Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

  “On the whole,” Pam said, “I guess I didn’t wake you up very much, did I? Lying here worrying, all by myself—deserted—and I make a few little sounds—very small sounds, really—just on the chance and now all you do is talk about people being de-cousined.” She sighed. “You may as well go back to sleep,” she said. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “What?”

  “What I just said—worry.”

  “Why not in the morning?”

  “Because,” Pam said, “it isn’t the sort of thing you can put off. Anyway, it’s keeping me awake. Listen—will you just listen?”

  Jerry would.

  If he would, he was told, he would see the situation. It was one they had to face. Sam Wyatt had come to them—well, come to Jerry—to be sustained. Had come trustingly. And what had they done? They had told about his allergy, which otherwise the police might never have heard of—

  “Oh,” Jerry said at that point, “come now, Pam.”

  Might not, then, have heard of so soon. But the point was, it had been heard of from them. And, as a result of that, there had been the discovery of Mrs. Hemmins’ cat and then Mrs. Hemmins’ assertion that Wyatt had had symptoms before he entered the apartment. Or—before he was supposed to have entered the apartment. And, as if that were not enough, they had told about the poison in the soup.

  “Probably,” Pam said, “he’s in jail this very minute. And we just sit here.”

  “If he lied about being in the apartment before,” Jerry said, “probably jail’s where he belongs.”

  “There might be a hundred explanations of that,” Pam said. “The point is—what about the stocky man?” She paused. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ash tray. (It continued to smolder; Jerry reached over and stubbed further. For this, absently, he was thanked.) “Jerry!” Pam said. “You know—what if they were in it together? A—a beaver game.”

  “Beaver?” Jerry said. “Oh, badger.”

  “Let’s not argue about animals,” Pam said. “Mightn’t it?”

  Jerry drew deeply on his cigarette.

  “I don’t quite see—” he began, and did not finish, because, when he began to look, he did see. It was a long jump, they had nothing to jump from. There were several possible landing places. Still—

  “This is one thing I’ve thought about,” Pam said. “Lying here, unable to sleep, with nobody to—”

  “All right, darling,” Jerry said. “You were put upon. What thing?”

  “Naomi Shaw and this—this cousin,” Pam said. “I don’t suppose he’d actually be a cousin, of course. She gets herself engaged to a man with all this money and—oh, I know—gets him to make a will leaving it all to her. Not as Mrs. Bradley Fitch, of course. As Naomi Shaw. And then she and this man kill Fitch and they whack up.”

  “Look,” Jerry said, “if she’s that kind of girl—and I must say she doesn’t look it—why wouldn’t she just marry Fitch? Why get involved in murder? And, as you say, ‘whacking up’ the swag?”

  “Because—” Pam said. “For one thing, I don’t know what you mean she doesn’t look it. Just because she’s so pretty. Show me a man who can—”

  “Subject,” Jerry said. “Subject, Pamela.”

  “All right,” Pam said. “You brought it up. Suppose she’s already married to this man and—Jerry!”.

  They had been talking in low tones, as became the hour, the possibility of sleeping neighbors. At his name, so spoken, Jerry jumped slightly against the pillow.

  “That’s it!” Pam said. “Don’t you remember? She was married. Somebody—oh, Sam Wyatt—told us that. She comes from Kansas City and probably it was somebody there, and he comes out of the past and has a hold on her and—and—you know about Kansas City. Gangsters.”

  She was, Jerry told her, slandering a considerable city. However—

  “You make it lurid,” he told her.

  “I don’t,” Pam said, “argue that I’ve dotted every ‘t.’ But—it’s certainly much more likely than Sam Wyatt. After all, he’s a writer. And writers just—think about things. Except Hemingway, who shoots things. And he’s an exception.”

  In many ways, Jerry agreed.

  “Well,” Pam said, “don’t we have to tell Bill about this—gangster? About his meeting Naomi Shaw where they wouldn’t be seen? To plot the murder?”

  “In other words, possibly. But—yes. Tomorrow.”

