Untidy Murder

by Frances Lockridge

  It sank in. They could watch it sinking in.

  “Right,” Bill said. “I’m asking you to help. By answering questions. Because, I gather, all three of you knew Mr. Wilming quite well. You were perhaps closer to him than anyone else?”

  “I was,” Donald Helms said. “He was—I’ll do anything to help.”

  Mrs. Helms reached out a hand and took her husband’s.

  “We all will,” she said.

  “I’m sure you will,” Bill said, and Pam North wondered whether there was irony in his voice. The others did not seem to hear it, she thought, if it was there.

  They could help; they could answer questions, one at a time, Bill told them. Beginning with Mr. Stanton. Then Bill looked at the Helmses and nodded to Helms’s enquiring look. The two got up then, and went across the room toward a door in the far wall. When they were about halfway to the door, Helms put an arm about his wife’s shoulders.

  They were through the door before Weigand spoke. Then his voice was merely conversational as he asked whether Stanton minded the Norths remaining. “You see,” Weigand told him, “they’re both quite fond of my wife, I think. It’s—perhaps personal with them too.”

  Stanton did not mind. Again he seemed a little puzzled, but he assured them he did not mind.

  9

  SATURDAY

  8 P.M. TO 9:35 P.M.

  There was no doubt now that the light was failing; failing sooner here in the woods than in open country. Where there had been shadows there was now the beginning of real darkness. But now, as if in recompense, the shadow which had all afternoon lain over her own mind had lifted. She felt now only expressibly tired and beaten and, although Piper was no more threatening than he had been since she had revived him in front of the burning cottage, frightened. I’m no nearer anywhere, she thought and now, with her greater clarity of mind, she realized there was no real gain in movement through the woods.

  She realized too that in the back of her mind, driving her on, had always been this knowledge that night was coming, that not even June afternoons are endless. With night would come the difficulties of darkness and, obscurely, atavistically, the fears of darkness. You were uneasy in the dark—the country dark—at best. And this was not at best. She might easily lose Piper or, what would be worse, her control of Piper. And there was always the chance that Piper was waiting for just that.

  It was only her guess that he was still numb, still bewildered in the darkness of a mind disturbed by shock, perhaps by an injury to the brain. She might be guessing merely what he, waiting the time out, wanted her to guess. If that were true, he would be waiting for night, when movements—the movements of attack—could be better than half completed before she was aware of them. With the automatic, and her knowledge that she knew how to use it, she had not been afraid of Piper all afternoon. Shamming or not, there was nothing he could do about it. But her safety would end with darkness.

  There was, to be sure, no indication that he was shamming now, or that there had been any change in his condition. He was sitting down again, hiding from the world in the shallow hollow of his hands, and he did not seem conscious of her being there at all. She sat down on another rock and waited, and wondered: Is this really another rock? Is this perhaps the same rock, or one of the same rocks? Has it been all a circle?

  There had been no real way of telling, all afternoon. More alert for the past two hours or so, she had had that danger in mind, and had used the slant of the light to guide them in what might have been, if not a straight line, at worst a general direction. She had chosen what she thought was east; probably, she thought now, because east meant toward New York. It did not matter; she could never march Piper to New York. But somehow it had felt better to be going what she hoped was east.

  But the past two hours were only a fraction of it, so that even if she had been going as she thought during that fraction of time, she might merely have been retracing steps taken in the opposite direction during the other, and major fraction. That was why she had not, so far, tried to call out. As long as they were near the cottage, or there was danger that they were near the cottage, calling for help would amount to calling for Farno—or might amount to calling for Farno. And even with the automatic, she was afraid of Farno. More exactly, perhaps, she was afraid of Farno and Piper together.

  But if I don’t find something by the time it’s dark I’ll have to start yelling, she thought. I’ll have to make Piper yell. I—

  She stood up then, and looked around. Surely now—surely!—there must be something she could see besides these endless trees! She looked at trees.

