by Frances
Bill Weigand thought of Ann’s waiting for the party to begin, and of what the party must have been like in the living room which occupied so much of the ground floor of the little house, and was so comfortable and quietly bright. He thought of Mrs. Pennock—or, more probably—a maid brought in for the occasion, passing canapés and cocktails, and of people in little groups of twos and threes, talking about other people with no more than a reasonable amount of malice, and Ann talking with them and moving from one small group to another. He thought of this, and of the rest of it—of the dinner and the further drinks after dinner, and of the party breaking up with Elliot remaining later than the others, and he could not see that the party would be likely to have had anything to do with the murder. He wished he knew what did.
And then Pam North and Mullins came in, and Pam was full of something she believed did have to do with it. Bill listened to her account of Pierson, and to Mullins’s steadying contributions, and it was interesting. It was a new name for the list—perhaps it was a name to top the list. Weigand got another sheet of paper and wrote it there—
Alfred Pierson.
It looked fine and tangible and maybe, Weigand thought, this was it. When he had all the story he lifted the telephone and called the district attorney’s office. The district attorney’s office saw it the way he did and within an hour, and with the permission—the ostensibly cordial permission—of the executive secretary of Estates Incorporated, auditors were adding and subtracting and checking the accuracy of the figures which represented, as a result of one of society’s more convenient conventions, a largely mythical substance which had enabled Miss Ann Lawrence to live in very tangible comfort in her little house. It became almost immediately apparent that Miss Lawrence’s substance was uncommonly mythical even for a convenient social myth. If Miss Lawrence had not been killed, she would very shortly have had to make a living.
XI. Wednesday, 2:33 P.M. to 10:40 P.M.
Detective Hanson, sitting on a bench just inside Gramercy Park, and commanding an excellent view of the little house of Ann Lawrence, deceased, and at the same time looking merely like a somewhat eccentric man of leisure who chose to sit in a park on a chilly March day, saw movement and looked at his watch. His watch said 2:29, from which Detective Hanson knew it was 2:33. The movement, in the areaway beside the Lawrence house, established itself as Mrs. Florence Pennock, outward bound.
Detective Hanson, who had been feeling the chill, was pleased. At least he would get to walk a bit. He sauntered to the gate, keeping an artfully casual eye on Mrs. Pennock, and emerged on the sidewalk. He looked up and down it, like a man undecided as to his future course, and turned after Mrs. Pennock, who was going east. He stayed on the Park side of the street, since she was on the other side. At the intersection, she turned north and Hanson quickened his pace. He crossed diagonally and came in behind her—about half a block behind. At the next intersection, she turned east again.
It was not, as Hanson had felt from the first, much of an assignment. Presumably, if “they”—“they” being the Homicide people, to whom Hanson was on loan from the precinct—wanted to know where Mrs. Pennock went and what she did, somebody had to follow her around. What Hanson did not see was why he should be the one. Hanson had a theory of his own about the whole business, and Mrs. Pennock was not involved in it. Hanson thought Miss Lawrence had been murdered by a bloke who was after her jewels. He was pretty sure she would have had jewels, because people who lived by themselves in complete—even if tiny—houses always had jewels. So far as Hanson’s experience went, this was a minor law of nature.
All right then, Hanson thought, crossing the street after Mrs. Pennock, some guy had got in and tried to get the jewels. He had come in during the party, when it was always easy to get into a house. Probably he had gone around to the back and got in through the kitchen, waiting outside until Mrs. Pennock and whoever was helping her was upstairs serving. Then this guy, after the jewels, had gone on upstairs at a convenient opportunity—Hanson was not quite sure how the convenient opportunity had been managed, since the stairs from the kitchen ended in the living room, in which everyone still was—but he figured there must have been some way—and started looking in the upstairs sitting room. And Miss Lawrence had surprised him there and started to scream and the guy had hit her, probably just to shut her up. When he saw how much more he had done than merely shut her up, he had run like hell.
That, Hanson decided, watching Mrs. Pennock cross the street diagonally, was almost certainly what had happened. The Homicide boys liked to make them fancy and kept digging around for motives and things. But so far as Hanson could see, jewels were plenty of motive and all you had to do was to figure it out from that. He’d be willing to bet, he told himself, that the boys from Homicide had never thought of anything so simple. Probably they hadn’t even bothered to find out if the Lawrence babe had had jewels, or if they were still in the house.
Mrs. Pennock turned another corner and in due course, Hanson turned it after her. He was just in time to see her go into a drug store half way up the block. Hanson followed her in without hesitation, confident that she had never seen him before. Without seeming to look around the store, he moved to the soda fountain and ordered a coke. Then, holding it, he half turned from the counter and looked around the store, abstractedly. It was a busy store and people kept coming in and going out and it was hard to locate one person. But unless it had another exit, which Hanson thought it hadn’t, Mrs. Pennock was still in it. It merely required system.
