by Frances
XIII
Being told that she had put her finger on it, Pam North shook a doubtful head. On being told when, with what selection of words, she said, “But—I didn’t mean that. I meant—”
Bill Weigand said he knew what she had meant. And that it was then—precisely then—that it had come together in his mind. She had, admittedly, said more than she meant.
“In all innocence,” Pam told him. “In all ignorance, too. It never crossed my mind. So far as I know, it never even crossed my subconscious. It’s still hard to believe.”
The maternal instinct, Jerry told her, certainly died hard, once aroused. She would have, in the future, to keep an eye on it.
They were in the station restaurant in Little Rock, with only fifteen minutes to wait for the Norths’ train to St. Louis. Pam had been firm about trains—nothing, she is convinced, happens on trains, or to them. When trains go around curves, they do not do it by tipping over.
Bill had been late in joining them; for a time it appeared that he would not arrive in time, which would have meant inevitably, that they would wait for another train, since loose ends must be tied together. It was true that Byron Kingsley was not a loose end. He was not loose anywhere, but tight in the Boone County jail. Nevertheless—
Bill said he was sorry to hold them up, and ordered coffee. He looked tired, but reasonably contented. He had spent most of the night watching some men digging in the clearing around the cabin above Mr. Perkins’s store in Top Town, and watching other men fishing in the turbulent stream below the cabin. The men who fished had found a rifle. The men who dug had found a skeleton—the long skeleton of what had been a long man; the skeleton of what had been a man named Carl Cunningham. A dentist in Fayetteville had looked at photographs, looked at charts, and been certain of that. A physician in Chicago had looked at photographs, including those made many years before of a fracture of the tibia, and been reasonably certain of that.
There was a hole in the frontal bone of the skull and when the skeleton was lifted carefully out of a shallow grave a bullet had rattled in the skull. So that was that—and another thing for Byron Kingsley to deny. Which, in a minimum of words, he did, as he denied everything else—that he had smothered Amanda Towne and crushed the head of Russell Barnes; posed as Cunningham at the New York hotel and on the plane, fired rifle shots at Bill Weigand and Pam and Jerry North.
“Not,” Bill said, “that he expected to hit us. Probably couldn’t even see us. But to establish that Cunningham was alive and shooting. He started shooting when he saw the car lights, on the chance that I was in the car, coming to talk to Cunningham. Got up ahead of us and fired a few more, and then played out his little scene behind the cabin.”
All of which, Byron Kingsley denied, and that he had killed anybody. Cunningham had been alive and done the shooting; Cunningham had fallen in the river and been swept away. The skeleton was that of someone else. It had to be.
Would he be tried for killing Cunningham? Or for the murders in New York? It was hard to say; it would be a matter for lawyers; for grand jurymen. It would depend, to some degree, on what evidence could be dug up, now that they knew—in New York and in Arkansas—what to dig for. But that is almost always the way of it, when no confession is offered. You know first, then you dig up proof of what you know.
Jerry looked at his watch. He compared it with the station clock. It was then that they had fifteen minutes left for the tying of loose ends.
“Pam put her finger on it,” he said, promptingly.
“Right,” Bill said. “She said Miss Towne had ‘recognized’ Cunningham in the book. Meaning she had recognized him as a character in the book, as you had. I’d been groping toward something. That brought it together. If she recognized Cunningham not only as a character but as the author too, there it was. Clear as clear. Then it all fitted.
“Perhaps it was the way he wrote—certain turns of phrase. Perhaps it was more than that. Cunningham had talked to her a lot, according to Fergus, about his plans to write. He may have outlined to her, years ago, the book he planned to write—and wrote on for years. Authors do talk about books they’re going to write? And, sometimes write themselves into them?”
“God yes,” Jerry North said, simply.
“She read part of Look Away, Stranger,” Bill said. “Perhaps read all of it. And became convinced that Cunningham was the author, not Kingsley. Let Kingsley see what she suspected that night in her suite. Probably said she was going to break it on her TV show. Perhaps asked him what he was going to do about it. And—found out.”
