Curtain for a Jester

by Frances Lockridge

  Pam waited.

  “Then she starts ringing,” Joe said. “Just leans on the button, though I started fast as I could. I opened the door ready to ask where the fire was and there she was, looking like that. All the way down you could—well, sort of hear her breathing.”

  “Evitts,” Pam said. “That’s her name. Martha Evitts.”

  “Could be,” Joe said. “Well—” He stood aside for Pam to go into the elevator.

  “Something dreadful must have happened,” Pam said again. But she went into the elevator.

  “Say he’s a great man for jokes,” Joe said, closing the door, starting the car. “Booby trap jokes. Maybe—” He stopped the car. He said, “Here we are.” He waited. Pam got out. She went into her apartment. She put the bag of groceries on a kitchen counter. She stood looking at it.

  But Pam North was not looking at it. She was not looking at anything. She was seeing a sensitive face, working in terror—in shock. She was seeing the blankness in large eyes. She tried to erase the picture from her mind; spent minutes in the effort, and abstractedly stored groceries in refrigerator and in bins. But the picture held, grew more vivid. Pam gave up, then, and, certain she had already wasted priceless time, almost ran from the apartment, along the corridor to the elevator. It seemed that Joe would never come with the car. But he came. He opened the door.

  “No,” Pam said. “We can’t just—do nothing.” She looked at Joe, then. “You saw her face,” she said. “She—people don’t look like that unless—I don’t know what. We’ve got to find out, Joe. Something’s—awfully wrong.”

  “Now listen, Mrs. North,” Joe said. “He’s a tenant. We can’t go barging—”

  “So,” Pam North said, “am I. You want me to walk up?”

  Joe hesitated. He shrugged. He closed the door and started the car. At the twelfth floor he stopped the car and opened the door. Pam went out; went toward the stairs to the penthouse. Joe looked after her a moment. “Damn it to hell!” Joe said, and went after her.

  Pam rang and chimes sounded. She waited and rang again.

  “Like I said,” Joe told her, relief in his voice. “Like I said, nobody’s home.”

  “You didn’t,” Pam said, and tried the knob. It turned. She opened the door a crack, pressed the bell again, heard the chimes again, and then called through the crack of the door. “Anybody there?” Pam said. “Mr. Wilmot?”

  “Look, Mrs. North,” Joe said. “You can’t do that. It’s private.”

  But Pam already had. The door was open. She called again. She went into the foyer. Joe, torn between tenants, stood behind her in the open door. Pam went across the foyer and looked into the living room beyond. She gave a little, shuddering cry, and Joe crossed the foyer and looked over her. “Jeeze!” Joe said. He looked at Mr. Wilmot, on his back in blood. “Whatta you know?” Joe said. “Whatta you know?”

  Pam backed against him, backing away.

  “Take it easy, Mrs. North,” Joe said. “Just take it easy. Maybe it’s one of his—”

  “No!” Pam said. “Can’tyou see?”

  Joe could see; he could see too well.

  “I guess,” he said, “we gotta call the cops.” He started to go around Pam, into the room, in search of a telephone. But Pam stopped him. They should not go farther into the penthouse; they should not touch anything in the penthouse. “Come on,” Pam North said, and led the way out. Joe went willingly.

  “I’ll call,” Pam said, in the elevator, going down. “I—I know the right ones.”

  “Jeeze,” Joe said. “Somebody sure—” He stopped speaking. At the fourth floor he stopped the car.

  “Want me to—?” he began, but Pam shook her head. She ran back to the apartment, and into it. Three cats stared. She said, quite politely, to the cats, “Don’t bother mamma now,” and went to the telephone. She dialed a number in the Watkins exchange and, when she was answered, said, “Can I speak to Captain Weigand, please?” as politely—as numbly—as she had spoken to the cats.

  She heard a familiar voice. She said, “Bill, this is Pam,” and gave him time only to begin an answer.

