That would hang somebody—or send electricity through somebody. Not even Dan Gordon would beat a conviction on that. (The chair was another matter; in the end he would almost as certainly not go to the chair.) You could imagine circumstances which would make the first killing merely manslaughter. In connection with Dan Gordon, you could imagine those circumstances with little difficulty. But it would take stretching—very expert stretching, by a very expert defense—to make uncontrollable irritation, or whatever psychiatry chose to call it, cover the killing of Grace Spencer.
He was thinking a good deal of Dan Gordon, Weigand realized. It fitted very well; it was the way to play it. Which would, Bill Weigand realized, not suit Mrs. Gerald North. Bill smiled involuntarily when he thought of Mrs. Gerald North. It was too bad they weren’t going to be able to work things out for her; work them out so Debbie Brooks and Dan Gordon had a chance to live happily ever after. But the chances were they weren’t.
If there is much more of this, Weigand thought, blinking his eyes, it would have to go over until morning. He looked at his watch again. Morning was now; it would have to go over until he had slept a little. But there shouldn’t be much more of it.
There were five reports clipped together. Those would be the reports on the afternoon compensation cases. There should be six. A note explained that. Two efforts had been made to talk to Robert Oakes, who lived on the East Side, not far from Stuyvesant Square. Oakes had not been at home. Another attempt would be made later.
The men who had been at home were Henry Flint, Fritz Weber, John Dunnigan, George Cooper and Jose Garcia. All agreed that they had been at the office the day before; all had employments and all argued that their work had led to eye ailments for which the insurance company should pay; all had been examined by Dr. Gordon for the first—and, as it turned out, the last—time that day. And even detectives, always suspicious in accordance with regulations, had found nothing about any of the five to connect them, in other than the most casual fashion, with Dr. Andrew Gordon. To them he had been a name and an address, and a time of day, handed them on a slip of paper; he had been an abstraction of science, wearing a white coat. On what he noted down on cards depended their immediate futures—perhaps more. But he, himself, was impersonal. Only what he wrote mattered.
Presumably these men varied—they were tall and short, they had beliefs which were all the more intense for being muddled, they had at some time loved, or hated, according to their capacities; some of them might be alive thirty years from now and some of them might die within a week. In their past lives, or in those they might live, there were, it was conceivable, the seeds of other murders. The police might meet them again, and would not entirely have forgotten them. Their names would be in files, somewhere, and might turn up. They might get themselves run over. Or they might drive through traffic lights. Then it might appear that, once, murder had brushed them.
But, so far as the reports Bill Weigand tossed into the file basket showed, it had this time only brushed them.
That, for now, was the size of it. Bill thought of Dorian. She would be asleep, now, relaxed and quiet. But there would be a dim light in the bedroom, because she always kept a dim light on when he was not at home. If he could go home she would awaken, without surprise—merely opening her greenish eyes slowly—and look at him and then, after a moment of gravity, she would smile and say something to him, using a language which was nobody’s business but their own.
“Damn!” Bill Weigand said. He went out of his office, down a corridor and into a small room which could have stood another window. Mullins was asleep on one of the two cots; he was not as ornamental asleep—or in any other condition, come to think of it—as Dorian. Bill undressed, sufficiently, and lay down on the other cot.
Now what the hell did Grace Spencer know? Bill wondered. What had she seen when she returned from lunch and made her check on the empty examining rooms and waited to call the doctor to meet his patients at three? Had she seen something and decided not to tell it, and then, perhaps, changed her mind, too late? Or had the significance of something she had seen impressed itself on her, again, too late? There was the crux of it—there was the crux of both cases.
Sergeant Mullins snored once, resonantly. Bill Weigand said “Damn!” again and turned his back to Mullins and after a little while he went to sleep.
7
TUESDAY, 8:30 A.M. TO 12:07 P.M.
