  “Yelling all the time,” Shaw said. “About Hilda. About some novel she’d written. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Bill said. “Go on.”

  “
It never made any sense,” Shaw said. “Here I was, half asleep at first, and he busts in yelling and swinging. The first time he hit me it staggered me, and then he came at me with his hands out. As if he was going to choke me. I ducked, and tried to make him hear me, and he didn’t listen. I said, ‘Hold it,’ and—oh, I don’t know. It was like talking to a crazy drunk.” He seemed to think of that. “Maybe he was drunk,” he said.

  Bill Weigand shook his head. He said he doubted it.

  “He had seen Miss Godwin’s body,” he said. “It may—it was rather shocking, you know. He was going to marry her, I understand.”

  “Thought he was, maybe,” Shaw said. “Her body? Where was this?”

  Bill told him. Shaw swore in his rumbling voice. He swore with apparent bitterness. He thumped the desk with a clenched hand.

  Weigand waited.

  “Were you in love with her, Mr. Shaw?” he asked then.

  Shaw looked up.

  “Me?” he said.

  “Rogers seemed to think you were,” Bill told him. “Or had been. That you were—insistent.”

  “Liar,” Shaw said. “Crazy liar. Thought any man who looked at her was—” He broke off.

  “You did look at her?” Bill said. Shaw merely stared at him. Bill waited. Then he said, “Well, Mr. Shaw?”

  “All right,” Shaw said. “Say I did. So what? Listen. I knew about this stuffed—” He stopped. Bill waited again.

  But the moment, if there had been a moment, had passed. The violence with which Shaw had entered the office seemed suddenly to flow away. It left a different man—it left a man who leaned back in the chair; who now smiled faintly.

  “Very well,” he said. “I asked the lady. The lady declined. I said, thank you very much, sorry to have been a trouble.”

  He was less convincing so.

  “Did Rogers, in so many words, accuse you of killing Miss Godwin?”

  Shaw shrugged.

  “As I told you,” he said, “he yelled all sorts of things. Maybe that I’d killed her. Then it sounded as if maybe he’d killed her and was going to kill me. Anyway, he made a stab at killing me. I had to knock him out.”

  He said this casually. Bill waited.

  “Knocked him down, anyway,” Shaw said. “He got up and came after me and I knocked him down again. I was—well, I was awake enough by then.”

  “Yes,” Bill said, “I can see you would have been. And—”

  “I decided to call you people,” Shaw said. “I didn’t want to but—hell, he might have had a gun or something.”

  Shaw had, he said, gone to a telephone in the next room. He had started to dial when he heard movement in the foyer. He had got back just as the door slammed after Rogers. He—

  The telephone rang. It was the man who had been keeping an eye on Shaw. He was reporting, unhappily, that he had lost his man. His man had come bursting out of the apartment house and got a cab. It was the only cab in blocks of early morning streets. Where he had gone—

  “All right,” Bill said. “He came here. He says he had a visitor about an hour ago. You see a visitor?”

  He listened. He said, “Right.”

  He looked up and Shaw was leaning toward him.

  “You had a man following me?” Shaw said. His rumbling voice was harsh again.

  “I wanted to know what you did,” he said. “I want to know what all of you have been doing.”

  “All of—whom?” Shaw demanded.

  “Rogers,” Bill said. “One or two others who”—he hesitated momentarily—“were in Miss Godwin’s circle,” he finished. “Who, for one thing, might have been mentioned in the book she wrote.” He waited a moment, looking intently at Shaw. “The book that’s disappeared,” he said. “The book which was, I’m told, autobiographical.”

  “I don’t—” Shaw began. He was calm again. Now he looked a little puzzled. But then he said, “Oh.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “In autobiographical novels, people write about people who have been in their lives, of course. Perhaps Miss Godwin did, Mr. Shaw. Perhaps somebody—didn’t like what she wrote.”

  “That,” Shaw told him, “is crazy, Captain.”

  It could be, Bill agreed. He had, in fact, been told that the book was innocuous. But—

  “Who said that?” Shaw demanded.

  Bill Weigand told him. Shaw’s eyes narrowed momentarily. Then he nodded.

  “So?” he said. “Wilson ought to know. It’s his field, after all.”

  Bill Weigand nodded. Professor Wilson ought to know. But he spoke with no apparent assurance, and Shaw waited.

  “It’s possible,” Bill said, “that whatever may have been—resented—was apparent only to the person concerned. Perhaps it revealed a secret of some sort which this person had shared with Miss Godwin; that she revealed in such a way that it wouldn’t be a revelation at all to the ordinary reader.”

