“Or by anything else,” he added.
“Jerry!” Mrs. North said. The doorbell rang and, clicked past the barrier, Bill Weigand came in. He said, when asked, that he had had lunch. He looked at the almost empty plate which had held Spanish lobster.
“Which is apparently just as well,” he added. “Is that that lobster stuff?”
“Yes,” Pam said. “I didn’t for a long time and then I thought, what difference did it make? So now I do. After all, that was a long time ago, and it wasn’t just the lobster. You’d have got him anyway, in the long run.”
“Probably,” Weigand admitted. “Anyway, as you say, it’s over. Whereas this one—” Weigand sighed. “These two, now,” he told them.
“Bill!” Pam said. “That’s dreadful. I wish people wouldn’t.”
“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Job or no job. I wish they wouldn’t. But they do. This one was with a pillow.”
He told them about Mr. Demming; pressed, he ran quickly over what he had learned since he saw them. It amounted, he said, to nothing that came clear. Where people used to live, who had insured whom, which two were about to marry and which were jealous of others—somewhere in all this there might be a solution. But, bluntly, he didn’t see it.
“Usually,” Pam said, “you have a point when you can make a guess. Or get a hunch, or whatever it is. Haven’t you yet?”
“No hunch,” Bill told her. “No major hunch, anyway. Some little, intermediate hunches, hardly worth the mind they’re thought on. It doesn’t jell.”
He looked at the Norths and they looked at him. He shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “probably it’s all there somewhere. Waiting to come out in the wash. There’s one point, Jerry—”
There was one point on which Jerry North might help him, and for that help he had stopped by on his way to an interview. “With the Akron girl,” he said. The matter of life insurance, written in favor of Burden, on Sproul. As a man who knew something of such matters—was Burden’s agency in bad straits financially? Was it probable that interest in what Sproul might have had to say was subsiding to a point which would leave the tour unprofitable?
“No,” Jerry said. “Two no’s. Burden’s got most of the big people; the people who get the big fees. Unless the whole lecture business is unsound, Burden is sound. I’d bet on it. And as for Sproul—I’ll grant you he’s been superseded here in the East. But the East isn’t everywhere. He’s still big stuff in the West and Middle West. And I could prove that by sales figures.”
Weigand said, “Um.”
“I’ll grant that the insurance deal is unusual,” Jerry said. “I mean, I don’t suppose it is commonly done. But I honestly think, Bill, it would be foolish to build too much on it.”
“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I’m afraid I agree with you. However—no stone unturned.”
“You’re full of aphorisms today, Bill,” Pam said. “I don’t think they’re terribly becoming. But by the way—how do you feel when you’re not feeling well? Both of you.”
She said the last to the two men, who stared at her.
“Again?” Jerry said.
“How do you feel when you’re not feeling well?” Mrs. North repeated. “Surely that’s clear enough.”
“It sounds all right,” Bill Weigand admitted. “Words and everything; even a verb. Only it doesn’t mean anything. When I don’t feel well I just don’t feel well. Sometimes I have a headache. Sometimes I’ve eaten something—”
“That isn’t it,” Pam said. “I don’t mean that at all. I don’t care whether you have a headache.”
“Well, Pam,” Bill said, “after all—Old acquaintance forgot?”
“Don’t make a joke out of it,” Pam told him. “Of course I’d be sorry. Have you got a headache?”
“No,” Bill told her. “Not today. I had one yesterday.”
“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “How did you feel?”
“Terrible,” Bill told her.
“No!” Pam said. “You keep slipping off. Jerry—how do you feel when you don’t feel well?”
“Please, Pam,” Jerry said. “You’ve got us. I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about. Bill hasn’t the remotest idea. The girls haven’t. Have you, girls?”
“No,” Margie said, and Beth shook her head.
“You!” Pam North said. “All of you. It’s perfectly simple, and if I make it any simpler there won’t be any point. Think! How do you feel when you don’t feel well. What do you say? You say, ‘I’m feeling—what?’”