The story was prominent in the newspapers. It was prominent in the Herald-Tribune, which Mrs. North read. It was prominent in the Times, around which Mr. North reached groping for his cup of coffee. Martini tossed a wadded cigarette package into the air, jumped straight up after it and came down twisted, with her tail and back bristling. She made a lunge for it, paused suddenly to scratch her right ear, and then batted it to Pam North’s feet. Martini sat and looked at Pam expectantly. Ignored, Martini spoke. She put out a paw and touched Pam’s nearest leg.
“Last pair of stockings, Teeney,” Pam said, in a reasonable tone. “Don’t.”
“What?” Jerry North said. “Say something?”
“Stockings,” Pam said. “Last pair. The Herald-Tribune didn’t get North Salem in.”
“No?” Jerry said, pleased. “The Times did. New lead.” He read it to her. “Police of Westchester County and New York today were investigating the apparently linked murders of Dr. Andrew Gordon, widely known oculist, slain yesterday in his office in the Medical Chambers, and of Grace Spencer, his nurse, beaten to death hours later at the Gordon home near North Salem, in Westchester County,” Jerry read. He paused. “A mouthful,” he added. “Ouch!”
“What?” Pam said.
“Teeney,” Jerry said. “The Herald-Trib hasn’t got the nurse?”
“It’s an earlier edition,” Pam said, defensively. “We usually get an earlier edition of it. Don’t!”
Martini, deciding that Pam’s leg offered the greater responsiveness, had returned to it. Martini made comment, deep in her throat, comprehensible only to herself.
“And don’t talk Siamese,” Pam said. “Talk cat.”
“Yah,” Martini said, drawing it out.
Nobody answered her. She kicked the wadded cigarette package aside, ran after it, jumped on it, smelled it, and wandered back, talking low in her throat. Still nobody paid attention. Seemingly without effort, almost absent-mindedly, she floated to the top of the breakfast table.
“No!” Pam North said. “No, Martini!”
Martini could ignore with anybody. She moved, delicately, to the cream pitcher, looked quickly at Pam, and hurriedly put her face in it.
“No!” said Pam, explosively.
Martini did everything at once. Her head came out of the pitcher, her fur bristled and she got under way. It was all one movement. It took the cream pitcher with it for an instant, and left the pitcher on its side, cream spreading. Martini landed in the cream she had spilled. Infuriated, she went up and over Jerry North, sailed to the windowsill and bounced to a chest. She stopped there, shook her feet one after another, looked at the Norths with an expression of hurt astonishment, said “Yah!” with anger and began to lick her feet. As she licked them, she began again to make the low, throaty noise.
“I do wish,” Pam said, mopping up the cream, “that you wouldn’t let her on the table.”
“I wouldn’t!” Jerry said, mopping cream tracks off his shoulder with a napkin. “I—” He ended, baffled. He tried again. “Listen,” he said, “it was your leg she was at. Not mine.”
“No discipline,” Pam said. “That’s the real trouble. No discipline at all. Poor Teeney.”
She went over to Teeney, who stopped licking her left hind foot, but remained in position. “Poor Teeney,” Pam said. “Nobody tells her anything.”
She stroked Martini’s head. Martini purred briefly and called attention to the fact that she still had a foot to lick. There would be time later, Martini indicated, for head rubbing.
“Which reminds me,” Pam said, coming back and sit
ting down at the table again. “What was Grace Spencer going to tell?”
Jerry put his Times down, looked at the empty toast plate, said, “oh” mildly, and pointed out that they did not know that Grace Spencer had been going to tell anybody anything.
“As good as,” Pam said. “Otherwise why?”
“Why go there?” Jerry said. “Or why killed?”
“They’re both the same thing,” Pam told him. “Part of the same thing. She remembered something and was going to tell Bill—no, she didn’t know Bill was there, did she?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Jerry said.
“Then Dan Gordon,” Pam said. “Or the wife. So that they could take it up with the police. What?”
