Murder Is Suggested

by Frances

  Finch did not answer that, in word or movement. He kept on looking at Bill Weigand.

  “How did you get to the house?”

  He had gone there in a cab. What kind of cab? One of the little ones, the ones hard to get into. A name on the cab? He didn’t remember any. Its color? Yellow, he thought; or yellow and black. Or maybe yellow and red.

  “Be fair, captain,” Finch said. “Do you pay attention to what kind of cab you get into? Note down the name of the driver and his number? Most people don’t.”

  Which was, of course, entirely true. And it was also true that, while time and men could turn up a cab whose trip record showed a stop outside the Elwell house, the time would be long and the men numerous. And, probably, nothing proved, except an approximate time of arrival.

  “Describe the way you found the professor. And the room.”

  Finch did. He had been there.

  “There’s a closet door,” Bill said. “Remember it?”

  Finch rubbed his chin. He remembered another door, roughly opposite the door he had entered by. Was it open or closed?

  “I’d have noticed if it had been open,” Finch said. “So it must have been closed. You mean—somebody could have been hiding in a closet?”

  Which might mean that Finch thought it really was a closet, not a passageway, or that Finch was lying about it—or that, in fact, the second entrance to the room had nothing to do with anything.

  “After you heard the shot,” Bill Weigand said. “Before you decided to use a key and go in and investigate, I take it nobody came out of the house? Came past you?”

  “For God’s sake,” Finch said, reasonably enough. “And said, ‘Afternoon. By the way, I just killed Professor Elwell’? For God’s sake, captain.”

  “And,” Bill said, “you didn’t find anybody in the house? Anybody alive?”

  Finch merely looked at him, and shook his head in wonder at such obviousness. But then he said, “I suppose there’s a back door, captain? And—there was time enough.”

  “All right,” Bill said. “Do you know a man named Hunter? Carl Hunter?”

  Finch had met him a few times, at Elwell’s house. Knew he was working with Elwell. “Something about cats,” Finch said. “God knows why.”

  Mullins looked at Finch, momentarily, with something like sympathy.

  “What they called an egghead,” Finch said. “Like the professor himself. Psychiatrist, or something like that.”

  “Psychologist,” Bill said, absently. “You didn’t see Mr. Hunter yesterday?”

  Finch said, “Huh?”

  “At the Elwell house,” Bill said. “Going away from the house.”

  “No. Was he there?”

  The idea obviously somewhat brightened Finch’s darkening mood. The question did not, however, get an answer.

  “Do you know a Miss Faith Oldham?”

  “Tall, skinny girl? I met her once, I think. Hey—seems to me Liz once said something about Hunter and the girl being—that way. Only there was something about another man and—” He stopped, evidently feeling that he had strayed, or been enticed, from the point. He looked at Weigand with renewed suspicion.

  “You didn’t see her at the house yesterday? Or near it?”

  “I didn’t see anybody at the house.”

  “About eleven-thirty this morning,” Weigand said. “Where were you then, Mr. Finch?”

  “I don’t—” Finch began.

  “Never mind. Where were you?”

  Finch had left some “gear” at the club in Connecticut. He had driven up to get it and, at eleven-thirty, he was somewhere between the club and his apartment, driving back. Alone? Yes, he had been alone.

  “Something happened then?” Finch said.

  “Mr. Hunter got shot,” Bill said. “Shot and wounded, but not badly. So, it looks as if he might have seen something, or might know something, doesn’t it?”

  Finch didn’t know what it looked like. All he knew was that Elwell had been dead when he found him, and was it an offense to go away, knowing him dead? “Whatever you think about it,” Finch added, and tried to make his voice hard and only partly succeeded.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “It is. I can take you in on that. Or as a witness. Or, on a charge of suspicion of homicide.”

  “So?”

  “For the moment, I’m going to tell you not to leave the city. And—take steps to see you don’t. Go keep your dinner date, Mr. Finch—if it’s in town.”…

  “Why?” Mullins said, when they were back in the car. “Could be we’ve got enough. He had a grudge, or could have had. He was there. He—”

  “Right,” Bill said. “And the D.A. wouldn’t buy it. And if he bought it, a grand jury wouldn’t. And if a grand jury did, a trial jury wouldn’t. Yet. If we could prove he was driving the car. But we can’t, and I doubt if we’re going to be able to.”