Bill Weigand looked at her and then at Jerry and both men shook their heads. Pam looked at them, compellingly.
“Say it!” she commanded. “Say it!”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I don’t get it at all. I’m sorry, Pam. When I’m feeling sick I just—”
“There!” Pam said. She was excited and pleased. “You say ‘I feel sick’ or ‘sort of sick,’ depending.”
“I feel sick,” Jerry said.
Pam looked at him, and her expression was suddenly worried.
“Jerry,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. The lobster?”
“I feel fine,” Jerry said. “I was just saying it over.” He looked at Pam a little desperately. “Are you all right, Pam?” he said.
Pam said she was fine.
“Now, Bill,” she said. “What do you say? Do you say, without thinking, I feel sick? Without thinking?”
“I don’t know,” Bill Weigand said. “Maybe I do. Or—I suppose I really say, ‘I feel ill.” Unless I do feel sick—nauseated, that is. But I don’t see that it makes any difference.”
“Neither do I,” Jerry North said. “Sick—ill. Probably I’d write ‘ill’ although I’d say ‘sick.’ And what possible connection this has with anything in the world—”
He broke off because there was an odd look, something like triumph, on Pam’s face. She nodded and seemed very pleased.
“You were born and grew up in New York, Bill,” she said. “Right?” Bill nodded. “And you came from the middle west, Jerry, middle west and south.”
“Of course,” Jerry said. “And of course it’s regional. You sound like a radio quiz, or expert or something. The man who tells where you came from by your accent. Anybody can do it, after a fashion. It depends on ear and training.”
“Naturally,” Pam said. She still seemed pleased. She looked at the two men, as if waiting for them to make some comment. But the men looked at each other and shook their heads and Pam looked somewhat disappointed. She was abstracted then, for a time, and nodded abstractedly when Bill Weigand left. For a time after he had gone she still said nothing. Then suddenly, she said she had to run uptown and do some shopping.
“For—for stockings,” she said. “Because the cats claw them so. I won’t be long and then we’ll go look at something. The Empire State Building or something.”
She went, almost tempestuously. Jerry North looked, with a puzzled expression, at the door she closed behind her. He knew the symptoms. Pam North was up to something. He had been wrong to let her go alone, but she had gone so quickly; really she had gone before he realized she was up to something. He went to the front of the apartment and looked from a window down into the street. Mrs. North was getting into a taxicab. She looked up and saw him and waved, and before Jerry could open the window to call, the cab with Pam North in it had rolled to the corner.
14
Saturday, 2 P.M. to 3:20 P.M.
Bill Weigand turned Pam’s last few remarks over in his head, decided that they looked much the same upside down as right-side up and telephoned his office from a drug store booth. Mullins was back from Newark and reported himself full of news and was Weigand coming in? Weigand said that, on the contrary, Mullins was coming out. Weigand hung up and walked up Sixth Avenue to Charles and sat at the bar and waited for Mullins, taking time over a rye and water. Mullins came, by subway, sat on the next stool and said, by way of introduction:
“Da
mn it, Loot, I’ve got to go to Newark.”
“You’ve been to Newark,” Weigand told him. “Think, Sergeant.”
Mullins looked at Weigand’s glass, looked up at the clock and shook his head sadly. He said he oughtn’t to, because he made it a rule not before five o’clock, but since the Loot insisted, Mullins ordered an old fashioned.
“I left the car,” he said. “I thought I could get on and get off again, but by the time I’d proved it they’d closed the doors and we were out somewhere in the meadows. So I gotta go back and get the car.” He looked at Weigand with sudden hope. “Unless you want to send somebody else, Loot?”
“Right,” Weigand said. “I’ll send somebody else—maybe. You got on all right?”
Mullins told him about getting on the train all right and said that anybody could do it. Weigand listened and nodded slowly.
“Without being remembered?” he asked. Mullins thought it over and nodded. With luck—with a heavily loaded train, enough people getting out at Newark, an air of assurance which raised no questions which might later rankle in minds. Weigand nodded again.
