Payoff for the Banker

by Frances

  Bill stepped forward and squatted to look closely at the dangling right hand. After a moment, he touched it lightly. He stood up, unconsciously wiping his fingers on his handkerchief. He looked puzzled.

  “Would it?” Pam said.

  Slowly, Bill shook his head.

  “Some time or other,” he said, “Murdock had a broken wrist. It wasn’t set quite properly—it’s what they call a silver-fork deformity. He had practically full use of it, probably, and the malformation isn’t very visible. But—”

  “But,” Pam said, “he couldn’t bend it the normal distance forward, could he, Bill?” She turned to Jerry quickly. “You remember Cousin Willard, Jerry?”

  “Vividly,” Jerry said.

  “All right,” Pam said. “Anyway you like—at the moment. He had a wrist like that. He broke it cranking a car. A Chevrolet. The battery didn’t work. And he couldn’t make it go forward properly.”

  “Not even by crank—” Jerry began and stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see what you mean. The wrist. Not the Chevrolet.”

  Pam said, “Of course.

  “And,” she said, “to hold a revolver up against the middle of your forehead the way Murdock did, you’d have to have your wrist go forward—your hand go forward, I mean. At right angles to your arm. And Willard’s wouldn’t.”

  The two men looked at each other. After a moment, Jerry half smiled.

  “Even if you moved your head toward the gun,” he said. “It would be possible, I suppose. But it would be—well, Pam’s word fits, Bill. Awkward.”

  Bill nodded slowly.

  “Damned awkward,” he said. He smiled, not cheerfully. “In more ways than one,” he said. “I just told the inspector Murdock had finished himself off and saved us the trouble. He won’t like it if Murdock didn’t. Particularly if—.”

  He reached quickly for the telephone; talked quickly into it. Then he talked more slowly and listened longer. A rumbling noise, to which the Norths paid careful inattention, came from the receiver. After a considerable time, and as there was a firm knock on the door, Weigand put the telephone back in its cradle.

  “He’s already told the reporters,” Bill said, sadly. “He doesn’t like it at all. All right, boys.”

  The boys came. They came with cameras and fingerprint blanks and a general air of competence. A hospital intern came with them, looked at the body from a distance, said, “D.O.A.,” and wrote the same in a notebook and went away. The men of the Homicide Squad moved around the room, not touching the body. Flashbulbs flared and cameras peered down at angles on the body of Oscar Murdock. An assistant medical examiner came with a black bag, looked the body over without opening the bag, said they could send it along.

  “Looks like suicide,” he said, contentedly.

  “Doesn’t it?” Bill Weigand said, without content.

  The Homicide fingerprint men took over the body. They rolled the fingers one by one on a pad and on numbered slips of paper.

  “Of course,” Jerry said, “he could have used his thumb. Or his left hand.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Or his big toe. If he used his left hand, why did he drop the gun with his right? And the prints aren’t going to show he used his thumb.”

  Bill Weigand was morose.

  “Look, Bill,” Pam North said. “It isn’t—well, conclusive. He could have done it.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “He could have done it—just like that. And somebody could have done it for him—held the revolver close to his head and pulled the trigger; bent his hand around the gun after wiping it. Not noticing Murdock’s wrist. And when we catch him, he’ll say Murdock could have done it, wrist or no wrist, and the doctors will have to say sure, he could have—it wasn’t physically impossible. It just wasn’t likely. And the jury will probably decide that that means a reasonable doubt and—the hell with it!”

  “Look, Bill,” Pam said. “You make it sound awful. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—to—what does Mullins say? Make it screwy. I just happened to notice.”

  Bill grinned at her.

  “Oh,” he said, “the truth above everything, Pam. Even if inconvenient. Only I wish you’d happened to notice before I called Art—Inspector O’Malley. However.”

  There was a pause, while they watched the busy men from Homicide.

  “Now what?” Pam said.

  “Now,” Jerry said, “you and I go home. Bill—what do you do, Bill?”

  Bill shook his head, abstractedly.