  “And Sam Wyatt, in jail?” Pam said.

  In the end, Jerry did telephone. Acting Captain Weigand was gone for the night.

  “If we went—” Pam said, but Jerry, this time, was firm, and Pamela was acquiescent. She said, “All right, tomorrow,” and turned on her side, and breathed deeply twice, and slept like a kitten.

  Jerry tossed and turned. He twisted. He got himself a drink of water and he smoked another cigarette. Finally, he returned to the Braithwaite manuscript which had kept them for the weekend in New York. Then Gerald North slept quickly.

  Two weeks after Around the Corner opened, Naomi Shaw, who had started as a featured player—with Sidney Castle—had become a star. “Critic’s Darling Elevated to Stardom,” the Daily Mirror reported. A week after that, she had rented herself a little house—a very little house, she had told her friends, and had added, “But of course I’m not very big,” and this her friends, particularly when male, had found charming. (It is true that Jane Lamont, Naomi’s understudy, had remarked that she couldn’t see that darling Naomi was so damned little as all that. “You’d think,” Jane had said, “that everybody else was big as an elephant.” But even Jane Lamont had been, to a degree, tolerant, as even women often were of Naomi Shaw.)

  The little house was squeezed between larger houses on a residential street of the upper East Side. It was a three-story house, but it was not much more than twenty feet wide. One climbed to the door, up a flight of stone steps, with an areaway below. One walked into a small foyer, and on the left could enter, from it, another small room with a single window and a large cabinet which contained radio and television and a record player. That it was difficult to sit far enough from the television, which had a large screen, was really (looked at properly) the more fun.

  Beyond these two rooms, reached by a doorway from the foyer, was the living room, which occupied the width of the house and was almost forty feet long, and had a far end of glass. Beyond the glass was a “garden,” occupied by a tree. In a near corner there was a narrow staircase leading up, and in the far corner, on the right, there was another leading down—down, as it happened, to the kitchen, and through the kitchen, to the garden.

  It was a charming little house, even from the outside, where Bill Weigand stood at eleven forty-five Saturday night. He was alone.

  There was a light in the single small window next to the door; there was a light, dimmer, visible through the glass of the door. Bill Weigand pressed a button and there were soft chimes within. He waited, and nothing happened, and he pressed the button once more. He waited longer, and pressed again. It was still some seconds before he was answered. Then Naomi Shaw came to the door herself. She looked first through the glass, and then opened the door until a chain held it. She said, in a soft voice—in the voice which no one had ever quite described—“Who is it?” The voice seemed meant for better words. Even these, they caressed.

  Bill Weigand told her, and she said, “Oh,” and hesitated. She said, “It’s so late, isn’t it?” but then, “What an odd thing for me to say.”

  “You telephoned me,” Bill told her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

  Then she released the chain and said, softly, “Come in, please,” and Bill went in. She led him through the foyer and down the living room and there turned.

  Five feet three, Bill thought—but thought subconsciously, in an official corner of his mind. Weight about a hundred and five. Brown hair, worn rather long; very large brown eyes, set rather far apart. Face, what is known as heart-shaped; mouth, rather full-lipped. Wearing—

&nb
sp; She is damned lovely, Bill Weigand thought, in an unofficial corner of his mind.

  —wearing a fitted black thing—house coat, belted. Very covering, very severe. Made of some heavy stuff—silk, he supposed.

  Actually, Bill thought, she stands as if she didn’t weigh anything at all. It wouldn’t make any difference if she wore a—a mother hubbard.

  She was pale, except that her lips were bright. She put a hand to her broad, white forehead and lifted the heavy dark hair from it and pushed it back a little, and she moved her hand and the hair fell where it had been. The gesture was slow; as she raised her arm the sleeve of the house coat fell back to her elbow, and the line of her forearm and wrist and hand was a perfect line.

  “I’d almost forgotten,” she said. “I’m—I’m so very tired.” There was a little check in her voice. The same, Bill thought, that she used at the end of the second act. But now, as then, the check—the fleeting hesitation—was right—exquisitely right. She was too tired—but not quite too tired—to remember words.

