by Frances
“Here,” Captain Florini said. He pointed to objects laid out on a table. “Out of the pockets. You want to give me a receipt, Lieutenant?”
Weigand gave him a receipt. Captain Florini put it in his pocket.
“In your lap, Weigand,” he said. “We’ll send the stuff through. You can have it.”
The tone was mildly pleased. Bill Weigand looked at him and waited.
“Merle,” Captain Florini said. “George Merle. As the sergeant says, very high class. They picked it up in the press room and AP local’s flashed it. You’ll have company, Lieutenant. Also, he was a friend of the commissioner’s. And of the mayor’s. And probably of the governor’s and for all I know of Mr. Big.”
He looked at Weigand and smiled.
“So there it is,” he said. “On a platter. Nothing in it for us precinct boys.”
Weigand’s face showed nothing. But his “Right” could be taken any way you chose. He crossed the little room to the table and looked down at the objects on it without touching them. Keys, a little pile of change, a notebook, a billfold which was comfortably swollen, a card case, a cigarette case, a silver lighter, two envelopes which had been slit open, a gold pocket watch, a case for glasses, a folding handkerchief, a fountain pen, two match folders, a folding checkbook in a case, a small pile of pieces of paper of anomalous purpose. He pulled a chair over and sat down.
“They haven’t been printed,” Florini told him.
“Right,” Weigand said.
He handled them gingerly, touching only edges and protuberances. The billfold first. Its bulge was attributable to tens and twenties, which Weigand did not count. There was a secondary bulge of identification cards and papers. There was an operator’s permit made out to George Merle of Elmcroft, Long Island; there was George Merle’s owner’s license for a Cadillac, 1942, convertible sedan. There was a sixty-trip commuter’s ticket to Elmcroft, if Mr. Merle’s gas ran out, but there was a folder of C gas coupons, so it probably wouldn’t. There were a number of cards which testified to Mr. Merle’s membership in a number of institutions. It looked as if the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle. The card case held engraved cards in two compartments, social and business. Unquestionably, the corpse had been that of Mr. George Merle—of George Merle, President, Madison Avenue Bank and Trust Company. Everything beautifully in hand, beautifully in order. Except for the three holes in Mr. Merle.
It was enough to go on with. He turned from the desk, and Captain Florini and the precinct men had gone. Weigand looked at Mullins and smiled slightly.
“Phooey,” Mullins said. “And double phooey.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “Coöperation, Mullins.”
He looked at the girl for the first time, although he had seen her from the first. She was sitting in a corner of a little sofa and she made herself small. She looked at him and her eyes were wide and shocked.
“Now,” Weigand said to her. “You found him? You’re”—he looked at a slip of paper from his pocket—“Mrs. Richard Hunter? This is your apartment?”
The girl opened her mouth to speak and her voice caught. She swallowed and said, “Yes.”
She was a pretty girl—slender, with blond hair cut boyishly but twisting slightly in a wave; her eyes were blue and she wore a dress of a paler blue. Just now she was pale; just now her eyes were wide and shocked. Her slender hands held tightly to one another and moved in a clenched embrace. Weigand noted but did not comment. A pretty, frightened girl. With a dead man in her apartment.
“You live here alone?” he said. It was hardly a question.
“Yes,” the girl said. “Did you get my message?”
“That Pam North told you to call me—me, personally? Yes. You know Pam?”
“No,” the girl said. “Not really. I met her and her husband at a party. I talked to her some. But they told, me about her—about her experience with—this sort of thing. About her knowing the police.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “You live here alone, Mrs. Hunter. Your husband is—away?”
You could guess her husband was away. Husbands of girls her age were mostly away.
“He’s—dead,” she said. “Rick was killed in the Pacific. It was in the papers, about him. He—.”
Bill Weigand said he remembered. He did remember. It had been memorable.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know, of course. So you do live here alone?”
Mary Hunter told him about that. As of yesterday—technically, if you preferred, as of Saturday. She had slept in the apartment the night before but only today was really moving in.
