Murder Comes First

by Frances

  She told Bill about that. As she repeated what Barton Sandford had suggested, she suddenly stopped.

  “Look,” she said. “Suppose Mrs. Logan was right. Suppose the girl is, as Mrs. Logan thought, ‘hard’—hard enough to—to eliminate obstacles. Particularly since, I suppose, Paul gets his mother’s money?”

  “Right,” Bill said. “Sally Sandford gets fifty thousand. He gets the rest. Perhaps another two hundred thousand.”

  “Then,” Pam said, “why not? The girl. Or the girl and Paul. Or the girl and her mother. Oh, when you come to that, just her mother?” She began to tick off on her fingers. “Or Sally, for the money or something we don’t know about,” she said. “Or even Sandford, so his wife would get the money? Or—”

  “Because,” Bill Weigand said, “your Aunt Thelma had cyanide in her possession, opportunity, a motive of sorts.”

  “Planted,” Pam North said. “Anybody could have got into her room. I could have. There’s a little suspicion on her, and the murderer wants there to be more, so he does.”

  Jerry pointed out that they were going in circles and went to make more drinks. The cats jumped to the chest to assist. Sherry put a paw on Jerry’s hand, apparently to stop the movement of the mixing spoon; Gin happily smelled lemon peel; Martini made herself into a chunky boat, paws curled under her chest, and watched with enormous, unblinking blue eyes. Jerry spoke to her and she closed the eyes slowly and then reopened them. Gin, after apparently considering it, decided not to join the humans in a drink.

  “All the same,” Pam said, when Jerry had passed the drinks, “they are my aunts. If nobody else is going to help them, I am.” She paused. “Oh dear,” she said. “Probably they tried to telephone me when they came back and found the men there and I wasn’t here, but out being followed. I’m sure Aunt Pennina would try to call me. Or Aunt Lucy. If they knew our number.”

  They did know that, Bill told her. Aunt Thelma had written it down, identified Pam’s name, in firm, neat figures, on a pad by the telephone in her room. Whether they had, in fact, tried to call Pam, Bill Weigand didn’t know. He doubted whether they would have been given the opportunity.

  “Then—” Pam began, and the telephone rang. She answered it, handed it to Bill Weigand, who listened, said, “Right,” said that they might be asked to keep at it for a bit. He put the receiver back.

  “The Kansas City police don’t find Mrs. Sandford at any of the likely places,” he said. “They don’t find evidence she’s been at any of them, under her own name, anyway. They’ll keep on checking. She ought to be told about her aunt’s death.”

  Pam nodded. She said, “Bill, can I see my aunts?”

  Bill was doubtful. He used the telephone again, Gin assisting. He asked, listened and looked a little surprised. “Well, that makes two of us, Tommy,” he said. He listened. “Not the right two, as you say,” he agreed. He replaced the receiver.

  “Thompkins isn’t satisfied entirely,” he said. “He can’t quite swallow the motive. The inspector’s satisfied; the D.A. himself is satisfied. However, Thompkins has managed to get this much—the Misses Whitsett have been taken back to the hotel. More or less because they’re too respectable for jail until everybody’s damn sure. They checked Cleveland for the respectability.”

  “Of course they are!” Pam North said. “They’re my aunts!”

  The aunts would be watched in the hotel; had been advised to stay in it. Meanwhile, two detectives from the D.A.’s Bureau had flown to Cleveland to dig there into the past of Thelma Whitsett and Mrs. Paul Logan. So, Pam North could see her aunts.

  “We’ll all go,” Pam said, and started up. Bill Weigand hesitated a moment. But then he said, “Right,” and they finished drinks and went.

  The aunts were having dinner in Aunt Thelma’s room. Aunt Thelma offered coffee to Pam and Jerry; after a moment of, evidently, somewhat dour consideration, she included Bill Weigand.

  “Although,” she said, “it’s nothing but hotel coffee.” She paused. “New York hotel coffee,” she added.

  “Thelma thinks none of this would have happened except in New York,” Aunt Pennina said calmly, buttering a roll. “I keep telling her—”

  “Nonsense, Pennina!” Thelma Whitsett said, sharply. “There is no cause to defend New York. What I say is perfectly true. There would have been no such nonsense in Cleveland.”

