Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

  “Since we didn’t take the napkin there,” Jerry said, “and you know we didn’t, how about a drink?”

  Mullins looked thirstily at Weigand, who hesitated, shrugged. “What Art don’t know won’t hurt us,” Mullins said, and Weigand smiled slightly, said it had been a long day, said, finally, “Why not?” A few minutes later, Pam said, “Now,” and, when Weigand hesitated just perceptibly, added, “After all, it’s our napkin.”

  “I’d tell you anyway, I suppose,” Bill said. “It’s got to be a habit. So far—”

  So far, it was merely a suspicious death. It had taken toxicological examination to make it that, although the first physician called—a heart specialist, who had offices in the Park Avenue apartment house—had had his doubts from the beginning. A corrosive poison was an obvious possibility. But so was some violent digestive attack, perhaps resulting from food poisoning. The physician had reported. An ambulance had come, and the police with it, and a medical examiner shortly thereafter. The medical examiner had called it poison, and then it really started. When Weigand and Mullins came into it, from Homicide East, with the precinct men and, a little later, a team from the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau, with an assistant district attorney. And men from the Police Laboratory. The autopsy was hurried; it was not waited for. By the time the preliminary report came from Bellevue, they were well into it. The preliminary report showed oxalic acid.

  “But,” Pam said, at that point, “I never thought of that as a poison—not as a real poison.” She paused a moment. “I suppose,” she said, “because my grandfather used to use it to clean his straw hat. It seems so—domestic.”

  It was, in a sense, Bill agreed. It was also a poison, and a fairly violent one. Half an ounce would kill; an eighth of an ounce had been known to kill. The amount it had taken to kill Bradley Fitch was not yet determined. Since he had died rather quickly—within, it appeared, not more than half an hour after ingestion—it was probable that the amount taken had been large. He had taken it on an empty stomach; in a concoction apparently intended as a hangover remedy.

  And the method of taking was one of the things which cast doubt on the simplest solution, which would have been suicide. Oxalic acid, because it can be procured easily and at small expense (which is not infrequently an item) had once been often used by suicides. In recent years, this had not been so true.

  “People don’t wear straw hats so much,” Pam said, and to this, after a slight start, the others agreed. It might well be that the acid was, as a result of the decline in straw hats, less often readily available in the home.

  “People used it for ink stains, though,” Mullins said. Weigand looked at him. Mullins said, “O.K., Loot.”

  A man ready to kill himself would not, it was to be presumed, bother to concoct a hangover remedy, since the cure he planned for other woes would serve for all. The other arguments against suicide were obvious. To all appearances, Fitch had been a man with few troubles and much to anticipate—specifically, marriage to Naomi Shaw. (But appearances, as all know—and as policemen know better than most—are not always trustworthy.)

  But further, it appeared that somebody had been with Fitch shortly before (if not actually at the time) he drank the poison. Somebody, at any rate, had rung the bell at the upstairs door. So Mrs. Rose Hemmins testified. He explained Mrs. Hemmins. She had heard the sound of footsteps, and had supposed they were those of Fitch, on his way to open the door.

  Weigand interrupted himself there to ask what they knew of the Fitch apartment. “Since you were at this celebration,” he added.

  They knew, Jerry told him, only a foyer and two rooms, both large, both party rooms.

  “And,” Pam said, “that the elevator doesn’t stop anywhere else, which was most impressive. I mean, when it stops at that floor, of course. You walk right into the apartment, or almost. Instead of a corridor and a lot of doors with letters. Like here.”

  It was all rather impressive, Bill Weigand agreed. Impressive and a little archaic. He did not suppose that there were now in New York many apartments like the one in which Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus Fitch, emanating the warm glow of great wealth, had installed themselves just before the first world war and ten years or so before the birth of their only child. There had been more such apartments then, and for some years thereafter, but even by the twenties the number had been dwindling.

  “Not enough servants any more,” Pam said. “Or, I suppose, children either.”

  Weigand supposed so. It takes a good many servants to staff a duplex apartment of sixteen rooms, several of them disproportionately large. It takes a large family, if people are not to rattle. It takes also, and obviously, a great deal of money, and a corresponding scale of life. “And,” Pam pointed out, “not so much living in the country.”