“She saw young Gordon come back with his father between two and three,” Jerry said, promptly. “She saw Mrs. Gordon having lunch with a gangster and paying him money. She saw somebody—Smith—say, carrying the doctor out of the last examining room, and began to think, later, that there was something a little strange about it. She saw Debbie having lunch with Westcott and urging him to do something to—I can’t finish that one.”
“To kill Dr. Gordon, who was keeping her under hypnosis for his own evil ends,” Pam said. “Anybody can finish any of them if you want to make it easy. What did she really have to tell?”
Jerry discovered cream that he had missed, and rubbed at it, dampening his napkin in his glass of water. He shook his head.
“Two times,” Pam said. “When he was going out, before lunch. After she came back from lunch and before she found the body. One or the other.”
Jerry shook his head again.
“Any time between the doctor’s return from the hospital and the time she found the body,” he corrected. “Something she saw or heard, either one. You can’t shut out the time she was at lunch. It’s quite possible she ran across something then.”
Pam considered; she nodded. He was making it harder, she said. But you couldn’t get away from it.
“Actually,” she said, “you know what I think?”
“Good God, no,” Jerry said.
Pam ignored this.
“I still think it was something she saw when he was leaving,” she said.
“I know,” Jerry told her. “Because people who are about to be murdered look different from people who aren’t. It—shows in their faces.”
“Well,” Pam said, “I should think they’d be worried.” She looked at Jerry and smiled quickly and shook her head before he could speak. “No,” she said. “Really. Because murders are the end of something else, almost always. They don’t just—just come out of a clear sky. They come out of circumstances—worrying circumstances. And the victim is worried too, just as much as the murderer.” She paused. “Oh,” she said, “differently, I suppose. But you don’t just get up all bright and cheery in the morning, all’s right with the world, and get murdered at eight A.M. with the orange juice.”
Jerry said he saw what she meant, although he thought her example badly chosen.
“Everybody’s worried in the morning,” he said. “It’s the natural state of man. Particularly at what would be about seven thirty. Unless he didn’t take his shower.”
“What?” Pam said. “Oh. That’s frivolous.”
All their guessing was frivolous, Jerry told her. Any guessing when you had nothing to go on was frivolous.
“And,” he said, “I’ve got to see an author about a contract. You know what they want now? Control of reprints.” He stood up and sighed. “Authors used to be milder in the old days.”
“And, to be honest, broker,” Pam said. “Did you ever hear of a publisher dying in a garret?”
“Thousands,” Jerry assured her. Pam looked doubtful.
“Anyway,” she said, “I think that Dr. Gordon probably looked worried, because he was going to be murdered. Or was in a hurry, as if he had an appointment. Or said something that didn’t mean anything at the time, but did afterward.”
“Like ‘we who are about to die’—?” Jerry said.
Pam stood up, too.
“Go see about the contract,” she said.
Jerry came around the table and kissed her. He said she tasted of jam. “Very nice,” he said, consideringly. “Strawberry.”
“Black raspberry,” Pam told him. “Lunch?”
Jerry said he would call her up.
“You’ll be here?” he said, getting his hat off the sofa.
Pam North looked vague, suddenly.
“Look,” she said, “suppose I call you? About noon? And then we can go to Charles early, because otherwise they’re full up and it’s so embarrassing for Hugo. And we have to have two drinks while we’re waiting and sometimes I wonder whether they’re good for us.”
Jerry looked at her, not without suspicion.
“Look,” he said, “you’re not going to be here. Right?”
Pam told him he sounded like Bill.
“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said, “wouldn’t it be fun just to let Bill do it? For—for a change? Instead of leading with that agreeable chin?”
“Jerry,” Pam said. “You can say nice things.”
She kissed him, and this time he did not think of jam. He was still not thinking of jam when he remembered, as he got out of the elevator, that Pam had not, even remotely, agreed not to lead with her chin.
