Murder Has Its Points

by Frances

  “Well, ma’am,” Mullins said, “not offhand. Don’t get out to Coney Island much.”

  “Before your time, anyway,” Mrs. MacReady said, and since she appeared to be around sixty Mullins thought it likely. “What’s Gladys Mason done?”

  “Nothing we know of,” Mullins said. “Just wanted a word with her. Looks like we’re not going to get it right away, don’t it? So, next best thing, what can you tell us about her? Except that she’s not around?”

  “She’s a good sort,” Mrs. MacReady said. “Whatever you say.”

  “Now ma’am,” Mullins said, “I don’t say she wasn’t. How old would you say? How long’s she worked here. Things like that.”

  The records in the employment office would show her age. “What she said it was, anyway.” Mrs. Mac-Ready herself would guess the middle forties. As for the length of time at the Dumont, a little over five years. “And,” Mrs. MacReady said, “the best one I’ve got. Did have, I guess you’d say.”

  Mrs. Mason was a widow. “Most of them are, like me.” Presumably, she had been a widow for some years. Before she came to the Dumont, she had worked, as a housekeeper, in other hotels. It was Mrs. MacReady’s guess that she had started as a maid somewhere, and “been too good for it.”

  “She must have been pretty a while back,” Mrs. MacReady said. “And, sort of high class, if you know what I mean. Come down in the world, like they say. Me, I was never up in it, you know. But sure you know.”

  “Sure,” Mullins said. “This son of hers.”

  He was told he meant Bobby. He agreed he meant Bobby.

  “Busboy, the poor kid,” Mrs. MacReady said. “Wants to be a college graduate, but it looks as if that’s out. Because here it is November and he’s still working for Karl. And, let’s face it, Karl’s a holy terror if there ever was one.”

  “The headwaiter?”

  Mullins had better not call Karl that to his face. Karl was maître d’.

  “He sees a busboy, he steps on it,” Mrs. MacReady said, unexpectedly.

  She knew something of Robert Mason. At the request of his mother, she had helped him get his job at the Hotel Dumont, lowly as the job was. That had been the previous spring, when school closed. One of those colleges; she didn’t know which one. Wouldn’t mean anything to her, anyway. He was working his way through. “With what Gladys, the poor thing, could do to help.” The job had, presumably, been only for the summer, for the school vacation. But here it was November. “And he’s still lugging trays.”

  “Not now he isn’t,” Mullins said. “Anyway, today he isn’t. Look. You think maybe Mrs. Mason got another job somewhere? And just lit out? With the kid? Look—maybe there’s a hotel in the town the boy’s school is in, and she got a job there. Could be?”

  “For one thing,” Mrs. MacReady said, “she’s got money coming. For another thing, why’d she light out without telling anybody? This ain’t a jail, Sergeant. I don’t say it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but it ain’t a jail. She wants to leave, she just says she wants to leave.”

  “What’s the boy like?”

  The boy was a good-looking kid, if you didn’t mind them thin as rails. He was, at a guess, a little over twenty. “Only thing I noticed particularly,” she said, “is that he sort of seemed to have his back up. Know what I mean? Sort of sore at everything. But a lot of kids are like that, nowadays.”

  “And don’t we know it,” Mullins said. “Bad-tempered, you’d call him?”

  He could call it that. “More like surly,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

  Then she said, “What’s it all about, Sergeant?”

  “Routine,” Mullins said, and was told to come off it. It was about this man Payne’s getting killed, wasn’t it? And what did that have to do with Gladys Mason.

  “Well,” Mullins said, “seems she might have heard something. That’s all I know about it. They say, ‘Go ask Mrs. Mason if she heard something.’ You know how it is, your husband being on the cops. You suppose I could see her room?”

  Mrs. MacReady didn’t see why not, or what good it would do him. Mrs. Mason had taken everything when she went. But if he wanted …

  The room on the seventeenth floor was very small—large enough for a cot-like bed, a chair, a small chest of drawers. Nothing in the drawers. A shallow closet off the room. Nothing in the closet. The bed unmade. No bath. The bath was down the hall. Not, clearly, a room for guests. A dormitory room, for help of the lower-middle echelon. On the street side.