  “He was,” Mullins said. “It sticks out.”

  Bill nodded his head to that. It stuck out. It didn’t make Finch a particularly responsible citizen, or a particularly desirable one. But neither did it make him a murderer, at least of Jameson Elwell.

  Mullins started the car. He said he supposed Bill was right.

  “He’d be too easy,” Mullins said. “Screwy, but not screwy enough. With the Norths in it? We try the other keys, I suppose?”

  They did. One of the keys fitted the door of the house the Oldhams lived in. One of them fitted the door from that house to the laboratory. The third of the almost identical group fitted the lock of the front door of the Elwell house.

  Bill Weigand dropped Mullins at a subway station and drove home, through diminished traffic. It would, he thought, be nice to come up with a hunch. Or, for that matter, evidence. It would be nice to know whether Faith Oldham and her mother had lied when they denied knowing of Faith’s inheritance. If they had, both the girl and Hunter would have had motives—the mother, too, for that matter. It would be nice to know—rather than only to suspect strongly—that Finch had been driving the Jaguar months ago. It would be interesting to know whether Elwell had used his influence over Faith to persuade her that Hunter was preferable to the polished and affluent Arnold Ames. It would be nice to know whether a person could be, under hypnosis, persuaded to kill.

  It would be nice to have a hunch.

  10

  After dinner, Jerry North read manuscript, shuddering from time to time. Pam North read Jameson Elwell on hypnotism, at intervals saying, “Jerry! It says here—” To which Gerald North said, for the most part, “Um-m-m,” and now and then, “You ought to see what it says here, for God’s sake.” Reading Elwell on hypnotism turned out, Pam found, to be more like eating peanuts than, as she had first supposed, plumbing a Christmas cake. As the evening progressed, she learned to skip over those passages in which technics were stressed—“you are growing sleepy; you are falling into a deep sleep,” for example—to avoid autosuggestion.

  “You don’t talk in your sleep much,” Pam said, at one point, and Jerry said, “Um-m-m,” and then, hearing her, “Huh?”

  “Which probably explains it,” Pam said, and got a more emphatic “Huh?” “Your not responding earlier,” Pam said, and at this Jerry laid down the manuscript and invited Pam to come again.

  “When I pretended to try to hypnotize you,” Pam said, “and you pretended I had. Cad, incidentally, while I think of it. People who talk in their sleep are usually good subjects, and if they will let you talk back without waking up, they’re even better. That’s what it says here. And those who actually get up and walk around in their sleep are the best of all.”

  “This man,” Jerry said, and tapped the manuscript—“this man talks in my sleep. What does that mean?”

  “I haven’t come across that yet,” Pam said, and then, “If you’re not interested. Martini—it says here that all animals can be hypnotized. Teeney!”

  Martini flicked the extreme tip of her tail.

  “You,” Pam said, to Martini, “are falling fast aslee
p. Fast, fast asleep.”

  Which was true enough.

  “Only,” Jerry pointed out, “she was already.”

  But this time it was Pam who said “um-m-m,” having found another peanut. Jerry watched Pam for a moment, always, to him, a satisfying activity, even when she is not doing anything. Then, with a sigh, he returned to duty. If only something would happen to somebody. Jerry was not particular what; he realized he was reading a modern novel and made no great demands. Any little thing. He would be satisfied if the hero, if he could be called that, would trip on something and fall downstairs. Or upstairs. Or, if that was too much to ask, catch a bad cold. Or even a slight cold. Anything to dam the stream of his consciousness.

