by Frances
Mrs. Pennock had found the body of the girl and had screamed and then had crossed the room and tried to awaken the girl. Because she looked, from a little distance, as if she were sleeping, lying on the floor on her back. She did not look that way when you got nearer; she was still lying that way when the police came, and the horrible wound in the back of her head was not easily visible as she lay. From the door she looked like a very lovely girl lying on her back and looking intently at the ceiling out of widely spaced brown eyes, with rather long, gently curling hair strewn out around her face.
“And matted together with blood and stuff,” Armstrong said.
She had been, Armstrong added, quite a looker. She had been wearing an evening dress when she was killed; a two-tone dress with the bodice of light yellow silk and a broad sash and a swirling skirt of dark blue. The clothing was not disarranged particularly, except that on one side the bodice, cut in a deep, narrow V in front, had fallen aside so as to leave a shoulder bare. The body was quite stiff and cold when they found it; there had been a fire, but it had burned itself out hours before. As she lay, her head was near the fireplace, but there was some evidence that she had not first fallen where she was found, or in that position. She had fallen forward, or started to, been caught and lowered to the floor and left there on her back. The reason for this was not clear, unless the person who struck her had not realized the force of his blow immediately, or what it had done, and had perhaps had a moment’s remorse and a moment, which must certainly have been very short, of thinking he might undo what he had done. If he had had any such idea, it could not have lasted long; one look at the wound would have made that clear to anyone.
“The poker had a crook, you know,” Armstrong said. “The kind of dull-pointed hook most pokers have. Well—that went in first. Half way through her head. It was—” he stopped a moment. “Sort of messy,” he said.
Weigand nodded.
That was what they had to start with. A girl in evening clothes, lying on a gay rose carpet with her head bashed in. When the medical examiner arrived, and by the time the body was removed—and Inspector O’Malley was in charge—they had an approximate time of death. Somewhere between two and four o’clock that morning. About an hour after the end of the party.
“Party?” Weigand encouraged.
Ann Lawrence had given a party the evening before. She had had some people in for dinner and others after dinner and things had been gay. Or so Mrs. Pennock, the housekeeper, said. So far as they had discovered, it had not been a party celebrating any particular occasion—just a party, eight at dinner, four or five after dinner; drinks and conversation and some dancing, but mostly drinks and conversation. The guests had left, or the last of them had left, about two. Ann had gone up to bed, presumably.
“The back room,” Armstrong said, gesturing at it, was where she slept. “This room was just a room to live in, sort of. And sometimes a guest room.”
The preceding evening it had been a place for the women to leave their wraps and to fix their hair. The men had put their things in the room near the door; the room with the big Capehart. There had been no overnight guest; Ann Lawrence had had the second floor to herself. After she had gone to it, Mrs. Pennock, who lived in the house, had gone to her own room, which was on the floor above. The maid who had been serving had gone home about the middle of the evening; Ann’s personal maid had gone after she had helped Ann dress. So in the house after the party there had been only Ann herself, and Mrs. Pennock—and someone else.
“The guy downstairs, if Artie’s right,” Armstrong said. “And I guess he’s right. Name of Elliot—John Elliot. A writer or something.”
Mrs. Pennock had told them that—that and enough more, it looked like, to send John Elliot to the electric chair.
Ann had been in her bedroom, with the door closed, when the housekeeper passed the second floor on her way to her own room. The front room had been dark. Ann was still up, and the housekeeper heard her moving about.
“And singing,” Armstrong added. “Not knowing yet what had happened to her luck.”
Mrs. Pennock had gone on upstairs, undressed and gone into the bathroom. And by that time, Ann was not alone. Elliot was with her, and to that the housekeeper would swear willingly—eagerly. “She’s pretty sore about the whole thing,” Armstrong said. “On account of liking the girl, and maybe being out of a job. And not much liking this guy Elliot. The girl was going to marry him, see?”
“Elliot?” Weigand said. “They were engaged?”
Armstrong pointed out, with reason, that that was what he had just said. John Elliot and Ann Lawrence were going to get married. Or had been going to get married.
