Murder Is Suggested

by Frances

  He rang the Elwell house, and waited, again, for at least sufficient time, and nobody answered there, either. Delbert Higgins, whose presence might be expected, was evidently elsewhere. Or very soundly asleep. Or not wanting to be bothered answering the telephone. Or—anything.

  Bill called precinct, which had no word of Hunter. He called his own office, which reported that the Connecticut State Police, asked to go beyond the formality of a report, had admitted not being too convinced, either, that Rosco Finch hadn’t been driving a Jaguar in April and wrecked it, and ended three lives. And had pointed out that being unconvinced is nothing to base charges on.

  Weigand drove to Hunter’s apartment, and climbed three flights of stairs and pushed the bell button. He pushed it for some time, tried the door and then, quite illegally, used a key he was not supposed to possess to unlock the door.

  The apartment was small, neat and empty. Hunter had not come home to change his clothes, which one would have expected, since the right trouser leg of the suit he was wearing had a hole in it, and blood on it. Or—if he had, he had not left the damaged suit. Bill could see no reason why he should not have, since the blood on it was his own. There were a good many books in the small apartment, including a good many on hypnotism. There was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. There was a single sentence typed on the sheet. “Mehitabel, although evidently superior in Experiment C, failed completely in the two ensuing experiments, conceivably because she does not especially care for liver.”

  One lived and learned, Bill thought, and continued his quick search. No gun in evidence. Bill had not supposed there would be. A good many manuscripts, presumably also concerned with cats. Perhaps not, of course; it might well be necessary, in time, to read what Carl Hunter had written—on cats and other subjects. It wasn’t yet. Bill left things as he had found them, and locked the door, and went down to his car and sat in it.

  He sat for a few minutes and rubbed his forehead with the ball of his right thumb. It didn’t seem to be coming together—a lot of pieces; no pattern. Finch and the Jaguar, Ames and Faith, Faith and Hunter, Elwell and—Enough for two patterns; perhaps for half a dozen. A policeman’s lot is not—

  It was as if his mind had fingers and snapped them, quite on its own. It was so sudden, so easy, that Bill considered it with skepticism. But then he said to himself that he’d be damned, and that it was a pattern and perhaps the pattern. He talked to his office on the car radio. Mullins was to be rousted out—he was bunked down in the squad dormitory. Or was supposed to be? Was. He was to be told where to meet Weigand. He was to use a patrol car and step on it.

  It took time to quiet Hope Oldham, and at best their success was relative. She became more coherent, but her frail hands did not cease their constant, twisting movement. And there was no stability in her, no real steadying. She would agree with Jerry that they had, really, no assurance that Hunter had left—or escaped from?—the hospital. But, a moment later, she would be shaking again, and saying over and over, “She’s gone to him. Gone to him. He’ll do what he did before.”

  And what he had done before was to kill Jameson Elwell. For the money Faith was to inherit from Elwell. Murder Elwell, get the money by marrying Faith, then kill Faith to make the money entirely his. “I know,” Hope Oldham said. “I know!”

  It was not much good to tell her that she couldn’t “know.” It was not much use to reason with her, although they tried it.

  “Listen,” Jerry said. “Will you listen? Even if Hunter’s what you say he is, if he killed Jamey so Faith would get the money, she’s safe as long as she isn’t married to him. Don’t you see? Her death now wouldn’t serve any purpose.”

  He made it as calm as he could, spoke as if it were obvious. And he was told he didn’t understand, that neither of them understood. They didn’t understand Hunter any more than they had understood Elwell. They couldn’t know what Hunter was capable of. They—

  “Wait,” Pam North said, taking her turn, trying in her turn to lessen the strange tension which had built up in the pleasant living room, where they had been sitting in such relaxed peace only an hour before. “Wait—you say you didn’t know about the inheritance. That Faith didn’t know. Then how would Mr. Hunter—” Pam caught up with herself, and said, “Oh,” before Hope Oldham, in one of her moments of sudden reasonable calm, said that she thought that would be obvious enough for anyone.

  “The professor told him,” Mrs. Oldham said. “It was all part of—of the plan. You don’t understand. The old man—it was enough for him to control people, to twist them. To—have power over them.”