  “Then,” Shaw said, “what would be the fuss? I mean—” He shrugged.

  Fuss was an odd term for murder, but Bill Weigand did not voice the thought. He merely said he didn’t know. He added, “Yet.” Shaw waited as if for him to continue. When he did not, Shaw stood up suddenly.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s my story. What do you do about it?”

  “Oh,” Bill said, “find Mr. Rogers, of course. Ask him what it was all about. You want to make charges against him—assault?”

  Shaw hesitated. Then he shook his head.

  “The guy’s crazy,” he said. “He’s got enough trouble.”

  Bill nodded. Shaw turned abruptly, and went out the door.

  “What d’y know?” Mullins said. “It’s a screwy one, all right. You mean that about the book? About some guy who’s a character in a book and gets sore and—” Mullins gave it up, shaking his head.

  “I don’t know, Sergeant,” Bill said. “You don’t like it?”

  “Jeeze,” Sergeant Mullins said, and reached for a telephone which began to ring. He said, “O.K.,” and wrote a name and telephone number on a pad. He said, “Keep at it, fella,” and cradled the telephone.

  “Seems you wanted this,” he said, and pushed the pad toward Weigand. “Name of the gal’s agent. Literary agent.”

  “Right,” Bill said, and, eyes on the pad, reached for the telephone.

  His own voice awoke him. He was crying out something, but the words he used faded with the dream as he came awake. The horror of the dream remained, although the shape of the dream wavered, dissolved in his mind. Pam had been falling and he had stretched out his hands to save her, but as he touched her her body was impalpable between his hands—or was it that his hands were without substance?—and she fell on, screaming. But there was a trunk and it was Pam’s body in the trunk, yet as he looked down on it the body changed and was not hers. “She’ll be all right,” Bill Weigand said. “Don’t worry” and then he was in an airplane, falling in tighter and tighter, ever more dizzying, circles. Pam was with him, falling too, but now there was no airplane and they were falling free in circles, she always beyond his reach. It was there, he thought, groping back, the dream ended. It had ended with someone screaming, and that had wakened him.

  He was sitting in a chair in the apartment, his head twisted a little to one side. He called, “Pam?” while he was still only partly awake and from another room a cat began to talk, harshly. Jerry North looked at his watch; the hands pointed to five forty-five. He had not slept long. He remembered, now. He had sat in front of the telephone. For a time one of the cats had sat on his lap. He had told himself the telephone would ring and he would hear Pam’s voice, or Bill’s, saying that Pam was found. But the telephone had not rung. He remembered, now, that he had fallen asleep and awakened, thinking the telephone had wakened him, and reached for it and heard only the dial tone. Then he must have fallen asleep again, or asleep enough to dream.

  Now, because he had, he felt an almost unbearable guilt. He felt that he had betrayed Pam and that the betrayal was irretrievable, and this conviction b
ecame a heavy shadow in which he moved. Logic would not lighten this shadow and, indeed, his mind made little attempt at logic. He stood up, abruptly. He leaned over the telephone, and dialed a number and got a heavy voice in answer, a tired voice.

  “He’s on the phone,” the voice said. “You want to hold on?”

  “Has he heard anything?” Jerry asked, and the voice said, “Not that I’ve heard, Mr. North. He’ll call you. Or do you want to wait?”

  There was no point to waiting; there had been no point to calling. That Bill Weigand was doing what he could, with men all over the city helping, did not need to be said; he did not need to telephone to find it out. That, when anything was discovered, he would be told was as obvious.

  “I’m going out,” Jerry said. “I’ll call him.”

  Until he said it, until he replaced the telephone in its cradle, Jerry North had not known he was going out. Even now he was not certain where, when he left the apartment, he would go. But he could not stay there longer and wait—merely wait. Pam’s mine, he heard his mind saying. She’s mine. I’ve got to find her. It’s my job. Pam’s mine.

  He was in the dark street before he knew what his plan was. He looked for a taxicab then, and found the streets empty. He began to walk, walking north, and as he walked he quickened his steps until he was almost running.

  They had not thought of that. They had assumed—at any rate, he had assumed—that whoever had got Pam at the office when she had been playing the record had got the record too. But perhaps he had not. Perhaps Pam had had warning; had had a moment. Pam was quick. She might have hidden the record.

  His mind hurried, now, as his body did. If she had managed to hide the record, a good deal would be explained. If she had merely heard it, if whatever story it told was by now in her mind only, the record destroyed, then—then she would not be alive. But if the record still existed, and only she knew where it was hidden, then she might be kept alive until—