  “Damn!” she said, aloud. “Oh—damn!” All at once she felt like laughing. This is so absurd, she thought. This is so ridiculous, so improbable. You can’t get lost in the woods when you are only a couple of hours by car from the city of New York. You can’t! I’ll just walk over there, she thought, and the woods will vanish and there will be a town, or a road. There will be—But over there there were only again, interminably, trees. She heard herself laughing and then she was altogether frightened.

  I’ll slap myself, she thought. That’s what you do for hysteria. You slap them. I’ll slap myself.

  And then miraculously she saw a light. There had been no light; then there was a light. She had not missed it. It had just happened. She stared at it and it did not go away; she moved a little and, from another angle, saw another light.

  She turned on Piper then.

  “Get up!” she said. “Get up! Go over there!”

  It was almost incredible that Piper got up, quite docilely. “Over there!” she told him, and pointed toward the lights. She realized now that they were not even very far away. “Go on!” she said. “Oh—go on!”

  Piper went through the woods toward the light. The going was not so easy; it was marshy here, and after a time there was a small, uncertain stream. Piper stopped at the stream and again she said, “Go on!” and he walked through it. She walked after him. Beyond he stopped again, where strands of barbed wire blocked them. But without instructions this time, he stooped down and climbed under. She made him move on a dozen feet and then she ducked under the wire. She felt lithe again, suddenly.

  Beyond the barbed wire the woods petered out. In a minute or two they were walking through tall grass. Then they came to a mowed lawn, and a big house was in front of them. They went toward it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Stanton,” Bill Weigand said. “You’ve been very clear. For the moment, I think that’s all.”

  Stanton got up.

  “Would you ask Mr. Helms to come?” Bill said.

  Stanton only nodded. He went across the room and through the door. Mullins finished noting a final statement; Bill looked at the Norths and smiled faintly, enquiringly. “Well?” he said. Pam North shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems clear enough. I didn’t hear anything. Jerry?”

  “No,” Jerry said.

  They had in fact heard a good deal in half an hour of questioning, during which Bill Weigand had not once asked Stanton whether he had killed Paul Wilming and Stanton had not once denied it—and during which that question and its answer had been the only one of real importance.

  They had started him on Wilming—Paul Wilming, somewhere in his late forties; for a little under four years Art Editor of Esprit; for the past month on his way out, and knowing it. He had been good, although not quite tops, at his job until about a year before. Then something had happened to his judgment—his flair. Stanton had shrugged, meaning he didn’t know what had happened, or why. Wilming had begun to make mistakes; his selections had had to be rejected in conference; increasingly, they had had to rely on Donald Helms to see that things were not rejected which should be seen. A few months ago he had got worse, his decline in efficiency had accelerated.

  “His mother died about then?” Weigand asked.

  “Yes,” Stanton said. “I suppose that was it. He didn’t seem to be all there.” Stanton had pondered. “Or not as much as
he usually was,” he added. “It wasn’t ever all. Used to be an art critic, you know.”

  The sequitur was not evident or, at any rate, not stressed. Stanton did not seem to remember precisely how he had come to hire Wilming in the first place. (“Probably asked for it and I decided to give him a try.”) Stanton and Wilming had never been particularly close friends. Wilming’s having a cottage on Stanton’s land meant no more than that Wilming wanted a weekend place out of town and Stanton had one he didn’t mind renting. They had not seen much of each other in the country.

  “Look,” Stanton said, “he was just a middle-aged guy, who looked like a middle-aged actor, and worked for me. Not very well, toward the end.” He considered. “Not one of the regulars, actually,” he said. “Come to think of it, I always thought of him as temporary. You know how it is.”

  They turned from Wilming to Helms and Mrs. Helms. Mrs. Helms was, as they could see, quite a girl. Stanton volunteered information. Too quickly? “But I’ve not been making passes,” he said, and grinned. “Otherwise engaged.” His grin was for Bill Weigand and Jerry North. “Damn sight too much engaged.” He merely saw the Helmses now and then, almost always together. The luncheon today was an exception. There was no tree to bark up.