Hanson looked down one side of the busy store and up the other, checking off the people who were not Mrs. Pennock. The rather short man buying aspirin was not Mrs. Pennock, nor was the rather dark man waiting for—apparently—a tube of shaving cream. The tall, thin girl who was evidently with the much broader, much shorter girl, and seemed to be helping her decide on a shade of face powder was not Mrs. Pennock, nor was the swarthy young man who was looking at a tray of fountain pens, although he was not, at a casual glance, the sort of young man who would have much use for a fountain pen. There was a gentle old couple sitting together at the end of the soda fountain, finishing coffee, and neither of them was Mrs. Pennock, although the woman was about the right age. They left the counter as Hanson looked past them and went toward the rear of the store, toward the section which said “Prescriptions.”
Following them with his eyes, and looking beyond them, Hanson saw Mrs. Pennock. She had joined a little group waiting outside a short line of telephone booths. Hanson finished off his coke and sauntered down. There was quite a little crowd around the telephone booths, and through the glass he could see the fortunate ones who had worked their way into them. All the people in the booths—three women and a man—were relaxed and unhurried. Two of the women were talking vivaciously into the transmitters; the other woman was dialing slowly from a number written down on a slip of paper—and apparently making a mistake and hanging up and starting over—and the man was leaning back against the wall of the booth with the receiver in his hand and listening with no apparent interest to someone else who was doing all the talking. Now and then the man would nod, apparently without saying anything, which struck Hanson as an odd gesture under the circumstances.
Detective Hanson joined the outer fringes of the little group and looked like a man mildly interested in calling somebody on the telephone if the occasion offered. Watching him—as more than one person was—you would have thought that his interest in telephoning was very mild indeed, since he managed to keep consistently on the fringes of the group as new people joined it; as the vivacious women finished talking and were replaced by, respectively, a very business-like man and an elderly woman in black, who, on entering, put down an enormous handbag on a very small ledge, held it there precariously by pushing against it, and began an anxious, but still unhurried, search through it. After a nickel, apparently. Hanson kept an eye on Mrs. Pennock, who was now second in line from one of the booths, and pursued his thoughts.
&
nbsp; He could argue later—and did argue later—that he had not been careless in his observation, although clearly he had missed something which was worth observing. He could, and did, give reasonably complete descriptions of several of the people who had, at one time and another, been waiting to get into the telephones while he and Mrs. Pennock also were waiting, and after she had got in. But he could not, he had to admit, tell with any assurance which of them were there early, and had left before Mrs. Pennock went into the booth, and which had been around the booth while she was inside it and who had come after when people were waiting, with growing impatience, for Mrs. Pennock to finish a rather protracted conversation.
He knew that there had been several men and women in the group—rather more, he thought—than at any other time, when Mrs. Pennock’s turn came and she went into the booth, neatly filling it. He had watched her idly as she dialed and he had, properly, moved closer to the booth on the chance she might leave the door partly open and so be subject to eavesdropping. He had had little confidence in this maneuver, and little confidence had been justified. She had closed the door firmly. He had thought of getting near enough to the booth to press his ear against it, and had concluded—rightly, it was admitted even by those who, by that time, were not at all pleased with him—that clamping his ear against the wall of a telephone booth would make him rather more conspicuous than a good detective ought to be. And he had not, in any case, assumed that what Mrs. Pennock would be saying would have anything to do with the case, because he did not figure she had anything to do with the case. Detective Hanson thought it was a matter of jewels.
(Even much later, walking his beat in deepest Staten Island, former Detective, then Patrolman, Hanson was convinced that he had been constructively right. It hadn’t been jewels, unless the Homicide boys were wrong about the whole thing—as they still might be, when you thought about it. But it might just as well have been jewels; the theory that it was jewels was still the theory at which any sensible cop would have arrived at the time. Given the whole thing to do over again, Patrolman Hanson decided, he would still have thought it was jewels. Hanson’s conscience was clear. If you had to be in deepest Staten Island, it was some consolation to have a clear conscience. Not much, maybe, but some.)
Hanson was not, admittedly, able to reconstruct the situation afterward from what he had seen at the time. It was easy enough to reconstruct it from what happened; there was only one way it could have happened. But Hanson did not see it happen; he did not know any of the people involved and so could not say whether any of them was in the group around the booth. He had merely stood by, making sure that he knew where Mrs. Pennock was, and hardly bothering to think that she was taking a good while. He knew that during almost all the time she was in the booth there had been a little group in front of it, pressing closer to let somebody by who wanted to go to a further booth—she was in the second of the five—and billowing out again when the person had passed. He could not, certainly, say who was in the group and when they showed him pictures of people who might have been, he identified several of them as possibilities, but no more than that. The only thing Detective Hanson was really sure about was what happened at the end.
At the end, Max Silverstone, who had a deal to close and wanted to close it, noticed that Mrs. Pennock didn’t seem to be talking any more, but was merely standing in the booth abstractedly and had put the receiver down on the little ledge. She was, in short, occupying a telephone booth and not using the telephone, and Mr. Silverstone had a deal to close—right then. Right then if ever. He waited for a minute or so even after he had noticed this, being a gentleman, and when he decided nobody could be expected to wait longer he had, at first, merely rapped on the glass with a coin—with a nickel, to be exact. She had paid no attention.
