A Pinch of Poison

by Frances Lockridge

  “Then she just died, I guess,” Mullins said. “Everybody was surprised, only the doc had said they’d oughta get a stomach pump.”

  Weigand nodded and considered.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s talk to McIntosh. We’ll want the stenographer.”

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. He went to the door, nodded to the stenographer and said, “You!” to McIntosh.

  McIntosh was a tall, broad, brown young man who looked like several good schools rolled into one. But his face was drained. Weigand was tall enough, but he had to look up at McIntosh. He did look up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Weigand, Homicide. Tell me about it.”

  David McIntosh’s voice was heavy and lifeless. His description of Lois’s collapse at the table followed that of Mullins, amplifying it with McIntosh’s own surprise and consternation, which had given place to anxiety and fear.

  “But at first it looked merely as if she had—well, had had too much to drink?” Weigand asked.

  McIntosh nodded.

  “She seemed excited and incoherent,” he said. “Her face looked flushed. But she hadn’t had anything to drink—not really.”

  “What?” Weigand wanted to know. McIntosh told him. A cocktail before dinner. Coffee afterward. Then a Cuba Libre.

  “Nothing before you met her, do you think?” Weigand asked. McIntosh was sure she had not, or not more than one drink at the outside.

  “She drank almost nothing,” he said. “When she had a drink she usually showed it.”

  Weigand nodded.

  “And you had water with dinner, I suppose?” he said. McIntosh agreed.

  “Was it something in what she drank?” he wanted to know. Weigand told him they didn’t know. But presumably it was something she had taken by mouth, in liquid or food. And liquid was more likely. It would, obviously, be more difficult to administer poison in solid food, without the opportunity for advance preparation.

  “And I gather you ordered at the table?” he said. “You hadn’t ordered in advance, before you came, I mean?”

  McIntosh said they hadn’t. Until they were actually in the taxicab, he said, they had not made up their minds where they would have dinner.

  “Could she have been given something, or taken something, before I met her?” McIntosh asked.

  “Frankly,” Weigand said, “we don’t know yet. This has to be merely a preliminary questioning, until we see where we are. Do you know of any reason why she should have taken her own life?”

  McIntosh looked surprised.

  “No,” he said. “That’s absurd. She never would have. And even if that isn’t true, she would never have come here, with me, and then drunk poison. It’s—inconceivable.”

  Weigand agreed it seemed unlikely. He said he gathered that McIntosh had known her a long time, and well.

  “Yes,” McIntosh said. “Since—oh, for a long time.” He paused. “I wanted her to marry me,” he said, simply.

  “I’m sorry,” Weigand said. “I know this is difficult. And she?”

  “Sometimes, yes,” McIntosh said. “But she was tied up, somehow. Her family—her half-brother, you know—and this job of hers. And some odd notion about being useful. I don’t know. But I think she would have married me, eventually.”

  His voice was expressionless, strained. Weigand looked at him a moment. He felt compassion for McIntosh and his voice revealed it.

  “All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. Give one of the detectives outside your address, will you?”

  McIntosh nodded. He went out.

  “It’s tough on him,” Mullins said, after McIntosh had closed the door. Weigand said it was. Very.

  “Who else have we got out there?” he wanted to know. Mullins told him. The maître d’hôtel. A bloke who said he was Lois Winston’s brother. Some dame with the brother. And—oh, yeh. A bus-boy.

  “A bus-boy?” Weigand repeated.

  Mullins, nodded. He looked a little embarrassed and uncertain. He said it was this way. Not more than five minutes had elapsed between the time Lois Winston had collapsed at her table and the time she died in the manager’s suite. By the time she died, the hotel physician suspected poison. He had suggested that the table at which she had been eating be left as it was until the police arrived, and Nicholas, the maître d’hôtel, had agreed. He had gone out to see to it and found the table already cleared and reset.

  “He said it was just routine,” Mullins said. “Seemed to think it was pretty smart of the bus-boy who did it. But I noticed when I got here that there were several tables around there that hadn’t been cleared and I just sorta wondered—could the boy be in on something? So I thought—”

  “Right,” Weigand assured him. “Probably it doesn’t mean anything, but we’ll have a talk with the boy. He does seem to have been pretty efficient.”