  Paul Wilming and Mrs. Helms? Stanton had shrugged at that. He thought Wilming might have taken her places while Helms was away. He didn’t know whether there was more than that. He would not think so. “I’d suppose he was too old for her. More like an uncle.” He did not know, or pretend to know. But Helms had been, at one time anyway, something of a protégé of Wilming’s. The relationship might easily have extended to, and included, Beatrice Helms. “Ask her.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “In due course.”

  Helms himself seemed to interest Stanton more. Helms was coming up while Wilming went down. “Damn glad it wasn’t he,” Stanton said. “Nuisance if anything happened to him.” He had looked at them. “Wilming was a better choice, from my point of view,” he said. “Probably prejudiced, of course.”

  But it was Wilming who had brought Helms in, about a year after Wilming himself had gone to Esprit. Helms had worked six months under Paul Wilming and then gone into the Navy as a combat artist. He had got out a year ago and come back. “Everybody who went away came back, it seemed like,” Stanton said. “For a while we had people so thick about the place there was no room for them to sleep.” After a few months Stanton had decided that he was glad Helms had returned; when Wilming began to slip he had been very glad.

  “The Navy did things for him,” Stanton said. “Made him grow up.”

  “How?”

  Stanton shrugged. What did people usually mean? He was more mature, more competent. “I’ll tell you,” Stanton said. “He used to be just a shy kid, even when he was too old to be a shy kid. Used to get red when people talked to him. Well, he still does. But now it doesn’t mean anything. Get what I mean?”

  Weigand supposed he did.

  “I imagine Wilming used to—well, sort of take care of him,” Stanton said. “Maybe Mrs. Helms did too. They’d just been married when he came here, and certainly somebody had to take care of him. But—not any more. People don’t scare him any more. Quite a surprise to some of the people around the office, as a matter of fact.”

  They left the Helmses and picked up stray pieces, apparently at random.

  “Who could have got into Wilming’s office without being seen?”

  “Anybody who knew the way. God knows, people are always meandering around the place. I could, Helms could. Twenty people in the office could and, as far as I know, anybody else in New York.” He paused. “One of these days I’m going to fix that,” he said. “Always falling over strangers.”

  “You have no theory, Mr. Stanton?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anybody who had reason to hate Wilming, or be afraid of him, or want him out of the way?”

  “Nope.” Stanton smiled faintly. “Far as the magazine is concerned, he wasn’t going to be in anybody’s way. Don’t know about outside, of course.”

  “Where were you when Wilming went out the window?”

  “My office, I guess. Maybe wandering around.” He seemed almost pleased. “No alibi.”

  There had been a pause then. Mullins’s pencil stopped.

  “By the way,” Bill Weigand said, “was this cottage you rented Wilming insured?”

  Stanton laughed.

  “Did I set it on fire to collect the insurance? Come off it, Weigand.”

  Weigand said, in effect, that he wasn’t on it. He did not think it had been set on fire to collect insurance.

  “If you were going to set it on fire, how would you go about it?” he asked. “Since the point’s come up?”

  Stanton said he was not an arsonist. He said he didn’t know the tricks.

  “You know the cottage,” Weigand said. “Knew it.”

  “I thought you knew how it was done,” Stanton said. “I thought it was a trap.” He nodded. “Guess this is too,” he said.

  Weigand merely waited, pleasantly.

  “Rig up a short circuit?” Stanton suggested. He looked at Weigand. “No? Kerosene and candles?” He again studied Weigand’s face. “Haven’t got it yet, huh? How about some monkey business with the gas stove? Or the refrigerator.” He looked at Weigand again. “Getting warmer, aren’t I?” he said, and again seemed pleased. He considered. “I suppose I could figure out something along that line,” he said. “Involve disconnecting something, probably. Was that the way it was done?”

  “It could have been,” Weigand said. “Something like that.”

  “Cagey,” Stanton said.