  Which was, of course, absurd. Pam and Jerry North exchanged a glance, each reassuring the other that this, at any rate, was entirely absurd. Of course, the desire for power, with no other reason than itself, was—Of course it was absurd.

  “I suppose,” Jerry said, “in Jamey’s case at least, you mean—what do you mean? That he hypnotized your daughter? In that way controlled her? But—she told Pam she had never been hypnotized, and Pam was—you were convinced, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Pam said. “Only—well, there is that other thing. Induced amnesia.”

  Jerry wished that he had not given Pam the book to read. He somewhat, indeed, wished he had never published Jameson Elwell’s book.

  “Of course he did,” Hope Oldham said. “Now you’re beginning—there are evil things, Mrs. North. We try not to believe in them, but there are evil things. Things come out of darkness.”

  It did, Pam thought, seem a little darker than usual in the living room. And of course Mrs. Oldham was only an hysterical woman. Of course there was nothing to any of this. She must keep telling herself.

  “Hypnotized her,” Mrs. Oldham said. “Made her—feel what he wanted her to feel. Believe what he wanted her to believe. Turned her against Arnold, against me. If she had been herself, do you think—could anybody think—she wouldn’t have realized how fine Arnold Ames is? How—how common, how low Hunter is? That with Hunter she would be—throwing everything away?”

  “You believed this all the time?” Jerry asked. “Were sure this—this influencing of your daughter—was going on? And—all the time that Hunter had killed Jamey?”

  She had not said that. She did not pretend that. It was only when she herself heard of the money Elwell had left Faith that she saw the whole thing clearly. “Then,” she said, “I knew. It was like a light going on. And now—where is she? What is he—”

  “Wait,” Pam said, “if you feel this way, why don’t we call the police? They’ll find her—probably they’re looking for Mr. Hunter now—and if they know about her—”

  And Hope Oldham, her hands twisting again, her voice shrill, said, “No, no, no!”, each time with greater emphasis, and held her twisting hands up as if to push away some physical threat. Which didn’t make any sense at all.

  “I don’t—” Pam began, but Jerry interrupted. He spoke quietly again, slowly. He said that Mrs. Oldham had forgotten one thing—left one thing out. Hunter himself had been shot; shot from behind, wounded. He could not, from what Jerry knew of it, have shot himself. Of course, he supposed it could be a coincidence but—

  “Well,” Jerry said, “I don’t believe it. I think it was part of—of the rest of it. And that means there was somebody else—somebody else with a gun—and—”

  “Don’t,” Hope Oldham said, and her face contorted. “Don’t you see that, either? And you ask why I don’t go to the police. How can I?”

  Jerry shook his head. But Pam said, her voice steady, but a little higher than it usually was, “You mean you think your daughter shot Mr. Hunter? Carefully, so as not to hurt him badly. So—so that we, and the police too, would think what Jerry just said? That the fact Mr. Hunter was shot at means he wasn’t the one who killed Jamey?”

  “Why,” Hope Oldham said, and was in that instant as calm as either of the Norths—possibly calmer. “Why, of course. He hypnotized her and made her do it—gave her the gun to do it with.
To clear himself. And make her guilty too. Because, it would be a crime to shoot anybody, even a man like that and—it would be, wouldn’t it, even if she weren’t really responsible? Didn’t really know what she was doing?”

  Jerry thought a moment. He said he supposed shooting a man, even on his instructions, would still be a criminal action, involving consequences if proved. The circumstances, if they in turn could be proved, would probably extenuate—to some extent.

  “And,” Mrs. Oldham said, and now there was bitterness in her tone, “you want me to—to help turn my daughter—the poor, helpless child—over to—to that? Call the police in and say, ‘Here she is. Do what you want with her’?”

  She was dramatic; it was all shrill, overdramatic, as implausible as a dream. It was all—

  “Jerry,” Pam North said slowly, “it could be the way she says. Couldn’t it? Is there any reason it couldn’t be? Except—oh, it’s bizarre. But—it’s possible, isn’t it? And—it fits together in a strange, awful way. And—”

  She let herself run down. She looked at Jerry and, as she had earlier, Hope Oldham looked at him too, her blue eyes intent. It was as if they both waited a decision, looked to him for it. Which was, Jerry thought briefly, almost the most bizarre thing about this, admittedly, bizarre interlude.

