Murder Is Suggested

by Frances

  They went up a flight and another flight, and into the large room with windows on the street, with a wide desk in front of the windows. A clock—a little silver clock—ticked on the desk. Not as sensitive as the clock in the song, obviously; not as suggestible. Why, Weigand wondered, had he thought of that word? He had, subconsciously, seen it at that instant—of course. On the back of a book. Suggestibility in Children. Elwell.

  The room did not vary from the sketches of the room, from the photographs of the room. The desk—with a blotter once pale green; not pale green now. A leather chair behind it and blood on the chair, too, as on the floor under it. Another leather chair at one end of the desk, and a typewriter (hooded) on a table against one wall, with a typist’s chair in front of it. And a leather sofa and the door of the closet—

  Weigand looked around the room, not touching anything. Sometimes, rooms seemed to speak, to remember. This room did not, so far as he could tell, have any comment to make—any comment not obvious. A man had been killed here; the blood told that. A man who worked at a desk, read books, wrote books.

  Weigand tried the closet door. It was locked—a snap lock obviously. He had brought with him a chain of keys which had been among the personal effects of Professor Elwell, and selected one which looked appropriate and then the telephone rang. Mullins picked it up and said, “Mullins,” and listened and said, “Hold it, I’ll ask him.”

  “Picked up this guy Hunter,” Mullins said. “Man who was here this afternoon? Want to know should they bring him here or—”

  “Here,” Weigand said.

  “Bring him along,” Mullins told the precinct.

  The closet would wait. Weigand put the keys back in his pocket and looked for a button “on” the desk. It was set into the frame of the desk and he pushed it. After a little time they heard slow footsteps on the stairs; heard a knock at the door; opened the door to Delbert Higgins, who appeared to have been crying further, and to be a little breathless. Weigand waited, expectant. “You rang, sir?” Delbert Higgins said, satisfying expectation.

  At a little after two he had admitted one Carl Hunter. At how much after two? Hunter was a frequent visitor. How frequent?

  Perhaps five minutes after two, perhaps ten. Mr. Hunter came to see the professor a couple of times a week; usually, but not always, he came after dinner.

  “He’s what they call a graduate student, sir,” Higgins said. “At least, that’s what the professor told me. Working for his doctorate, the professor said. The professor was helping him, sir. People needed help, the professor would—” Higgins’s voice broke; he dabbed his eyes. He said, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not myself.”

  But probably, Bill Weigand thought, Higgins was himself, with a way of life suddenly cut off, no new way of life in sight. Bill said he understood. And Higgins himself had left—when?

  About fifteen minutes after he had let Mr. Hunter in, and Hunter had climbed up toward the top-floor office. Higgins had heard the graduate student knock at the office door, had heard Professor Elwell say, “Come,” and had gone down to his own quarters in the basement—“Although it really isn’t that, sir. Very light and airy”—and changed his jacket and put on a topcoat and gone out through the service entrance in the rear and down two houses to a passageway to the street. And to a movie. And afterward—

  “Never mind,” Weigand said. “You locked the front door? The service door?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “When Mr. Hunter went out—out the front door, presumably—it would have locked behind him? A snap lock, that is?”

  “Oh yes, sir.”

  “You heard the professor ask Mr. Hunter to come in?”

  “Oh yes, sir. ‘Come,’ the professor said. I heard that, sir.”

  “And nothing else?”

  “Nothing—oh—no, no sir. You think I’d—”

  “No,” Weigand said. “Mr. Hunter’s coming around, Higgins. With a man from the precinct. Let them in, will you?”

  Higgins went. Bill Weigand took the keys out again, and again selected one appropriate and tried it in the closet door. The door opened. The closet was very shallow. Just depth enough to hold, on either side of the door, narrow filing cabinets, reaching to the ceiling. The rear wall of the closet was of wood. A closet hardly more than a niche in the wall, Weigand thought, as he closed the door and heard the tongue of the automatic lock snap into the slot of the striking plate. Of course, it would be in the exterior wall of the house. No depth possible unless it jutted into the house next door, which was unlikely. Odd that—

  “Coming now,” Mullins said, from the window and Weigand joined him there, and looked down at the top of a police car, at two men getting out of it. It was then, while they waited, that Weigand looked diagonally westward, and saw a slice of the Hudson in the moonlight.