  It was getting so, Jerry thought, that there are only two kinds, and both of them long. Nobody will buy them any more unless they’re long. Fiction goes by the pound, Jerry thought. Often enough, a pound of flesh. That is one kind—the sexual mechanics kind; the “let-me-tell-you-how-it-happens” kind, the telling each time with a fervor suitable to the newly discovered. That kind was, commonly, written by the middle-aged who would, one would have supposed, long since have lost the wide-eyed enthusiasm of puberty. But they had not, and, which was of more immediate importance to publishers, the reading public had not either. There was the other kind, and this—this which was, it had to be admitted, not completely holding his present attention—was of its species. In such, nothing whatever happened, including the obvious. And how the reviewers loved them. The trouble with me, Jerry thought, is that I’ve had a long day—a day with too many words in it. So I’m not being fair to “this” and—

  “Jerry,” Pam said, “it says here—”

  She waited. He came up, and now thankfully.

  What it said there was that people did not—unlike modern novels—come in two kinds. They were not—

  “—not just hypnotists or hypnotees,” Pam said. “One person can be both. He—Elwell, I’m talking about—”

  “I know who you’re talking about,” Jerry said.

  “Whom,” Pam said. “He stresses that to prove it isn’t a question of dominant will power. He says—I’ll read you what he says—‘The belief that the operator is a person of dominating will and the subject one easily dominated is, of course, without validity, being one of the superstitions which have clustered immemorially about the science in the popular mind.’ He does write like a professor, doesn’t he?”

  “A little,” Jerry admitted. “I especially like the ‘of course,’ don’t you? Like the Russian ‘as is well known.’ Anticipatory reinforcement of the improbable, it’s called.”

  “Is it?”

  “As of the moment,” Jerry said. “By me, anyhow.”

  “Let’s stay on the subject,” Pam said. “Anticipatory reinforcements of the improbable another time. All right? Anyway, he goes on—no, I’ll translate as I go—he cites several cases in his own experience in which a single person was both an excellent subject for hypnotism and an experienced operator. By operator, he means ‘hypnotist.’”

  Jerry knew. He had, after all, read the book. Since he had—

  “Published it,” Pam said. “I know. Anyway, I know what you say. Then, you remember his case history? In this connection?”

  Jerry did not contend that he remembered, in exact detail, each of the many case histories used for exemplification in the numerous pages of Hypnotism in the Modern World.

  “About,” Pam said, “a Mr. H. A young assistant of Jamey’s in experiments; a man who was not only a good hypnotee but a good hypnotist—one of the best of each Jamey had ever encountered, although by no means unique in—‘in having this dichotomous character.’ Phew!”

  “Phew indeed.”

  “‘Mr. H.’” Pam repeated. “‘H’ for ‘Hunter,’ wouldn’t you think?”

  It was quite possible.

  “A man of unusual intelligence and strength of character, Jamey says ‘Mr. H.’ is—was. In this field, as in others, a man uncommon not only in the discernment of his approach to the fields of research, but in the persistence and inventiveness with which he meets the problems of technic which so constantly arise in the science of psychology as, of course, in other sciences. I was reading that.”

  “I thought,” Jerry said, “that I detected a somewhat different style.”

  “Mr. Hunter,” Pam said. “Persistent. And—inventive.”

  “If,” Jerry said, “a touch posthypnotic.”

  He was invited to be serious. He said by all means. Carl Hunter was persistent and inventive, in the judgment of a man who should have known; who was trained to know. And, where did it get them? In, as he supposed was the point, the question of the murder of Jameson Elwell, Ph.D.?

  “I don’t know,” Pam said. And then she closed Hypnotism in the Modern World. “For all we know, Bill’s solved it already. Is it too late to call up and ask him? After all, Jamey was your author.”

  It was, Jerry thought, a somewhat tenuous “after all.” Furthermore, it was almost eleven o’clock.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Pam said, without enthusiasm, and the door chimes sounded. “Now who ever at this hour?” Pam said, and went to see.

  A slight woman in a close-fitting woolen dress stood at the door; a woman young of body, much less young of face; a woman with very brown hair and somewhat light blue eyes. She wore a beige fall coat and carried a black handbag under her left arm.

  “Is Faith here?” the woman said. The voice was thin.

  There was, inescapably, a moment of confusion. The Norths live in downtown Manhattan, where mankind still is variable. (Although not, residents of the area will tell you, wistfully, in the old way.) There are variables who offer tracts.

