Jerry was not unconscious; he did not seem even to be much hurt. But he was remarkably surprised. He sat with his eyes wide open and stared at Pam, and he raised one hand in a familiar gesture before he spoke. The hand lingered in his wet hair as he regarded Pam, kneeling frantic-eyed beside him.
“For God’s sake, Pam,” Jerry said. “For God’s sake.”
“Darling!” Pam said. “Darling! Oh Jerry—it’s you! And I hit you!”
“You certainly did,” Jerry said. He did not sound so helplessly astonished, now. “You certainly hit me, all right. And what the hell—?”
“Jerry!” Pam said, and because it sounded so fine she said it again. “Jerry! You’ve come!”
“Well—” Jerry North said, doubtfully. He looked at her, and in spite of everything he looked as if he were about to smile. “I seem to have picked the hell of a time for it,” he remarked. “What was the idea, Pam?”
“Oh,” Pam said. “I thought you were trying to kill me. But you’re not the one.”
“No,” Jerry said, with finality. “I’m certainly not.”
“He’s killed Harry Perkins, now,” Pam said, and now that she knew Jerry was not much hurt, there was a new terror in her voice—a remembered terror. “Harry’s hanging up there, Jerry. At the top of the stairs. By Nemo’s leash.”
Jerry put a wet arm around his wet, and convulsively shaking, wife. He pulled her toward him, and as he held her, stared up the stairs into the darkness. He held her more closely, reassuringly. Then, quietly, he pulled himself and her to their feet. His voice was very low, and he kept his arm tight around her.
“Hold it, baby,” he said. “Hold it. Where’s the phone?”
Pam pointed toward the door of the coat closet. They went toward it, and as they went both of them kept looking sidewise up the stairs.
10
WEDNESDAY
11:30 P.M. TO THURSDAY, 1:15 A.M.
There was no light beating in Ross Brack’s eyes and nobody stood over him with a length of hose. He was comfortable enough in Weigand’s small, shabby office, sitting on the wrong side of Weigand’s scarred desk. The light beat down on the detective and on Brack more or less impartially; it glared down, also, on Mullins, who sat like a man with nothing to do, and on the police stenographer, who kept busy. Brack did not look as tired as Weigand, and was smoking a cigarette. But it would have been easier for Weigand to leave the office than for Brack to leave.
“You worked with Anthony,” Weigand said, not in the form of a question. Brack said “no.”
“Or he worked with you,” Weigand amended. “Say he was smalltime.”
“No,” Brack said. “I knew the punk. He didn’t work with me.” He paused and regarded Weigand and smiled. “Though I wouldn’t know what you mean by work,” he added.
Weigand told him he could skip it.
“I’ve nothing on you,” he said. “Not at the moment. Later, I hope. I want to know about Anthony.”
“Nor any other time,” Brack told him. “Anthony was a punk.”
“Right,” Weigand said. “What kind of a punk, Brack?”
“Just a punk,” Brack said. “He wasn’t working for me. On his own. Punk stuff.”
“Such as?” Weigand said. Brack stared at him. “He’s dead,” Weigand pointed out. “It won’t be a squeal.”
Brack continued to stare. Finally he said, “The hell with it.
“Shake-down,” Brack said. “Small time stuff. Dames. Old dames, mostly. Before he ran into the Buddie dame.”
“And after?” Weigand said. Brack shook his head. Weigand waited for him.
“Maybe,” Brack said. “How the hell should I know?”
“You get around,” Weigand told him. “You’re not a punk.”
Brack said “Thanks.”
“You know something about Anthony,” Weigand insisted. “The boys might find out.”
“I wouldn’t, copper,” Brack said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t.” He looked at Mullins, who smiled at him with unkind affection. “Nor you, copper,” Brack said to Mullins. Mullins continued to smile at him, and then looked across at the stenographer. The stenographer had quit making notes, and was smiling too. His smile resembled that of Mullins.
“Think of that,” Mullins said. “Think of that now—punk.”
“Skip it,” Weigand said. “Both of you. This is just a little talk.”
