Murder within Murder

by Frances Lockridge

  “Cake?” he said, by way of conversation.

  “As far as I can see,” Pam North said, “it’s whipped cream and always will be. Of course not, Jerry! At ten o’clock at night?”

  “Not a cake,” Jerry said. He thought. “Pie?” he said, a little hopefully.

  “You don’t beat a pie,” Pam said. “And it would still be ten o’clock at night, wouldn’t it?”

  “I see what you mean,” Jerry said.

  “Butter,” Pam said. “Only it isn’t. And it’s been half an hour. Or almost.”

  “Butter?” Jerry said.

  Pam said of course butter. What did he think?

  “Well,” Jerry said. “I didn’t think butter. I thought we didn’t have any butter. I thought you had spent your red points up through December.”

  “November,” Mrs. North said. “It’s very nice of Morris, but sometimes I think it’s illegal. Do you suppose it is?”

  Jerry said he supposed it was, in a fairly mild way. But it all came out pretty much the same in the end.

  “Except,” Pam said, “when they end it we’ll be ahead, you know. And where will Morris be?”

  Morris, Mr. North thought, would be all right.

  “Anyway,” Pam said, “there wasn’t any other way I could think of, and he said it was all right to take them in advance. Of course, it would be different if we had children. It’s different for people with children. Particularly babies.” Mrs. North resumed grinding the eggbeater. “Babies really pay off,” she said. “Nothing but milk, or blue points at the worst. Before they abolished them.”

  “Listen,” Jerry said, pulling himself away from the idea that someone had abolished babies. “What about butter? I thought you couldn’t use any more butter. I thought it was straight olive oil from here on in.”

  “Of course we can’t use butter,” Pam said. “That’s why I’m making it.”

  “You’re—” Jerry said and paused—“you’re making butter?”

  “Why not?” Pam said. “Only apparently I’m not. It’s still whipped cream. And they told me it wouldn’t be more than half an hour.”

  “You mean,” Jerry said, “that you’re sitting there, in a play suit, making butter? Butter?”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “Churning, really. You take some cream—except the cream’s so thin now you have to take the top of milk, except the milk’s pretty thin too—and beat it until it’s butter. If ever, which I doubt. Here, you churn.”

  She lifted the bowl from her lap and held it toward Jerry, who got up and went over to the sofa and sat down beside her and looked into the bowl. It was full of whipped cream, sure enough. He said so. He said it just looked like whipped cream to him.

  “Although come to think of it,” he said, “my mother used to say to look out it didn’t turn to butter. That was when I was a boy, of course.”

  “Well,” Pam said. “There still is butter, even if you aren’t a boy. And everybody says it will work. Beat, Jerry!”

  Jerry beat. He held the eggbeater in his left hand and twirled with his right, and the beater made a deep, intricate swirl in the soft, yellowish whipped cream.

  “You know,” Jerry said, after a while, “I never thought we’d be churning here in a New York apartment. Ten floors up, particularly. Did you?”

  Pam said it was the war. The war had changed a lot of things and the changes had outlasted it. They both looked into the bowl, trying to see the future in it. Then Pam spoke, suddenly.

  “Jerry!” she said. “You’re spattering!”

  “I—” Jerry began, and stopped. He was certainly spattering. Because, as suddenly as Pam had spoken, the whipped cream had come apart. Part of it was thin and spattering and part of it—

  “For God’s sake!” Jerry said, in a shocked voice. “Butter!”

  It was butter. It was sticking to the eggbeater. There was not a great deal of it. It was not exactly a solid. But it was beyond doubt butter. The Norths looked at one another with surprise and delight and disbelief.

  “Jerry!” Pam said. “We made butter!”

  “I know,” Jerry said. “It’s like—like finding gold. Or a good manuscript. It’s—it’s very strange.”

  They took the bowl out to the kitchen and scraped the butter off the eggbeater and poured off what they supposed was buttermilk—although it didn’t taste like buttermilk—and squeezed the water out of the butter as Pam had been told to do. And they were wrapping up almost a quarter of a pound of butter in oiled paper, and still not really believing it, when the telephone rang. Pam was wrapping, and thereupon wrapped more intently, so Jerry was stuck with the telephone.