  In his mind he put it together, slowly—a need for money, a desire for power; one of two men turning on the other at the end—to hurry the money, perhaps to end the power. They knew only the surface, and that only by hearsay, of the relationship between Jameson Elwell and his protégé, Carl Hunter. Perhaps—There was an infinite range of the perhaps. Hunter, if the “Mr. H.” of Elwell’s book, as there was no reason to think he was not, was skilled in hypnosis. Faith had turned, apparently very suddenly, from the highly “eligible” Arnold Ames to the notably less “eligible” Hunter. It was quite conceivable that Hunter, if he had wanted evidence favorable to himself—he might have thought the police closer to the truth than, as far as Jerry himself knew, they had been—might have persuaded Faith to wound him slightly. (Trusting optimistically to her marksmanship.) With hypnotic technics or, for that matter, without them. Women in love will sometimes go to considerable lengths. A girl inexperienced, as Faith seemed to be; suggestible, as her mother thought her—well, such a girl might be persuaded to go to quite considerable lengths.

  “I suppose,” Jerry said, “it could be fitted together this way. I wonder if Bill—”

  But there was, aside from Mrs. Oldham’s stated objection, an obstacle to getting in touch with Bill Weigand, and asking him if he had thought of this bizarre theory and, if he hadn’t, putting it to him. Bill was off somewhere, probably in search of Hunter. He could, of course, be reached, in time. But if Hunter had the girl, if he was in any way what Hope Oldham thought he was—

  “She’s all right as long as she’s not married to him,” Pam said, and Jerry realized that, once again, Pam’s thoughts paralleled his. Mrs. Oldham looked at him, her pale eyes very intent. It was almost as if she waited for words sure to come.

  “If,” Jerry said, “Hunter really has this influence over Miss Oldham he could—take care of that, couldn’t he? Simply by taking her to some place—it used to be Maryland, maybe it still is—where there isn’t any need to wait to get married. Once they were married—if there was an accident driving home—” He did not finish.

  Hope Oldham covered her face with her hands and her body began again to shake. Again Pam went to her. And this time, one of Hope Oldham’s thin hands closed on Pam’s wrist, closed trustingly. The movement was touching; Pam felt sudden tenderness, a sudden need to protect this tormented woman.

  “We just sit here,” Hope Oldham said, almost in a whisper. “Just sit here.”

  There was no reproach in the words, in the tone; there was a kind of resignation in both. But the reproach was, nonetheless, implicit. She had turned to them for help; they were not helping. To hold shaking shoulders, say “there, there” is not helping. Pam turned and looked up to Jerry, looked anxiously.

  Anything, or almost anything, would be better than nothing. Get Bill and tell him; failing Bill, get Mullins. Jerry was at the telephone again, dialing again. “Homicide, Stein speaking.” Lucky it was Stein; Stein knew him, time was saved.

  Mullins had just left, on instructions from Weigand, presumably to join Weigand. Stein had not himself taken the message. He did not, therefore, know what was up. He would find out. Could he get the captain on the radio? He could try; have the dispatcher try. Have him call Jerry? Right. Meanwhile—

  “A girl’s—” Jerry began, but Hope Oldham gave a little gasping cry. “Never mind,” Jerry said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Yet, anyway. When we get hold of Bill—”

  Stein said, “O.K., Mr. North.”

  Nevertheless, the police would have to be told. Mrs. Oldham could not protect her daughter from two things at once—from Hunter, from the police. She would have to be brought to see that.

