Murder Comes First

by Frances

  “We mustn’t take chances,” Pam told him. “We don’t want you catching cold.…”

  An alarm clock wakened them, which it almost never did, and for a moment Mr. North was puzzled and resentful. Then he said, “Oh God, Philadelphia” and got up. Apparently he had somehow forgotten to reopen the window and thought he detected a slight headache. There was, he was relieved to notice, no signs of a cold.

  “Not today!” Pam said.

  Glumly, Jerry said, “Today. And I’ve got to stop by the office first.” Authors and book and author luncheons, and the bringing of such together, did not wait on murder or even on the FBI. He told Pam to stay in bed; that he would pick up a bite somewhere. He spoke of “somewhere” in a tone indicating doubt of its existence, and was told not to be silly. He told Pam he oughtn’t to let her, was relieved that she was unimpressed, and went to the guest bathroom, his in the absence of guests. While he was shaving, he heard the cats speak delightedly from the kitchen, which indicated Pam’s presence there; the scent of coffee reached him as he tied his tie. “I stand upon a something something and tie my tie once more,” he informed the mirror, thinking rather ineffectively of Conrad Aiken. “There are horses neighing on far off hills.” There would also be authors neighing in Philadelphia, a less consoling thought. He went out to breakfast.

  It was, Pam told him, funny how they had scared themselves last night, and the cocktail mixer, landing on carpet, was not even broken. He had, Pam told him, looked very amusing half under the bed fishing for Martini.

  “About Sandford and the FBI,” Jerry said, as he finished his coffee. “You might have something there.”

  Pam said it had been clearer the night before, but that she still thought she had something.

  “Look,” Jerry said, “I’ll probably be late. I want to drop in at some of the book shops and introduce Ferguson. It’s supposed to help.” He paused. “Though God knows why meeting Ferguson—” he added, and paused again. “Will you—” he said, and then stopped entirely. Would she stay out of it; leave it alone? Would she let matters take their course, even if that meant the police took the aunts? Would she avoid involvement in what might, just possibly, be as dangerous as they had both, during the night, momentarily feared? He looked at his slim wife, who stood so well the grim impact of morning.

  “Of course I’ll take care of myself,” Pam told him. “Don’t I always?”

  There was no time to argue that, since it would have required much time. Jerry got his briefcase, said he hoped she would and went. Pam poured herself another cup of coffee, and thought about what to do next.

  The more she thought about it, the more probable it seemed that Barton Sandford was really an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posing as a biochemist. Or perhaps really a biochemist at heart, on loan to the government. Martini jumped to the table and Pam poured a little cream into a saucer; Sherry came up to investigate and Martini growled at her. Sherry jumped down, landing within inches of Gin, who promptly hissed. It’s peaceful here, Pam thought. If it weren’t for the aunts I wouldn’t—

  “For one thing,” Pam told Martini, who industriously absorbed cream, “he looks like an FBI man. Alert. Cleancut. Doesn’t he?” Martini looked up briefly and returned to the saucer. “Of course,” Pam said, “I never actually saw one. Except that one of Jerry’s, and then ony at the door.” She paused. “Or was he Naval Intelligence?” she asked Martini, who did not look up.

  Whichever he was, he had been the right type—the Barton Sandford type. It had been during the war, and he had come to interview Jerry about a friend of theirs who wanted to get in something. He had, Jerry told her afterward—the Barton Sandford type had been leaving as she came home and had looked at her with only mild suspicion—been a very careful man. He had wanted to be sure he and Jerry were alone and, after Jerry had told him they were, Martha had made some kitchen noise. The Barton Sandford type had broken off sharply, Jerry said, stared hard at the kitchen door and then even harder at Jerry. “Alone, you said,” the Barton Sandford type had told Jerry, and for a moment, Jerry told Pam, he had expected to be arrested. The whole thing, Jerry was inclined to think, had done his friend no good.

  The point, if any, was that he had looked like Barton Sandford, Pam told Martini. The same cleancuttedness, the same alertness. “The kind who look ingenuous but apparently aren’t,” Pam told Martini, who gave the saucer a final lick and jumped down. “So probably he is.”