  “I,” he said, “spread it out and look at it. At home, I think.” He paused. “Tell you,” he said, “why don’t you and Pam drop around. We’ll give you a drink. We’ll put your little minds to work, too, probably. And we won’t tell the inspector, huh?”

  Pam looked suddenly surprised.

  “Of course,” she said. “We’ve got to. That’s why we came here in the first place, Bill. To get you so we could tell you why Mary Hunter hated Mr. Merle. And this—this put it out of our heads. Didn’t it, Jerry?”

  8

  TUESDAY, 10:45 P.M. TO WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 12:35 A.M.

  The early editions of the tabloids were full of the story. The Mirror thought it more important than the war and its front page blared: “Banker Slain in Girl’s Flat!” The News had had, one could suspect, a short, unhappy struggle with its conscience. War remained dominant. But the untimely death of George Merle captured the third page and was complete with diagram, including an outline drawing of Merle’s sprawled body. It was the body of a man, and it was clothed, but it was after all a body. There was an inset cut of Mary Hunter and in the caption the News asked itself a question. “Why,” the News inquired, “did millionaire banker visit pretty widow of Naval hero?” The News did not reply, but it managed to smirk slightly. There, its story indicated—its story in double column, with appropriately double authorship—there was a question it could answer, and it would.

  But whatever lay between the lines, the lines themselves were irreproachable and naive. Mr. Merle had been a banker of great wealth and, as was natural under circumstances so auspicious, almost notorious probity. He was indefatigable in good works; he was at once devout and philanthropic, as much vestryman as company director. It was inconceivable that anyone could have wished him ill and, so wishing him, planted three .38 calibre slugs in his chest. The News was chagrined at what the world was coming to, even while it gloated over what had come to Page 3. It had even managed a hurried editorial in which, with the dexterity of long practice, it indicated without precisely saying so—without, indeed, precisely saying anything whatever—that the tragedy reported on Page 3 was only what one could expect in a country which, for three Presidential terms, had seethed with deliberately fanned class hatred. “Is This A Warning?” the News asked itself, editorially. It seemed to the News that probably it was.

  The Norths scanned the papers as the Buick, sedate now and obedient to traffic signals, ambled toward the Weigand apartment in the Murray Hill district. They scanned them in glimpses under street lights, and they read Bill Weigand excerpts from time to time. Between excerpts, Bill switched the radio to the broadcast band and a bell rang. The Times told in measured sentences of the world at war. At the end it admitted a minor note. “The police have just announced,” the Times said, “the suicide of Oscar Murdock, business associate of the late George Merle, who was questioned earlier this evening in connection with Mr. Merle’s murder this afternoon in a Madison Avenue apartment.” The Times did not amplify and returned to the headline war news for the benefit of any who, not punctual to his hourly rendezvous with history, might have tuned in late. The Times let the implications lie as they would, which was heavily.

  Weigand stopped the Buick in front of the apartment and flicked off the radio. He sat for a moment, a little wrinkle in his forehead, and then moved quickly. He led the Norths into the building and the elevator; he led them into his own apartment on the fifth floor. He did not even pause for more than a smile at Dorian, looking up suddenly from the draw
ing pad in her lap, turning suddenly in her chair as Pam North said something to Jerry—something to indicate presence on the scene and the intrusion of outsiders. Pam North deeply believed, not without evidence, that there was no telling what married people would say to each other when they thought they were alone. She remembered one time—She put the memory back in safe-keeping and thought of other things.

  Bill was at the telephone. Already he was talking crisply to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley. The crispness showed through the politeness.

  “Right,” he said. “Then you haven’t told them different? It’s still suicide?” He waited. “I know, Inspector,” he said. “I know. Yes, I should have. Yes.” He waited again. “The point is,” he said, “why not play it that way, now that we’ve gone this far? It will get the story out of our hair for a day or two. It looks as if we were supposed to think it was suicide. It looks—” He broke off, listening. His face looked tired. But when he managed to get in again his voice was not tired.