“And her husband? Poor Mr. Barnes?”
“At a guess, Pam, she’d talked about it with Barnes. Said something like ‘Read this and see if it hits you the way it does me.’ And told Kingsley it wasn’t her idea only. That somebody else would say the same thing. And—told him who.”
“Look,” Jerry said. “He killed Cunningham to get the book? So he could get it published as his own?”
That was possible, of course. Bill rather doubted it. It seemed more likely that Kingsley’s first murder had been otherwise motivated, and about the motives they could only guess. It might have been that he had merely killed Cunningham in a brawl. Conceivably, even, he might have killed him by accident. But when, after burying Cunningham three years ago, he had left the cabin, he had taken the bulky manuscript of Look Away, Stranger with him. He had read it and, they could assume, been impressed. He had waited. When nothing happened, he had taken a chance—put his own name on the manuscript and started sending it around, probably hoping no more than that he could pick up a few dollars.
“He took a chance,” Jerry said. “Cunningham might have shown the book to someone else.”
There had been that chance, obviously. But Cunningham was a recluse. It was possible, also, that he had told Kingsley that nobody had seen the book. Perhaps he had even let Kingsley read the book, and had told him nobody else had. They could only guess. Probably, on that detail, they would never be able to do anything but guess.
“Five minutes,” Jerry said, and put a bill down on the restaurant check.
“Killed Amanda Towne,” Pam said. “Started to leave the suite and saw the maid working up the corridor. Thought she would find the body too soon after he was known to have been there. I suppose others knew he had the appointment? That Mrs. Fleming? Or that Mr. Gray?”
“Gray,” Bill said.
“Moved the body from her suite to ours,” Pam said. “Planted the lipstick mark on the pillow. Bill—was it just a coincidence that it was our suite?”
To a degree, Bill told them, as they stood up—to a degree it had to be. Kingsley had had no way of knowing they would be at the hotel. But—and here again Bill admitted he was guessing—Kingsley may well have seen them leaving their suite when they went out to dinner; seen them and recognized them. And carried Amanda Towne’s body to their suite, instead of another, because their involvement would give him the chance to keep informed about what happened, and so in a position for such further improvisation as seemed desirable. As, for example, first seeking to implicate Judge Parkman; then switching to Cunningham.
“In other words,” Pam said. “Straight men. From beginning to end, just straight men. That’s us.”
It was an odd way to describe Pamela North, Bill thought, as he walked with them to the train gate.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Mr. and Mrs. North Mysteries
1
Standing at the third-floor window, William Weigand could look north and west and see the Hudson River. He could not, to be sure, see a great deal of it—a narrow slice of river had been Professor Jameson Elwell’s share. Such views are rationed in Manhattan, and rationed grudgingly. But there was moonlight on what Weigand could see of the Hudson; a tug, coaxing a string of barges upstream, moved in whiteness against black shadows etched on shining water. Weigand closed his eyes, which were tired, and opened them again to see the river fresh. A moment of tranquillity—
Someone knocked at the door of the room which had, evidently, been Professor Elwell’s office and Weigand turned from the window and nodded to Sergeant Mullins, who opened the door. “Mr. Carl Hunter,” a policeman who remained invisible told Mullins, and a tall young man in a narrow gray suit—a man in a button-down shirt; a man with close-trimmed hair—came into the room. He stopped just inside the door, which closed behind him and said, “You wanted to see me?” and then, without waiting for an answer, walked across the room to a wide desk.
There was a small, silver clock on the desk. The young man in the gray suit picked the clock up and looked at it. He turned it over in his hands and wound it, and looked at it again. Then he took two long steps away from the desk and threw the clock into the black mouth of a fireplace. It broke noisily. The young man looked at the remains of the clock for a moment, brushed his hands together briskly and turned back to face Captain William Weigand, of Homicide, Manhattan West, and Sergeant Aloysius Mullins.
