Death on the Aisle

by Frances

  Evans said he’d like to get his hands on the guy who did it. Weigand said they would try to do that for him.

  “Meanwhile,” he said, “you take it easy here. You’re perfectly safe.”

  Weigand, remembering another man who had not been perfectly safe in a hospital, felt a slight qualm. But, after all, there were men on guard, this time. And it was, or seemed to as city-bred a man as Weigand, easier to protect people in New York than in a little town like Brewster.

  Not, Weigand told himself, that Evans was not in some danger. The person who pushed could not have been absolutely sure he was not recognized. Therefore, he must have thought that Evans was dead or, alternatively, must have been planning to go back later and see that he was dead. Weigand would pass the word around that Evans did not know his assailant, which might help. Or might, if murderers are, like detectives, always suspicious, fail to convince the person who had tried to end Mr. Evans.

  Weigand wondered which of his suspects would be most likely to mistake an unconscious man for a dead man, and after wondering shrugged his shoulders. Almost any of them, he decided. Unless one or more had special experience of which he, at present, knew nothing.

  “You’ll be all right, now,” he told Evans, standing up. “I’m leaving a man to see that nobody bothers you. Later, perhaps, we’ll try to—”

  He didn’t finish. A nurse came in quickly. Weigand was wanted on the telephone, urgently, by a Detective Stein. He was to hurry.

  Weigand said “Right,” and hurried.

  XI

  TUESDAY—10:55 P.M. TO 11:35 P.M.

  Bill Weigand stared down at Ellen Grady’s body and felt, as Mullins had felt before him, that curious, impersonal sense of loss, being for a moment all men lamenting the destruction of loveliness. He said nothing and turned away and went back into the bedroom, in which men were working.

  “All right,” Lieutenant Weigand said to one of them. “Get your pictures. And where the hell do you suppose the M.E.’s man has got to?”

  The question was rhetorical, and the police photographer acknowledged its existence by a routine shake of the head. He said, “Come on, Joe,” and Joe went on, with flashlight bulbs. The bulbs began to flash in the bathroom. Weigand stood a moment watching the fingerprint men, who needed no advice from him and were covering everything diligently, and went out into the living room. Mullins was there, and a uniformed policeman stood at the door, and Pam North, looking very small and a little dazed, sat in a chair.

  “Jeez, Loot,” Mullins said.

  “Right,” Weigand told him. “A hell of a note.”

  “Bill!” Pam said. “It’s dreadful. She was so—so lovely. And she would have been like that for a long time yet. And—”

  “Right, Pam,” Bill Weigand said. “Don’t think about it. Try not to, anyway. We’ll—hello, Doc. You’re early, aren’t you?”

  Dr. Francis stared at him, haughtily. Then he looked at Mrs. North.

  “Well,” he said, doubtfully. “You again.”

  “Doctor!” Pam’s voice was protesting. “Don’t say it like that! You make it sound—”

  Dr. Francis of the Medical Examiner’s office said he was sorry.

  “However—” he added, vaguely. He let it ride.

  “And as for being early—there wasn’t anybody ahead of you this time, Lieutenant.” He stared at Weigand. “You certainly have ’em, don’t you, Bill?”

  Weigand nodded, not pleased.

  “All right,” Dr. Francis said, in resignation. “Where’s this one? Somebody said in the bathtub?”

  Weigand motioned him toward the bedroom. Dr. Francis followed the gesture. Weigand looked down at Pam.

  “Did you see anything, Pam?” he asked. Pam merely looked at him. “So you did,” he said. “What was it, Pam?”

  Mrs. North said she didn’t know whether it meant anything. But it was funny.

  “The shoe?” Weigand suggested. “On the bench?”

  Pam looked at him in honest surprise.

  “Why, no,” she said. “What’s funny about that? She just dropped it as she was passing, because it was still in her hand after she had pulled it off. Or she was standing on one foot to take it off and put it down on the bench to catch her balance. Or any number of things. There’s nothing funny about that.”