He turned to Brack, and pointed out that it was no skin off Brack. He told Brack to be himself.
“It’s nothing to you,” he explained. “If you talk, maybe we’ll remember it. Later.” He looked at Brack. “What the hell,” he said. “This is a killing, Brack. None of yours. You’re just a guy who knows another guy. Who was he shaking?”
Brack seemed to be thinking it over. He drew on his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke between himself and Lieutenant Weigand. The smoke floated away.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Maybe the old girl. Maybe the army guy. Maybe the kid.”
“Clem?” Weigand said. “Clem Buddie?”
Brack said it could be. He paused, and seemed to make up his mind.
“Want to get that guy out of here?” he said, jerking his head toward the stenographer. Weigand didn’t look at the stenographer, but he said, “All right, Flanner.” The stenographer closed his notebook and got up. “How about him?” Brack said, jerking his head at Mullins.
“No,” Weigand said. “He stays around. Be yourself, Brack.”
Brack waived it with a shrug. He said “O.K.” He remarked, echoing Weigand, that it was no skin off him.
“He had some letters,” Brack said. “The punk did. From the kid to me.” Brack smiled as between men. “That baby sure wrote a letter,” he said.
Brack went on talking. He was very careful. But a picture appeared. Anthony had dropped around to “my place” one afternoon. “The hotel place,” Brack said. “You boys know it.”
Weigand nodded. They did.
“And a hell of a lot it ever got you,” Brack added, with pleasure. “So the punk comes around.”
Brack had been alone in the hotel rooms and let Anthony in. Anthony stuck around for an hour or so, having some drinks. Before he came there were “a couple” of letters from Clem Buddie to Brack in a table drawer. After Anthony left, there were no letters. Brack had been annoyed and had sent a couple of the boys around the next day to get the letters. But the boys had missed Anthony, somehow and, before Brack took any other steps, Major Buddie had talked to him—had talked and met Brack’s price. After that the letters weren’t worth bothering with.
“What the hell?” Brack said. “Let the punk make a yard or two. They were asking for it.”
The letters? Brack was not reticent; Brack leered a little. It was evident that the letters, in wrong hands, would not enhance Clem Buddie’s reputation.
“The kid was nuts about me,” Brack said. It pleased him.
“You’re a punk, Brack,” Mullins told him, conversationally. He described Brack further. Brack did not seem offended; he seemed to regard it as a tribute.
Did he know what Anthony had planned to do with the letters? Brack smiled and shrugged. How would he know?
“Put the bee on her old man,” he suggested. “Or on the old lady. Or on the kid. How should I know? Or on the whole family. He was quite a punk, for a small-timer.”
The letters had disappeared about ten days earlier. Did Brack really know that Anthony had taken them? Brack shrugged. Anthony had had the chance; he didn’t know anybody else who had had the chance. Was he out of the room while Anthony was there? Sure—they’d been drinking, he’d said. Did they think he was a blotter? Had he seen Anthony since? He had not. Was he looking for him? Hell no! As far as he was concerned, that was all washed up. When he was paid off he stayed paid off.
“Sometimes,” Mullins interjected. “You’re a jerk, Brack.”
Brack told Mullins he talked too much. He said Mullins might talk himself into trouble, some time: Mullins said
“Yeh?” with heavy skepticism.
“Skip it,” Weigand told them both. “All right, Brack. Go peddle your papers.” Brack stood up and looked down at Weigand. “And watch yourself,” Weigand added.
Brack grinned at him, crookedly.
“I’m a business man, copper,” Brack told him. “Strictly legitimate.”
Mullins made a noise, but Weigand only stared up at Brack. Finally he said, “On your way, punk.” His voice was full of contempt, but Brack appeared not to notice it.
Mullins and Weigand watched Brack go out and after he had gone Mullins remarked, in a conversational tone, on what Brack was. Weigand said, “Right.”
“However,” Weigand said, “he gave us something.”
Mullins agreed that he had.
“What this guy Anthony was doing ain’t healthy,” Mullins said. “People don’t like to shell out, sometimes. Sometimes they do something about it.”
