Murder in a Hurry

by Frances

  “Smell Jerry,” she advised him.

  He did; it was an agreeable coincidence.

  “Hello,” Jerry said. “Yes, boy, the same cats.”

  Now they were all watching the little dog. Aegisthus left Jerry North, smelled Sherman Pine, without comment; regarded Weigand, apparently with favor, came to Liza herself, and was again entranced.

  “Same cats,” Liza told him. He looked up at her and barked.

  “Really, Mary,” Barbara Whiteside said, once more. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough of—this?” She pointed at the dog, who turned suddenly and faced her, and seemed to understand the disapproval in her voice, because he barked again, this time on a different note. Then, Liza thought, he almost growled, but Mary Halder spoke his name quickly, and he relaxed and went to her. “I’ll take him downstairs,” Mary Halder said, and looked briefly to Weigand for his approval. He nodded. She picked the little dog up in her arms, then, and went toward the spiral staircase. But she went behind it and to another flight leading down. She was gone several minutes, and during those minutes, Weigand merely waited; during those minutes no one spoke. Then Mary Halder came back up the stairs, without the dog, and went back to her chair.

  Liza looked at her and then, for some reason, at Pam and Jerry North. She was just in time to see some unspoken communication between them—a communication of eyes, of the slow movement of Mr. North’s head. Again she felt, as she had felt in regard to Brian’s family, that she was alien, left out. The feeling was only momentary; it was ridiculous to have such a feeling; the Norths were as she and Brian would be. Oh please, as we will be, she thought, and felt lost again at the need for thinking it, for praying it, like a child. Until now, until today, it had been as inevitable, as beyond the need of praying for, as her next breath.

  Now, with the little, curiously named, dog put away “downstairs,” with Mary Halder back, the group turned again to Lieutenant Weigand who stood, more or less facing the windows, with the windows forming a background for the men and women who faced him. He waited a moment, seemed about to speak, and then turned away again, seeing the attention of the others go to something behind him. Sergeant Mullins was coming down the room. When he saw Weigand’s attention, he made a motion with his head, and Weigand went up the room to join him. They talked for a moment, and then walked back toward the door, where two other men in civilian clothes were waiting. The four of them walked together, then, and it was several minutes before Weigand turned back toward the group at the end of the room, regarded it for a moment, and then walked back. Their eyes, which had followed him as he left, were on him now as he approached.

  “Miss O’Brien,” Weigand said, and he spoke crisply, “this man who was with you when you found Mr. Halder’s body. Will you describe him again, please?”

  Now all of them looked at her.

  “A little man,” she said. “A very little, old man with a wrinkled face, with blue eyes, with—” She went on, doing as well as she could, trying to make words do what a pencil could so much better have done. She finished.

  “Does any of you know such a man?” Weigand asked now, and he spoke more curtly than he had done before, as if now there were need for haste.

  For a moment no one answered and Liza, looking at the faces of the Halders, could not tell at once whether the description had meaning for any of them. But then, as if he had waited merely to give the others a chance, after looking briefly at the woman who now, again, seemed almost too young to be his mother, Brian spoke.

  “Sure,” he said. “A crony of Dad’s. His name’s Felix. I’m not sure of his last name—Stedman, something like that. He and Dad played chess together; when Dad was away—he usually fed the animals. He had a little shop around there somewhere. A second hand store, something like that.” He stopped.

  Weigand nodded. He looked around at the others. “Any of the rest of you—?” he asked.

  “I heard of him; my husband mentioned him,” Mary Halder said. “Just about that much, but I don’t think his name is Stedman.”

  For a moment longer Weigand waited. Nobody else contributed anything.

  “Not Stedman,” Bill said. “Sneddiger. Felix Sneddiger. He’s an upholsterer; has a little shop around there as you say, Mr. Halder. He was with Miss O’Brien when—when she went into the shop this afternoon. She found Mr. Halder’s body, you know.” This, Liza realized, was for the benefit of anyone who did not know. “Mr. Sneddiger was with her only part of the time. He was very much affected by—by what they found. According to Miss O’Brien, he more or less collapsed.” He looked at Liza. “Right?” he said. She nodded. “She went to get him something and he disappeared,” Weigand said. “We’ve been trying to find him.”