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Naturally. Now, who could have got into the cottage? Say, since Wilming himself was last there. Do you know when that was?”

  “Last weekend,” Stanton said. “As a matter of fact, I picked him up Monday morning and drove him to the station.”

  “He didn’t come out during the week?”

  “I didn’t see him. But I might not have; probably wouldn’t have.”

  “Who else could have got in?”

  Stanton shrugged. Obviously, anybody with a key. The cottage was out of sight, or near enough out of sight, from any other place.

  “You don’t need to ask,” Stanton said then. “Sure, I’ve got a key. Wilming had two. And for all I know, he may have had a dozen made and passed them out.” He seemed amused by his own thought. “Though I shouldn’t think it would have done him a lot of good,” he added, not obscurely. “And—obviously I could have gone over any evening and rigged up your booby trap.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “Obviously.”

  Again there was a pause, a rest for Mullins’s pencil. Bill Weigand checked in his mind; he ran over his memory of Flanagan’s notes.

  “I seem to remember,” he said, “that there was some change in Wilming’s plans about this weekend. A last-minute change. Involving Helms. Do you know anything about that?”

  What Helms had told him, Stanton said. Wilming had found he had some work to clean up Friday night. He had planned to take Helms to the cottage late that afternoon. “Coming here later. He had—” Stanton broke off.

  “My God,” he said. “Helms was coming on ahead. Your trap might have caught him instead of the man it was set for.”

  “Not my trap,” Weigand reminded him. “Somebody else’s trap. Helms was to come on ahead?”

  “That’s right. My God!”

  The thought of the chance danger which appeared to have threatened Helms disturbed Stanton more, Pam North thought, than the actual danger which Wilming had not escaped—than Wilming’s not having escaped it. Stanton apparently realized this.

  “Hate to lose Helms,” he said. “Think he’s going to be useful.”

  The tone was not one of apology, but of explanation. To Pam, listening, the attitude seemed a little ruthless.

  “People oughtn’t to leave things like that around where they—” He looked at
Weigand, and broke off. “I’m sorry, Weigand,” he said. “Forgot about—”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Since it wasn’t your trap, forget it.”

  Stanton merely nodded. There seemed to be sympathy on his face.

  “You didn’t know about this change until Helms told you? After Wilming was killed?”

  That was right, Stanton said.

  It was then that, rather unexpectedly, Bill thanked Stanton and let him go. It was then that he said “Well?” to the Norths, and waited.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Pam said. And Jerry said, “No.”

  “Except that he’s very glad it wasn’t Mr. Helms,” Pam said. “He seemed to be willing—well, not upset about it—to spare Mr. Wilming.”

  “Helms was useful, as he said,” Weigand told her. Pam nodded.

  “I wonder—” she began, and then stopped because the man they were talking about had come through the door and was crossing the room. As he came up to them and spoke, he reddened a little. The flush ran up into his blond hair; it showed deep through the tan on his forehead. He looked young and embarrassed because of the flush, but at the same time it was clear that he was not really so young as the reddening made him seem—nor, Pam thought, so embarrassed.

  “I—” he began and then, as if a hand had been placed over his mouth, he broke off. At the same instant he stopped moving toward them. He stood—it seemed midway of a stride—and looked fixedly out through the french window he was facing. He half raised his right hand in a pointing gesture. “Somebody’s coming,” he said. “See?”

  They turned to look where he was pointing and, almost as they turned, Bill Weigand was on his feet. There had been a little table in front of him, with a glass on it, and the table went over. The glass rolled on the floor, unbroken, spilling. And Bill kicked the little table out of the way as he moved toward the window.

  A not very tall, broad-shouldered man without a hat was walking toward the window. He walked oddly, as if he were half asleep, his face was streaked with black and his eyes were fixed ahead, but not as if they saw what was ahead. And a slim young woman in a tattered dress came behind him, holding a heavy automatic pointed at his back—a young woman who moved as if she were very tired, but still with a grace which would have identified her to all of them even if they could not have seen her scratched, smudged face.