The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  “If she had been—really dissatisfied with you? Made an issue of it?”

  “That could have been just too bad,” Fergus said, and then suddenly set his glass down hard. “What are you trying to prove?”

  “Nothing,” Bill said. “Just the picture. The drinks are on me, Mr. Fergus.”

  “The hell they are,” Fergus said. “After that crack—the hell they are, captain.”

  VIII

  At five-thirty Friday evening, Bill Weigand rang the Norths’ apartment and got no answer. He had rung it an hour earlier, and got a man with an Italian accent, who had said, “Nobodya here, mister,” and hung up. It had been, on the whole, a frustrating afternoon—an afternoon of chaff and very little wheat. Such afternoons are to be expected, but need not be welcomed.

  Mullins had not found Judge Parkman. He had talked to a good many people who might be expected to know where Judge Parkman might have gone. None of them had known. Mrs. Parkman declined to see Mullins, or to explain why she would not. So, if the ruffled judge had been the visitor Amanda Towne expected—or had planned to meet—he could not be given the opportunity to insist that (a) he had never been near the place or Miss Towne or (b) that he had been there, and she was fine—just fine—when he left. So, frustration, presumably temporary.

  Seattle had not yet helped. Hot Springs was still checking back. Chicago had added additional information, which tallied with the information Weigand already had—with the supplementary report that James Fergus had been on the losing side of a minor civil war at CBC in the late ’thirties, and that was what had happened to James Fergus. Mr. Lovelace, who might have walked off with a key to the Norths’ suite at the Breckenridge, still tarried short of Galveston. A waiter at Bleeck’s remembered that a couple answering the description of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North had indeed arrived at the restaurant around five o’clock the previous afternoon, and had ordered—and drunk—martinis. And had eventually been joined by a man answering the description of Captain William Weigand of Homicide, Manhattan West. Which was nice to know.

  Jerry’s author, Mr. Byron Kingsley, who had admittedly talked to Amanda Towne shortly before her death, and who coincidentally came from Arkansas—which made three of them—was not at his hotel. He would be given a message asking him to call Captain Weigand at his convenience.

  Tony Gray breakfasted at one o’clock in the afternoon in a small apartment in the Murray Hill area. He had known Amanda Towne for a year or so; he worked for the network, and was assigned to her show, as a “legman.” Which meant that he found out whether people who offered themselves as “People Next Door,” or were offered by others, would be likely to have anything to say, and to be able to say it.

  “Ad lib, you know,” Gray told Weigand, who accepted a cup of coffee. “Some of them talk an arm off. Others freeze—like this poor old dame Wednesday. This Grandmother of the Year. God.”

  Amanda had been a very smooth operator. He had never seen a better. “Not even Mary Margaret.” You couldn’t ask for a better person to work with than Amanda Towne. Wonderful woman, altogether, and it was hard to believe that anybody would do a thing like that to her. Everybody loved her; everybody he’d run into, anyway. (Her estranged husband was not, it appeared, among the people he had run into.) He had heard that James Fergus had once held a much different, and much more important, job with the network and that, only a few years ago, he had been M.C. on a couple of pretty good shows. Of course, Fergus was getting along. Voice showed it. You couldn’t hide it in the voice.

  Tony Gray was quick and red haired and in his twenties—a young man going places. The next week, as a matter of fact, he and a photographer were going to Singapore for a picture job. He wouldn’t, then, act as a legman for whoever took over “People Next Door”?

  Not he. As a matter of fact, they wouldn’t have kept him on that job—which was interesting, but didn’t lead places—if Mandy hadn’t insisted. Now that she could no longer insist—

  He slowed down a little at that point. Not, he said, that he wouldn’t have been damned glad to work with her as long as she wanted. Still—

  “Right,” Bill said, and went to talk to Alice Fleming, who was heavy and black haired, and had an office—a small office—on Fifth Avenue and who said that Amanda Towne had been a fine person to work with, if you knew how to handle her—they all took handling, the ones in her line—and if you kept your end up.