  But where that got her, Pam was not certain. She collected the breakfast things and stacked them in the kitchen for Martha; she went to shower and dress. It seemed unlikely that Mrs. Logan had been killed as a result of something in which the FBI would be interested. Apparently this was another matter entirely. “I’m dragging a red herring up a blind alley,” Pamela North told herself, and dressed to go out. When she had dressed, she telephoned the aunts.

  The aunts were, in a somewhat qualified fashion, still at liberty. Aunt Thelma had, however, caught cold.

  “Always does when she gets upset,” Aunt Pennina told Pam. “Lucy says its psychosomatic. Lucy’s been reading about it. There’s a policewoman in the corridor, I think. Will they arrest Thelma even if she’s got a cold?”

  Pam could only say she hoped not.

  “That detective friend of yours,” Aunt Pennina said. “He seemed sensible. Can’t you give him a good talking to, Pamela?”

  “Oh, I did,” Pam said. “It’s all right as far as he’s concerned. But—”

  “The district attorney,” Aunt Pennina said. “That inspector.”

  “Aunt Penny,” Pam said. “Mrs. Logan didn’t have anything to do with atoms, did she? That you know of, I mean?”

  “Good gracious, child,” Aunt Pennina said. “Atoms? The ones that explode? What have they got to do with it?”

  “Nothing, probably,” Pamela said.

  “As for poor Grace,” Aunt Pennina said, “what would she have had to do with atoms? What—”

  “I’ve got to go now, Aunt Penny,” Pam said. “It’s too long to go into on the telephone. Is Aunt Thelma taking aspirin?”

  “Good gracious no, child,” Aunt Pennina said. “I don’t suppose she’ll ever take any medicine again.” She paused. “I’m not sure I will,” she added. “With all this cyanide around.” She paused again. “Poor Thelma is dreadfully frightened, Pamela,” she said. “However she acts. I suppose you know that? And—we all are, Pamela.”

  “You mustn’t be,” Pam told her. “It—it’ll be all right.”

  Aunt Pennina did not say anything. She made a small sound—like the catching of a breath, almost like a curbed sob.

  “Aunt Penny,” Pam said. “I won’t let anything happen.”

  There was a pause, and the small sound again. Then, in a voice which was not quite certain, Aunt Pennina Whitsett said, “You’re a dear child, Pamela. I hope—”

  It was easy enough to say, Pam North thought, hanging up a few seconds later, hoping she had encouraged Aunt Penny, realizing how frightened the three elderly women were if even Aunt Penny’s voice—and her fears—went out of control. It’s easy enough to say I won’t let anything happen. Of all the days for Jerry to have to go to Philadelphia!

  She telephoned Bill Weigand, finding him at home. He knew nothing new, except that it had been decided not actually to arrest Thelma Whitsett that day, perhaps not until they had cleaned up the Cleveland end, which might take several days. But after that?

  “I’m afraid so, Pam,” he said. “Unless something new turns up.”

  “And,” Pam said, “nobody’s turning, are they?”

  Bill hesitated a mome t. Then he said he was checking up on a point or two. More or less unofficially, he told her. Probably nothing that would come to anything.

  “What?” Pam asked him.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, Pam. It’s—they’re ticklish points, Pam.”

  “Bill!” Pam said. She was indignant. “When did Jerry and I ever—”

  “N
ever,” Bill said. “All the same—no. Not now, anyway.” He paused. “I wish you and Jerry’d just—”

  “Bill,” Pam said. “The poor old things! You think I’d just let them—let the inspector and that district attorney—when you’re just sitting there talking about mysterious ticklish points?”

  Bill Weigand didn’t. He said he didn’t. He said, in a different voice, that all the same he wished she would.

  Pamela North, for the first time in her life, hung up on Bill Weigand, who said, “Damn!” unhappily, and then told Dorian that there were times when protective custody didn’t seem like a completely bad idea.

  “Incidentally,” he said, “you used to want me to get off the cops. You could be going to get what you wanted.”

  “Wonderful,” Dorian said. “If—if you want it.”

  “The last thing,” Bill said. “Damn the Misses Whitsett.” He leaned down and kissed Dorian, who put her arms around his neck and held him hard. “I’m going downtown and stick my neck out,” he told her. “Maybe I’ll come back without my head.”

  Dorian held the head in question against her body, and kissed the top of it and then let Bill go.