  Mullins leaned out of the single window. The room was at the side of the hotel and the entrance marquee was narrow. Looking down and to the side, Mullins could—just could—look under the marquee. He stood as far to one side as possible, and could see farther under the marquee. About, he judged, to the point at which Payne had been standing when he was shot. An uninterrupted line of vision equals, of course, an uninterrupted line of fire.

  It is one thing to look around a room and find nothing useful in it. It is another thing to go over a room as experts go over a room. Mullins went back to Mrs. MacReady’s office, and she said, “You again,” which was what he had expected. She said, “Didn’t find anything, did you?” and he admitted he hadn’t.

  “However,” he said, “we’ll want the technical-lab boys to go over it, and nobody to mess around in it first. O.K. And, how’s to give me a description of Mrs. Mason? The boy, too, as well as you can.”

  “So,” she said, “it’s like that, is it. Well—”

  Mrs. Mason, medium height. (If he knew what she meant. He did not, but nodded his head.) Weighed maybe a hundred and fifty. Light “complected.” Yellowish sort of hair, but graying. Blue eyes. Sort of a round face, if he knew what she meant. “Didn’t look very happy, most of the time.” Pretty good figure, although she’d probably put on a few pounds. Dress her up, and give her something to smile about, and she’d be a good-looker still.

  The boy—six feet, anyway, and thin as all get out. (Which was an expression Mullins hadn’t heard for years.) Black hair, and it usually needed cutting. Face thin, like the rest of him. Eyes set way back in his head. As she had said, acted as if he had a chip on his shoulder, and looked like it, too. “I don’t say,” she added, “that a lot of girls wouldn’t go for him. Give him sideburns and a guitar.”

  Mullins stopped at Mr. Purdy’s desk to repeat what he had said about Mrs. Mason’s room. Purdy guessed it would be all right. Mullins regarded him briefly. “Sure, I’ll see to it,” Mr. Purdy said.

  Mullins went crosstown to the far West Forties and up three flights of stairs which needed sweeping, breathing air that needed changing. The room the boy had had was small; it had a grimy window on an air shaft; it had a single light bulb depending from the ceiling. The room, like the only slightly larger room on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Dumont, had been emptied.

  The woman who, traced into basement lodgings, admitted she “ran the joint,” was buxom, had very red lips and almost equally red cheeks and wore what Mullins took to be a housecoat. She was very highly scented. She smiled brightly until Mullins identified himself. The smile disappeared, at that.

  She didn’t know anything about the kid; not a damned thing about the kid. He rented the room and that was the end of it. He had, that morning, told her he was leaving; he had carried a cheap suitcase; he had been wearing a raincoat, and dark trousers. He had been paid up to the end of the week and had tried to get a refund, and had been told no soap. He had not said why he was leaving, or where he was going.

  “There’ll be men around to go over the room,” Mullins said. “Don’t let anybody in it until they say it’s O.K. Don’t go in yourself.”

  “Listen, copper, I’ve got to make a living, don’t I? Suppose somebody wants to rent—”

  “You heard me,” Mullins said. “Nobody. We’ll make it as quick as we can.”

  Mullins took the Eighth Avenue subway to Twenty-third Street, and walked to 230 West Twentieth.

  The girl had been in a grea
t hurry to see James Self. That much was obvious. It was reasonably obvious, also, that she had wanted to get to Self to find out what Self had told a detective, had been asked by a detective. Which was entirely understandable; natural curiosity would take care of that. Only—had the girl been frightened? Or, Bill Weigand thought, am I riding a hunch to nowhere?

  He walked through the Village street, seeking a telephone. It would be fine if, by now, precinct had come up with a sniper, complete with rifle, void of any motive for murder save a psychotic need to put bullets into people. Weigand could, then, quit bothering people who had cause to dislike Anthony Payne and free himself of the nagging suspicion that their causes were just. A burly, bearded novelist. A lean, unbearded bookseller. Two down (only by no means down) and how many more to go? A playwright-director who had expressed the wish that a collaborator drop dead. A handsome young actor who had lost his job but, conceivably, now gained more. (Nothing to prove that; merely something to be asked about.)

  Bill found a drugstore, and a telephone booth. He got Stein. No sniper nabbed that Stein had heard of. Mullins was there, and Mrs. Mason, and also a son of hers, appeared to have taken a powder. Mrs. Gerald North had telephoned, and would call back. The bullet which had killed Payne had not been too badly damaged, so if they found a rifle they would know if it was the right rifle.