  Weigand merely waited. Mrs. North seemed to hesitate a moment. Then she said probably it was nothing.

  “Only,” she said, “I wondered where her dress was, didn’t you? I mean, you could see the other things she took off and just threw around, but there wasn’t any dress.”

  Weigand’s mind re-pictured the room. He nodded.

  “I remember,” he said. “No, there wasn’t any dress. But wouldn’t she have hung it up in the closet?”

  Pam looked at him, and he could see she was puzzled.

  “Well,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought so. She didn’t hang things up—left that for the maid, probably. She just threw things. Did you see the negligee?”

  “Yes,” Weigand said.

  “Well,” Pam said, “the dress she had on this afternoon was nice—green, but a nice green and from a good shop. But it was just something she wore to rehearsals. And the negligee was ever so much nicer, and it looked new and she didn’t bother with it. So why did she hang up the dress? I’d have thought that, at the most, she would have tossed it on the chair, or on the bed. But it’s hung up.”

  “Is it?” Weigand said. “You looked.”

  Pam nodded. She said to come on and she’d show him. She led him into the bedroom and to the door which opened beside the bathroom door. It was closed.

  “It was closed before,” Pam said, in response to Weigand’s unspoken enquiry. “I opened it.”

  Weigand said, “Oh.” Then he said, generally to the fingerprint men, that one set of prints they would find would be Mrs. North’s. He opened the door, using a handkerchief to protect the knob. Pam watched him.

  “That’s just what I did,” she said, mildly. “So there won’t be a set of Mrs. North’s prints, Lieutenant.”

  One of the fingerprint men laughed and swallowed it. Weigand said he was glad to see Pam was advancing. A light came on in the closet as the door opened and Weigand and Pam looked in. Pam pointed to a green dress.

  “There,” she said. “That’s the one she was wearing.”

  The dress was hanging on a hanger. Weigand looked at it. He said it was a little odd, come to think of it. Pam said she thought it was. Not just the dress, but the belt. Weigand said, “What belt?” and looked again. Pam said that apparently he hadn’t seen it, after all. She pointed.

  “Buckled,” she said. “The dress is hung up, which is odd. And then, instead of just letting the belt dangle the way anybody would—the way even a neat person would and she wasn’t—she buckles the belt together across the front. And that’s very odd. Isn’t it?”

  Weigand looked at the dress and nodded slowly.

  “You’re sure it’s the same dress?” he said. Pam merely looked at him. Weigand said that, as far as that went, he was fairly sure himself.

  “Of course,” he said, “it may have been a dress she was particularly fond of.”

  Pam looked at him again and shook her head.

  “Actresses don’t wear dresses they’re particularly fond of to rehearsals,” she said. “Do they?”

  They might, Weigand thought.

  “Supposing there was some man attending the rehearsals they wanted to impress,” he said.

  “Your numbers are funny,” Pam said. “Or is it tenses? They always are when it’s about collectives, aren’t they?”

  “What?” said Weigand. “Oh—I see what you mean. Don’t quibble, Pam.”

  Pam said she was sorry, and that it wasn’t really quibbling.

  “I keep thinking of—in there,” she said, looking at the bathroom and quickly away again. “It keeps my mind off. But I think the dress is important—oh!”

  “Oh what?” Weigand wanted to know.r />
  Pam said it was oh nothing, really. She’d just thought. Bill Weigand waited, but she said nothing more.

  “If you’ve thought of something, Pam,” he said, “you really ought—”

  Then Dr. Francis came out.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s classic. But I never actually saw it before. All the same Mr. Smith and the brides of Bath.”

  Weigand said he’d be damned and Mrs. North said, “What Mr. Smith?”

  There had been a Mr. Smith in England, he told her, who married and insured his wives and drowned them in bathtubs. He had drowned several before the police began to notice the coincidences, and even then it was a little hard to prove that Mr. Smith had not merely run into a series of nasty accidents.