It had been hardly any trouble at all to get the names and addresses she wanted from Sergeant Mullins, although he talked at some length, and anxiously, about the inspector. Pam had had a twinge of conscience at circumventing Bill Weigand, but she paid no attention to it and obediently went away. She had more trouble circumventing Martini, who, chagrined that Jerry had escaped while she was giving a final polish to the right rear leg, was determined to block the escape of the one who smelled different, but did supply food when sharply spoken to. Pam backed out again—and almost bumped into a very surprised young man she had never seen before—but she caught Martini in the air as the little cat sprang, put her back and closed the door firmly after pushing out of it one hopeful, enquiring paw. This time, however, there was no taxicab. She waited ten minutes on the curb of Sixth Avenue, under a sign which called it “Avenue of the Americas,” and then was forced to take a bus.
Four of the addresses she had were in Manhattan, one was in Harlem and the sixth was—distantly, she feared—in Brooklyn. She would take the Manhattan ones first and then Harlem and then, if her strength and time lasted, the distant Brooklynite. The first, she decided, was the one in West Fiftieth, beyond Ninth Avenue.
It was a tenement and the one she wanted was on the fifth floor. It was a long way up; above the third floor the narrow wooden stairway sagged away from the wall, so that walking up it one instinctively hugged the wall and fought against a tendency to slip outward. “Some day,” Pam thought, “fire will go up these stairs and—and spread out at the top.” She shivered. The fifth floor was the top; that would be where the fire would mushroom. The air was staler there than it had been below where a sometimes-opened door let dead air out. But there was a glimmer from a dirty skylight above the stairwell—a skylight ideally situated, Pam thought, to provide a draft for the fire. She picked out one of the doors and knocked, and the door opened almost immediately. At first there seemed no reason for this response, and then Pam looked down.
“Hello, dear,” she said, looking into round brown eyes, “is your father Mr. Dunnigan?”
“I’m Mabel,” the little girl said, each word formed carefully on small lips. “Mabel Dunnigan. Who are you?”
“I’m Pamela North,” Mrs. North said.
“That’s a funny name,” Mabel told her. “Goodbye.”
She started to shut the door.
“You mean ‘hello,’ dear,” Mrs. North said. “Hello, Mabel.”
“I mean goodbye,” Mabel said. “They’re different woids. Goodbye.”
“Words,” Pam said. “But I want to see your father, Mabel. I—”
A woman came out of a door into the inn
er corridor of the flat. She picked Mabel up and held her under an arm. The woman was taller than Pam by a good deal, and heavier by more. She looked down.
“Whatever it is,” the woman said, “we don’t want it. My husband’s sick.”
“I know,” Pam said. “I want to see him. About yesterday. About Dr. Gordon.”
“There was a cop here,” the woman said. “You from a paper?”
“No,” Pam said. “I—”
“You’re sure not a cop,” the woman said, looking at Pam.
“In a way,” Pam said. “I help Lieutenant Weigand.” She looked at the woman. “And Sergeant Mullins,” she said, making it stronger.
A man’s voice came out of the room the woman had left.
“Who is it?” the voice said. “Mabel! Who is it?”
“Some woman says she’s from the police,” the woman said, and raised her voice. “I said you’d seen the police.”
“Well, bring her in,” the man’s voice said. The woman looked at Pam, made a gesture with her head, and stood out of the way, still holding little Mabel.
“She’s pretty,” Pam said, moving in. “Sweet. Hello, Mabel.”
“Goodbye,” Mabel said, still under her mother’s arm. The woman said nothing, but she smiled. It was a worried smile, but it was there.
John Dunnigan was sitting in a morris chair by a window which opened on an airshaft. He half got up when Pam went in. The room was unlighted; gray light came in unwillingly from the window, but Dunnigan faced away from it. When her eyes were adjusted to the gloom, Pam saw that his eyes were red and swollen.
“If you’re from the police,” Dunnigan said, “I’ve told everything I know. Which is nothing. The doc was all right when he finished with me. I went out and came home.”
He spoke as if he had planned it; had it ready.
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