  The voice on the telephone was familiar, and Jerry said, “Yes, Bill?” When she heard him, Pamela put the butter into the icebox quickly and came in and stood in front of Jerry and made faces until he noticed her. Jerry said, “Wait a minute, Bill,” and when he looked at her Pam spoke.

  “Tell him we made butter,” she said. “Tell him he’s the first to know.”

  “Pam says we made butter, Bill,” Jerry said. “We did, too. Almost a quarter of a pound.”

  He listened.

  “What did he say?” Pam said.

  “He said ‘well,’” Jerry told her.

  “Was he excited?” Pam wanted to know.

  “Were you excited, Bill?” Jerry said into the telephone. Then he spoke to Pam. “He says ‘reasonably,’” Jerry told her. “But he says he’s got a murder if we don’t mind.”

  “Oh,” Pam said. “All right. Tell him we’re sorry.”

  “Pam says we’re sorry, Bill,” Jerry said into the telephone. “What?”

  His voice was suddenly different and, as she heard the change, Pam’s own expressive face was shadowed. Because something Bill had said had made murder real to Jerry, and that would make it real to her. She did not want murder to be real again—not ever again.

  “Yes,” he said. “A woman fiftyish—solidly built—gray hair? With a p instead of a b as it happens. Yes. She’s been working for us. At the office. Research.”

  He listened for almost a minute and there was a queer expression on his face. Then he seemed to break in. “I can explain that,” he said. “She was doing research for us—preliminary research. For a book we’re getting out on the subject. Do you want the details?”

  He listened again.

  “Naturally,” he said. “She has relatives in the city, I think. But I’ll come around. Although from what you say there doesn’t seem to be much doubt.”

  He listened again.

  “All right,” he said. “The morgue. I’ll be along.”

  He replaced the receiver and looked at Pam a moment, his thoughts far from her. Then he brought them back.

  “A woman named Amelia Gipson,” he said. “She was working at the office—had been for about a month. Somebody seems to have poisoned her. In the public library, of all places. Bill wants me to make a preliminary identification before he gets in touch with her relatives.”

  “In the public library?” Pam said. “At Forty-second Street? The big one?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “What a strange place,” Pam North said. “It’s—it’s always so quiet there.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “She was reading about murders at the time, apparently. For us. For the murder book I told you about. My Favorite Murder—working title. Remember?”

  Pam said she remembered. With a writer for each crime—a writer who wrote about murder. She remembered.

  “Miss Gipson was getting together preliminary data,” Jerry said. “We promised them that. It was an odd job for her, come to think of it. She used to be a college professor—or something like it. Anyway, she used to teach in a college. She was a trained researcher. But it was an odd job for her.”

  It ended oddly enough, Pam thought, and said. It ended very oddly.

  “I think I’ll go with you,” Pam said then. “It’s so strange about its being the public library.”

  Jerry thought she
shouldn’t, but she did.

  The body was under a sheet and they pulled the sheet back from the face. Confidence no longer sat on the face; the features were twisted, curiously. But it was Amelia Gipson and Jerry turned to Lieutenant William Weigand of Homicide and nodded.

  “What?” Jerry said. “And how?”

  Bill Weigand told him what.

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “Suddenly, sitting in the library, she was very sick. As she would be. Then in about an hour she was dead. In Bellevue. That’s all we know, at the moment.”

  “You don’t eat anything in the library,” Pam pointed out. “Do you?”

  Bill smiled faintly and shook his head. That was it, he said; that was part of it. Unless you were on the staff, you didn’t eat in the library. You didn’t drink.

  “So,” Jerry pointed out, “she had taken it—had been given it—before she went to the library.”

  Bill Weigand shook his head. He said the time didn’t fit. He said she had been at the library for something like two hours—probably more—when she became ill.

