Murder within Murder

by Frances Lockridge

  “For evenings, probably,” Pam said. “Although it doesn’t seem in character, somehow. The way she looked. And being a Latin teacher in a girls’ school. I’d have thought castile soap and perhaps a little talcum, if anything.”

  Bill Weigand had crossed to the desk. He was looking through it, piling the contents of pigeonholes in neat order. He had left Miss Gipson’s purse lying on the coffee table. It was all right for her to look into it, Bill told Pam absently, when she asked.

  It was a very neat purse. Pam thought that it was much neater than any purse she had ever looked into—certainly much neater than her own. And it seemed almost empty. There was a change purse in it, containing a little more than twenty dollars. There was a social security card. No driver’s license. A fountain pen. Four neat squares of cleansing tissue. No compact. No lipstick. No lists of any kind, scrawled on the backs of envelopes. No scraps of material, no hairpins or loose stamps or unanswered correspondence. It was hardly recognizable as a woman’s handbag.

  “And no perfume,” Pam said aloud. “In it or on it. Which is odd.”

  Bill Weigand was reading a letter and Jerry stood by him, reading over his shoulder. Pam got up, leaving the handbag, and went into the bathroom. It was a neat bathroom. She opened the built-in medicine cabinet. There was a box of bicarbonate and a plastic drinking cup, a box of cleansing tissue, two toothbrushes and a can of tooth powder, a can of white talcum with no perceptible scent and a cardboard box from a druggist with a doctor’s name on it and the handwritten instructions: “One powder three times a day two hours after meals.” On a shelf inset under the medicine cabinet were a comb and brush and a box of hairpins. Nowhere that Pam could see was there any perfume.

  Nowhere in the apartment, she found, was there any perfume, except that which faintly haunted the air. So it was not Miss Gipson’s perfume, but had been worn by a guest. It was a tiny discovery and, having made it, Pam decided it was of no importance; that it was not even a discovery. Because the perfume had probably been worn by a chambermaid while she was cleaning up the room. Pam went over, satisfied, and stood beside Jerry, behind Bill Weigand.

  “Find anything, Pam?” Bill said, without looking up from the letter he was reading.

  “No,” Pam said. “Except that she didn’t wear perfume after all. It was a maid. Or somebody who came to see her. And she had indigestion. There are some powders in the medicine cabinet to be taken after meals. And there’s nothing much in her purse.”

  There had been more in it, Bill told her. One other object—a folding aluminum cup.

  “You mean,” Pam said, “one of those things made of rings that catch on each other? They always leak and I haven’t seen one for ages. I thought they went out when paper cups came in.”

  He meant that kind of a cup, Bill told her. He had not seen one for a long time either. But Miss Gipson had had one in her purse and it was now in the police laboratory, because—

  “Bill!” Pam said, “Jerry! To take her medicine in when she was away from home. After meals. Two hours after meals. But tonight she was a little late. Only not late enough.”

  Bill Weigand put down the letter and turned to look at her and Jerry looked at her too. Then the two men looked at each other. Bill got up.

  “In the medicine cabinet?” he said, and was already across the room to the bathroom door. He came out holding in a handkerchief the cardboard box of medicine, and they opened it on the coffee table. It was half-filled with folded papers. He opened the paper nearest the front of the box and sniffed the powder it held. He looked a little disappointed.

  “Smells like medicine,” he said. “Not like sodium fluoride. But it is a little greenish.”

  He answered the enquiry in their looks. Sodium fluoride, he said, was colored green in accordance with a requirement of the State law, to minimize the risk of confusing it with some harmless powder—as once, in another state, it had been confused with baking powder with tragic results.

  “What’s it for, anyway?” Jerry asked, and Pam and Bill Weigand answered almost at once: “Roaches.”

  “That, by the way,” Bill said, “was how we got on to Purdy—the guy Miss Gipson was reading about. The Purdys didn’t have roaches. He’d forgotten that when he arranged for an accident to happen to his wife. The whole building had been fumigated about a week before they moved in—and they had just moved in when Mrs. Purdy died. Mr. Purdy would have had a spot of trouble explaining that when we sprung it on him at the trial. It was something we had up our sleeves.”

  As he talked, he opened another folded slip of paper and sniffed its contents. He shook his head and tried a third and shook his head again. Then he refolded the powder into the paper containers and put them back in the box.

  “We need a chemist for this,” he said. “It seems to be medicine. But—”

  “But the one she took tonight needn’t have been,” Pam said. “Somebody could have filled one of these folders with poison and left it for her to take. Putting it in front, of course, where she would be sure to take it.”

  “Would she?” Jerry said.