  Again she was agreed with. So, most such apartments had been cut up into smaller ones. That of the Fitch family had not, although the family, properly speaking, had been reduced to one man. Bradley Fitch had maintained the big place, which occupied a good part of the eighth floor and of the ninth in the twelve-story building. It had entrances on both floors; was internally connected by two stair flights (family and staff) and a dumbwaiter, which had apparently not been used for years. Fitch’s own quarters had been on the ninth floor, with other bedrooms and baths; the lower floor was devoted to living areas, a big kitchen, and servants’ rooms. Both floors had windows on Park and on the side street—and on a large air shaft.

  “So,” Bill said, “people who wanted to call on Fitch, and knew their way around, went directly to the ninth floor and he let them in there.” Apparently, if the housekeeper was right, somebody had that morning, at eleven or a little before.

  “Then you don’t know it was Sam,” Pam said, and Bill Weigand said they did not, as yet, know it was anybody. Certainly, it did not appear to have been Sam Wyatt. Wyatt had showed up half an hour later, and at the downstairs door. He had been let in by the housekeeper, Mrs. Hemmins; with her, he had found Bradley Fitch dead on the floor. It had been he who had gone to a telephone and called a doctor. He had been present still when the police arrived, had told them what he knew, had been asked to wait, in case Homicide had further questions. He had, by choice, waited in the anteroom on which the elevator opened. There, Bill Weigand had talked to him.

  It did not appear that he had much of importance to contribute. He had dropped around, on the chance of finding Fitch available. He had been shocked—shocked as Mrs. Hemmins had been—to find what they did in the upstairs study. He was now more shocked than ever to hear that Fitch had been poisoned.

  He had not been asked about the cocktail napkin, since it had not been found—more precisely, had not been identified—when he was talked to by Weigand and Mullins. The napkin had been picked up in the course of the thorough—the incredibly thorough—examination given a room in which murder has been done. Weigand had identified it as he checked over articles arranged for his viewing. But that had been later.

  Wyatt had been asked why he had wanted to talk to Fitch at, for both of them, a comparatively early hour. He had said, at first, “Business,” and then, when Weigand and Mullins waited, Mullins’ pencil poised over his notebook, Wyatt had amplified. It had been about the play.

  “About its closing, of course,” Pam said. “We know about that. Sam was here because of that. When he must have picked up the napkin.”

  It had been about Around the Corner, and its closing. Wyatt had explained the situation. He had decided to make, alone and with Fitch alone—“no man’s himself with a girl like Nay around,” he had explained to Weigand—one more effort to persuade Fitch to be reasonable; to, at least, let Nay remain in the play for another six months. “It seems,” Weigand said, “it will make all the difference to a movie sale.”

  Pam did not see why that would be true; Jerry, after a few moments of thought, said it might. In New York, Around the Corner could hardly be more highly thought of. But it had been on Broadway only briefly; there had hardl
y been time for the rest of the country to hear of it. Motion picture producers, particularly in these days, bid against one another only for those “properties” which were almost universally known. “Like,” Jerry said—“oh, like Lindbergh’s memoirs.” Or, to go back a few years, Life with Father. It was when there was bidding that the money rolled in.

  In any case, that was the explanation Wyatt had given. He had, he had told Weigand, been moderately hopeful of making Fitch see their point. This hopefulness, it appeared, had arisen during a party Fitch had given the night before at “21.”

  “One of these damned stag affairs,” Wyatt had said, and had snapped his fingers. (“Always do that?” Bill asked. “Most of the time,” Jerry said.) Wyatt had dropped in, rather briefly, according to his account. He had had a drink or two. Who had been there? Damned near everybody. Men—theater people—Fitch had met through knowing Naomi Shaw. Other men about whom Wyatt professed to know little. “Probably polo players,” he had told Weigand. “People like that.” (That he had snapped his fingers then, snapping polo players into oblivion, the Norths did not need to be told.)

  Had anything been said, by Fitch presumably, which led Wyatt to think a renewed discussion of the play’s fate might be helpful?

