Death of an Angel

by Frances Lockridge

  A cab had stopped for Strothers after a few minutes. On an impulse, Wyatt had waved down a cab for himself, being lucky. He had had the cab follow Strothers.

  This time, Bill did not ask why.

  Wyatt had followed the producer to the Algonquin, and followed him into it—or part way into it. He had seen him meet Naomi Shaw and, with her, start toward the entrance of the Oak Room.

  “Then I decided to come back here,” Wyatt said. “Try to find out what he’d been up to.”

  “Why did you think he’d been up to anything?”

  Wyatt looked hard at Weigand.

  “Somebody has,” he said. “You think I have. You’re willing to settle for me. Think I don’t know?”

  “So,” Bill said, “you’re merely trying to be helpful.”

  “To save my own skin. You want me to go on? Or am I just wasting your time?”

  “Go on.”

  Wyatt had walked back to the apartment house. “With these friends of mine following me.” He had gone up to the apartment, and rung the bell several times and, after it remained unanswered, gone to find the superintendent.

  “Don’t ask me why, except that I thought something had happened. He’d got in.”

  He didn’t know that, Bill pointed out. He did not know Strothers had gone there to see Mrs. Hemmins. He did not know that, if he had gone to see her, he had found her in the apartment.

  “A quarter of an hour he was inside,” Wyatt said. “It wouldn’t take five minutes to find out she didn’t answer. It didn’t take me five minutes to find out she didn’t answer. And—the superintendent hadn’t let anybody else in. He told me that when I asked him.”

  Wyatt had found the superintendent. Together they had found the body of Rose Hemmins—and the body of Toby, her cat. The superintendent had reported what they had found. “And that,” Wyatt said, “is all I know about it.” He looked at Bill Weigand with resolution; with an expression affirming innocence. Unfortunately, the expression was disrupted by another sneeze. The poor man, Pam North thought. Just when he was registering.

  Sam Wyatt stood, then. He held his hands out, side by side, the fists clenched. “All right,” he said, “put them on.”

  Bill let him stand so for a moment. Then Bill said, “No, Mr. Wyatt. The tumbril isn’t ready yet. I’ll let you know when it is.”

  Wyatt looked at the acting captain of Homicide East.

  “You know,” Wyatt said, “I don’t think I like you.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m damned sure I don’t,” he said. But then he sneezed again. “Oh hell” Sam Wyatt said. “Let me get out from where there’re cats.”

  “Wherever you like,” Bill Weigand told him. “For now.”

  Wyatt was surprised. He showed it. It occurred to Pamela North that he was, indeed, almost disappointed. You write a scene, she thought, and it doesn’t play the way you thought it would. You sneeze, and nobody puts handcuffs on at cue and—I wonder, Pam thought, if he’s writing the whole thing? Or—if he wants us to think he is? Writers are such funny people. If, of course, they’re all like poor Sammy. Imagining everything out in advance.

  As Wyatt went, a thin—a curiously rejected—figure, in search of purer air, Sergeant Mullins lifted enquiring eyebrows. “Right,” Bill said, and Mullins went to see to it.

  “Well,” Jerry North said, flatly. “You think he’s the one?”

  “I’m not,” Bill said, “as sure as he seems to think I am. He tells a circumstantial story. Lots of nice detail. But—” He did not finish, although he was given time.

  “Sometimes,” Jerry said, “a writer becomes a figment of his own imagination. Sometimes you can see them at it.”

  “Only,” Pam said, “you can’t always tell which is which. And sometimes there are—oh, figments within figments.” She paused. “If I know what I mean,” she added. “Anyway, I think it’s very strange about the poor cat.”

  “I—” Bill began and then said, to a blond young man who had come in from the elevator foyer and stood just inside the door, “Yes, Freddy. You want to see me?”

  Detective Frederick Willings—who sometimes thought people would still be calling him Freddy when he was ninety—said, “If you’ve got a moment, captain,” and came over. He looked, with a policeman’s doubt of civilians, at the Norths. He was told to go ahead. He went ahead.

