Murder Out of Turn

by Frances Lockridge

  “Was Miss Corbin once a student of Professor Abel’s?” Weigand asked.

  “Yes,” the girl said, unhappily. “Years ago, and he hadn’t seen her for years between, but it—he wouldn’t want it talked about. And it wasn’t anything, really.”

  “You knew because she sometimes called up here?” he prompted. “Perhaps she came around to pick the Doctor up? And you heard things from other people?”

  She shook her head at first, and then as he continued to look at her she nodded, unwillingly.

  “Only,” she said, “it was all over. Really all over.” She spoke eagerly, demanding belief. “That’s why it would be so unjust if anything came out and hurt Professor Abel. Because really, he had quit seeing her entirely.”

  “Had he?” Weigand said. There was doubt palpable in his voice. She seized on the doubt.

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “It was never anything, really—she was young and pretty, I suppose, and he enjoyed going places with her. To dinner and places. He met her again, you know, when he was acting as a consultant for an advertising agency she was connected with. But he hadn’t seen her for weeks.”

  It came out in a rush, blown along, it was evident, by belief.

  “Or only at the camp,” the girl said. “But there he couldn’t help it, and there were always others around. He never saw her in town any more, or took her places.” She looked at Weigand anxiously. “I’m sure you’ll believe me,” she said. “It’s really the way I say. Why, for the last two weeks I’ve been telling her he was out when she telephoned. He told me to say he was out. Doesn’t that prove it?”

  She was so triumphant about it, as he nodded, that Weigand felt a little ashamed. But she needn’t know, of course, that it wasn’t helping Abel for her to convince the police that he had broken with Jean Corbin; that it was quite the opposite of helpful. But she needn’t know, unless, of course, that small knowledge came to be swallowed up in a much larger, and more devastating, knowledge. He led the questioning downhill to trivialities, thanked her, and collected Mullins. Mullins said he was getting plenty of notes.

  “You’re sure going to need them,” he added, without optimism.

  It was after two when they made their next stop, far downtown, and Mullins looked inquiringly at Weigand, who made no move to get out. Then he looked suspicious.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Here’s where you go to work. Get onto the surrogate’s clerk, go through the files, find out all there is to find out about the Brownley fortune. Find out who the heirs are, if it has been determined. And what the status of the litigation is, now. You’ll find Helen Wilson on the list as one of the heirs. And there’ll be a man named Blair—John Blair. We’ll want all there is about them. You can have [he looked at his watch, which said two-twenty] a couple of hours. We’re going to start back around five, I hope.”

  “Back?” said Mullins. Weigand nodded.

  “Back to the country, Mr. Mullins,” he said. “Back among the crows and the murders. We’ll be just in time for a new murder, I expect.”

  Mullins looked at Weigand, shook his head sadly and got out.

  “Hey!” Weigand called after him. “Remember Charles’?”

  Mullins nodded.

  “We’ll meet there about five,” Weigand told him. He saw Mullins’ face brighten. “Maybe I’ll be good for a drink or two,” Weigand promised. Mullins disappeared through a revolving door, and even his back seemed to smile approval. Weigand drove to the Criminal Courts building and sent his name in to Assistant District Attorney Fleming. Fleming said, “Hiya, Bill?” And Weigand said he had his troubles.

  “Listen,” said Fleming, “didya hear this one? A woman I know lives up in the country and she went into some little A. & P. in the nearest town the other day and asked for truffles. She said: ‘Have you got any truffles?’ and what do you think he said?” Fleming paused only imperceptibly, taking no chances. “He said, ‘Lady, I got plenty, but there’s no use talking about them.’ Just like that. Pretty quick guy, wasn’t he?”

  “Very quick,” Weigand said. “Very quick indeed. You helped in the Hunt case, didn’t you?”

  “Hunt?” Fleming said.

  “Clayton Hunt,” Weigand told him. “Wall Street. Securities. Sing Sing.”

  “Oh,” Fleming said. “That Hunt. Sure.”