  “It doesn’t wait that long,” he said. “We’ve established that. The dose she seems to have got would have made her violently ill in half an hour or so. Her book slips were time stamped at 7:33. Allow her some time to find the books she wanted in the catalogues, fill out the slips—say a quarter of an hour—and we have her in the library at fifteen after seven, or thereabouts. Of course, she may have left the library and come back. If she didn’t, she was poisoned in the library. Presumably while she was sitting at one of the tables in the reading-room—the North Reading Room.”

  “You mean,” Pam said, “somebody just came along and said ‘Sorry to interrupt your reading, but do you mind drinking some poison?’ Because I don’t believe it.”

  “Not that way, obviously,” Jerry said. “You’re getting jumpy, Pam.”

  “Not any way like it that I can see,” Pam said. “And I’m not getting jumpy. Do you, Bill?”

  Practice helped. Bill did not even have to check back to the clause before the clause.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “And it happened. Therefore—a job for us. For Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley and his helpers. Mullins. Stein. Me.”

  “Well,” Pam said “She worked in Jerry’s office.” It was merely statement; it held implications.

  Mullins was in the shadows. Mullins spoke.

  “O’Malley won’t like it, Loot,” Mullins said. “He sure as hell won’t like it. He likes ’em kept simple.”

  “But,” Pam said, “it isn’t simple. Hello, Sergeant Mullins. Is it?”

  “Hello, Mrs. North,” Mullins said. “No. But the inspector don’t want you in none of them. None. He says you make ’em complicated. Hard, sort of.”

  “All right, Sergeant,” Bill Weigand said, and there was only the thin edge of amusement in his voice. “She was an employee of Mr. North. It was inevitable that we call him. For the moment—until we get in touch with her relatives—we can assume he represents her interests. Right?”

  “Say,” Mullins said. “That’s right, ain’t it, Loot?”

  “Of course it is,” Pam said. “Where do we go, Bill? First?”

  Bill shrugged. There were a hundred directions. The library. The office of North Books, Inc. Amelia Gipson’s apartment.

  “Mullins is going to the library,” he said. “Stein’s there, and some of the boys. I’m going to the apartment.” He paused and smiled a little. “I should think,” he said, “that Jerry has a right to accompany me, Pam.”

  “So should I,” Pam North said. “Shall we start now? It isn’t—it isn’t very nice in here.” She looked around the morgue. “It never is,” she said, thoughtfully.

  While Bill Weigand picked up a parcel containing Miss Gipson’s handbag, and signed a receipt for it, and while they got into the big police car Pam had been silent. Now, as they started toward Washington Square and the Holborn Annex she spoke.

  “Why,” Pam said, “didn’t she kill herself?”

  “Miss Gipson?” Jerry said, in a startled voice. “She would no more.…” Then he broke off and looked at Bill. “Which is true,” he said, after a moment. “She wouldn’t think of it—wouldn’t have thought of it. But you didn’t know that, Bill. How did you know?”

  Bill nodded. He said he had been wondering why they didn’t ask him that.

  “That’s the way Inspector O’Malley wanted it,” he said. “That’s the way he thinks it ought to be. Simple. Suicide. Unfortunately, she wrote us a note.”

  “What kind of a note?” Pam said. “Non-suicide note?”

  Weigand looked at Pam North with approval. He said, “Right.”

  “She was taking notes,” he said. “On the Purdy murder. Writing them out very carefully in a notebook, in ink—very carefully and clearly. And we almost missed her note to us—did miss it the first time. Then Stein thought that while the last thing she had written almost fitted, it didn’t really fit. The last thing she wrote was: ‘I have been poisoned by—! It didn’t finish. Just ‘I have been poisoned by—’ and a scraggly line running off the page.”

  “Then how,” Pam said, “can even—can the inspector think it was suicide. If he still does.”

  Bill Weigand said the inspector still wanted to.