  Pursuant to instructions, he had been talking to the superintendent of the building, to the doorman, to the operator on duty in the elevator which served the Fitch apartment. The doorman had said that there had been a woman hanging around suspiciously just before the police arrived. “We’ll check on that,” Bill Weigand told him gravely, pointedly not looking at Pam North.

  The superintendent of the building, who had a flat on the ground floor, was shocked by the whole business—personally shocked by what he had seen; shocked in behalf of the owners of the building by this second blow to the building’s dignity. He had had a drink or two to steady himself. He found it difficult to tell what things were coming to.

  He had not let anyone into the apartment before he let Mr. Wyatt in. Mr. Wyatt had seemed excited and upset when he had come asking to be let in. He had kept snapping his fingers, which proved he was excited and upset. He had been sure something must have happened to Mrs. Hemmins. “Turned out he was right, didn’t it?” the superintendent said, and Freddy Willings had agreed that it had. Who else might have visited the apartment previously, if anybody had, the superintendent wouldn’t know. Maybe Roy, on the elevator, would. Except maybe he had been eating and put the car on automatic. He was supposed to eat about eight, and not take more than half an hour at it.

  Roy, who was elderly, had been eating from about eight until around eight-thirty. He had had no relief, and had left the elevator at the first floor, set for automatic operation. “Most of our people go away weekends,” Roy said. “Like you’d expect.” There was no way of knowing whether the elevator had been used in his absence. It had been at the first floor when he returned to it.

  During the earlier part of the evening? Before he went to eat? And, after he returned?

  Just after he returned—this skinny man, up and down, ringing like he was in an awful hurry when he wanted to be brought down; asking where he could find the super; finding the super and going up with him. After that—“You people. Cops. Never saw so many cops.”

  Before?

  Before eight—about ten minutes before eight—a couple. The woman “skinny,” maybe forty, maybe fifty. The man considerably older, wearing the kind of straw hat you didn’t see so often any more. The man had been drinking, but he didn’t show it too much. “Smelled like it, though.” The couple had got off on the eighth floor and had crossed the foyer to the door of the Fitch apartment. Whether they had got in, he didn’t know. He assumed they had, since they had not rung to be brought down before he went to eat. For all he knew, they were still “up there.”

  His report finished, Freddy Willings, neatly dressed but with a police shield pinned to his coat, as is required of detectives at the scene of a crime, waited.

  “The man with the straw hat,” Pam North said. “The bleached straw hat.”

  “Apparently,” Bill said.

  “But,” Pam said, “Mrs. Hemmins was shot, wasn’t she? And Toby, too? Don’t people always use the same methods?”

  “No,” Bill said. “Freddy, I want you to go to the Barclay. See a Mr. and Mrs. James Nelson.”

  “Yes sir,” Freddy Willings said.

  “Ask them,” Bill told him, “if they killed Mrs. Hemmins and her cat.”

  “Right,” Willings said. He turned, almost military in his precision, and started for the door. Bill looked at him with a little doubt.

  “Freddy,” Bill said, and Detective Willings stopped. “Not in precisely those words, perhaps.”

  “No sir,” Freddy Willings said.

  “A good detective is always more or less suspicious and very inquisitive,” Bill said. “I quote from the Manual of Procedure, Fredd
y. Find out what the hell the Nelsons were doing here.”

  “Yes sir,” Freddy said, and went to do it. Bill Weigand watched him go, smiling faintly. He turned to Pam North. He said, “You’re a housewife, aren’t you?”

  “What on earth?” Pam said. “Yes. I suppose so. If you like pigeonholes.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bill said, and went and returned. He carried wadded cloth. There were spots of blood on it. He shook it out and it dangled, wrinkled badly, from his hand. It was, now, evidently a tea-towel, banded in red at top and bottom. He asked Pam what she made of it.

  “Well,” Pam said, “it’s a tea-towel.” She swallowed. She said she supposed that that was blood on it.

  “Oh, yes,” Bill said, dismissing the blood. “A wrinkled tea-towel.”

  They waited.

  “Mrs. Hemmins had dressed herself in a black dress,” Bill said. “Black silk dress—or rayon or nylon or something of the kind. Dressed herself up, I’d think. Because she knew somebody was coming. And—she had this tea-towel wadded up in her hand. And, she wasn’t wearing an apron.” He stopped and waited for Pam North, who looked at the cloth and after a bit said, “Well?” Then she held out her hand and took the towel.

