6
TUESDAY, 12:20 A.M. TO 3:55 A.M.
Nickerson Smith stood in the doorway and looked at them. He looked with the hopefully polite, and blank, expression of a man who has walked in too late on a story.
“Wondering about me?” he said, repeating Mrs. North’s remark. “Why?”
“Where you were,” Pam told him. “Everybody was here but you.”
Smith shook his head and looked at Lieutenant Weigand. Weigand’s expression told him nothing in particular.
“I’m afraid,” he said, and waited for somebody to pick it up. Bill Weigand, after a moment, picked it up.
“Where have you been, Mr. Smith?” Bill asked. “And, for that matter, why are you here?”
“Driving out,” Smith said. He looked puzzled. “To see my nephew, naturally. Want to have a talk with him.”
“About the money,” Bill said, with no inflection of enquiry.
“Yes,” Smith said.
“How did you know he would be here?” Bill wanted to know.
Smith shrugged. He said it seemed the most likely place. He looked at Weigand shrewdly.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Murder,” Pam North said, for Bill.
All of them looked at Nickerson Smith. He looked sad.
“I know,” he said. “Of course.” Then he looked puzzled. “But all these State troopers,” he said. “They’re all over the place.”
“A new murder,” Pam said. “That is—” She stopped speaking and looked at Bill. She looked at Jerry, who shook his head at her. But Bill Weigand nodded.
“Right,” he said. “A new murder. Grace Spencer.” He said it flatly.
Nickerson Smith looked shocked.
“Grace—” he said. “Why, that’s the nurse!”
“Right,” Bill told him.
“But,” Smith said, and paused. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Try,” Mrs. North advised him. “Grace Spencer. Somebody killed her. Because she remembered something—something odd. Something she couldn’t be allowed to tell. Where were you, Mr. Smith?”
Smith looked puzzled again. He shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “When was she killed? If it wasn’t too long ago, I was driving here.”
Pam looked at Bill Weigand, and he nodded.
“About an hour,” she said. “Less, perhaps.”
Jerry shook his head.
“More,” he said. “A little more.”
“On the road, then,” Smith said. He looked without anger, almost with amusement, at Mrs. North. “Do I need an alibi?” he asked.
“Heavens,” Mrs. North said. “You ought to know that, if anybody. People who kill people need alibis. You ought to know.”
“I do,” Smith said. “On that basis, I don’t.” He looked at Mrs. North. “I’m not sure I get the basis,” he added.
“Look,” Mrs. North said, “it’s guilty people who need alibis, isn’t it? So that they will be some place else when they weren’t? If you killed Miss Spencer, of course you need an alibi. Like a gas station.”
“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said. He ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair. “Why a gas station?”
“To stop at, of course,” Pam told him. “While the lights were off.”
Nickerson Smith looked at Weigand; and Dorian suddenly, quite unexpectedly, laughed from the deep chair in which she was sitting. It was a subdued laugh, and brief.
“You all look so funny,” Dorian said, when everybody looked at her. “Pam’s perfectly clear.”
“Of course,” Pam said. “It’s simple. You got ten gallons and he remembers you because you asked what time it was.”
Jerry shook his head, looking again at Pam.
“What time was it?” he said.
“About twenty minutes after eleven,” Pam said, without hesitating. She looked at her watch. “You were right,” she said. “It’s twelve thirty now. More than an hour.”
“So you mean,” Smith said, speaking very slowly and carefully, “where was I at about eleven twenty, and did I stop at a gas station so I can prove it?”
“Of course,” Pam North said. “What would I mean?”
Smith shook his head.
“I was on the road somewhere,” he said. “On my way here. About at Hawthorne Circle, probably.”
“Why?” Pam said. “Did you look at your watch?”
Smith looked confused again, but only for a moment.
“Oh,” he said, “at the Circle. No—it would just be about right.”
He looked at Weigand then and his eyes challenged Weigand.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “what is all this? This—lady—seems to suspect me. Am I supposed to take that as the official attitude?”
Weigand smiled a little, but it was not an informative smile.