  “People are fairly helpless in bathtubs,” Weigand pointed out. “If you move suddenly—pull on their legs, push down on their shoulders. They drown. I gather Miss Grady drowned, Doc.”

  Dr. Francis nodded.

  “And,” he said, “there’s a bump on the back of her head. Probably she bumped it against the back of the tub when she was jerked down into the water. She’d be apt to. And it may have been enough to make her a little groggy, which would make it easier. Or maybe whoever did it grabbed her hair first, and banged her head on the tub, and then jerked. Anyway, she’s drowned. She floated up a little—the weight of her body in the sloping tub brought her head up, after she was dead. I don’t think the autopsy will show anything else.”

  Dr. Francis stopped and looked at Weigand as if he were just seeing him.

  “Pretty, wasn’t she?” he said. “Seems a pity, somehow.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “It does indeed. And by the way—”

  “About the other one,” Dr. Francis said, preceding him. “We’ve just started on him, but he died of a stab wound in the back of the neck—punctured the cord. And he’d eaten about an hour or so before. Was that what you wanted?”

  Weigand said it was.

  “Well,” Dr. Francis said, “send this one along and we’ll go through it. And find it was a case of drowning in slightly soapy water. And then we’ll know as much as we do now.”

  Dr. Francis went out into the living room.

  “And try,” he called back, “not to have any more tonight, huh?”

  Weigand said they’d try. He and Mrs. North followed into the living room. Weigand told Mullins he wanted the doorman. The doorman was procured. He said he was John Smith.

  “Huh?” said Mullins, incredulously. “What do you think you’re …” He stopped, because Weigand was shaking his head at him.

  “Somebody has to be,” Weigand told Mullins. “It’s the law of averages.” He looked at Smith. “I suppose?” he said. Smith nodded. He said, suddenly, that it was no fun, if they wanted to know.

  “Nobody believes it,” he said. He seemed resigned to fate.

  “Well,” Weigand told him, “remember the man who was really John Doe. And the draft board wouldn’t believe it and the Army wouldn’t believe it. Very upsetting to Mr. Doe. Now …”

  Now, Weigand wanted to know, what about Miss Grady’s maid? Was there one, and when, and where was she?

  The maid, John Smith explained, was part of the house service, if a tenant wanted a maid, and Miss Grady did. Miss Grady wanted very complete service—breakfast late in the morning, apartment cleaning, some laundry work. Maggie was the maid assigned.

  “Maggie?” Weigand repeated. “Maggie what?”

  Smith didn’t know. It would be on the records. As far as he was concerned, merely Maggie. She had been there that day and finished about four o’clock. Smith had been standing in front of the building and seen her come out the service entrance and had said goodnight to her and watched her go down the street.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Now—who visited Miss Grady later? This evening, I mean after she came in. Did you see her come in, by the way?”

  Smith had. She had come in a few minutes before seven and spoken to him. She had come by cab and gone straight to her apartment. That was, say, about 6:45.

  “And—?” Weigand said.

  After that, Smith said—about half an hour after that—a man came to see Miss Grady.

  “Mr. Ahlberg,” Smith said.

  “So,” Weigand said. “Mr. Ahlberg. Do you know him?”

  Smith did. And, also, Mr. Ahlberg had had himself announced. Miss Grady hadn’t sounded much as if she wanted to see him, when Smith talked to her on the house telephone, but had said, finally: “Oh, all right, send him up.” Ahlberg had gone up.

  “And when did he come down again?” Weigand wanted to know.

  Smith looked puzzled.

  “Come to think of it,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him come down at all.”

  “But you would have seen him?” Weigand insisted.

  Smith started to nod, and then shook his head.

  “I might have,” he said. “But then I might not.”

  He explained. The elevator was automatic, operated by the passengers. And Smith had not been uninterruptedly in the lobby or on the sidewalk.

  “A couple or three times,” he said, “people wanted cabs and there weren’t any at the stand. Then I went up to the avenue and flagged one. He could’ve come out one of those times.”

  He did not know when the times were.