“Assuming,” he said, “that nobody recognized you as a cop. Defense counsel could raise a doubt there.” He looked at Mullins, looming beside him. “Quite a doubt,” he added.
“O.K.,” Mullins said. Mullins was equable. “I look like a cop. So what? I am a cop. Only I didn’t bull my way on the train. Didn’t have to. It’s a cinch.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “I think it is. I think that’s the way it was done. And when we know a little more, maybe we can prove it. Maybe we can dig around and find somebody who will remember seeing the guy who did it.”
“Guy!” Mullins repeated. “It was a guy?”
Only, Weigand told him, in a manner of speaking. In other words, he was still guessing.
“Guy or gal,” Mullins said, and Weigand nodded and said, “Right.” Mullins thought.
“If it was a gal,” Mullins said, fishing out a piece of orange and nibbling at it, “would she of dressed up like a man?”
“Why?” Weigand wanted to know.
Maybe, Mullins suggested, so that if somebody saw her coming out of Bedroom C and remembered that the occupant of Bedroom C was a man, that somebody would think she was the occupant. It sounded more complicated as Mullins put it. Weigand thought it over and shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It would be an unnecessary refinement; it would amount to doing it the hard way. The chance of a woman’s raising questions merely because she was dressed like a man would be greater than the chance of raising them because she was the wrong sex to come out of the bedroom. If it was a woman, I think she looked like a woman. And—” he broke off, thought, emptied his glass, shook his head at the barman, and continued.
“Maybe,” he said, “Demming expected whoever it was. Maybe he wrote a letter to the guy or girl in question, saying he was coming east to spill the works. Maybe the murderer wired back, arranging to board the train in Newark and explain how Demming was all wrong. So then, when the train was slowing down at Newark, Demming stood up and waved or made some sort of motion so that the person who was meeting him would know where he was.”
“Sure,” Mullins said. “Just sort of beckoned—come on in and kill me.”
Weigand stood up and Mullins, looking a little wistfully at his glass, obeyed. As they went to the door, Weigand said that Demming had been, obviously, too trusting. But he had not thought he was being too trusting; he had merely underestimated. Weigand led the way to the Buick and slid under the wheel.
“And,” he said, starting his car, “what do we know about Demming? Has Pittsburgh come through?”
Pittsburgh had, to a degree. Demming had lived there for about ten years, working as the assistant head of the bond department of one of the banks. He had come from a bank in Chicago and, preceding that, had worked in a bank in Des Moines. During the last two years of his life he had been a semi-invalid and, although he sometimes went to his office, he was constructively on pension. He was a widower, his wife having died before he came to Pittsburgh from Chicago. He had been in his late fifties when he died—the bank records listed him as fifty-eight. He had lived in a hotel in Pittsburgh and his social life had been limited. It had proved difficult to find anyone who knew more about him than the bare facts which were on record.
Weigand listened, guiding the car northward. He nodded slowly when Mullins finished.
“Des Moines,” he said. “That’s the tie-in.”
Mullins repeated the name of the city and there was a note of inquiry in his voice.
“Des Moines,” Weigand repeated. Mullins said, “Yeah.”
“Where the WAACS come from,” he said. “Only I don’t get the tie-in.”
“Iowa,” Weigand told him. “Des Moines, Iowa. The metropolis of the state. And Sproul came from Iowa.”
“O.K.,” Mullins said. “You call that a tie-in?”
Weigand admitted that it tied nothing tightly. But it tied a loop around at least two of the people involved—the two people who had died. They both came from Iowa; one was coming to tell something about the other’s death when he himself was killed. It was tenuous, but perhaps it helped. It might indicate that the motive for Sproul’s murder lay in Sproul’s past. If they could find another person, still living, who also was tied in with that past—well, they would have something to think over. So—Weigand called on his memory. It would be pleasant if memory recalled that someone else had come from Iowa.