  Alice Fleming had known Amanda Towne since Amanda came on from Chicago; she had been her business manager for five years or so. And, to be honest, Amanda had needed a business manager. Otherwise, she would have spent everything she had. Poured it down the drain. If she and Orson Bart—“He was her agent, you know”—had not kept an eye on things—well! “For an example, there was this man down in Arkansas—somebody she used to work with. In Chicago, I think. Trying to be a writer, he was, and not making it. She sent him a check every month until Bart and I took over, and why? What did it get her?”

  “A man named Cunningham?” Bill said, offering no theory as to what generosity might have got Amanda Towne.

  “Heard about him, have you? From poor old Jim?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “She’d stopped sending him money?”

  “Unless she squeezed it out of what we let her keep. I wouldn’t put it past her—helping lame dogs over stiles. That was Mandy. A great girl, but—” She stopped at that, and looked at Weigand intently from shrewd black eyes. He was not, she told him, to get any ideas about her and Bart. All they got was their percentages, if he was getting notions. The rest went to a fund. So that Amanda Towne would have something when—when, Bill supposed, her voice got old.

  Alice Fleming had no idea who would do a thing like that to Mandy, or want to. Unless it was one of the nuts she had interviewed. A lot of them were nuts. This Judge What’s-his-name, for example. He had really been fussed, and blamed it on Mandy. Instead of on his own big mouth. Perhaps, among the hundreds of people who had been through Amanda Towne’s mill in the years of its grinding one might have held a grudge. Perhaps—perhaps—But, actually, she hadn’t the foggiest, although she certainly wished the police luck.

  “She hadn’t,” Bill said, “had any changes in mind? On the show?”

  “Changes? What do you mean, changes?”

  Bill didn’t know what he meant. If he knew, he would not need to ask. Personnel changes, perhaps? Changes in format which might, in some fashion, affect personnel.

  “You mean poor old Jim?”

  He meant nothing specific. He was looking for something specific. What about Mr. Fergus?

  “She thought he was a drag on the show,” Alice Fleming said. “She’d planned to ask them to put another announcer on. For the good of the show. That’s the only thing I know about.”

  “If she’d asked that,” Bill said, “they’d have done what she asked?”

  He was damn right. At least that much. It could be that—

  She stopped. He waited.

  “All right,” she said, “poor old Jim’s getting on. He’s got a lot of chores around CBC—commercials, newscasts, weather reports. But, if Mandy had made a pitch they might have taken another look at him. You see what I mean? Thought, maybe the girl’s right. Maybe he is a drag on things. Maybe—” She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t work for CBC. Probably he’d just have gone on with his other chores.”

  In other words, Bill thought now—sitting at his desk, reaching for a report in the “In” basket—Fergus might have been fired entirely. Would he kill to keep his job? And kill another man, too—killing him by brute strength, and brutally? If so, why?

  Plenty of questions, as always. Had Alice Fleming been too quick to deny an imputation not made—the imputation that she and a man named Bart had been up to funny business with the money Amanda Towne made? Another question, another thing to be checked out.

  The “In” report was from Detective (first grade) Freddy Willings, who had been the one sent to see what could
be found out at the Hotel Breckenridge because it was in hotels like the Breckenridge he had grown up.

  They had spent most of the day going over the suite which Amanda Towne had occupied—occupied for several years, so that her personality had impinged, so that its atmosphere was no longer heavy with the hotel’s stately neutrality. (Some of the furniture, for example, was hers; all the pictures were hers.) It was a suite of living room (twenty-five feet by fifteen) and a bedroom; a dressing room off a bath; a serving pantry, which was in effect a small, neat kitchen. (Sketch of suite enclosed.) There were twin beds, each of full bed size, in the bedroom. There were two sofas and four upholstered chairs (two of modern design) in the living room. There were a great many clothes in two large closets. They included a mink coat, a mink stole and a sealskin coat. There was a desk, with letters and checkbooks and memoranda, and such other things as accumulate in a busy person’s desk. (All duly gathered up, labeled, and forwarded for further inspection.) There were a great many fingerprints—Amanda’s own, those of her personal maid (see report subjoined), some of hotel maids, and some which were merely fingerprints at large. These last had been sent through the machine—and the machine had been momentarily pleased, if a little surprised, to find that one had been made by J. L. Roscoe (alias a good many other things) who had left a rather fascinating trail of forged checks from one end of the country to the other before the Federal Bureau of Investigation caught up with him.