  “It’s dry,” she said. She held it up. “It was damp and somebody wadded it up damp and it dried that way. Anybody can see that by looking at it.”

  “Not a freshly laundered towel she’d picked up and wadded in her hand?”

  “That would look different,” Pam said. “This one was used and then, instead of being shaken out and hung on a rack or something, it was just—well, wadded up.” She looked at it more carefully, and shook her head. She held it out to Bill Weigand. She said, “Is there something special about it? Outside of careless housekeeping?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “She wasn’t dressed for washing dishes. And, as you say, the towel’s dry now. If it had just been used, you’d expect it to be damp.”

  “It means something?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Bill Weigand said. “I’m just inquisitive, as I reminded Freddy Willings to be.”

  10

  Sunday, 10:20 P.M. to Monday, 1:05 A.M.

  Naomi Shaw had a house of her own. Samuel Wyatt had a small, but comfortable, suite in an apartment hotel. Phyllis Barnscott lived at the Algonquin; the James Nelsons—now presumably explaining themselves to Detective Freddy Willings, who it was to be hoped talked Mrs. Nelson’s language—had a house in Rye.

  But Mr. Wesley Strothers, who employed Miss Shaw and Miss Barnscott, who paid royalties to Sam Wyatt, lived in the westward reaches of Bank Street. Bank Street is a street in the Village; it is one of those streets which are hard for cab drivers to discover; it is not an impressive street. The house in which Wesley Strothers lived was not an impressive house. Acting Captain Weigand went up a short flight of sandstone steps, which were flaking off, and opened a heavy door and went into a small vestibule, which was almost completely dark. Weigand struck a match and examined push-buttons. Strothers lived on the third floor. Weigand pressed the button several times, and was unanswered. He went out to the sidewalk and looked up at the windows of the third floor. They were unlighted. Weigand went back to his car and sat in it. The radio talked to itself, speaking, harshly, of trials and tribulations, and of the need of patrol cars to cope therewith.

  He sat in the car for almost half an hour, and smoked several cigarettes and—toward the end a little sleepily—sought among the facts he had for the hunch he needed. The hunch remained elusive. Presumably, this meant that he still lacked facts. It was to be hoped that that was what it meant. He named names to himself—Naomi Shaw; her former husband, Robert Carr; Alicia and James Nelson; Phyllis Barnscott; Peggy Latham, who had (perhaps) sought love and had come up with polo ponies. But perhaps they were an adequate substitute; Miss Latham was only a name, brought to his attention. Miss Latham had a brother. Bill had to search memory for his name. Arnold Latham, Jr. So far, a character created by Naomi Shaw. And Samuel Wyatt—to some extent, as Jerry had suggested, a character created by Samuel Wyatt.

  Bill had, before, run into such people as these. They had proved not so much puzzling as elusive. You sought to put a finger on them, and they were not there. They were performing versions of themselves; they were writing characters for themselves, and scenes for the characters to play. Wyatt, now—imagining himself arrested, imagining himself in the death cell at Sing Sing, filling in all the details, presumably with dialogue. Living it all out in his mind. James Thurber’s Walter Mitty? Or a man staring, hopelessly, into a future shaped by his own actions? “Figments within figments,” Pam North had said. Sometimes things Pam said kept going round and round in the mind like—like rolling drops of mercury. “Figments within—”

  A cab stopped behind Bill’s Buick. Bill watched it in the mirror. A tall man, a little stooped, a bare-headed man with dark hair, got out of the cab and paid, and went up the sandstone steps. The cab pulled out, went on through Bank Street. Bill allowed several minutes. He went back to the dark vestibule, and lighted another match, and pressed the proper button. After a little time, the door in front of him clicked, in apparent excitement. Bill climbed stairs—the house listed to his right, and the stairs were tilted accordingly—to the third floor. Wesley Strothers stood in a doorway with the light behind him. He said, “Yes?” He listened. He said, “Sure. But isn’t it pretty late?” He was told there were just a few points.