  Pam thought she would. She thought that Miss Gipson had done all things in due order and that, with folders of digestive powder—if it was digestive powder—filed neatly in a box she would as neatly have removed them, starting from the front.

  “In character,” Pam said. “But as a matter of fact, almost anybody would. It’s the natural way to do it. So if somebody wanted Miss Gipson to die tonight, he would put a folder of sodium fluoride in front of the folders of medicine in the box and be pretty sure she would take it with her when she went out. Only—”

  Only, Jerry pointed out, she might have carried a day’s supply with her at a time. Or she might take them only irregularly; only when she needed them.

  “But,” he said, “there is nothing to indicate that it made any difference precisely when she died, is there Bill?”

  Weigand, still looking at the box, shook his head. He said there was very little at the moment to indicate more than that Amelia Gipson was dead of poison and that, unless she had lied as the last action of her life, she had not killed herself.

  “But,” he said, “it’s quite possible that somebody did put a folder of sodium fluoride in with Miss Gipson’s medicine, figuring that she would take it sooner or later. If someone could get into the apartment and find the medicine—and knew she took it—it wouldn’t be too difficult. And—”

  “The perfume!” Pam said. “That’s where it came from. The murderer was wearing it. Which narrows things down to women, or almost.”

  “Almost?” Jerry repeated, and then, when Pam looked at him, said, “Oh.”

  “Either reading,” Pam told him.

  Bill urged her to keep it simple. He reminded her of Inspector O’Malley.

  “Say it was a woman,” he said. “And don’t bank too much on the theory. It may have been the maid who cleaned up the room.”

  “Then,” Pam said, “somebody’s going to have to smell the maids. Not me. It was too embarrassing, before.”*

  Bill Weigand agreed, without excitement. He said he would have it checked. Tomorrow. Not by Pam North.

  “But,” she said, “how will somebody else know? That it’s the same, I mean, or isn’t, without smelling it. It won’t last forever here, you know.”

  “One of us will have to remember the scent,” he told her. “I’ll have the boys bring in samples, if necessary. There probably aren’t very many maids. They probably haven’t been able to get very many maids.”

  “All right,” Pam said. “What else? Here?”

  There was, Weigand told her, a good deal else. Now he seemed more interested than he had before; it was as if he had been waiting to take up something more important. There were letters, he said. And bank records. He looked at Jerry curiously.

  “Did you get the idea she needed a job?” he said. “That she needed it to live on?”

  Jerry said he hadn’t got any particular idea about it. He sa
id that was the reason people usually got jobs. He added, thoughtfully, that he couldn’t think of any other good reason.

  “Well,” Bill said, “she didn’t need the job. For one thing, she had better than twenty thousand in a cash balance at the Corn Exchange. And three savings accounts each up to the seventy-five hundred maximum. And in addition she seems to have been custodian of a trust fund. Anyway she’s got a book of checks printed up for the Alfred Gipson Trust and she’s been signing as trustee. How much did you pay her, Jerry?”

  “Forty,” Jerry told him.

  Bill Weigand raised his shoulders and let them fall. There, his shoulders said, was that.

  “A discrepancy,” Pam amplified.

  Jerry said it was all of that. But Bill had picked up a small sheaf of letters.

  Jerry said he had been wondering. Then they got to the letters. Pam held out her hand and Bill Weigand picked one of the letters from the little sheaf and handed it to her. She read:

  “Dear Aunt Amelia: I’m not going to get down on my hands and knees any more about it. What you say you are going to do is wicked and barbaric—it’s no better than murder. It’s terrible that there are people like you in the world. You know I love Kennet—that I always loved him—that what you found out didn’t make any difference. I think you want to kill that—what’s between Kennet and me. Maybe you can. But don’t think I won’t try to stop you—every way there is.”

  The letter was signed only with a capital “N.” It was a kind of proud and flaunting “N.” The letter was written in a characteristic hand—decisive, clear; very vigorous and very young.

  “Well!” Pam said. “She didn’t like Aunt Amelia? Who is she?”

  Apparently, Bill said, she was Nora Gipson, Amelia Gipson’s niece. There was a reference to her in one of the other letters; a letter about the trust fund. Which did not, at the moment, seem to have any bearing. However—He handed Pam a second letter. It was written in a sloping, nervous hand that quavered a little. It was written also by a woman; by, if you accepted the heading on the letter paper, Mrs. Willard Burt. It addressed itself to “Dear Amelia” and went on:

  “You have made—somehow—a terrible mistake. You should know that what you think is impossible—if you really do think it. I keep feeling that I must have misunderstood you yesterday. It is the only thing I can think. That you could really imagine—dream—But I won’t go on.