  (The machine’s pleasure in this identification was sharply diminished when a question or two revealed that Mr. Roscoe had been on “People Next Door” a week earlier and had talked interestingly about the methods of check forgers and counter-measures of circumvention.)

  They had found two glasses on a coffee table, and that neither of them had contained anything noxious. Bourbon and water had been in one, and the other, on which Miss Towne’s prints were plain, had held scotch. The prints on the other glass had been those of Byron Kingsley, who had obligingly, if unconsciously, recorded them anew when he signed his statement at West Twentieth Street. This did not, apparently, advance the matter, since Kingsley had already admitted his presence. He had not, to be sure, mentioned bourbon.

  There were no signs in the apartment of violence of any kind—nothing to confirm or refute the always evident possibility that she had been killed, as it were, at home and transported down the hall to Suite 718, occupied so briefly by Mr. and Mrs. Gerald North.

  There were loose pillows on both sofas, and there was no mark—of, say, rouged lips—on any. But—two of the pillows were red, and red on red is not always visible to the eye. Freddy Willings had had these sent to the lab. He was a thorough man, Freddy Willings, a characteristic of which Bill Weigand highly approved. Probably, Amanda Towne had been killed where she was found (which raised more questions than it answered), but there was no harm in making sure, if that proved possible. Bill read on.

  Anita Baker, personal maid, had been tracked to Harlem, and was pretty and bright and entirely co-operative. From Tuesday through Saturday of each week she had, for two years and three months, gone to Miss Towne’s suite at eleven each morning and left it at five each evening, and done what Miss Towne wanted done. She had gone on Wednesday, and gone home on Wednesday—and spent most of the day going over Miss Towne’s clothes, pressing here and there, and tightening a hook or two, and fixing one stuck zipper, and sending two dresses and a robe to the cleaner’s. There had been nothing, up to five o’clock, to mark it off from any other day. When she came in, at around four, Miss Towne had been as she usually was about four—a little tired, a little let down, a little in need of a cup of tea.

  “Tea?” the detective repeated.

  Really tea—it was always tea, at that hour. Not that, at other hours, Miss Towne had not behaved more—normally. But, when she first came home, always tea—a Lapsang souchong, brewed in pot, the time of steeping immutable. The detective wrote down the name of the tea, wondering why. Miss Towne had not said that she expected anyone to call later, or that she did not. However, she almost never mentioned her plans unless she was having several people in and wanted Anita to stay and help out.

  It took Detective (third grade) Wilson a little over two hours to make the trip to Harlem, wait for Miss Anita Baker to come home from shopping, and discover that Miss Towne liked a kind of tea he had never heard of and had been no different on the last day of her life than on any other day. But the only way to find out is to ask.

  Mrs. Rose Pinkney—hotel maid and cat fancier—was summoned from Brooklyn and taken more slowly, more carefully (if with somewhat less vocal vigor) over the ground Inspector O’Malley had first explored. In this instance, Detective Willings took her over it physically, took her from room to room along the corridor on the seventh floor into which opened suites 718 through 725, odd and even numbers on opposite sides.

  It was established, by re-enactment in Suite 718—still vacant by police order—that Mrs. Pinkney took from eight to ten minutes to turn down beds, check towels and pick up. Willings supposed that, on less dramatized—and observed—occasions she might take a little longer. The housekeeper was watching now, an encouragement to briskness. Then, from the time she went into 718 an hour might elapse before she reached 724, which opened from the end of the corridor, being a corner suite? If, that was, she worked back and forth across the corridor? Did she?