  He looked around at them.

  “None of you has seen him, of course?” he asked.

  Nobody answered.

  “That’s strange,” Weigand said. “Because—he apparently came here. To this house.”

  He tossed this, let it explode. And then, Liza saw, the members of the family—Mr. Halder’s daughter and her husband the colonel; Jasper Halder and his wife; Brian and Brian’s mother—looked at one another quickly, uneasily; looked each of them at one face, then at another, the glances intercepting, racing (she thought) away from such interceptions; each of them, it seemed to Liza, at once doubtful of the others and unsure of what another might find in his own face; each of them wary and each alone. The detective lieutenant, his own face expressionless, watched them, waited for them, gave them time. It was Mrs. Whiteside who finally spoke.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” she said. “This—this odd little man Miss O’Brien says she saw. Why would he come here?”

  “I saw him, Mrs. Whiteside,” Liza heard herself say.

  Mrs. Whiteside ignored this; ignored it pointedly.

  “Why should he come here?” she repeated, asking it of Weigand.

  Weigand shrugged. He said that, nevertheless, there was every indication he had come there. He told them what the indications were. Precinct men, with Liza O’Brien’s description to work on, had had no trouble finding out the little man’s identity. Everybody knew him, apparently, for blocks around. They had had no trouble in finding his shop. But they had not found Felix Sneddiger himself; only by rather amazing luck had they found trace of him, but they had had the luck and found the trace within minutes of finding his empty shop.

  There was a hack stand on a nearby corner and, on the chance, one of the precinct men had asked the driver, reading a pocket mystery behind the wheel, if he had seen a little old man around, and described the man, named him. And the driver, gnarled, almost as old, from his appearance, as the man they sought, said, at once, “Felix? Sure.”

  He had not only seen him around; he had taken him away. His records showed when—ten minutes of five—and where. The where was Sutton Place.

  “I was settin’ here reading,” the hacker told the precinct man. “Felix comes along, sorta trotting. He says to me, Joe, he says, you know where Sutton Place is and I says to him, I’ve been driving a hack in this town for twenty-five, thirty years, whatta you think? Kidding, like, account of I know Felix maybe ten, fifteen years. So he gets in and I drives him—”

  He had driven him to the Halder house; the precinct man had taken Joe on the trip again, Joe had stopped in front of the house and said, “Yeah, this is it.”

  “And,” Weigand said, “he waited long enough to see Mr. Sneddiger come up to the door, apparently ring the bell, stand there for a minute and then, when someone opened the door, go in. The driver didn’t see who opened the door. But he’ll swear Mr. Sneddiger came here, was let into the house. Now—there isn’t any of you remembers anything about this? It would have been about—five-fifteen, five-twenty.”

  “I,” Mrs. Whiteside said, “wasn’t home at that hour. I had been shopping and—oh, it must have been almost six.”

  Weigand waited; he got statements from the others. Colonel Whiteside had got in about that time, he thought
, he hadn’t noticed, he had not seen Sneddiger. Mrs. Mary Halder had, on the other hand, gone out at about that time, to meet Sherman Pine. “For cocktails,” she said. She had not seen Sneddiger.

  “I was home,” Jennifer Halder said. “We don’t live here, you know, Lieutenant. We live—” she gave an address in the East Sixties. “I was just—oh, dawdling around, waiting for J. K. to come.” She paused. “My husband,” she said. “We call him J. K., mostly or—well, we used to call him ‘Junior’ a good deal. Then I—I heard the awful news on the radio and—well, I came here. Oh—my husband called and said he had heard it too and suggested we come here.”

  “Junior” it appeared, it was said by “Junior,” had stopped off for a drink, heard the news on the radio in a bar, telephoned his wife. But where, precisely, he was at five-fifteen or five-twenty he wouldn’t try to say. He conveyed that he wouldn’t take the trouble to decide, even if it were very little trouble.

  And Brian was not much more definite.

