A Key to Death

by Frances

  “Oh yes,” Pam said. “When she saw Forbes was there, probably. She was sitting so she could see him.”

  “I don’t—” Jerry began, and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Because of the way he—Forbes, I mean—looked at them, of course,” Pam said. “What else?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said, feeling, at once, that he should, and that there was something wrong with it—post hoc ergo propter hoc, possibly. Or, Jerry decided, a little desperately, the other way around.

  After that, Pam said, they had eaten and had been waiting for dessert when the second interruption came.

  “But I don’t know what any of this has to do—” Pam said, and was stopped by Bill Weigand’s gesture; said, “Oh, all right.”

  The maitre d’ had come to the table, apologized for interrupting, said that a gentleman at the bar would like to see Mr. Ingraham. Ingraham had stood up, asking that they excuse him, and followed the maitre d’ to the small bar at one side of the entrance to the dining area. There he had joined a tall man, who evidently awaited him, sitting on one of the stools.

  “A big man, in his sixties, probably,” Pam said. “He had gray hair—iron gray, they call it, although—” This time Pam stopped her own digression. “Red face and a very long jaw and he wore a blue suit that was too tight across the shoulders. Of course, I didn’t want to stare.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Of course not, darling.”

  “I never,” Pam said, “understand how people can just not be interested. Especially when things are so interesting.”

  Ingraham had talked with the man at the bar for perhaps five minutes. The big man had gone, then, and as he turned away, Ingraham had put a hand briefly on the man’s shoulder, in a gesture which might have been one of encouragement. Ingraham had returned to the table, then, and there had been no further interruptions. After dinner, the Norths had gone home and, after a suitable lapse of time, to bed.

  “The man at the bar,” Bill Weigand said. “Describe him again, will you?” Pam described him again. Weigand’s eyes narrowed; he nodded his head; he said it was interesting.

  “Sounds like Matt Halpern,” he said. “He was a client of Ingraham’s. We’ve found that out.”

  “Halpern?” Pam repeated. “Oh, the labor czar.”

  He had been called that, Bill agreed. At the moment, he appeared to be a czar facing revolution, which is a common lot of czars. He was also a czar under indictment for misappropriation of union funds.

  “And a client of Ingraham’s?” Jerry North said, disbelief in his voice. “I never knew Forbes took on that sort of thing.”

  Apparently he had, this time, Bill told them. Why—well, they would try to find out. Particularly since Halpern seemed to have become a dangerous associate.

  “Somebody tried to kill him around midnight last night,” Bill told them. “Fired shots out of a car, into his, and, as the newspapers say, ‘sped off.’ Missed Halpern. Wounded a man with him, not seriously.” Unexpectedly, Bill Weigand smiled, with some amusement. “Private cop,” he said. “Named Mallet. Presumably a bodyguard for Halpern. But—Mallet was down on his hands and knees on the car floor a second after the first shot. A bullet ricocheted and hit him in the—well, the area most prominent in his position. Very sad case.”

  “Mallet?” Pam said. “Haven’t I read about him somewhere?”

  “I hope not, Pamela,” Bill Weigand said.

  Weigand stood, then, and thanked them, and promised to keep in touch—a promise which, over the years, had become inevitable—and opened the office door. Pamela started through it, and then drew back and said, in a voice suddenly very small, not quite certain, that she thought they might wait a minute. Bill looked out, and nodded, and closed the door.

  Men were carrying the body of Forbes Ingraham from his big office where, at ten minutes after eleven that morning, he had been found dead. He had been shot once in the forehead, from close range. He had fallen forward on his desk, and his blood had flowed onto the yellow pad which was always there, rendering indecipherable whatever he might have written on it in his neat, small script.

  The Norths, coming at noon to sign their wills, had found Acting Captain William Weigand, Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, already there—Weigand and many others, from the precinct, the police laboratory, the District Attorney’s office. By then they were all convinced that, although Forbes Ingraham might conceivably have fired the bullet into his own head, he had not done so, seemingly having lacked a weapon. Nowhere in the suite of offices was a weapon to be found, and this was to be expected. It was murder, and almost at once took on the appearance of murder most obscure.