  Mullins looked relieved. He wanted to know who the Loot wanted. Weigand decided on Nicholas.

  Nicholas had little to add to the detail of Lois Winston’s collapse at the table. He knew Mr. McIntosh well, since he often came there, usually with Miss Winston. And he knew who Mr. McIntosh was, naturally.

  “Did you?” said Weigand. “Who is he?”

  Nicholas looked surprised and a little shocked.

  “Mr. McIntosh is the son of Mr. James McIntosh,” he said. “The Mr. James McIntosh.”

  “Oh,” Weigand said. “So.” He could see the point of Nicholas’s attitude. It was important, and not only in Nicholas’s realm, to be the son of the Mr. James McIntosh. Nicholas noted the expression on the lieutenant’s face with approval.

  “So naturally,” Nicholas said, “when we got the reservation tonight we saw that Mr. McIntosh received just the table he asked for, down front, near the floor. Which made it all the more—obvious—when the young lady behaved so strangely. Whereas at their usual table …”

  “Oh,” Weigand said. “Mr. McIntosh had made a reservation. By telephone?”

  Nicholas nodded. Lieutenant Weigand thought it over.

  “Was it Mr. McIntosh himself who phoned?” he asked.

  Nicholas did not know, but he could try to find out.

  “Do that,” Weigand instructed. “But what about this bus-boy?”

  Nicholas looked perplexed. Then his face cleared. That would be young Frank Kensitt. The boy who cleared the table so quickly? Weigand nodded.

  “But that was nothing,” Nicholas insisted. “We train the boys to be efficient at the Club Plaza. In the natural course he would have cleared the table at once.”

  “Even,” Weigand said, “when he had no reason to be sure Mr. McIntosh would not return? He didn’t know it was anything serious, remember.”

  Nicholas pointed out that he had seen the young lady carried across the restaurant. He might naturally assume that something not entirely trivial was going on. Weigand nodded slowly. He said that Nicholas had better go back to his post.

  “Oh,” Weigand said, “some friends of mine are out there, I think. A man and two young women, one of them with sort of reddish hair. See that they’re well taken care of, will you?”

  Nicholas, eagerly, would. Weigand drummed on the desk beside which he was sitting for a moment after Nicholas left. His face was abstracted, and Mullins waited.

  “Let’s have the brother,” Weigand directed. Mullins went to the door and said, “You!” at the brother. The brother was a dark, discontented, slight young man who looked more worried than grieved. He was Randall Ashley; Lois Winston was his sister.

  “Half-sister, of course,” he amplified, sitting nonchalantly where Weigand indicated. “Her father was Clarence Winston, the oil man. Mine was Kenneth Ashley.” His tone was faintly supercilious.

  “What kind of a man was he?” Weigand asked. Randall Ashley looked faintly surprised.

  “What kind of—oh, copper,” he said. “Mother married Father about two years after Mr. Winston died.”

  Then, Weigand discovered, Lois was about thre
e years old. Randall had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley a little over a year later. Lois was twenty-seven—had been twenty-seven. So Randall was twenty-three.

  “Although you’d have thought, from the way Sis acted, that I was about thirteen,” Ashley put in, rather sulkily. Weigand looked at him without favor.

  “You weren’t here with your sister, I gather,” he said. “I mean, you had your own party.”

  “I was here with a friend,” Ashley said. The word “friend” seemed faintly underlined.

  “Were you?” Weigand said. “Who?”

  “I don’t see—” Ashley began. Weigand didn’t either, exactly, but he felt like being stern.

  “Who?” he repeated.

  Young Ashley looked more sulky than ever. Then he submitted.

  “Madge Ormond,” he said. “She’s a singer.”

  “Night club?” Weigand hazarded. Ashley frowned.

  “Does that make any difference?” he wanted to know.

  “No,” Weigand said. “As far as I know it makes no difference at all. I just wondered.”