  Nothing had been said, Wyatt told the questioning policeman. (“Very open and aboveboard about the whole thing,” Weigand said. “Or seemed to be.”) It was—well, it had proved hard to put words to. Fitch had been a good host at the stag party; had seemed a friendly man; even a pleasant man. Wyatt supposed that, subconsciously, he had taken Fitch out of a pigeonhole labeled “Polo Player” or “Rich Man’s Little Boy” and looked at him and—liked what he saw. Fitch had been, it appeared, especially friendly with the men from the theater, including Wyatt himself.

  “Left me feeling he might have been thinking it over,” Wyatt had said. “Hell—left me with the feeling he could think. Thought if I got him alone we might work something out.”

  There had obviously, Wyatt said, been nothing to lose. Or, it had seemed so.

  “You don’t count on murder,” Wyatt said, and snapped his fingers.

  “You didn’t try the upstairs door?”

  “Up—oh, no. Didn’t know about it—didn’t know Fitch lived up there, as you say he did. I’d only been here once before—to that damned big party.”

  Had he thought Fitch was drinking a lot at the more recent party—the stag party?

  He had not thought so, particularly. Fitch had been all right while he was there. The party was still going when he left.

  Did he remember who had been at the stag party? Specifically, by name?

  The men in the cast of Around the Corner. Strothers, Jasper Tootle. The director of Around the Corner, Marvin Goetz. And a lot of polo players. He didn’t remember names; he was no good at names. “All pretty much alike, anyway,” Wyatt said, contentedly putting them in the pigeonholes, from one of which he had, tentatively, removed Bradley Fitch.

  They had let Wyatt go along, after a few more questions. Now they would have to get him back, and ask him about the napkin. There was little doubt what he would say; little doubt what had happened. Wyatt had, absent-mindedly, stuck the cocktail napkin in his pocket while at the Norths’. While with Mrs. Hemmins in the study, with Fitch dead on the floor, he had as absent-mindedly taken it out for some reason. Perhaps to dab with it at a forehead on which, understandably, cold sweat might have formed.

  “So this,” Weigand said now, dangling the little napkin between his fingers, “won’t get us anywhere. Inspector O’Malley thought—well, he thought it might.”

  “I know,” Pam said. “Inspector Artemus O’Malley thought it might get Jerry and me in jail.”

  (Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley, at that time commanding Manhattan detectives, is a conservative policeman, disapproving of amateur intervention—particularly by people named North. He is also somewhat choleric.)

  “Well,” Mullins said, “we know this much, anyway. It’s going to be a screwy one.”

  And this, also, was because the Norths were in it.

  “The elevator man doesn’t help?” Jerry asked, and Bill told him there wasn’t any. Until noon, the apartment house elevators were self-operating. To get to the ninth floor—to any floor—you got in and pressed a button. To get to the ground floor again, you got in and pressed another button. A policeman’s lot, Bill supposed, had been easier before automatic elevators, automatic telephones; easier in Inspector O’Malley’s more active days.

  “I’d think,” Pam North said, “she’d keep a cat.”

  Sergeant Mullins set his glass down very carefully. He looked at Mrs. North with anxiety evident on his solid face. Jerry was gentle; his words might have been as fragile as eggshells.

  “Who, dear?” Jerry said.

  “But evidently she doesn’t,” Pam said.

  “Please, Pam,” Bill Weigand said.

  “Alone so much of the time in that big place,” Pam said. “Oh—perhaps a dog, but it would have been the same thing. Mrs. Hemmins, of course.”

  “Mrs. North,” Sergeant Mullins said. He spoke in a hushed tone. “You’re saying a cat and a dog are the same thing?”

  It didn’t matter, Pam said, since obviously it wasn’t either. Or, for that matter, a horse.

  At that, Jerry said, “Oh.” He turned to Weigand. “Actually,” he said, “she’s talking about Sam Wyatt.” He considered this. “In a way,” he added.

  “He’d have been sniffling,” Pam said. “He’s very susceptible. He—” She stopped, since Bill was looking at her intently.

  “He was,” Bill said. “You’re saying he’s allergic?”

  “Why,” Pam North said, “of course, Bill. What else would I be saying? He was sniffling? And his eyes were running? When you talked to him?”