“Right,” Weigand said.
If he was sure that was clear, Armstrong said, he would get on with it. There was a ventilator in Mrs. Pennock’s bathroom, on a shaft which also served the larger bathroom below—the bathroom which connected, with its adjoining dressing room, the two rooms used by Ann on the second floor. Even when the doors of the second floor bathroom were closed, you could hear a good deal of what went on on the second floor. With them, or one of them, open you could hear just about everything. One of them—the one leading, by way of the dressing room, into the front sitting room, apparently had been open the night before, since Mrs. Pennock had heard plenty.
Elliot must have come up the stairs almost immediately behind her, Mrs. Pennock thought, although there had been ten or fifteen minutes between the time she reached her own floor and the time she went into the bathroom. He had been there long enough, anyway, to have got well into a conversation with Ann. And they were quarreling.
Armstrong thought Weigand would want to talk to Mrs. Pennock himself, probably, but this was the gist. The girl was refusing to do something that Elliot wanted her to do. He was insisting, with growing excitement. She kept saying “No,” and “No, John, I won’t have it that way,” and finally they had both got excited. Mrs. Pennock could not tell what they were arguing about, although she evidently listened carefully, but she did hear enough to decide that it was no ordinary argument—that it was emotional and violent. Particularly on Elliot’s part.
The quarrel had gone on for several minutes, getting more and more violent until; Mrs. Pennock said, Elliot was shouting and the girl’s voice was raised. And she heard sounds which made her think that at least one of the two was moving around violently. Elliot, she thought; it sounded as if he were striding back and forth and pushing things which got in his way. And then he had shouted some words of which she wasn’t sure and after that, in a very loud voice—
“It’s a showdown, then! You can’t make—”
And then some more she wasn’t sure of. Because then, she thought, one of them had closed the door leading into the dressing room; probably Ann herself, since she knew how voices carried up the airshaft. But even after the door was closed she heard voices, still raised and growing, she thought, angrier. And then one more phrase clearly. It was Ann speaking this time, and apparently near the door—perhaps with her back to it. She said—
“I’ve made up my mind too, Johnny. Unless you do, it’s all—”
Then the girl had moved, apparently, and the rest of what she was saying was lost. Mrs. Pennock heard the man’s heavier voice once more, and then a dull sound which she decided was a door slamming as he left the room, because after that she heard nothing more. But now she thought that perhaps it wasn’t a slamming door.
“She couldn’t hear a blow—I mean the poker,” Weigand said. “Not if she couldn’t hear the voices more clearly.”
There could have been a scuffle, Armstrong pointed out. Perhaps the girl saw Elliot pick up the poker and come at her and perhaps she had time to try to run and—oh, knocked over a chair or something.
There wasn’t, admittedly, a chair knocked over when the police got there, and Mrs. Pennock had denied anything was out of place—except the body of the girl itself—when she entered the room. But Elliot might have put the chair back on
its feet for some reason. Or perhaps for no reason, abstractedly. People did funny things, Armstrong pointed out. Particularly after they had killed somebody. Weigand agreed. He also said that he would have to talk to Mrs. Pennock. For one thing, he would like to know why she had not discovered the body until late in the afternoon, twelve hours after the girl had died.
Armstrong could tell him that, or what Mrs. Pennock said about it. She had been waiting for the girl to ring and had not, because of the lateness of the party the night before, expected a ring much before two o’clock. She had been clearing up, which she had hot tried to do after the party, and the two maids had been helping her, and she had not noticed the time. When she did notice it, it was already three o’clock and, although Ann usually slept most of the day after a party, Mrs. Pennock had thought it odd. But it took her the better part of another hour before she decided to risk waking the girl. Armstrong, after explaining this, thought it over and wondered, audibly, if it didn’t sound a little fishy.
Bill thought not; or not necessarily. Probably Mrs. Pennock was glad enough to have her mistress asleep and out of the way, if there was much cleaning up to do; glad not to have to fix breakfast, or whatever you called a first meal taken in the middle of the afternoon. Probably Mrs. Pennock, letting her preference control her reason, had not allowed herself to notice how late it was really getting. Armstrong agreed that it was possible. At any rate, there was nothing against it.