  “After—after I put Liza in a cab,” he said, “after I called the police—I decided I needed a drink. I was—well, I was pretty much shot, I guess. After all—” He did not amplify, he let it trail off. “I had a couple of drinks,” he said. “Then I decided to come here, to—to tell the others. I should have done it right away but—well, as I said, I was pretty well shot by—by everything. It was around six when I got here, probably.”

  It didn’t sound like Brian, Liza thought. Oh please, Brian, can’t you tell it doesn’t sound right?

  But the detective lieutenant had merely listened, not shown on his face whether it sounded right or not, not hurried Brian Halder. When Brian finished, he even nodded.

  “By the way,” he said. “You don’t live here either, Mr. Halder? But you have a key?”

  Brian didn’t live in the house. He had a key.

  “And you, Mrs. Halder? Mr. Halder?”

  Jennifer Halder had a key; her husband had a key.

  “Of course,” Whiteside said, “if this man—this Sneddiger—really came here, one of the servants may have—”

  They would see, Weigand told him. A man was talking to the servants; he was downstairs now, talking to the servants.

  “Really!” Mrs. Whiteside said. “We might at least have been told!”

  Weigand looked at her, did not answer, looked away; looked back up the room toward the door and then went to where Sergeant Mullins stood, with one of the other detectives. Weigand talked to them for several minutes, and then returned.

  “Three servants,” he said. “Right? Burns, his wife. A girl named Grace”—he looked at a slip of paper in his hand—“Grace Forward? Is that right?”

  “Farwood,” Mrs. Whiteside said. “Really, Lieutenant!”

  “None of them admits to seeing Sneddiger,” Weigand said, ignoring it. “Nor to hearing the bell ring. And all of them were here, they say.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Whiteside said. “You see how ridiculous it is, Lieutenant.”

  But now Weigand shook his head.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We’ll have to find out, of course. We’ll have to go over the house.”

  “Really!” Mrs. Whiteside said. “That’s perfectly ridi—”

  “Of course,” Mary Halder said. She looked at Mrs. Whiteside. “My house,” she said. “Now. Or didn’t you realize, Barbara?”

  “Well!” Mrs. Whiteside said. But she did not deny it was Mary Halder’s house.

  The search took some little time. It began in the downstairs kitchen, the servants’ quarters there; it was cursory on the main floor, where there was so little place for concealment. It lasted longest on the second, third and fourth floors of the tall, narrow house. It ended in a closet on the third floor; a closet of the big, rear bedroom, a bedroom with a view of the river, which was Mary Halder’s.

  The closet, like the room, was large. Felix Sneddiger’s body was in a far corner of it, half concealed by hanging clothes. The little man with the wrinkled face had been strangled; merciless hands had squeezed his life out. It hadn’t, the detective thought, been much trouble to kill the little, aged man, nor had it taken very long.

  5

  Tuesday, 9:10 P.M. to 11:25 P.M.

  She had fainted; that was it. Now, in the cab, sitting between Pam and Jerry North, memory was merciless; now the numbness which had supervened was gone and she had to remember. Someone had called to Weigand from the top of the spiral staircase, and Weigand had gone up the stairs, very quickly. And all of them had looked up, their eyes following after him. After a few minutes, Weigand had come down again, not so quickly, had stood for a moment looking at all of them, at one and then at another. His gaze had stopped at her and then he had said, slowly, that he was sorry. He was sorry, but he would have to ask her to do something for them. And, at his indication, she had gone up the spiral staircase and then, from the second floor to the third, up another, but straight, stair flight and into a big room in the rear of the house, with windows opening toward the east, toward the lights on the river, on the island in the river, on the shore beyond. Each step she took, she thought, she could remember now.

  It had been in a closet, and Weigand, standing behind her, reaching over her shoulder, had held back a long dress—a black lace dress. And he had said, “Is that the man, Miss O’Brien?”

  The little old face was hideous, now; the blue eyes were wide open, sightless and horrible. There were the marks of fingers on the thin, corded neck. The face itself—

  She had never fainted before; never known that blackness comes in, swirls in, from either side, so that the visible world narrows, until there is only a shrinking tunnel of fading light, until—Backing away, feeling herself sinking into the blackness, surrounded by it, she had said, “Yes. That’s the—” She could remember saying that.