  “Not a great deal,” Bill said. “Slightly. I supposed he had a summer cold.”

  “For all we know,” Jerry said, “he had. He may have caught one last night. Anyway, even if there is a cat—or—”

  “Not a horse,” Pam said. “Unless—but that’s silly.”

  They waited.

  “It just occurred to me,” Pam said, “that since Mr. Fitch played polo so much, whatever it is about a horse might have sort of—well, stuck to him. But that would have been other clothes, obviously. It’s almost certainly a cat. Mrs. Hemmins sounds exactly like a cat.”

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. “Bill knows Sam was in the apartment. He was in the apartment when Bill talked to him.”

  “In the anteroom,” Pam said. “Where the elevator stops. Not really inside. But he had been.” She paused. “Of course,” she said. “That’s why he was in the anteroom. Probably the cat doesn’t get there. What kind of cat is it, Bill?”

  “I didn’t see any kind,” Bill said, and spoke abstractedly. “This allergy Wyatt has—the symptoms come on quickly?”

  “He wasn’t here five minutes,” Pam said. “I thought at first he was—well, crying because the play was closing. Of course, I suppose it would be three times as quick here, wouldn’t it? Because of three cats.”

  The three cats, who find a group of four humans excessive—more than four is impossible—had withdrawn. Being addressed, they appeared, in a body, in a doorway, their tails arching in enquiry. “Good evening, Martini,” Bill said, knowing who must be first addressed. “Gin. Sherry.” Martini spoke briefly. Gin not at all, Sherry at length. “We’re not having any, Sherry,” Pam said. “She thinks canapés, because we’re having cocktails. Of course, we don’t know how many Mrs. Hemmins has. They wouldn’t have been around, of course. Too many policemen.”

  “Look,” Mullins said. “We know he was in the apartment. He says so. This Hemmins says so. We don’t need a cat to prove it.” He paused. “Do we?” he said.

  “No, sergeant,” Bill said. “All the same—” He crossed the room to the telephone, saying, “All right?” to the Norths and getting “Of course,” in that exchange dictated by convention, if not
by common sense. He consulted a memorandum, dialed a number. He said, “Weigand. Is there a cat there?” He waited a moment. “Yes,” he said, “a cat. I don’t care what kind of cat. Or, a dog will do, apparently.”

  He turned, telephone in hand, and raised enquiring eyebrows.

  “Oh, that’s what Sam said,” Pam said. “A cat is better. That is, I mean worse, of course.”

  Bill nodded. He said, “Well, ask her, will you? I’ll hold on. Oh—and ask her if Mr. Wyatt had a cold while he was in the apartment.”

  “Thinks I’ve gone nuts,” Bill told the others, while he waited.

  “Well,” Mullins said, in a tone of consideration. Bill grinned at him. He said, “You say yourself they’re always screwy when the Norths—” and broke off, to say, “Yes?” He listened.

  “Big black fellow?” he said. “Have the run of the place? Or didn’t you ask?”

  The policeman who had answered the telephone had, it appeared, put cat and cold together, and come up with an answer—and the proper question of Mrs. Rose Hemmins. The cat did have the run of the apartment; of both floors, except that Mrs. Hemmins tried to keep him downstairs when Fitch was at home. She tried, but that morning she had failed—

  “Right,” Bill said. “And the cold?”

  He listened. He said, “Wait a minute. Is she certain?” and listened again and said, “It may be. Ask her again.” He waited. After some little time, he said, “Right,” and turned back.

  “Mrs. Hemmins says he had a cold,” he said. “But—she says he had it when he arrived.”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “then it was really a—” But she did not finish it.

  “Right,” he said, when she did not. “Or—he hadn’t just arrived. The cat—it’s a big black cat, the boys say—had been upstairs. Visiting Fitch, apparently. So—” He shrugged.

  “Perhaps he has got a cold,” Pam said. “Anyway, I know he—” But again she did not finish.

  “He took it hard,” Jerry said. “The play’s closing. Not only because of the money but—writers are odd people, sometimes. He kept saying the play was nothing. Couldn’t imagine what people saw in it. All the same, it was—hell, it was a dream come true. And—”