  “Right,” he said. “But here’s what I’d like to do, with the things the way they are. Let the killer think he’s fooled us. Let him think he’s pinned it on Murdock. Let him have his little laugh. Maybe he’ll be laughing so hard he won’t see us coming. And then we tell the newspaper boys sure, we planned it that way right along—a sp—a trap to catch woodcocks.”

  He paused and listened. He smiled slightly.

  “I know,” he said. “They’ll burrow under anything, Inspector.” He listened further. “That’s tough,” he said. “All of it? That’s sure tough.” He made faces over the telephone at the other three. His face straightened. “No,” he said, “they haven’t got much to do with it, Inspector.” The inspector rumbled.

  “Right,” he said. “I think you’ve got something there, Inspector. We’ll let it ride along as is for a while, anyway. And meantime I’ll keep on it. Right?” The telephone rumbled. “Right,” Bill said. He put the telephone down and looked at it. He looked up from it at his wife and the Norths.

  “The inspector thinks we’d better not tell the press it wasn’t suicide,” he reported gravely. “The inspector’s got an idea there’s no use telling the killer, how much we know.” He barely smiled. “He also,” he added, “thinks woodcocks are woodchucks. They’ve been eating his broccoli. How are all the pretty pictures?”

  The last was to Dorian Weigand. She showed him pretty pictures of tall girls in new clothes, pictures of tall girls in new clothes being Dorian Weigand’s occupation. Bill Weigand smiled at them blissfully, as one might smile at genius. Dorian looked over his bent head, her lips curled in a smile, her greenish eyes lively under long lashes.

  “I,” she said. “Think he’s sweet. Don’t you? He thinks I’m—oh, Cézanne.”

  Bill took hold of her head, ostensibly by the ears. He shook it slightly and let it go.

  “Why not?” he said. “You think I’m Sherlock.” He looked at her. “I hope,” he added.

  Pam North turned to Jerry.

  “Dr. Watson, I presume,” she said.

  Jerry agreed solemnly.

  “Of course, Mrs. Watson,” he said. “Fancy meeting us here.”

  “I’ll get you drinks,” Dorian promised, pushing Bill back so she could stand up. She walked across the room toward the kitchen and Bill looked at her with admiration. He looked at the Norths and did not hide his admiration. They smiled at him, agreeing. Nobody said anything. They sat down in familiar chairs and, by unspoken agreement, did not begin until Dorian came back with a tray. It was a big tray and she was not big, but she carried it easily, with grace. She mixed without orders, calling off—Pam, a little rye and lots of water; Jerry, some scotch and not so much water; Bill, scotch and soda. “Me, scotch and soda too, like Bill.” She smiled at him.

  “It was because he wouldn’t let her marry Josh,” Pam said, beginning in the middle. “Or Josh marry her, which is the same thing, of course. Because he hated her father, but she doesn’t know why. Mary Hunter, I mean.”

  “What was because of that, Pam?” Bill asked her, and Dorian looked from one to another, her eyes wide.

  “That was why she said, she said he ought to die,” Pam explained. “That’s why she’s so frightened. Because she said that to him, and then he did die. In her apartment.”

  Bill looked interested. He said, “Oh?” and looked at Jerry North. Jerry reached across the little space between their chairs and captured one of Pam’s hands. He said to let him tell it; let him, anyway, put a foundation under it. He told Dorian and Bill about the interview in the big house on Long Island between a slight girl in white and an implacable man behind a heavy desk. He told what had led up to that interview, as far as they knew it, and what came after.

  “She left after she said that—that about thinking George Merle ought to die,” he said. “She left without seeing Josh Merle. She went home and waited for him to call—waited for him to tell her it didn’t matter what his father said or what his father did—that nothing and nobody could stop their getting married. Only—well, the kid didn’t call. He didn’t call that night or the next day—he just never did call.”

  “And so,” Pam said, “she decided he cared most about the money and she wrote him a letter—one letter—saying—well, saying he cared most about the money. And he didn’t answer that. And that winter he went into the Navy as an aviation cadet after Pearl Harbor and quite a while later Mary met Rick Hunter and married him and he went off and got killed. Only I think she loved Josh all the time, except that of course she hated him too. And she hated his father, I guess.”