The young man had a square face and intelligent-looking gray eyes.
He said, “You wanted—?” and then, it was evident, was stopped by what he saw in the faces he looked at. This was understandable; Mullins’s mouth was somewhat open. Mullins’s blue eyes were filled with consternation.
“Oh,” Mr. Carl Hunter said, in the tone of one who has just got the point. “I suppose you want—” With that, before he paused again, he seemed a little irritated. “It kept on losing time,” he said. “What’s the use of a clock that keeps on losing time?”
Mullins said, “Lookit, mister,” in a harsh voice. “What you think you’re—”
“All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, and Mullins—who is a large man with the appearance of a policeman—said, with reluctance, “O.K., Loot. Only—”
“Do you always break clocks that run slow, Mr. Hunter?” Weigand asked the young man, who looked puzzled for a moment and then shook his head, but shook it uncertainly. The question seemed to have made him uneasy.
“I guess not,” he said. “Silly thing to do, wasn’t it? Be interesting to trace the psychological motivation if—” He let that trail off. “They tell me,” he said, “that a pretty bad thing’s happened. That Professor Elwell—”
“Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell’s dead, Mr. Hunter. Been dead since a little after three this afternoon.”
“The man who came around,” Hunter said. “Said you wanted to see me—what he said was, ‘The captain would like to ask you a couple of things’—he said ‘about an accident.’ But from the look of things—”
“Right,” Weigand said. “Professor Elwell was murdered, Mr. Hunter. It must have been quite soon after you left this afternoon.”
“He was fine when I left,” Hunter said, quickly. And that was what Weigand had supposed he would say, since it could hardly be expected that, under the circumstances, he would say anything else.
“Right,” Weigand said again. “I wonder if you—”
He paused. Mullins had crossed to the fireplace. He looked down at the clock momentarily and then squatted and picked the clock up. He looked at it and then looked at the watch on his thick wrist. He stood up, then.
“Funny thing, Loot-I-mean-captain,” Mullins said. “Clock says nine-thirteen. And you know what time it is? Nine-seventeen. So when this character threw it there and it stopped—see what I mean?” He looked at Weigand; then, with a different expression, at the young man in the narrow gray suit. “So what about it, mister?” Mullins said.
“When I looked at it—” Carl Hunter said, but then he seemed momentarily bewildered. “I was sure it was slow,” he said. Now uneasiness was in his voice.
It was, Weigand thought, the uneasiness of a puzzled man. Or, of course, of a man who wished to appear puzzled. The investigation could not, Bill Weigand thought, be said to be beginning in a very orderly fashion. It was almost as if—He smiled faintly to himself, although he did not feel particularly like smiling, and had not for several hours. The affair was starting in a “screwy” fashion. But Mr. and Mrs. North were not in it. At least—
He had got into it himself rather later than he would have liked. He had got back to his office in West Twentieth Street at a few minutes after five, intending only a quick look around before calling it a day, and feeling altogether ready to call it a day. He was tired, then, and his throat was dry and his eyes smarted. He had smoked too many cigarettes in courtroom corridors, and been too bored. Home and a cool drink—it was warm for October—and the tranquillity which, at such parched moments, was to be found also in the quiet of greenish eyes and the clarity of—
He was standing at his desk, calling it a day (and good riddance) when the telephone rang. It was not any telephone, ringing for any policeman. Send not to ask, Weigand thought gloomily, and picked the instrument up and said, “Weigand.”
“His nibs,” the telephone said.
“Put him on,” Weigand said and, instinctively, held the receiver at a little distance from his ear.
“Where the hell have you been?” Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley shouted. Weigand removed the receiver further from his ear. The inspector could put a really nasty emphasis on the word “you.” Also, the inspector knew perfectly well where Weigand had been. Such matters are not unrecorded.
“General Sessions,” Weigand said. “Summoned as a rebuttal witness in the case of People of the State of New York versus ‘Puggy’ Wormser. To testify that, no, we didn’t beat him with rubber hose.”