  “It’s all right, now,” Pam North said, and Pam North’s hand, pressing her arm, tightening on it, brought Liza back. “Good girl,” Pam said. “It’s all right, now.”

  Liza tried to smile; she could feel herself shaking.

  “A drink is what you need,” Jerry North said. “A drink and another drink and then some food. Did you have any dinner?”

  She shook her head; she was afraid her voice, if she used it, would tremble as her body did.

  “Neither did we,” Pam said. “Now I come to think of it. Only one martini with too much vermouth, terribly strong. And then all that.” She paused. “Including Aegisthus,” she said. “Is it too late for Charles?”

  “Almost,” Jerry said. “We can try.”

  “I—I don’t want to eat,” Liza heard herself say.

  “Well,” Pam said, “I do. Jerry does. You can sit with us.”

  “I ought to go home,” Liza said.

  “Why?” Pam said. “Anyway, we told Bill. He’s very sorry. Because of Dorian, partly, I suppose. But he would be anyway. Only, of course, he had to.”

  “Listen, Pam,” Jerry North said, “the child’s been through enough.” His tone was light, almost laughing.

  “She knows what I mean,” Pam said. “So do you, as a matter of fact. It’s just because you read Fowler.”

  “Now,” Jerry said, “you’ve really got me.”

  She’s got me, too, Liza thought. But I’m listening; I’m almost forgetting.

  “English usage,” Pam North said. “You really expect people to, but nobody ever does. Perhaps I don’t more than some people, of course. It’s—here’s Charles.”

  The cab was U-turning in Sixth Avenue, stopping in front of the restaurant. They were, it turned out, just not too late. “One thing,” Pam North said, “there’s room at the bar, now. Hello, Gus.”

  “I don’t think—” Liza began.

  “The only question,” Pam told her, “is whether a martini or something else. There’s no basic question.”

  There were three martinis, softly sharp, very cold, with tiny dots of oil from the peel of a lemon slowly spreading on their surfaces. They were full; Pam leaned forwa
rd and sipped hers without raising it from the bar. “Easier,” she explained. Then she raised it and drank.

  Liza’s stomach was surprised; then it was pleased. She was no longer, she found, shivering. She sat between the Norths, drank, said she was being a lot of trouble. She was told not to be absurd.

  “By the way,” Jerry said, “about the sketches. They’re fine. I’ll send you something to sign.”

  That was good, too; that helped; that pushed back, momentarily, the recurring memories. She finished her drink and there was another one before her. Now she did not hesitate.

  After the second round, they went to a corner table in the café section and now Liza was hungry; it was surprising, it was incontrovertible. She was still between the Norths, they still talked, including her, not requiring anything of her. She felt strangely at home, as if she had known them for a long time, instead of for days only.

  “Better, now?” Pam asked her, finally, over coffee.

  “Oh,” Liza said, “so much. I’m all right now.”

  “Eating’s good for people,” Pam told her. “Does things for them.” She looked quickly at Jerry. “Well,” she said, “it does.”

  “Always,” Jerry said.

  Then there was another pause. Then it was Liza herself who returned to it. It was time to return to it.

  “You’ve been good to do this,” she said. “I needed this. It was—it’s so dreadful. But you two oughtn’t to have to—”

  Pamela North shook her head, shook off that aspect.

  “Obviously,” she said, “the little man knew something. Mr. Sneddiger. Knew too much. But—didn’t you think he was surprised when he saw Mr. Halder’s body? It sounded as if he were.”

  “Oh yes,” Liza said. “I’m certain he was.”

  “But then—” Pam said, and shook her head. “There was so little time afterward and—” She sounded puzzled, as if things were refusing to work out. “And you had gone and Mr. Halder—your Mr. Halder—had—” This time she stopped as if a new idea had presented itself. She looked quickly at Liza.

  “You mean he could have seen Brian do something?” Liza said. “After Brian put me in the cab? You mean Brian could have—have gone back and—oh, no!” She shook her head. “Anyway, Mr. Halder was already dead. He’d been dead for hours, hadn’t he? So what could there have been?”