  “Bill,” Pam North said, “I’m terribly sorry but-but I’m afraid I’ve found a body. With—with a knife in it.” She paused; she swallowed. She saw blood spreading from a plump man, spreading on a green floor. “It’s a Mr. Wilmot, Bill,” she said. “There was a great deal of—”

  She broke off. She waited a moment, and things got a little better.

  “I think you’d better come, Bill,” Pam said. “It’s right here on top of the building.”

  She called Jerry, then. She felt he would want to know.

  The block in front of the building was already filled with cars, with people, when William Weigand, acting captain, Homicide, Manhattan West, turned his Buick into it. He found a spot near enough the curb. Mullins got out on one side; Weigand on the other. By common impulse, they looked up, but not toward what Pam North had described as the top of the building. They looked toward windows on the fourth floor. Pamela and Gerald North, side by side, were leaning out of a window, looking down.

  “This’ll tie Arty in knots,” Sergeant Aloysius Mullins said, referring to Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, bearing with fortitude the thought of Inspector O’Malley tied in knots. “There’s that to be said for it, Loot I mean captain,” Mullins said. He lifted a hand in salute to the Norths. “With the Norths in it,” he added.

  “It’ll be screwy,” Weigand finished for him, leading the way. “All right, sergeant.”

  They went among the curious, past uniformed men at the door of the apartment house, past a uniformed man in the lobby. They went up in the elevator, not stopping at the fourth floor. That would come later. They climbed the stairs to the penthouse.

  It was surprising—it was always surprising—how so many men could get so little in one another’s way. In the doorway from the foyer, Bill Weigand stopped for a moment, watching a scene with which he was long familiar. Mr. Wilmot’s last party was well attended.

  The precinct was, as usual, fully represented. The detective district—in this case the First, with headquarters at the Charles Street Station—had provided a three-man contingent, headed by Captain Rothman. The police photographers were at it, the fingerprint men were industriously dusting. There wasn’t yet—Weigand moved into the room to let new arrivals enter—there was now an assistant district attorney from the Homicide Bureau and a detective from the same. “Hello, Flannery,” Weigand said to the latter. Rothman came over. “M.E.’s not here yet,” he said. He looked at Mr. Wilmot, still on his back, still wearing a black-handled knife in his chest. “Bled a lot, didn’t he?” Rothman said. “How’s Arty?”

  “As usual,” Weigand said.

  Rothman expressed sympathy. He said it looked as if this—he indicated—had been dead quite a while. He said, “You know about him, don’t you?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “By reputation.”

  “The playboy of the Western World,” Rothman said. “Rather a nuisance in his early days.”

  “Well, the joke’s on him this time. You got the squeal?”

  “Friends of mine live in the building,” Weigand said. The two watched. There was as yet nothing more required of them. Mullins, talking with a precinct man, wrote in his notebook. “People named North,” Bill said.

  “The ones who get in Arty’s hair?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “He considers them-irregular. He—”

  But then the man from the medical examiner’s office came. He looked with distaste at the blood. He said, to the photographers, “You boys about through?” and one of the photographers took just one more. The physician moved in, then. He looped a cord around the knife and drew it out. He looked around with it, and a man from the lab took it. The doctor examined; he took temperature; he probed the wound. Photographers shot elsewhere; elsewhere fingerprint men dusted. Overlooking all, a sketch-artist made a diagram. After a time the doctor stood up. He turned to Rothm
an and Weigand, and the assistant district attorney and the bureau detective joined them.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “He’s dead enough. Got him in the heart or close to it. Lost consciousness within seconds; probably died within seconds. You want an estimate?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “The usual.”

  The doctor looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes past eleven.

  “After midnight,” the doctor said. “Before—oh, say six.”

  They waited. Dr. Foynes was a cautious man. He felt them waiting.

  “Narrower?” he said.

  “If you can, doctor,” Bill said.

  “Never give up, do you?” Foynes said. “All right—between two and four, at a guess. With margin of error as indicated. Death almost at once after the wound—probably. Didn’t move around much—probably. Stabbed from in front by right-handed person—probably. Conceivably, from a quick look, he could have done it himself. No hesitation marks I can see, though. Suspicious death.”