  “Of course,” Bill told her, “maybe they’ll merely put me on a desk job out in Queens.”

  He was told he thought of the nicest things. He went.

  For a minute or two after he had left, Dorian Weigand sat curled as she had been in a corner of the sofa. Then she uncurled and stood up, all in one unbroken movement, and walked across the room to the telephone. She moved with singular grace. She sat down at the telephone and dialed the number of the Norths’ apartment. She had almost given up when Pam answered.

  “Dorian,” Pam said, “tell Bill I didn’t mean to hang up on him. Or, I did then but I don’t now. I was so long because I’d just gone out when the bell started and I couldn’t find the key at first. You know.”

  Dorian said she knew.

  “Pam,” she said, “you are going to go on with it? In spite of what Bill said?”

  “I have to,” Pam told her. “The aunts. And Jerry’s picked today to have to go to Philadelphia.”

  “Then,” Dorian Weigand said, “maybe I can help? Anyway, keep you company. Shall I?”

  “That,” Pam North told her, “would be wonderful. We’ll show them.”

  But when they were together, when Pam had said, “Um-m, new hat” and Dorian had said, more doubtfully, “Do you really like it? Bill says—,” it was not immediately apparent what they were going to show to whom.

  “Don’t tell me secrets,” Pam said, “unless you want to, of course, but is Bill really on to something?”

  Something, yes; what, Dorian didn’t know. Something that disturbed him, made him feel that to enquire into it would be “sticking his neck out.”

  “Something not for laymen,” Dorian said. “Or lay-women, either.”

  “Probably,” Pam said, “something about the man he saw last night at the restaurant.” She told Dorian her new theory about Barton Sandford. Which left them, she wanted to know, where?

  “Not the aunts,” Pam said. “We have to start there. Not Mr. Sandford, because why would the FBI use poison, even if? Not Mrs. Sandford, because she doesn’t seem to be around and why? Particularly if he’s with the government, because she wouldn’t want to embarrass him. It must be difficult enough to be with the government even without cyanide. So we’ve got the Hickeys and Mrs. Logan’s son. You know about them?”

  Dorian did; that much Bill had told her.

  “The Hickeys, Paul Logan, the typewriter,” Pam said, ticking them off on fingers. “You know about the typewriter?”

  Dorian did know.

  “I still think—” Pam began, but Dorian shook her head. If that had been checked, it had been checked; if the police said there was only one typewriter, there was only one typewriter.

  “Probably,” Dorian said, “Mrs. Svenson didn’t get it straight.”

  They went then to see Mrs. Rose Hickey, getting her address by telephone from Hilda Svenson at the Logan house. That, at any rate, Mrs. Svenson did get straight. Mrs. Hickey, plump and round, a woman who should have been surrounded by an aura of comfortableness but today was not, let them in. She said, “The poor dears,” about Pamela North’s aunts, and what could the police be thinking of?

  Pam, taking more words than usual, explained what she and her friend Dorian Hunt were trying to do. Dorian showed no surprise that Pam used her maiden name, which was also the name under which, as a commercial artist, Dorian worked. They had not planned it, but had not needed to.

  “We’re trying to find something,” Pam said, “anything that will help make the police understand my aunts had nothing to do with it. We—well, we just thought you might be able to help.”

  “Oh,” Rose Hickey said, “I do so wish I could. But I’ve kept going over and over it in my mind and—well, there just isn’t anything.” She looked at the two younger women. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears. “Grace was such a wonderful person,” she said. “And to think that our last words were—were harsh!”

  Mrs. Logan, Pam suggested, had been worried, upset. Because she was, some little thing had come to seem important. Mrs. Hickey mustn’t blame herself.

  “She said such dreadful things,” Mrs. Hickey said. “That my Lynn was—” But then she stopped and looked at Pam and Dorian uncertainly. “I wasn’t going to tell anybody,” she said. “And it wouldn’t help you, my dear.” This last was to Pam.

  “Of course not,” Pam said. “I realize that. Except—any little thing—Mrs. Logan’s state of mind. Mountains out of molehills and that sort of thing. You know?”

  From the expression on Mrs. Hickey’s face it was not certain that she did.

  “To fill out the picture,” Dorian said, gently.