“This lady suspects everyone,” he said. “So do I. So does Lieutenant Heimrich here. This is Nickerson Smith, Heimrich. Dan Gordon’s uncle. Brother of the doctor’s first wife. And—one of the executors of his sister’s will. Dr. Gordon was the other.”
“And,” Nickerson Smith said, “Gordon managed to throw away about three fourths of the money. Leaving me to hold the bag.”
Heimrich made deprecating consonants with his tongue and teeth. They could mean anything.
“And,” Smith said, “I was in my office when Andrew was killed.”
Heimrich looked at Weigand, who nodded.
“That’s right,” Weigand said. “He was.”
“Oh, so you talked to the girl,” Smith said, enlightened.
“Right,” Bill said. “We talked to your secretary. You were in your office.”
“Then?” Smith said.
Then, Bill said, as far as he was concerned Smith could talk with his nephew. But it was up to Heimrich; they were in Heimrich territory.
“Why not, Mr. Smith?” Heimrich said, pleasantly. “He’s in his room. Tell the man at the door I said you could talk to him. You know where his room is, of course.”
Nickerson Smith shook his head. Oddly enough, he said, he had been at the house only once before, and then had stayed on the first floor. Heimrich looked surprised. He said he understood Smith was a relative; it was clear from his tone that relatives knew one another’s houses. Smith smiled faintly.
“We didn’t see much of one another,” he said. “After my sister died, and particularly after Andrew remarried, I saw them only occasionally. In town. I’m afraid that, even with Dan, I wasn’t a—a good relative.” He thought a moment. “Apparently it would have been better if I had been,” he said. “All around. I left too much to Andrew.”
Nobody had anything to say to that. Smith looked at all of them, said morosely and to nobody in particular that it was water under the bridge, and went off with a guiding trooper. They looked after him for a moment. Pamela’s gaze was oddly speculative. She continued to regard the place where Mr. Smith had been for some time after the others had turned away.
“You look,” Jerry said, after they had contemplated her preoccupied face for a moment, “very speculative. Like Teeney when she sees a cigarette package, which maybe somebody will empty for her.”
Pam started. She looked at Jerry and said, “Oh!”
“Well,” she said, “I do want him.”
“Hey!” Jerry said.
“Platonically,” Pam said. “As a murderer. Is that platonic?”
Bill Weigand shrugged. Not platonic, he thought. “Hopeless” was the word.
“Don’t set your heart on him, Pam,” he said. “Because he couldn’t have killed Gordon. And whoever killed Gordon, killed the nurse.” He paused. “I hope,” he added, with some fervor.
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Heimrich said. “No doubt about it.” He was relaxed, contented. “So you can work it out all nice and clean for both of us, Weigand. We’ll make the motions and you do the work.” He was almost purring. “Different from that other time,” he said. “This time you shake the tree a
nd we’ll catch the apples. O.K.?”
“Right,” Weigand said, “and I think we’ll leave you to your motions, Lieutenant.”
“O.K.,” Heimrich said, still contented. “You’ll hear from us.” He smiled at Weigand, and his smile was a police smile. “Naturally,” he said, “we’ll do a little tree shaking, too.” He regarded the ceiling momentarily. “Starting with Mrs. Gordon,” he said. “And her boy friend. If he is.”
“The neighbors might know,” Pam North suggested.
Heimrich regarded her.
“Why, Mrs. North,” he said. “You wouldn’t want us to listen to gossip, would you?” He was heavily jocose; it was a joke.
“Personally,” Pam North said, “I like gossip. As long as it isn’t trivial.”