  It had been, Weigand learned, one of those large and popular cases which district attorneys prefer to try in person, but Fleming and another assistant had worked it up, interviewing witnesses and preparing outlines, and sitting in at the trial to question witnesses not likely to excite the press. Thus Fleming had interviewed Helen Wilson and the district attorney had questioned her.

  “And her testimony was important?” Weigand said. “For the State, I mean. It helped clinch things, as I recall?”

  That, Fleming said, was right. She had been Hunt’s confidential secretary, had transmitted his orders and kept his files. And so what she knew was important, when they came to fitting the picture together for the jury.

  “Although I don’t suppose she knew the importance of the things she was doing when she did them,” Fleming said. “The picture could be pieced together only when you were looking for a picture, if you know what I mean. And there was nothing to indicate that she had pieced them together. Until the newspapers began to put it together from the testimony.”

  “And then did you have trouble with her?” Weigand wanted to know. “I mean, when she began to see where it was leading?”

  Fleming said that they hadn’t, exactly, had trouble.

  “She didn’t try to squirm out of anything,” he said. “Out of any definite fact, that is. She wasn’t happy about it, or cooperative beyond the mere facts, but the jury could see that and it all helped—helped us, that is. Made what she testified all the more convincing.”

  Weigand nodded, and said there was another point.

  “Did you,” he asked, “gather that there was something between her and Hunt? Something more than transmitted orders and letters taken and the like?”

  Fleming thought a moment and then shook his head, slowly.

  “Not what you mean,” he said. “On her part, anyway—and, to give him credit, on his. That’s only what I felt, of course. It wasn’t to our advantage to dig anything up. Impeach her testimony. And the other side, naturally, wouldn’t bring it up. But my impression, for what it’s worth, is that the thing was on the up and up, as far as that sort of thing was concerned.”

  He nodded, confirming his impression to himself.

  “Of course,” he said, “it may not have been all business between them. I got the impression that she felt a lot of admiration for him, that sort of thing. I think her father was dead?” Weigand nodded. “Well, she may have thought of Hunt as—not a father, of course, but somebody who would fill the lesser roles of a father. I’m just guessing; I don’t know whether it helps.”

  Weigand nodded that it helped.

  “As a matter of fact,” Fleming said, “I liked the girl—an honest sort of girl. It’s too bad about her.”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “I think it’s too bad. And did Hunt feel—fatherly, toward her, do you suppose?”

  Fleming shook his head and said he wouldn’t know. There was nothing to show about that, he said.

  “But he seemed to be an all right sort of guy in other ways,” Fleming said. “A crook, obviously, but otherwise a decent enough citizen. Family man—all that sort of thing. Really meant it, too, I’d guess.”

  “Did his family have any particular contact with Helen Wilson—during the trial, I mean?” Weigand asked.

  Fleming shook his head. Mrs. Hunt and her daughter had been in court, of course, and heard Helen’s testimony, but he didn’t know of any contact. They had—but wait a minute. There was one thing he’d seen. Helen had finished testifying early in the afternoon and the luncheon recess was taken immediately, and everybody poured out into the rotunda of the Supreme Court building. And there Mrs. Hunt and her daughter, in the c
rowd, had come face to face with Helen Wilson, who was being escorted out of the building by one of the assistant district attorneys. Things were looking bad for Hunt, by that time, and his wife and daughter showed it.

  “The daughter especially,” Fleming said. “She was white, you know—strained-looking. I don’t know if you’ve seen her?”

  “Yes,” Weigand said. “I’ve seen her.”

  “Nice-looking,” Fleming said. “Only not then—or maybe then too, in a way. But sort of frozen and hopeless, and having trouble with control, if you know what I mean. Well, she and Helen Wilson came almost face to face.”

  “And what happened?” Weigand said.

  “Well,” Fleming said, “nothing happened, really. The Wilson girl was disturbed and unhappy, because the picture was clear enough by then and the importance of the pieces she had given us, and when she saw the Hunts she hesitated and I thought she was going to say something. And—”

  “And?” Weigand said.