  “Amelia, you used to know—in the old days—that you could trust me. Believe me, nothing has changed—I haven’t changed. You can trust me now as you used to—trust me when I tell you that there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in what you say.

  “Dear—I know this isn’t very coherent. But we can’t let things stay as they are. It isn’t safe—for either of us. Won’t you come and have lunch with me? On Thursday—here? I know if we can talk quietly I can make you understand how insanely wrong you are.”

  The letter was signed: “As ever, Helen.”

  Pam looked at the letter for a moment after she had finished it. Then, slowly, she read it again. Her face was puzzled.

  “I don’t understand it, do you?” she said. She might have been speaking to either of the men. “It’s—pathetic. And somehow frightening. Or was she—this Helen—just sort of hysterical—about something not really as important as she thinks?”

  Bill said he didn’t know. He said it was one of the things they would have to find out. As they would have to find out about Nora. About the perfumed woman who substituted poison for medicinal powders. About the peculiar discrepancy between Amelia Gipson’s apparently very comfortable financial situation and the forty-dollar-a-week job she had elected to take with North Books, Inc.

  “About the job,” Pam said. “Could she have found out something? About one of the old murders? Something that made her dangerous, even now?”

  Bill Weigand thought for a moment, and then emphasized the doubt on his face by shaking his head. He said he shouldn’t think so.

  “You don’t,” he pointed out, “make some new discovery about an old crime by reading what newspaper and magazine writers—or even book writers, Jerry—say about it. Because the police always know more; much more. You know that. More even than the official records. It’s in the minds of the men who have worked on the case—in their hunches—in what they’ve guessed from the look in somebody’s eyes, in the tones of voices. Stuff that isn’t written down. At best, people who write about old crimes have to rely on logic. And at best, logic isn’t enough. Not in this business.”

  Pam said she knew. She said there was no doubt he was right. She said it was only an interesting coincidence.

  “Anyway,” Jerry pointed out, “the murders she was working on are, with one or two exceptions, solved murders. And the exceptions—as I remember them—go a good ways back. Somebody wanted to do the Hall-Mills case again, and I couldn’t talk him out of it, although it’s been done to death. But I shouldn’t think Amelia would happen to stumble on a dangerous solution of that one. For one thing, almost everybody’s dead.”

  Bill Weigand broke it up. He said that, in any event, they were done there. For the moment. Tomorrow they would really do the apartment. Tomorrow they would—and he smiled at that—have the chambermaids smelled by an expert smeller. He stood up and the Norths went ahead of him out of the apartment. At the door, Weigand bent and examined the lock. He stood up and said that people were fools.

  “She’s had a special lock put on,” he said. “About half as good—as safe—as the one she had taken off, unless the builders skimped badly. I could open this one with a bent hairpin.”

  “Really?” Pam said, and looked at the lock in turn.

  “No,” Bill Weigand said. “Maybe not. But I could open it with a pick in a couple of minutes; an expert could do it in thirty seconds. And anybody, with a reasonable assortment of keys, would have a ten-to-one chance of simply walking in.”

  They went down the hall, and down to the desk in the lobby. Weigand telephoned the precinct for a man to stand by outside Miss Gipson’s apartment until the next day; he spoke briefly to the sleepy manager of the Holborn Annex. He arranged for the questioning, the next morning, of the maid who did the rooms on Miss Gipson’s floor; he discovered that maid service was optional with the tenants, and that by no means all of them wanted it, and that as a result there were only three women—one of them young, the other two middle-aged—employed regularly by the Annex. The younger woman did Miss Gipson’s room.

  He spoke about the lock, and the manager awakening shrugged and lifted his hands. He knew the lock Miss Gipson had insisted on having installed was inferior to the standard locks on the other apartment doors in the building. He had told her so; the man who installed the lock had told her so. But she had insisted; she had thought they were trying to talk her out of their trouble and expense. She had said it was nonsense to expect her to trust to a lock like hundreds of others, all openable with a master key.

  “How about the maid?” Weigand asked.

  “Naturally,” the manager said, “she had to have a key. Even Miss Gipson admitted that. But the key had to be kept at the desk—the girl had to get it each time she did the room and return it after she had finished. Miss Gipson checked up periodically.”

  “And the key was always to be accounted for?” Weigand asked.

  The manager smiled faintly. He said there had been a couple of times; he said Miss Gipson wanted them to fire the maid. He pointed out that it would have been much easier to replace Miss Gipson; there was a suggestion that he had, tactfully, conveyed this fact of post-war housing to her. He wanted to know, in that connection, when the apartment would be available for a new tenant.

  “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.”