  “All right,” Ashley said. “She is. So what?”

  Weigand said he would ask the questions. Where, for example, were Ashley and Miss Ormond sitting in reference to his sister and Mr. McIntosh?

  “Most of the dance floor was between us,” Ashley said. He looked a little worried, Weigand thought, and was pleased to think. “Why?” Ashley added. Weigand said it was merely routine.

  “Although,” he added, “it seems probable that somebody passed your sister’s table and put something in her drink.”

  “Listen!” Ashley said. He stood up. Weigand remained seated and looked at him. “If you’re trying to—”

  “Oh, go home, Mr. Ashley,” Weigand said. “Go home to Mama. Or home to Miss Ormond. We’ll find you when we want you.”

  Ashley hesitated a moment. Then he turned quickly to the door. Weigand nodded after his back and Mullins followed him into the living-room of the suite. Then, after a moment, Mullins came back.

  “O.K.,” Mullins said. “He’s got a tail. Why him?”

  “I don’t know, Mullins,” Weigand said. “I suppose merely because I don’t like him.”

  Mullins looked at Weigand a moment. Then he grinned.

  “O.K., Loot,” he said. “O.K.”

  He thought a moment.

  “What are you going to do about those people out there, Loot?” he inquired, waving in the general direction of the restaurant. Weigand regarded him and asked what he would suggest.

  “Get their names and addresses?” Mullins suggested, doubtfully.

  “Why?” asked Weigand. “They’ve been coming and going for—[he looked at his watch]—more than an hour since the girl died. If there was a murderer, and he was on the roof, do you suppose he has waited?”

  Mullins thought it over, and said he supposed not.

  “But maybe somebody saw something?” he suggested.

  Weigand said that if anybody had, the police probably would hear from them when the news came out. However—

  “You might have some of the boys ask anybody who is still at a table near the McIntosh table,” he said. “There’s no harm in it, except to the hotel’s feelings, and you might turn up something.” He paused. “And,” he said, “you’ll find Mr. and Mrs. North and Miss Hunt out there. You might ask Mrs. North to come in.”

  Mullins’ face brightened.

  “Jeez,” he said. “Is Pam and Jerry here? And Miss Hunt?” He beamed. “We’ve had some times,” he said, hopefully. Then his face clouded. “Only they was always screwy ones,” he remembered. “The cases, I mean.”

  Weigand agreed that they were.

  “And this one,” he added, “doesn’t seem to be any too clear.” He drummed on the table. “You might chase the boys out of the living-room—have them ask some questions of somebody, or go over the tablecloth or something. Is there anybody else left?”

  “Only,” Mullins said, “this bus-boy guy. Just a kid, he is.”

  Weigand said Mullins could send the kid in. The kid came in. He had red hair, clashing with the maroon of his uniform, and he looked at Weigand with round eyes.

  “Say, mister,” he said, “are you a detective?”

  Weigand admitted it.

  “An officer?” Frank Kensitt insisted. “One of the mucky-mucks?”

  “What?” said Weigand. “Oh. Yes, in a way. Why?”

  Frank looked around anxiously, with wide blue eyes. The eyes fell on the body, and the boy said, “Jeez.” Then, unexpectedly, his eyes filled with tears. After a moment he spoke angrily through the tears.

  “Listen, mister,” he said, “Miss Winston was a swell lady. Did somebody bump her?”

  Weigand nodded.

  “Did you know her, Frank?” he asked. Frank nodded. He sure had known her, he said.

  “She got me this job,” he said. “And got me out of the farm school and everything. She was a swell lady.”

  Weigand probed. Frank was, it developed, a ward of the “office.” Weigand puzzled it a moment. “The Placement Foundation?” he suggested. Frank nodded. He was too old for adoption when the “office” took him and, after several other places, he had gone to the farm. And Miss Winston had got him out and got him a job and if any guy thought—

  “All right, kid,” Weigand said. He would, he supposed, have to follow this up, or have it followed up. But he had better get it from—who was that, now?—Mary Crane, at the Foundation. “Why did you clear the table so fast, kid?”