  It was, Fleming said, only a feeling. Helen Wilson had started to say something and looked at the Hunt girl’s face and hesitated and flushed. And the Hunt girl—

  “Well,” he said, “she just looked through Wilson. Nothing you could put a finger on; no rebuff you could put into words. But it made Helen feel like two cents—two cents’ worth of Judas, if you know what I mean. Unjust, too, as it happened, but you could see how the Hunt girl might feel.” He paused, recalling the situation. “Funny thing,” he said. “I heard the two girls became rather good friends. I wouldn’t have thought it, from that day. Although there was no real reason why they shouldn’t, of course, after it was all over.”

  Weigand drew deeply on his cigarette and ground it out.

  “Well,” he said, “thanks.”

  “Help?” Fleming asked.

  “I don’t know,” Weigand said. “It might.”

  Weigand felt a little submerged, driving uptown toward his next stop. “It might help,” he said to himself, but he couldn’t get away from it. It might at that—hell! He swerved to the curb in Park Avenue, just below the Grand Central, and was gruff with a doorman who tried to assure him that he could not park in front of the entrance. “The hell I can’t,” Weigand assured him. He confirmed that this was the address he had got at Bell, Halpern & Bell, and told a uniformed man on the switchboard that he wanted the superintendent. He told the superintendent that he wanted to examine the apartment which had been Jean Corbin’s. The superintendent read the newspapers too, it appeared; anyway, Weigand’s displayed shield was persuasive.

  “This,” Weigand thought, “will probably be a fool’s errand.”

  It was a very large building, but it was a very small apartment—one moderate-sized room, a depression for a serving-pantry, a bath and dressing-room. The closet was full of clothes; very nice-looking clothes, and the closet was aromatic with dying scent. It wasn’t pleasant to think of the girl who had owned the clothes, as Weigand had last seen her. And what could the clothes tell him? That she had been pretty, and gaily busy of nights; that she had made money and spent it, and known the good places to go for clothes. All of which he knew.

  The slender, neatly kept desk told him no more, except that Jean Corbin had been orderly in small matters. There was a stack of bills under a paperweight, and none was overdue. They looked as if they had been stacked up for payment. There was a checkbook lying nearby and the neat tabulations on its counter-foils indicated a healthy, if unswollen, balance. Weigand riffled through the stubs, expecting nothing sensational—and found nothing sensational. He looked around the room, and felt the girl who had, so finally, gone out of it. Modern and quick and polished she had been, immaculate and assured. Her impression on the room was light, but defined; she had left it in the material of fabrics, in the moderated brightness of lamp-shades, in magazines on a table near the telephone. And her death had been so very ugly.

  It was getting him nowhere, but it was routine gone through. Obscurely, he felt that the atmosphere of the room completed his picture of Jean Corbin—that there was now nothing new to be learned about her which would be significant to his purpose. She had kept a light, assured hand on things, and somewhere the hand had slipped; somewhere she had met a person who was not light and assured, but rough and angry. And it might be that, ironically, it was nothing more than accident; that all this poise had been shattered by something which, so far as she was concerned, was as senseless and unordered as an avalanche. He turned a mental page and locked the door of Jean Corbin’s apartment behind him, and left the key at the telephone desk.

  The doorman was helpful, now, and full of deference. He moved into the street and held up a staying hand while Weigand swung his car and headed south down Park and Fourth. Weigand swung through Fourteenth to Fifth, and turned through disorderly streets near the Washington Arch. Perry Street. He slid along it looking at numbers and found one. There was no doorman here, forbidding encroachment. It was with some difficulty that he found the janitor who could let him into Helen Wilson’s apartment on the top floor of an old house. He climbed dark, carpeted stairs behind the janitor, who had also read the newspapers and was willing to talk. So far as Weigand could determine, the janitor had nothing of importance to say. The Wilsons had been mighty fine people, and easy to please.

  “Mrs. Wilson and her daughter?” Weigand said. “They both lived here, then?”

  “In winters,” the janitor said. “Just in winters. Mrs. Wilson spends the summers out at that place in the country, and the girl commutes.”