  Now Pam and Jerry North waited, and again Pam clasped her hands together, since they persisted in shaking. When they had waited long enough, Bill Weigand investigated, and went with them out of Francis Cuyler’s office and through the corridor and the reception room. Mary Burton lay on the sofa in the reception room. She was very white. Bill watched them go, and turned back. He said to Mullins, “Well, let’s see what it looks like.”

  It took them time, talking, one by one, to the people who had been in the office that morning—and who had heard no shot from Ingraham’s sound-proofed office. All had been talked to earlier by detectives from the precinct, briefly by the assistant district attorney from the Homicide Bureau. They had, by and large, agreed on the facts—on the externals of the facts. Since the facts did not lead immediately to a conclusion, the assistant district attorney had gone elsewhere, leaving spade work to the police—which meant, in the first instance, to Homicide, West, which meant to Weigand, Mullins assisting—and, if developments required, some hundreds more assisting too.

  Now they talked to Reginald Webb, surviving partner of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb; to Francis Cuyler, tall and dark, pawing black hair from a white face, an associate of the firm; to Saul Karn, five feet tall, precise, gesturing with rimless glasses to emphasize his points, and also an associate; to Phyllis Moore, pretty and white and shaken, and to Dorothy Lynch—Mrs. Dorothy Lynch—trim and competent, and showing no emotion; to Mary Burton—Mrs. Mary Burton—middle-aged and long-faced, insisting she was quite all right, holding a damp wad of handkerchief to red eyes.

  Mrs. Burton, of all of them, had the most immediate reason to be near shock. She had found Ingraham’s body. Remembering, she had made a low, moaning sound and covered her face with her hands. She had lifted her long face after a moment, and said, in a choked voice, that she was very sorry—that it had been a terrible shock.

  In the end, she told the most of it, and her version was not substantially changed by any of the others.

  She, Mary Burton, senior of the clerical force, had reached the office at nine. Precisely at nine. Mrs. Lynch had been a few minutes late; Phyllis Moore a few moments later still. Cuyler had come in at a little after nine-thirty; Karn immediately after him. Reginald Webb had arrived at about ten and had called almost at once for Mrs. Lynch and the morning mail. All these arrivals were as customary; there was, at the beginning, nothing to indicate that Tuesday, February 9, was to be different from any other day.

  But then Forbes Ingraham had arrived at ten-thirty, and that was a little unexpected, being half an hour before his usual time. He had said “good morning” to Mary through the information window, as he usually did.

  “And seemed as usual?”

  “Yes. Oh yes.” She dabbed at her eyes.

  Ingraham had gone on into his office and, after a brief lapse of time—“I always waited until he had time to get settled”—Mary had called him on the telephone and given the day’s schedule. His first appointment was at eleven, and with Matthew Halpern. “The labor leader, you know. The firm was representing him.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Go on, Mrs. Burton. Then?”

  Forbes Ingraham had thanked her; had asked about her health, and how things were on Staten Island. (Things had been cold that morning—cold and blustery.) He had hung up, then.

  B
ut, about five minutes later, which would have made it about a quarter of eleven, Ingraham had called the switchboard back and this time he had asked for an outside line. And that had been strange, almost unprecedented. “He always asked me, or sometimes one of the others, to get whoever he wanted, but this time—it was—I don’t know—almost as if he didn’t—” She did not finish this, or need to. Forbes Ingraham’s last telephone call had been a secret one—too secret to be shared with Mary Burton. “Almost as if he didn’t trust me,” she might have said, been going to say. She dabbed at her eyes.

  “You don’t know who he called, then?”

  “Of course not. How could I?”

  Bill Weigand could think of a way, but did not mention it. Mary Burton was, he decided, not then in any condition to consider a suggestion that she might have listened at the switchboard.