The Norths were home, Bill Weigand thought—with that just perceptible twinge of uncertainty which was so often a concomitant to making up one’s mind about Pam and Jerry North. Dorian was home, he knew, having just talked to her. He pushed that thought away; he pushed away the thought that it would be better to be with her. He whistled a bar or two of Sullivan’s music and thought of Gilbert’s lyrics. For a couple of laymen—He looked at his watch, and learned what he could have guessed. It was getting on toward three o’clock-three o’clock in the morning. Another song came back into his mind, which was an indication that his mind was tired. And it was less applicable; they hadn’t danced the whole night through. They had driven through the night, guided by a radio car which was trailing another car, they had found a sick man and a dead woman; a man in tweeds and a wife unprostrated by grief, and a little girl asleep with bright hair strewing her pillow. And they had wallowed back through fog. Weigand’s eyes were as tired as his mind. He ran a hand over them and held them closed a moment. Then he opened them and looked at his desk, and at the reports piled in front of him.
The report on Nickerson Smith was on top, and it told him nothing he had not already heard. From one fifteen certainly, from one ten probably, until he had taken the call from Nurse Spencer, he had been at his desk. That much of his story was true, and that was what was significant. So far as they had got, which was not far, the rest of his story was true, at least in its factual elements. He had been named co-executor with Andrew Gordon of the estate left by his sister, and Gordon’s wife. The will did provide that the principal go to Dan Gordon on his twenty-fifth birthday. The rest of it was more obscure and would require further enquiry—laborious, careful enquiry by accountants. Presumably this enquiry would show that the estate had wasted badly; if Nickerson Smith had a motive for lying about that the motive was surpassingly obscure. The enquiry might show that Gordon had lost the money; whether by financial incompetence, bad luck or chicanery there might be a way of telling. It might show that the fault—if there had been fault—was Smith’s. His motive for lying at that point need not be obscure.
Weigand conjured a picture of Smith into his mind. A solid, substantial man with a square face and a habit of looking at people he spoke to with an unwavering gaze. He had bristling gray hair—or did he have? The picture was not clear. Weigand passed the detail and sought the general effect. The general effect was a substantial businessman in his middle fifties, with no noticeable peculiarities. There was an additional factor to be considered—Mrs. Gerald North openly preferred him as the murderer. Weigand was impartial as he considered this; he weighed Pam’s insight—if insight was what you called it, and Bill Weigand had given up being sure—against the facts. Pam had been right in the past. She had also been wrong. Her average was good. But the facts were against her.
Nickerson Smith was tempting, because you could give him a motive. But he was, so far as Weigand could see, unobtainable. Weigand dismissed the mental image of Nickerson Smith, put the report on him in the file basket and regarded the report on Mrs. Andrew Gordon. It was, he decided as he read it, rather interesting.
A waiter captain at Longchamps had been found who believed, without certainty, that he remembered Mrs. Gordon lunching there, coming in at some time around one. The picture they had showed him had helped. If the woman he was thinking of was Mrs. Gordon, it was true that she had seemed, at first, to be waiting for somebody. But, still if he was thinking of the right woman, she had not, as she said, waited fruitlessly. About ten minutes after she arrived—this was always if the woman the waiter captain was thinking of, was the woman they wanted him to think of—she had been joined by a man. The waiter captain did not go beyond that. There was a man and that was the end of it. It could be presumed that the waiter would have noticed if he had been an Indian with feathers, or an Indian with a turban. Failing these peculiarities, he was merely a gentleman who had joined a lady for lunch.
But, even so vaguely established, it was interesting. Presuming the waiter captain was remembering Mrs. Gordon, and Weigand thought he was, she had had a companion at the luncheon she had pictured as solitary. Her husband, after all? Or the tweed-covered Westcott? Or someone else? If it had been Dr. Gordon, it would be very interesting indeed.
From the restaurant she had, as she had said, gone to a Madison Avenue shop. There was no question about it this time; she was known there—and she had bought dresses for a little girl and had them mailed to an address in North Salem. But—and again this evidence was more assured—she had not been alone. There had been a man with her. He had merely stood and waited, not taking part in her decisions among the dresses offered. But he had certainly been there. And, as certainly, he remained vague. Again he was merely a man. Apparently, he had been unassertive, whatever—and whoever—he might have been. Dr. Gordon? But would he not have been interested in helping to pick out clothes for his little girl? Westcott? Or, again, somebody new?