It did not. The Akrons came from New Jersey, south of Atlantic City. Schwartz came originally from Minnesota; Ralph White was born and grew up in Rhode Island and Mrs. Williams also was a New Englander. Y. Charles Burden came from—Weigand’s memory pricked up its ears. Mr. Burden came from Nebraska, which was close to Iowa. As was, on second thought, Minnesota. Loretta Shaw came from the south and, as he remembered that, Weigand noted that it showed not at all in her speech. She came from Georgia, where the climate has an extreme influence on the English language. But it was no longer evident when Miss Shaw spoke. Bandelman Jung had been born in Java, by his own report. But the birthplaces of all concerned were, so far, by their own report. It might be worth checking on the accuracy of these reports, Weigand thought. It would take time; it would be neater to know first and prove afterward, if for no other reason than that, if you knew already, you would have to prove only what you knew; you would seek only corroboration, not illumination.
It would be pleasant if things were neater, Weigand agreed with himself, crossing through Fifty-seventh Street to Park, left-turning there and continuing north. The Akrons lived on Park in the Sixties. Weigand wheeled into the space immediately in front of the apartment house and looked blandly at the doorman who was keeping it open. He promised not to be long and mentioned that he was police. The doorman looked shocked and worried. He was relieved when Weigand let him announce them to Miss Jean Akron. At any rate, his manner said, it was not coming to the battering down of doors.
Miss Akron was at home and would see Lieutenant Weigand. Weigand and Mullins waded through carpet to the elevators and went up. The Akrons lived handsomely in a penthouse at the top, where the dim-out restrictions would cause them the most trouble. Weigand, waiting in the long, windowed living room, saw the blackout curtains waiting at each window, only partially hidden and marring the room. Some of the joy had gone out of living high, he suspected. Nervous people were already climbing down out of penthouses. But the Akrons were not, it appeared, that nervous.
Jean Akron, when she came across the room and watched Weigand and Mullins get up, did not appear to be nervous in the least. She was only polite and distant, as if plumbers had unexpectedly come to call. It was an unimportant, although faintly perplexing, intrusion, to be met with poise. Jean Akron, looking very handsome, met it with poise.
She was built to show poise, Weigand reflected, watching her cross the room. She was fair and tall and slender and moved easily; her broad foreh
ead was smooth and without trouble, her taffy-colored hair was relaxed and quiet in its braids. As she greeted them—but would you call it a greeting?—her eyebrows lifted just perceptibly. She told Lieutenant Weigand that he wanted to see her.
About odds and ends only, Bill Weigand assured her; about this and that and Mr. Demming—Mr. Robert J. Demming, the “J.” being, not for James or John, but for Jasper. Mr. Robert Jasper Demming.
Jean Akron showed nothing; she did not even show that she was showing nothing. She shook her head.
“Should I know Mr. Demming?” she asked. “I don’t remember. Is he somebody—important?”
“Now,” Weigand said. “I don’t know about earlier. Now he’s important because he’s dead.”
The composed young woman said “Oh” in a tone which might mean anything and was grave enough to acknowledge Death. Then she shook her head. She said she didn’t think she had ever heard of him. Weigand said, “Right.” He added that it was part of his job to ask people such things; part of his job now to find who had known Mr. Demming in life. Because, he told her, somebody had; apparently the person who had killed Sproul had.
“He was killed, then?” she said. “He didn’t take something himself?”
Weigand told her Sproul had been killed. That much, he said, they were sure of. If they had not been sure before, the removal of Mr. Demming made them sure now. And nothing they had discovered, in any case, gave motive for suicide. Or did she know of something? The last question was casual, almost random. It touched, Weigand’s attitude told her, on a point entirely academic, but not without historic interest of a sort.
“No,” she said. She was sitting, now, on a low sofa, pliant and relaxed. “I don’t know of anything. Anything specific, that is. But poor Victor was always so involved.” She paused, lighted a cigarette. “With things and people,” she said. “He was—oh, call it restless.” She was reminiscent. “Nothing was ever settled for Victor,” she said. “Nothing assured.”
Weigand said “hmm.” But it was a mistake, because the sound was an interruption. She dragged deeply on her cigarette and exhaled the subject with the smoke.
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