Weigand nodded. People had been known to do something about blackmailers. Men like Major Buddie, for example—it was hard to imagine the major taking blackmail lying down.
“Or the rest of them,” Mullins pointed out. “The girl herself. Or the old lady. Or damn near anybody.”
There was, Weigand admitted, a complication. Anthony might have tried to sell the letters to Clem’s father, accompanying his offer with a threat.
“Yeh,” Mullins said, a little uncertainly. “But what did he do to them if the major wasn’t having any? Peddle them to the papers or something?”
Weigand thought not. For one thing, the papers wouldn’t have them. “No privilege,” Weigand pointed out. “And I don’t know any paper that would touch them anyway. But there was always Mrs. Buddie.”
Mullins thought it over and nodded, but still a little doubtfully.
“Mrs. Buddie has the money,” Weigand pointed out. “She can leave it where she likes, to those she’s fond of. The letters wouldn’t make her any fonder of Clem. She might even turn the girl out. She might even take it out on the major.”
Mullins nodded, with less doubt.
The same threat—to show the letters Clem had written to her grandmother—might work against Clem herself, Weigand pointed out. Or against her sister, Judy. Mullins looked doubtful. Weigand nodded.
“Judy’d go a long way for her little sister,” he assured Mullins. “It sticks out all over her. Use your eyes, sergeant.”
“O.K.,” Mullins said. “O.K., Loot. Anybody else?”
Bruce McClelland, assuming the authenticity of his apparent devotion to Clem, might go an equally long distance to protect her, Weigand pointed out. Nor was it possible entirely to ignore Mrs. Buddie herself. Assume she was the tolerant one, and the major intolerant. Suppose instead of the major’s keeping the letters from his mother, she were keeping them from him. And suppose she, instead of he, got tired paying. It was perhaps not so likely, but it was possible—it depended on the people.
This much was evident, if Brack had put them on the right track; if Anthony had died because of his use of the letters. Somebody got tired paying him. The major, either of the girls, Bruce, Mrs. Buddie. You could take your choice.
“And the letters?” Mullins asked. “Where—?”
The telephone interrupted him. Weigand scooped it up and listened and said, “What?!” He listened again, and Mullins, watching him, could tell from his face that something had happened. After a moment, Weigand said, hurriedly, “Right. We’ll be along,” and put the telephone back in its cradle, hard. He sat for an instant, and spoke vividly into the air. Then he spoke at Mullins.
“Somebody got Perkins,” he said. “The little guy who was hiding out. And Jerry’s back. Pam seems to have hit him on the head with a vase.”
“Jeez,” Mullins said. “It gets screwier and screwier. I thought Jerry was in K.C.”
They were at the door, Weigand leading the way. It seemed, he said over his shoulder, that Jerry North had come home.
They were running down the stairs toward the car; they were in the car and roaring up town, Weigand driving and the red lights blinking. The siren was silent, except in extreme emergencies; sirens were not popular in New York that winter.
“It must have been quite a jolt to him,” Mullins said. “Being conked. Why?”
Weigand, intent on the snowy pavement, shook his head. Jerry hadn’t said, he told Mullins.
“He did seem sort of surprised,” Weigand admitted, as he swerved around a bus. “And he says somebody has hanged Perkins.”
“Hanged him?” Mullins repeated. It evidently puzzled him. “Why hang him?” he said. Weigand said he didn’t know; that they would have to find out.
They swung, skidding on the hardened snow, off Fifth Avenue and slid to a stop in front of the Buddie house. At the door, Mullins started to ring, but Weigand stopped him.
“Door’s unlocked,” Weigand said, turning the knob. It was unlocked. “Unlocked when Jerry got here, he said,” Weigand amplified. “And that’s a funny thing.”