  “Yes,” Pam said, adopting the method experience had proved the most efficacious. “We are both saved.”

  This usually resulted in a “Bless you, sister,” or even, now and again, in a “Hallelujah!” and, eventually, in departure, in most cases after the purchase, for a modest sum, of a tract.

  “I don’t—” the slight little woman said. “Oh—you are Mrs. North?” Pam nodded. “You didn’t understand me,” the little woman said. “Faith Oldham. My daughter. Is she here?”

  Now Pam noticed that the thin voice was also a strained voice; that there was an odd intentness in the light blue eyes.

  “No,” Pam said. “But come in, Mrs. Oldham. Perhaps we—”

  Hope Oldham did not wait for Pam to finish. She came into the room and looked around it, quickly, as if she had not believed denial, thought to see her daughter. But then, it seemed blindly, she groped for a chair and sat in it, and put her hands over her face.

  “I so hoped—” she said. “I’m—so afraid something—”

  The woman’s slim body, which seemed to parody youth, began to shake as if mind had lost all control of trembling nerves. Pam went to her quickly, bent over the chair and put an arm around the shaking shoulders, holding the older woman close. “I’ll be all right,” Hope Oldham said, and said it again, in a voice which was not “all right.”

  She was crying—sobbing, at any rate. She was close to hysteria, Pam thought, holding her and making small meaningless sounds intended to bring comfort. And at the same time, apropos of nothing, uninvited, a thought edged into Pam North’s mind. Those subject to hysteria are, “notoriously”—the word was Professor Elwell’s—subject also to hypnosis. What had that to do with anything? “There,” Pam said to Hope Oldham. “There. There.” And again, the frail woman said she would be all right.

  “Take a deep breath,” Pam said. “A really deep breath.”

  Hope Oldham’s breast—a younger woman’s breast—rose as she breathed deeply. And her shoulders did not shake so under Pam’s comforting, reassuring, arm. Again Hope drew air slowly, deeply, into her lungs.

  “I’m all right now,” she said, and this time the tone was different, this time the words had meaning. Pam released her and Hope Oldham managed a smile and said, “Thank you, my dear. It
was just—” She stopped and again drew a deep breath.

  “I so hoped she would be here,” Mrs. Oldham said. “Was almost certain. To find she isn’t—”

  She seemed about to begin shaking again.

  “Wait,” Pam said. “We’ll get you something. Coffee? Or—”

  “Here,” Jerry said, and held a small glass out. “Maybe this will help, Mrs. Oldham.” She looked at it. “Cognac,” Jerry said. “It’ll be good for you.”

  She took it doubtfully. But she sipped from it and nodded her head over it.

  “We’ll all have—” Pam began, but Jerry had thought of that, also. They all had.

  “I—“Mrs. Oldham began and Jerry, his voice very gentle, said, “Finish it first.” She finished. “Now,” Jerry said. “Your daughter is—she’s gone some place? You’re trying to find her?”

  “I thought she had come here,” Mrs. Oldham said, and now her voice was reasonably steady. “I know I should have telephoned. Not just—forced my way in on you. At this hour, too. But I was so certain. I said to myself, ‘Of course! That’s it. Mrs. North was so kind earlier, so understanding, and now—of course she’s gone there.’ It was as if something told me. And—”

  She stopped suddenly.

  “She was here this morning?” Mrs. Oldham said, and spoke very quickly, with a return of excitement. “It wasn’t just something she—told me? To throw me off the track?”

  “She was here,” Pam said. “To—” It was Pam’s turn to stop, to consider. To find out, through her, what the police thought, specifically about Carl Hunter? That was, Pam supposed, the answer. (Although there might, of course, have been more to it.) “She just wanted somebody to talk to,” Pam said. “She’s so upset about Jamey and—”

  “But not,” Mrs. Oldham said, “not her own mother. Somebody she hardly knew at all!”

  Which was certainly true.

  “Well,” Pam said.

  “Sometimes,” Jerry said, his voice still gentle, “sometimes it’s easier to talk to people one isn’t close to, Mrs. Oldham. One feels freer. With no past associations to—intervene.”