  “And,” Weigand said, “anybody who wanted to could have come in while you were out after a cab, got in the elevator and gone up to the Grady apartment. Right?”

  Smith admitted it was.

  “Did you see anybody else?” Weigand went on.

  “Yes,” Smith said. “There was a girl came in and said she was going to see Miss Grady. Said not to bother to announce her, and I had some people coming out who wanted a taxi and—well …”

  “You let her go,” Weigand said. “Although you are supposed to announce everybody. Right?”

  “All right,” Smith said. “Suppose I did? Mostly people don’t mind. And if they have to wait for a cab they do mind.”

  “And,” Weigand explained further, “if you get them a cab you get a tip. Right?”

  “All right,” Smith said. “So what, Captain?”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “I wish you hadn’t, this time. But you couldn’t know, of course. What did the girl look like?”

  She had been a pretty girl, slight and with brown hair—sorta light brown hair—hanging down almost to her shoulders, and no hat and large eyes and—

  “She looked like a million,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s partly why I didn’t stop her.”

  Weigand nodded slowly, thinking of the only girl he had seen in recent hours who matched the description of the attentive Mr. Smith. So Alberta James had also visited Miss Grady during the last hour or so that Miss Grady was alive. Weigand heard Pam say “Oh,” in a small, hurt voice beside him. Weigand discovered, a little to his surprise, that he felt much as Mrs. North sounded. The male, encroaching on the policeman, hoped for an instant that another attractive female was not going to be wasted.

  Smith seemed to know nothing more. He went back to the lobby. Mullins looked after him, and then looked at Weigand.

  “You know, Loot,” he said, “it’s pretty near got to be a dame. Maybe not this James dame, but a dame. Because she wouldn’t have let no guy—well, see her—(Mullins looked embarrassedly at Mrs. North)—well, nude sort of.”

  “Naked,” Pam said. “I wondered how soon you’d think of that, one of you.”

  Weigand smiled at her.

  “I’d thought of it, Pam,” he said. “Only—don’t be too innocent, you two. It could have been—”

  “Oh, of course,” Pam said, sounding rather cross with herself. “Her lover, of course. Some man she wouldn’t mind seeing her.” She paused. “Or really’d like to have,” she added, unexpectedly. Then she, in turn, looked embarrassed.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Or it needn’t even have been that. She wasn’t—well, strict. At least, I suppose she wasn’t. Her virtue
aside, I mean. She wouldn’t have minded, particularly if there was some man she wanted to see and knew pretty well and if she were in a hurry to dress and go out, if—” He paused, the sentence beyond him.

  “If he’d sat here in the living room, or even in the bedroom and talked through the door,” Pam finished for him. “Left open a crack so he could. Of course not.”

  “And then,” Weigand said, “if this man went in suddenly she might be surprised for a moment and not move and then—well, it would only need a moment.”

  “Of course,” Pam said. “So where are we? It could have been either a man or a woman. And it needn’t be either Mr. Ahlberg or Alberta, because anybody could have come in. And—and—”

  “Only,” Mullins said, “if it was Mr. Ahlberg, she’d have been dead when the James dame came and the James dame would have—noticed it. And said something. Wouldn’t she?”

  Pam thought a moment.

  “Unless,” she pointed out, “Mr. Ahlberg went first and pretended to leave when Alberta came and then went back and drowned Miss Grady. It could have been that way.”

  Weigand had almost stopped listening. But he broke in to tell them it was foolish to spend time guessing.

  “After all,” he said, “we can always ask questions; else what are policemen for?”

  Mrs. North was uncharacteristically silent on the ride back to the theatre. She sat beside Weigand in the back seat while Mullins, driving almost sedately with the Lieutenant to observe, coasted them along the lighted streets. She was so silent that Bill Weigand, conscious of her under his own thoughts, broke his own injunction against speculation.

  “What did she know, I wonder,” he said, half to himself. “What did she know or what had she seen? And who would Evans have seen if he had turned around?”