  The apartment comprised two small rooms, with a kitchenette behind a curtain in a corner of one, and a bathroom between. The floors of both rooms canted, in accordance with the weary subsidence of the elderly house. The furniture was worn. Bill, directed, sat in what would, he supposed, be described as a “comfortable old chair.” He found it merely old.

  “Not much of a place, is it?” Wesley Strothers said. He had a deep, pleasant voice. He was, Bill realized, younger than one thought on seeing him first. The stoop misled, probably. And deep-set eyes somehow suggest advancing years. At a guess—a second guess—Wesley Strothers was not over forty. Perhaps he was a few years under forty. “Lived here for five-six years,” Strothers said. “Waiting for a hit. Or for the place to fall down. I’d begun to think it would fall down first, and then Sammy came along with this script of his.” He paused. “Well?” he said.

  “Probably you’ll move now,” Bill said.

  “First of October,” Strothers said. “God, yes.”

  “Now that the play is going to keep running?”

  “You people get around, don’t you?” Strothers said. “Look, can’t I get you something. Brandy? Or coffee, for that matter?”

  Bill shook his head, while saying, “Thanks, no.”

  He wouldn’t mind, he was told, if Strothers made himself coffee. “Drink a lot of coffee.” Bill would not. He watched Strothers, who pulled back the curtain of the kitchenette, lighted a two-burner stove, put a percolator over the flame. He wiped out the inside of a cup. “Got most of my meals on this until a few months ago,” he said, pointing at the stove. “Eating better, now. But things get dusty. Sure you won’t have a cup?”

  Bill thanked him again.

  Strothers remained by the kitchenette. He looked down at Weigand.

  “I’d begun to feel left out,” Strothers said. “Get a long statement from Nay. Put Sammy through it. Must have made him snap his fingers a lot. Writers are funny, but I suppose we’ve got to have them. Or go back to the commedia dell’arte.” He looked at Bill Weigand with sudden doubt. “Improvisation, you know,” he said.

  “Yes,” Bill said. “It takes time to get around to everyone, Mr. Strothers. You did give us a statement.”

  “That I was here, eating breakfast, when you say poor Brad was killed,” Strothers said. “That I didn’t know of any enemies he had.”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “Now,” Strothers said, “you want me to go over it in detail, I suppose?”

  Absently, Wesley Strothers continued to dust out the
inside of the coffee cup. Then he put the cup down and hung the tea-towel on a rod. He shook the percolator slightly, as if to arouse it. He opened the door of the small refrigerator which was under the gas plate and bent down and found what he wanted, and came up with a bottle of cream. Bill waited for the completion of these domestic chores.

  “Mrs. Hemmins has been killed,” he said, then, in a conversational tone.

  Wesley Strothers put the cream bottle on a counter. He put it there very carefully. He drew in a deep breath. He said, “God!” He said, “Not Rosie!”

  “Yes,” Bill said. “Rose Hemmins. And her cat. They were both shot.”

  The tall, dark man left the kitchenette and took the step or two needed to bring him near the middle of the small room. He stood there, looking down at Bill Weigand from caverned eyes.

  “When did it happen? Just a few hours ago she—” He stopped. He shook his head slowly, “Why?” he said. “For God’s sake, why?”

  “I suppose,” Bill said, “because she knew something. Perhaps tried to cash in on what she knew.”

  “Rosie?” Strothers said. “It’d be the last—” He did not finish. He gestured bewilderment with both hands. “When did you say it happened?”

  “This evening,” Bill told him. “We don’t know the exact time. Three or four hours ago, probably. Have you seen her recently, Mr. Strothers?”

  Strothers looked down at Weigand, his dark eyes intent, and for a moment did not reply. But then, slowly, he began to nod his head. He pulled a chair around to face Weigand and sat down in the chair.

  “Yes,” he said. “This evening. From what you say, it must have been just before she was killed.” He shook his head again. “The poor old thing,” he said. “She was all dressed up. As if she were going out some place. A movie, maybe. And now she’s dead. Shot, you said? And—the cat, too?”

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  “She was fond of the cat,” Strothers told him. “Thought more of the cat than—well, she thought a lot of the cat.” He leaned forward, suddenly. “She was dressed up because somebody was coming,” he said. “Not because she was going out.”