Death Takes a Bow

by Frances Lockridge

  But by that time it was well after three o’clock and the little dark man, probably, was dead. That thought, as she waited for the half-convinced sergeant to make a telephone call which was oddly received, crowded out almost all other thoughts. He was almost certainly dead, the little dark man, and with him whatever he knew about the murder of Victor. Leeds Sproul.

  It was only quite late that another thought managed to get through. Mrs. North remembered her nieces, waiting at their table at the Roundabout. And alarmingly exposed to sailors.

  10

  Friday, 7:10 P.M. to 9:45 P.M.

  Bill Weigand looked down at the Norths and smiled and said he had thought he would find them there.

  “And where,” he added, “are the nieces? The famous nieces?”

  “Famous?” Jerry repeated. “Sit down, Bill. At home, with Martha. We’re on vacation. Why famous?”

  Weigand sat down and said that it was merely a manner of speaking. He looked at Pamela North with amusement.

  “All right,” she said. “Say it.”

  Bill told her he hadn’t anything to say.

  “Well,” Pam said, “how could I know? They took him right from under the lion, in broad daylight, except that it was raining, of course. And that one did have a gun.”

  So, Weigand told her, did the other one. It was a habit they had.

  “Well,” Pam said, a little hotly. “They didn’t look like cops. You can always tell a cop.”

  Weigand said, “Ouch.”

  “These just looked like anybody,” Pam said. “How could I tell?”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “And, by the same token, how could Patrolman O’Brien, of Traffic A?”

  Pam said, all right, she’d got herself into it. And Bill had got her out. And she supposed it was funny.

  “Sort of,” Bill Weigand agreed. “The Feds pick up a suspicious character, who consorts with a known agent, and we start to take him off quietly to ask him some questions. And you tie up traffic at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street trying to get them arrested. And attract attention generally.”

  “And,” Pam said, “get arrested for my trouble.”

  Weigand told her she hadn’t really been arrested. She had merely been invited to explain.

  “By two very large policemen,” Pam pointed out. “Don’t be technical. What would you call arrested?”

  “Booked,” Weigand told her. “On a charge. Like conspiracy to commit espionage. Or harboring. Or being a suspicious character, as you certainly were to O’Brien. He must have thought you were a great friend of the little man’s to go to all that trouble for him.”

  Pam said she didn’t see it. She didn’t like to have people killed. Even if they weren’t friends. And she had no way of knowing. Bill Weigand was still looking at her with amusement, and finally she smiled back and said, “All right, I got into it. Again. Was he?”

  “Was he what?” Weigand said, and felt that, in the time he had known Mrs. North, he must have said that a hundred times. “Was he what, Pam?”

  “A spy,” Pam said. “Did he kill Sproul because—because Hitler told him to. Or Hirohito? And did he have the telegram for Mrs. Williams? And is she a spy, too? And why did he trip me?”

  “Really, Pam,” Jerry said. “Really, baby.”

  “He doesn’t say,” Bill Weigand told her. “Or, exactly, he says ‘no’ in a great many words, all very indignant. He says he is a fugitive from the Nazis, as everybody knows; that he knew Heinrich as another anti-Nazi and that the F.B.I. has made a terrible mistake. He says this at length. The last I heard they hadn’t got around to Sproul, although we asked them to bear it in mind. It’s not what they’re chiefly interested in, of course.”

  “Heinrich?” Mr. North repeated. “Who’s Heinrich?”

  Heinrich, Weigand told them, was the bulky man Pam’s little man had been talking to under the lion. (“Your little man is Bandelman Jung, Pam,” Weigand interjected. “Or says he is.”) Heinrich was not an anti-Nazi, whatever Bandelman Jung thought, or wanted others to think he thought. Heinrich was a bona-fide enemy agent, like you read about. About Grade C, but genuine. The F.B.I. followed him around, and snaffled off people he spoke to. Heinrich was being very useful, but not to the Reich. The F.B.I. was enjoying Heinrich very much.

  “You’d think,” Pamela said, “that Heinrich would begin to suspect, after a while. I mean, never being able to talk to anybody twice. You’d get to feel—sort of puzzled. Lonely, sort of.”