  Frank looked around the room.

  “Is there anybody else here?” he asked, tensely. Weigand shook his head.

  “All right,” Frank said. “They’re in my locker!”

  “Who are in your locker?” Weigand inquired.

  Frank looked annoyed, and his voice was impatient.

  “The dishes,” he said. “The things Miss Winston ate and drank out of. What did you think?”

  “You mean,” Weigand said, “that you cleared the table and put all the dishes in your locker? Why?”

  Frank looked contemptuous.

  “Fingerprints,” he said. “And things like that. I knew it wasn’t no pass-out, not no ordinary pass-out. Not with Miss Winston. So I saved the things.”

  “Well,” Weigand said, “I’ll be damned.” He looked at Frank, who was regarding him intently. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Weigand said. “You’re quite a kid.”

  “You want ’em, don’t you?” Frank’s voice was anxious. Weigand nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll send a man with you to get them.” Suddenly he grinned at the boy. “Only why fingerprints, son?” he said. “Why not some poison left in a glass or on a plate?”

  Frank stared harder.

  “Jeez,” he said. “Sure enough!”

  5

  TUESDAY

  10:50 P.M. TO 11:25 P.M.

  The body of Lois Winston went in a long basket, down a service elevator, to an ambulance marked “Department of Hospitals. Mortuary Division.” Nicholas arrived in time to stand aside for it, looking a little ill, as it was carried through the door of the suite. He looked after it and shook his head gravely, paying tribute to death.

  “Yes?” Weigand said. He was sitting in a lounge chair in the living-room, and his nervous fingers tapped a cigarette against the side of an ash-tray.

  “About Mr. McIntosh’s reservation,” Nicholas said. “You asked me to check on it.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. “And—?”

  “He appears to have telephoned himself,” Nicholas said. “At least my assistant who took the reservation says a man called. He specified a table near the floor, although usually he preferred one of the divans against the wall.”

  “Right,” Weigand said. He stared through Nicholas for a moment. “Suppose,” he said, “you give me a list of all reservations made for this evening. You can do that?”

  There was, Nicholas admitted, a list. But the manager would have to approve. If—
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  “All I want is the list,” Weigand said. His voice sounded tired, “I don’t care who has to approve. The manager, Mr. Ritz or the whole waiters’ union. Just get me the list.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nicholas said. He moved to the door and opened it. He became, instantly, Nicholas of the Ritz-Plaza.

  “But I am very sorry, ladies-sir,” he said. “This is a private apartment and I regret—”

  “Nonsense,” Pam North said, briskly, appearing around Nicholas. “Tell him, Bill!”

  Bill told him. Pam came in and Dorian behind her. Mr. North, looking rather worried, followed them.

  “Well,” Weigand said. “A delegation. Sit, friends. Join me in a little murder.”

  Pam looked doubtfully at the closed door to the bedroom.

  “Is it?” she said, and nodded at the door.

  Weigand told her it was.

  “They just took it,” he said. “It was Lois Winston, of East Sixty-third Street and the Placement Foundation, daughter of the late Clarence Winston, who was an oil man, and the present Mrs. Kenneth Ashley who—” Then he stopped and looked annoyed. He looked around for Mullins and sighed. He emerged from the chair and sought Mullins at the door and returned with Mullins, who beamed at the Norths and Dorian.

  “Hello, Mrs. North,” Mullins said, pleased. “And Mr. North. And Miss Hunt! Sorta like old times, ain’t it?”

  “Hello, Mr. Mullins,” Pam said. “It’s nice—” She stopped and looked at him more intently. “By the way,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you got a first name? To call you by, I mean.”

  Mullins suddenly looked sheepish and looked hurriedly at Lieutenant Weigand. Weigand nodded, remorselessly.

  “Tell her, sergeant,” he ordered. Mullins swallowed.

  “Aloysius,” he said, his voice suddenly booming. “Aloysius Clarence.”

  He looked at the Norths and Dorian defiantly. Mrs. North looked rather blank.

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh—all right, Mullins.” She looked at him gently. “I’m sorry,” she said.