  “Of course,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you. But you telephoned.”

  “I know,” she said. “We must sit down, mustn’t we? Please?”

  She indicated a chair, and again the gesture was beautiful. She sat on a sofa.

  “It’s all been like a dream,” she said. “A dreadful dream but—not a nightmare. Everything a little smudged. It’s all seemed so—unreal.” Again she lifted the heavy hair from her forehead, and again released it. “I haven’t even cried,” she said. “Why, do you suppose?”

  “It happens that way,” Bill said, and waited. She looked at him, as if, still, it were his turn to speak. “You said, after I told you I was one of the men investigating—” He hesitated. “Mr. Fitch’s death,” he said. “You said, ‘I have to tell you something. Tonight. Can you come to my house?’”

  “Did I?” she said. “Yes, I must have. I’d fallen asleep, I think. Yes, I know I had. I waked up and—everything was very clear. You know how it is, sometimes? Like a bright light? But then—little by little there isn’t any light? I suppose it’s all part of a dream, don’t you? The afterglow of a dream?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “You had something to tell me?”

  “That’s just it,” she said. “I—thought I had. It was all so clear. I had to do something about it right away, so I telephoned you, but then—you must understand how it is. Can’t you? Can’t you even try?”

  She leaned a little toward him, sat so that, leaning forward, she lifted her chin as she looked at him. Damn it all, Bill thought. It’s completely real. But—in the play she does that. When—when is it? In the third act? But that is when she’s making up the story about her father. Of course—

  “I’ll try,” Bill said. “But you’re not really telling me you called about a dream?”

  She shook her head slightly, and said that it was not as simple as that. She said that many things were not as simple as we tried to make them—as words made them. “But I’m not good at words,” she said. “Somebody else writes the words for me.” He would have to be patient. She had been ever since she had—had heard—in this almost numbed condition. She did not know the right word for that. Probably it was what they called shock. Then, that evening, after she had eaten something—“and I had a drink before; two drinks”—she had gone to sleep. Or, she said, into a kind of half sleep.

  She had wakened from the sleep, or half sleep, suddenly—so suddenly that the awakening was itself a kind of shock. And in that instant of waking, and even for some minutes afterward—“long enough for me to call you”—it had seemed to her that what had happened was very clear, very certain.

  “It must have happened to you,” she said. “Surely it must happen to everybody. That feeling of—illumination? I suppose, actually, it’s because, although you think you’re awake, you’re not really awake. I know Sam told me once—” She paused. “Mr. Wyatt,” she said. “He wrote my play.”

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  She looked at him intently. She was, he thought, trying to find something in his face. He began to doubt that she would find what she wanted to find.

  “Mr. Wyatt told me,” she said, and the intentness was in her softly lovely voice, “that he dreams plots sometimes. Stories, you know? And that when he first wakes up they still seem good—oh, sometimes for as long as half an hour. And then—then, he said, they fall apart in his hands. They weren’t really anything to begin with. This was like that. As if I’d made up a story while I was asleep. And—”

  Suddenly, she covered her face with her hands. Her body trembled under the house coat. Bill was tempted to touch a slender, shaking shoulder, and did not. She raised her face, after a moment, and her eyes were dry. “I can’t cry,” she said. “Why can’t I cry? It’s as if—inside—I still don’t—don’t believe that Brad’s—that Brad’s not alive.”

  Weigand shook his head. He waited a moment. He said, “What was this—story, Miss Shaw? A theory about Mr. Fitch’s death?”

  “He was killed, wasn’t he?” she said. “It was that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody’s been so—so careful about it,” she said. “People called up and wanted to come around and—I only wanted to be alone. Phyllis—she’s in my play, you know—did come but—but after a while she saw I’d rather be alone. She was so sweet—but—Somebody tricked him into taking this poison?”

  “Apparently. You had a theory? When you waked up this evening?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That was it. Only, it was the way I said. It—it fell apart in my hands. After I called you.”