“They aren’t my things,” she said, looking around. “Nothing here is mine.” She paused. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know about any of it.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “You walked in and he was lying here. You’d never seen him before?”
She hesitated. After the hesitation she did not need to say she had seen him before.
“A long time ago,” she said, “I knew his son. Years ago, before I met Rick.”
“And you knew Mr. Merle, too?” Weigand said. It was a statement.
The girl nodded.
“He was Josh’s father,” she said. “I went there weekends a few times. That was the only way I knew him.”
Weigand looked at her, waiting.
“The only way,” she said. “I know how it looks and—.”
“It’s just a coincidence?” Weigand said.
“It’s got to be,” the girl said. “I haven’t seen him in—oh, for a long time. Except—.”
She stopped and Weigand waited.
“Not for a long time,” she said. “Two years, anyway. I think Rick and I ran into him once at a restaurant somewhere. That’s all.”
It was all for now, anyway, Weigand decided. He asked her to tell him about finding the body.
She had, she said, come home with some things and walked into the hall and there he was. You could see him from the hall. He had fallen in full view from the hall—on a straight line. And she had dropped the package.
“And screamed?” Weigand said.
“Yes,” the girl said. “I must have. But I don’t remember.”
“And recognized him?” Weigand said.
The girl nodded, without speaking. She had a fine head, Weigand noticed.
“And then,” Bill Weigand said, “you called Mrs. North. Why?”
“Because—I told you,” the girl said. “I had met her and they said she—”
“No,” Bill said. “I mean why did you call her? Instead of the police. How did you happen to think of calling her first? When you’d met her only casually, and knew only casually that she knew me. She’s not a policewoman, you know. And her husband isn’t a detective. They’re just friends of mine.”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I guess I thought they were detectives. Private detectives or something.”
“He publishes books,” Weigand said. “Didn’t you gather that, at the party? When people were talking about them? And she—oh, works for the Navy League and things like that. Who told you they were detectives?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Hunter said. “Maybe I didn’t think they were really detectives. I—I just thought of them.”
Bill Weigand let it lie. He let it lie heavily.
“When did you recognize Mr. Merle?” he asked, after a moment. “When did you know it was somebody you knew? From the first?”
“No,” the girl said. “Not from the first. Not until I went in and—and looked. Closely. Then I recognized him.”
“And you didn’t scream,” Weigand said. “Or did you.”
“I must have,” she said. “I—I was frightened. And—I guess horrified.”
Weigand looked at Mullins. Mullins shook his head.
“Not according to the guy on the elevator,” Mullins said. “He’d just brought her up. He says he would have heard her and he says he didn’t.”
“Would he have heard you, Mrs. Hunter?” Weigand asked
. “If you had screamed?”
The girl shook her head and said she didn’t know.
“How can I tell?” she said. “What difference does it make?”
“Well,” Bill Weigand said, “look at it this way. Here you are, a young woman coming home with things for dinner. You walk into your apartment and a man is lying dead on the floor. With blood around him. Why wouldn’t you scream?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said.
“You wouldn’t scream if he were still alive,” Bill pointed out. He spoke softly. “Now would you, Mrs. Hunter? If he were—just standing there and you recognized him.”
“And then shot him,” the girl said. “Is that what you mean?” She paused. “And I suppose the elevator man would have heard a scream, but wouldn’t have heard three shots?”
Weigand smiled. His smile was not friendly.
“Not if he had gone on down,” he said. “If there had been—say two or three minutes intervening. As probably there would have been.”
“Wherever he was, he would have heard shots,” the girl insisted.
Weigand shook his head.
“The trouble with that is that he didn’t,” he told her. “I don’t know why, but he didn’t. He thinks he wouldn’t if he were four floors down, or if he did would mistake the sound for a truck backfiring. In any case, he didn’t. And shots were fired. Obviously.”
The girl showed spirit.
“Not by me,” she said.