  She looked sharply at Bill Weigand, ready to pounce upon any disclaimer of this obvious fact. Bill merely nodded with interest.

  “In Cleveland,” Aunt Thelma said, “the person is considered. That inspector of yours, young man!”

  It appeared that, in regard to the inspector, words failed Thelma Whitsett.

  “It’s all just like a play,” Aunt Lucy took the opportunity to say. “The trial of somebody or other. There was this young woman who was suspected of murdering somebody and the young district attorney—”

  “Lucinda!” Thelma Whitsett said. “That inspector of yours, young man. An entirely preposterous man! Merely because I decided, after consideration, not to marry Paul Logan.”

  “Aunt Thelma,” Pam North said. “The cyanide.”

  “Someone put it there,” Thelma Whitsett said. “Obviously, the man who killed poor Grace for her money. Anybody could see that.”

  “I read the most fascinating book once—” Lucinda Whitsett offered. Thelma rejected her offer sharply.

  “Well, young man?” she said to Bill Weigand. “Let him speak for himself, Pamela.” Now her voice, suddenly, seemed strained.

  “Inspector O’Malley is an excellent policeman,” Bill Weigand said. “He has every reason for suspecting you, Miss Whitsett. He has, in fact, every reason for charging you with homicide.” His voice was mild. “I have no idea what would be done about it in Cleveland,” he said.

  “If this were not so inconvenient,” Thelma Whitsett said, “it would be laughable. Has this inspector of yours any idea of the difficulty in obtaining suitable reservations in Palm Beach?”

  “Listen, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. “Listen all three of you. You mustn’t pretend this way. Don’t you see?”

  And then Jerry North saw what Pam had no doubt already seen; what probably Bill Weigand had seen. Miss Thelma Whitsett was frightened. She was very frightened.

  “Don’t you see,” Pam North said, “it won’t just go away, my dears. It—” She looked at Bill. “Tell them,” she said.

  “Mrs. North is quite right, Miss Whitsett,” Bill Weigand told Aunt Thelma. “It won’t just go away. You can’t push it away. It isn’t laughable at all.” He stood up and looked down at Thelma Whitsett. “Grace Logan is dead,” he told her. “You were there. You saw her die. You could have killed her.”

  “No!” Thelma Whitsett said, and for a moment her resolute face seemed about to crumble. “Grace was—young man—Grace was—”

  “Grace was a friend of ours,” Pennina Whitsett said, when her sister’s voice broke. “We wished only good things for Grace, Lieutenant Weigand. We were all girls together. We—we are old women now.”

  Her voice was very quiet. She looked at Weigand gently, very steadily.

  “I’m sure you will understand,” she said.

  “—someone else,” Lucinda Whitsett was saying then, and nobody had heard the start of her sentence. “It is like something I read once. There was this Mr. Gribland or some such name—”

  Thelma Whitsett had recovered her composure. She said, “Lucinda!” in a sharp tone. Lucinda Whitsett said, “Yes, Thelma,” and stopped.

  “Miss Whitsett,” Bill said. “A minute ago you said that it was you who decided not to marry Paul Logan. ‘After due thought,’ you said, or something like that. Wasn’t it really that he—well, wasn’t it he who changed his mind, after he met your friend Grace Rolfe? Whom he then married?”

  “I—” Thelma began, but stopped when Pennina Whitsett spoke.

  “Don’t dear,” she said. “Poor dear Paul—he wasn’t what you thought, you know. It’s been better as it wa
s. But—but everybody in Cleveland knows, dear. There’s no use going on with it. Not with Pamela and Gerald and—and their friend.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Not with anybody, if it isn’t true. Logan left you for Grace Rolfe, you hated her then and for years and—”

  “And,” Thelma Whitsett said, “went insane because I was jilted a quarter of a century ago? Bought cyanide somewhere? Killed one of my best friends?” Her voice was firm again, almost derisive. She turned to Pam.

  “I’m sorry, Pamela,” she said. “I’m afraid your friend’s a fool.”