  Ingraham’s call had been short. She had supposed that he had not found available the person with whom he had wished to speak.

  “You and Miss Moore were still in the office? I mean, the office you share?”

  She shook her head at that. It had been, she thought, a few minutes before Mr. Ingraham asked for the outside line that Mr. Cuyler had had Miss Moore sent in to take dictation. She would have been alone, unless—“I don’t remember whether Eddie was here then. Mr. Karn sent him out on an errand, but I don’t remember whether it was then or later. He’s the office boy.”

  Bill Weigand nodded.

  Mr. Halpern had been a few minutes late for his appointment—five minutes late, perhaps a little more. He had apologized; Mary had told him that she was sure it wouldn’t matter, and that she would let Mr. Ingraham know he was there.

  “Halpern was alone?”

  “Why—yes. At least, I didn’t—”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Then?”

  She had telephoned Forbes Ingraham. And the telephone had not been answered. She had tried again, and had still not been answered. She had assumed the telephone was not ringing properly.

  “Then—” she said, and once more covered her face with her hands, and once more Weigand and Mullins, sitting with her in Cuyler’s office, waited.

  Then she had gone into Mr. Ingraham’s office, knocking first and receiving no reply; still assuming that something must have happened to the telephone.

  “You went through the reception room? And the library?”

  She had not gone through the reception room; she had only crossed the corridor, going through a door from the clerical office and then through one, directly opposite, into the larger office where she had found Forbes Ingraham dead.

  “He was—it was—” she said, and seemingly could not go on. She was told she need not. The body had been untouched when Weigand arrived. Ingraham had, apparently, been leaning forward in his chair, toward the desk; possibly talking to someone who stood on the other side of the desk, and may have leaned toward him. When he was shot, in the middle of the forehead, with a bullet from, it appeared, a thirty-two calibre revolver—they did not have the bullet, yet—he had slumped forward on the desk, his head on the blotter, on the yellow pad. His right arm rested on the desk, his left hung beside him. He had, the assistant medical examiner assumed, lost consciousness so near instantly as to make no difference; he had almost certainly been dead in seconds. Except to fall forward, he apparently had not moved after he was shot.

  Mary Burton had screamed, and screamed again, and then run clumsily out of the office by the door which led to the library, and cried for help—cried that something had happen to Mr. Ingraham, that he was “hurt—terribly hurt!” She did not remember what she had said, but others remembered it so. Webb had run from his office across the library; Cuyler from his into the corridor which separated library from reception room. Saul Karn had come, but less rapidly.

  And at some point during this confusion, unnoticed in the confusion, Matthew Halpern had walked out. No one admitted knowing when, or being able to guess why. Mrs. Burton was sure that he had been there from a few minutes after eleven until, failing to get an answer to her telephone call, she had gone into Ingraham’s office. After that, she was sure of nothing about him, nor were the others. He had, apparently, been in the reception room only five minutes, perhaps ten.

  No one had heard the shot which killed Ingraham, or would admit to having heard it. With the sound-proofing of the office, this was possible, although it still bore looking into. When Mary Burton had gone into the office, one of the big windows had been partly open, so that street noises entered. If an explosion had, dimly, been audible outside Ingraham’s office, it might have been dismissed—subconsciously dismissed—as a truck backfire.

  When Mrs. Burton screamed, Webb and Mrs. Lynch had been working in his office; Cuyler and Miss Moore in his. Karn had been alone in his. Phyllis Moore had been in Cuyler’s office for about fifteen minutes. Before that, he had been alone there. She had been in the library. Webb and Mrs. Lynch had been at work longer, but not without interruption. He had got a long distance telephone call, which promised to take some time—and did. During it, Mrs. Lynch had first gone to the file room to get certain papers he wanted; then, taking advantage of the break, briefly out of the office and down the outside corridor to the women’s toilet. Webb had, they both agreed, been finishing his conversation when she returned. She was back, they both guessed, although neither could be sure, at about eleven.