“Right,” Weigand said. “It’s all a coincidence. You rent an apartment, a man you used to know picks it to walk into, somebody else shoots him. You’re not connected at all.”
“I don’t care how it sounds,” Mary Hunter said. But there was desperation in her voice. “Mrs. North will—”
“Mrs. North,” Bill Weigand said, “is a very charming young woman who does work for the Navy League and is married to a man who publishes books. She is not—”
“Bill,” Pam North said from the door. “How nice of you. Are we late?”
Bill looked at her and beyond her at Jerry. He said, “Hullo, you.” He said no, they weren’t late.
“It’s nice to be charming,” Pam said. “Where’s the body?”
“In the morgue,” Bill said. “Where would it be?”
“I don’t know,” Pam said. “As you were saying, I’m not a detective. Hello, Mrs. Hunter. This is Bill Weigand.”
“We’ve met,” the girl said. “He thinks I did it. He thinks because I called you I—.” She stopped.
“Yes,” Pam said. “I wondered about that too. It wasn’t wise of you, if you didn’t do it. Or, if you did.” She paused and looked from Mary Hunter to Bill Weigand and back again. “Not that we’re not interested,” she said. “This is Jerry.”
She gestured over her shoulder.
“Aren’t we, darling,” she said.
“Oh,” Jerry North said. “Very, of course. How do you do, Mrs. Hunter?”
The Norths seemed to have animated her.
“Terribly,” she said. “Your friend thinks I killed the old—Mr. Merle.”
“The old what?” Pam said. She sounded interested.
The girl flushed.
“The old boy,” she said. “Not what you think. Josh used to call him that and I—I did too. Because Josh did. Josh is his son, you know.”
“Look,” Jerry said, “we don’t even know who got killed, or anything. Perhaps we’d better just go along and—.”
Pam shook her head at him. She turned to Bill and said, “All right, Bill.” Bill looked at Sergeant Mullins.
“O. K., Loot,” Mullins said. “Sooner or later. Hullo, Mrs. North. Mr. North. They’ll want to know.”
Weigand looked at the Norths.
“Yes,” he said. He said it with a certain inflection.
Mrs. North crossed the room and sat on the sofa with Mary Hunter. “All right,” she said. Jerry still stood inside the door.
Weigand told them, economically, what he knew. He was impartial about Mary, telling what she had said. He told about the scream which was not screamed. When he had finished, Pam North’s forehead was wrinkled. She looked at Mary Hunter and waited.
“I don’t know,” Mary said. “I seem to remember screaming, but maybe I merely screamed in—in my mind, sort of. If the old man was where he would have heard me, and says I didn’t, then I didn’t. Maybe I’m not the screaming type. I didn’t scream when I—when I heard about Rick.”
“Nobody knows, Bill,” Pam North pointed out, looking at him. “Although if I came in and saw—what she saw—I’d scream. Wouldn’t I, Jerry?”
“For the record,” Jerry said, “you didn’t. When it was in the bathtub. You just kind of made sounds—it was a kind of incredulous moan. But of course, it wasn’t our bathtub.”*
“Didn’t I?” Pam said. “I thought—. You see how it could have been, Bill. And where’s the gun?”
Bill Weigand said he didn’t know. He added that there had been time enough to do something with a gun.
“Such,” Pam said, “as what? What do you do with a gun? Mary hasn’t got a gun. Or have you?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “In my trunk. Under things. It was Rick’s and when he left he—left it with me.”
“Is it?” Pam asked, of Bill Weigand.
It was the first he had heard of it, Bill told her. They were in at the beginning.
“I could—” Mary began, but Bill shook his head. He nodded to Mullins and Mullins held out his hand. Mary Hunter found her keys and gave them to Mullins and pointed at a key and at the trunk. It was a steamer trunk and Mullins unpacked it methodically, thinking that women certainly needed a lot of underwear. He got to the bottom and looked at Bill and said, “No.”
“Well,” Weigand said, “there we are. No. Well, Mrs. Hunter?”