  Bill sat thinking it over, his face remote.

  “He just—dropped her?” he said. “When papa said no more dough? Just like that—is that what you gathered?”

  “Just like that,” Jerry told him.

  “Of course,” Pam said, “it doesn’t mean they didn’t meet again—things like that. I mean—oh, neither of them was walled up, or anything. They both kept on going around. I gather they met but—but not to talk to each other. Not really to talk.”

  “And if he had a side of it?” Bill said. “Just to get it straight.”

  “What side?” Pam wanted to know.

  Bill Weigand shrugged slightly. He pointed out that they didn’t know what Josh Merle’s father might have told Josh.

  “You make it sound—oh, like the cruel parent in something or other,” Pam said.

  So, Bill pointed out, did she. And, he added, cruel parents sometimes got killed. In stories.

  “And for that matter,” he added, “out of stories.”

  “For revenge?” Pam said. “Really, Bill.”

  “Even for revenge,” Bill told her. “For all kinds of reasons, people kill. But I wasn’t thinking of that—or, at any rate, not primarily of that. You could work it out another way.”

  “Could you?” Jerry said. “I don’t—.” He broke off. He broke off because Pam was looking at him and shaking her head.

  “Oh, yes, Jerry,” she said. “Oh, yes you could. We may as well admit it, even if it isn’t true. Because now she’s a widow.”

  Jerry said, “Oh.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Now she’s a widow—now she could marry Josh. God, what a name!”

  Pam shook her head at him. She said lots of people had it.

  “Only,” she said, “maybe not people you fall in love with much. I’ll give you that. And get the money.”

  “Right,” Bill said, and was faintly surprised at his readily understanding. “Suppose she thought she could hit it off with Josh again, now that she was—older—more experienced. And free again. Suppose she—well, loved him in a fashion, wanted to prove to herself that she couldn’t just be ditched—and wanted money. And the only thing in the way would be the boy’s father. And now—well, now he isn’t in the way. And now he can’t cut Josh off with—what is it?—a shilling. Now Josh won’t have to choose between her and the money. He can have both. As, taking it the other way, so can she. Which gives her a
motive.”

  “And,” Pam pointed out, “him. Two fine motives. But why the other man with the funny name—Oswald something? Why kill him?”

  “Because,” Bill said, “Oscar—not Oswald—Murdock knew something. That made a good enough reason.”

  “Or,” Jerry suggested, “because it was convenient.”

  The others waited. Jerry’s voice was faintly doubtful as he amplified.

  “Suppose,” he said, “that the murderer knew Murdock was under suspicion. He was, wasn’t he?”

  Bill Weigand thought it over. He agreed you might call it that.

  “Vague suspicion,” he said. “And chiefly after I had talked to his girl—Laurel. Before that I was just—call it—curious.”

  “All right,” Jerry said. “Call it merely curious. But the murderer didn’t need to know that. He might have thought you were—oh, hot on his trail. Baying at his heels.”

  “He doesn’t,” Dorian said firmly. “Did you ever hear him, Pam?”

  Bill shook his head at her. He nodded it at Jerry.

  “And,” Jerry went on, “decide that Murdock was made to order as a fall guy. Suspected by the police, Murdock kills himself. Neater, that way. The chase is ended. The case is solved. The police forget the whole thing. The murderer sleeps soundly of nights.” Jerry paused and thought it over. “Actually,” he added, “I think that’s one of our better motives. Straightforward, simple—you kill one man; you arrange for another man to kill himself—to appear to kill himself—under circumstances which will lead the police, notoriously unbright, to accept suicide as confession.”

  “And,” Bill Weigand agreed dryly, “the police live up to their bill. And the amateur saves the day.”

  “Seriously,” Pam said, “seriously, I rather like it.”

  Bill Weigand nodded slowly. He said he didn’t dislike it.

  “And,” he said, “we have no evidence one way or the other. When we catch the man who killed Merle, we can always ask him why he killed Murdock. But merely guessing at the reason for Murdock’s murder doesn’t seem to get us anywhere.”