  “Why? You thought of something that didn’t fit?”

  “I suppose so. But, really, because none of it fitted. I called back at your office, but they said you’d already gone out.”

  “What was the theory, Miss Shaw?”

  “No,” she said, “it wouldn’t be fair. Now that I know it—it can’t really be right.”

  Nevertheless, he told her, they were interested in any theory. In any possibility. It took him a little time. She seemed very reluctant. Once—he thought to gain time—she interrupted something she was saying and listened, and then she said she thought she had heard something; and then that, probably, she had only heard Nellie, and that Nellie—Nellie Blythe—was her maid, and had a room on the third floor.

  “If there’s nothing to it, nobody will be hurt,” he told her, several times, in several ways. He was asked, finally, if he promised that. He promised that. Then—

  Putting it in words, she said, made it the more absurd. Arnold Latham, Jr., had been furious. Perhaps that wasn’t the word. He had been bitter. That was true. Strangely, disproportionately bitter.

  About what?

  But she thought everybody knew. Brad had been planning to marry Peggy Latham. Arnold’s sister. A date had even been set.

  “And then Brad and I met,” she said. “We—neither of us could help it. Brad felt awful about Miss Latham but—what could he do? It would have been worse to go on with it and—it wouldn’t have been fair to anybody, would it? But Arnold couldn’t see it that way. He—he said dreadful things to Brad.”

  “Mr. Fitch told you this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Latham said threatening things?”

  “I don’t know if they were really threatening. Just—very angry things. You see, the Lathams haven’t—well, they haven’t too much money. Not the way people like that have money. I suppose—but that would be a dreadful thing to say, wouldn’t it?”

  “That Mr. Latham was counting on his sister’s marrying a very rich man? Was disappointed enough to kill because of that?”

  “I told you it was wrong,” she said. “It was just—something happened to my mind.”

  “So far as you know, Mr. Fitch hadn’t—” He hesitated. “Miss Latham isn’t expecting a child by him?”

  She straightened at that, opened her large eyes very wide.

  “People like that
?” she said. “But really, captain! That sort of thing doesn’t happen to them.”

  Only to poor little working girls, her tone implied.

  The others—what did she think? That they knew too much? The files of almost any adoption agency, if she could look at them—which she could not—would tell her a different story.

  “So far as you know, Mr. Fitch hasn’t left her money? As—as a sort of compensation?”

  “Why,” she said, “he wouldn’t have done that. That would be—such a crude thing to do.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Very crude, Miss Shaw. You know Mr. Latham, Jr.? His sister?”

  She had met Arnold Latham once or twice, before she and Fitch had—made up their minds. Peggy Latham, she thought, only once. “A blond girl, quite tall. The kind who plays golf.”

  “Did Mr. Latham seem to be a violent person?”

  “No. I told you it was all—that it wasn’t right. You made me tell you about it.”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “I did. When you were formulating this theory, Miss Shaw. Didn’t it occur to you that, if Mr. Latham was going to kill anyone, it wouldn’t be Mr. Fitch?”

  She looked at him. She appeared to be puzzled.

  “I don’t—” she said, and then shook her head. The heavy, dark brown hair swayed with her head’s movement.

  “You,” Bill said. “If anyone. That’s obvious, isn’t it? On the assumption that, with you out of the way, his sister would be back in the money? Literally, in the money?”

  “I didn’t—” she said. “What a—a frightening—”

  “Miss Shaw,” Bill Weigand said, “why did you ask me to come here?”

  She had an expressive face—for all its dainty beauty, a very expressive face. They had told Mary Shaftlich that, years ago, when she was taking elocution at Northeast High School. Her face was, now, extremely expressive. Words were unnecessary. She’s really good, Bill Weigand thought. But it’s true she’s better when someone else writes the words.

  “You didn’t ask me to come here to tell me this,” Bill said. “You were frightened when you called—frightened and entirely wide awake. Not because of this—this nebulous theory. This—”