  And Carl Hunter, graduate student at Dyckman University, seeker after a doctorate in (it was to be assumed) psychology, came in and destroyed a small silver clock which had been, whatever he said, dutifully keeping time.…

  “I could have sworn it was slow,” Hunter said, in a puzzled voice. “Why else would I—” He stopped with that, and it was as if he had walked into a solid wall.

  “When you were here this afternoon,” Weigand said. “You saw the clock was slow then, Mr. Hunter? Was that the way it was?”

  “That’s it,” Hunter said, relief in his tone. “Of course that’s it. And the professor must have set—”

  He stopped again.

  “My God,” he said. “We stand here and talk about—about a damn clock. And—Jamey’s dead. Killed.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “As I said, it must have happened soon after you left. When did you leave, Mr. Hunter?”

  “I wasn’t here more than half an hour,” Hunter said. “So it must have been—oh, about a quarter of three.”

  “By the clock?”

  “I don’t think—no, I remember. By my watch. I looked at it and I had a—an appointment at three and I said, ‘Thanks, sir,’ and left. And he was all right, then. He was sitting right there”—Hunter pointed at the desk, and looked at it, and quickly looked away again—“and made a kind of salute, the way he did, and said, ‘Don’t keep her waiting, Carl’ and—”

  “Yes?” Bill Weigand said. “Her?”

  “Just a girl I know,” Hunter said.

  “You met her—where was that?”

  “At the Campus Book Store. Not that it’s really on the campus. You see it’s—”

  “Never mind,” Weigand said. “You met her—when, Mr. Hunter?”

  “Well,” Hunter said, and spoke slowly, “she was a little late, captain. It must have been—”

  He did not, this time, hesitate to a stop. Sounds stopped him—the sound of knocking stopped him, the snap of a lock.

  A tall young woman—thin, almost gangling; a young woman with hair so blond as to be almost white—walked into the room and, seeing them, stopped—stopped with a kind of young awkwardness, as a child might stop who has chanced into a room forbidden children. Her face was thin; the blue eyes seemed too large for it. She put a thin hand up to her lips—to lips unexpectedly full, curved, bright.

  But the reason Bill Weigand and Mullins stared at her was not related to her appearance. The reason was that the young woman had walked out of the closet.

  2

  Bill Weigand looked from the young woman to Sergeant Aloysius Mullins, and looked by instinct and with sympathy. Events were baffling enough to Weigand; what, he thought, must they be to Mullins? A look told him.

  It was not so much surprise that flooded over Sergeant. Mullins’s large, always somewhat reddened, face. Surprise was there, of course—surprise, disbelief, even consternation. But under those things, the basis of those things, was a great indignation, a great anger. This, Mullins’s face said, was beyond acceptance. This went too far—this went a helluva lot too far. This—

  “All right, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said, gently, and turned back to the girl,
who was looking from one to the other of them, eyes very round—very startled. But when she spoke, it was to Carl Hunter. Her voice was unexpectedly low, vibrant.

  “Carl,” she said. “Carl—what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Screwy,” Sergeant Mullins said, in a faraway voice. “That’s what it is—screwy.”

  But it was clear that he spoke only to himself, a man withdrawn from that which could not be tolerated.

  “Where’s Uncle Jamey?” the girl said.

  “Faith—” Carl Hunter said but, instead of going on, looked at Weigand, left it to him.

  “I’m sorry,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell is dead. He was—shot.” He looked at the desk and the girl looked and then raised both hands to her thin face and covered her face, and the tips of her slim fingers rubbed against her forehead, as if to lessen sudden pain. They waited. After a few seconds the tall girl lowered her hands. Her eyes seemed more than ever too large for her thin, now very pale, face.