  Bill and Jerry agreed. But Heinrich was not, so far as was yet revealed, a sensitive man. Heinrich didn’t seem to notice.

  “Of course,” Pam said, “maybe it’s been that way all his life. Maybe he doesn’t notice any difference. He looked a little like that.”

  They let the question of Heinrich’s possibly thwarted life die gradually among them. Weigand drank a Martini, because it was technically before dinner, but declined food because he had actually had some sandwiches when it looked as if he wouldn’t get away. Jerry North happily explored the earthenware pot which had contained pot au feu, a specialty of the house. Mrs. North looked abstractedly at a silver dish which had contained sole marguéry, let remembrance appear momentarily on her face, and said that Bill had wanted to know about the nieces.

  “Tell him, Jerry,” she directed.

  Jerry said it was sort of funny.

  “Pam called up,” he said, “and went on about the nieces, which she’d left somewhere. So I had to drop what I was doing and go after them. And whatever led you to the Roundabout, Pam? A loathsome place.”

  “Isn’t it,” Pam said. “Mrs. Williams. And she was there, too.”

  “Well,” Jerry said, “the nieces were there, all right. Right where Pam had left them. And were they having a fine time.”

  “Sailors?” Bill wanted to know. Jerry shook his head.

  “Marines,” he said. “Very fine Marines, as it turned out. One of them was a Ph.D. and probably Phi Beta Kappa from the way he talked, and the other was Princeton. Very fine Marines. They treated me very nicely, when Beth introduced us. They stood up and called me ‘sir’ and evidently wanted me to sit down very quickly, because I was old and infirm and they didn’t want me collapsing on their hands. Beth and Margie thought so too, I noticed.”

  “Nonsense,” Pam said. “You look fine, Jerry. Not old at all. Really.”

  Bill and Jerry looked at each other and didn’t say anything. Then Jerry went on.

  “The boys were very much afraid I’d think they’d picked the girls up,” he said. “By that time they’d discovered, probably, that the girls were a little younger than—well, a little younger than they’d thought. They looked a little worried. And they were, in a nice way, rather severe with me. They indicated that we were taking rather a risk, leaving nieces about. One of them was very serious. He said—well, he said:

  “‘I don’t know whether you know, sir, but there are some men around who wouldn’t understand. Sailors, you know.’

  “And the other Marine nodded, very gravely, with a kind of worried look. So I thanked them, and brought the girls home. Beth said, on the way, that she thought Marines were much nicer than sailors. And Margie said, ‘But Beth, Uncle Jerry was a sailor,’ and Beth said, ‘Oh, but that was such a long time ago. Things were different, weren’t they, Uncle Jerry?’”

  “And what did you say?” Pam wanted to know.

  Jerry shrugged.

  “I said, ‘Sure!’” he told her. “What did you expect me to say?”

  Pam looked a little worried.

  “Do you suppose things are different, Jerry?” she said. “Ought we to do something about it? For the nieces, I mean?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “I don’t think things are very different. I think the nieces will be all right. If we watch them.”

  Pam thought it over and Fritz looked down at her and said, “Ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, Mrs. North?” Pam looked tempted and shook her head. She ordered coffee and so did Jerry, and Weig
and joined them. The coffee came.

  “Where are you?” Jerry said. “Do you know yet?”

  It hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet, Weigand told them. They sounded like Inspector Artemus O’Malley. No, he didn’t know.

  “How’s Bandelman Jung for a choice?” Jerry wanted to know. Bill Weigand shrugged. He said that, obviously, it could be. Certainly Jung had been into things.

  “He was the guy you chased,” he said. “Or the chances are he was. He left fingerprints in the speakers’ room, all right. He was—probably he was the man who stole the lecture notes and—brought them back.”

  “What?” Pam said.

  Weigand told them about it. Or told them as much as he thought they ought to know.

  “And sent them back to you by messenger,” Pam said. “That was funny. Were there prints on the notes?”

  Weigand shook his head. He said, “gloves.” Pam said Jung sounded like the murderer to her.

  He could be, Weigand agreed. Certainly he had been doing a good many things, some of them in connection with Sproul’s death, which needed explanation. But the trouble was that a good many others could be, too.