  “Very,” Bill said, looking at Wilmot.

  “No prints on the knife,” Rothman said. “We got that far. Prints all over everything else. Been a lot of people around recently. Looks as if—”

  “He had a party last night, captain,” one of the precinct detectives said. He had just come in from the foyer. He had waited. “Maybe twenty-thirty people here. Two from an apartment in the building. Name—” he checked his notebook—“name of North,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. Gerald.”

  “Right,” Bill said. He was not surprised. Rothman raised eyebrows at him.

  “You’ll be in charge, lieutenant?” the assistant district attorney said. “Of your side, I mean, of course.”

  “Inspector O’Malley,” Weigand told him. “You know that, counsellor.”

  “Oh,” the attorney said. “Sure. Well, get us something, lieutenant.”

  “Captain,” Mullins told him. “Captain, counsellor.”

  “All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, but his lips twitched toward a smile. “We’ll do what we can, counsellor.”

  The assistant district attorney went toward the door. The detective from the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau went with him.

  “Sometimes,” Rothman said. Bill Weigand said, “Right.”

  “You start with the squeal?” Rothman said. It was rhetorical—the police department started everywhere, with photographs, with fingerprints, with the patient work of a score of men, if necessary of a hundred men. It started with laboratory reports, and interviews, and searches into the past. It started everywhere. But it started also with the “squeal,” which was to say the complaint, which was to say Pamela North.

  The photographers were packing up. The sketch artist looked at his work, looked at the room, changed a line. He checked a measurement. The fingerprint men had worked their way into another room. All this went on without the need of direction; it had begun when Weigand, hearing Pam North’s receiver cradled, had waited a moment and made the first of several calls which started the machinery. Much more would go on, now the starter had been pressed.

  “Come on, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said.

  They went down in the elevator to the fourth floor. They went to a door which was familiar and pressed a doorbell.

  “Hello, squeal,” Bill Weigand said to Pamela North. “This time you found quite a body.”

  He and Mullins went in.

  IV

  Thursday, 12.05 PM. to 1:25 P.M.

  The strangest thing, Pamela North insisted, was that the dummy had had red hair. At that, Sergeant Mullins sighed audibly.

  “All right,” Pam said, in answer. “Why did it? Give me one good reason.”

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “The hair had to be some color. Black, brown, gray, platinum blond.”

  “It was a male dummy,” Pam said. “Not platinum. Who ever saw a dummy with red hair?”

  Bill Weigand had, he said. He had seen a lot of them. Dummies in show windows, wearing the latest things in things; with red hair, sometimes with green hair.

  She was not, Pam said, talking about fashion dummies in shop windows. They, of course, might have red hair—or green hair. But they were different. They were made to look like dummies in show windows, and to go with clothes. Whereas, this was meant to look like a man. That, she said, was the point.

  “This one was meant to be somebody,” she said. “Else why the red hair?” But when she looked at her husband, at Bill Weigand, last of all at Mullins she saw only doubt in faces. “You don’t think so?” she asked Bill.

  “No,” Bill said. “I think the dummy was just a gag. Intended to enliven the party.”

  “Then why kill it twice?” Pam asked. “Shoot it once, defenestrate it once.”

  “I wish,” Jerry said, “you would use some other word.”

  “It just keeps coming out,” Pam said. “It’s a surprise to me, really. What—”

  The bell rang, announcing someone at the door of the Norths’ apartment. The man at the door was large, he looked sleepy. He said, “Excuse me, is Captain Weigand here?” and then, with Weigand produced, “Fox, sir. Eighth precinct. About this damn dummy. I talked to him”—he jerked a thumb toward the ceiling, toward the penthouse—“about it. They”—he jerked the same thumb in the same direction—“said you were the one to tell about it.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Go ahead, Fox.”

  Sergeant Fox went ahead.

  “You didn’t see him?” Weigand asked, when Fox had finished. “Talked to him through the door. At about two-thirty this morning?”