  “I’ll come in,” Bill said, and went in.

  The abrupt departure of Mrs. Mason and her son did not, Mullins pointed out, need to mean anything. That was, it presumably meant something—like, for example, Mrs. Mason having got a better job somewhere. Nothing, Mullins said he was saying, that would do them any good. But still—

  “The descriptions are no good,” Mullins said. “The kid—maybe, except there could be hundreds it would fit. And as for hers—thousands. Course, we can send a sketch man up and have him see what he can work out with Ma MacReady. Only, do we want her?”

  Bill tapped his desk with active fingers. Mrs. Mason must have seen advantages in unannounced departure from the Dumont which outweighed the advantage of picking up money due her on the way. Another job seemed an insufficient advantage.

  “She could have fired a gun from her room,” Mullins said. “If she’s good with a gun. The kid, I suppose, could have borrowed his mom’s room. Only—why the hell?”

  Bill couldn’t help with that. He could, however, offer another suggestion.

  Mrs. Lauren Payne was, perhaps, afraid she had, while under or partly under sedation, said something which would damage someone. Most likely, of course, would damage her herself. Pam North could remember nothing which might incriminate anybody. Possibly Mrs. Mason had heard more, or had a better memory.

  “Yeah,” Mullins said. “You think a payoff?”

  A sufficient payoff, by Lauren Payne, for forgetfulness, for disappearance before memory was officially jogged, would, it was obvious, explain the abrupt departure of Mrs. Gladys Mason. It was reasonable that she might have taken her son along.

  “The Paynes had a room overlooking the street,” Bill said, and his drumming fingers paused briefly. “Fourth floor. She was in it—anyway, Payne told the Norths she had gone up to their room because she had a headache. Only—”

  He looked across the room at a wall with a crack in it. He saw the front of the Hotel Dumont. He saw a narrow marquee, extending, to be sure, only a part of the distance from building to curb. But still—

  “From Mrs. Mason’s room,” he said, “the marquee doesn’t shield?”

  “Nope,” Mullins said. “Doesn’t make it any easier. But somebody could shoot under it. If Payne was leaning the right way—”

  “Give your friend Purdy a ring,” Bill said. “Find out where the Paynes’ room is. If it’s in the middle of the building, above the marquee—”

  Mullins got it. He reached for the telephone on Weigand’s desk, but at that moment it rang. “Get one outside,” Mullins said, as Weigand reached to silence the shrill telephone. Bill nodded and said, “Weigand,” and then, “Hello, Pam.”

  “Bill,” Pam said, “she’s one of the wives.”

  She paused, quite clearly in expectation of response—presumably of somewhat excited response.

  Pamela North now and then comes up with answers to questions which have not yet been asked. She also draws conclusions from premises not stated. One can only explore.

  “Who?” Bill said. “Of what wives?”

  “And,” Pam said, “she’s the one who was with her after I was and—what did you say?”

  “Only,” Bill said, “who are we talking about, Pam? And, for that matter, what?”

  She said, “Bill! Mr. Payne’s murder, of course. About the housekeeper being one of his wives. The middle one, actually. After Faith and before Lauren. He says the son isn’t his; but Faith thinks probably he is. Bill, Anthony Payne must have been really an awful man.”

  “Pam,” Bill said, and spoke slowly. (The way to overtake Pamela North is sometimes to move very slowly indeed.) “Are you talking about Mrs. Mason? Mrs. Gladys Mason?”

  “She spells it g-l-a-d-d-i-s,” Pam said. “Of course.”

  “She doesn’t now,” Bill said. “If we’re talking about the same woman. She was married to Payne? Her son is his son?”

  “He denied it,” Pam said. “When he was suing for the divorce. And, apparently, got a man to back him up. Hired the man, probably. And then didn’t support either of them. So you see—”

  “Pam,” Bill said. “My dear—listen, Pam. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? The beginning was—”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “at Sardi’s. But I don’t see what real difference that—”

  “Please,” Bill said.

  Pamela North can be patient with slow minds. She can be specific with those who must have each ‘t’ crossed, ‘i’ dotted. She was a little disappointed in Bill Weigand, but she tempered the breeze.