“Didn’t we?” O’Malley asked, momentarily diverted.
“No.”
“Kid gloves,” O’Malley said. “That’s what’s the trouble nowadays. G.d. kid gloves.”
It was a subject by which Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley could easily be diverted. O’Malley was a graduate of the school of hard knocks, which he believed it more blessed to give than to receive. Left to himself he would expatiate indefinitely on the theme.
“You wanted me?” Weigand said, not leaving O’Malley to himself.
To this, Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley said, “Huh?” in honest, but momentary, bewilderment. He made up for it. He said, “What did you think I called for, captain?” Weigand withdrew the receiver another half inch from his ear. He said, mildly, that he had just got in. There was no point in saying that he had, also, been just about to go off. It was already evident that he wasn’t.
“Some g.d. professor’s got himself killed,” O’Malley said. (He said “g.d.,” circumventing the Holy Name Society.) “Seems like he’s got a name.” O’Malley disliked murder victims who had names. Names stirred up newspapers. “Sent it through hours ago.”
“I was—” Weigand began.
“I know where you were,” O’Malley said. “You think I can’t hear, Bill? What the hell’s the matter with that outfit of yours?”
“Nothing,” Weigand said. “If it came through, somebody’s on it. Lieutenant Graham—no, he’s on the Birdy kill. Mullins, probably.”
“Find out,” O’Malley said. “Get on it. You young squirts.”
“Right,” Weigand said.
“Keep in touch,” O’Malley said. “I’ll be home. Or maybe at Paddy’s Grill. That is, if there’s something you can’t handle. Otherwise—”
“Right,” Weigand said.
He hung up, complete with instructions—and, in spite of weariness, of acute realization that policemen may not plan on tranquil evenings, somewhat amused. There was only one O’Malley, and he to be disturbed only if the heavens fell. And a good cop, all the same, and an appreciative one. (Hence Weigand’s captaincy, fairly early on, although Bill Weigand could not convincingly argue, even to himself, that he was too young a squirt.) Weigand used the telephone again.
Mullins was on it, along with the precinct men and, in the normal course, a detective assigned to the district attorney’s Homicide Bureau. Along, also, with lab men, with photographers, with, in a word, everybody.
“It” had begun at precisely
eleven minutes after three o’clock on that afternoon of Wednesday, October twenty-second.
It had begun with a sound in the ears of a young woman who had said, with professional cheer, “Operator?”
The voice had been that of a man—a man who spoke with obvious and great effort, as if each articulated sound took more strength than the man had left.
“This is emerg—” the man said, and the voice faded.
“I don’t—” the operator began, and the other words came—came faint, came in gasps, so that they were just understandable. “Doctor,” the man said. “Been shot. Ambu—”
But there the words stopped.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the operator said, automatically. And then said, “Hello? Hello!” And there was no answer at all.
The line remained open, which helped. An open line from a dial telephone may be tracked down, given time enough. It was tracked down. The call had come from the number listed to Jameson Elwell, who lived on the upper west side of Manhattan, on one of the streets which slope sharply down from West End Avenue toward Riverside Drive.
But the tracing of calls from dial telephones does take time, and the uniformed men of the first squad car found Jameson Elwell dead. He had bled to death from a gunshot wound, in what was clearly his office on the third and top floor of a narrow house. There had indeed been nobody else in the house when the police arrived. It had been necessary to force the door of the house—the heavy door with polished brass knob, two steps below sidewalk level. That had taken time, also, and it had taken more time to find Jameson Elwell, since they had, quite naturally, worked upward through the house.
He was slumped over his desk, his hand still on the telephone, but the hand limp now. The desk blotter was soaked with his blood, and blood had trickled to the floor around the desk. But it would not, the assistant medical examiner said, when he had looked and touched, have made any real difference if they had got there more quickly. With a bullet so near the heart, the remarkable thing was that Jameson Elwell had been able to dial the operator, to say as much as he had said—almost to complete the word “ambulance.”