The Norths were waiting in the foyer, without a light. They looked a little damp and subdued, and Jerry now and then rubbed his head speculatively, feeling the bump. It was Weigand who flashed on the first lights, and almost as he did so the commotion began in the street, as police cars piled in and the squad assembled. Now it was all to do over again—pictures, doctors, fingerprint men, statements—all the rest of it. Weigand sent detectives to wake the family, and peremptory knocking sounded on bedroom doors. Shepherded by detectives, the people in the house assembled—sleepy eyed, heavy witted, hair standing on end. Before Weigand thought to warn, the girls were awakened and brought down, and so were brought past the swinging body of Harry Perkins, dangling in the stair well with the green leash around its neck. And Clem screamed, and buried her face against Judy’s shoulder. And Judy, very white but silent, held her and, without letting the younger girl look again, led her by the hanging man.
Flashlights flared in the topmost hall of the old house and cameras were aimed up and down at the hanging figure. And only then, while a precinct man held the body and drew it toward him, leaning himself perilously out over the stair well, did Mullins saw at the leash with a sharp knife until it parted. The precinct man carried the body back up the stairs and laid it in the hall.
“He’s light,” the precinct man said. “For a stiff.”
Weigand watched the body lowered to the floor.
“It looks like a broken neck,” he commented, and knelt beside the body, touching the neck with long fingers. It was a broken neck; Harry Perkins had been hanged neatly enough to satisfy the most demanding professional executioner. Weigand stepped back to let the fingerprint men and photographers go on. When they finished, he knelt again by the body and examined the knot which had held the noose in the green leash. It was not, as he had half expected, a hangman’s knot. But it was approximately as interesting. It was a bowline—around Harry Perkins’s neck it had been a running bowline—and the knot itself had come behind his left ear. Weigand said “Well,” thoughtfully, and went to look at the part of the leash still fast to the baluster.
That had no knot at all. The murderer had taken advantage of the tongue and hook fastener with which the leash was normally affixed to Nemo’s collar. He had merely run the leash around the baluster and hooked it upon itself. This was not so expert; the hook might have broken. Weigand took it off and looked at it. The risk had been slight; the leash had been made for a heavier dog than little Nemo. But a bowline at this end too would have been safer, if you wanted to keep Perkins hanging.
Safer and, Weigand added to himself, slower. Even if you could loop a bowline expertly—and it would take someone better than a fumbler to put the knot in the rather stiff leather thong—it would take a few seconds. And use of the snap saved the seconds which must have been of value. But if seconds were of value, why hang Perkins at all? Why not merely hit him over the head, if you had a weapon? Or strangle him if, for reasons not entirely clear, you preferred to use the leash?<
br />
Weigand left the squad to it and went back down to get Pam’s story. On his way up, he had left the Norths at the door of Pam’s room. Now they were behind the door, and opened it when he knocked. And Pam threw out her hands in a gesture toward the room and said: “Look!” Weigand looked.
“At first,” Pam said, “I thought it was the cats, because they can tear up almost anything. But they couldn’t open my suitcases, so I knew it wasn’t the cats. So this must have been where he was all the time. And I thought he was after me.”
Pam seemed a little affronted, as she looked about the disordered room—the room in which, since the cats could not open suitcases, somebody had been conducting a search for something; a search so hurried that it must have been almost frenzied.
“All the time I was down there hiding,” Pam said, somewhat bitterly, “he was up here tearing things apart. Or she. Why?”
“Because,” Weigand said, reasonably, “you had something he wanted—or he thought you had. Did you?”
Pam looked puzzled and shook her head.
“I can’t think of anything,” she said. “I haven’t found anything. Or lost anything.”
Then somebody thought she had, Weigand told her. He looked across at Jerry, who was sitting sadly in a chair with one hand to his head.
“Aches,” he announced, briefly, when Weigand looked at him. He looked aggrieved. “I wish, Bill,” he said, “that you wouldn’t leave Pam in a house full of murderers.” He felt his head. “And vases,” he added, darkly.
Weigand admitted it was a mistake. It wouldn’t happen again. Meanwhile—what had happened?
Pam told him about Perkins—about his appearance at her door, his evident terror, her agreement to go up to his room to hear what it was he had to say.
“Something about the murder, of course,” Pam said.
Weigand wanted to know if he had said so. In so many words.
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