  “Yes. I’d know his voice if I heard it again.”

  “He said he was Wilmot?”

  “That’s right, captain.”

  “Then you won’t hear his voice again, Fox. He said the dummy had fallen off the terrace by accident?”

  “Yes sir. I tried to get him to open up but—well, he sounded drunk, sir. It looks now as if I should have made him open up but—well, I didn’t, captain. It didn’t seem that important, nobody being hurt. Figured they could send somebody around later to get a statement and give him a summons or whatever.”

  It didn’t matter, Weigand told him. It gave them a time. Wilmot was alive at two-thirty. He was drunk. It cleared up the question of the falling dummy.

  “Mr. Fox,” Pam North said, “the dummy did have red hair, didn’t it?”

  Fox said, “M’am?”

  “Red hair,” Pam said. “You saw it.”

  Fox looked at Weigand. Weigand nodded.

  “There was a red wig in the—the debris,” Fox said. “I suppose it came off the dummy.” He waited. He said, “Anything else, sir?”

  There wasn’t, for the moment. He could go home and back to bed. He went.

  “If there’s a red-haired man in it somewhere,” Pam said, “it would all tie together, wouldn’t it?” She looked around. “Well,” she said, “it might.”

  Without that, Bill said, they had enough. He counted on his fingers:

  A young woman named Martha Evitts, who had been cruelly held up to ridicule at the party; who had reappeared that morning; who had been at least some minutes in the penthouse; who had left in excitement; who had not reported her employer’s murder.

  “She was terrified,” Pam said. “You don’t even know she was in the penthouse.”

  “No?” Bill said. “What terrified her, then?”

  Pam thought; Pam said, “We-e-ll.” They waited. “All right,” Pam said, “it doesn’t prove she killed him. Anyway you say he was dead by then. Long dead. Why would she go back?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “We don’t know, of course. We’ll ask.”

  He resumed counting.

  There was the man who had dressed as a small boy. The man named Baker. He had been angry at the—joke?

  The Norths thought he had. Pam was sure, further, that he was in love with Martha Evitts.

  There was Wilmot’s divorced wife.

  “A snake in her bed,” Pam said. “Didn’t s
he say that, Jerry?”

  She had.

  There was Wilmot’s nephew. Bill looked at Mullins, who looked at his notes. “Clyde Parsons.” He had come to a party not knowing it was a party, which had been a joke on him. What might underlie that they had yet to discover.

  “He got drunk,” Jerry said. “Got drunk very quickly. He’s a nasty drunk, I think.”

  “There were a dozen others,” Pam pointed out. “More than a dozen. A girl in a white dress which looked like somebody’s original, and a man with a big nose—I just remember him—and the comic butler, except he probably was just hired for the occasion.”

  Bill shook his head at that. The butler was named Frank-Sylvester Frank. He had been, years before, a comic butler, free-lancing at parties. But for five years he had been Wilmot’s butler, prankish only for Wilmot’s guests.

  “Wilmot wanted a monopoly, apparently,” Bill said. “We’ve sent a man for him. Of course, there’s no particular reason to suppose the murder grew out of the party.”

  “It must have,” Pam said. “It was the kind of party it would.” She considered the sentence. “Grow out of,” she added, cleaning it up. “I mean—”

  “Yes, Pam,” Jerry told her.

  “There was Mr. Monteath,” Pam said, and Jerry ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. Jerry said, “Listen, Pam.” He said, “Monteath is a second secretary or something. Maybe a first secretary. He’s just come back after ten years in Europe; hadn’t seen Wilmot in that long. Also, he left here last night while Wilmot was still alive. We know that.”

  Bill raised eyebrows. Jerry told him how they knew. Bill nodded.

  “The only thing is,” Pam said, “he killed the dummy. The first time, I mean.” There was a long moment of silence. “Well,” Pam said. “I suppose all of you are right.”

  The doorbell rang again. Mullins half rose; stopped and looked somewhat sheepish. “Regard this as a squad room,” Jerry told him, and Mullins attended the door.