  It would have been possible for any of the five, if their denials were disregarded, to go into Ingraham’s office unnoticed. Mary Burton could have seen anyone who went along the corridor, and through the library, if she had been looking in that direction from the information window. She did not remember that she had been, at least until Halpern arrived, and then only briefly.

  It was not, Weigand had begun to suspect by then, going to be one of those direct cases, agreeably supplied with physical clues, which Deputy Chief Inspector Artemus O’Malley so much admired, and which Sergeant Mullins admired equally—to which Weigand had, certainly no objection. The slug might have usable markings, when got out of Ingraham’s head; more probably, it would have been damaged by the bone it had damaged irreparably. They had not, as yet, turned up the gun. They did not seem, again at the moment, to be on their way to establishing anything like exclusive opportunity. They had found plenty of fingerprints, but none which signed confessions, or indicated anything with any clarity.

  And they knew by then that there was another entrance to Ingraham’s office, and that it quite possibly had been used by his murderer.

  The office had three doors—one from the library, commonly used by clients; one from the corridor, used by the stenographic people; a third, opposite the library door, which had been used, presumably, most often by the late Samuel Schaeffer and the now late Forbes Ingraham. It opened from one office into the other.

  This door was unlocked when the police tried it, after the knob had been dusted for prints. A precinct man went through it first, and into another large office which had an atmosphere of settled non-occupancy. This office, also, had three doors—one from the corridor; the one through which the precinct man went out of Ingraham’s office and, directly across from it, a door leading—

  Arranging that the fingerprint men dust ahead of him, the precinct man had discovered where it led. He had been surprised. It led out.

  It led into a wide corridor, evidently a public one, and so provided an entirely separate—and unadvertised—entrance to the offices of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb. It did, exploration disclosed, more than this—through a doorway, past an open, metal fire-door, it led into the adjacent building and, after a turning, to two elevators. (It was subsequently discovered that the party wall between two similarly elderly and dignified buildings had been so pierced at every floor level when, a good many years before, they had come under common management.)

  The knobs on the door between Ingraham’s office and that of his late partner, the knobs on the door which led to the outer corridor—on none of these four knobs was t
here any fingerprint whatever. The door to the building corridor was locked. The inter-office door was not.

  With all this Mullins, hearing of it, had been pleased. They knew something, anyway—the killer could have come and gone through Schaeffer’s office, wiping doorknobs as he left. Mullins was then so close to purring that Weigand hesitated to mention the obvious—that this might be appearance, not truth; that, specifically, anyone, however he had in fact entered Ingraham’s office, might take the trouble to wipe off knobs, so providing that element of misdirection understandably prized by murderers.

  It was then, although the Norths were not actually yet in it—being only names on an engagement record—that Mullins decided it was another screwy one, and so remarked.

  “Screwy?” Weigand repeated. “Isn’t porous more like it, sergeant?”

  Either was bad enough, Mullins said. And Artie would not like it.

  “Unless it’s Halpern,” Mullins added. “Artie’ll like Halpern fine.”

  Bill Weigand wasn’t sure he didn’t like Matthew Halpern fine himself. It appeared that violence had begun to build up about Halpern, and that was always interesting. They would—

  The telephone rang on the desk in the office from which Francis Cuyler had now been for some time excluded. Weigand answered it, said, “Yes,” said, “Put him on,” said, “Yes, counsellor,” and listened for more than a minute.

  “Right,” he said, then. “Thanks for passing it on. It can be very helpful.”

  He put the receiver back and looked at it.

  “The call Ingraham made,” he said after a moment, “was to District Attorney Sumner. It was to arrange an appointment for this afternoon. It went through at about ten forty-five. But—the appointment wasn’t made. Ingraham started to go into details and interrupted himself. He said, ‘Can I call you back in about half an hour?’ The D.A. was just saying ‘Sure, Forbes’ when Ingraham hung up. Seemed hurried. So—”