  Sometimes she did. Sometimes she worked to one side and down the other. It depended, in large measure, on how many suites she found occupied. It also depended, to some degree, on how she happened to feel at the time. “Sometimes one way, sometimes the other,” she said, and added, “makes a change,” and then, with a glance at the housekeeper, “no rules about it I ever heard of.”

  There were no rules about it. On Wednesday?

  “Crisscrossed,” Rose Pinkney said.

  So it would have been about an hour from the time she went into Suite 718 until she reached Suite 724? Willings felt the faint stirring of a theory.

  “Would have been,” Rose Pinkney said. “Only I don’t. Didn’t, that is.”

  “Don’t what?” Willings asked her, and was patient.

  “Go in Miss Towne’s suite,” she said. “Not on the evening shift. On account of, it bothers her. Did, I mean. Ask her.” Willings was a little startled. Mrs. Pinkney indicated the housekeeper. Willings said, “Oh.”

  The housekeeper said that that was true. Miss Towne had left orders, shortly after she moved into the suite, that the evening service was to be omitted. If she needed more towels, she would call for them. If she found the turning down of beds beyond her strength, she would so indicate. Meanwhile, she preferred a minimum of barging in.

  “Quite often, I believe, she had conferences in her rooms,” the housekeeper said. “I always assumed that she did not wish them interrupted.”

  “So you didn’t go into her suite Wednesday?” Willings said.

  “How many times—” Mrs. Pinkney began and checked it and said, “No sir.”

  A quarter after seven, or thereabouts, Mrs. Pinkney had gone into the suite occupied by Mr. and Mrs. North. At, say, a quarter after eight she would, then, have reached—but not entered—Suite 724, at the end of the corridor. But, since she had not entered, that now meant nothing. Miss Towne might have been still alive in the room. She might, just possibly, have been dead in the room, with the murderer still there, too, and waiting a clear coast—waiting, it could be presumed, for Mrs. Pinkney to complete her rounds and go away.

  Detective Willings’s theory flickered somewhat. It had been that the murderer, seeing that Mrs. Pinkney was working toward the Towne suite and having reasons to want discovery delayed—as what murderer would not?—had moved the body from a room still untended to one already visited. But, since Mrs. Pinkney did not actually go into the Towne suite, as Willings had assumed she did—

  Of course. The operative word was “assumed.” If he had assumed it, so might have the murderer. It was unlikely that there would, in any conv
ersation Willings could think of, have been occasion for Miss Towne to explain that she did not like to be bothered by evening maids.

  On the other hand, it was most probable that Miss Towne had been killed where found—and where a pillow was marked with red from her lips. The red—lipstick red—fabric of the loose pillows on the sofa in 724—well, it was rather interesting. It would interest those whose job it primarily was to put two and two together. Of these, Detective Willings was not yet one. So he did not incorporate his theory directly into his report, although Bill Weigand could read it between lines if he chose.

  Bill Weigand did. He called the lab. They were getting around to the pillows as fast as they could. Did Bill think his was the only case in the works? Bill did not. In the morning? Sure, in the morning. Or perhaps later that night. If they found anything, they would pass on what they found. “Atta boy,” Bill said, and disconnected and rang the Norths again. And was again unanswered.

  He might as well, Bill decided, surprise Dorian by dropping in for dinner. And surprise, and delight, himself. He drove uptown and east, and went up to an apartment which had windows overlooking the East River—an apartment much too expensive for a police captain who did not have some money of his own (inherited too late to sustain him through law school, else he would probably not have been a police captain) and whose wife was not a reasonably well-paid fashion artist.

  Dorian was surprised. So were Pam and Jerry North, who were contentedly having cocktails with Dorian on, as they freely admitted, Pam North’s invitation. “Painters,” Pam said, “make things impossible.” Dorian, who has green eyes and moves with a special grace, said, “Fancy seeing you here,” and Bill said, “Fancy,” and kissed her.

  “I,” Pam North said, “can remember when you used to kiss me like that, Jerry. Long, long ago.”