  “Opportunity?” Jerry said.

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “And motive, in most cases.”

  The dose of morphine—what Dr. Francis called a “massive dose”—could have been given either during the dinner Sproul had eaten with his friends before he went to the Today’s Topics Club, in which case the food he had taken would delay its action, or in the drinks he had had with Mrs. Williams immediately before he went out to speak. The two times represented, approximately, the extreme limits of the probable period. Those at the dinner had been the two Akrons, Schwartz, Loretta Shaw, the pompous Mr. White and Y. Charles Burden. Not Jung, not Mrs. Williams. But Mrs. Williams had had an opportunity later, at the club. There was no evidence that Jung had had an opportunity; as nearly as they could tell by tracing the drinks from the bar to the consumer, he had had no opportunity. Certainly it was hard to see how he could have put morphine in the first drink, partly consumed before Mrs. Williams took Sproul to the speakers’ room. He might conceivably have got near enough to the waiter who was carrying the second drink upstairs to have spilled in the poison, but the waiter was sure he hadn’t. Mrs. Williams had had an opportunity to poison either drink; Loretta Shaw had had an opportunity to poison the one served upstairs.

  “So did I,” Jerry interjected.

  “So did you,” Bill Weigand agreed. “Did. you, by any chance?”

  “No,” Pam said. “Sproul was a best seller. Don’t be foolish, Bill.”

  They came to motives, and Weigand summarized the evidence of the lecture notes. It was, he warned them, cryptic evidence. In no case, for example, was it clear enough to take into court. They were trying to trace down the hints, but that was slow work. The police in Cincinnati were still investigating Schwartz’s past, for example. So far they had discovered only that he left a newspaper of which he had been city editor, rather suddenly. They had also discovered a disinclination on the part of the remaining executives to talk very openly about why he had gone.

  They had talked to the publishers of White’s first and only book, and they were comparing it—a man who was supposed to know about such matters was comparing it—with a manuscript of White’s which White’s depressed agent had been persuaded to lend for the purpose.

  “How—?” Pam began.

  “For style tricks,” Jerry said. “I suppose, Bill?”

  Bill said he gathered that was it. And would it work?

  “If he has mannerisms, it might,” Jerry said. “If he has the same mannerisms now he had when his first book came out. It was damn near unreadable, by the way. If he stole it, not worth stealing. Of course, maybe he ‘improved’ on the original idea; made it his own. Maybe it wasn’t so bad originally. But I’d hate to guess much on the results your expert gets.”

  Bill Weigand said he wasn’t betting much on it. But he could think of no better way to check on the scandalous hint which Sproul had planned to make in his lecture. Unless, of course, they could find the man from whom Sproul had stolen.

  “We’ll work on that too, if we have to,” Weigand said. “Look for a needle in yesterday’s haystack.”

  No motive was certain. They didn’t know enough; it was not a simple, comfortable murder for money or safety or, so far as they could guess, hatred. But it might be any of these. They might be barking—no, whining—up entirely the wrong trees. But they had to use the trees they had, until they got more—Schwartz and Loretta Shaw, the Akrons, Ralph White and Y. Charles Burden.

  “And the little dark man, with the funny name, and Mrs. Williams,” Mrs. North insisted. “And German spies. Or Japanese.”

  “Mrs. Williams or little Jung,” Weigand agreed, without enthusiasm. “For the record, to keep it straight, and for Mrs. Pamela North. But why Axis spies?”

  “Because,” Pamela told him, “Mr. Sproul was really a—a British agent. Or a man from G-2. And he was on their trail.”

  Weigand shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Not a British agent. Nor a man from G-2. Nor an F.B.I. man in disguise. Give us some credit, Pam. Sproul was just a man who wrote books, who had lived in Paris, who was about to lecture to clubwomen. With the tacit approval of the O.W.I., to be sure. But he was nothing official.”

  “Well,” Mrs. North said, “he had a list of enemy agents in this country and he was going to turn it over to the F.B.I. He found out about it in Paris, because he knew somebody before the war started and got drunk and boasted. Or maybe not a list of names; maybe just some leads we could follow up. And maybe they were more important than he knew, and they killed him because of that. Couldn’t it be? You don’t know it isn’t, do you?”