  “My poor aunts are so—” Pam said, and stopped as if words could not convey the way it was with her poor aunts.

  “Well,” Mrs. Hickey said, “I don’t see how it will help. And—and it’s so painful, of course. But—”

  It was true that Mrs. Hickey and Mrs. Logan had quarreled—“only it wasn’t really a quarrel”—about Paul Logan’s desire to marry Lynn Hickey. It was true that Mrs. Logan had said unpleasant things about Lynn—“dreadful things, not true at all”—and that Mrs. Hickey, after trying to quieten her friend—“she was so upset, you know”—had herself lost quietness and flared back.

  “She said Lynn was hard,” Mrs. Hickey said. “Hard and—and mercenary. That she wanted Paul’s money, that is, Grace Logan’s money, which Paul gets when Grace—” She stopped. “Gets now,” she corrected, and again her eyes filled. “That she was a bad influence on Paul, who ought to marry some gentle little thing who wouldn’t—” She stopped of her own accord, as if something had on that instant become clear to her. “She said, ‘try to change him,’” Rose Hickey said, rather slowly. “Maybe she meant more than that. Maybe without knowing it she meant, ‘try to get him out from under my thumb. Untie the apron strings.’” She looked at Pam and Dorian. “I didn’t think of that until just now,” she said. “Is it an awful thing to think?”

  “We can’t help what we think,” Dorian said. “Perhaps it was true.”

  “She seemed really to—to almost hate Lynn,” Mrs. Hickey said. “And Lynn’s so sweet, really. Grace said—said dreadful things, finally. I tried not to listen. That there wasn’t anything Lynn wouldn’t do to—to—”

  She stopped. It was as if she had tripped over her own words. Her eyes widened.

  “People say such dreadful things when they’re excited and upset,” Pam North said quickly. “Absurd, angry things, just to hurt people. And poor Mrs. Logan was upset, wasn’t she?”

  She mustn’t think about what she said, Pam thought; mustn’t hear her own words again, mustn’t think we heard them, or thought they had meaning.

  “That’s what we really have to find out,” Pam said, the words hurrying. “What she was upset about, or
afraid of or—didn’t she give you any hint, Mrs. Hickey?”

  It worked, or seemed to. Mrs. Hickey’s face lost its expression of shock. She hesitated, as if giving the question thought.

  “Only about Sally,” she said. “Sally Sandford, you know? She’s left Barton, I’m afraid, and of course that upset Grace, because she’s so fond of both of them. It did make her nervous, I think. I don’t know of anything else.”

  “Hilda,” Pam said, “Hilda Svenson thought that something had happened in the last few weeks that particularly upset Mrs. Logan. Something connected with Sally. Did you feel that?”

  “There may have been,” Rose Hickey said. “I’m not sure. Sometimes I felt that Grace confided more in Hilda, really, than she did in me. Of course, Hilda’s really a very sympathetic person. You’d never think she—but I mustn’t say that.”

  They waited.

  “Only that she has these dreadfully radical ideas,” Mrs. Hickey said. “Almost—almost communistic, really.” She spoke the dreadful word in a special tone. “It’s the way she was brought up, of course. In Europe, you know.”

  Mrs. Svenson, Pam thought quickly, must have been “brought up,” if one could arbitrarily delegate the years from perhaps five to perhaps twenty as those of bringing up, some fifty to thirty-five years before.

  “I thought she was Swedish,” Dorian said.

  “But dear,” Mrs. Hickey said, “it’s almost as bad in Sweden. Didn’t you know? The government owns things. And I myself heard Hilda say, when there was one of those dreadful strikes—or was going to be, on the railroads, I think—that the government ought just to take them over. Without a by your leave or anything,” She looked from one to the other of the younger women. “Think of all the people who own stock,” she said. “Even not very much stock.”

  They thought for a moment of people who owned stock, even not very much.

  “But she’s not really a communist?” Pam said. “Mrs. Svenson, I mean. I mean, not one of the real ones? The Stalin ones?”

  “She says not,” Mrs. Hickey said. “All the same, she did say that about the railroads. Or maybe it was the mines. Of course, maybe she’s just confused, a confused liberal.” She paused. “I will say,” she admitted, “Hilda said dreadful things about Stalin, too. True things, of course. But after the railroads, I couldn’t help wondering.”