  “And,” he said, “he can make a talking point. You see, she was taking notes on a poison case. The death of a woman named Lorraine Purdy, who was killed, curiously enough, with sodium fluoride. Presumably by her husband, although we were supposed to think by accident. But it wasn’t accident—it was Purdy. He ran for it and got himself killed in an airplane accident. O’Malley wants to think that the last thing Miss Gipson wrote was part of her notes on the Purdy case.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “We can’t let him,” he said. “It almost fits. It doesn’t fit. Why was she taking notes on the Purdy case, Jerry?”

  Jerry explained that. It was not only the Purdy case. It was a series of cases—ten murder cases, all famous, all American. Her notes were to go to selected writers who were accepted as specialists in crime. “Like Edmund Pearson was,” Jerry amplified. Each was to write the story of one of the murders as a chapter in a book. Jerry was to publish the book. It had been his idea. It was not, he added, a new idea. Other publishers had done it; he had done it before himself, several years earlier. There was always a market for crime. As Pearson had proved; as Woollcott had proved; as dozens of lesser writers had proved.

  “We did the digging for them,” Jerry said. “Miss Gipson did the digging for us. She was a researcher.”

  When he decided on publishing the book and had needed somebody to do research, Jerry had decided against tying up anybody on his own staff—a rather small staff these days—on a long and detailed job. He had gone to a college placement bureau and Miss Gipson was the result. The rather unexpected result.

  “I’d supposed we’d get a girl just out of college,” Jerry North said. “Most of them are—the research girls. Miss Gipson was a surprise. She’d been a Latin teacher in a small, very good college for girls in Indiana—Ward College, I think it was. She got tired of it or something and decided on a new field. She was a little surprised when it turned out to be murder research, but she was doing a good job.”

  “I think,” Pam said, “she carried it too far.”

  They looked at her.

  “I only mean,” she said, “you don’t have to go to the length of getting murdered. It’s too—thorough.”

  The two men looked at each other and after a while Jerry said, “Oh.”

  3

  WEDNESDAY, 12:10 A.M. TO 2:20 A.M.

  You started with a body and tried to bring life back to it, Pam thought, looking around the room in which Miss Gipson had lived. That was what you did in murder—that was what Bill Weigand had to do. She looked at him, standing in the middle of the room and looking around it, his eyes quick. He was building—trying to build—in his own mind the person who had bee
n Amelia Gipson. He started with the body of a middle-aged woman; a body growing cold on a slab in the morgue; a body which said certain things, but not enough. The body spoke of regular meals, of comfortable life, of the number of years lived, of the manner of death. It told—it would tell—what the last meal eaten by a living person had been, and how long it had been eaten before death. It told of past illnesses which had been endured and survived; of an appendicitis operation many years before; of virginity maintained until it withered.

  Those things the body in the morgue told of. But they were not the things which were most significant; which now were most vital. The body could not tell who had hated Amelia Gipson, or if anyone had loved her; it could not tell what she thought of things, and what others thought of her—of her tastes, her needs, her responsibilities. It could not tell where, in her life, had sprouted the seed of her death. These things—all the things Bill Weigand had to find out—lay now in the little things Amelia Gipson had left behind. They lay in this room, and its order; in the letters and notebooks and check-stubs in the secretary in the corner; in what men and women had seen and remembered about Miss Gipson that evening; in the contents of her medicine cabinet and her safe deposit box, if she had one. The things they had to know lay in what she had done in the past and what she had planned to do in the future. Research into death was at the same time research into life.

  “She used scent,” Pam said, suddenly. “Does that surprise you? Either of you?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “I don’t think she used perfume, Pam. I didn’t notice it at the office.”

  “You must have had a cold,” Pam said. “You didn’t mention it.”

  “I didn’t have it,” Jerry said.

  Pam said all right. She said in that case it was because he smoked too much. Clearly, Miss Gipson had used perfume. It was still in the room.

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I noticed it. But she didn’t wear any tonight. I noticed that, too.”

  “Something with ‘Fleur’ in it,” Pam said. “Fleur de Something or Other. Fleur de what?”

  Neither of the men knew. But Jerry admitted there was perfume in the room.