  “Your uncle?” Bill Weigand said.

  For an instant she looked at him as if she had not heard him, almost as if she did not see him. But then she shook her head.

  “Not really,” she said. “I called him that. Always. Since I was a little girl. Killed? Just—sitting there and somebody shot him?”

  Some things must be repeated before they become real.

  “Yes,” Bill Weigand said.

  “I’m Faith Oldham,” the girl said. “We live downstairs.”

  “Down—” Bill began, and did not finish. Instead he went past the girl to the closet. She had left the door partly open and he opened it more widely. Of course—it should all along have been obvious. Not a closet, really—not primarily a closet. A passage into the house next door. What he had taken to be the back wall of the closet was a door. Yes—a sliding door, open now. He went through into the house next door, into a room which, in size and shape, was a twin of the professor’s office. But not in furnishing—this other room was carpeted, as the office was not; here heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. There was faint illumination in the room from a ceiling light. Weigand went back into the room Elwell had died in.

  “Downstairs in the other house?” Bill said to the girl, who looked at him as if the question surprised her but then said, “Yes. Of course. My mother and I—”

  It was not, once explained, in any special way remarkable. Jameson Elwell had owned two houses, side by side, shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. He occupied all of one and the top floor of the other, and had had a passage opened through and used the double thickness of the two house walls as storage space. And the curtained room?

  “He called it the laboratory,” Carl Hunter said. “Carried on—experiments. Psychological experiments. Psychological—enquiries.”

  “I see,” Bill said, but was not sure he did see. “With animals?”

  “Animals?” Hunter repeated. The girl merely stood and looked at Hunter. “Oh—you’re thinking of Pavlov? Thorndike? No. That is, not here. That’s done at the university. We’ve got a project now with cats that may—” He stopped and shook his head impatiently. “Which is neither here nor there,” he said. “This—I suppose the word ‘laboratory’ gives the wrong impression to a layman. A room to talk to people in. A—quiet room.” He looked at Weigand sharply. “Nothing mysterious,” he said. “And certainly nothing to do with what’s happened.”

  The uneasiness, the uncertainty, had gone from Carl Hunter’s manner. He seemed now quite sure of himself. Too sure, at least of the point he made. There was no telling, yet, what it had to do or did not have to do with what had happened.

  For one thing, it was evident that Higgins’s locking of the service door, the automatic locking of the front door when Hunter went out of it—if he had, whenever he had—proved nothing one way or the other. Clearly, anyone—including a murderer—might get from one house to the other through the “laboratory.” As Faith Oldham just had.

  “Miss Oldham,” Weigand said. “It is Miss Oldham?”

  She looked at him, now, but as if she had returned from a long journey.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Miss.”

  “Did Professor Elwell expect you this evening?”

  “Expect—oh. There wasn’t anything definite. When—when I want to see him I come through the other room and knock and if he’s not busy—” She put her fingers to her curved, full lips. “That’s the way it—used to be,” she said, the low voice muffled.

  “You come—?” Bill said, and his voice was almost as low as the girl’s.

  “When—when I want to ask him something,” she said. “When I’m worried. He’s like—he was like—I don’t know. He knew so much. Was so—kind.”

  A childlike quality persisted. Then, abruptly, it vanished.

  “Who killed him?” she said, and her tone demanded. “Why would anybody kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” Weigand said. “It only happened a few hours ago. Apparently, just after Mr. Hunter left him. Did he say anything about expecting someone, Mr. Hunter? Another student, perhaps?”

  “Don’t you think I’d have told you if he had?” Hunter said. “No.”

  “And you,” Weigand said. “You came to ask him something too, Mr. Hunter?”

  “No,” Hunter said. “The other way around. This project—no use going into that. He was supervising it, of course. A lot of us are doing the spade work. I brought him some tabulations to check over. One of us—usually I was the one—brought him data two or three times a week.”

  “Look,” Mullins said, “what did you say this project was about? Did you say cats, mister?”