Then, thoroughly exasperated, Mr. Silverstone had pushed in on the door. It pressed against Mrs. Pennock, who did not move for a moment and then gave suddenly. Then Mrs. Pennock fell out of the booth onto Mr. Silverstone. She covered Mr. Silverstone’s good-looking gray suit with blood. She had been standing in blood on the floor of the booth and when the door was open it ran out, smearing Mr. Silverstone’s brown shoes. And more blood ran out of Mrs. Pennock.
Mr. Silverstone let out a strangled sort of sound and tried to push Mrs. Pennock back into the booth, but she wouldn’t go. Mr. Silverstone held Mrs. Pennock away with one hand and brushed at the blood on his suit with the other and then, just as Detective Hanson caught Mrs. Pennock’s body, Mr. Silverstone fainted. He fell in the blood which had flowed out onto the floor.
The ambulance surgeon, when he arrived, examined Mr. Silverstone, who was by then sitting in a chair with sweat standing out on his white forehead, and said he would be all right. Mr. Silverstone had looked down at the blood on his gray suit and shuddered, and kept on shuddering.
The ambulance surgeon had said, in effect, that Mrs. Pennock was all right where she was, which was on the floor just outside the booth. Hanson had lowered her there after Mr. Silverstone had been removed. Mrs. Pennock was as all right on the floor as she would be anywhere, until the Medical Examiner sent somebody. She had been dead, when the ambulance surgeon looked at her, for about half an hour. She had been stabbed through the left side of the back, and through the heart; she had lost consciousness instantly and the time she had lived after that was a matter of purely medical interest. For all other purposes she had been dead when the knife was pulled out and the blood followed it.
The knife was on the floor of the booth. It was long and slim and sharp and apparently had been much used. It was the sort of knife, ground down by repeated sharpenings, that expert carvers use in carving meat; the kind that professional carvers use in view of passers-by as they work on thick slabs of meat, reducing them to thin sandwiches.
Pure reflex, they supposed, had led to its being drawn out and not left in the ugly wound it had made. Thought had followed reflex and the knife had been dropped. It had caught momentarily in Mrs. Pennock’s clothing, apparently, and so had not made much sound when it struck the floor. And by that time the door of the booth had obviously been closed again.
Because, Bill Weigand told Sergeant Mullins, who agreed, there was only one way it could have been done. It was hard to think of its being done that way, but it was impossible to think of its being done any other way. Somebody in the group around the booth, hiding the knife with his body, had opened the folding door with his left hand and, concealing the knife now by holding it along his arm—it had to have been that way, Bill thought—appeared to tap Mrs. Pennock on the shoulder. As if he were a friend, and wanted to remind her of something, probably. And when he appeared to tap her on the shoulder, he had actually driven the very sharp knife into her back.
“He” could have been of either sex. The blow took little pressure, unless the knife met a bone, and it had not. Actually, it was, if anything, easier to think of the murderer as a woman, who could have concealed the knife in her handbag, or by holding it against her handbag, and who might more naturally have reached in to call the attention of another woman to something by touching her on the shoulder. Unless somebody was watching carefully, and if the murderer were assured and confident and did not attract attention by hesitancy, it might have been done that way.
“Hell,” Mullins said. “It was done that way, wasn’t it? Sure, it could have been.”
Mullins repeated this remark late in the afternoon, at the bar in Charles’s, and both the Norths and Dorian Weigand agreed that there could be no quarrel with his logic. Bill Weigand, although his face was set—Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley had not been cordial when he heard the news—smiled faintly. He admitted that Mullins had something.
But the smile faded faintly. He drank his martini.
“Of course,” he said, “I shouldn’t have used Hanson. The man must be half-witted. But I had to use somebody and—well, I didn’t actually figure anything would happen to Mrs. Pennock. Even now, I can’t see why anything should have. Whi
ch is about what Hanson says, incidentally. He keeps talking about her not having the jewels.”
“You couldn’t know,” Dorian said. “How could you know, Bill? And you have to turn some of it over to other men. You can’t be everywhere.”
The trouble seemed to be, Bill said with some bitterness, that apparently he couldn’t be anywhere. Not anywhere that did any good.
“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “I haven’t the damnedest idea what’s going on. That’s what’s the matter, really. I’m just groping around in a fog. And somebody’s going around in the fog, seeing everything he wants to see, and killing people. And that’s what I’m supposed to stop.”
He paused and looked at them.
“Good God,” he said. “That’s my only excuse. If I can’t stop this sort of thing, I haven’t any excuse at all.”
“Bill, dear,” Dorian said. “You’ll stop it. Of course you will.”
Bill Weigand smiled, but his smile was unhappy.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll stop it, eventually. Or it will just stop—when this guy in the fog gets through. When he has everything all tidied up. Eventually everybody’ll be dead but him, and then I can arrest him. Which is a hell of a way to be a policeman.”