Mrs. Pennock had been sent to her kitchen and Detective Sergeant Stein summoned her out of it. She was broad and substantial in a black dress which suggested, but was not, a uniform. She stood solidly in the room and did not look at the chalked outline by the fireplace and did not look as if she had ever screamed. When she spoke, her voice was flat and heavy.
The story she told was much the story Lieutenant Armstrong had told in her behalf. She said she had gone up, after turning out the lights on the lower floor, about two-thirty. She must, Bill Weigand thought, looking at her, have gone up heavily—a tired, heavy woman in her middle years, up too late. When she had reached her own room she had dropped into a chair and for a time “just sat there.”
“I’m not as young as I used to be,” she said, solidly and flatly. It was fifteen minutes perhaps—perhaps almost half an hour—before she was rested enough to begin undressing. It was perhaps five minutes later that she had gone to the bathroom and walked in on the conversation of Ann and John Elliot. Her account of that conversation—of the overheard fragments of that conversation—might have been an echo of Armstrong’s account. The girl had said “no” to something; and John Elliot had said, in a loud, angry voice, that it was a showdown. Ann had said that she had made up her mind. “Too.” She had said that, unless he did something, it was all—And then Mrs. Pennock had not heard the rest.
“All over, she was going to say,” Mrs. Pennock told them. “If she’d known that sooner, she’d be alive. I told her.”
“What did you tell her, Mrs. Pennock?” Weigand asked, his voice quiet and interested.
“Not to have anything more to do with him,” Mrs. Pennock said. “He’s—no good. I told her he was after her money.”
What, Weigand wanted to know, had Ann Lawrence said to that?
“Told me not to meddle,” Mrs. Pennock said. “Naturally. Told me I was a fool. But I wasn’t. He killed her.”
It was not an assertion. It was a routine statement of the obvious. In the same tone, after looking out the window, Mrs. Pennock might have remarked that it was snowing.
Why, Weigand asked, was she so sure? Mrs. Pennock looked at him without change of expression. She looked at him as if he, after watching the heavy flakes falling outside, had said it was not snowing.
“Why?” Weigand insisted. “You heard their voices raised, deduced a quarrel, heard a sound which may have been a door slamming. It needs more than that, Mrs. Pennock.”
Mrs. Pennock Said, flatly, that the other policeman hadn’t thought so. The stout policeman. Lieutenant Armstrong made a muffled sound at the description of Inspector Artemus O’Malley. Weigand nodded and said probably the inspector was right. However—She spoke as if she had some other reason for her certainty.
“He’s no good,” she said. “That Mr. Elliot. After her money. Whining around her. He’s crafty. He’ll fool you if you let him.”
“And kill you too?” Weigand said.
“Why not?” Mrs. Pennock asked. “He found out she was through with him and that he wasn’t going to get her money. He got mad and killed her. He’s no good.”
It occurred to Bill Weigand that Mrs. Pennock and Inspector O’Malley must have enjoyed an almost perfect meeting of minds. Both liked it simple. “Sing something simple”—Weigand just stopped himself from humming it. And probably they were right, at that. In any case, there was nothing to be gained by discussion. He led her to the other point. Why had she waited until so late in the afternoon to go upstairs to waken Miss Lawrence?
“She liked to sleep late,” Mrs. Pennock said. “She could, not like some people. And I had plenty to do as it was, with only the girls to help. And not much help.”
“But you must have wondered,” Weigand insisted. “After all, she had had more than twelve hours to sleep. That would have been a lot of sleep.”
Mrs. Pennock repeated that she had been busy. She hadn’t noticed. Miss Lawrence didn’t like to be waked up before she was ready. And, finally, she had wondered in the end.
“Right there she was,” Mrs. Pennock ended suddenly. “The poor, pretty thing. With her head all smashed in.”
She pointed. But still she was not emotional. The woman was, in what was probably an unimportant fashion, baffling. It was hard to guess what her attitude had been toward Ann Lawrence.