  Bill did not quite smile. It was so evident that Mullins hoped, hoped anxiously, that the project was not about cats. But Hunter and the girl merely looked, a little blankly, at the large sergeant.

  “Why?” Hunter said. “Yes. It’s about cats. Their varying reactions to stimuli under—” He snapped his fingers. “Don’t start me on that,” he said. “Why?”

  “Cats,” Mullins repeated. He spoke as a man whose worst fears have been confimed. Men broke clocks, young women came out of closets and now—cats. Omens.

  “Another screwy one,” Sergeant Mullins said, as much to himself as to Captain William Weigand.

  “They’re not in it,” Weigand said, gently.

  “They will be,” Mullins told him. Mullins spoke from an abyss.

  Hunter and Faith Oldham looked from one policeman to the other.

  “This girl you were going to meet at the bookshop,” Weigand said to Hunter. “You said she was late?”

  “Carl,” the girl said. “I—I told you. I couldn’t—”

  “Never mind,” Hunter said, and smiled at the tall girl and there was, Bill thought, warmth and reassurance in his smile and—and more? There was no use guessing.

  “How late were you, Miss Oldham?” Bill asked her.

  “About twenty minutes,” she said. “It was supposed to be three o’clock and—Carl. Does it matter?”

  “Jamey was killed a little after three, they say,” Carl Hunter told her. “If we’d been together at the bookshop—” He shrugged.

  The tall girl turned on Weigand. Her face was not pale now. Her face was flushed. She was quite a different person now from the tall, uneasy girl who had walked into the room and stopped, abashed.

  “You’re not crazy enough to think Carl—Carl knows anything about this,” she said. “Nobody could be that—”

  “Wait,” Bill said. “Mr. Hunter’s ahead of us. He was here this afternoon. Of course we have to find out what we can about when he left. And—”

  She did not wait.

  “What you’re saying,” she said, “is that he needs an alibi. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  Her tone accused.

  “I—” Weigand began, but was interrupted. Sergeant Mullins had returned.

  “Lady,” Sergeant Mullins said, and spoke to a child. “A good alibi never hurt anybody. Whether he needs it or don
’t need it.”

  “For the record,” Hunter said, “I didn’t kill Professor Jameson Elwell.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Now—about this laboratory. Let’s have a look at it.”

  He led them into it, pausing long enough to confirm the obvious—that the door into the office, from the “closet” which was only incidentally a closet, could be locked against entrance from the office, but not against entrance to the office. Which seemed at first a little odd, but did not a moment later. To get into the “laboratory” from the other house one needed a key. Weigand opened that door, looked at the top of a flight of stairs and closed the door again.

  “You have a key, of course,” he told Faith Oldham. “Anybody else you know of? Your mother?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know about anybody else. Uncle Jamey gave me a key so I could—if I needed to talk to him I mean—come this way instead of going outside and up through the other house and—” She stopped. “I don’t know about any other keys,” she said.

  “The door downstairs,” Bill said. “The front door. Of this house. It’s kept locked, of course?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t—oh, you mean somebody could have got in through our house? I don’t mean ours, really—it was his house. Mother and I just—rent the lower floors. That’s what you mean?”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “If somebody had a key to the front door, another key to this door”—he pointed—“he could come up without you or your mother seeing him? Or—hearing him?”

  How, she wanted to know, could she answer that? It depended on where they were in the house. On whether they were in the house at all. This afternoon, for example—this afternoon she had left the house at about three to meet Hunter at the bookshop. Her mother had been there at the time, but had been dressed to go out, ready to go out. When she had actually gone only she could tell them. “But she’s not home now,” Faith Oldham said. “This is her bridge night.”

  “Servants?”

  She smiled at that, smiled faintly. “Not for a long time,” Faith Oldham said. “Not for years and years. You see, daddy—” She stopped. She shook her head, as if at herself. “Look,” she said. “I told you we rented our part of the house. We—well, we don’t. Uncle Jamey just lets—just let—us live there. Because he and daddy—Anyway, that’s the way it is. And—that’s the way he—was.”