And, after the shop which sold the dresses, Mrs. Gordon had gone to another shop which had sold her a hat. There was no doubt of the identification here. And, this time, she had mailed back to North Salem the hat she had been wearing and put on the new hat. But—this time there had been no man. They were sure of that at the shop. If there had been a man, it appeared, they would have noticed him.
The rest of the report made the already known, official. Bill. Weigand tossed the report into the file basket. There would be some new questions to ask Mrs. Gordon, when next she was asked questions.
Dan Gordon came next. The reports added little, as far as his actions went, to what they already knew—and did not either contradict or confirm what they had been told. Young Gordon had spent Sunday night at the Harvard Club and had left early. The elevator starter in the office building had said “oh yes, sure” when shown Gordon’s picture, and had remembered seeing him come in some time between nine and ten—and remembered that he came down again a little later.
The same starter had remembered him coming into the lobby again, he thought a little before one, with a very pretty girl and thought they had stopped for a few moments to talk, letting one elevator go up without them. But this memory was vague; the starter supposed they had gone up together but, pressed, he admitted that this was only a supposition. “May just figure that people who come into the lobby always do go up,” the precinct detective who had made the investigation noted. At any rate, it appeared that Dan Gordon had not loitered, obviously, in the lobby waiting for his father to come down. But the lobby was busy, with offices emptying and refilling at the lunch hour. He might easily have hung around, unnoticed. Queried as to whether he had seen Dr. Gordon come down, the elevator starter threw up his hands. If it had been a little after one, then he had come with a swarm. There were outgoing swarms at a few minutes after twelve, minor swarms half an hour later, returning and departing swarms just before and just after one. That Dan Gordon was noticed at all was because his arrival, with the pretty girl, was during a comparatively slack period in lobby traffic. Which checked, Bill Weigand reflected. And the rest—proved nothing.
The Army in Washington, reacting to an urgent plea, confirmed and amplified what had been partially a guess. Dan Gordon had served as an infantryman in the
ETO for two years, and had been around. He had been around where it was thick and he had been good—good enough to be commissioned in the field just before the German collapse. And there had been nothing wrong with him; he had been wounded once and had recovered and been sent back, and thereafter there had been nothing wrong with him. Then, in midsummer, when they were merely sweating it out, he had, unexpectedly, cracked up.
This was unusual, but not unprecedented. Almost nothing was unprecedented among the things which could happen to combat soldiers in a war like that. Gordon had been hospitalized and, in the course of time, returned to the States. Combat fatigue, but the prognosis had always been good. He had responded normally; late in the previous autumn he had been released from the hospital and, at his own request, from the Army. It was to be expected, the Army psychiatrists indicated, that he would continue to improve and that, within a year, he would be entirely normal. No treatment was indicated; time and peace could be expected to take care of things.
Bill Weigand made a note, tossed the report on Dan Gordon into the file basket and looked at his watch. After three, now. He ran a hand again across his tired eyes. He sat for a moment looking at nothing, tapping the top of his desk. He went back to it.
There was a brief report on Deborah Brooks—a report consonant with the brevity of her life. It seemed to tell them nothing the girl had not told them; it told them less—“said to be engaged D. Gordon” was an almost absurd summary of what her eyes said—what her whole face said—when she looked at “D. Gordon”; of what her foolish, impulsive actions had told them that afternoon and night. The report on Grace Spencer was longer, but it, too, told less than they knew. There was no hint in it of what the girl—whose body was now lying somewhere under glaring lights; was now no longer sentient, but merely a fact in an investigation—had revealed when she dropped her head on her arms after she had answered their questions and sobbed with a kind of hopelessness.
There was nothing on Lawrence Westcott, the attentive neighbor. Nothing had been known of Westcott when the Police Department—which meant unhurried, ingenious men in ordinary clothes, turning things over methodically—had started that community effort which would not end until, somewhere, at some time, a jury said: “We find the defendant guilty—” of whatever they found the defendant guilty of. In this instance, Weigand supposed, murder in the first degree would have to be the answer. Because of the nurse.
Death of a Tall Man Page 12