  “He can make her say anything,” Mrs. Oldham said, still in a low voice, now almost as if talking to herself. “Make her do anything. I know he can—know he can. Make her say dreadful things—make up things. We just sit here. We—”

  “There,” Pam North said, ineffectually. “There. It will work out all right. You’re making it worse than—” Than it was? Of course. Hold to that assurance, steady on that. Mrs. Oldham was—what did they say? “Beside herself.” Things like this—

  “It is comparatively easy for an experienced operator to get a good subject to throw what he believes to be acid toward the face of a person protected by ‘invisible’ glass. However—”

  The sentence popped into Pam’s mind. She tried to eject it. Elwell had said “however.” On the other hand—was the pattern of events in which Mrs. Oldham so apparently believed any stranger, any more difficult to accept than that a man or woman, on instruction, should try to maim, to blind, another, presumably without hatred, without hysteria?

  “Nothing he couldn’t make her say,” Mrs. Oldham said, still as if talking to herself. “Nothing—nothing too wild, too cruel. Nothing—”

  “There,” Pam said. “There, there, Mrs. Oldham. We’ll find her. Nothing will—”

  I go on saying meaningless things, Pam thought; go on making meaningless sounds. “There.” What does “there” mean? Why say “there, there” when you are trying to soothe, to comfort? Why not—

  Pam North stood up very suddenly.

  “Over,” Pam said. “Not down. Over.”

  They both looked at her. Jerry ran fingers through his hair, a little convulsively.

  “She said, ‘I’ll come over,’” Pam said. “Wasn’t that it, Mrs. Oldham. ‘Come over’?”

  “Yes,” Hope Oldham said. “Come over.”

  “Not down,” Pam said. “Don’t you see? Doesn’t either of you see? If she had been coming here, she’d have said, ‘I’ll come down.’ Because she lives uptown and we here. And if she’d been going to—oh, say the university—she’d have said ‘up.’ We all do if we live in Manhattan. But—‘over.’” She waited.

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “East side. West side. Possibly. But—” The “but” was doubtful.

  “Or,” Pam said, “to the house next door. That’s what we used to say. Our house was in a row of houses and the girl next door would say ‘come on over’ and I’d say—Don’t you see?”

  “Well—” Jerry said. “It might be. But—Mrs. Oldham, when she went to the professor’s house from your house, didn’t she go through the laboratory? And you saw her going out the front door and—”

  “Probably,” Pam said, “Bill took the key. I’d think he would have. And—Mrs. Oldham, did she have a key to the front door? Of the professor’s house?”

  “Yes,” Hope Oldham said. “And this dreadful man—that would be the place he’d want her to come. It’s—it’s all arranged there.”

  She stood up abruptly.

  “If Bill took one key,” Jerry said, sl
owly, to Pam, “I imagine he’d take the other. If Faith had both.” He paused. “Of course—” he said.

  “Hunter would have a key,” Pam said. “There were records and things, and if the professor wasn’t there and—and nobody was there—”

  “That’s it,” Hope Oldham said. “That’s where he’s taken her. That—”

  She started, abruptly, toward the door.

  The Norths consulted, without words. They started after her. Pam paused for a moment; picked up the black purse Mrs. Oldham had left on a table. “You’re forgetting,” Pam said, and held the purse out to the frail woman. “Or would you rather I carried it?” Pam said, not knowing precisely why she made the offer.

  Hope Oldham reached for her purse, the movement automatic, and opened the door before Jerry could reach it and hurried—almost ran—along the corridor toward the elevator. They went after her.

  Bill Weigand drove down the sloping block, past the two houses which stood shoulder to shoulder. There were lights visible in neither, which proved nothing. Lights might blaze in rooms at the rear of both, for all one could tell from the street. Bill had to drive almost to the end of the block before he found a place to park the Buick. And, with it parked, he sat in it and waited. He had a wait of about ten minutes. Then a police car, unmarked—at least to public eyes—came down the street. It passed the Buick, moving slowly, looking for a lodging. It reached the end of the block and turned right, and Bill continued to wait.

  Sergeant Mullins, in due course, walked up the block and opened the Buick door and got in. He said, gloomily, that somebody ought to do something about the parking problem. “There ought,” Mullins said, “to be a law.”

  “There is,” Bill said. “Now—”

  He talked briefly. Mullins said “Yeah,” twice and “Uh-huh” twice and, “But listen, Loot,” once only. Bill finished and Mullins said, “Uh-huh,” thoughtfully and then, “It leaves quite a lot out.”