The slender girl with the short blond hair merely looked blank. She did not, so far as Bill Weigand could tell, look frightened.
“Then I don’t know,” she said. “I thought it was. I never used it.” She paused. “For anything,” she said. “Not since Rick—taught me to use it. I must have put it in something I stored.”
“Anyway,” Pam said, “she didn’t have it today.”
“Why?” said Jerry.
“Where?” said Pam. “I mean—where? In with the groceries? In a holster? Where?”
Jerry looked at the girl in the close-fitting blue dress. He saw what Pam meant. He looked at Bill Weigand. Bill shook his head.
“Obviously,” he said, “if we decided she didn’t find the body as she says, then we don’t need to believe anything she says. It may have been—oh, in the icebox with the soda and she may have gone out ostensibly to mix a drink and come back with it. And she may—hell, she may have thrown it out the window.”
He broke off and looked at Mary Hunter who merely looked back, with an expression which was half shrug.
“Drop that, for the moment,” Bill said. “We can only guess until we look. The boys will look.”
They could, he said, take up something else. She had rented the apartment on Sunday, day before yesterday. She had moved in—when? Yesterday afternoon? Very well, she had moved in yesterday afternoon, and everything was ordinary and routine. Right?
“Yes,” the girl said.
“Who did you rent the apartment from?” Weigand asked. “An agent?”
The girl shook her head.
“A man I knew,” she said. “A man I used to know in—in an office.”
She hesitated and they all noticed it.
“What office?” Bill Weigand said.
Mary Hunter wanted to know what difference it made.
“I don’t know,” Bill told her. “Apparently it makes a difference. To you.” He stopped a moment and looked at her.
“Listen, Mrs. Hunter,” he said. “I’m not trying to trap you. I’m not trying to do anything but find out the facts. If you didn’t kill Merle, don’t make me drag facts out of you. If you did—well, if you did, there’s the tele
phone. Call a lawyer.”
He waited as if he expected her to cross the room to the telephone. She did not move.
“All right,” she said. “It was at the bank. Mr. Merle’s bank. Right after Rick went away I—I had to find something to do. Everybody was working at something. It wasn’t much of a job, because I couldn’t do anything.” She paused. “But I can now,” she said. “I’m a secretary now. I went to school.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “Go on.”
“Mr. Murdock worked there,” she said. “He was sort of an assistant to Mr. Merle. Like a—like a secretary, but not a stenographic secretary. That was—oh, a year and a half ago. Right after Rick went. When I—heard about Rick I didn’t go back. I didn’t want to go anywhere.”
She paused, as if waiting. Nobody said anything.
“I don’t have to work,” she said. “For the money, that is. Father left me some money.”
There was another pause and she did not go on.
“Right,” Weigand said, after they had waited. “Now about the apartment. You had kept in touch with this—Murdock, did you say? And you asked him if he knew anybody who had an apartment to rent?”
The girl shook her head. She said it hadn’t been that way, exactly. She had run into Murdock quite by accident and he had asked what she was doing and she had said she had a new job, beginning Monday.
“That was last week,” she said. “Yesterday was the Monday I meant. And he said, ‘You don’t want a new apartment to go with it, do you?’ And I said I might, and did he know of one. He said he was just moving and wanted to sublet his and that I could have it Sunday if I wanted it. And I went and looked at it and it was all right, because of the way I wanted to live for a while. And so—this is it.” She paused and half smiled.
“Only,” she said, “it isn’t the way I planned.”
Under other circumstances, Pam thought, Mary Hunter would be gay. As she must have been gay with Rick, from the way her voice changed when she spoke of him. Not, Pam decided, that she wasn’t getting over that, in a way.
Bill Weigand did not appear to notice Mary’s last remark.
“So until day before yesterday, this apartment belonged to a man named Murdock,” he said. “Any first name?”
“Oscar,” Mary said. “Mr. Merle called him Ozzie, but his name was Oscar. On the roster. Oh!”