  He opened the door and showed an inclination to remain. Weigand told him he needn’t. The apartment, even at four o’clock of September afternoons, was shadowy. Weigand switched on the lights from a tumbler just inside the door. Lamps glowed and sidelights by a fireplace. It was an easy, comfortable room, with windows on the long shadows of the street. There was easy, comfortable furniture in it, and a daybed. Behind there was another room, evidently Mrs. Wilson’s, and to one side a kitchen. There was a bath next to the kitchen.

  The desk was not so neat, nor the bills so recently paid or so large. Nor, in their closet off the hall, were the clothes so gently shining or bearing such superior names. Everywhere there was simplicity and—Weigand thought for a word. Friendliness. People left impress on their rooms. You could sit in this one, and stretch your legs, and smoke and talk, and pull a chair near for your feet. There was a low bookcase along one wall. Weigand completed his inspection of the desk pigeonholes to no advantage and opened the drawer beneath. The drawer bulged with photographs—photographs of Helen and of her mother at the camp, of others—there was a picture of the Norths playing tennis, and one of Dorian Hunt. Weigand looked at it. Dorian was sitting on the ground, with her brown knees drawn up and held between her hands, and she was looking back at the camera and laughing. It was taken at a camp somewhere, by the costume of shirt and shorts. There was a picture of Van Horst, standing beside a woman whom Weigand could not place; and there were half a dozen pictures, bound together by rubber bands, taken somewhere else—in Florida, at a guess. All of people he had never seen before except—yes, there was Mrs. Wilson, smiling a little self-consciously among men and women who were, for the most part, much younger.

  He laid the pictures on the shelf of the desk as he looked at them, working down through the layers. Then he held a picture and stared at it and laid it down on the desk and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. So Clayton Hunt was Helen’s “most affectionately,” was he? And what was he to deduce from that? Distant avuncular fondness? Indulgent employer to admiring aide? Or—

  Leaning back, he stiffened, and then eased his chair’s legs to the floor. The soft sound was repeated outside. Somebody was coming up the stairs which led only to the Wilson apartment—coming very quietly, without announcement. There was the faintest of footfalls on the landing before Weigand moved, quickly, to the light switch, praying that the door fitted closely; thankful that it opened inward and against the wall where he was stand
ing. The lights were out as he moved again, through the shadows and quickly, and he had escaped from the dangerous proximity to the switch—where the hand of the intruder would first come groping—before he heard a key sliding gently into the lock. He was across the living-room and into the bedroom beyond and had shut the communicating door almost to behind him before the key turned with a tiny, clicking sound, and the apartment door began to open.

  The door opened inward slowly, for a moment screening the intruder. Weigand’s muscles tightened with his nerves. His breath came in softly to fill his lungs, and he could feel a prickling at the back of his neck. Then the door was fully opened and Weigand’s breath came out again in a soundless sigh.

  Dorian Hunt stood in the doorway. For a moment she stood hesitant, her eyes traveling around the room. Then she was moving, quickly and with a grace which the man watching wished desperately he might forget, toward the opened desk.

  She stopped there, as he had known she would, and across the room he could hear her quickly-drawn breath. For a moment she stood, action frozen, one hand outstretched toward the rifled desk. Only her eyes moved for that moment, and then the body turned slowly. And then the instant broke, and there was a flow of movement in the girl which carried her back toward the door. Then Weigand spoke, and the harshness in his voice startled him.

  “Well, Miss Hunt?” he said.

  His voice checked her. She turned, facing him, as he came through the door from the bedroom. Her hands clenched as they hung by her sides.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s better. You wouldn’t rush off, would you?”

  His voice was cold, scathing. Anger and color flared in her face.

  “Why shouldn’t I leave?” she said, and her voice was high and shook a little. “Can you stop my leaving?”

  Weigand’s answer was immediate and unspoken. He crossed to the door behind her, closed it and stood against it. She turned to face him, and they stood close together. He could see her breast rising and falling quickly.