  “It does,” she said when she had finished, “give you two more suspects, doesn’t it? And I hope it isn’t either of them, because if Faith is right they’ve had raw deals, haven’t they?”

  “Payne seems rather to have specialized in them,” Bill said. “Mrs. Constable’s reason for going to you, not to us—did it seem a little thin, Pam?”

  “Not then,” Pam said. “When I repeat it to you—perhaps. But—” She paused. “Of all of them,” Pam said, “I’d think she had the least motive, Bill.”

  It was a jump again, but Bill could make this one with her. It might appear that Faith Constable was offering a red herring. But any obvious grudge Faith might have had against Payne must, surely, have grown threadbare with years. Any obvious grudge—One not obvious?

  “Mrs. Mason and her son have disappeared, Pam,” Bill said.

  Pam said, “Oh,” and sounded unhappy. Then she said, “Bill. The busboy I told you about? Who seemed to be—glaring at Tony Payne. Or, of course, at Jerry, but I didn’t really think so. A tall, thin, dark boy. Was he—?”

  “I think so,” Bill said. “It fits together.”

  And Pamela North, again, said, “Oh,” in the same tone and then, “I hope not, Bill.” She paused. “I hope it will be a sniper. Don’t you?”

  It would, Bill agreed, be very convenient if it turned out to be a sniper. He said they would have to keep on hoping. He said, “Listen, Pam. You won’t—”

  “Of course not,” Pam North said. “Does Mrs. Payne—I mean the latest, of course—have a lot of money of her own?”

  Bill Weigand flipped through his mind quickly. Somebody—Of course. Gardner Willings.

  “I understand she has some,” he said. “I don’t know whether it’s a lot. Why—?”

  “Mink,” Pam said. “Very minky mink. It probably doesn’t matter. That is, obviously mink does matter. Can you and Dorian come by for a drink later?”

  He chuckled at that. He said he didn’t know; that he’d let her know if they could.

  “For yourselves alone,” Pam said “Don’t laugh. Goodbye, Bill.”

&nbs
p; Sergeant Mullins came in after a few minutes. Bill had spent them looking at the crack in the wall opposite. He had let the information (which would have to be checked, of course) that Mrs. Payne had money of her own trickle through his mind. If she had enough—She would be free now to, among other things, marry somebody else—

  The Paynes had had a two-room suite at the Hotel Dumont. It had been on the front. It had been on the fourth floor, well toward the right as one faced the building. Guessing, without seeing, Mullins supposed that someone who wanted to might have fired from the window of one of the rooms and sent a bullet under the marquee, into a selectd skull. If a good enough shot.

  “The thing is, Loot,” Mullins said, “she checked out just before noon.” He sighed. “They don’t seem to stay put, do they?”

  The Paynes were registered as from Ridgefield, Connecticut. “Could be,” Mullins said, “she just went home. I asked the State cops to make a check, just for the fun of it. O.K.?”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “Live on something called Nod Road,” Mullins said. “Funny thing to call a road, isn’t it? Was that Mrs. North phoned?”

  His tone was not exactly accusing. Sergeant Mullins does not really share Inspector O’Malley’s view of Mr. and Mrs. North. On the other hand, where the Norths are screwiness is.

  Bill said yes, and told Mullins what Mrs. North had called about.

  Mullins considered.

  “You know,” he said, “that’s not so screwy, is it? When you think the kid wants to go to college and apparently they can’t swing it? And he sees his old man—what mama tells him is his old man, anyway—rolling in it? And his mother’s had a dirty deal and—” He paused. “It’s not really screwy at all, is it, Loot?”

  9

  Facts are collected; they are poured into a mind and shaken together, in the hope of a precipitate. But some facts are hunches only; some facts are, at best, splinters from the truth. Where a man was at a certain time may be a fact. But who the man was, what kind of man he was, may be of far greater importance, and that can never be more than guessed at, with guesses formulated under conditions necessarily adverse. Almost no one is quite himself while being interrogated by a policeman. Some who are normally mild turn belligerent; the pugnacious may grow wary. Criminal investigation has been loosely compared to many things, including the putting together of a jigsaw puzzle. It is seldom that simple. The pieces of such a puzzle are of fixed shape, immutable. Men and women change shape when touched.