  “It’s because,” Lucinda Whitsett said, “all men think men are so important. It’s in all the books you read. So if a woman doesn’t—”

  Aunt Thelma’s “Lucinda!” must have come then by force of habit, Pam North thought. Because in a way Lucinda Whitsett was making perfectly good sense. She was even making very useful sense.

  It was Bill Weigand, however, who answered. He smiled slightly at Lucinda Whitsett.

  “You may have something there, Miss Lucinda,” he said.

  “Of course she has,” Pennina Whitsett said, and found another roll and began to butter it.

  But none of them was able to explain the cyanide. Miss Thelma Whitsett no longer, to be sure, insisted that the police had themselves planted the poison, being now inclined to join Lucinda in suspecting the real murderer. It was clear, however, that police chicanery remained, in Thelma Whitsett’s mind, a distinct possibility. “Things happen in this town,” she pointed out, adding that it wasn’t like Cleveland. Pennina Whitsett said, reasonably, that she supposed it was the murderer, since who else would gain, and that it was too bad they had stayed so long at Wanamaker’s, since otherwise they might have caught the man in the act. (All three of the Misses Whitsett seemed firmly to assume that a man had poisoned their friend.)

  “If you hadn’t insisted on stopping in the middle to have lunch,” Thelma told her sister, “we might have.”

  “I got hungry,” Pennina Whitsett said, equably.

  But the three admitted that nothing was disturbed in any of their rooms; that, except for the poison tucked under clothing in Thelma Whitsett’s suitcase, there was nothing to indicate an intruder. It did develop, however, that none of the Misses Whitsett had locked her door when she left the hotel, all of them assuming that the doors locked automatically behind them. “They do in Cleveland,” Miss Thelma said. “It’s the proper way.” It was not, however, the way of the Hotel Welby.

  “As a matter of fact,” Bill Weigand said, “none of the doors was locked when the boys got here. There’s that. It’s a point for the—” He stopped abruptly, having too obviously been on the verge of continuing, “for the defense.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Pam North told her aunts. “I won’t let it.”

  But when, having thus reassured the aunts, Mr. and Mrs. North and Weigand went down in the elevator, Pam found herself wondering just how she was going to avoid letting it come to precisely that. She was not encouraged when Bill, after checking in by telephone, reported that he had been told to take off the two days he had coming. If not official notice that the Logan case was considered closed with what they had, this was the next thing to it. “Ouch!” Jerry North said, and Bill said, “Right.”

  “I,” Pam North said, with sudden decision, “am going to the Logan house. I want to talk to young Mr. Logan.”

  That was, Bill told her, between her and young Mr. Logan, who had, however, already been talked to. Pam said she had to start somewhere.

  “And he’s closest home,” she said. “He’s at home.”

  She was told by Bill Weigand, in a worried tone, to watch herself. Bill was told that that meant he didn’t think it was finished.

  “Since,” Pam told him, “I don’t have to watch myself from the aunts. Obviously.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said, and then that he would, thus unexpectedly relieved, try to make a date with his wife for dinner. He started again toward the telephone booths, and Pam called after him. He returned.

  “Why,” Pam said, “don’t you take Dorian to Gimo’s? Then, if we can, Jerry and I’ll join you.”

  Bill had never heard of Gimo’s.

  “A little place in the East Fifties,” Pam said, and gave him the address. “Very nice.”

  Bill looked doubtful, feeling apparently that Pam North was up to something. He was told he would love it; he regarded her for several seconds and then said, “Right.”

  “The place I went with Mr. Sandford,” Pam North told her husband in the taxicab. “The place I was followed from. I thought Bill might just as well case the joint.”

  She was told her idiom was showing lamentable indications of collapse, and that it came from associating with policemen. This Pam denied. She said it came from things she read.

  “Like Aunt Lucy,” she said. “Her mind must be full of jacks.”

  “Jacks?” Jerry said. “Oh, jack straws.”

  It was, Pam told him, no time to quibble. They came to the Logan house. There was no longer a policeman there; there was no crowd there; it was again merely a house standing with its elbows cramped tight against its sides.

  And Paul Logan was not, at that moment, in it. For a time there appeared, as Jerry pressed the doorbell, to be nobody in it. Then, as if from a distance, a square woman in her middle fifties, with blond hair pulled tight, with red cheeks packed tight and bright blue eyes, came to the door and opened it partially. Pam asked for Mr. Logan.