  Weigand agreed they didn’t know it wasn’t.

  “However,” he added, “we can think it wasn’t. We can think that Sproul was killed privately.”

  “Privately?” Mrs. North repeated. “In front of all those people?”

  “For private reasons,” Weigand said. “Be yourself, Pam. Somebody killed Sproul because they didn’t like Sproul, or what he was going to say, or going to do, or had done or said. For personal reasons, as distinct from impersonal reasons, if you like it better that way.”

  The three sipped coffee. Jerry North held up his left hand and began bending fingers down on it.

  “Schwartz because of something in his past that Sproul was going to reveal,” he said. “White for ditto.” That took the first two fingers. “Akron and sister Akron for ditto.” He turned down one finger for the two. “Burden for—?” He looked inquiringly at Weigand.

  “Ditto, I suppose,” Weigand said. “Or—because for some reason he didn’t want Sproul to go on with the tour? I’ll admit I can’t think of any reason. And Schwartz, to go back, because Sproul had alienated Mrs. Schwartz’s affections.”

  “All right,” Jerry said, turning down a finger for Burden. “Jung because of something in his past, again; Loretta—” Jerry looked at his hand and discovered that, although he had been forced to utilize his thumb, he had run out of fingers. He moved to the right hand. “Loretta Shaw for what?” he asked.

  Weigand shook his head.

  “Unless she didn’t want to marry Sproul after all, and didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying so,” he said. “Really, I wouldn’t know. Nor would I have any idea why Mrs. Williams should kill Sproul, unless at the last moment she felt she had made a dreadful mistake in engaging him to lecture at the club and was doing her best to correct it.”

  “Flippant,” Mrs. North said, with disapproval.

  “Your flippancy, to start with,” Bill Weigand told her. “She’s your Mrs. Williams, Pam. All yours. You can also have Dr. Dupont.”

  “Dupont?” Mrs. North said.

  “The president of the Today’s Topics Club,” Jerry told her. “The old man who fainted.”

  “No,” Mrs. North said, “I don’t want him. I’m n
ot sure I even want Mrs. Williams. Did the little dark man have the telegram?”

  The two men looked at her and then at each other. Finally Jerry North shook his head.

  “She’s got me this time,” he admitted. “I knew it would come some day.” He turned to his wife. “What telegram, dear?” he said. “If it isn’t a secret?”

  “The one Mrs. Williams got, of course,” she said. “The one Mr. Jung took. At the restaurant, I told you.”

  Bill Weigand looked at Jerry North, and Jerry shook his head.

  “You told me you saw Jung and Mrs. Williams talking,” he said. “And that Jung tripped you and you decided to chase him. Then you told me all about the chase, block to block, and about being arrested and what you said to the sergeant and what the sergeant said to you, and about telephoning Bill and having him talk to the sergeant. But nothing about a telegram.”

  “Well,” Mrs. North said, “that’s funny. Because that was the whole thing. That was what made Mrs. Williams faint. Unless it was too much to drink. A yellow telegram.”

  She told them about the telegram which had been delivered to Mrs. Williams at the bar. Weigand said it was better late than never, but—He got up.

  “I’ll find out,” he said, and went across the wide, main room at Charles to the telephones behind the desk. After a little while he came back, looking unexpectedly annoyed.

  “Cooperation!” he said, with vigor. “A fine lot of cooperation they give us!”

  The Norths looked at him and waited.

  “The Feds,” he said, after a moment of staring with indignation at the wall, “decided they didn’t want Mr. Jung. Or, rather, that they didn’t want him locked up. They want him loose with a string attached, like their Mr. Heinrich. And so they listen to him, and say ‘Yes, Mr. Jung, certainly, Mr. Jung’ with a lot of politeness and turn him loose. And they say they don’t want to pick him up again unless we have a charge against him which will stick, because they think he may be very useful roaming around and meeting people. And that is known as cooperation.”

  “Well,” Jerry North said reasonably, “do you want him? Have you got a charge?”