“You were fond of her?” Weigand asked, almost out of curiosity.
“Fond?” the heavy woman repeated. “I don’t know about fond. She was all right. She was fair, in her way. The job was all right.”
Something didn’t jibe, Bill Weigand thought. If it was no more than that, why had Mrs. Pennock tried to intervene against John Elliot?
“You tried to persuade her not to marry Mr. Elliot,” Weigand reminded her. “Wasn’t that because you were fond of her?”
Mrs. Pennock seemed to be thinking it over.
“Maybe it was that,” she said, finally. “She was a pretty little thing and didn’t know much. She couldn’t see through your Mr. Elliot. But she didn’t want my advice, it turned out. Might have saved my breath to cool my porridge.”
She had, Weigand decided, a talent for the familiar. She was altogether an odd person. But perhaps she was a very good cook, or a superior housekeeper, or both. She had not, he decided, been employed for her charm.
“Well,” she said. “Why don’t you take him away? Now that you’ve arrested him.”
She was talking, clearly, about John Elliot. Weigand said that they hadn’t arrested him yet. Mrs. Pennock allowed herself a facial expression. It apparently was contempt.
“Where’s the stout policeman?” she said. “He’d tell you to.”
“Gone,” Weigand said. “He did, practically, Mrs. Pennock. He agrees with you perfectly.”
She nodded. That, her nod said, was foregone. It merely indicated that the stout policeman was in his right mind. Weigand watched her for a moment, half amused. Then he thanked her and told her there was, for the moment, nothing more she could do. He sent Stein downstairs for John Elliot. Stein went down casually, in no hurry. Weigand was looking around the pleasant room, waiting without anxiety, when Stein yelled. The detective sergeant’s voice was angry and surprised and excited all together. But all he yelled was, “Hey! Lieutenant!”
Weigand ran down the delicate, curving stairs. In the middle of the spreading living room, a uniformed policeman was sitting on the floor, his head in his hands. Stein was leaning over him, cursing steadily. There was nobody else in the room. Mr. John Elliot, presumptive murderer, had gone away.
III. Tuesday,
8:10 P.M. to 9 P.M.
Mr. North put his foot down. He did not think they had better help Sergeant Mullins. He was fond of Sergeant Mullins; he wished him well. But he did not wish him the assistance of Mrs. North. Mr. North ran a hand through his hair.
“For once, Pam,” he pleaded. “Just for once—no. We aren’t private detectives.”
“Well—” Pam said, speculatively. “The baked apple is pretty subtle, Jerry. Isn’t it, Dorian?”
Dorian was purposely non-committal. She said it was an odd thing to call a baked apple.
“Well,” Pam said, “obscure, then. Because there isn’t, really, anything less subtle than a baked apple. Is there?”
“A boiled potato,” Jerry suggested. “Or anything with whipped cream on it.”
Pam said not on a boiled potato. She said Jerry had the oddest ideas. She looked at him with reproach. Nobody, he said, ever put whipped cream on boiled potatoes.
“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said.
“Even tea shops,” Pam said. “I don’t think, anyway. Do they?”
“Probably,” Jerry told her. “They put it on carrots.”
“Jerry!” Pam said. “You’re making it up.”
“Salads,” Jerry told her. “With shredded carrots and whipped cream. In tea shops. And women eat it.”
“Really, Jerry,” Dorian said. “Really. And how did we get here?”
Pam answered for her husband. She said because Jerry insisted on talking about whipped cream on boiled potatoes.
“Instead of Mullins,” she said. “He’s just trying to change the subject, of course.”
Jerry tugged at his hair and looked around wildly. He looked at Pam, and, beseechingly, at Dorian.
“As a matter of fact, Jerry,” Dorian told him. “You did.”
“I—” Jerry said, a little desperately. “I—whipped cream on boiled potatoes?”
Both Dorian and Pam nodded contentedly.
“Because I wanted to help Sergeant Mullins,” Pam said. “Because baked apples are subtle. And Mr. Mullins isn’t.”