  “He’s not at home,” the square woman said. “He went out to dinner.”

  Pam North said, “Oh.”

  The square woman began the closing of the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Pam said. “I remember. One of my aunts said something about you once. About hot rolls spread with something. Lobster newburg. You’re—” Pam paused, having run out of a dim memory.

  “Hilda,” the square woman said. “Hilda Svenson.”

  “The Misses Whitsett,” Pam said. “They’re my aunts. They used to come here and have teas—wonderful teas. The most wonderful they ever had.”

  “That’s nice,” Hilda said. Then her round eyes grew rounder. “The Misses Whitsett,” she repeated, the name sounding a little different on her tongue. “They were here—here—” Then the blue eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s so dreadful,” Pam North said. “You were with her such a long time.”

  “Fifteen years,” Hilda said. “Fifteen years last March. The Misses Whitsett are your aunts?”

  “Yes,” Pam said.

  “Such nice ladies,” Hilda said, blinking at the tears.

  “The poor things,” Pam said. “Now the police think they were the ones.”

  “Please?” Hilda said.

  “That they gave the—the awful poison to Mrs. Logan,” Pam North said. “At least, that one of them did.”

  “That iss not possible,” Hilda said. She paused momentarily. “Nonsense, that iss,” she added.

  “And I thought perhaps Mr. Logan would remember something that would help them,” Pam said. “I’m so sorry he isn’t—”

  “You come in,” Hilda said, and opened the door wide. “This man. He is?”

  “My husband,” Pam said.

  “A quiet one,” Hilda said. “You both come in.”

  They both went in. They went to the upstairs living room and were asked to sit down, but Hilda stood. After persuasion, she sat too, to the relief of Mr. North. Pam North and Hilda agreed that the death of Mrs. Logan was a dreadful thing; Hilda’s round blue eyes filled again with tears.

  “They should be punished,” Hilda said. “Whoever.”

  Mr. and Mrs. North agreed to this.

  “We keep feeling,” Pam said, “that there must have been something nobody knows about, or recognizes. Something before, you know, Hilda. Living here in the house, being so close to her, perhaps you can remember something?”

  “What something?” Hilda asked, and Pam said that that was it,
one couldn’t tell. Perhaps Mrs. Logan had said something that now, remembered, would be important; perhaps she had seemed not herself.

  “Worried,” Hilda said. “She was worried. About that Sally. You know about that Sally?”

  Pam did; Jerry did.

  “She left that nice Mr. Sandford,” Hilda said. “Some foolishness. When my husband was alive, there was no such foolishness. In the old country.”

  “Of course it is,” Pam said.

  “You young ones,” Hilda said, and looked at Pam North with skepticism. She looked at Jerry North. “Don’t let her,” she told him. “Foolishness.”

  “I won’t,” Jerry promised.

  “Listen, Mrs. Svenson,” Pam said. “Was Mrs. Logan just worried about the whole thing? About Mrs. Sandford’s foolishness? Or about something she was afraid had happened?”

  “Please?” Hilda Svenson said.

  “That something had happened to Mrs. Sandford,” Jerry said. “Like being hurt, or ill?”

  It was something about the typewriter,” Hilda said. “There was something not right about the typewriter.”

  It took time to get more, and then it was not clear. At first, Grace Logan, Hilda thought, had merely been worried because of the foolishness of Sally’s prolonged escapade. Later, the worry had apparently taken a different form. Hilda sometimes had to be guessed at; the Norths could guess that something had happened, three or four weeks earlier which, to Mrs. Logan, had given new, and more significant, meaning to her niece’s continued absence. It was something about a typewriter.

  “A machine one writes on,” Hilda explained.

  “Mrs. Sandford wrote her aunt on a typewriter,” Pam said. “Was that the one she meant?”

  Hilda did not know. Mrs. Logan had been elliptic; had said, as Hilda remembered it, that there was something wrong about the whole business. “The typewriter most of all.” She had not amplified and Hilda had not asked more.

  “I was cooking,” she said. “She came to my kitchen and talked and sometimes I had to go on cooking. Things will not wait while people talk.”